Darwinia

Chapter Fifteen

From the Journal of Guilford Law:

I mean to recount these events while I still can.

It is a miracle I am still alive, and it will be another miracle if any of us survive the winter. We have found shelter in this unspeakably strange place — of which more later — but food is scarce, the climate frigid, and there is the ever-present possibility of another attack.

Today I am still weak (I hold a pencil the way Lily does, and my writing looks like hers), and the daylight is already fading.

I hope someday Lily will read these words even if I can’t deliver them to her myself. I think of you, Caroline, and of Lily, so often and so vividly that I can almost touch you. Though less easily now that the fever has diminished.

Of all my feverish phantasms, you are the only ones I will miss.

More tomorrow, if circumstances allow.

Three months have passed since the Partisans attacked our expedition. During much of that time I was unconscious or raving. What follows is my reconstruction of events. Avery Keck, John Sullivan, and “Diggs” Digby have filled in the gaps for me, with contributions from the other survivors.

I have to be succinct, due to limitations of strength and time. (Light comes fitfully through these high stone embrasures, filtered by oilcloth or animal skins, and I have to make a contribution to our survival even if it’s a modest one — mainly helping Diggs, who has lost the use of his left arm, to cook our meager suppers. He’ll need me soon. Diggs is stoking the fire now and Wilson Farr has gone for a bucket of snow.)

After we left the Bodensee, and as we approached the Alps, we were attacked by a band of armed Partisans whose only apparent motive was to murder us and plunder our supplies. We lost Ed Betts, Chuck Hemphill, and Emil Swensen in the first volleys — would have lost more if we had camped closer to the tree line. Tom Compton’s quick thinking saved us. He led us around one of the region’s huge insect middens, a trap into which the pursuing Partisans stumbled and were consumed. Those who did not die in the nest fled or were shot.

They weren’t the only victims. One of the insects managed to inject its poison into my bloodstream. By nightfall I was at death’s door, according to Dr. Farr. I was not expected to survive, and most of the rest of the expeditionaries suffered numerous major or minor wounds. Preston Finch survived with only a twisted ankle, but his spirit was crushed; he spoke in monosyllables and abandoned the leadership role to Sullivan and Tom Compton.

When the survivors had rallied sufficiently to limp back to the ruined encampment they found the scientific equipment and samples burned, the animals slaughtered, rations and medical supplies stolen.

It pains me to think of it even now. All our work, Caroline! All Sullivan’s voucher samples, his notes, his plant press, lost. Both of my cameras were destroyed and the exposed plates shattered. (Sullivan broke the news when I eventually regained consciousness.) My notebook survived only because I kept it on my person at all times. We did manage to salvage a few other notes, plus writing implements and enough scraps of paper that many of the surviving expeditionaries are keeping their own winter diaries.

I couldn’t mourn the dead, Caroline, any more than I could open my eyes or do more than draw breath while the poison burned through my body.

I mourned them later.

The wounded needed rest and food. Once again, Tom Compton was our salvation. He cauterized my insect bite and treated it with the sap of a bitter weed. Dr. Farr accepted this wilderness midwifery because there was no civilized medicine left to us. Farr used his own medical skill to bind wounds and set broken bones. From the remnants of our supplies we fashioned a more defensible and less obvious camp, in case more Partisans were lurking. Few of us were well enough to travel.

The logical next step was to seek help. Lake Constance was only a few days behind us. Erasmus would have gone back to his hut and his kraal by now, but the boats were waiting — unless they too had been discovered by hostile forces — and the journey down the Rhine would be less difficult than the journey up. Figure a month to reach Jeffersonville, less than that for a rescue party to return.

Tom Compton volunteered to go, but he was needed to help shelter and treat survivors. His hunting and trapping experience meant he could forage for food even without ammunition for the rifle he carried. In fact he took to hunting fur snakes with a Bowie knife. The animals eventually learned to shy at the smell of him, but they remained so docile that he could slit a snake’s throat before the dumb beast realized it was in danger.

We dispatched Chris Tuckman and Ray Burke, unhurt in the attack, to seek help. They took what remained of our tinned food (a pittance) and a tent that hadn’t burned, plus pistols, a compass, and a generous portion of our hoarded ammunition.

Three months have passed.

They haven’t come back.

No one has come. Of the original fifteen, nine of us remain. Myself, plus Finch, Sullivan, Compton, Donner, Robertson, Farr, and Digby.

Winter came early this year. Icy sleet, and then a granular, relentless snow.

Sullivan, Wilson Farr, and Tom Compton nursed me back to a semblance of health — fed me vegetable gruel and carried me, when we were forced to travel, on a travois rigged behind a wild snake. For obvious reasons, I lost weight — more, even, than the rest of us, and we’re a hungry crowd these days.

Caroline, you should see me. That “little belly” you complained of is only a memory. I’ve had to make new notches in my belt. My ribs are as plain as the tines of a pitchfork, and when I shave (we have a mirror, a razor) my Adam’s apple bobs like a cat under a bedsheet.

As I said, we found shelter for the winter. But the shelter we found—

Caroline, I cannot begin to describe it! Not tonight, at any rate.

(Listen: Diggs at his work again, his forked-branch crutch knocking the stone floor, water hissing as the kettle goes over the fire — he’ll be needing me soon.)

Perhaps if I describe it as I first saw it… through a fever haze, of course, but I was not delirious, although it might sound that way.

Caroline, be patient. I fear your incredulity.

Picture us, a ragged band of men in animal furs, some walking, some limping, some dragged on harnesses, starved and freezing as we cross another snowy ridge and peer down into yet another wilderness valley… Diggs with his ruined arm, Sullivan limping pitifully, me on a sledge because I still could not walk any significant distance. According to Farr I was suffering the effect of the insect venom on my liver. I was feverish and yellow and — well, I won’t go into detail.

Another alpine valley, but this one was different. Tom Compton had scouted it out.

It was a broad river valley, cut from stony soil and populated with dour, spiky mosque trees. From my place on the sledge, wrapped in furs, that was all I saw at first: the slope of the valley and its dark vegetation. But the rest of the party fell quickly silent, and I raised myself up to see what had alarmed them, and it was the single thing I had least expected to see in this desolate land.

A city!

Or the ruin of a city. It was a vast mosaic through which a river had run riot, visibly aged but obviously the work of intelligent builders. Even at this distance it was apparent the architects were long gone. Nothing walked this city’s relentlessly parallel streets. The buildings still intact were iron-gray boxes hewn from stone, softened by mist and time. And the city was large, Caroline, large beyond believing — a ruin that could have contained all of Boston and a couple of counties more.

For all its apparent age, the city’s outlying structures were more or less complete and handily available. This ruin promised everything we had despaired of finding: shelter for ourselves and our animals, a supply of fresh water, and (given the wooded hills and evidence of nearby snake herds) plentiful game. Tom Compton had scouted the city and environs and thought we could winter here. He warned us that the city was an uninhabited ruin, that we would have to work hard to keep ourselves warm in its drafty warrens, even with plentiful firewood. But since we had pictured ourselves dying in our snakeskin tents — or simply frozen to death in some Alpine pass — even this grim prospect seemed the gift of a benevolent God.

Of course the city raised countless questions. How had it come to exist, in a land void of human habitation, and what had happened to its builders? Were its builders even human, or some novel Darwinian race? But we were too exhausted to debate the ruin’s provenance or meaning. Only Preston Finch hesitated before descending the slope of the valley, and I don’t know what he feared; he hadn’t spoken aloud for day’s.

The prospect of shelter buoyed our spirits. We collected mosque and sage-pine windfall along the way, and before the stars began to shine in the wintry sky we had a fire roaring, casting fitful light among the colossal stones of the Nameless City.

Dear Caroline: I have not been as faithful in keeping this journal as I would have liked. Events are pressing.

There hasn’t been any new disaster — don’t worry — only the ongoing disaster of our isolation and the demands of the primitive life.

We live like Red Indians, in order to live at all. My fever has passed (for good, I hope) and my poisoned leg has regained its sensation and even some strength. I can walk a fair distance with only a stick for support and I have begun to accompany Tom Compton and Avery Keck on their hunting expeditions, though I’m still confined to the broad sweep of the valley. By spring I should have no trouble keeping up with the expedition when we finally make for Lake Constance and home.

For hunting we bundle ourselves in furs and hide boots. Our clothes are stitched with bone needles, the rags of our civilized clothing salvaged for thread. We have two rifles and even some ammunition, but most of our hunting is by bow or knife. Tom made the bows and shafts from local wood and bone, and he is still our only marksman. A rifle shot, he points out, could attract unwelcome attention, and the bullets might be needed on the journey home. I doubt the Partisans are anywhere nearby. Winter must hinder them as much as it hinders us. But several of us have experienced the sense of being watched from time to time.

We have captured a few fur snakes and corralled them in a ruined foundation with a half-roof for shelter. Sullivan looks after them and makes sure they have enough forage and water. He has switched from botany to animal husbandry, at least for the duration.

I’ve grown closer to Sullivan, perhaps because our parallel injuries (my leg, his hip) kept us confined together for some weeks. Often we’re left alone with Diggs or Preston Finch. Finch remains nearly wordless, though he helps with the physical labor. Sullivan, by contrast, talks to me freely, and I almost as freely to him. You might be wary of his atheism, Caroline, but it’s a principled atheism, if that makes any sense.

Last night we were assigned the late watch, a plush duty if you don’t mind the hours. We kept the fire burning and swapped stories, as usual, until we heard a commotion from the stables, as we call the semi-collapsed structure where the animals are kept. So we donned our furs and limped into the frigid night to investigate.

Snow had been falling all afternoon, and Sullivan’s torch cast a flickering glow across a boulevard of unsullied white. With its broken stones and fractured walls cloaked in snow the City seems only temporarily vacated. The buildings are identical, though in various stages of decay, and identically made, of huge bricks cut from raw granite and set in place without benefit of mortar. The bricks or blocks are perfectly square, about ten feet on a side. The buildings themselves are identically square and arranged in squares of four, as if by a meticulous but unimaginative child.

The doorways may once have possessed wooden doors, but if they ever existed they have long since rotted and weathered away. The openings are about twice as high as a man’s head and several times wider than his girth, but this, Sullivan points out, tells us virtually nothing of the original inhabitants — the doors of cathedrals are larger than the doors of sod huts, but the men who pass through them are the same. Nevertheless, the impression lingers of some squat, gigantic race, antediluvian, pre-Adamic.

We had put up a crude mosquewood fence to keep our twelve captive snakes corralled in their ruin. Usually they’re fairly quiet, barring the usual belching and mewling. Tonight the noise was nearly continuous, a collective moan, and we tracked it under the half-fallen stone eaves, where one of our herd was giving birth.

Or rather (we saw as we came closer) it was laying eggs. The eggs emerged from the beast’s pendulous abdomen in glittering clusters, each egg about the size of a softball, until a gelatinous mass of them lay steaming in a mound of windblown snow.

I looked at Sullivan. “The eggs will freeze in this weather. If we build a fire—”

Sullivan shook his head. “Nature must have made a provision,” he whispered. “If not, we’re too ignorant to help. Stand back, Guilford. Give them room.”

And he was right. Nature had made a provision, if an awkward one. When the female finished dropping her eggs a second animal, perhaps the male parent, approached the pearlescent mass and in a singular motion of its six limbs managed to scoop the eggs from the snow into pouches arrayed along its belly… there, presumably, to incubate until the hatchlings could survive on their own.

The moaning and barking finally relented, and the herd went back about its business.

We fled to the warmth of our own shelter. We had taken over two immense rooms in one of the less exposed buildings, partitioned and sealed them from the weather with snakeskins and made an insulating floor of dried rushes. The effect was cheerful, if only by comparison with the frigid outer dark.

Sullivan grew thoughtful, warming his hands, putting a kettle of snow at the edge of the fire for root tea. “They’re born,” he said, “they reproduce, they die… Guilford, if they didn’t evolve, it’s inevitable that they will evolve — selected by nature, bred by circumstance…”

“The handiwork of God, Finch would say.” Since Finch was perpetually silent, I felt obliged to take his part, if only to keep Sullivan interested.

“But what does that mean?” Sullivan stood up, nearly toppling the kettle. “How I would love to have an explanation so wonderfully complete! And I don’t mean that sarcastically, Guilford; don’t give me your sorrowful stare. I’m serious. To look at the color of Mars in the night sky, at six-legged fur-bearing snakes laying eggs in the snow, and see nothing but the hand of God… how sweetly simple!”

“Truth is simple,” I said, smarting.

“Truth is often simple. Deceptively simple. But I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”

Which is what I mean, Caroline, by “principled atheism.” Sullivan is an honest man and humble about his learning. He comes from a Quaker family and will even, when he’s tired, slip into the Quaker habit of tongue. I tell thee, Guilford…

“This city,” he brooded. “This thing we call a city, though notice, it’s nothing but boxes and alleys… no plumbing, no provision for the storage of food; no ovens, no granaries, no temples, no playing fields… this city is a key.”

To what? I wanted to ask.

He ignored me. “We haven’t explored it closely enough. The ruin is miles wide.”

“Tom scouted it.”

“Briefly. And even Tom admits…”

Admits what? But Sullivan was sliding into introspection and it would have been useless to push him. I knew his moods too well.

For many of us Darwinia has been a test of faith. Finch believes the continent is a patent miracle, but I suspect he wishes God had left a signature less ambiguous than these wordless hills and forests. Whereas Sullivan is forced into a daily wrestle with the miraculous.

We drank our tea and shivered under our Army blankets. Tom Compton had insisted we keep a night watch ever since the Partisan attack. Two men by the midnight fire was our best effort. I often wondered what we were watching for, exactly, since another attack, had it come, would have overwhelmed our defenses whether or not there was time to rouse the sleeping men.

But the city has a way of provoking wariness.

“Guilford,” Sullivan said after a long silence. “When you sleep, these days… do you dream?”

The question surprised me.

“Seldom,” I said.

But that was a lie.

Dreams are trivial, Caroline, aren’t they?

I don’t believe in dreams. I don’t believe in the Army picket who looks like me, even if I see him whenever I close my eyes. Fortunately Sullivan didn’t press the matter, and we sat out what remained of our watch without speaking.

Mid-January. Unexpected bounty from the last hunting expedition: plenty of dressed meat, winter seeds, even a couple of Darwinian “birds” — moth-hawks, brainless bipedal leather-winged creatures, but they taste like lamb, of all things, juicy and succulent. Everyone ate to contentment except Paul Robertson, who is down with the flu. Even Finch smiled his approval.

Sullivan still talks of exploring the ruins — he is almost obsessed with the idea. And now, with our larders bolstered and the weather taking a mild turn, he means to put his plan into action.

For spare hand and litter bearer he has enlisted Tom Compton and me. We set out tomorrow, a two-day expedition into the heart of the city.

I hope this is wise. I dread it a little, to be honest.

Chapter Sixteen

It was an unseasonably cold London winter, more bitter than any of the Boston winters Caroline remembered. A wolf-winter, Aunt Alice called it. Supply boats came less frequently up the ice-choked Thames, though the harbor boiled with industry and smokestacks blackened the sky. Every building in London added a plume of coal smoke or the grayer smudge of a peat or wood fire. Caroline had learned to take some solace in these sullen skies, emblems of a wilderness beaten back. She understood now what London really was: not a “settlement” — who, after all, would want to settle in this unproductive, vile country? — but a gesture of defiance toward an intractable nature.

Nature would win, of course, in the end. Nature always did. But Caroline learned to take a secret pleasure in each paved road and toppled tree.

A mid-January steamer arrived with a shipment of stock Jered had ordered last summer. There were enormous spools of chain and rope, penny nails, pitch and tar, brushes and brooms. Jered hired a truck from the warehouse to the store every morning for a week, replacing sold-through inventory. Today he unloaded the last of the supplies into the stockroom and paid the teamster, whose horses snorted fog into a brisk back-alley wind, while Caroline and Alice arranged the shelves indoors. Aunt Alice worked tirelessly, dusted her hands on her apron, spoke seldom.

She avoided Caroline’s eyes. She had been like this for months: cold, disapproving, brusquely polite.

