Darwinia

Chapter Twenty-Six

In the Campanian Lowlands many of the old names had been revived. The Bay of Naples still opened to the Tyrrhenian Sea, was still bounded by Cape Miseno and the Sorrento Peninsula, was still dominated by the active volcano Vesuvius (though the first settlers commonly called it “Old Smoky”). The land was arable, the climate reasonably gentle. The dry spring wind blowing from Asia Minor was still known as the scirocco.

Settlements on the slopes and hills took ideosyncratic names. Oro Delta, Palaepolis, Fayetteville, Dawson City. Disciples of the utopian Upton Sinclair had founded Mutualville on the island once called Capri, though commerce had moderated their strict communal regimen. The harbor had been improved to promote trade. It was common now to see freighters from Africa, refugee ships from the tumbled lands of Egypt and Arabia, American oil tankers where there had once been only fishing boats and trawlers.

Fayetteville was not the largest settlement hugging the bay. It was less an independent town these days than it was a finger of Oro Delta stretched down the coast, catering to farmers and farmworkers. The lowlands produced rich crops of corn, wheat, sugar beets, olives, nuts, and hemp. The sea provided docketfish, curry crabs, and salt lettuce. No native crops were cultivated, but the spice shops were well stocked with dingo nuts, wineseed, and ginger flax foraged from the wildlands.

Guilford approved of the towm. He had watched it grow from the frontier settlement it had been in the twenties into a thriving, relatively modern community. There was electricity now in Fayetteville and all the other Neapolitan townships. Streetlights, pavement, sidewalks, churches. And mosques and temples for the Arabs and Egyptians, though they mainly congregated in Oro Delta down by the waterfront. A movie theater, big on Westerns and the preposterous Darwinian adventures churned out by Hollywood. And all the less savory amenities: bars, smokehouses, even a whorehouse out on Follette Road past the gravel pit.

There was a time when everybody in Fayetteville knew everybody else, but that time had passed. You were liable to see all kinds of strange faces on the streets nowadays.

Though the familiar ones were often more disturbing.

Guilford had seen a familiar face lately.

It paced him along the hilly roads when he went walking. All this spring he had seen the face at odd moments: gazing from a wheat field or fading into sea fog.

The figure wore a tattered and old-fashioned military uniform. The face looked like his own. It was his double: the ghost, the soldier, the picket.

Nicholas Law, who was twelve years old and keen to enjoy what remained of the summer sunlight, excused himself and bolted for the door. The screen clattered shut behind him. Through the window Guilford caught a glimpse of his son, a blur in a striped jersey heading downhill. Past him, there was only the sky and the headland and the evening blue sea.

Abby came from the kitchen, where she had taken dessert out of the refrigerator. Something with ice cream. Store-bought ice cream, still a novelty in Guilford’s mind.

She stopped short when she saw the abandoned plate. “He couldn’t wait for dessert?”

“Guess not.” Stickball at twilight, Guilford thought. The broad green lawn in front of the Fayetteville school. He felt a pang of dislocated nostalgia.

“You’re not hungry either?”

She was holding two desserts. “I’ll take a taste,” he said.

She sat across the table, her pleasant face skeptical. “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

“A little. Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“Off by yourself too often.” She sampled the ice cream. Guilford noticed the fine filaments of gray at her temples. “There was a man here today.”

“Oh?”

“He asked if this was Guilford Law’s house, and I said it was, and he asked if you were the photographer with the shop on Spring Street. I said you were and he could probably reach you there.” Her spoon hovered over the ice cream. “Was that right?”

“That was fine.”

“Did he come to see you?”

“May have. What did this gentleman look like?”

“Dark. He had odd eyes.”

“Odd in what way, Abby?”

“Just — odd.”

He was unsettled by the story of this stranger at the door and Abby alone to greet him. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not worried,” Abby said carefully. “Unless you are.”

He couldn’t bring himself to lie. She wasn’t easily fooled. He settled for a shake of his head. Plainly she wanted to know what was wrong. Plainly, he couldn’t tell her.

He had never spoken of it — not to anyone. Except in that long-ago letter to Caroline.

