Darwinia (37 page)

He lifted his rifle and fired two rapid shots at the creature.

The bullets chipped its gleaming armor, perhaps cracked an exposed rib, caused it to stumble back a step. Guilford fired again, fired until his clip was empty and the monster lay motionless on the ground.

Tom
, he thought.

But the frontiersman was beyond repair.

Guilford turned back to the Well.

The rim was close. The spiral of stone steps was intact, though perilously littered with fresh debris. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to take the stairs. Jump and let gravity carry him. There was no bottom to this rabbit hole, only the end of the world. He began to run.

He stopped when a human figure stood up not ten paces in front of him.

No, he realized, not human, only some poor soul less advanced in its destruction. The face in particular looked as if it had been broken long ago, bones shifting along the fault lines like volcanic plates.

This creature struggled to raise its own rifle, its arms shaking with the palsy of transformation.

Guilford took another clip of ammunition from his belt.

“You don’t want to shoot me,” the monster said.

The words cut through the rush of the rain and the distant crack of artillery.

Ignore him
, the god-Guilford said.

“There’s someone with me, Guilford. Someone you know.”

He ejected the spent clip. “Who would that be?” Watching the monster struggle with its own rifle. Bad case of the shakes. Keep him talking.

No
, the picket insisted.

The monster closed its eyes and said, “
Dad?”

Guilford froze.

Guilford froze, though he felt the picket’s urgent pleading.

“Nick?”

The monster still struggling against its own convulsions to raise the rifle. He saw it but couldn’t make sense of it. He remembered the bright, awful roses of his son’s blood.

The picket was suddenly beside him, faint as mist.

Time slowed to a crawl. He felt his hammering heart beat at half speed, slow timpani notes.

The monster flailed its gun with a glacial imprecision.

The picket said, “Listen to me. Quickly, now. That isn’t Nick.”

“What happens to the dead? Do the demons get them?”

“Not always. And that isn’t Nick.”

“Guilford. Do you think I would let them take him?”

“Didn’t you?”

“No. I didn’t. Nick is with me, Guilford. He’s with
us
.”

The picket held out his hands in a cradling motion, and for a moment — a sweet and terrible moment — Nick was there, eyes closed, asleep, twelve years old and at peace.

“That’s what this is all about,” the picket said. “These lives.”

Guilford said, “I’m so tired… Nick?”

But Nick had vanished again.

“Fire your gun,” the picket said sternly.

He did.

So did the monster.

Guilford felt the bullets pierce him. The pain, this time, was brutal. But that didn’t matter. Close now. He fired and fired again, until the man with the broken face lay shattered on the ground.

Guilford dragged his own broken body to the rim of the Well.

He closed his eyes and fell. Pain ebbed into mist. Free as a raindrop now.
Hey, Nick, look at me.
And he felt Nick’s somnolent presence. The picket had been telling the truth. Nick was wrapped in timelessness, sleeping until the end of the ontosphere, falling into the luminous waters of the Archive, numbers deeper than any ocean, warm as summer air.

He blinked and saw the god burst out of him. This luminous thing had once been Guilford Law, dead on a battlefield in France, nurtured by Sentience, equipotent with the gods and one of them, inseparable from them, a being Guilford could not begin to comprehend, all fierce light and color and vengeful as an angry angel, binding the demons who howled their frustration across the far and fading borders of the world.

They stood a while on the high ground above the ruined City of Demons. The day was uniformly bright, but the sky was full of stars.

“What now?” Guilford asked.

“We wait,” the picket said, infinitely patient.

Guilford saw more men climbing the hillside. The City was silent now, empty once more. Guilford recognized the Old Men, Tom and Erasmus among them, whole and smiling. He was surprised he could see their faces so clearly across this distance.

“Wait for what?”

“The end of all battles,” the picket said.

Guilford shook his head sternly. “No.”

“No?”

“No. That’s not what I want. I want what I wasn’t allowed to have.” He looked hard at the picket. “I want a life.”

“All the life you want — eventually.”

“I mean a human life. I want to walk like a whole man, grow old before I die. Just… human life.”

The picket was silent for a long stretch.

I surprised a god
, Guilford thought.

Finally the picket said, “It may be within my power. Are you certain this is what you want?”

“It’s all I ever wanted.”

The ancient Guilford nodded. He understood — the oldest part of him, at least, understood. He said, “But the pain—”

“Yes,” Guilford said flatly. “The pain. That, too.”

Karen, back from her morning walk, told Guilford a huge sea wheel had washed up on the beach. After lunch (sandwiches on the veranda, though he couldn’t eat more than a bite) he went to have a look at this nautical prodigy.

He took his time, hoarding his energy. He followed a path from the house through dense ferns, through bell trees dripping August nectar. His legs ached almost at once, and he was breathless by the time he saw the ocean. The Oro Delta coast possessed as benign a climate as Darwinia could boast, but summer was often crippling humid and always hot. Clouds stacked over the windless Mediterranean like great marbled palaces, like the cathedrals of vanished Europe.

Last night’s storm had stranded the sea wheel high on the pebbled margin of the beach. Guilford approached the object tentatively. It was immense, at least six feet in diameter, not a perfect circle but a broken ellipse, mottled white; otherwise it looked remarkably like a wagon wheel, the flotsam of some undersea caravan.

In fact it was a sort of vegetable, a deep-water plant, typically Darwinian in its hollow symmetry.

Odd that it had washed up here, to grace the beach behind his house. He wondered what force, what tide or motion of the water, had detached the sea wheel from its bed. Or perhaps it was more evidence of the ongoing struggle between Darwinian and terrestrial ecologies, even in the benthic privacy of the ocean.