They had argued at first, after the shock of the Partisan attack on the Weston. Alice refused to believe Guilford was dead. She was resolute on the matter.

Caroline knew quite simply and plainly that Guilford had died; she had known it from the moment Jered had told about the Weston, though that was proof of nothing; the expedition itself had been put ashore upriver. But even Jered acknowledged that they would have been easy prey for determined thieves. Caroline kept her feelings to herself, at least at first. But in her heart she was a widow well before the summer ended.

No one else conceded the truth. There was always hope. But September passed without word, and hopes dimmed with autumn and vanished, for all practical purposes, by winter.

Nothing had been proven, Alice said. Miracles were possible. “A wife ought to have faith,” she told Caroline.

But sometimes a woman knows better.

The argument wasn’t settled, couldn’t be settled. They simply ceased to speak of it; but it colored every conversation, cast its shadow over the dinner table and insinuated itself between the ticking of the clock. Caroline had taken to wearing black. Alice kept Guilford’s suitcase in the hallway closet as an object lesson.

But more than that weary disagreement was bothering Alice today, Caroline thought.

She had a clue before the morning’s work was finished. Alice went to the counter to serve a customer and came back to the storeroom wearing the pinched look that meant she had something unpleasant to say. She narrowed her eyes on Caroline, while Caroline tried not to flinch.

“It’s bad enough to grieve,” Alice said grimly, “when you don’t know for a fact that he’s dead. But it’s worse, Caroline — far, far worse — to finish grieving.”

And Caroline thought, She knows.

Not that it mattered.

That evening, Jered and Alice took themselves to the Crown and Reed, the local pub. When she was certain they were gone, Caroline escorted Lily downstairs and briefly into the cold street, to a neighbor, a Mrs. de Koenig, who charged a Canadian dollar to look after the girl and keep quiet about it. Caroline told Lily good-bye, then buttoned her own jacket and hood against the winter chill.

Stars shivered above the frozen cobbles. Gas lamps cast a wan light across crusts of snow. Caroline hurried into the wind, fighting a surge of guilt. Contagion from her aunt, she thought, this feeling of wickedness. She was not doing anything wicked. She couldn’t be. Guilford was dead. Her husband was dead. She had no husband.

Colin Watson stood waiting at the corner of Market and Thames. He embraced her briefly, then hailed a cab. He smiled as he helped her up, the smile a jejune thing half-hidden by his ridiculous moustache. Caroline supposed he was suppressing his natural melancholy for her. His hands were large and strong.

Where would he take her tonight? For a drink, she thought (though not at the Crown and Reed). A talk. That was all. He needed to talk. He was thinking of resigning his commission. He’d been offered a civilian job at the docks. He hadn’t lived in Jered’s storeroom since last September; he had taken a room at the Empire and was alone most nights.

That made things easier — a room of his own.

She couldn’t stay with him as long as she would have liked. Jered and Alice mustn’t know what she was doing. Or, if they knew, there must be at least a certain doubt, a gap of uncertainty she could defend.

But she wanted to stay. Colin was kind to her, a sort of kindness Guilford had never understood. Colin accepted her silences and didn’t try to pry them open, as Guilford had. Guilford had always believed her moods reflected some failure of his own. He was solicitous — thoughtful, certainly, after his own lights — but she would have liked to weep occasionally without triggering an apology.

Lieutenant Watson, tall and sturdy but with moods of his own, allowed Caroline the privacy of her grief. Perhaps, she thought, it was how a gentleman treated a widow. The upheaval of the world had cracked the foundations of civility, but some men were still gentle. Some still asked before they touched. Colin was gentle. She liked his eyes best of all. They watched her attentively even as his hands roamed freely; they understood; ultimately, they forgave. It seemed to Caroline there was no sin in the world those quiet blue eyes couldn’t redeem.

She stayed too late and drank more than she should have. They made scalding, desperate love. Her Lieutenant put her in a cab, when she insisted, an hour later than she had planned, but she made the cabbie let her off a block before Market. She didn’t want to be seen climbing out of a hansom at this hour. Somehow, obscurely, it implied vice. So she walked off-balance into the teeth of the wind before reclaiming Lily from Mrs. de Koenig, who wheedled another dollar from her.

Jered and Alice were home, of course. Caroline struggled to maintain her dignity while she put away her coat and Lily’s, saying nothing except to soothe her daughter. Jered closed his book and announced tonelessly that he was going to bed. He stumbled on the way out of the room. He’d been drinking, too.

But if Alice had, she didn’t show it. “That little girl needs her sleep,” she said flatly. “Don’t you, Lily?”

“I’ll put her to bed,” Caroline said.

“She doesn’t look like she needs much putting. Asleep on her feet, at this hour. Bed’s warm and waiting, Lily! You go along, love, all right?”

Lily yawned agreeably and waddled off, leaving her mother defenseless.

“She slept late this morning,” Caroline offered.

“She’s not sleeping well at all. She’s afraid for her father.”

“I’m tired, too,” Caroline said.

“But not too tired to commit adultery?”

Caroline stared, hoping she hadn’t heard correctly.

“To fornicate with a man not your husband,” Alice said. “Do you have another word for it?”

“This is beneath you.”

“Perhaps you should find another place to sleep. I’ve written Liam in Boston. He’ll want you home as soon as we can book passage. I’ve had to apologize. On your behalf.”

“You had no right to do that.”

“Every right, I think.”

“Guilford is dead!” It was her only counterargument, and she regretted using it so hastily. It lost its gravity, somehow, in this under-heated parlor.

Alice sniffed. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“I feel the loss of him every day. Of course I know it.”

“Then you have a funny way of grieving.” Alice stood up, not concealing her anger. “Who told you you were special, Caroline? Was it Liam? I suppose he treated you that way, walled you up in his big Boston house, the suffering orphan. But everyone lost someone that night, some more than their parents… some of us lost everything we loved, every person and every place, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and some of us didn’t have wealthy relations to dry our eyes and servants to make our comfortable beds.”

“Unfair!”

“We don’t get to make the rules, Caroline. Only keep them or break them.”

“I won’t be a widow for the rest of my life!”

“Probably not. But if you had any sense of decency at all you might think twice before conducting an affair with a man who helped murder your husband.”

Chapter Seventeen

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

The voice seemed to condense out of the tavern air, smoky, liquid, and ingratiating. But it wasn’t a message Vale wanted to hear. How best to sum up his response?

Be succinct, he thought. “Please fuck off.”

A figure took the stool beside him. “That’s not called for, is it? Really, don’t mind me, Elias. I’m only here to chat.”

Groaning, he turned his head. “Do I know you?”

The man was tall. He was also suave, carefully dressed, and handsome. Though perhaps not as handsome as he seemed to think, flashing those horsey white teeth like beacon lights. Vale guessed he was twenty-two, twenty-three — young, and far too confident for his age.

“No, you don’t know me. Timothy Crane.”

Hand like a piano player’s. Long bony fingers. Vale ignored it. “Fuck off,” he repeated.

“Elias, I’m sorry, but I have to talk to you whether you like it or not.” The accent was New England, maddeningly aristocratic.

“Who are you, one of the Sanders-Moss nephews?”

“Sorry. No relation. But I know who you are.” Crane leaned closer. Dangerously close. His breath tickled the fine hair on Vale’s right ear. “You’re the man who speaks to the dead.”

“I’m the man who would like to convince you to fuck off.”

“The man who has a god inside him. A painful and demanding god. At least if it’s anything like mine.”

Crane had a cab waiting at the curb. Jesus Christ, Vale thought, What now? He had the blurred sensation of events accelerating beyond his comprehension. He gave the cabbie his home address and settled in next to this grinning jackanapes.

It had been a quiet autumn, a quieter winter. The gods followed their own agenda, Vale supposed, and although the game with Eugene Randall had not played itself out — there had been two more séances, to no visible effect — the resolution seemed comfortably distant. Vale had even entertained the wistful notion that his god might be losing interest in him.

Apparently not.

The chatty Mr. Crane shut up in the presence of the driver. Vale tried to force himself sober — braced his shoulders, frowned and blinked — as the taxi crawled past electric light standards, globes of ice suspended in the frigid night. Washington winters weren’t supposed to be so cruel.

They arrived eventually at Vale’s town house. The street was quiet, all windows primly dark. Crane paid the cabbie, removed two immense suitcases from the vehicle, lugged them through Vale’s front door, and dropped them insolently next to the umbrella stand.

“Staying a while?”

“Afraid so, old chap.”

Old chap? Preserve me, Vale thought. “Do we have that much to talk about?”

“Lots. But it can wait until morning. Suppose you get a good night’s sleep, Elias. You’re really in no condition. We can discuss this when we’re both more refreshed. Don’t worry about me! I’ll curl up on the sofa. No formalities between us.”

And damned if he didn’t stretch out on the velvet settee, still smiling.

“Look here. I’m too tired to throw you out. If you’re still here in the morning—”

“We’ll talk about it then. Fine idea.”

Vale threw up his hands and left the room.

Morning arrived, for Elias Vale, just shy of noon.

Crane was at the breakfast table. He had showered and shaved. His hair was combed. His shirt was crisp. He poured himself a cup of coffee.

Vale was faintly aware of the stale sweat cooking out of his own clogged pores. “How long do you imagine you’re staying?”

“Don’t know.”

“A week? A month?”

Shrug.

“Maybe you’re not aware of this, Mr. Crane, but I live alone. Because I like it that way. I don’t want a houseguest, even under these, uh, circumstances. And frankly, nobody asked me.”

“Not their style, is it?”

The gods, he meant.

“You’re saying I have no choice?”

“I wasn’t offered one. Toast, Elias?”

Two of us, Vale thought. He hadn’t anticipated that. Though of course it made sense. But how many more god-stricken individuals were out there walking the streets? Hundreds? Thousands?

He folded his hands. “Why are you here?”

“The eternal question, isn’t it? I’m not sure I know. Not yet, at least. I gather you’re meant to introduce me around.”

“As what, my catamite?”

“Cousin, nephew, illegitimate child…”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll do as we’re told, when the time comes.” Crane put down the butter knife. “Honestly, Elias, it’s not my choice either. And I suspect it’s temporary. No offense.”

“No offense, but I hope so.”

“In the meantime we’ll have to find a bed for me. Unless you want my luggage cluttering up your front room. Do you entertain clients here?”

“Often. How much do you know about me, anyway?”

“A little. What do you know about me?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Ah.”

Vale made a desperate last try. “Isn’t there a hotel in town—?”

“Not what they want.” The smile again. “For better or worse, our fates appear to be intertwined.”

The astonishing thing was that Vale did get used to Crane’s occupation of his attic room, at least in the way one grows accustomed to a chronic headache. Crane was a considerate houseguest, more meticulous than Vale about cleaning up after himself, careful not to interrupt when Vale was with paying customers. He did insist on being taken to the Sanders-Moss salon and introduced as Vale’s “cousin,” a financier. Fortunately Crane seemed to have genuine working knowledge of banking and Wall Street, almost as if he had been raised to it. And maybe he had. He was vague about his past but hinted at family connections.

Just now, in any case, the Sanders-Moss table talk turned most often to the loss of the Finch expedition, the prospect of war. The Hearst papers had been touting a war with England, claimed to have evidence that the English were funneling weapons to the Partisans, which would make them at least indirectly responsible for the loss of American lives. An issue Vale cared nothing about, though his god apparently took an interest.

When they were together in the town house they tried to ignore one another. When they did talk — generally after Vale had taken a drink — they talked about their gods.

“It doesn’t just threaten,” Vale said. Another cold night, trapped in doors with Crane for company, a bitter wind rattling the casement windows. Tennessee whiskey. Timor mortibus conturbat me. “It promised I would live. I mean live… forever.”

“Immortality,” Crane said calmly, paring an apple with a kitchen knife.

“You too?”

“Oh, yes. Me too.”

“Do you — believe?”

Crane peered at him quizzically. “Elias. When was the last time you cut yourself shaving?”

“Eh? I can’t remember—”

“Long ago?”

“Long ago,” Vale conceded. “Why?”

“Appendicitis, influenza, consumption? Broken bones, toothache, hangnail?”

“No, but — what are you saying?”

“You know the answer, Elias. You just don’t have the nerve to test yourself. Haven’t you ever been tempted, standing over a basin with a razor in your hand?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

Crane spread his left hand on the dining table and drove the knife smartly through it. The blade cracked through small bones and into wood. Vale recoiled and blinked.

Crane winced, briefly. Then he smiled. He tightened his grip on the shaft of the knife and pulled the blade out of his hand. A drop of blood welled out of the wound. Just one. Crane dabbed it away with a napkin.

The skin beneath was smooth, pink, seamless.

“Christ,” Vale whispered.

“Apologies for damaging the table,” Crane said. “But you see what I mean.”

Chapter Eighteen

From the Journal of Guilford Law:

Excuse my handwriting. The fire is warm but doesn’t cast much useful light. Caroline, I think of you reading this and take some comfort in the thought. I hope it is warm where you are.

We are relatively warm here by the standards we’ve grown accustomed to — maybe too warm. Unnaturally warm. But let me explain.

We left this morning on our hobble-legged expedition to the heart of the ruins, Tom Compton, Dr. Sullivan, and I. We must have made a comical sight (Diggs certainly seemed to think so) — the three of us bundled in snake fur, white as dandelion clocks, two of us limping (on opposite legs), four days’ supplies lashed to a sledge behind a grunting snake. A “snipe-hunt,” Digby calls this little voyage.

In any case, we ignored the jibes, and soon enough our beast had pulled us deeper into the ruins, into the oppressive silence of the city. I cannot communicate, Caroline, the eeriness of this haunted place, its slablike structures so uniformly arrayed and far extended. The snow, as we made our way southwest under a sunny sky, lay bright and crisp beneath the sledge. But the low angle of the winter sun meant that we traveled most often in shadow, down broad avenues cloaked in wintry melancholy.

Tom Compton led the fur snake by its rope halter. The frontiersman was in no mood to talk, so I hung back with Dr. Sullivan, hoping the sound of a human voice would dispel the gloom of these immense, repetitive alleys. But the mood had affected Sullivan, too.

“We’ve been assuming the city was built by intelligent beings,” he said. “That may not be so.”

I asked him to explain.

“Appearances are deceptive. Have you ever seen an African termite hill? It’s an elaborate structure, often taller than a man. But the only architect is evolution itself. Or think of the regularity and complexity of a honeycomb.”

“You’re saying we might be inside some kind of insect hive?”

“What I’m saying is that although these structures are obviously artificial, the uniformity of size and presumably of function argues against a human builder.”

“What kind of insect carves granite blocks the size of the Washington Monument?”

“I can’t imagine. Worse, it’s unprecedented. No one has reported anything like it. Whoever or whatever built this city, they seem to have left no progeny and had no obvious antecedents. It’s almost a separate creation.”

This mirrored my own thoughts too closely. For all its strangeness, Darwinia possesses its own beauty — moss-green meadows, sage-pine glades, gentle rivers. The ruins have none of that charm. For endless hours we traveled the city’s relentlessly regular streets, sun angling low behind monoliths of cracked stone. The snow ahead of us was trackless and blank. Neither Sullivan nor I thought twice about that until Tom pointed out the peculiarity of it. In the four or five days since the last snowfall no animal had left its track here, nor any flying things, not even moth-hawks. Moth-hawks are common in these parts; whole flocks of them roost in the ruined structures at the rim of the city. (Easy game, if you’re desperate enough to want to eat the things. You sneak up on a roosting flock at night, with a torch; the light dazzles them; a man can kill six or seven with a stick before they gather their wits and fly away.) But not here. Granted, there’s little enough forage deep in these stone-choked warrens. Still, the absence of life seems ominous. It heightens the nerves, Caroline, and I admit that as the afternoon passed and the shadows lengthened we were all three of us on our toes, apt to start at the slightest commotion.

Not that there was any commotion. Only the crackle of hidden ice, the soft collapse of sun-softened snow. With dusk we made our camp, undisturbed. It speaks to the size of this place that we have still not reached what Sullivan calculates to be the center of the city. We carried kindling with us, mosque-tree branches, dense but hollow and not especially heavy; we used them to make a fire in one of the structures with a more or less intact roof. We couldn’t hope to heat the cathedral-sized interior, but we were out of the wind and able to make a cozy-enough corner for ourselves.