At least the man at the door had not been Guilford’s double. You forget, he thought, after so many years. When a memory is so strange, so foreign to the rigor of daily life, it falls right out of your head… or it rattles there, half-noticed, like a pea in a whistle. Until something reminds you. Then it comes back fresh as an old dream stored in ice, unwrapped and glinting in the light of day.

So far there had only been glimpses — harbingers, perhaps; omens; rogue memories. Maybe it meant nothing, that youthful face tracking him in a crowd and then gone, gazing like a sad derelict from evening alleyways. He wanted to think it meant nothing. He feared otherwise.

Abby finished dessert and carried away the dishes. “Mail came from New York today,” she said. “I left it by your chair.”

He was grateful to be released from this dark chain of thought. He moved into what Abby called “the living room,” though it was only the long south end of the plain rectangular house Guilford had built, largely by hand, a decade ago. He had framed the structure and poured the foundations; a local contractor had plastered and shingled it. Houses were easier in a warm climate. It was Abby and Nicholas who had brought the house to life, with framed pictures and tablecloths and antimacassars, with rubber balls and wooden toys lurking under the furniture.

The mail amounted to several back issues of Astounding, plus a stack of New York papers. The newspapers looked depressing: details of the war with Japan, better reporting than the wire-service coverage in the Fayetteville Herald but more dated.

Guilford turned to the magazines first. His taste for fantasy, had ebbed in the years after he lost Caroline and Lily, but the newer magazines had drawn him back. Vast airships, planetary travel, alien life: all these things seemed to him both more and less plausible than they used to. But the stories could be relied on to carry him away.

Except tonight. Tonight he finished whole pages without remembering what he’d read. He contented himself with staring at the gaudy and infinitely promising cover illustrations.

He was nodding in his chair when he heard the fire truck clanging its way into town from the station on Lantern Hill.

Then the telephone rang.

Telephones were relatively new to Fayetteville, and he hadn’t grown accustomed to having one at home, though he’d used the one at work for more than a year. The grating ring went up his spine like a fish knife.

The voice at the other end was Tim Mackelroy, his assistant at the studio. Come quick, Tim said, Christ, it’s terrible, but come quick, the shop is burning down.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Guilford had built his house away from town, a half mile by dirt track from the nearest paved road. He could see Fayetteville from the front door, a distant grid of streets and homes, and a plume of smoke rising from what was probably Spring Street.

He told Abby he’d sort this out. She shouldn’t wait up for him. He would call as soon as he had solid information. Until then she shouldn’t worry pointlessly; if worse came to worst, the business was insured with the Oro Delta Trust. They would rebuild.

Abby said nothing, only kissed him and watched from the window as he drove the battered Ford away in a rising cloud of dust.

It had been a dusty month. The sky was gaudy, the sun about to touch the rim of the western sea.

Guilford passed Nick, who was still cycling toward town. He stopped long enough to toss Nick’s bike in the back and make room for the boy up front.

Nick was somber when he heard the news, but Nick was often somber. Large eyes in a small face. He frowned constantly. No smiles for Nick, only different frowns. Even when he was happiest — playing, reading, working on his models — he wore his frown of concentration, a firm compression of the lips.

“How could the studio catch on fire?” Nick asked.

Guilford said he didn’t know. It was too soon to figure that out. The urgent business was to make sure Tim Mackelroy was safe and then to see what could be salvaged.

Wild hillside gave way to terraced fields. Guilford turned onto the paved High Road. Traffic was light, only a few motorcars, horsecarts from the Amish settlement up toward Palaepolis, a couple of farm trucks coming back empty from the granaries. Follette Road was Fayetteville’s main sheet, and he saw smoke as soon as he took the corner by the feed and grain warehouse. A pumper truck blocked the intersection of Follette and Spring.

There wasn’t much left of Law Mackelroy, Photographers. A few charred timbers. A shell of blackened bricks.

“Wow,” Nick breathed, the smoke reflected in his eyes.

Guilford found Tim Mackelroy standing under the marquee of the Tyrrhenian Talking Picture Theater. His face was streaked with smoke and tears.

Across the cobbled road the F.F.D. pumper played a steady stream of water over the smoldering ruins. The crowd had already begun to disperse. Guilford recognized most of the people there: a lawyer from Tunney’s law office, the salesgirl from Blake’s; Molly and Kate from the Lafayette Diner. When they saw him they made shy, sympathetic faces. Guilford told Nick to wait in the car while he talked to Mackelroy.