On land, in Guilford’s lifetime, the flowering plants had begun to conquer their slower Darwinian analogues. At the verge of the road from Tilson he had lately discovered a wild stand of morning glories, blue as summer. But some of the Darwinian species were returning the favor; skeleton lace and false anemones were said to be increasingly common south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The sea wheel, a fragile thing, would be black and rotted by tomorrow noon. Guilford turned to walk home, but the pain beneath his ribs took him and he chose to rest a moment. He wetted a handkerchief in a tide pool and mopped his face, tasting the salt tang on his lips. His breath came hard, but that was to be expected. Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.

Forced to sit a while, he admired the strangeness of the sea wheel, its heady incongruity.
A strange thing washed up on a strange shore: well, I know how that feels.

Last night’s storm had cleared the air. He watched the glossy sea give back the sky its blue. He whistled tunes between his teeth until he felt fit enough to start the journey back.

Karen would be waiting. He hadn’t told her what the doctor had said, at least not the full story, though she obviously suspected something. She would be all right about it, but he dreaded the phone calls from friends, perhaps especially the inevitable call from Lily and all the attendant consequences: a last visit, old sins and old grief hovering in the air like voiceless birds. Not that he wouldn’t like to see her again, but Lily herself was frail these days. At least he wouldn’t outlive her.
Small mercies
, Guilford thought.

Given these dark musings, he was not especially surprised, when he stood up and turned away from the stranded sea wheel, to find the picket waiting for him some yards down the rocky beach.

Guilford approached the phantom amiably. Skinny and boyish, the picket looked. This wasn’t his double, not anymore. This was someone else. Younger. Older.

He assayed the faintly flickering apparition. “Tell me,” Guilford said, “don’t you get tired of wearing those old Army rags?”

“They were my last human clothes. It wouldn’t seem right to wear something else. And too conspicuous if I don’t wear anything at all.”

“Been a while,” Guilford said.

“Thirty years,” the god said, “give or take.”

“So is this like one of those movies? You show up to unroll the heavenly red carpet? Out of my deathbed into the clouds and violin music?”

“No. But I’ll walk you back to the house, if that’s all right.”

“You don’t have any particular purpose, being here? Out slumming? Not that it isn’t nice to see you…”

“There’s a question I want to ask. But not just yet. Shall we walk? I always did think better on my feet.”

They talked haphazardly as they followed the path through the woods. Guilford wasn’t afraid of the picket, but he did feel a certain nervous excitement. He found himself rambling about Darwinia, how the continent had changed, how the cities and railways and airplanes had civilized it, though there was still plenty of back country for those who like to get lost… as if the picket didn’t know these things.

“You prefer the coast,” the phantom said.

He did. It suited him. Maybe he liked it because it was a place where opposite elements met and meshed: the old and new worlds; the sea and the land. Past and future.

The picket listened patiently, and Guilford was lulled for a while. Then it struck him. “This is the first one, isn’t it?”

“First what?” the picket asked.

“First sympathy visit. Drop in on the old bastard before he buys the farm.”

“This isn’t a sympathy visit.”

“Then why—?”

“Think back,” the picket said. “Thirty years ago, Guilford, I offered you a life like mine.”

“After the Binding,” Guilford agreed. “When both of us were dead.”

“And do you remember what you answered?”

“Vaguely.” A lie. He remembered every word.

“You said, ‘I want what I wasn’t allowed to have. I want to grow old before I die.’ ”

“Uh-huh.”

“It wasn’t easy. Bones from dust. Flesh from air. An aging, mortal, human body.”

“It’s true, I’ve been resurrected from the dead more than most people I know.”

“I came to ask whether it was worth it.”

“That’s your question? That’s the purpose of this little visit?”

They were nearing the house. The picket hung back in the shadow of the trees, as if he didn’t want Karen to see him. In the deep shade he was almost invisible, a true phantom, barely more tangible than a breeze.

“I was born a human being,” the picket said, “but I haven’t been
simply
human since the stars were young. And you’ve done something I never did. You grew old. You chose to grow old. So tell me. Was it worth it?”

Guilford wondered what to say. He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries. But he thought of his life since the Binding, both its general shape and its isolated events — getting to know his daughter Lily; marrying Karen and making a home for her; watching the general ebb and flow of babies born, lives lost, people inventing themselves in the sad, desperate way people do.
I was born in 1898
, Guilford thought:
more than a century ago.

That might not mean much to a god, but it impressed Guilford a great deal.

Simple question, simple answer.

“Of course it was worth it.”

He turned to look for the picket, but the picket was gone, as if there had never been anything among the trees more substantial than the sunlight and the shade.

Karen wept when he told her what the doctor had said, but in the evening he wiped her tears and she firmed up. After all, she said, he wasn’t dead yet. She made death sound like a promissory note from a card shark: a debt not certain to be collected.

He loved this hardness in her, like the tart crispness of a fresh apple. She broke out the special-occasion bottle of Territory whiskey — the wedding and funeral bottle, she usually called it, though not tonight — and drank a fair portion of it before wheeling off to bed. He loved her intensely. He decided he had never loved her more.

But he couldn’t sleep.

He sat alone on the porch and looked at the sky.

Was that dot on the horizon Mars? He had never been good about celestial matters. Astronomy, that was one of Dr. Sullivan’s hobbies. Dr. Sullivan could have pointed him at Mars without blinking.

Mars would be trouble soon. The photographic probe last winter had only hinted at the problem. On Mars, the psions had broken out of their Wells and were enslaving the natives — a gentle, almost human people, Guilford knew, though he couldn’t say how or why he knew this. They would need help. More Bindings to come before the end of the World, and it was still anyone’s guess how the world would end. Not even the gods knew for sure.