Darwinia (33 page)

Artistry.

He knew, of course, how all this would look to an untutored individual, i.e., quite ghastly. Slice, daub, slice again, like a doctor practicing cranial surgery on a corpse, and beware the nerves that ran beneath the skin. He had once given himself a droopy lip that lasted three days and prompted one of his aides to inquire whether he might have had a stroke. It was delicate work that required patience and a steady hand.

He kept the gear in a leather bag in the medicine cabinet, the Immortal’s Makeup Kit: fresh razors, a whetting stone, cotton balls, tweezers.

To approximate the roughness of aged skin, he found sandpaper handy.

He preferred a number ten grit, applied until the pores grew bloody.

Obviously, the illusion couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. But it wouldn’t have to be. Soon the war would take another, different turn; disguises would be shed; in six months, a year… well, everything would be different. He had been promised as much.

He finished with the razor, cleaned it, rinsed droplets of blood from the sink, flushed bloody wads of cotton down the toilet. He was satisfied with his work and about to leave the bathroom when he noticed something peculiar about himself. The nail of his left index finger was missing. The space where it should have been was blank — a moist, pink indentation.

That was odd. He didn’t remember losing the nail. There had been no pain.

He held both hands in front of him and inspected them with a deep uneasiness.

He discovered two more loose nails, right thumb and right pinky. Experimentally, he teased the thumbnail up. It parted from the flesh with a gluey, nauseating smack and dropped into the basin of the sink, where it glistened like a beetle’s wing on the steamy porcelain.

Well
, he thought.
This is new.

Some kind of skin disease? But surely it would pass. The nails would grow back. That was how things worked, after all. He was immortal.

But the gods were silent on the subject.

Elias Vale’s last client was a Caribbean woman dying of cancer.

Her name was Felicity, and she had come through the autumn rain on her stick-legs to Vale’s shabby suite in the Coaltown district of New Dresden. She wore a flower-print shift that hung on her hollow body like a collapsed tent. The tumors — as his god perceived them — had already invaded her lungs and bowel.

He closed the shutters on a view of wet streets, dark faces, industrial stacks, sour air. Felicity, seventy years old, sighed at the dimming of the light. She had been shocked, at first, by the broken contours of Vale’s face. That was all right, Vale thought. Fear and awe were comfortable neighbors.

Felicity asked, in a faint voice still ripe with Spanish Town inflections, “Will I die?”

She didn’t need a psychic for that diagnosis. Any honest layman would know at once she was dying. The wonder was that she had been able to climb the flight of stairs to Vale’s consulting room. But of course she hadn’t come to hear the truth.

He sat across from her at a small wooden table, its short leg propped on a book of astrological charts. Felicity’s yellow eyes glistened in the watery light. Vale offered his hand. His hand was soft, plump. Hers was gaunt, parchment skin framing a pale palm. “Your hand is warm,” he said.

“Yours is cold.”

“Warm hands are a good sign. That’s life, Felicity. Feel it. That’s all the days you lived, all running through your body like electricity. Spanish Town, Kingston, the boat to Darwinia… your husband, your babies, they’re there, all your days together under the skin.”

She said sternly, “How many more?”

Vale’s god had no interest in this woman. She was important only for the fifteen-dollar consultation fee. She existed to top off his purse before he hopped a train to Armageddon.

Ready or not.

But he felt sorry for her.

“Do you feel that river, Felicity? That river of blood? River of iron and air running from high mountain heart down to the delta of fingers and toes?”

She closed her eyes, wincing slightly at the pressure of his hand on her wrist. “Yes,” she whispered.

“That’s a strong old river, Felicity. That’s a river as wide as the Rhine.”

“Where does it go to — in the end?”

“The sea,” Vale said, gently. “Every river runs into the sea.”

“But… not yet?”

“No, not yet. That river hasn’t run dry.”

“I feel very poorly. Some mornings I hardly can drag myself from bed.”

“You’re not a young woman, Felicity; Think of the children you raised. Michael, building bridges in the mountains, and Constance, with her own young ones almost grown.”

