Evolution When young Charles rode the Beagle round the Cape bound for the revelations of the Galapagos, little did he know that war and rampant radiation would turn this continent he circumnavigated into a land which would first prove his theories of survival and selection, not in millennia but months, and with like rapidity prove them as useless as Newton’s linear equations to the curving temporal attentuations of space. And now even his special island is rife with protean life and the unique and isolated species he once cataloged with such care have vanished in an onslaught far more unique and constantly changing, more fertile than flights of pure imagination. Expansion From space, with each revolution of the planet, the dark arboreal palimpsest seems to lengthen. In the time lapsed motion of satellite tapes, it swells like a gargantuan amoeba in mitosis. Rio. Caracas. Sao Paulo. The coastal cities which survive do so by a daily confrontation. The lines of armor clad troops advance warily, spraying gouts of liquid fire into the wilds. Napalm. Cyanogen. Agent Orange. A poison rain of defoliants and excoriation falls in waves from the decks of combat planes and choppers, yet the flames are strangely dampened and die. In a makeshift refugee camp, a native Indio from the abandoned interior, drafted to fight, sleeps in battle fatigues by his pregnant wife. All his dreams have been transformed to frights in which the serpentine vines he burns by day have rooted deep within their displaced lives, to twine and strangulate the bloody umbilical and suffocate the breath of his unborn child. Elan Vital Beyond the claws of bestial battle, beyond the green on green attrition, some say a force is dwelling here which links its manifold creations, a rank and raging barbaric spirit, a dim but still awakening sentience, that touches and taints our souls and gives rise to stray obsessions. The banks of thunderous cumuli stacked against the Andes range, fall east to meet miasmic mists which rise in streaming drifts from the swamps of lowland basins, and in this airborne compilation dense and brackish figures evolve in an endless surreal cinemontage of unconscious organic visions. Some say that far and farther south, beyond the Rivers Negro and Parana, beyond the encroaching vegetation, a retreating tribe has suffered an enchantment and possession in the shadow of the forest wall, for now they divinate its growth and foretell our changeling future as they read the clouds’ collisions. Appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine