Darwinia (34 page)

It wouldn’t be an easy fight.

He watched the City as the afternoon waned but saw nothing more… only those sundial streets, counting hours against the earth.

He returned as cautiously as he had come. Shadows pooled like water among the trees. He found himself thinking of Karen, the barmaid at the Schaffhausen Grill back in Randall. What could she possibly see in him?
I am as old as leather
, Guilford thought.
Dear God, I’m barely human anymore.

Still, it attracted him, the familiar fantasy of human warmth… it attracted him; but it reeked of nostalgia and pain.

Daylight had faded by the time he arrived at camp. Dinner was tinned rations, probably misappropriated from some freighter bound for the China Sea. Ancient men milled among the darktrees. Ghost Soldiers, some of them called themselves. This was an infantry unit, and the unit commander was Tom Compton, who sat pipe in hand by the bank of a stony creek contemplating the last blue of the evening sky.

Guilford could not look at Tom without a sensation of double exposure, of layered memory, because Tom had been with him at Belleau Wood, their battalion marching slow cadence into enemy fire, two fresh American soldiers determined to rout the Boche the way their grandfathers had routed Jeff Davis’s armies, not quite believing in the bullets even as the bullets decimated their lines like the blade of an invisible scythe.

Other memories, other enemies: Tom and Lily and Abby and Nick…

No innocence left between us
, Guilford thought,
only the stink of blood.

He reported what he had seen at the City.

“The weather should hold fair,” the frontiersman said, “at least for another day. I doubt that favors us.”

“We move out tonight?”

“Caissons are already rolling. Don’t count on getting much sleep.”

In her fifteen years at the Department of Defense, Lily thought she had taken the measure of Matthew Crane.

He was a civilian “consultant” who spent most of his time lunching with congressional overseers and signing his name to duplicate copies of appropriations paperwork. He was tall, gaunt, personable, and well-connected. His staff of three secretaries and a half dozen aides was not overtaxed. His salary was generous.

He was, of course, demon-ridden, and for the last fifteen years Lily’s real work had consisted of observing Mr. Matthew Crane and occasionally passing her observations to the Old Men. She didn’t know how useful or important any of this was. Possibly she would never know. Her most private fear was that she had wasted years performing trivial espionage in aid of a final Battle that might not happen in her lifetime and would probably not be resolved for ages — eons.

She was fifty years old, and she had never married, seldom even come close. She had learned to live with her solitude. It had its consolations.

The irony, perhaps, was that she had come to feel a kind of fondness for Matthew Crane. He was polite, reserved, and punctual. He wore tailored suits and was meticulous, even vain, about his clothing. She detected a vestige of human uncertainty buried under that glaze of absolute emotional control.

He was also, at least in part, a creature calculating, ruthless, and not at all human.

This morning he came into the office disheveled, clutching his left arm against his body, and brushed past the secretarial staff wordlessly. Lily exchanged a concerned look with Barb and Carol, the younger secretaries, but said nothing.

She tried never to ask herself the ultimate question:
What if he finds out who I am?
It was an old, abiding fear. Crane could be a charming man. But she knew he would never be merciful.

Alone in his office, Matthew Crane took off his jacket, stretched his arm across the lacquered desk top, and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. He put a blotter under his elbow to soak up the blood that continued to flow.

He had stumbled against the water fountain in the lobby and somehow lacerated the skin of his left forearm. The arm was bleeding. That was an unwelcome novelty. It had been a long time since Crane had seen more than a dram of his own blood.

If this
was
his own blood. It seemed not quite right. It was the wrong shade of red, for one thing. A muddy brick red, almost brown. Something in it sparkled like flecks of mica. And the blood was viscous, like honey; and it smelled faintly (perhaps more than faintly) of ammonia.

Blood
, Matthew Crane thought feverishly,
should not do these things.

The wound itself was minor, more an abrasion than a cut, quite superficial, really, except that it didn’t rush to heal itself, and the underflesh revealed by the wound was peculiarly structured, not like honest human meat, more like the hemorrhaging honeycomb of a wasp’s nest.

He buzzed Lily on the interoffice line and asked her to have some cotton and a bandage sent up from the infirmary. “And please don’t make a crisis of it — I’ve only scratched myself.”

A moment’s silence. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Crane replaced the phone. A drop of blood dribbled onto his pants. The smell was stronger now. Like something the janitor might use to clean a toilet.

He took several calming breaths and examined his hands. His fingers looked like an infant’s fingers, pink and unformed. The last of the nails had come off during the night. He had searched for them, childishly, petulantly, but hadn’t been able to find them among the pink-stained bedclothes.

He still had his toenails, however. They were trapped in his shoes. He could feel them, loose and tangled in the webbing of his Argyll socks.

Lily arrived a few moments later with cotton pads and a bottle of disinfectant. He had neglected to cover his arm, and she gaped at the wound.
She would be hysterical
, Crane thought,
if she got a closer look.
He thanked her and told her to get out.

He poured iodine over the cut and mopped up the excess with a copy of the
Congressional Proceedings
. Then he tied loose cotton around his arm with a shoelace and rolled his tattered and blood-brown sleeve down over the mess.

He would need a new jacket, but what was he supposed to do? Send Lily out to a men’s shop?

Something had gone wrong, and it was more than the loss of his nails, more than the wound, more than the unnerving silence of his indwelling god. Crane felt the wrongness in his bones, literally. He ached all over. He imagined he could feel an upheaval in the mantle of the Earth, a clashing of the gears that operated the material world.

Battle is at hand, he thought, the moment of ascendancy, the dawning of a new age; the gods would erupt from their hidden valley in Europe, would build their palaces with the bones of the truculent masses, and Crane would live forever, would rule forever his barony of the conquered Earth…

His god had told him so.

What had gone wrong?

Maybe nothing. But he was falling apart.

He held up his nailless fingers, ten pudgy pink sausages.

He saw from the litter on the desk that his hair had begun to fall out, too.

Matthew Crane didn’t leave his office during the morning, and he canceled the day’s appointments. For all Lily knew he might had died of exsanguination, except that he rang periodically with demands for more bandages, a mop and bucket, a bag of surgical cotton. (“Quickly,” on this last request. “And for Christ’s sake be discreet.”)

Hard to be discreet
, Lily thought,
when you’re begging bottles of Pine-Sol from the building’s janitor.

Crane accepted these offerings through a door barely ajar; Lily was forbidden to come in.

But even through this chary aperture she could smell the bitter tang of ammonia, bleach, and something more pungent, sharp as nail polish remover. Barb and Carol wrinkled their noses, stared at their typewriters, said nothing.

They left promptly at four-thirty. The interoffice line buzzed just as Lily was tidying her own desk. She was alone in the spacious outer office, echoes muted by carpeting, the tiled ceiling, the banks of recessed lighting. Outside the office’s single window, daylight was already waning. Her ficus, she observed, had begun to wilt.

Don’t pick up the phone
, Lily thought.
Just take your purse and leave.

But the person she had so painstakingly created, this dutiful secretarial drone, the unloved middle-aged woman married to her work — that person wouldn’t ignore the summons.

She thought briefly of what Guilford had told her about her grandfather during their brief time in Fayetteville. Her grandfather had been a Boston printer so firmly attached to his sense of duty that he had been killed while attempting to reach his print shop — which hadn’t seen a paying customer for a month — in the midst of that city’s food riots.

Hey, grandfather
, Lily thought.
Is this what it felt like, fighting the crowd?

The receiver was already in her hand. “Yes?”

“Please come in,” Matthew Crane said.

His voice was hoarse and in articulate. Lily looked with deep foreboding at the closed inner door.

Elias Vale approached the sacred city, leaving bloody tracks in the loam beneath the sage-pine trees.

