returned to the place from where it had been stolen. Billy stared at it. Again, the eyeless thing seemed to try to look at him. It wriggled its coiling zombie arms. What the fuck? Billy thought.
“You brought it to life?” Vardy said. “Whatever for?”
“Vardy, please don’t,” Billy said. “This won’t work, this’ll never work. It’s over, Vardy, and your old god lost.”
“It may not,” Vardy said. There was the noise of combustion from his workstation. “Work. It may not. But it may. You’re right—he did lose, my god, and I cannot forgive the cowardly bastard for that. Nothing bloody ventured, say I.”
“You really think they’re that powerful? That symbolic?” Billy crept on.
“It’s all a matter of persuasion, as perhaps by now you know. It’s all a matter of making an argument. That’s why I wasn’t too bothered by Griz. Is that where you’ve been, with him? With a category error like that in his plan …” He shook his head. Billy wondered how long ago Vardy had insighted what Grisamentum had in mind, and how. “Now, these things were the start of it. They’re where the argument started.”
Billy crept close to the real targets of the time-fire, the real subject of the predatory prophecy. Not and never the squid, which had only ever been a bystander, caught up by proximity. Those other occupants of the room, in their nondescript cabinet, like any other specimen, exemplary and paradigmatic. The preserved little animals of Darwin’s Beagle voyage.
THIS WAS A FIERY REBOOTING. UPLOADING NEW WORLDWARE.
He had remembered Vardy’s melancholy, the rage in him, and what Collingswood had once said. She was right. Vardy’s tragedy was that his faith had been defeated by the evidence, and he could not stop missing that faith. He was not a creationist, not any longer, not for years. And that was unbearable to him. He could only wish that his erstwhile wrongness had been right.
Vardy did not want to eradicate the idea of evolution: he wanted to rewind the fact of it. And with evolution—that key, that wedge, that wellspring—would all those other things follow, the drably vulgar contingent weak godlessness that had absolutely nothing going for it at all except, infuriatingly, its truth.
And he was persuaded, and was trying to persuade the city and history, that it was in these contemplated specimens, these fading animals in their antique preserve, that evolution had come to be. What would evolution be if humans had not noticed it? Nothing. Not even a detail. In seeing it, Darwin had made it be, and always have been. These Beagle things were bloated.
Vardy would burn them into un-having-been-ness, unwind the threads that Darwin had woven, eradicate the facts. This was Vardy’s strategy to help his own unborn god, the stern and loving literalist god he had read in texts. He could not make it win—the battle was lost—but he might make it have won. Burn evolution until it never was and the rebooted universe and the people in it might be, instead, created, as it and they should have been.
It only happened that night because Billy and his comrades had made it that night, had provoked the end-war, and this chaos and crisis. So Vardy had known when he had to act.
“It won’t work,” Billy said again, but he could feel the strain in time and the sky, and it seemed very much as if it would work. The bloody universe was plastic. Vardy held a Molotov cocktail.
“Look,” said Vardy. “Bottle magic.” Filled with the phlogiston he had coerced Cole to make, with his daughter’s untutored help, at threat of his daughter’s life. A combusting tachyon flame. It roared with inrushing sound, illumined Vardy’s face.
He brought it closer, and its glow lit the pickled frogs within a jar. They shifted. They shrank in the time-blistering warmth, tugged their limbs into their trunks. They became more paltry, ungainly long-tailed legless tadpoles. He held the flame so it licked the glass of their jar, and after a second of warming it burst into sand and sent the tadpoles spraying. They reversed and undid their having been and shrank as they fell, and never were, and nothing hit the floor.
Vardy turned to the shelf of Darwin’s specimens and raised his arm.
Billy struggled to his feet. He could think only, Not like this. He would try to spill the fire. Perhaps it would reverse the life cycle of the heavy-duty floor, rubbers separating, the chemicals racing back to elemental forms. But his hands were behind him and