“And Carlotta,” Felicity murmured, her sad eyes closed.

“And little Carlotta, round and beautiful as the day she died. She’s waiting for you, Felicity, but she’s patient. She knows the time is not yet.”

“How long?”

“All the time in the world,” Vale said. Which wasn’t much.

The urgency in her voice was chastening. There was still a strong woman in this sack of bone and rotten tissue.

“Two years,” he said. “Maybe three. Long enough to see Constance’s little ones out on their own. Long enough to do the things you have to do.”

She sighed, a long exhalation of relief and gratitude. Her breath smelled like the butcher shop on Hoover Lane, the one with goat carcasses strung in the window like Christmas decorations. “Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.”

She would be dead by the end of the month.

He folded the money into his pocket and helped her down the stairs.

New Dresden’s rail yard was a vast, sooty wasteland illuminated by harsh industrial lights on steel poles. The city’s towers rose up behind the longhouses like tombstones, steamy with rain.

Vale wore dark clothing. He carried a cloth bag with a few possessions in it. His money was on a belt cinched around his waist. He carried a pistol in the folds of his trousers.

He crawled under a torn section of chain-link fence, drenching his knees on the muddy ground. The soil of compressed dirt and cinders and coal fragments harbored pools of rainwater on which oil floated in rainbow slicks. He had been shivering for most of an hour, waiting while an inland train was shunted onto the nearest track. Now the diesel engine began to speed up, its headlight beaming through the rain-streaked darkness.

Go
, Vale thought.
Run.

He felt his god’s sense of urgency coursing through him, and it wasn’t about catching this particular train. Human history was spiraling down to the zero point, perhaps even faster than the gods had anticipated. Vale had work to do. He had come to this desolate place for a reason.

He tossed his bag through the open door of a flatcar and hurled himself after it. He landed rolling, bending back the fingers of his left hand. “Shit,” he whispered. He sat up against the wooden slats of the far wall. The car was dark and stank of ancient cargo: moldy hay, snakes and cattle bound for slaughter. Rail-yard lights strobed past the open door.

He was not alone. There was another man huddled in the far corner of the car, visible in flashes. Vale’s hand went instinctively to his pistol. But he saw in a flicker of hard light that the man was old, shabby, hollow-eyed, and probably drunk on aftershave or antiseptic. A nuisance, perhaps, but not a threat.

“Hey, stranger,” the old man said.

“Leave me alone,” Vale said crisply.

He felt the burden of his days. He had passed many anonymous years since Washington, had led a marginal life in the marginal districts of too many towns. New Orleans, Miami, Jeffersonville, New Pittsburgh, New Dresden. He had learned a few things useful to the gods and he had never lacked for food or accommodation, though he was sometimes poor. He had been, he suspected, held in reserve, waiting for the final summons, the last trumpet, the ascension of the gods over mankind.

And always there had been the fear: What if that battle never came? What if he was condemned to an endless round of cheap rooms, the confessions of impotent men and dying women and grieving husbands, the shallow consolations of discount liquor and Turkish heroin?

Soon
, his god whispered. Or perhaps it was his own secret voice. Lately, the distinction escaped him.

The train rattled deep into the countryside, past dripping mosque trees and sage-pine forests, across steel bridges slick with autumn mist, toward the wild East, toward Armageddon.

He woke in a wash of sunlight with the hobo looming over him. He scooted away from the evil-smelling old man and reached for his pistol.

The hobo backed off, holding up his grimy hands in an appeasing gesture. “No harm done! No harm done!”

The train clacked through daylight forest. Beyond the open door, a ridge declined toward a mossy river.

“Just keep the fuck away from me,” Vale said.

“You hurt your hand, my friend,” the hobo said.

“That’s my problem.”

“Looks bad.”

“It’ll heal.” He had twisted it coming into the train last night. It didn’t hurt. But it did look a little odd.

Four of the five nails were missing. The flesh beneath was pale and strange.

