Darwinia (32 page)

“And if all the battles are lost,” the picket said, “then all of this, all past, all future, everything you loved or might have loved, will be food for locusts.”

“Tell me something,” Guilford said. “Just one thing. Please explain why all this depends on
me
. I’m nothing special — you
know
that, if you’re what you say you are. Why don’t you go find somebody else? Somebody smarter? Somebody with the strength to watch his kids grow old and die? All I ever wanted — Christ! — is a life, the kind of life people have, fall in love, make babies, have a family that cares enough to give me a decent burial…”

“You have a foot in two worlds. Part of you is identical to part of me, the Guilford Law who died in France. And part of you is unique: the Guilford Law who witnessed the Miracle. That’s what makes this conversation possible.”

Guilford put his head down. “We were alike for what, nineteen or twenty years out of a hundred million? That’s hardly a significant fraction.”

“I’m immensely older than you are. But I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to carry a gun into a muddy trench. And fear for my life, and doubt the sanity of the enterprise, and feel the bullet, feel the pain, feel the dying. I don’t like asking you to walk into an even uglier war. But the choice is forced on us both.” He bowed his head. “I didn’t make the Enemy.”

Nick behind the sofa. Abby curled over him, protecting him. Horsehair and stitched cotton and the smell of gunpowder and — and -

Blood.

“I have nothing to offer you,” the picket said grimly, “but more pain. I’m sorry. If you go back, you take me with you. My memories. Bouresches, the trenches, the fear.”

“I want something,” Guilford said. He felt grief rising in him like a hot balloon. “If I do what you say—”

“I have nothing to offer.”

“I want to die. Not live forever. Grow old and die like a human being. Is that so much to ask?”

The picket was silent for a time.

Turing packets worked tirelessly to shore up the crumbling substructures of the Archive. Psilife advanced, retreated, advanced again on a thousand fronts.

A second wave of viral codes was launched into the Archive, targeted against the psions’ heavily armored clock sequences.

The noospheres hoped to disrupt the psions’ timing, to sever them from the ontosphere’s own Higgs clock. It was a daring plan, if dangerous; the same strategy might be turned against themselves.

Sentience waited: deeply patient, if deeply afraid.

There were hundreds of men like him working the trans-Alpine rail line.

They held Railworkers Union cards. They carved mountains with TNT, they bridged gorges, they spiked track. Or they were engineers, porters, oilers, machinists, stevedores.

When work was thin, they vanished into the wilderness for months at a time. Or they vanished, almost as easily, into the smoky urban slums of Tilson and New Pittsburgh along the Rhine.

They were solitary, silent. They had no friends, no family. They didn’t look especially old (their age was hard to place), but age surrounded them like an aura. Their carriage suggested an economy of motion, a terrible and sullen patience.

Karen Wilder knew the type. She’d seen plenty of them. Just lately, she’d seen more than ever.

Karen tended bar at the Schaffhausen Grill in the town of Randall, New Inland Territories. She’d been here five years now, wandered in from a mine town in the Pyrenees, broke and looking for work. She was good at her job and had a no-nonsense arrangement with the owner. The cook kept his hands off her and she didn’t have to go upstairs with the customers. (Though that was less of a problem since she turned forty last year. The offers hadn’t stopped, but they had slowed down some.)

Randall was a whistlestop on the Rhine-Ruhr line. The big freight cars came through every day, heavy with coal for Tilson, Carver, and New Dresden. Below the falls, the Inland Highway crossed the tracks. The railhead had grown enormously in the last few years. Respectable families had moved in. But Randall was still a frontier town, the Homestead and Emigration Laws still funneling in a steady stream of drifters from the cities. The new hands were troublesome, Karen had found; argumentative, quick with their fists. She preferred the company of longtimers, even (or especially) the nontalkative ones, like Guilford Law.

She had known him the day he first walked in — not his name, but his
kind
.