In any case it is warmer here than at the perimeter. Sullivan points out that the stone floor is warmer than he can account for, almost warm enough to melt ice, perhaps due to an underground spring or other source of natural heat. Tom Compton overcame his wary silence long enough to tell us that, one clear night when he camped in the hills after a snake hunt, he had seen a blue-green fairy glow shining deep within the city. Some kind of vulcanism, maybe, though Sullivan says the geology is wrong. We’ve seen no sign of it ourselves.

I should add that Tom Compton, ordinarily the staunchest of pragmatists, seems more unnerved than either Sullivan or I. He said a peculiar thing tonight as I began this entry… mumbled it, leaning into the fire so intently that I worried an ember would ignite his briar-patch beard.

“I dreamed of this place,” he said.

He wouldn’t elaborate, but I felt a chill despite the fire. Because, Caroline, I’ve dreamed of this place too, dreamed of it deep in the fever sleeps of autumn, when the poison was still coursing through my body and I couldn’t tell day from night… I dreamed of the city too, and I don’t know what that means.

… and dreamed again last night.

But I have more than that to tell you, Caroline, and not much time. Our supplies are limited and Sullivan insists we use each moment as economically as possible. So I will tell you in the plainest and most direct words what we found.

The city isn’t just a grid of squares. It has a center, as Sullivan suspected. And at the center is not a cathedral or a marketplace but something altogether stranger.

We came upon the building this morning. It must once have been visible from a great distance, but erosion has camouflaged it. (I doubt even Finch would deny that these ruins are terribly old.) Today the structure is surrounded by a field of its own rubble. Huge stone blocks, some polished as if fresh from the quarry, others worn into a grotesquery of angles, impeded our progress. We left our sledge behind and hiked through the maze-like passages created by chance and weather until we found the core of the central building.

Rising from this bed of rubble is a black basaltic dome, open on roughly a quarter of its periphery. The vault of the dome is at least two hundred feet high at its apex and as broad as a city block. The unbroken sections are still smooth, almost silky, worked by a technique Sullivan can’t identify.

A perpetual fog cloaks the dome, which is perhaps why none of us had seen it from the slopes of the valley. Melted snow and ice, Sullivan guessed, heated from below. Even in the rubble field the air was noticeably warm, and no snow had collected on the dome itself. It must be well above the freezing point of water.

The three of us gazed mutely at this scene. I mourned my lost camera. What a plate it would have made! The desolate Alpine ruins of the European hinterland. Caroline, we might have lived for a year on a photograph like that.

None of us voiced his thoughts. Maybe they seemed too fantastic. Certainly mine did. I was reminded again of E.R. Burroughs’ adventure stories, with their volcanic caverns and their beast-men worshiping ancient gods.

(I know you disapprove of my reading habits, Caroline, but the fantasies of Mr. Burroughs are proving to be a fair Baedeker to this continent. All we lack is a suitable Princess, and a sword for me to buckle on.)

We returned to the sledge, fed our snake, gathered what supplies we could carry and hiked back to the dome. Sullivan was as excited as I have ever seen him; he had to be restrained from dashing madly all over the site. He settled for a camp just beyond the rim of the dome and is obviously frustrated we haven’t gone farther — but there’s a lot of territory under this incline of polished stone, all strewn with rock, and it’s frankly a little unnerving to have that unsupported mass of granite hanging over our heads.

The interior was nearly lightless, in any case — the sun had declined beyond a gap-toothed rank of ruins — and we were forced to build a hasty fire before we lost the light entirely.

We met the night with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, crouched over our fire like Visigoths in a Roman temple. There is nothing to see beyond our circle of firelight but its flickering reflection on the high inner circumference of the vault.

No, that’s not entirely true. Sullivan has drawn our attention to another light, fainter still, the source of which must be deep inside this rubble-choked structure. A natural phenomenon, I dearly hope, though the sense of another presence is strong enough to raise hackles.

Not light enough to write by, though. Not without risking blindness. More tomorrow.

HERE THE JOURNAL ENDS.

“A little more rope, please, Guilford.”

Sullivan’s voice rose from the depths as if buoyed on its own echoes. Guilford played out another few feet of rope.

The rope had been one of the few useful items rescued from last summer’s attack. These two spools of hempen fiber had saved more than one life — provided harnesses for the animals, rigging for tents, a thousand useful things. But the rope was only a precaution.

At the center of the domed ruin they had found a circular opening perhaps fifty yards in diameter, its rim cut into a spiral of stone steps each ten feet wide. The shallow stairs were intact, their contours softened by centuries of erosion. A stream of water cut the well’s southern rim, fell, became mist, merged into fog-hidden deeps. Faint daylight came from above, a cool lambent glow from beneath. The heart of the city, Guilford thought. Warm and still faintly beating.

Sullivan wanted to explore it.

“The slope is trivial,” he said. “The passage is intact and it was obviously meant to be walked. We’re in no more danger here than we would be out in the cold.”

Tom Compton stroked his mist-dewed beard. “You’re stupider than I thought,” he said, “if you mean to climb down there.”

“What would you suggest?” Sullivan wheeled to face the frontiersman. He was as angry as Guilford had seen him, his face a thunderous brick-red. “That we walk back to our pathetic little shambles and pray for sunny weather? Creep north to the Bodensee come spring, unless cold kills us first, or the Partisans, or the Rheinfelden? Damn thee, Tom, this might be our only chance to learn something from this place!”

“What good is learning,” the frontiersman asked, “if you take it to your grave?”

Sullivan turned away scornfully. “What good is friendship, then, or love, or life itself? What don’t you take to your grave?”

“Wasn’t planning on taking anything there,” Tom said. “At least not yet.”

He reeled the rope from his hands.

It won’t be so bad in daylight, Guilford thought, and there was daylight here, through the breached vault of the dome, dim as it might be. In any case, the rope was reassuring. They rigged harness to link themselves together. The slope might be gentle but the stone was slick with moisture, a fall could turn into a slide, and there was no telling how far into the fog this decline might reach. Below ground level the limit of visibility was a scant few yards. A dropped stone gave back uncertain echos.

Sullivan went first, favoring his bad leg. Then Guilford, favoring his own. The frontiersman followed behind. The down-spiraling walkway was broad enough that Guilford was able to avoid looking directly into the well’s smoky deeps.

He couldn’t guess what this well had been made for or who might have walked this way in ages past. Nor how far down it might descend, into what lava-heated cavern or glowing underworld. Hadn’t the Aztecs used wells for human sacrifice? Certainly nothing much good could have happened down this rabbit hole.

Sullivan called a halt when they had descended, by Guilford’s estimate, a hundred feet or more. The rim of the well was as invisible now as the bottom, both hidden in lofting spirals of fog. Sullivan was winded and gasping, but his eyes were bright in the strange, dim radiance.

Guilford wondered aloud whether they hadn’t come far enough. “No offense, Dr. Sullivan, but what exactly do you expect to find here?

“The answer to a hundred questions.”

“It’s some kind of well or cistern,” Guilford said.

“Open your eyes, for God’s sake! A well is what this is not. If anything, it was designed to keep groundwater out. Do you think these stones grew here? The blocks are cut and the joints are caulked… I don’t know what the caulking material is, but it’s remarkably well preserved. In any case, we’re already below the water table. This is not a well, Mr. Law.”

“Then what is it?”

“Whatever its purpose — practical or ceremonial — it must have been important. The dome is a landmark, and I’d guess this passageway was meant to accommodate a great deal of traffic.”

“Traffic?”

“The city builders.”

“But they’re extinct,” Guilford said.

“You hope,” the frontiersman muttered from behind.

But there was no end to the descent, only this spiral of stone winding monotonously into blue-tinted fog, until even Sullivan admitted he was too fatigued to go any farther.

“We need,” he said at length, “more men.”

Guilford wondered who he had in mind. Keck? Robertson? One-armed Digby?

Tom looked up the way they had come, now a colorless overcast. “We shouldn’t wait to turn back. Daylight’ll be gone soon — what there is of it.” He cast a critical eye at Sullivan. “When you get your breath back—”

“Don’t worry about me. Go on! Reverse order. I’ll follow behind.”

He was pale and dewed with sweat.

The frontiersman shrugged and turned. Guilford followed Tom, calling a halt whenever the line between himself and Sullivan grew taut. Which it often did. The botanist’s breathing was audible over a considerable distance now and it grew more labored as they climbed. Before long Sullivan began to cough. Tom looked back sharply and slowed the ascent to a crawl.

The fog had begun to thicken. Guilford lost sight of the far wall, stone steps vanishing behind a twining curtain of vapor. The rope served a purpose now, as even Tom Compton’s broad back grew faint in the mist.

With the loss of visible landmarks came disorientation. He couldn’t guess how far they had come or how much of the climb remained. Doesn’t matter, he told himself sternly. Every step is one step closer. His bad leg had began to hurt him, a vicious pain that ran like a wire from calf to knee.

Shouldn’t have gone so far down, Guilford thought, but Sullivan’s enthusiasm had been contagious, the sense of some immense revelation waiting, if only they could reach it. He stood a moment, closed his eyes, felt chill air flow past him like a river. He smelled the mineral smells of granite and fog. And something else. Muskier, stranger.

“Guilford!”

Tom’s voice. Guilford looked up sheepishly.

“Watch where you’re standing,” the frontiersman said.

It was the brink of the escarpment. Another step and he might have fallen.

“Keep your left hand on the wall. You too, Sullivan.”

Sullivan came into view, nodding wordlessly. He was a shade, a wraith, a gangly spirit.

Guilford was groping his way behind the frontiersman when the rope suddenly cinched at his waist. He called a halt and turned.

“Dr. Sullivan?”

No answer. The rope remained taut. When he looked back he saw only fog.

“Dr. Sullivan — are you all right?”

No answer, only this anchoring weight.

Tom Compton came scrabbling out of the mist. Guilford backed up, slacking the rope, peering into the dimness for any sign of Sullivan.

He found the botanist lying on the wide granite ledge, face down, one hand still touching the damp rock wall.

“Ah, Christ!” Tom dropped to his knees. He turned Sullivan over and searched his wrist for a pulse.

“He’s breathing,” the frontiersman said. “More or less.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t know. His skin’s cold and he’s ungodly pale. Sullivan! Wake up, you son of a bitch! Work to do!”

Sullivan didn’t wake up. His head lolled to one side, limply. A trickle of blood escaped one nostril. He looks shrunken, Guilford thought dazedly. Like someone let the air out of him.

Tom stripped his pack and bunched it under the botanist’s head. “Stubborn fucker, wouldn’t slow down for love of life…”

“What do we do now?”

“Let me think.”

Despite their best efforts, Sullivan wouldn’t wake up.

Tom Compton rocked on his heels for a time, deep in thought. Then he hitched his pack over his shoulder and shrugged out of the rope harness. “Hell with it. Look, I’ll bring blankets and food from the sledge for both of you. After that you stay with him; I’ll go for help.”

“He’s wet and nearly freezing, Tom.”

“He’ll freeze faster in the open air. Might kill him to move him. Give me a day to reach camp, another day to get here with Keck and Farr. Farr will know what to do. You’ll be all right — I don’t know about Sullivan, poor bastard.” He frowned fiercely. “But you stay with him, Guilford. Don’t leave him alone.”

He might not wake up, Guilford thought. He might die. And then I’ll be alone, in this godforsaken hole in the ground.

“I’ll stay.”

The frontiersman nodded curtly. “If he dies, wait for me. We’re close enough to the top, you ought to be able to tell night from day. You understand? Keep your fucking wits about you.”

Guilford nodded.

“All right.” Tom bent over the unconscious shape of Sullivan with a tenderness Guilford had never seen in him, smoothed a strand of gray hair from the botanist’s dank forehead. “Hang on, you old cock-knocker! You damn stupid explorer.”

Guilford took the blankets Tom brought him and made a rough bed to shield Sullivan from cold air and cold stone. Compared to the atmosphere outside the temperature in the well was nearly balmy — above the freezing point; but the fog cut through clothing and chilled the skin.

When Tom vanished into the mist Guilford felt profoundly alone. No company now but his thoughts and Sullivan’s slow, labored breathing. He felt both bored and near panic. He found himself wishing stupidly for something to read. The only reading matter that had survived the Partisan attack was Digby’s pocket New Testament, and Diggs wouldn’t allow it out of his possession. Diggs thought the onion-leafed book had saved his life: it was his lucky charm. Argosy was long lost.

As if a person could read, in this arsenic-colored dusk.

He knew night had fallen when the light above him faded entirely and the moist air turned a deeper and more poisonous shade of green. Minute particles of dust and ice wafted out of the deeps, like diatoms in an ocean current. He rearranged the blankets around Dr. Sullivan, whose breathing had grown harsh as the rasp of a saw blade in wet pine, and ignited one of the two mosquewood torches Tom Compton had brought him. Without a blanket of his own, Guilford shivered uncontrollably. He stood up whenever his feet grew numb, careful to keep one hand on the rock wall. He propped the torch in a cairn of loose rocks and warmed his hands at the low flame. Mosquewood dipped in snake tallow, it would burn for six or eight hours, though not brightly.

He was afraid to sleep.

In the silence he was able to hear subtle sounds — a distant rumbling, unless that was the pulse of his own blood, amplified in the darkness. He remembered a novel by H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, and its subterranean Morlocks, with their glowing eyes and terrible hungers. Not a welcome memory.

He talked to Sullivan to pass the time. Sullivan might be listening, Guilford thought, though his eyes were firmly closed and blood continued to ooze sluggishly from his nose. Periodically Guilford dipped the tail of his shirt into a trickle of meltwater and used it to wipe the blood from Sullivan’s face. He talked fondly about Caroline and Lily. He talked about his father, clubbed to death during the Boston food riots when he had doggedly tried to enter his print shop, as he had done every working day of his adult life. Dumb courage. Guilford wished he had some of that.

He wished Sullivan would wake up. Tell some stories of his own. Make his case for an ancient, evolved Darwinia; hammer the miraculous with the cold steel of reason. Hope you’re right about that, Guilford thought. Hope this continent is not some dream or, worse, a nightmare. Hope old and dead things remain old and dead.

He wished he had a hot meal and a bath to look forward to. And a bed, and Caroline in it, the warm contours of her body under a snowdrift of cotton sheet. He didn’t like these noises from the deeps, or the way the sound rose and ebbed like an impossible tide.

“I hope you don’t die, Dr. Sullivan. I know how you’d hate to give up without understanding any of this. No easy task, though, is it?”

Now Sullivan drew a deep, convulsive breath. Guilford looked down and was startled to see the botanist’s eyes spring open.

Sullivan looked hard at him — or through him — it was hard to tell which. One of his pupils was grotesquely dilated, the white rimmed with blood.

“We don’t die,” Sullivan gasped.

Guilford fought a sudden urge to back away. “Hey!” he said. “Dr. Sullivan, lie still! Don’t excite yourself. You’ll be all right, just relax. Help’s on the way.”

“Didn’t he tell you that? Guilford tell Guilford that Guilford won’t die?”

“Don’t try to talk.” Don’t talk, Guilford thought, because you’re frightening the crap out of me.

Sullivan’s lips curled into a one-sided frown, awful to behold. “You’ve seen them in your dreams…”

“Please don’t, Dr. Sullivan.”

“Green as old copper. Spines on their bellies… They eat dreams. Eat everything!”

In fact the words struck a chord, but Guilford pushed the memory away. The important thing now was not to panic.

“Guilford!” Sullivan’s left hand shot out to grasp Guilford’s wrist, while his right clutched reflexively at empty air. “This is one of the places where the world ends!”

“You’re not making sense, Dr. Sullivan. Please, try to sleep. Tom will be back soon.”

“You died in France. Died fighting the Boche. Of all things.”

“I don’t like to say it, but you’re scaring me, Dr. Sullivan.”

“I cannot die!” Sullivan insisted.

Then he grunted, and all the breath sighed out of him at once.

After a time Guilford closed the corpse’s eyes.

He sat with Dr. Sullivan for several hours more, humming tunelessly, waiting for whatever might climb out of the dark to claim him.

