Darwinia (31 page)

Bullets fractured wood, plaster, upholstery, curtains. One of Abby’s kitchen candles winked out. The smell of charred wood was pungent and intense.

“Abby?” he called out. “Are you all right?”

The east-facing room was Nick’s. His balsa-wood airplane models were lined up on a shelf with his crystal radio and his seashell collection.

Tom Compton tore the drapes away from the window and kicked the glass out of the lower pane.

The house was still ringing with the sound of breaking glass.

The frontiersman ducked under the sill, raised his head briefly and ducked back.

“I see four of ’em,” he said. “Two hiding back of the cars, at least two more out by the elm. Are you a good marksman, Lil?”

“Yes.” No sense being modest. Although she had never fired this Remington.

“Shoot for the tree,” he said. “I’ll cover the close targets.”

No time for thought. He didn’t hesitate, simply gripped the window frame with his left hand and began to fire his pistol in a steady, rapid rhythm.

The pearly sky cast a dim light. Lily came to the window, exposing her head as little as possible, and drew a bead on the elm, and then on the rough shape beside it. She fired.

This was not a rabbit. But she could pretend. She thought of the farm outside Wollongong, shooting rabbits with Colin Watson back when she still called him “Daddy.” In those days the rifle had seemed bigger and heavier. But she was steady with it. He taught her to anticipate the noise, the kick.

It had made her queasy when the rabbits died, spilling themselves like torn paper bags over the dry earth. But the rabbits were vermin, a plague; she learned to suppress the sympathy.

And here was another plague. She fired the rifle calmly. It kicked her shoulder. A cartridge rattled across the wooden floor of Nick’s room and lodged under the bed.

Had the shadow-figure fallen? She thought so, but the light was so poor…

“Don’t stop,” Tom said, reloading. “You can’t take these people out with a single shot. They’re not that easy to kill.”

Guilford had lost the feeling in his left leg. When he looked down he saw a dark wetness above his knee and smelled blood and meat. The wound was healing already, but a nerve must have been severed; that would take time to repair.

He crawled toward the sofa, trailing blood.

“Abby?” he said.

More bullets pounded through the ruined door and window. Across the room Abby’s cloth curtains began to smolder, oozing dark smoke. Something banged repeatedly against the kitchen door.

“Abby?”

There was no answer from the sofa.

He heard Tom and Lily’s gunfire from upstairs, shouts of pain and confusion outside.

“Talk to me, Abby!”

The back of the sofa had been struck several times. Particles of horsehair and cotton stuffing hung in the air like dirty snow.

He put his hand in a puddle of blood, not his own.

“I count four down,” Tom Compton said, “but they won’t stay down unless we finish ’em. And there might be more out back.” But no second-story window faced that direction.

He hurried down the stairs. Lily followed close behind him. Her hands were shaking now. The house stank of cordite and smoke and male sweat and worse things.

Down to the living room, where the frontiersman stopped short in the arched doorway and said, “Oh, Christ!”

Someone had come in through the back door.

A fat man in a gray Territory Police uniform.

“Sheriff Carlyle,” Guilford said.

Guilford was obviously wounded and dazed, but he had managed to stand up. One hand clasped his bloody thigh. He held out the other imploringly. He had dropped his pistol by the sofa -

By the blood-drenched sofa.

“They’re hurt,” Guilford said plaintively. “You have to help me take them to town. The hospital.”

But the sheriff only smiled and raised his own pistol.

Sheriff Carlyle: one of the bad guys.

Lily struggled to aim her rifle. Her heart pumped, but her blood had turned into a cold sludge.

The sheriff fired twice before Tom got off a shot that sent him twisting against the wall.

The frontiersman stepped close to the fallen Sheriff Carlyle. He pounded three bullets into the sheriff at close range until the sheriff’s head was as red and shapeless as one of Colin Watson’s rabbits.

Guilford lay on the floor, fountaining blood from a chest wound.

