Darwinia (25 page)

The city had been shelled. The city had burned.

Had many died?

Many — but there was no counting, no toll of the dead.

As he approached the city Guilford began to entertain the troubling suspicion that he was being followed.

There was a face he’d seen, a familiar face, and he seemed to see it repeatedly among the increasing number of refugees, or pacing him along the forest road, or peering at him from the fretwork of mosque trees and pagoda ferns. A man’s face, young but careworn. The man was dressed in khaki, a battered uniform without insignia. The man looked remarkably like the picket from Guilford’s dreams. But that was impossible.

Guilford tried to approach him. Twice, on a lonely stretch of road deep in the twilight of the forest, he shouted at the man from his horse. But no one answered, and Guilford was left feeling foolish and frightened.

Probably there was no one there at all. It was a trick of the weary eye, the anxious mind.

But he rode more cautiously now.

His first sight of London was the blackened but intact dome of the new St. Paul’s, brooding over a field of mist and rubble.

A makeshift rope ferry carried him to the north shore of the Thames. Drizzle fell steadily and pocked the turbulent river.

He found an encampment of refugees in the treeless fields west of town, a vast and stinking clutter of tents and trench latrines in the midst of which a few Red Cross flags drooped listlessly in the rain.

Guilford approached one of the medical tents where a nurse in a hairnet was handing out blankets. “Excuse me,” he said.

Heads turned at the sound of his accent. The nurse glanced at him and barely nodded.

“I’m looking for someone,” he said. “Is there a way to find out — I mean, any kind of list—?”

She shook her head curtly. “I’m sorry. We tried, but too many people simply wandered away after the fire. Have you come from New Dover?”

“By way of there.”

“Then you’ve seen the number of refugees. Still, you might try asking at the food tent. Everyone gathers at the food tent. It’s in the western meadow.” She inclined her head. “That way.”

He looked across several broad acres of human misery, frowning.

The nurse straightened. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice softening. “I don’t mean to sound thoughtless. It’s just that there are…
so many
.”

Guilford was walking toward the mess tent when he saw the phantom again, passing like his own shadow through the mud and rent canvas and smoky fires.

“Mr. Law? Guilford Law?”

He thought at first the ghost had spoken. But he turned and saw a ragged woman gesturing to him. It took him a moment to recognize her. Mrs. de Koenig, the widow who had lived next door to Jered Pierce.

“Mr. Law — is that really you?”

“Yes, Mrs. de Koenig, it’s me.”

“Dear God, I thought you were dead! We all thought you’d died on the Continent!”

“I’ve come looking for Caroline and Lily.”

“Oh,” Mrs. de Koenig said. “Of course.” But her toothless smile faded. “Of course you have. Tell you what. Let’s have a drink, Mr. Law, you and me, and we’ll talk about that.”

Dear Caroline,

Probably you will never see this letter. I write it with that expectation, and only a faint hope.

Obviously, I survived the winter in Darwinia. (Of the Finch expedition, the only survivors are myself and Tom Compton — if he is still alive.) If the news is reaching you for the first time I hope it does not come as too great a shock. I know you believed I died on the Continent. I suppose that belief explains your conduct, much of it at least, since the autumn of ’20.

Maybe you think I despise you or that I’m writing to ventilate my anger. Well, the anger is real. I wish you had waited. But that question is moot. I attach no blame. I was in the wilderness and alive; you were in London and thought I had died. Let’s just say we acted accordingly.

I hesitate to write this (and there’s small enough chance of you reading it). But the habit of addressing my thoughts to you is hard to break. And there are matters between us we need to resolve.

And I want to beg a favor.

Since I’m enclosing my notes and letters written to you from the Continent, let me finish the story. Something extraordinary has happened, Caroline, and I need to set it down on paper even if you never see this. (And maybe it’s better for you if you don’t.)