Shortly before dawn, exhausted, he fell asleep.

They want so badly to come out!

Guilford can feel their anger, their frustration.

He has no name for them. They don’t quite exist. They are trapped between idea and creation, incomplete, half-sentient, longing for embodiment. Physical1y they are faint green shapes, larger than a man, armored, thorny, huge muzzles opening and closing in silent anger.

They were bound here after the battle.

The thought is not his own. Guilford turns, weightless. He is floating deep in the well, though not on water. The air itself is radiant around him. Somehow, this uncreated light is both air and rock and self.

The picket floats beside him. A spindly man in a U.S. Army uniform. Light flows through him, from him. He is the soldier from Guilford’s dreams, a man who might be his twin.

Who are you?

Yourself, the picket answers.

That’s not possible.

Seems not. But it is.

Even the voice is familiar. It’s the voice in which Guilford speaks to himself, the voice of his private thoughts.

And what are these? He means the bound creatures. Demons?

You may call them that. Call them monsters. They have no ambition but to become. Ultimately, to be everything that exists.

Guilford can see them more clearly now. Their scales and claws, their several arms, their snapping teeth.

Animals?

Much more than animals. But that, too, given a chance.

You bound them here?

I did. In part. With the help of others. But the binding is imperfect.

I don’t know what that means.

See how they tremble on the verge of incarnation? Soon, they’ll assume the physical once again. Unless we bind them forever.

Bind them? Guilford asks. He is afraid now. So much of this defies his comprehension. But he can sense the enormous pressure from below, the terrible desire thwarted and stored for eons, waiting to burst forth.

We will bind them, the picket says calmly.

We?

You and I.

The words are shocking. Guilford feels the impossible weight of the task, as immense as the moon. I don’t understand any of this!

Patience, little brother, the picket says, and lifts him up, up through the eerie light, through the fog and heat of almost-incarnation, like an angel in a ragged army uniform, and as he rises his flesh melts into air.

Tom Compton loomed over him, holding a torch.

I would get up, Guilford thought, if I could. If it weren’t so cold here. If his body hadn’t stiffened in a thousand places. If he could order his dizzying thoughts. He had some vital message to impart, a message about Dr. Sullivan.

“He died,” Guilford said. That was it. Sullivan’s body lay beside him, under a blanket. Sullivan’s face was pale and still in the lantern light. “I’m sorry, Tom.”

“I know,” Tom said. “You did a good job staying with him. Can you walk?”

Guilford tried to put his feet under him but only managed to bang his hip on a ridge of stone.

“Lean on me,” the frontiersman said.

Once again, he felt himself lifted.

It was hard to stay awake. His torpid body wanted him to close his eyes and rest. “We’ll build a fire when we’re out of his hole,” the frontiersman told him. “Step lively now.”

“How long has it been?”

“Three days.”

“Three?”

“There was trouble.”

“Who’s with you?”

They had reached the rim of the well. The interior of the dome was suffused with watery daylight. A gaunt figure waited, slouched against a slab of rock, canvas hood pulled over his face. The mist obscured his features.

“Finch,” Tom said. “Finch came with me.”

“Finch? Why Finch? What about Keck, what about Robertson?”

“They’re dead, Guilford. Keck, Robertson, Diggs, Donner, and Farr. All dead. And so will we be, if you don’t keep moving.”

Guilford moaned and shielded his eyes.

Chapter Nineteen

Spring came early to London. The thawing marshes to the east and west gave the air an earthy scent, and Thames Street, freshly paved from the docks to Tower Hill, rattled with commerce. To the west, work had begun again on the dome of the new St. Paul’s.

Caroline dodged a herd of sheep headed for market, feeling as if she were bound for slaughter herself. For weeks she had refused to see Colin Watson, refused to accept his invitations or even read his notes. She was not sure why she had agreed to see him now — to meet him at a coffee shop on Candlewick Street — except for the persistent feeling that she owed him something, if only an explanation, before she left for America.

After all, he was a soldier. He followed orders. He wasn’t Kitchener; he wasn’t even the Royal Navy. Just one man.

She found the place easily enough. The shop was dressed in Tudor woodwork. Its leaded windows dripped with condensation, the interior heated by the steam from a huge silver samovar. The crowd in side was rough, working-class, largely male. She gazed across a sea of woollen caps until she spotted Colin at a table at the rear, his coat collar turned up and his long face apprehensive.

“Well,” he said. “We meet again.” He raised his cup in a sort of mock-toast.

But Caroline didn’t want to spar with him. She sat down and came to the point. “I want you to know, I’m going home.”

“You just got here.”

“I mean to Boston.”

“Boston! Is that why you wouldn’t see me?”

“No.”

“Then won’t you at least tell me why you’re leaving?” He lowered his voice and opened his blue eyes wide. “Caroline, please. I know I must have offended you. I don’t know how, but if it’s an apology you want, you can have it.”

This was harder than she had expected. He was bewildered, genuinely contrite. She bit her lip.

“Your aunt Alice found out about us, is that it?”

Caroline dipped her head. “It wasn’t the best-kept secret.”

“Ah. I suspected as much. I doubt Jered would have put up a fuss, but Alice — well, I assume she was angry.”

“Yes. But that doesn’t matter.”

“Then why leave?”

“They won’t have me any longer.”

“Stay with me, then.”

“I can’t!”

“Don’t be shocked, Caroline. We needn’t live in sin, you know.”

Dear God, in a moment he’d be proposing! “You know why I can’t do that! Colin — she told me.”

“Told you what?”

Two seamen at the nearest table were smirking at her. She lowered her voice to match Colin’s. “That you murdered Guilford.”

The Lieutenant sat back in his chair, goggling. “God almighty! Murdered him? She said that?” He blinked. “But, Caroline, it’s absurd!”

“By sending guns across the Channel. Guns to the Partisans.”

He put down his cup. He blinked again. “Guns to the — ah. I see.”

“Then it’s true?”

He looked at her steadily. “That I murdered Guilford? Certainly not. About the weapons?” He hesitated. “Up to a point, it may be. We aren’t supposed to discuss these things even among ourselves.”

“It is true!”

“It may be. Honestly, I don’t know! I’m not a senior officer. I do what I’m told, and I don’t ask questions.”

“But guns are involved?”

“Yes, a number of weapons have passed through London.”

That was nearly an admission. Caroline thought she ought to be angry. She wondered why her anger was suddenly so elusive.

Maybe anger was like grief. It took its own sweet time. It waited in ambush.

Colin was thoughtful, concerned. “I suppose Alice might have heard something through Jered… and he probably knows more about it than I do, come to that. The Navy employs his warehouse and his dray teams from time to time, with his consent. He might well have done other work for the Admiralty. Fancies himself a patriot, after all.”

Alice and Jered arguing in the night, keeping Lily awake: was this what they had been fighting about? Jered admitting that guns had gone through his warehouse on the way to the Partisans, Alice afraid that Guilford would be hurt…

“But even if weapons went across the Channel, you can’t be sure they had anything to do with Guilford. Frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to interfere with the Finch party. The Partisans operate along the coast; they need coal and money far more than they need munitions. Anyone could have fired on the Weston — bandits, anarchists! And as for Guilford, who knows what he ran into past the bloody Rheinfelden? The continent is an unexplored wilderness; it’s dangerous by nature.”

She was ashamed to feel her defenses crumbling. The issue had seemed icily clear when Alice explained it. But what if Jered was as guilty as Colin?

She shouldn’t be having this conversation… but there was nothing to stop it now, no moral or practical obstacle. This man, whatever he might have done, was being honest with her.

And she had missed him. She might as well admit it.

The seamen in their striped jerseys grinned lewdly at her.

Colin reached for her hand. “Walk with me,” he said. “Somewhere away from the noise.”

She let him talk all the way along Candlewick and up Fenchurch to the end of the pavement, let herself be soothed by the sound of his voice and the seductive idea of his innocence.

The mosque trees had been a dull green all winter, but sudden sun and melting snow had coaxed new blades from the tree crowns. The air was almost warm.

He was a soldier, she told herself again. Of course he did what he was told; what choice did he have?

Jered was another matter. Jered was a civilian; he didn’t have to cooperate with the Admiralty. And Alice knew that. How the knowledge must have burned! Bitter, her voice had been, arguing with her husband in the dark. Of course she blamed Jered, but she couldn’t leave him; she was chained to him by marriage.

So Alice hated Colin instead. Blind, displaced, unthinking hatred. Because she couldn’t afford the luxury of hating her own husband.

“See me again,” Colin begged. “At least once more. Before you leave.”

Caroline said she would try.

“I hate to think of you at sea. There have been threats to shipping, you know. They say the American fleet is massed in the North Atlantic.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Perhaps you should.”

Mrs. de Koenig passed her a note from Colin later that week. There was a general mobilization, he said; he might be shipped out; he wanted to see her as soon as possible.

War, Caroline thought bitterly. Everyone was talking about war. Only ten years since the world was shaken to its foundations, and now they want to fight over the scraps. Over a wilderness!

The Times, a six-page daily pressed on fibrous mosque-pulp paper, had devoted most of its recent editorials to chastening the Americans: for administering the Continent as if it were an American protectorate, for “imposing boundaries” on the British Isles, for various sins of arrogance or complacency. Caroline’s accent provoked raised eyebrows at the stores and market stalls. Today Lily had asked her why it was so bad to be an American.

“It isn’t,” Caroline told her. “That’s all just talk. People are upset, but they’ll calm down sooner or later.”

“We’re riding a ship soon,” Lily said.

“Probably.”

She had stopped taking meals with Alice and Jered. She would have rented a room for herself and Lily at the Empire if her stipend from home had been more generous. But even pub meals were an ordeal now, with all this talk of war. Her aunt and uncle were stiffly formal with Caroline when they couldn’t avoid her altogether, though they still fawned over Lily. Caroline found this easier to bear since her talk with Colin. She found herself nearly pitying Alice — poor staunchly moral Alice, locked into a network of guilt as tight as those curls she wove into her graying hair.

“Sleep,” Caroline told Lily that night, tucking her under her cotton sheets, smoothing the fabric. “Sleep well. We’ll be traveling soon.”

One way or another.

Lily nodded solemnly. Since Christmas, the girl had stopped asking about her father. The answers were never satisfactory.

“Away from here?” Lily asked.

“Away from here.”

“Somewhere safe?”

“Somewhere safe.”

A sunlit morning. There was pavement being poured on Fenchurch, the smell of tar wafting over the town, everywhere the clap of horses’ hooves and the flat ring of buckles and reins.

She saw Colin waiting on Thames Street near the docks, sunlight at his back, reading the newspaper. Her sense of excitement rose. She didn’t know what she would tell him. She didn’t have a plan. Only a collection of hopes and fears.

She had taken a bare handful of steps toward him when sirens wailed from the City Center.

The sound paralyzed her, raised gooseflesh on her shoulders.

The crowd on the quay seemed paralyzed too. Colin looked up from his paper in consternation. Caroline raised her arm; he ran to her. The sirens wailed on.

She fell into his embrace. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want my daughter.” Something bad was happening. Lily would be frightened.

“Come on, then.” Colin took her hand and gently pressed it. “We’ll find Lily. But we have to hurry.”

The wind came from the east — a steady spring wind, smoky and fragrant. The river was placid and white with sails. South along the marshy bank of the Thames, the stacks of the gunboats had only just appeared.

Chapter Twenty

It’s simple, Crane had told him. We’re part of something that’s getting stronger. And they’re part of something that’s getting weaker.

Maybe it looked that way from Crane’s point of view. Crane had slid into the ranks of Washington’s elite — well, the semi-elite, the under-elite — like a gilded suppository. Only months in town, and now he was working for Senator Klassen in some shadowy capacity; had lately taken his own apartment (for which small mercy thank the gods); he was a fixture at the Sanders-Moss salon and had earned the right to condescend to Elias Vale in public places.

Whereas Vale’s own invitations had dropped off in number and frequency, his clients were fewer and less affluent, and even Eugene Randall saw him less often.

Randall, of course, had been subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating the loss of the Finch expedition. Perhaps even a deceased spouse takes second place to such lofty obligations. The dead, in any case, were notoriously patient.

Still and all, Vale had begun to wonder whether the gods were playing favorites.

He sought distraction where he could find it. It was one of his newer clients, an elderly Maryland abortionist, who had given Vale the amber vial of morphine and a chased-silver hypodermic syringe. Had shown him how to find a vein and raise it and prick it with the hollow needle, a process which made him think abstractly of bees and venom. Oh sting of oblivion. He took to the habit recklessly.

The kit — it folded into a neat silver sleeve about the size of a cigarette case — was in his jacket pocket when he arrived at the Sanders-Moss estate. He hadn’t planned to use it. But the afternoon went badly. The weather was too wet for winter, too cold for spring. Eleanor welcomed him with an uneasy expression — one can only coax so much mileage out of a lost christening dress, Vale supposed — and after lunch a drunken junior congressman began to bait him about his work.

“Stock market tips, Mr. Vale? You talk to the dead, they must have a few choice observations. But I don’t suppose the dead have much opportunity to invest, do they?”

“In this district, Congressman, they don’t even vote.”

“Touched a sore point, Mr. Vale?”

“It’s Doctor Vale.”

“Doctor of what would that be exactly?”

Doctor of Immortality, Vale thought. Unlike you, you rotting slab of meat.

“You know, Mr. Vale, I happen to have looked into your past. Did a little research, especially when Eleanor here told me how much she was paying you to read her palm.”

“I don’t read palms.”

“No, but I bet you know how to read a balance sheet.”

“This is insulting.”

The congressman smiled gleefully. “Why, who told you that, Mr. Vale? John Wilkes Booth?”

Even Eleanor laughed.

“This is not the guest bathroom!” The maid Olivia tapped irritably at the door. “This the help bathroom?”

Vale ignored her. The hypodermic kit lay open on the green-tile floor. He slumped on the toilet. He had cranked open the pebbled window; a chill rain came in. The chain of the water closet tapped restlessly against the damp white wall.

He had taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeve. He slapped the crotch of his left arm until a vein came up. Fuck them all, Vale thought primly.

The first shot was easeful, a still calm that enveloped him like a child’s blanket. The bathroom looked suddenly vague, as if wrapped in glassine.

But I am immortal, Vale thought.

He remembered Crane driving the knife through the back of his hand. Crane, it turned out, had a perverse fondness for self-mutilation. Liked to pierce himself with knives, cut himself with blades, prick himself with needles.

Well, I am no stranger to needles myself. Vale preferred the morphine even to Kentucky whiskey. The oblivion was more certain, somehow more comprehensive. He wanted more of it.

“Mr. Vale! That you in there?”

“Go away, Olivia, thank you.”

He reached for the syringe again. I am, after all, immortal. I cannot die. The implications of that fact had grown somewhat unnerving.

This time his skin resisted the needle. Vale pushed harder. It was like probing cheddar cheese. He thought he had found the vein at last, but when he pushed the plunger the skin beneath began to discolor, a massive, fluid bruise.

“Shit,” he said.

“You have to come out or I’ll tell Mrs. Sanders-Moss, she’ll have somebody break down this door!”

“Only a little longer, Olivia dear. Be nice and go away.”

“This is not the guest bathroom! You been in there an hour already!”

Had he? If so, it was only because she wouldn’t let him concentrate on the task at hand. He refilled the syringe.

But now the needle wouldn’t pierce his skin at all.

Had he dulled the point? The tip looked as lethally sharp as ever.

He pushed harder.

He winced. There was pain, remarkably. The soft skin dimpled and cratered and reddened. But it didn’t break.

He tried the flesh on his wrist. It was the same, like trying to cut leather with a spoon. He lowered his pants to his ankles and tried the inside of a thigh.

Nothing.

Finally, in angry desperation, Vale jabbed the weeping needle against his throat where he imagined an artery might be.

The tip snapped off. The syringe drooled its contents uselessly down his open collar.

“Shit!” Vale exclaimed again, frustrated almost to tears.

The door burst open. Here was Olivia, gaping at him, and the upstart junior congressman behind her, and wide-eyed Eleanor, and even Timothy Crane, frowning officiously.

“Huh!” Olivia said. “Well, that figures.”

