The Signature of All Things

meadows of Philadelphia transformed into fields of warm black sand; Prudence was suddenly dressed in Hanneke’s clothing; Sister Manu tended to the boxwoods in Beatrix Whittaker’s Euclidean garden; Henry Whittaker paddled up the Schuylkill River in a tiny Polynesian outrigger canoe.
    Arresting though these images may have been, the dreams somehow did not disturb Alma. Instead, they filled her with the most astonishingsensation of synthesis—as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing . Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again—that feeling she had experienced only once before, in the weeks leading up to her wedding with Ambrose—of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.
    She would awaken, catch her breath, and immediately begin writing again.
    Having established the ten guiding principles of her daring theory, Alma now harnessed her most quivering, electrified energies, and wrote the history of the Moss Wars of White Acre. She wrote the story of the twenty-six years she had spent observing the advance and retreat of competing colonies of moss across one tumble of boulders at the edge of the woods. She focused her attention most specifically upon the genus Dicranum , because it demonstrated the most elaborate range of variation within the moss family. Alma knew of Dicranum species that were short and plain, and others that were dressed in exotic fringe. There were species that were straight-leafed, others that were twisted, others that lived only on rotting logs beside stones, others that claimed the sunniest crests of tall boulders, some that proliferated in puddled water, and one that grew most aggressively near the droppings of white-tailed deer.
    Over her decades of study, Alma had noticed that the most similar Dicranum species were the ones that could be found right next to each other. She argued that this was not accidental—that the rigors of competition for sunlight, soil, and water had forced the plants, over the millennia, into evolving minuscule adaptations that would advantage them ever so slightly over their neighbors. This is why three or four variations of Dicranum could simultaneously exist on one boulder: they had each found their own niche in this contained, compressed environment, and were now defending their individual territory with slight adaptations. These adaptations did not have to be extraordinary (the mosses did not need to grow flowers, or fruit, or wings); they simply needed to be different enough tooutcompete rivals—and no rival in the world was more threatening than the rival who was brushing right up against you. The most urgent war is always the one fought at home.
    Alma reported in exhaustive detail battles whose victories and defeats were measured in inches, and over decades. She recounted how climate alterations over those decades had given advantages to one variety over another, how birds had transformed the destiny of the mosses, and how—when the old oak beside the pasture fence fell and the pattern of shade shifted overnight—the whole universe of the rock field changed with it.
    She wrote, “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”
    She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”
    She wrote, “The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.”
    She wrote, “The victor shall win—but only until he no longer wins.”
    She wrote, “This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.”
    She wrote, “Ongoing battle between and among species is inescapable, as is loss, as is biological modification. Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of