He wasn’t accustomed to this raw Darwinian wilderness. His god guided his steps, had steered him from the train yard at Perseverance past primitive mine heads, down dirt and gravel roads, at last into the unfenced forest. His god warned him away from the white-bone coral of the insect middens, found him fresh water to drink, sheltered him from the chill of the clear autumn nights. And it was his god, Vale supposed, who infused in him this sense of purpose, of wholeness, of clarity.

His god, to date, had not explained the rapid loss of his hair and nails, nor the way his immortal skin lacerated and sloughed away after any minor injury. His arms were a patchwork of weeping sores; his shoulders throbbed with pain; his face — which he had last seen reflected in a pool of icy water — seemed to be coming apart along its fractured seams. His clothes were stiff with dried fluids. He stank, a piercing chemical reek.

Vale climbed a wooden ridge, leaving his pink worm-trail in the dry soil, his excitement flaring to a crescendo.
Close now
, his god whispered, and as he crested the hill he saw the city of redemption, the sacred city glittering darkly in its hidden valley, vast and imperial and ancient, long uninhabited but alive now with god-ridden men. The city’s heart, the Well of Creation, still beat beneath a fractured dome. Even at this distance Vale could smell the city, a mineral fragrance of steam and sunlight on cold granite, and he wanted to weep with gratitude, humility, exaltation.
I am home
, he thought,
home after too many years in too many lightless slums and dark alleys, home at last.

He ran gladly down the wooded slope, breathless but agile, until he reached the barbed-wire perimeter where men like himself, half gods seeping pink-stained plasma, greeted him wordlessly.

Wordlessly because there was no need to speak, and because some of these men might not have been able to speak even if they had wanted to, considering the way their skin drooled from the faces like rotten papier-mâché. But they were his brothers and Vale was immensely pleased to see them.

They gave him an automatic rifle and a box of ammunition, showed him how to sling these things over his blistered shoulder and how to arm and fire the rifle, and when the sun began to set they took him to a ruin where a dormitory had been installed. There was a thin mattress for Vale to sleep on, deep in the stony darkness, wrapped in the organic stench of dying flesh and acetone and ammonia and the subtler odor of the city itself. Somewhere, water dripped from stone to stone. The music of erosion.

Sleep was elusive, and, when he did sleep, he dreamed. The dreams were nightmares of powerlessness, of being trapped and slowly suffocated in his own body, smothered and submerged in the effluvia of his flesh. In his dreams Vale longed for a different home, not the sacred city but some abandoned home that had slipped from his grasp long ago.

He woke to find his body covered in delicate green pustules, like pebbled leather.

He spent a day on a makeshift firing range with those among his mute companions who could still hold and operate a rifle.

Those who could not — whose hands had become ragged claws, whose bodies were racked with convulsions, who had budded new appendages from their enlarged spines — made their war plans elsewhere.

And Vale understood, by way of his god’s silent communication, some of the truth of the situation. These changes were natural but had come too soon, had been provoked by sabotage in the realm of the gods.

His gods were powerful, but not all-powerful; knowing, but not all-knowing.

That was why they needed his help.

And it was a pleasure to serve, even if some fraction of himself cried out against his captivity, even if he felt, from time to time, a painful nostalgia for the part of him that was merely human.

No one spoke in the sacred city, though a few men still cried out in their sleep. It was as if they had left language in the forests behind the barbed-wire barricades. All of these men were god-ridden and all of the gods were ultimately one god, so what need was there for conversation?

But the part of Elias Vale that longed for his lost humanity similarly longed for the sound of human speech. The stutter of gunfire and the slap of footsteps echoed down these stone avenues into melancholy silence, and even the soundless voice of his own thoughts began to grow faint and incoherent.

He woke, a day later, with a new skin, green as the forest and bright as shellac, though it still leaked a pale whitish fluid at the joints.

He discarded the last of his reeking clothes. There was no need for modesty in the sacred city.