I looked for you in ruined London. Shortly after I arrived I found Mrs. de Koenig, our neighbor on Market Street, who told me you’d left on a mercy ship bound for Australia. You left, she tells me, with Lily and this man (I will not say “this deserter,” though from what I understand he is one), this Colin Watson.

I won’t dwell on my reaction. Enough to say that the days that followed are vague in my mind. I sold my horse and spent the money on some of what had been salvaged from the High Street distilleries.

Oblivion is a dear purchase in London, Caroline. But maybe that’s always the case, everywhere.

After a long time I woke to find myself lying in an open heath in the mist, brutally sober and achingly cold. My blanket was soaked through and so were my filthy clothes. Dawn was breaking, the sun just lightening the eastern sky. I was at the perimeter of the refugee camp. I looked at the few fires smoldering unattended in the gray light. When I was steadier I stood up. I felt abandoned and alone…

But I wasn’t.

I turned at some suggestion of a sound and saw -

Myself.

I know how strange that sounds. And it was strange, strange and disorienting. We never see our own faces, Caroline, even in mirrors. I think we learn a tan early age to pose for mirrors, to show ourselves our best angles. It’s a very different experience to find one’s face and body occupying the space of another person.

For a time I just stared at him. I understood without asking that this was the man who had paced me on the ride from New Dover.

It was obvious why I hadn’t recognized him sooner. He was undeniably myself, but not exactly my reflection. Let me describe what I saw: a young man, tall, dressed in threadbare military gear. He wore no hat and his boots were muddy. He was stockier than I am, and he walked without limping. He was clean-shaven. His eyes were bright and observant. He smiled, not threateningly. He carried no weapon.

He looked harmless.

But he wasn’t human.

At least not a living human being. For one thing, he wasn’t entirely
there
. I mean, Caroline, that the image of him faded and brightened periodically, the way a star twinkles on a windy night.

I whispered, “Who are you?”

His voice was firm, not ghostly. He said, “That’s a complicated question. But I think you know part of the answer already.”

Mist rose up around us from the sodden ground. We stood together in the chill half-light as if a wall divided us from the rest of the world.

“You look like me,” I said slowly. “Or like a ghost. I don’t know what you are.”

He said, “Take a walk with me, Guilford. I think better on my feet.”

So we strolled across the heather on that fogbound morning. I guess I should have been terrified. I was, on some level. But his manner was disarming. The expression on his face seemed to say:
How absurd, that we have to meet like this
.

As if a ghost were to apologize for its clumsy trappings: the winding-sheet, the chains.

Maybe it sounds as if I accepted this visitation calmly. What I really felt was more like entranced astonishment. I believe he chose a time to appear when I was sufficiently vulnerable — dazed enough — to hear him over the roar of my own dread.

Or maybe he was a hallucination, provoked by exhaustion and liquor and grief. Think what you like, Caroline.

We walked in the faint light of morning. He seemed happier, or at least most solid, in the deep shadow of the mosque trees bordering the meadow. His voice was a physical voice, rich with the human noise of breath and lungs. He spoke without pretension, in colloquial English that sounded as familiar as the rumble of my own thoughts. But he was never hesitant or lost for words.

This is what he said.

He told me his name was Guilford Law and he had been born and raised in Boston.

He said he’d lived an unexceptional life until his nineteenth year, when he was drafted and sent overseas to fight a foreign war… a European war, a “World War.”

He asked me to imagine a history in which Europe was never converted, in which that stew of kingdoms and despotisms continued to simmer until it erupted into a global conflict.

The details aren’t important. The gist is that this phantom Guilford Law ended up in France, facing the German army in static, bloody trench battles made more nightmarish by poisonous gas and aerial attacks.

This Guilford Law — “the picket,” as I’ve come to think of him — was killed in that war.

What amazed him was that, when he closed his eyes for the last time on Earth, it wasn’t the end of all life or thought.

And here, Caroline, the story becomes even more peculiar, even more mad.