“A shot of morphine in the niggers’ toilet? Uncouth, Elias, to say the least.”

“Shut up,” Vale said wearily. The initial effect of the morphine, if any, had worn off. His body felt dry as dust, his mind maddeningly lucid. He had allowed Crane to take him to his car, after Eleanor made it clear that he would not be welcome on the property again and that she would call the police if he tried to return. Her exact words had been less diplomatic.

“They’re generous employers,” Crane said.

“Who?”

“The gods. They don’t care what you do on your own time. Morphine, cocaine, women, sodomy, murder, backgammon — it’s all the same to them. But you can’t stupefy yourself when they want your attention, and you certainly can’t inject a lethal overdose into your arm, if that was what you were attempting to do. Stupid thing to try, Elias, if I may say so.”

The car turned a corner. Dismal day was passing into dismal evening.

“This is business now, Elias.”

“Where are we going?” Not that he particularly cared, though he felt the queasy presence of the god inside him, ramping up his pulse, straightening his spine.

“To visit Eugene Randall.”

“I wasn’t told.”

“I’m telling you now.”

Vale looked listlessly at the upholstery of Crane’s brand-new Ford. “What’s in the bag?”

“Have a look.”

It was a leather doctor’s bag, and it contained just three articles: a surgical knife, a bottle of methyl alcohol, and a box of safety matches.

Alcohol and matches — to sterilize the knife? The knife to—

“Oh, no,” Vale said.

“Don’t be priggish, Elias.”

“Randall isn’t important enough for… whatever you have in mind.”

“It’s not what I have in mind. We don’t make these decisions. You know that.”

Vale stared at the blithe young man. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“No. Not that it matters.”

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“Elias, that’s privileged information. I’m sorry if you’re shocked. But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like.”

“You mean to kill Eugene Randall?”

“Certainly.”

“But why?”

“Not for me to say, is it? Most likely the problem is the testimony he plans to give the Chandler Committee. All he needs to do, and I know his dear departed Louisa Ellen already told him so, is to let the committee get on with its work. There are five so-called witnesses who will say they saw English-speaking gentlemen firing mortars and regulation Lee-Enfields at the Weston. Randall would save himself and the Smithsonian a great deal of trouble if he simply agreed to smile and nod, but if he insists on muddying the issue—”

“He believes Finch’s people may still be alive.”

“Yes, that’s the problem.”

“Even so — in the long run, what does it matter? If it’s a war the gods want, Randall’s testimony is hardly a serious impediment. Most likely the papers won’t even report it.”

“But they will report Randall’s murder. And if we’re careful, they’ll blame it on British agents.”

Vale closed his eyes. The wheels turn within the wheels, ad infinitum. For one agonizing moment he yearned for the morphine syringe.

Then a sullen determination rose in him, not precisely his own. “Will this take long?”

“Not long at all,” Crane told him soothingly.

Perhaps it was the lingering effect of the morphine in his bloodstream, but Vale felt the presence of his god beside him as he walked the empty museum corridor to Randall’s office. Randall was alone, working late, and probably the gods had arranged that, too.

His god was unusually tangible. When he looked to his left he could see it, or imagined he saw it, walking next to him. Its body was not pleasant or ethereal. The god was as obnoxiously physical as a full-grown steer, though more grotesque by a long reach.

The god had far too many arms and legs, and its mouth was a horror, sharp as a beak on the outside, wet and crimson within. A ridge of tumorous bumps stitched its belly to its neck, a sort of spine. He disliked the color of the god, a lifeless mineral green. Crane, walking to the right of him, saw nothing.

Smelled nothing. But the smell was tangible, too, at least to Vale’s nose. It was an astringent, chemical smell — the smell of a tannery, or a broken bottle in a doctor’s office.

They surprised Eugene Randall in his office. (But how much more surprised would Randall have been if he could see the hideous god! Obviously he couldn’t.) Randall looked up wearily. He had taken on the position of director since Walcott left the Institution, and the job had worn him down. Not to mention the congressional subpoena and his wife’s postmortem nagging.

“Elias!” he said. “And you’re Timothy Crane, aren’t you? We met at one of Eleanor’s salons.”

There would not be any talking. That time had passed. Crane went to the window behind Randall and opened his medical bag. He brought out the knife. The knife glistened in the watery light. Randall’s attention remained fixed on Vale.

“Elias, what is this? Honestly, I don’t have time for—”

For what? Vale wondered as Crane stepped swiftly forward and drew the knife across Randall’s throat. Randall gurgled and began to thrash, but his mouth was too full of blood for him to make much real noise.

Crane put the bloody instrument back in the bag and withdrew the brown bottle of methyl alcohol.

“I imagined you meant to sterilize the knife,” Vale said. Idiotic notion.

“Don’t be silly, Elias.”

Crane emptied the bottle across Randall’s head and shoulders and splashed the last of it over his desk. Randall dropped from his chair and began to crawl across the floor. One hand was clutched to his throat, but the wound pulsed gobbets of blood between his fingers.

Next, the matches.

Crane’s left hand was alight when he emerged from Randall’s burning office. Crane himself was fascinated, turning his hand before his eyes as the blue flames sighed into extinction for lack of fuel. Both flesh and cuff were unharmed.

“Exhilarating,” he said.

Elias Vale, suddenly queasy, looked for his attendant god. But the god was gone. Nothing left of it but smoke and firelight and the awful stench of burning meat.

Chapter Twenty-One

Guilford rode a fur snake, recovering his strength as Tom Compton led the animals up the slope of the valley. It wasn’t an easy climb. Ice-crusted snow bit at the snakes’ thick legs; the animals complained mournfully but didn’t balk. Maybe they understood what lay behind them, Guilford thought. Maybe they were eager to be away from the ruined city.

After dark, in a sleeting snow, the frontiersman found a glade within the forest and built a small fire. Guilford made himself useful by collecting windfall from the nearby trees, while Preston Finch, cloaked and grim, fed kindling to the flames. The fur snakes huddled together, their winter coats glistening, breath steaming from their blunt nostrils.

Dinner was a freshly killed moth-hawk, cleaned and charred, plus strips of snake pemmican from Tom Compton’s pack. The frontiersman improvised a lean-to out of sage-pine branches and loose furs. He had salvaged a number of furs, one pistol, and the three pack animals from the most recent attack. All that remained of the Finch Expedition.

Guilford ate sparingly. He wanted desperately to sleep — to sleep off chronic malnutrition, sleep off three days of hypothermia in the well, the shock of Sullivan’s death, the frostbite that had turned his toes and fingertips an ominous china white. But that wasn’t going to happen. And right now he needed to know exactly how bad the situation had become.

He asked the frontiersman how the others had died.

“It was all over by the time I got back,” Tom said. “Judging by their tracks, the attackers came from the north. Armed men, ten or fifteen, maybe spotted Diggs’s kitchen fire, maybe just got lucky. They must have come in shooting. Everybody dead but Finch, who hid out in the stables. The bandits left our snakes behind — they had snakes of their own. Left one of their own men, too, leg-shot, couldn’t walk.”

“Partisans?” Guilford asked.

The Frontiersman shook his head. “Not the one they left behind, anyhow.”

“You talked to him?”

“Had a word with him. He wasn’t going anywhere. Both legs fucked up beyond repair, plus I introduced him to my knife when he got truculent.”

“Jesus, Tom!”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t see what they did to Diggs and Farr and Robertson and Donner. These people aren’t human.”

Finch looked up abruptly, hollow-eyed, startled.

Guilford said, “Go on.”

“It was obvious from his accent this shitheel was no Partisan. Hell, I’ve drunk with Partisans. They’re mostly repatriate Frenchmen or Italians who like to get tight and fly their flag and take a few shots at American colonists. The big-time Partisans are pirates, armed merchantmen, they’ll bag some creaky old frigate and steal the cargo and call it import duties and spend the money in a backwater whorehouse. Travel up the Rhine, the only Partisans you meet are wildcat miners with political opinions.

“This guy was an American. Said he was recruited in Jeffersonville and that his people came into the hinterland bounty-hunting the Finch expedition. Said they were paid good money.”

“Did he say who paid ’em?”

“Not before he passed out, no. And I didn’t have a second chance to ask him. I had Finch to worry about, and you and Sullivan back at the well. Figured I’d sling the son of a bitch on a sledge and drag him along by daylight.” The frontiersman paused. “But he escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“I left him alone just long enough to harness the snakes. Well, not alone, precisely — Finch was with him, for all the difference that makes. When I got back, he was gone. Ran off.”

“You said he passed out. You said his legs were shot up.”

“He did, and his legs were bloody meat, a couple of bones obviously broken. Not the kind of wound you can fake. But when I came back he was gone. Left footprints. When I say he ran, I mean he ran. Ran like a jackrabbit, headed off into the ruins. I suppose I could have tracked him but there was too much else to do.”

“On the surface of it,” Guilford said carefully, “that’s impossible.”

“On the surface of it it’s bullshit, but all I know is what I see.”

“You say Finch was with him?”

Tom’s frown deepened, an angle of discontent in the frost-rimed cavern of his beard. “Finch was with him, but he hasn’t had a word to say on the subject.”

Guilford turned to the geologist. Every indignity the expedition had suffered since Gillvany’s death was written on Finch’s face, plus the special humiliation of a man who has lost command — who has lost lives for which he was nominally responsible. There was nothing pompous about Finch any longer, no dignity in his fixed stare, only defeat.

“Dr. Finch?”

The geologist looked at Guilford briefly. His attention flickered like a candle.

“Dr. Finch, did you see what happened to the man Tom talked to? The injured man?”

Finch turned his head away.

“Don’t bother,” Tom said. “He’s mute as a stick.”

“Dr. Finch, it might help us if we knew what happened. Help us get home safe, I mean.”

“It was a miracle,” Preston Finch said.

His voice was a sandpapered croak. The frontiersman gave him an astonished stare.

Guilford persisted gently. “Dr. Finch? What is it you saw, exactly?”

“His wounds healed. The flesh knitted itself together. The bones mended themselves. He stood up. He looked at me. He laughed.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“That’s a big help,” Tom Compton said.

The frontiersman sat watch. Guilford crawled into the lean-to with Finch. The botanist stank of stale sweat and snake hides and hopelessness, but Guilford didn’t smell much sweeter himself. Their human effluvia filled the narrow space, and their breath condensed to ice in the frigid air.

Something had stirred Finch to a fresh alertness. He stared past layered furs into the brutal night. “This isn’t the miracle I wanted,” he whispered. “Do you understand that, Mr. Law?”

Guilford was cold through and through. He found it hard to make himself concentrate. “I understand very little of this, Dr. Finch.”

“Isn’t that what you thought of me, you and Sullivan? Preston Finch, the fanatic, looking for evidence of divine intervention, like those people who claim to have found pieces of the Ark or the One True Cross?”

Finch sounded old as the night wind. “I’m sorry if you got that impression.”

“I’m not insulted. Maybe it’s true. Call it hubris. Sin of pride. I didn’t think things through. If nature and the divine are no longer separate then there might also be dark miracles. That awful city. The man whose bones unbroke themselves.”

And tunnels in the earth, and my twin in a tattered Army uniform, and demons straining at incarnation. No: not that. Let it all be illusion, Guilford thought. Fatigue and malnutrition and cold and fear.

Finch coughed into his hand, a wrenching sound. “It’s a new world,” he said.

No denying it. “We need to get some sleep, Dr. Finch.”

“Dark forces and light. They’re at our shoulders.” He shook his head sadly. “I never wanted that.”

“I know.”

A pause. “I’m sorry you lost your photographs, Mr. Law.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

He closed his eyes.

They traveled each day, a little distance, not far.

They followed game trails, rocky riverbeds, snowless patches beneath the mosque and sage-pine trees, places they wouldn’t leave obvious tracks. Periodically, the frontiersman left Guilford to supervise Finch while he went hunting with his Bowie knife. Often there was snake meat, and the moth-hawk roosts were a common last resort. But for many months there had been no vegetables save a few hard-scavenged roots or tough green mosque-tree spines boiled in water. Guilford’s teeth had loosened, and his vision was not as acute as it once had been. Finch, who had lost his glasses in the first attack, was nearly blind.

Days passed. Spring was not far off, by the calendar, but the skies remained dark, the wind cold and piercing. Guilford grew accustomed to the aching of his joints, the constant pain at every hinge in his body.

He wondered if the Bodensee had frozen. Whether he would see it again.

He kept his tattered journal inside his furs; it had never left his possession. The remaining blank pages were few, but he recorded occasional brief notes to Caroline.

He knew his strength was failing. His bad leg had begun to pain him daily, and as for Finch — he looked like something dragged out of an insect midden.

Temperatures rose for three days, followed by a cold spring rain. The season was welcome, the mud and wind were not. Even the fur snakes had grown moody and gaunt, foraging in the muck for last year’s ground cover. One of the animals had gone blind in one eye, a cataract that turned the pupil gauzy and pale.

Fresh storms came towering from the west. Tom Compton scouted out a rockfall that provided some natural shelter, a granite crawl space open on two sides. The floor was sand, littered with animal droppings. Guilford blocked up both entrances with sticks and furs and tethered the snakes outside to act as an alarm. But if the little cavern had once been occupied, its tenant showed no sign of returning.

A torrent of cold rain locked them into the sheltered space. Tom hollowed out a fire pit under the stones’ natural chimney. He had taken to humming ridiculous, sentimental old Mauve Decade tunes — “Golden Slippers,” “Marbl’d Halls,” and such. No lyrics, just raw basso melodies. The effect was less like song and more like an aboriginal chant, mournful and strange.

The rain storm rattled on, easing periodically but never stopping. Runnels of water coursed down the stone. Guilford scratched out a trench to conduct moisture to the lower opening of the cave. They began to ration their food. Everyday we stay here, Guilford thought, we’re a little weaker; every day the Rhine is a little more distant. He supposed there was some neat equation, some equivalency of pain and time, not working in their favor.

He dreamed less often of the Army picket, though the picket was still a regular fixture of his nights, concerned, imploring, and unwelcome. He dreamed of his father, whose doggedness and sense of order had conducted him to an early grave.

No judgment implied, Guilford thought. What brings a man to this desolate tag-end of the Earth, if not a ferocious single-mindedness?

Maybe the same single-mindedness would carry him back to Caroline and Lily.

You cannot die, Sullivan had said. Perhaps not. He had been lucky. But he could certainly force his body beyond all tolerable limits.

He turned to face Tom, who sat with his spine against the cold rock, knees drawn. His hand groped periodically for the pipe he had lost months ago. “In the city,” Guilford said, “did you dream?”

The frontiersman’s response was glacial. “You don’t want to know.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Dreams are nothing. Dreams are shit.”

“Even so.”

“Dreamed one dream,” Tom said. “Dreamed I died in some field of mud. Dreamed I was a soldier.” He hesitated. “Dreamed I was my own ghost, if that makes any sense.”

Too much sense, Guilford thought.

Well, not sense, exactly, but it implied… dear God, what?

He shivered and turned away.

“We need food,” Tom said. “I’ll hunt tomorrow if the weather allows.” He gazed at Preston Finch, sleeping like a corpse, the skin of his face tattooed against his skull. “If I can’t hunt, we’ll have to slaughter one of the snakes.”

“We’d be cutting our own throat.”

“We can reach the Rhine with two snakes.”

For once, he didn’t sound confident.

Morning was clear but very cold. “Stoke the fire,” the frontiersman told Guilford. “Don’t let it go out. If I’m not back in three days, head north without me. Do what you can for Finch.”

Guilford watched him amble into the raw blue light of the day, his rifle slung on his shoulder, his motion cadenced, conserving his energy. The fur snakes turned their wide black eyes on him and mewed.

“I never wanted this,” Finch said.

The fire had burned low. Guilford crouched over it, feeding damp twigs into huddled flame. The moisture burned off quickly, more steam than smoke. “What’s that, Dr. Finch?”

Finch stood up, stepped cautiously out of the cave and into the frigid daylight, fragile as old paper. Guilford kept an eye on him. Last night he had been raving in his sleep.

But Finch only stood against a rock, loosened his fly, and urinated at length.

He hobbled back, still talking. “Never wanted this, Mr. Law. I wanted a sane world, d’you understand that?”

