But it hadn’t. Guilford believed that quite firmly, though he didn’t dare say so aloud. Not a miracle, he thought, but a mystery. Unexplainable, but maybe not intrinsically unexplainable.
All that land mass, those ocean depths, mountains, frigid wastes, all changed in a night… Frightening, Guilford thought, and more frightening still to consider the unknown hinterlands he had covered with his hand. It made a person feel fragile.
A mystery. Like any mystery, it waited for a question. Several questions. Questions like keys, fumbled into an obstinate lock.
He closed his eyes and lifted his hand. He imagined a terrain rendered blank, the legends rewritten in an unknown language.
Mysteries beyond counting.
But how do you question a continent?
Book One
Spring, Summer 1920
“Oh ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky: but can ye not discern the signs of the times?”
Chapter One
The men who crewed the surviving steamships had invented their own legends. Tall tales, all blatantly untrue, and Guilford Law had heard most of them by the time the Odense passed the fifteenth meridian.
A drunken deck steward had told him about the place where the two oceans meet: the Old Atlantic of the Americas and the New Atlantic of Darwinia.