We sat on a fallen log in the cool of the morning, and I was struck by his easy presence, the solidity, the sheer apparent
heft
of him. His dark hair moved when the wind blew; he breathed in and out like any other living thing; the log jostled with his weight as he shifted to face me.

If what the picket told me is true then Schiaparelli and like-minded astronomers are correct: life exists among the stars and planets, life both like and unlike our own, in some cases different in the extreme.

The universe, the picket said, is immensely old. Old enough to have produced scientific civilizations long before human beings perfected the stone axe. The human race was born into a galaxy saturated with sentience. Before our sun congealed from the primal dust, the picket said, there were already wonders in the universe so large and subtle that they seem more magic than science; and greater wonders to come, enterprises literally eons in the making.

He described the galaxy — our little cluster of some several million stars, itself only one of several billion such clusters — as a kind of living thing, “waking up to itself.” Lines of communication connect the stars: not telegraph or even radio communication but something that plays upon the invisible essence (the “isotropic energy,” by which I gather he means the aether) of space itself; and these close-seined nets of communication have grown so intricate that they possess an intelligence of their own! The stars, he suggested, are literally
thinking among themselves
, and more than that:
remembering
.

Preston Finch used to quote Bishop Berkeley to the effect that we are all thoughts in the mind of God. But what if that’s literally true?

This Guilford Law was a physical animal until the day he died, at which point he became a kind of thought… a
seed sentience
, he called it, in the mind of this local God, this evolving galactic Self.

It was not, he said, an especially exalted existence, at least at first. A human mind is still only a human mind even when it’s translated into Mind at Large. He woke into the afterlife with the idea that he was recovering from a shrapnel wound in a French field hospital, and it required the appearance of a few of the predeceased to convince him he had actually died! His “virtual” body (he called it) resembled his own so closely that there seemed to be no difference, though that could change, he was told. The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change. There was much to learn, worlds to explore, new forms of life to meet — to
become
, if the spirit so moved him. His organic body had been limited by its physical needs and by the brain’s ability to capture and retain memories. Those impediments were lifted.

He would change, inevitably, as he learned to inhabit the Mind that contained him, to tap its memories and wisdom. Not to abandon his human nature but to build on it, expand it.

And that, in sum, is what he did, for literally millions of centuries, until “Guilford Law,” the so-called seed-sentience, became a fraction of something vaster and more complex.

What I was talking to this morning was both Guilford Law and this larger being — billions upon billions of beings, in fact, linked together and yet retaining their individuality.

You can imagine my incredulity. But under the circumstances any explanation might have seemed plausible.

Can you read this as anything other than the raving of a man driven mad by isolation and shock?

The shock is real enough, God knows. I grieve for what both of us have lost.

And I don’t expect you to believe me. All I ask is your patience. And your good will, Caroline, if that stock is not exhausted.

I asked the picket how any of this could have happened.
I
was Guilford Law, after all, and I
hadn’t
died in any German war, and that was as plain as the rising of the sun.

“Long story,” he said.

I said I wasn’t going anywhere.

The afterlife, the picket said, wasn’t what he had expected. Most fundamentally, it wasn’t a
supernatural
afterlife — it was a man-made (or at least intelligent-creature-made) paradise, as artificial as the Brooklyn Bridge and in its own immense way equally finite. Recovered souls from a million planets were linked together in physical structures he called “noospheres,” planet-sized machines which traveled the galaxy on endless voyages of exploration. A paradise, Caroline, but not heaven, and not without its problems and enemies.

I asked him what enemies these gods could have.

“Two,” he said.

One was Time. Sentience had conquered mortality, at least on the scale of the galaxy. Since before the advent of mankind, any arguably sentient creature that died within the effectual realm of the noospheres was taken up into paradise. (Including every human being from Neanderthal Man to President Taft and beyond. Some, he implied, had required a fair degree of “moral reawakening” before they could adjust to the afterlife. I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.)