Finch was hard to understand in general, when he spoke at all. Two of his front teeth had loosened; he whistled like a kettle. Guilford nodded abstractedly as he fed the fire.

“Don’t patronize me. Listen. It made sense, Mr. Law, the Conversion of Europe, it made sense in the context of the Biblical Flood, Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah, and if it was not the act of a jealous but comprehensible God then it could only be chaos, horror.”

“Maybe it only looks that way because we’re ignorant,” Guilford said. “Maybe we’re like monkeys staring in a mirror. There’s a monkey in the mirror, but no monkey behind the mirror. Does that make it a miracle, Dr. Finch?”

“You didn’t see that man’s body give up its wounds.”

“Dr. Sullivan once said ‘miracle’ is a name we give our ignorance.”

“Only one of the names. There are others.”

“Oh?”

“Spirits. Demons.”

“Superstition,” Guilford said, though his hackles rose.

“Superstition,” Finch said tonelessly, “is what we call the miracles we don’t approve of.”

Not much paper left, nor ink. I’ll be brief (Except to say I miss you, Caroline, and have not abandoned hope of seeing you again, holding you in my arms.)

Tom Compton gone now four days, one past his limit. I should move on, but it will be difficult without his help. I still hope to see his hairy shape come ambling our of the forest.

Dr. Finch is dead, Caroline. When I woke up he was not in the shelter. I stepped out into the crisp morning to discover he had hanged himself with our rope from the branch of a sage-pine tree.

Last night’s rain had frozen to him, Caroline, and his body glistened like a perverse Christmas ornament in the sunlight. I shall cut him down when I feel stronger, make this little stone cavern his monument grave.

Poor Dr. Finch. He was tired, and sick, and I suspect he didn’t want to go on living in what he came to believe is a demon-haunted world. And maybe there is some wisdom in that.

But I shall carry on. My love to you Lily.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The plush lobby of the Empire Hotel was abandoned. The residents had gathered at the crown of the street to watch the shelling. Caroline passed by the red-velvet furniture and hurried up the stairs with Colin and Lily behind her.

Colin unlocked the door of his room. Lily was at the window instantly, craning to see the battle past the wall of a warehouse. Lily had been grateful to leave Mrs. de Koenig: she wanted to see what was happening, too.

“Fireworks,” Lily said solemnly.

“Not really, darling. This is something bad.”

“And loud,” Lily reported.

“Very loud.” Are we safe here? Caroline wondered. Was there somewhere else to go?

Artillery fire rattled the walls. American artillery, Caroline thought. What did that mean? It meant, she supposed, that she was an enemy national in a country at war. And that might be the least of her worries. The docks were ablaze, she saw as she pulled Lily away from the window — and the shipyards, the customs house, probably Jered’s warehouse full of munitions. The wind was gentle but persistent, and from the east, and something was already burning at the far end of Candlewick Street.

The Lieutenant cleared his throat. She turned and found him standing uncertainly in the frame of the open door.

“I should be with my regiment,” he said.

She hadn’t anticipated this. The prospect terrified her. “Colin, no — don’t leave us alone here.”

“Duty, Caroline—”

“Duty can go to hell. I won’t be left again. I won’t let Lily be left, not now. Lily needs someone she can depend on.”

And so do I, she thought. So do I, God knows.

Colin looked helpless and unhappy. “Caroline, for God’s sake, we’re at war!”

“And what are you going to do? Win the war all by yourself?”

“I’m a soldier,” he said helplessly.

“For how long — ten years? More? God, aren’t you finished? Don’t you deserve to be finished?”

He didn’t answer. Caroline turned her back to him. She joined Lily at the window. The smoke from the wharves obscured the river, but she could see the stacks of the American gunboats, downstream, and the English shipping they had already sunk, shattered dreadnaughts listing into the Thames.

The artillery fell silent. She could hear voices now, shouting in the street below. A bitter tang of smoke and burning fuel haunted the air.

The silence was protracted. Finally Colin said, “I could resign my commission. Well, no, not in time of war. But, God knows, I’ve thought of it…”

“Don’t explain,” Caroline said briskly.

“I don’t want anything to hurt you.” He hesitated. “This is probably not the best time to mention it, but I happen to be in love with you. And I care about Lily.”

Caroline stiffened. Not now, she thought. Not unless he means it. Not if it’s an excuse for him to leave.

“Try to understand,” he begged.

“I do understand. Do you?”

No answer. Only the sound of the door quickly closing. Well, that’s that, Caroline thought. I’ve seen the last of Lieutenant Colin Watson, damn him. Just us now, Lily, and no crying, no crying.

But when she turned he was still in the room.

The principal targets of the attack were the Armory and the several British military vessels anchored at the wharves, all destroyed in the first hour of the bombardment. The Armory and the dockside warehouses burned throughout the night. Seven British gunships were scuttled, the hulks burning sullenly in the sluggish Thames.

Initial damage to the Port of London was relatively slight, and even the wharf fires might have been brought under control if not for the stray rounds that exploded at the eastern end of Candlewick.

The first civilian casualty of the attack was a baker named Simon Emmanuel, recently arrived from Sydney. His shop had emptied of customers as soon as the American ships sailed upriver. He was at the ovens trying to salvage several dozen raisin buns when an artillery shell entered through the roof and exploded at his feet, killing him instantly. The resulting fire engulfed Emmanuel’s shop and spread quickly to the stables next door, the brewery across the street.

Local citizens attempting a bucket brigade were driven off by an explosion in a newly installed gas main. Two city employees and a pregnant woman died in the detonation.

The wind from the east turned dry and gusty. It shrouded the city in smoke.

Caroline, Colin, and Lily spent the next day in the hotel room, though they knew it would be impossible to stay much longer. Colin left to buy food. Most of the shops and Market Street stalls had closed and some few of those had been looted. He came back with a loaf of bread and a jar of molasses. The Empire’s own kitchen was a casualty of war, but the hotel supplied bottled water free of charge in the dining room.

Caroline spent the morning watching the city burn.

The dock fires had been contained, but the east end burned freely; there was nothing to keep the fire from engulfing the whole of the city. The fire was massive now, moving at its own pace, dashing suddenly forward or hesitating with the pulse of the wind. The air stank of ashes and worse.

Colin spread a handkerchief on a side table and put a molasses-soaked wedge of bread in front of her. Caroline took a bite, then set it aside. “Where are we going to go?” They would have to go somewhere. Soon.

“West of the city,” Colin said calmly. “People are already sleeping in the high heather. There are tents. We’ll bring blankets.”

“And after that?”

“Well, it depends. Partly on the war, partly on us. I’ll have to keep shy of military police, you know, at least for a while. Eventually we’ll buy passage.”

“Passage where?”

“Anywhere, really.”

“Not the Continent.”

“Of course not—”

“And not America.”

“No? I thought you wanted to go back to Boston.”

She thought of introducing Colin to Liam Pierce. Liam had never cared for Guilford, but still, there would be questions, objections raised. At best, an old life to resume, with all its burdens. No, not Boston.

“In that case,” Colin said, “I’d thought of Australia.” He said it with a rehearsed modesty. Caroline suspected he’d thought of it often. “I have a cousin in Perth. He’ll put us up until we’re settled.”

“There are kangaroos in Australia,” Lily said.

The Lieutenant winked at her. “Plenty of kangaroos, my girl. Thick on the ground.”

Caroline was charmed but breathless. Australia? “What would we do in Australia?”

“Live,” Colin said simply.

The next morning a porter knocked at the door and told them they would have to leave at once or the hotel couldn’t guarantee their safety.

“Surely not so soon,” Caroline said. Colin and the porter ignored her. Probably it was true, they ought to leave. The air had grown unbearably foul overnight. Her lungs ached, and Lily had started to cough.

“Everybody east of Thames Street out,” the porter insisted, “that’s what the Mayor’s Office says.”

Strange how long it took a city to burn, even a city as small and primitive as London.

She gathered her bags together and helped Lily pack. Colin had no luggage — no possessions he seemed to care about — but he folded the hotel’s bedsheets and blankets together into a bundle. “The hotel won’t mind,” Colin said. “Not under the circumstances.”

What he meant, she thought, was that the hotel would be ashes by morning.

Caroline adjusted her hair in the bureau mirror. She couldn’t see at all well. The atmosphere outside was a perpetual twilight, and the gas had been off since the attack. She combed this spectral wraith of herself, then reached for her daughter’s hand. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go.”

Colin disguised himself during their trek into the vast tent city that had sprung up west of the city. He wore an oversized rain slicker and a slouch hat, both purchased at outrageous prices from a rag vendor working the crowd of refugees. Army and Navy personnel had been detailed to emergency relief. They circulated among the makeshift shelters distributing food and medicine. Colin didn’t want to be recognized.

Caroline knew he was afraid of being captured as a deserter. In the literal sense, of course, he was a deserter, and that must be difficult for him, though he refused to discuss it. “I was hardly more than an accounts clerk,” he said. “I won’t be missed.”

By their third day in the tent city, food had grown scarce but optimistic rumors spread wildly: a Red Cross steamer was coming up the Thames; the Americans had been defeated at sea. Caroline listened to the rumors indifferently. She’d heard rumors before. It was enough that the fire seemed at last to be burning itself out, with the help of a frigid spring rain. People talked about rebuilding, though privately Caroline thought the word ludicrous: to reconstruct the reconstruction of a vanished world, what folly.

She spent an afternoon wandering among the smoldering campfires and fetid trench latrines, searching for her aunt and uncle. She regretted having made so few friends in London, having lived such an insular existence. She would have liked to see a familiar face, but there were no familiar faces, not until she came across Mrs. de Koenig, the woman who had looked after Lily so often. Mrs. de Koenig was glum and alone, wrapped in a streaming tarpaulin, her hair knotted and wet; at first she failed to recognize Caroline.

But when Caroline asked about Alice and Jered, the older woman shook her head miserably. “They waited too long. The fire came down Market Street like a live thing.”

Caroline gasped. “They died?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you certain?”

“Certain as rain.” Her red-rimmed eyes were mournful. “I’m sorry, Miss.”

Something is always stolen, Caroline thought as she trudged back through the mud and rotting plants. Something is always taken away. In the rain it was possible to cry, and she cried freely. She wanted to be finished crying when she had to face Lily again.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Fireworks bloomed over the Washington Monument, celebrating the victory in the Atlantic. Sudden lights colored the Reflecting Pool. The night air smelled of gunpowder; the crowd was gleeful and wild.

“You’ll have to leave town,” Crane said, smiling vaguely, hands in his pockets. He walked with a Brahman slouch, at once imperial and self-mocking. “I assume you know that.”

When had Vale last seen a public celebration? A few halfhearted Fourth of July fêtes since the strange summer of 1912. But the victory in the Atlantic had rung across the country like the tolling of a bell. In this throng, at night, they wouldn’t be recognized. It was possible to talk.

He said, “I would have liked time to pack.”

Crane, unlike the gods, would tolerate a complaint.

“No time, Elias. In any case, people like us don’t need worldly possessions. We’re more like, ah, monks.”

The celebration would go on until morning. A glorious little war. Teddy Roosevelt would have approved. The British had surrendered after devastating losses to their Atlantic fleet and their Darwinian colonies, fearing an attack on Kitchener’s rump government in Canada. The terms of the victory weren’t harsh: a weapons embargo, official endorsement of the Wilson Doctrine. The conflict had lasted all of a week. Not so much war, Vale thought, as Diplomacy by Other Means, and a warning to the Japanese should they choose to turn their martial attention westward.

Of course, the war had served another purpose, the gods’ purpose. Vale supposed he would never know the sum of that purpose. It might be no more than the increase of enmity, violence, confusion. But the gods were generally more incisive than that.

There had been a sidebar in the Post: British nationals and sympathizers were being questioned in connection with the murder of Smithsonian director Eugene Randall. Vale’s name hadn’t been mentioned, though it would probably make the morning edition. “You ought to thank me,” he told Crane, “for taking the fall.”

“Colorful expression. You aren’t, of course. You’re too useful. Think of it this way: you’re discarding a persona. The police will find you dead in the ashes of your town house, or at least a few suggestive bones and teeth. Case closed.”

“Whose bones will they be?”

“Does it matter?”

He supposed not. Some other victim. Some impediment to the due and proper evolution of the cosmos.

Crane said, “Take this.” It was an envelope containing a rail ticket and a roll of hundred-dollar bills. The destination printed on the ticket was New Orleans. Vale had never been to New Orleans. New Orleans might as well have been East Mars, as far as he was concerned.

“Your train leaves at midnight,” Crane said.

“What about you?”

“I’m protected, Elias.” He smiled. “Don’t worry about me. Perhaps we’ll meet again, in a decade or two or three.”

God help us. “Do you ever wonder — is there any end to it?”

“Oh, yes,” Crane said. “I think we’ll see the end of it, Elias, don’t you?”

The fireworks reached a crescendo. Stars erupted to the roar of cannonade: blue, violet, white. A good omen for the new Harding administration. Crane would flourish, Vale thought, in modern Washington. Crane would rise like a rocket.

And I will sink into obscurity, and maybe that’s for the best.

New Orleans was warm, almost sultry; the spring became tropical. It was a strange town, Vale thought, barely American. It looked transported from some French Caribbean colony, all lacy ironwork and thunder and soft patois.

He took an apartment under an assumed name in a seedy but not slummy part of town. He paid his rent with a fraction of Crane’s money and began scouting second-story offices where he might conduct a little spiritualist business. He felt strangely free, as if he had left his god in the city of Washington. Not true — he understood that — but he savored the feeling while it lasted.

His craving for morphine was not physical, and perhaps that was part of the package of immortality, but he remembered the intoxication fondly and spent a few evenings trolling the jazz bars in search of a connection. He was walking home through a starry, windy night when two strangers jumped him. The men were muscular, their blunt faces shadowed under navy watch caps. They dragged him into an alley behind a tattoo shop.

They must have been god-ridden, Vale decided later. Nothing else made sense. One had a bottle, one had a length of threaded steel rod. They demanded nothing, took nothing. They worked strictly on his face. His immortal skin was slashed and gouged, his immortal skull fractured in several places. He swallowed several of his immortal teeth.

He did not, of course, die.

Swathed in bandages, sedated, he heard a doctor discuss his case with a nurse in a languid Louisiana drawl. A miracle he survived. No one will recognize him after this, God knows.

Not a miracle, Vale thought. Not even a coincidence. The gods who had closed his skin to the morphine needle in Washington could just as easily have staved off these cutting blows. He had been taken because he never would have volunteered.

No one will recognize him.

He healed quickly.

A new city, a new name, a new face. He learned to avoid mirrors. Physical ugliness was not a significant impediment to his work.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Guilford found the Bodensee where a glacial stream entered the lake, frigid water coursing over slick black pebbles. He followed the shoreline slowly, meticulously, riding the fur snake he had named Evangeline. “Evangeline” for no reason save that the name appealed to him; the animal’s gender was a mystery. Evangeline had foraged more successfully than Guilford had over the last week, and her six splined hooves covered ground more efficiently than his toothpick legs.

A gentle sun blessed the day. Guilford had rigged a rope harness to keep himself sprawled on Evangeline’s broad back even when he lost consciousness, and there were times when he drifted into a nodding half sleep, head slumped against his chest. But the sunlight meant he could shed a layer of furs, and that was a relief, to feel air that was not lethally cold against his skin.

As snakes went, Evangeline had proved intelligent. She avoided insect middens even when Guilford’s attention lapsed. She never strayed far from fresh water. And she was respectful of Guilford — perhaps not surprising, given that he had killed and cooked one of her compatriots and set the other free.

He was careful to keep an eye on the horizon. He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.

He credited Evangeline with finding the arch of stone where the expedition’s boats had been cached. She had nosed her way patiently along the pebbled shore, hour by hour, until at last she stopped and moaned for his attention.

Guilford recognized the stones, the shoreline, the hilly meadows just beginning to show green.

It was the right place. But the tarpaulin was gone, and so were the boats.

Dazed, Guilford let himself down from the fur snake’s back and searched the beach for — well, anything: relics, evidence. He found a charred board, a rusted nail. Nothing else.

The breeze slapped small waves against the shore.

