Darwinia (21 page)

Randall, of course, had been subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating the loss of the Finch expedition. Perhaps even a deceased spouse takes second place to such lofty obligations. The dead, in any case, were notoriously patient.

Still and all, Vale had begun to wonder whether the gods were playing favorites.

He sought distraction where he could find it. It was one of his newer clients, an elderly Maryland abortionist, who had given Vale the amber vial of morphine and a chased-silver hypodermic syringe. Had shown him how to find a vein and raise it and prick it with the hollow needle, a process which made him think abstractly of bees and venom.
Oh sting of oblivion.
He took to the habit recklessly.

The kit — it folded into a neat silver sleeve about the size of a cigarette case — was in his jacket pocket when he arrived at the Sanders-Moss estate. He hadn’t planned to use it. But the afternoon went badly. The weather was too wet for winter, too cold for spring. Eleanor welcomed him with an uneasy expression — one can only coax so much mileage out of a lost christening dress, Vale supposed — and after lunch a drunken junior congressman began to bait him about his work.

“Stock market tips, Mr. Vale? You talk to the dead, they must have a few choice observations. But I don’t suppose the dead have much opportunity to invest, do they?”

“In this district, Congressman, they don’t even vote.”

“Touched a sore point, Mr. Vale?”

“It’s Doctor Vale.”

“Doctor of what would that be exactly?”

Doctor of Immortality
, Vale thought.
Unlike you, you rotting slab of meat.

“You know, Mr. Vale, I happen to have looked into your past. Did a little research, especially when Eleanor here told me how much she was paying you to read her palm.”

“I don’t read palms.”

“No, but I bet you know how to read a balance sheet.”

“This is insulting.”

The congressman smiled gleefully. “Why, who told you that, Mr. Vale? John Wilkes Booth?”

Even Eleanor laughed.

“This is not the guest bathroom!” The maid Olivia tapped irritably at the door. “This the
help
bathroom?”

Vale ignored her. The hypodermic kit lay open on the green-tile floor. He slumped on the toilet. He had cranked open the pebbled window; a chill rain came in. The chain of the water closet tapped restlessly against the damp white wall.

He had taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeve. He slapped the crotch of his left arm until a vein came up.
Fuck them all
, Vale thought primly.

The first shot was easeful, a still calm that enveloped him like a child’s blanket. The bathroom looked suddenly vague, as if wrapped in glassine.

But I am immortal
, Vale thought.

He remembered Crane driving the knife through the back of his hand. Crane, it turned out, had a perverse fondness for self-mutilation. Liked to pierce himself with knives, cut himself with blades, prick himself with needles.

Well, I am no stranger to needles myself.
Vale preferred the morphine even to Kentucky whiskey. The oblivion was more certain, somehow more comprehensive. He wanted more of it.

“Mr. Vale! That you in there?”

“Go away, Olivia, thank you.”

He reached for the syringe again.
I am, after all, immortal. I cannot die.
The implications of that fact had grown somewhat unnerving.

This time his skin resisted the needle. Vale pushed harder. It was like probing cheddar cheese. He thought he had found the vein at last, but when he pushed the plunger the skin beneath began to discolor, a massive, fluid bruise.

“Shit,” he said.

“You have to come out or I’ll tell Mrs. Sanders-Moss, she’ll have somebody break down this door!”

“Only a little longer, Olivia dear. Be nice and go away.”

“This is not the guest bathroom! You been in there an hour already!”

Had he? If so, it was only because she wouldn’t let him concentrate on the task at hand. He refilled the syringe.

But now the needle wouldn’t pierce his skin at all.

Had he dulled the point? The tip looked as lethally sharp as ever.

He pushed harder.

He winced. There was pain, remarkably. The soft skin dimpled and cratered and reddened. But it didn’t break.

He tried the flesh on his wrist. It was the same, like trying to cut leather with a spoon. He lowered his pants to his ankles and tried the inside of a thigh.

Nothing.

Finally, in angry desperation, Vale jabbed the weeping needle against his throat where he imagined an artery might be.

The tip snapped off. The syringe drooled its contents uselessly down his open collar.

“Shit!” Vale exclaimed again, frustrated almost to tears.