They came from the coast and the hinterland, from Tilson and Jeffersonville and New Pittsburgh and a hundred smaller towns; from the Alps, the Pyrenees, the compass points of the Territories. They came together, a secret army, where roads met rail lines, in a dozen villages and nameless crossroad inns. They carried their own weapons: pistols, rifles, shotguns. Ammunition arrived in crates at the railhead towns of Randall and Perseverance, where it was unloaded into trucks and wagons and distributed to tent armories deep in the forest. Artillerymen arrived disguised as farmers, field artillery packed under hay bales.

Guilford Law had spent the last year as an advance scout. He knew these hills and valleys intimately. He followed his own path toward the City of Demons, watching the forest for signs of the enemy.

The weather was clear, cool, stable. The mosque trees didn’t shed their angular foliage, only turned gray as the season passed. The forest floor, a mulch of plant tissue dotted with varicolored mold, disguised his tracks. He moved through cinnamon-scented shadow, among slim fingers of sunlight. His knee-length jacket was of cured wormhide, and underneath it he carried an automatic rifle.

The City of Demons wasn’t marked on any map. Public roads came nowhere near. Topological maps and aerial surveys ignored it, and neither the land nor the climate tempted homesteaders or loggers. Private aircraft, especially the little Winchester float planes popular in the Territories, occasionally passed overhead, but the pilots saw nothing unusual. The wooded valley had been edited out of human perception in the years since it was nearly exposed by the Finch expedition. It was invisible to human eyes.

But not to Guilford’s.

Go carefully now
, he told himself. The land rose in a series of semi-wooded ridges. It would be too easy to make himself conspicuous, crossing these spines of ancient rock.

He approached the City, perhaps not coincidentally, from the same hillside where he had first seen it almost fifty years ago.

But no: he had seen it before that… he had seen it in its prime, more than ten thousand years earlier, its granite blocks freshly carved from the meat of the mountain, its avenues crowded with powerful armored bipeds, avatars of the psions. They were the product of an evolution in which invertebrates had taken a longer path toward the invention of the spine, a history that would have obliterated the old earth entirely if not for the intervention of galactic Mind.
Battles half lost
, Guilford thought,
battles half won.
In the midst of this new Europe the psions had left a hole in the mantle of the planet, a Well, a machine that communicated directly with the enabling codes of the Archive itself and from which, in due time — soon — the psions would re-emerge, to inhabit the earth even as they devoured it.

Here, and on a million Archival planets.

Now, and in the past, and in the future.

The memories were Guilford’s, in a sense, but vague, transient, incomplete. He was aware of his own limitations. He was a frail vessel. He wondered if he could contain what the god-Guilford was preparing to pour into him.

He lay prone at the top of the ridge and saw the City through a screen of nettle grass. He heard wind gusting among the stalks, felt billyflies settle among the hairs of his arms. He listened to the sound of his own breathing.

The City of Demons was being renewed.

The psions had not yet emerged from their Well, but the streets were inhabited once more, this time by demon-ridden men. More old war buddies, Guilford thought. Like the Old Men gathering in the forest, these men had died at Ypres or the Marne or at sea — died in one world, lived in another. They were conduits for the transit between the Archive and its ontosphere. Lacking conscience, they were perfect vehicles for the psions. They were the Defenders of the City of Demons and they carried their own weapons. They had been arriving singly or in pairs for many months.

Guilford counted their tents and tried to spot their entrenchments and artillery positions. Clear, delicate sunlight cast cloud-shadows over the City. The Dome of the Well had been cleared of extraneous rubble. It stood distinctly visible now, a plume of moist air rising from its broken shell into the autumn afternoon.

Guilford sketched the entrenchments in a pocket notebook, marking points of vulnerability, possible avenues of attack from the wooded hillside. Their clock is running fast, he reminded himself. The Turning packets had done their work. They’re not as prepared as they should be.

But the defenders had dug in solidly, in concentric layers of entrenchments and barbed wire ranging from the City’s crumbled perimeter to the Dome of the Well.