Abby and Nicholas were behind the useless fortress of the sofa, unspeakably dead.

Guilford woke in the shade of the elm, in the tall grass, in a patch of false anemones blue as glacial ice. A gentle breeze cooled his skin. Diffuse daylight held each object suspended in its even glow, as if his perception had been washed clean of every defect.

But the sky was black and full of stars. That was odd.

He turned his head and saw the picket standing a few paces away. His shadow-self. His ghost.

Probably he should have been afraid. Mysteriously, he wasn’t.

“You,” he managed to say.

The picket — still young, still dressed in his tattered uniform — smiled sympathetically. “Hello, Guilford.”

“Hello yourself.”

He sat up. At the back of his mind was the nagging sensation that something was wrong, terribly wrong, tragically wrong. But the memory wouldn’t yield itself up. “I think,” he said slowly, “I’m
shot
…”

“Yes. But don’t worry about that right now.”

That sky, the sky full of stars crisp as electricity and close as the end of his arm, that bothered him, too. “Why am I here?”

“To talk.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk. Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. You can cover your ears and whistle ‘Dixie,’ if you want. Wouldn’t you rather hear what I have to say?”

“You’re not exactly a font of good news.”

“Take a walk with me, Guilford.”

“You walk too much.”

“I think better on my feet,” the picket said.

Just as in burned London a quarter century ago, there was a forced calm inside him. He ought to be terrified.
Everything
was wrong… worse than wrong, some surge of memory suggested. He wondered if the picket was able to impose an emotional amnesia on him, to smother his panic.

Panic would be easy, maybe even appropriate.

“This way,” the picket said.

Guilford walked with the picket up the trail beyond the house, among the brush and wind-twisted trees. He looked back at his house, small and alone on its grassy headland, and saw the ocean beyond it, glass-flat and mirroring the stars.

“Am I dead?”

“Yes and no,” the picket said.

“That could be a little clearer.”

“It could go either way.”

Despite the unearthly calm Guilford felt a feather touch of dread.

“Depending on what?”

“Luck. Resolve. You.”

“Is this a riddle?”

“No. Just hard to explain.”

They climbed the trails steadily. Ordinarily Guilford would have been winded by the hike, but his lungs worked more efficiently here, or the air was thicker, or he was as invulnerable as a dream. Before long they reached the high summit of the hill. The picket said, “Let’s sit a while.”

They found a mosque tree and put their backs against it, the way Guilford sometimes sat with Nick on a summer night, looking at the stars. Stars in the ocean, stars in the sky. More stars than he had imagined there could be. The stars were visibly rotating — not around the northern axis but around a point directly overhead.

“Those stars,” he said, “are they real?”

“ ‘Real’ is a word that means more than you think, Guilford.”

“But this isn’t really the hill back of my house.”

“No. Just a place to rest.”

This is his ground
, Guilford thought.
Ghost territory.
“How does it feel, being a god?”

“That’s not what I am.”

“The difference is subtle.”

“If you turn on an electric light, does that make you a god? Your own ancestors might have said so.”

Guilford blinked at the vault of the sky. “Hell of a light bulb.”

“We’re inside the Archive,” the picket said. “Specifically, we’re enclosed in a nodular logic packet attached to the procedural protocols of the Terrestrial ontosphere.”

“Well, that explains it,” Guilford said.

“I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, we’re still inside in the Archive — we can’t leave it, at least not yet — but we’re not exactly on Earth.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I can’t take you out of the Archive, but I can show you what the Archive looks like from the outside.”

Guilford wasn’t sure what he was being offered — and the buried sense of
urgency
still pricked at him — but since he had no real choice, he nodded. “Show me,” he said.

As suddenly as that, the sky began to shift. It ceased to spin. The stars moved in a new direction, south to north, the southern horizon dropping at a dizzying speed. Guilford gasped and wanted to cling to the ground even though there was no sensation of motion. The breeze persisted, warm and gentle from the sea.