The sun was low. He would need wood for a fire, if he could muster the energy to build one.

He sighed. “End of the road, Evangeline. At least for now.”

“It will be, if you don’t get a decent meal into yourself.”

He turned.

Erasmus.

“Tom figured you’d show up here,” the snake herder said.

Erasmus fed him real food, lent him a bedroll, and promised to take him and Evangeline back to his makeshift ranch beyond the Rheinfelden, just a few days overland; then Guilford could hitch a ride downriver when Erasmus floated his winter stock to market.

“You talked to Tom Compton? He’s alive?”

“He stopped by the kraal on his way to Jayville. Told me to look out for you. He ran into bandits after he left you and Finch. Too many to fight. So he came north and left decoy fires and generally took ’em on a goose chase all the way to the Bodensee. Saved your bacon, Mr. Law, though I guess not Preston Finch.”

“No, not Finch,” Guilford said.

They paralleled the Rhine Gorge, following the land route Erasmus had established. The snake herder called a halt at a pool of water fed by an unnamed tributary, shallow and slow. Sunlight had heated the water to a tolerable temperature, though it was not what Guilford would call warm. Still, he was able to wash himself for the first time in weeks. The water might have been lye, for all the skin and dirt he shed. He came out shivering, naked as a grub. The season’s first billyflies bumped his torso and fled across the sunlit water. His hair dangled over his eyes; his beard draped his chest like a wet Army blanket.

Erasmus put up the tent and scratched out a pit for the fire while Guilford dried and dressed.

They shared canned beans, molasses-sweet and smoky. Erasmus cooked coffee in a tin pan. The coffee was thick as syrup, bitter as clay.

The snake herder had something on his mind.

“Tom told me about the city,” Erasmus said, “about what happened to you there.”

“You know him that well?”

“We know each other, put it that way. The connection is, we both been to the Other World.”

Guilford shot him a wary glance. Erasmus gave him back a neutral expression.

“Hell,” the snake herder said, “I would of sold Tom those twenty head if he’d asked. Yeah, we go back some. But Finch showed up all blood and thunder, pissed me off… not to speak ill of the dead.”

Erasmus found a pipe in his saddlebag, filled it and tamped it and lit it with a wooden match. He smoked tobacco, not river weed. The smell was exotic, rich with memory. It smelled like leather-bound books and deep upholstery. It smelled like civilization.

“Both of us died in the Great War,” Erasmus said. “In the Other World, I mean. Both of us talked to our own ghosts.”

Guilford shivered. He didn’t want to hear this. Anything but this: not more madness, not now.

“Basically,” Erasmus said, “I’m just a small-potatoes third-generation Heinie out of Wisconsin. My father worked in a bottling company most of his life and I would of done the same if I hadn’t shied off to Jeffersonville. But there’s this Other World where the Kaiser got into a tangle with the Brits and the French and the Russians. A lot of Americans got drafted and shipped off to fight, 1917, 1918, a lot of ’em killed, too.” He hawked and spat a brown wad into the fire. “In that Other World I’m a ghost, and in this one I’m still flesh and blood. You with me so far?”

Guilford was silent.

“But the two worlds aren’t strictly separate anymore. That’s what the Conversion of Europe was all about, not to mention that so-called city you wintered in. The two Worlds are tangled up because there’s something wants to destroy ’em both. Maybe not destroy, more like eat — well, it’s complicated.

“Some of us died in the Other World and went on living in this one, and that makes us special. We have a job ahead of us, Guilford Law, and it’s not an easy job. I don’t mean to sound as if I know all the details. I don’t. But it’s a long and nasty job and it falls on us.”

Guilford said nothing, thought nothing.

“The two worlds get a little closer all the time. Tom didn’t know that when he walked into the city — though he may have had an inkling — but he knew it for sure by the time he left. He knows it now. And I think you do, too.”

“People believe a lot of things,” Guilford said.

“And people refuse to believe a lot of things.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. You’re one of us, Guilford Law. You don’t want to admit it. You have a wife and daughter and you’d just as soon not be recruited into Armageddon, and I can hardly blame you for that. But it’s for their sake, too — your children, your grandchildren.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Guilford managed.

“That’s too bad, because the ghosts believe in you. And some of those ghosts would like to see you dead. Good ghosts and bad ghosts, there’s both kinds.”

I won’t entertain this fantasy, Guilford thought. Maybe he’d seen a few things in his dreams. In the well at the center of the ruined city. But that proved nothing.

(How could Erasmus have known about the picket? Sullivan’s cryptic last words: You died fighting the Boche… No, set that aside; think about it later. Yield nothing. Go home to Caroline.)

“The city,” he heard himself whisper…

“The city is one of theirs. They didn’t want it found. And they’re going to great lengths to keep it hidden. Go there in six months, a year, you won’t find it. They’re stitching up that valley like a sack of flour. They can do that. Pinch off a piece of the world from human knowledge. Oh, maybe you or I could find it, but not an ordinary man.”

“I’m an ordinary man, Erasmus.”

“Wishing won’t make it so, my mother used to say. Anyhow.” The snake herder groaned and stood. “Get some sleep, Guilford Law. We still have a distance to travel.”

Erasmus didn’t raise the issue again, and Guilford refused to consider it. He had other problems, more pressing.

His physical health improved at the snake farm. By the time the stock boats arrived from Jeffersonville he was able to walk a distance without limping. He thanked Erasmus for his help and offered to ship him Argosy on a regular basis.

“Good idea. That book of Finch’s was a slow read. Maybe National Geographic, too?”

“Sure thing.”

“Science and Invention?”

“Erasmus, you saved my life at the Bodensee. Anything you want.”

“Well — I won’t get greedy. And I doubt I saved your life. Whether you live or die is out of my hands.”

Erasmus had loaded his stock into two flat-bottomed river boats piloted by a Jeffersonville broker. It was Guilford’s ride back to the coast. He offered the snake herder his hand.

Guilford said, “About Evangeline—”

“Don’t worry about Evangeline. She can go wild if she likes. Once people name an animal it’s too late for common sense to prevail.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll meet again,” Erasmus said. “Think about what I said, Guilford.”

“I will.”

But not now.

The riverboat captain told him there had been trouble with England. A battle at sea, he said, and strictly limited news over the wireless, “though I hear we’re walkin’ all over ’em.”

The snakeboats made good time as the Rhine broadened into the lowlands. The days were warmer now, the Rhinish marshes emerald-green under a bright spring sky.

He took Erasmus’ advice and arrived in Jeffersonville anonymously. The town had grown since Guilford last saw it, more fishermen’s shacks and three new permanent structures on the firm ground by the docks. More boats were anchored in the bay, but nothing military; the Navy had a base fifty miles south. Nothing commercial was sailing for London — nothing legal, anyway.

He looked for Tom Compton, but the frontiersman’s cabin was vacant.

At the Jeffersonville Western Union office he arranged for a bank transfer from his personal account in Boston, hoping Caroline hadn’t closed it out on the assumption he had died. The money arrived without a problem, but he couldn’t get a message through to London. “From what I hear,” the telegraph operator told him, “there’s nobody there to receive it.”

He heard about the shelling from a drunken American sailor at the waterfront dive where he was supposed to meet the man who would take him across the Channel.

Guilford wore a blue pea coat and a woollen watch cap pulled low across his brow. The tavern was crowded and dank with pipe smoke. He took a stool at the end of the bar but couldn’t help overhearing the talk that flowed around him. He paid no particular attention until a fat sailor at the next table said something about London. He heard “fire” and “fucking wasteland.”

He walked to the table where the seaman sat with another man, a lanky Negro. “Excuse me,” Guilford said. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but you mentioned London? I’m anxious for news — my wife and daughter are there.”

“I’ve left a few bastards there myself,” the sailor said. His smile faded when he saw Guilford’s expression. “No offense… I only know what I heard.”

“You were there?”

“Not since the shooting started. I met a stoker claims he was up the Thames with a gunboat. But he talks when he drinks, and what he says ain’t all the Christian truth.”

“This man is in Jeffersonville?”

“Shipped out yesterday.”

“What did he tell you about London?”

“That it was shelled. That it burned to the ground. But talk is cheap. You know how people are. Christ, look at you, shaking like that. Have a fuckin’ drink on me.”

“Thanks,” Guilford said. “I’m not thirsty.”

He hired a channel pilot named Hans Kohn, who operated a scabbed but seaworthy fishing trawler and was willing to take Guilford as far as Dover, for a price.

The ship left Jeffersonville after dark, on a gentle swell under a moonless sky. Twice Kohn changed course to avoid Navy patrols, faint silhouettes on the violet horizon. There was no question of navigating the Thames, Kohn told him. “That’s locked up tight. There’s an overland route from Dover, a dirt-track road. Best I can do.”

Guilford went ashore at a crude wooden landing along the Kentish coast. Kohn put back to sea. Guilford sat on the creaking dock for a time, listening to the cry of shore birds as the eastern sky turned a milky vermilion. The air smelled of salt and decay.

English soil at last. The end of a journey, or at least the beginning of the end. He felt the weight of the miles behind him, as deep as this ocean he had crossed. He thought about his wife and little girl.

The overland route from Dover to London consisted of a trail hacked out of the English wilderness, muddy and in places barely wide enough to accommodate a single horse and rider.

Dover was a small but thriving port town cut into the chalky coastal soil, surrounded by windswept hills and endless blue-green miles of star sorrel and a leaf-crowned reed the locals called shag. The town had not been much affected by the war; food was still relatively plentiful, and Guilford was able to buy a saddle-trained mare, not too elderly, that would carry him overland to London. He wasn’t a natural rider but found the horse an immensely more comfortable mount than Evangeline had been.

For a time he was alone on the London road, but as he crossed the highland meadows he began to encounter refugees.

At first it was only a few ragged travelers, some mounted, some hauling mud-crusted carts stacked with blankets and china and tattered wooden tea chests. He spoke to these people briefly. None had encouraging news, and most of them shied at the sound of his accent. Shortly after dusk he came across a crowd of forty families camped on a hillside, their fires glittering like the lights of a mobile city.

His paramount thought was of Caroline and Lily. He questioned the refugees politely but could discover no one who had known or seen them. Discouraged and lonely, Guilford reigned his horse and accepted an invitation to join a circle around one of the campfires. He shared his food freely, explained his situation, and asked what exactly had happened to London.

Answers were short and brutal.

The city had been shelled. The city had burned.

Had many died?

Many — but there was no counting, no toll of the dead.

As he approached the city Guilford began to entertain the troubling suspicion that he was being followed.

There was a face he’d seen, a familiar face, and he seemed to see it repeatedly among the increasing number of refugees, or pacing him along the forest road, or peering at him from the fretwork of mosque trees and pagoda ferns. A man’s face, young but careworn. The man was dressed in khaki, a battered uniform without insignia. The man looked remarkably like the picket from Guilford’s dreams. But that was impossible.

Guilford tried to approach him. Twice, on a lonely stretch of road deep in the twilight of the forest, he shouted at the man from his horse. But no one answered, and Guilford was left feeling foolish and frightened.

Probably there was no one there at all. It was a trick of the weary eye, the anxious mind.

But he rode more cautiously now.

His first sight of London was the blackened but intact dome of the new St. Paul’s, brooding over a field of mist and rubble.

A makeshift rope ferry carried him to the north shore of the Thames. Drizzle fell steadily and pocked the turbulent river.

He found an encampment of refugees in the treeless fields west of town, a vast and stinking clutter of tents and trench latrines in the midst of which a few Red Cross flags drooped listlessly in the rain.

Guilford approached one of the medical tents where a nurse in a hairnet was handing out blankets. “Excuse me,” he said.

Heads turned at the sound of his accent. The nurse glanced at him and barely nodded.

“I’m looking for someone,” he said. “Is there a way to find out — I mean, any kind of list—?”

She shook her head curtly. “I’m sorry. We tried, but too many people simply wandered away after the fire. Have you come from New Dover?”

“By way of there.”

“Then you’ve seen the number of refugees. Still, you might try asking at the food tent. Everyone gathers at the food tent. It’s in the western meadow.” She inclined her head. “That way.”

He looked across several broad acres of human misery, frowning.

The nurse straightened. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice softening. “I don’t mean to sound thoughtless. It’s just that there are… so many.”

Guilford was walking toward the mess tent when he saw the phantom again, passing like his own shadow through the mud and rent canvas and smoky fires.

“Mr. Law? Guilford Law?”

He thought at first the ghost had spoken. But he turned and saw a ragged woman gesturing to him. It took him a moment to recognize her. Mrs. de Koenig, the widow who had lived next door to Jered Pierce.

“Mr. Law — is that really you?”

“Yes, Mrs. de Koenig, it’s me.”

“Dear God, I thought you were dead! We all thought you’d died on the Continent!”

“I’ve come looking for Caroline and Lily.”

“Oh,” Mrs. de Koenig said. “Of course.” But her toothless smile faded. “Of course you have. Tell you what. Let’s have a drink, Mr. Law, you and me, and we’ll talk about that.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Dear Caroline,

Probably you will never see this letter. I write it with that expectation, and only a faint hope.

Obviously, I survived the winter in Darwinia. (Of the Finch expedition, the only survivors are myself and Tom Compton — if he is still alive.) If the news is reaching you for the first time I hope it does not come as too great a shock. I know you believed I died on the Continent. I suppose that belief explains your conduct, much of it at least, since the autumn of ’20.

Maybe you think I despise you or that I’m writing to ventilate my anger. Well, the anger is real. I wish you had waited. But that question is moot. I attach no blame. I was in the wilderness and alive; you were in London and thought I had died. Let’s just say we acted accordingly.

I hesitate to write this (and there’s small enough chance of you reading it). But the habit of addressing my thoughts to you is hard to break. And there are matters between us we need to resolve.

And I want to beg a favor.

Since I’m enclosing my notes and letters written to you from the Continent, let me finish the story. Something extraordinary has happened, Caroline, and I need to set it down on paper even if you never see this. (And maybe it’s better for you if you don’t.)

I looked for you in ruined London. Shortly after I arrived I found Mrs. de Koenig, our neighbor on Market Street, who told me you’d left on a mercy ship bound for Australia. You left, she tells me, with Lily and this man (I will not say “this deserter,” though from what I understand he is one), this Colin Watson.

I won’t dwell on my reaction. Enough to say that the days that followed are vague in my mind. I sold my horse and spent the money on some of what had been salvaged from the High Street distilleries.

Oblivion is a dear purchase in London, Caroline. But maybe that’s always the case, everywhere.

After a long time I woke to find myself lying in an open heath in the mist, brutally sober and achingly cold. My blanket was soaked through and so were my filthy clothes. Dawn was breaking, the sun just lightening the eastern sky. I was at the perimeter of the refugee camp. I looked at the few fires smoldering unattended in the gray light. When I was steadier I stood up. I felt abandoned and alone…

But I wasn’t.

I turned at some suggestion of a sound and saw—

Myself.

I know how strange that sounds. And it was strange, strange and disorienting. We never see our own faces, Caroline, even in mirrors. I think we learn a tan early age to pose for mirrors, to show ourselves our best angles. It’s a very different experience to find one’s face and body occupying the space of another person.

For a time I just stared at him. I understood without asking that this was the man who had paced me on the ride from New Dover.

It was obvious why I hadn’t recognized him sooner. He was undeniably myself, but not exactly my reflection. Let me describe what I saw: a young man, tall, dressed in threadbare military gear. He wore no hat and his boots were muddy. He was stockier than I am, and he walked without limping. He was clean-shaven. His eyes were bright and observant. He smiled, not threateningly. He carried no weapon.

He looked harmless.

But he wasn’t human.

At least not a living human being. For one thing, he wasn’t entirely there. I mean, Caroline, that the image of him faded and brightened periodically, the way a star twinkles on a windy night.

I whispered, “Who are you?”

His voice was firm, not ghostly. He said, “That’s a complicated question. But I think you know part of the answer already.”

Mist rose up around us from the sodden ground. We stood together in the chill half-light as if a wall divided us from the rest of the world.

“You look like me,” I said slowly. “Or like a ghost. I don’t know what you are.”

He said, “Take a walk with me, Guilford. I think better on my feet.”