The door burst open. Here was Olivia, gaping at him, and the upstart junior congressman behind her, and wide-eyed Eleanor, and even Timothy Crane, frowning officiously.

“Huh!” Olivia said. “Well,
that
figures.”

“A shot of morphine in the niggers’ toilet? Uncouth, Elias, to say the least.”

“Shut up,” Vale said wearily. The initial effect of the morphine, if any, had worn off. His body felt dry as dust, his mind maddeningly lucid. He had allowed Crane to take him to his car, after Eleanor made it clear that he would not be welcome on the property again and that she would call the police if he tried to return. Her exact words had been less diplomatic.

“They’re generous employers,” Crane said.

“Who?”

“The gods. They don’t care what you do on your own time. Morphine, cocaine, women, sodomy, murder, backgammon — it’s all the same to them. But you can’t stupefy yourself when they want your attention, and you certainly can’t inject a lethal overdose into your arm, if that was what you were attempting to do. Stupid thing to try, Elias, if I may say so.”

The car turned a corner. Dismal day was passing into dismal evening.

“This is business now, Elias.”

“Where are we going?” Not that he particularly cared, though he felt the queasy presence of the god inside him, ramping up his pulse, straightening his spine.

“To visit Eugene Randall.”

“I wasn’t told.”

“I’m telling you now.”

Vale looked listlessly at the upholstery of Crane’s brand-new Ford. “What’s in the bag?”

“Have a look.”

It was a leather doctor’s bag, and it contained just three articles: a surgical knife, a bottle of methyl alcohol, and a box of safety matches.

Alcohol and matches — to sterilize the knife? The knife to -

“Oh, no,” Vale said.

“Don’t be priggish, Elias.”

“Randall isn’t important enough for… whatever you have in mind.”

“It’s not what
I
have in mind. We don’t make these decisions. You know that.”

Vale stared at the blithe young man. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“No. Not that it matters.”

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“Elias, that’s privileged information. I’m sorry if you’re shocked. But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like.”

“You mean to kill Eugene Randall?”

“Certainly.”

“But why?”

“Not for me to say, is it? Most likely the problem is the testimony he plans to give the Chandler Committee. All he needs to do, and I know his dear departed Louisa Ellen already told him so, is to let the committee get on with its work. There are five so-called witnesses who will say they saw English-speaking gentlemen firing mortars and regulation Lee-Enfields at the
Weston
. Randall would save himself and the Smithsonian a great deal of trouble if he simply agreed to smile and nod, but if he insists on muddying the issue—”

“He believes Finch’s people may still be alive.”

“Yes, that’s the problem.”

“Even so — in the long run, what does it matter? If it’s a war the gods want, Randall’s testimony is hardly a serious impediment. Most likely the papers won’t even report it.”

“But they will report Randall’s murder. And if we’re careful, they’ll blame it on British agents.”

Vale closed his eyes. The wheels turn within the wheels,
ad infinitum
. For one agonizing moment he yearned for the morphine syringe.

Then a sullen determination rose in him, not precisely his own. “Will this take long?”

“Not long at all,” Crane told him soothingly.

Perhaps it was the lingering effect of the morphine in his bloodstream, but Vale felt the presence of his god beside him as he walked the empty museum corridor to Randall’s office. Randall was alone, working late, and probably the gods had arranged that, too.

His god was unusually tangible. When he looked to his left he could see it, or imagined he saw it, walking next to him. Its body was not pleasant or ethereal. The god was as obnoxiously physical as a full-grown steer, though more grotesque by a long reach.

The god had far too many arms and legs, and its mouth was a horror, sharp as a beak on the outside, wet and crimson within. A ridge of tumorous bumps stitched its belly to its neck, a sort of spine. He disliked the color of the god, a lifeless mineral green. Crane, walking to the right of him, saw nothing.

Smelled nothing. But the smell was tangible, too, at least to Vale’s nose. It was an astringent, chemical smell — the smell of a tannery, or a broken bottle in a doctor’s office.