He was a longtimer of the purest ray serene. Lean, almost skinny. Big hands. Ancient eyes. Karen found herself to tempted to ask what those eyes had seen.

But he wasn’t much of a talker. He’d been a regular for a year, year and a half now. He came in evenings, ate sparingly, drank a little. Karen thought maybe he liked her — he always offered a word or two about the weather or the news. When he talked to her he inclined his body toward her like a shade plant leaning toward the sun.

But he always went upstairs with the whores.

Tonight was a little different.

Mid-September, the Schaffhausen tended to attract strictly locals. The summer crowd, loggers and snake-herders, low-rent tourists riding the rails, found warmer places to go. The owner had hired a Tilson-based jazz band in an effort to attract customers, but the musicians were expensive and hard on the female talent, and the trumpeter liked to play drunken scales in the town square at dawn. So that hadn’t lasted. Come September the Schaffhausen was restored to its usual calm.

Then the longtimers had begun showing up. (The Old Men, some people called them.) It didn’t seem unusual at first. People like that drifted through Randall all the time, renting some dusty old room for a while, moving on. They paid their bills, no questions asked, no questions answered. They were a fact of life, like the wild snakes that roamed the southern hills.

But lately some of these men had stayed longer than usual, and more had arrived, and they sat in clusters in the Schaffhausen arguing about god-knows-what in hushed tones, and Karen’s curiosity was aroused despite her best intentions.

So when Guilford Law sat at the bar and ordered a drink she put it in front of him and said, “Is there a convention in town or what?”

He thanked her politely. Then he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The hell you don’t.”

He gave her a long look. “Karen, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”
Yes, Mr. Been-here-every-night-for-a-year, that’s my name.

“Karen, it’s an awkward question.”

“None of my business, in other words. But something’s up.”

“Is it?”

“Only if you have eyes. Every rail-rat and wood-louse in the Territories must be here tonight. You folks have a look about you, you know.”

Like something starved and beaten that refuses to die.
But she wouldn’t tell him that.

For a split second she thought he was going to confide in her. The look that crossed his face was of such purified human loneliness that Karen felt her lower lip begin to tremble.

What he said was, “You’re a very pretty girl.”

“That’s the first time in fifteen years anybody’s called me a
girl
, Mr. Law.”

“It’s going to be a hard autumn.”

“Is it?”

“You might not see me for a while. Tell you what. If I’m back by spring, I might look you up. If that’s all right, I mean.”

“Okay with me, I suppose. Spring’s a long time off.”

“And if I don’t make it back—”

Back from where?
She waited for him to finish.

But he swallowed his drink and shook his head.

Pretty girl
, he had said.

She got a dozen spurious compliments a day from men who were drunk or indifferently particular. Compliments meant nothing. But what Guilford Law had said stayed with her through the evening.
So simple
, she thought.
And sad, and curious.

Maybe he would look her up… and maybe that would be all right with her.

But tonight he finished his drink and went home alone, moving like a wounded animal. She challenged him with her eyes. He looked away.

Lily left work at four-thirty and rode a bus to the National Museum.

The day was cool, clear, brisk. The bus was crowded with grim wage earners, middle-aged men in worsted suits and crumpled hats. None of them understood the imminence of celestial war. What they wanted, in her experience, was a cocktail, dinner, an after-dinner cocktail, the kids asleep, television tuned to one of the two national networks, and maybe a nightcap before bed.

She envied them.

There was a theme exhibit at the Museum, advertised on immense banners like baronial flags suspended above the doors.

“Miracle,” she supposed, to appease the religious lobbies. She still preferred to think of the continent as Darwinia, the old Hearst nickname. The irony was lost now; most people acknowledged that Europe had a fossil history of its own, whatever that might mean, and she could well imagine the young Charles Darwin collecting beetles in the Rhine marshes, puzzling out the continent’s mystery. Though perhaps not its
central
mystery.

Off the bus, through cool air into the fluorescent inner chambers of the museum.