So we strolled across the heather on that fogbound morning. I guess I should have been terrified. I was, on some level. But his manner was disarming. The expression on his face seemed to say: How absurd, that we have to meet like this.

As if a ghost were to apologize for its clumsy trappings: the winding-sheet, the chains.

Maybe it sounds as if I accepted this visitation calmly. What I really felt was more like entranced astonishment. I believe he chose a time to appear when I was sufficiently vulnerable — dazed enough — to hear him over the roar of my own dread.

Or maybe he was a hallucination, provoked by exhaustion and liquor and grief. Think what you like, Caroline.

We walked in the faint light of morning. He seemed happier, or at least most solid, in the deep shadow of the mosque trees bordering the meadow. His voice was a physical voice, rich with the human noise of breath and lungs. He spoke without pretension, in colloquial English that sounded as familiar as the rumble of my own thoughts. But he was never hesitant or lost for words.

This is what he said.

He told me his name was Guilford Law and he had been born and raised in Boston.

He said he’d lived an unexceptional life until his nineteenth year, when he was drafted and sent overseas to fight a foreign war… a European war, a “World War.”

He asked me to imagine a history in which Europe was never converted, in which that stew of kingdoms and despotisms continued to simmer until it erupted into a global conflict.

The details aren’t important. The gist is that this phantom Guilford Law ended up in France, facing the German army in static, bloody trench battles made more nightmarish by poisonous gas and aerial attacks.

This Guilford Law — “the picket,” as I’ve come to think of him — was killed in that war.

What amazed him was that, when he closed his eyes for the last time on Earth, it wasn’t the end of all life or thought.

And here, Caroline, the story becomes even more peculiar, even more mad.

We sat on a fallen log in the cool of the morning, and I was struck by his easy presence, the solidity, the sheer apparent heft of him. His dark hair moved when the wind blew; he breathed in and out like any other living thing; the log jostled with his weight as he shifted to face me.

If what the picket told me is true then Schiaparelli and like-minded astronomers are correct: life exists among the stars and planets, life both like and unlike our own, in some cases different in the extreme.

The universe, the picket said, is immensely old. Old enough to have produced scientific civilizations long before human beings perfected the stone axe. The human race was born into a galaxy saturated with sentience. Before our sun congealed from the primal dust, the picket said, there were already wonders in the universe so large and subtle that they seem more magic than science; and greater wonders to come, enterprises literally eons in the making.

He described the galaxy — our little cluster of some several million stars, itself only one of several billion such clusters — as a kind of living thing, “waking up to itself.” Lines of communication connect the stars: not telegraph or even radio communication but something that plays upon the invisible essence (the “isotropic energy,” by which I gather he means the aether) of space itself; and these close-seined nets of communication have grown so intricate that they possess an intelligence of their own! The stars, he suggested, are literally thinking among themselves, and more than that: remembering.

Preston Finch used to quote Bishop Berkeley to the effect that we are all thoughts in the mind of God. But what if that’s literally true?

This Guilford Law was a physical animal until the day he died, at which point he became a kind of thought… a seed sentience, he called it, in the mind of this local God, this evolving galactic Self.

It was not, he said, an especially exalted existence, at least at first. A human mind is still only a human mind even when it’s translated into Mind at Large. He woke into the afterlife with the idea that he was recovering from a shrapnel wound in a French field hospital, and it required the appearance of a few of the predeceased to convince him he had actually died! His “virtual” body (he called it) resembled his own so closely that there seemed to be no difference, though that could change, he was told. The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change. There was much to learn, worlds to explore, new forms of life to meet — to become, if the spirit so moved him. His organic body had been limited by its physical needs and by the brain’s ability to capture and retain memories. Those impediments were lifted.

He would change, inevitably, as he learned to inhabit the Mind that contained him, to tap its memories and wisdom. Not to abandon his human nature but to build on it, expand it.

And that, in sum, is what he did, for literally millions of centuries, until “Guilford Law,” the so-called seed-sentience, became a fraction of something vaster and more complex.

What I was talking to this morning was both Guilford Law and this larger being — billions upon billions of beings, in fact, linked together and yet retaining their individuality.

You can imagine my incredulity. But under the circumstances any explanation might have seemed plausible.

Can you read this as anything other than the raving of a man driven mad by isolation and shock?

The shock is real enough, God knows. I grieve for what both of us have lost.

And I don’t expect you to believe me. All I ask is your patience. And your good will, Caroline, if that stock is not exhausted.

I asked the picket how any of this could have happened. I was Guilford Law, after all, and I hadn’t died in any German war, and that was as plain as the rising of the sun.

“Long story,” he said.

I said I wasn’t going anywhere.

The afterlife, the picket said, wasn’t what he had expected. Most fundamentally, it wasn’t a supernatural afterlife — it was a man-made (or at least intelligent-creature-made) paradise, as artificial as the Brooklyn Bridge and in its own immense way equally finite. Recovered souls from a million planets were linked together in physical structures he called “noospheres,” planet-sized machines which traveled the galaxy on endless voyages of exploration. A paradise, Caroline, but not heaven, and not without its problems and enemies.

I asked him what enemies these gods could have.

“Two,” he said.

One was Time. Sentience had conquered mortality, at least on the scale of the galaxy. Since before the advent of mankind, any arguably sentient creature that died within the effectual realm of the noospheres was taken up into paradise. (Including every human being from Neanderthal Man to President Taft and beyond. Some, he implied, had required a fair degree of “moral reawakening” before they could adjust to the afterlife. I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot.)

But Sentience Itself was mortal, and so was the Milky Way Galaxy, and so was the universe at large! He uttered a few phrases about “particle decay” and “heat death” that I followed only vaguely. The sum of it was that matter itself would eventually die. With all the intelligence at their disposal, the noospheres devised a way to prolong their existence beyond that point. And they contrived to build an “Archive,” a sum of all sentient history, which could be consulted not only by the noospheres themselves but by similar entities embedded in other, inconceivably distant galaxies.

So one enemy was Time, and that enemy had been, if not conquered, at least rendered toothless.

The other enemy he called psilife, from the Greek letter psi, for “pseudo.”

Psilife was the ultimate result of attempts to mimic evolution in machines.

Machines, he said, could achieve consciousness, within certain limits. (I think he used these words — “consciousness” and “machines” — in a technical sense, but I didn’t press him.) Both organic and true machine consciousness utilized something he called “quantum indeterminacy,” whereas psilife was a kind of mathematics.

Psilife produced “system parasites,” or what he called — as nearly as I can repeat it — “mindless Algol Rhythms preying on complexity, inhabiting it and then devouring it.”

These Algol Rhythms did not hate sentient beings any more than the hunter wasp hates the tarantula in which it deposits its eggs. Psilife inhabited sentient “systems” and devoured sentience itself. It used communication and thought as a means of manufacturing copies of itself, which would copy themselves in turn, and so ad infinitum.

And psilife, thought not conventionally sentient and without individuality, could emulate these qualities — could act with a kind of concentrated if antlike intelligence, a blind cunning. Imagine if you can a vast intelligence utterly devoid of understanding.

Psilife had arisen at various times and places throughout the universe. It had threatened Sentience and had been beaten back, though not to extinction. The Archive was thought to be impermeable to penetration by psilife; the decay of conventional matter would mean the end as well of these virulent Algol Rhythms.

But that wasn’t the case.

The Archive was corrupted by psilife.

The Archive.

Caroline, what do you suppose would constitute the ultimate history, from a god’s-eye view?

Not someone’s interpretation of the past, however thoughtful and objective. Nor could it be the past itself, which is difficult to consult in any direct and simple fashion.

No, the ultimate practical history book would be history in a looking glass, the past re-created faithfully in some accessible way, to be opened like a book in all its original tongues and dialects; a faithful working model, but with all the empty spaces removed for the purpose of simplification, and accessible to Mind at Large in a fashion that wouldn’t alter or disturb the book itself.

The Archive was static, because history doesn’t change, but it was swept at long intervals by what the picket called a “Higgs field,” which he compared to a phonograph needle following the groove of a recording. The record doesn’t change, but a dynamic event — the music — is coaxed out of a fixed object.

In a sane world, of course, the music is identical each time the record is played. But what if you put a Mozart symphony on the phonograph and it turned into Die Zauberflöte halfway through?

Dazed as I was, I could see where this was headed.

The picket’s World War was the Mozart symphony. The conversion of Europe was Die Zauberflöte.

“You’re telling me we’re inside this Archive?”

He nodded calmly.

I shivered. “Does that mean — are you telling me that I’m a sort of history book — or a page, at least, or a paragraph?”

“You were meant to be,” he said.

This was an awful lot to absorb, of course, even in a receptive state. And, Caroline, when I think of you reading this… you must be certain I’ve gone mad.

And maybe you’re right. I would almost prefer to believe it myself. But I wonder whether this letter is really addressed to you… to you, I mean, to Caroline in Australia… or to that other Caroline, the Caroline whose image I carried into the wilderness, the Caroline who sustained me there.

Maybe she’s not altogether extinct, that Caroline. Maybe she’s reading over your shoulder.

Do you grasp the enormity of what this specter told me?

He suggested — in broad daylight and in the plainest language — that the world around me, the world you and I inhabit, is nothing more than a sustained illusion inside a machine at the end of time.

This went far beyond what I could easily accept, despite all my experience with Mssrs. Burroughs, Verne, and Wells.

“I can’t make it any more plain,” he said, “or ask you to do more than consider the possibility.”

It gets more complicated. When we were a “history book,” Caroline, every event, every action, was predetermined, a rote repetition of what had gone before — though of course there was no way we could have known that.

But psilife has injected “chaos” (his word) into the system — which is the equivalent of what the theologians call “free will”!

Which means, the picket said, that you and I and all the other sentient beings who had been “modeled” in the Archive have become independent, unpredictable moral entities — real lives, that is; new lives, which Sentience is sworn to protect!

The psilife invasion, in other words, has freed us from a machine-like existence… even though psilife means to hold us hostage and ultimately to exterminate us all.

(Tempting to think of these psilife entities as the Rebel Angels. They gave us status as moral creatures by bringing evil into the world — and must be fought to the death even though they freed us!)

We talked a while longer, as the last of the morning mist burned off and the day turned brighter. The picket grew more ghostly in the light of noon. He cast a shadow, but it wasn’t as dark as mine.

At last I asked him the most important question: why had he come here, and what did he want from me?

His answer was lengthy and disquieting.

He asked for my help.

I refused it.

Dr. Sullivan, when he argued with Preston Finch, would often quote Berkeley back at him. The words stuck with me. “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?”

Sometimes we do, though, Caroline. Sometimes we do wish to be deceived.

It might surprise you to know I’m going back to the Continent, probably to one of the Mediterranean settlements. Fayetteville or Oro Delta. The weather is warm there. The prospects are fresh.

But I mentioned that I have a favor to ask.

Your life in Australia is yours to pursue, Caroline. I know you carry a burden of unhappiness I was never able to lift from your shoulders. Maybe you found a way to lay that burden down for good and all. I hope so. I won’t question your decision and I won’t come after Lily uninvited.

But please — I beg this one favor of you — please don’t let Lily go on thinking I’m dead.

I’m sending this with a Mr. Barnes, who signed on with a Red Cross refugee transport bound for Sydney, on the understanding that he’ll forward it to any living relative of Lieutenant Colin Watson. I’ve instructed him to do nothing that would compromise the Lieutenant’s position vis-à-vis the military. Mr. Barnes seems trustworthy and discreet.

Also enclosed, my notes from the winter on the Continent. Think of them as letters I couldn’t send. Maybe when Lily’s older she’ll want to see them.

I know I’m not the husband you hoped for. I sincerely hope time and memory will be gentle to both of us.

I doubt we’ll meet again.

But please remember me to Lily. Maybe we’re all only phantoms in a machine. It’s an explanation Dr. Sullivan might have been interested to hear. But no matter what we are — we are. Lily is my daughter. I love her. That love is real, if nothing else. Please tell her so. Tell her I love her very much and always.

Always.

Always.

Interlude

The seed-sentience Guilford Law dropped into the Archive on a nucleus of complex matter no larger than a grain of sand.

A steady rain of such grains fell into the Archive continuously. They were seed-sentiences drawn from every world, every species whose history was jeopardized by the psilife incursion. Each grain was in effect a weapon, stealthed against recognition and cued to interact with the Archive’s hermetic substructure in ways that would divert the attention of the enemy.

Battles raged at every point within the Archive. Subsentient Turing packets roamed freely, seeking out the algorithmic signature of psilife and interrupting its reproduction. Psilife nodes, in turn, mutated or disguised their reproductive codes. Predator packets flourished for a time, then died back as the invaders targeted and stalled their attack sequences. The war became an ecology.

Guilford’s role lay elsewhere. His autonomic systems tapped the functional architecture of the Archive and delivered him to the replica of the archaic Earth. He could not manifest himself as a phenomenological being — at least, not functionally, and not for long — but he could communicate directly with the replica Guilford Law.

What happened here was important. Psilife had radically altered the ontosphere that was the heart of the Archive. The scars of battle were everywhere.

The continent of Europe had been revised in a single stroke, overridden with a mutant history. Psilife had attempted to create an evolutionary sequence which would permit their entry into the ontosphere through the vehicle of subsentient insectile creatures.

The effort had met effective resistance. Their goal had been to transform the Earth entirely. They had converted only a fraction of it.

But the replica world was permanently changed. Lives which had been cut short — such as Guilford’s — warped into new, autonomous, wholly sentient shapes. Many of these were permeable conduits from the substructure of the Archive into its core ontology. Roads, that is, through which spirits — such as Guilford’s, or the parasitical nodes of psilife — might enter and alter the plenum of history.

The seed-consciousness which was Guilford Law felt rage at the damage already done. And fear: fear for the new seed-minds created by the psilife invasion, who might not be salvageable: who might face, in other words, the horror of utter extinction.

Entities who had been no more than reconstructions of the past had become hostages — vulnerable, perhaps doomed, if the psilife incursion into the ontosphere continued unresisted.

As a seed-sentience, isolated from his noosphere, Guilford could not hope to comprehend more than a fraction of the War. He wasn’t meant to. He had come, with others, for the sole purpose of intervening in the battle for the Earth.

He understood the Earth well enough.

In Europe, the psions had been bound (but only temporarily) in their abortive access point: a well, as it appeared in this plenum, linking the hidden structures of the Archive to the ontological Earth. The psions had used huge insectile creatures as their avatars, invested their means and motives in these animals, used them to build a crude stone city to protect their access point.

That city had fallen in an earlier battle. The passageway had been effectively sealed.

For now.

New activity had drawn him. The Higgs field, sweeping the Archive to create ontological time, clocked toward a new psilife diaspora. Another Armageddon. Another battle.

All this he sensed directly: the well, and his own avatar Guilford Law, the continent some called Darwinia; even the altered Martian landscape. Crises past and crises future.

He could not intervene, not directly. Nor could he simply capture and rule an avatar, as the psions did. He respected the moral independence of the seed-lives. He approached his avatar tentatively. He struggled to narrow himself to the avatar’s mental range… to become the purely mortal thing he had once been.

It was strange to rediscover that core of self, the chaotic bundle of fears and needs and aspirations that was the embryo of all sentience. Among his thoughts:

This once was me. This once was all that existed of me, naked and alone and afraid, no other Self. A mote on a sea of inanimate matter.

He was suffused with pity.

He entered the avatar’s perceptions as a phantom, which was all that he could manifest of himself in the Archive’s ontosphere. There is a battle coming, he told his avatar. You have a role to play. I need your help.

His avatar listened through Guilford’s plodding explanation. The words were clumsy, primitive, barely adequate.

And then his avatar refused him.

“I don’t care what you say.” The younger Guilford’s voice was frank and final. “I don’t know what you are or whether you’re telling the truth. What you’re describing, it’s medieval — ghosts and demons and monsters, like some tenth-century morality play.”

The infant sentience was bitter. He had been abandoned by his wife. He had seen far more than he could comprehend. He had watched his compatriots die.

The elder Guilford understood.

He remembered Belleau Wood and Bouresches. He remembered a wheat field red with poppies. He remembered Tom Compton, cut down by machine-gun fire. He remembered grief.