They surprised Eugene Randall in his office. (But how much more surprised would Randall have been if he could see the hideous god! Obviously he couldn’t.) Randall looked up wearily. He had taken on the position of director since Walcott left the Institution, and the job had worn him down. Not to mention the congressional subpoena and his wife’s postmortem nagging.

“Elias!” he said. “And you’re Timothy Crane, aren’t you? We met at one of Eleanor’s salons.”

There would not be any talking. That time had passed. Crane went to the window behind Randall and opened his medical bag. He brought out the knife. The knife glistened in the watery light. Randall’s attention remained fixed on Vale.

“Elias, what is this? Honestly, I don’t have time for—”

For what? Vale wondered as Crane stepped swiftly forward and drew the knife across Randall’s throat. Randall gurgled and began to thrash, but his mouth was too full of blood for him to make much real noise.

Crane put the bloody instrument back in the bag and withdrew the brown bottle of methyl alcohol.

“I imagined you meant to sterilize the knife,” Vale said. Idiotic notion.

“Don’t be silly, Elias.”

Crane emptied the bottle across Randall’s head and shoulders and splashed the last of it over his desk. Randall dropped from his chair and began to crawl across the floor. One hand was clutched to his throat, but the wound pulsed gobbets of blood between his fingers.

Next, the matches.

Crane’s left hand was alight when he emerged from Randall’s burning office. Crane himself was fascinated, turning his hand before his eyes as the blue flames sighed into extinction for lack of fuel. Both flesh and cuff were unharmed.

“Exhilarating,” he said.

Elias Vale, suddenly queasy, looked for his attendant god. But the god was gone. Nothing left of it but smoke and firelight and the awful stench of burning meat.

Guilford rode a fur snake, recovering his strength as Tom Compton led the animals up the slope of the valley. It wasn’t an easy climb. Ice-crusted snow bit at the snakes’ thick legs; the animals complained mournfully but didn’t balk. Maybe they understood what lay behind them, Guilford thought. Maybe they were eager to be away from the ruined city.

After dark, in a sleeting snow, the frontiersman found a glade within the forest and built a small fire. Guilford made himself useful by collecting windfall from the nearby trees, while Preston Finch, cloaked and grim, fed kindling to the flames. The fur snakes huddled together, their winter coats glistening, breath steaming from their blunt nostrils.

Dinner was a freshly killed moth-hawk, cleaned and charred, plus strips of snake pemmican from Tom Compton’s pack. The frontiersman improvised a lean-to out of sage-pine branches and loose furs. He had salvaged a number of furs, one pistol, and the three pack animals from the most recent attack. All that remained of the Finch Expedition.

Guilford ate sparingly. He wanted desperately to sleep — to sleep off chronic malnutrition, sleep off three days of hypothermia in the well, the shock of Sullivan’s death, the frostbite that had turned his toes and fingertips an ominous china white. But that wasn’t going to happen. And right now he needed to know exactly how bad the situation had become.

He asked the frontiersman how the others had died.

“It was all over by the time I got back,” Tom said. “Judging by their tracks, the attackers came from the north. Armed men, ten or fifteen, maybe spotted Diggs’s kitchen fire, maybe just got lucky. They must have come in shooting. Everybody dead but Finch, who hid out in the stables. The bandits left our snakes behind — they had snakes of their own. Left one of their own men, too, leg-shot, couldn’t walk.”

“Partisans?” Guilford asked.

The Frontiersman shook his head. “Not the one they left behind, anyhow.”

“You talked to him?”

“Had a word with him. He wasn’t going anywhere. Both legs fucked up beyond repair, plus I introduced him to my knife when he got truculent.”

“Jesus, Tom!”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t see what they did to Diggs and Farr and Robertson and Donner. These people aren’t human.”

Finch looked up abruptly, hollow-eyed, startled.

Guilford said, “Go on.”

“It was obvious from his accent this shitheel was no Partisan. Hell, I’ve drunk with Partisans. They’re mostly repatriate Frenchmen or Italians who like to get tight and fly their flag and take a few shots at American colonists. The big-time Partisans are pirates, armed merchantmen, they’ll bag some creaky old frigate and steal the cargo and call it import duties and spend the money in a backwater whorehouse. Travel up the Rhine, the only Partisans you meet are wildcat miners with political opinions.