The exhibit was immense. Abby ignored the majority of it and walked directly to the glass case devoted to the Finch Expedition of 1920 and the brief Anglo-American conflict. Here were examples of old-time compasses, plant-presses, theodolites, a crude memorial retrieved years after the event from the Rhinelands below the Bodensee:
In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany
. Photographs of the members of the expedition: Preston Finch, ridiculously stiff in a solar topee; gaunt Avery Keck; luckless Gillvany; poor martyred John Watts Sullivan… Diggs, the cook, wasn’t represented, nor was Tom Compton, but here was her father, Guilford Law, with a day’s beard and a flannel shirt, from his earlier Gallatin River expedition, a frowning young man with a box camera and dirty fingernails.

She touched the glass case with the tip of a finger. She hadn’t seen her father for twenty years, not since that dreadful morning in Fayetteville, the sun rising, it had seemed to her, on an ocean of blood.

He hadn’t died. Grave as his wounds were, they healed rapidly. He had been held in the Oro Delta County Hospital under surveillance: the Territorial Police wanted him to explain the gunshot deaths of Abby, Nicholas, three anonymous out-of-towners, and Sheriff Carlyle. But he was ambulatory long before the doctors anticipated; he left the hospital during the midnight shift after overpowering a guard. A warrant was issued, but that was hardly more than a gesture. The continent swallowed fugitives whole.

He was still out there.

She knew he was. The Old Men contacted her from time to time. Periodically, she told them what she learned from her secretarial job in the office of Matthew Crane — a demon-ridden Department of Defense functionary — and they reassured her that her father was still alive.

Still out there, unmaking the Apocalypse.

The time, they insisted, was close at hand.

Lily paused before an illuminated diorama.

Here was a Darwinian fossil biped — she couldn’t remember or pronounce its Latin name — a two-legged and four-armed monster that had hunted the European plains as recently as the Ice Age, and a formidable beast it was. The skeleton in the diorama stood eight feet tall, with a massive ventral spine to which dense bands of muscle had once been attached, a domed skull, a jaw full of flint-sharp teeth. And here beside it a reconstruction, complete with chitinous skin, glass eyes, serrated claws long as kitchen knives, tearing the throat of a fur snake.

A museum exhibit, like the photograph of Guilford Law; but Lily knew neither her father nor the beast was truly extinct.

“We’re closing down shortly, Ma’am.”

It was the night guard, a short man with a slack paunch, nasal voice, and eyes far more ancient than his face. She didn’t know his name, though they had met often before, always like this. He was her contact.

As before, she pressed a book into his hand. She had bought the book yesterday at a chain store in Arlington. It was a popular science book,
The Martian Canals Reconsidered
, with the latest photographs from Palomar, but Lily had only glanced at it. Interleaved between its pages were documents she had photocopied from work.

“Someone must have left this,” she said.

The guard accepted the book into his beefy hands. “I’ll see it gets to the Lost and Found.”

He had exchanged this pleasantry with her often enough that she had begun to think of it as another name for the Old Men, the Veterans, the Immortals:
the Lost and Found.

“Thank you.” She was brave enough to smile before she walked away.

Growing old, Matthew Crane thought, is like justice. It must not only happen, it must be seen to happen.

He had devised a number of techniques to ensure that he didn’t appear conspicuously young.

Once a year — every autumn — he retired to the privacy of his marbled bathroom, showered, toweled himself dry, and sat before the mirror with a pair of tweezers, plucking hairs from his head to create the effect of a receding hairline. The gods were not kind enough to anesthetize him during this procedure, but he had grown accustomed to the pain.

When that was finished, he etched few new lines into his face with the edge of a straight razor.

The technique was delicate. It was a question of cutting deeply (but not too deeply) and often. This area at the corner of the eye, for instance. He took care not the slice the eye itself, drawing the blade firmly outward along the cheek. Blood welled up, briefly. Dab and repeat. After the third or fourth cut, the stubbornly immortal flesh yielded a permanent scar.