The Signature of All Things

eye, moss did not even seem to move at all. But moss did move, and with extraordinary results. Nothing seemed to happen, but then, a decade or so later, all would be changed. It was merely that moss moved so slowly that most of humanity could not track it.
    Alma could track it, though. She was tracking it. Long before 1848, she had already trained herself to observe her world, as much as possible, through the protracted clockwork of Moss Time. Alma had drilled tiny painted flags into the stones at the edges of her limestone outcropping to mark the progress of each individual moss colony, and she had now been watching this prolonged drama for twenty-six years. Which varieties of mosses would advance across the boulder, and which varieties would retreat? How long would it take?She observed these great, inaudible, slow-moving dominions of green as they expanded and contracted. She measured their progress in fingernail lengths and by half decades.
    As Alma studied Moss Time, she tried not to worry about her own mortal life. She herself was trapped within the limits of Human Time, but there was nothing to be done for it. She would simply have to make the best of the short, mayfly-like existence she had been granted. She was already forty-eight years old. Forty-eight years was nothing to a moss colony, but it was a considerable accretion of years for a woman. Her cycles of menstruation had recently finished. Her hair was turning white. If she was fortunate, she thought, she might be permitted another twenty or thirty years in which to live and to study—forty more years at the most. That was the best she could wish for, and she wished for it every day. She had so much to learn, and not enough time in which to learn it.
    If the mosses had known how soon Alma Whittaker would be gone, she often thought, they might pity her.
----
    M eanwhile, life at White Acre carried on as ever. The Whittakers’ botanical business had not expanded for years, but neither had it contracted; it had stabilized, one could say, into a steady machine of profitable returns. The greenhouses were still the best in America, and there were, just now, more than six thousand different varieties of plants on the property. There was a craze at the moment in America for ferns and palms (“pteridomania,” thecheeky journalists called it) and Henry was reaping the benefit of that fad, growing and selling all manner of exotic fronds. There was much money to be made, too, on the mills and farms that Henry owned, and a good bit of his land had been profitably sold to the railroad companies in the past few years. He was interested in the burgeoning rubber trade, and had recently used his contacts in Brazil and Bolivia to begin investing in that uncertain new business.
    So Henry Whittaker was still very much alive—perhaps miraculously so. His health, at the age of eighty-eight, had not much declined, which was rather impressive, considering how strenuously he had always lived and how vigorously he had always complained. His eyes gave him trouble, but with a magnifying lens and a good lamp, he could keep track of his paperwork. With a sturdy cane and a dry afternoon, he could still walk his property, dressed—as ever—like an eighteenth-century lord of the manor.
    Dick Yancey—the trained crocodile—continued to manage the Whittaker Company’s international interests ably, importing new and lucrative medicinal plants like simarouba, chondrodendron, and many others. James Garrick, Henry’s old Quaker business partner, was now deceased, but James’s son John had taken over the pharmacy, and Garrick & Whittaker medicinal brands still sold briskly across Philadelphia and beyond. Henry’s dominance of the international quinine trade had been dealt a blow by French competition, but he was doing well closer to home. He had recently launched a new product, Garrick & Whittaker’s Vigorous Pills—a concoction of Jesuit’s bark, gum myrrh, sassafras oil, and distilled water, which professed to cure every human malady from tertian fevers and blistering rashes to feminine malaise. The product was a tremendous success. The pills were inexpensive to manufacture and brought in a steady profit, particularly in the summertime, when illness and fever broke out across the city, and every family, rich or poor, lived in fear of pestilence. Mothers would try the pills for anything afflicting their children.
    The city had risen up around White Acre. Neighborhoods bustled