“What am I looking at?”

“Just watch,” the picket said.

More stars scrolled up from the horizon, countless stars, and then retreated at a shocking speed, became blurs and bands of light… the arms, the disk of a galaxy. The starlight stabilized, became a vast and luminous wheel in the sky.

“The Archive’s ontosphere,” the picket said quietly. “It’s
isness
.”

Guilford couldn’t frame a response. He felt awe like a band across his chest, tightening.

Now the galaxy itself began to blur together, to form an undifferentiated sphere of light.

“The ontosphere in four dimensions.”

And that faded as suddenly. Now the sky was an immensity of rainbow-colored lines on velvet black, iridescent, parallel, stretching in every direction to infinity until he couldn’t bear to look, until looking threatened his sanity -

“The Higgs structure of the Archive,” the picket said, “visualized and simplified.”

Simplified!
Guilford thought.

That faded, too.

For a moment the sky was utterly dark.

“If you were outside the Archive,” the picket said, “this is what you would see.”

The Archive
: a seamless, sealed sphere of sullen orange light that filled the western horizon and was reflected in the still water of the bay.

“It contains all that the galaxy once was,” the picket said softly. “It did, at least, until the psions corrupted it. That smudge of red light over the hills, Guilford, is all that remains of the
original
galaxy, with all its stars and civilizations and voices and possibilities — an immense black hole devouring a few lifeless cinders.”

“Black hole?” Guilford managed to ask.

“A singularity, matter so compacted that nothing can escape from it, not even light. What you see is secondary radiation.”

Guilford said nothing. He felt a great fear battering at this envelope of calm which contained him. If what the picket had told him was true then this mass in the sky contained both his past and his future; time all fragile, tentative, vulnerable to attack. That smoldering cinder was a slate on which the gods had written worlds. Misplace an atom and planets collide.

And on that slate they had written Lily and Caroline and Abby and Nicholas… and Guilford. He had been extracted from it, temporarily, a number fluctuating between zero and one.

Souls like chalk dust
, Guilford thought. He looked at the picket. “What do you want from me?”

“We talked about this once before.”

“You want me to fight your battle. To be a soldier.”

“Strange as it may seem, there are things you can do in the ontosphere that I can’t. I’m asking for your help.”

“My help!” He stared at the dully radiant image of the Archive. “I’m not a god! Even if I do what you want, what difference can it possibly make?”

“None, if you were the only one. But there are millions of others, on millions of other worlds, and millions more to come.”

“Why waste time on me, then?”

“You’re no more or less important than any of the rest. You matter, Guilford, because
every
life matters.”

“Then take me home and let me look after Abby and Nick.”

They were all right, weren’t they? He struggled with vague, disquieting shards of memory. Memory like broken glass…

“I can’t do that,” the picket said. “I’m not omnipotent. Don’t make the mistake of thinking so.”

“What kind of a god are you, then?”

“Not a god. I was born of mortal parents, Guilford, just like you.”

“A million years ago.”

“Far more than that. But I can’t manipulate the ontosphere the way you suggest. I can’t rewrite the past… and only you can influence the future.” He stood up. The picket carried himself with a dignity Guilford didn’t recognize as his own. For a moment Guilford seemed to see past him… not
through
him, but beyond the humble appearance into something as hot and immense as the sun.

This isn’t a human being
, Guilford thought. Maybe it used to be a human being; maybe it even used to be Guilford Law. But it was some other kind of creature now.
It walks between stars
, Guilford thought,
the way I might walk into Fayetteville on a sunny day.

“Consider the stakes. If this battle is lost, your daughter will be enslaved and your grandchildren will be used as incubators for something utterly soulless. In a very real sense, Guilford, they will be eaten. It’s a form of death from which there is no resurrection.”

Nick
, Guilford thought.
Something about Nick. Nick hiding behind the big living room sofa…