Tim had been his partner since ’39, when the shop expanded. Tim ran the commercial side of the operation. Guilford stuck to photography these days and spent most of his time in the portrait studio. It was — or had been — a good business. The work was often routine, but he didn’t mind that. He enjoyed the studio and the darkroom and he enjoyed bringing home enough money to pay for the house on the headland and Nick’s school and a future for himself and Abby. He did some electronics repair on the side, now and then. He had arranged to import a big stock of Edicron and G.E. receiving tubes when the radio tower went in above Palaepolis — did a booming business for a while, since half the radios people had brought in from Stateside arrived with bad tubes, solder joints eroded by salt air, or parts knocked loose by the sea voyage.

Things had been rough after London, of course. Guilford had spent his first five years in Oro Delta crewing the harbor boats or taking in crops, exhausting work that left little time for thought. Nights had been especially hard. The Campanian farms were already producing bounty harvests of grain and grapes by ’21, so there was no lack of local liquor and wine, and Guilford had taken some solace — more than a little solace — in the bottle.

He put the bottle down after he met Abby. She had been Abby Panzeca then, a second-generation American-Sicilian who had come to Darwinia with family stories of the Old World rattling around her head. In Guilford’s experience such people were usually disappointed; often as not they drifted back to the States. But Abby had stuck around, made a life for herself. She was waiting tables at an Oro Delta dive called Antonio’s when Guilford found her. She joked with the Neapolitan longshoremen who frequented the place, but they didn’t touch her. Abby commanded respect. She wore an aura of dignity that was almost blinding, like the glow around an electric light.

And she clearly liked Guilford, though she didn’t pay him serious attention until he stopped coming in to Antonio’s with the stink of fish all over himself. He cleaned up, saved his salary, worked double shifts until he could afford to buy the gear to start his own photo studio — the only portrait studio in town, even if it wasn’t much more, in those days, than a storeroom over a butcher shop.

They were married in 1930. Nick came along in ’33. There had been another child, a baby girl, in ’35, but she died of influenza before she could be christened.

The shop had fed his family for fifteen years.

Nothing remained of it but bricks and char.

Mackelroy stared woefully through a mask of soot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”

“You were here when it started?”

“I was in the office. Thought I’d make up some invoices before I headed home. A little after business hours. That was when they came through the windows.”

“What came through the windows?”

“Milk bottles, it looked like, full of rags and gasoline. Smelled like gasoline. They came through the window like bricks, scared the crap out of me, then boom, the room’s burning and I can’t get through the flames to the fire extinguisher. I called the fire department from the phone in the diner, but the fire burned too fast — it was just about a done deal before the pumper got here.”

Guilford thought: Bottles?

Gasoline?

He took Mackelroy by the shoulders. “You’re telling me somebody did this on purpose?”

“Sure as hell wasn’t an accident.”

Guilford looked back toward his car.

Toward his son.

Three things, perhaps not coincidence.

The arson.

The picket.

The stranger Abby had talked to this morning.

“Fire chief wants to talk to you,” Mackelroy was saying, “and I think the sheriff wants a word too.”

“Tell them to call me at home.”

He was already running.

“Son of a bitch!” Nick said in the car.

Guilford gave him a distracted glance. “You want to watch that kind of language, Nick.”

“You said it first.”

“Did I?”

“About five times in the last ten minutes. Shouldn’t we slow down?”

He did. A little. Nick relaxed. Summer-brown wildlands fled past the Ford’s dusty window.

“Son of a bitch,” his father said.

Abby was safe, if concerned, and Guilford felt somewhat foolish for hurrying home. Both the fire chief and the sheriff had telephoned, Abby said. “All of that can wait till morning,” he told her. “Let’s lock up and get some sleep.”

“Can you sleep?”

“Probably not. Not right away. Let’s get Nick tucked in, at least.”

Once Nick was squared away, Guilford sat at the kitchen table while Abby perked coffee. Coffee this close to midnight signified a family crisis. Abby moved around the kitchen with her usual economy. Tonight, at least, her frown resembled Nick’s.

Abby had aged with supreme grace. She was stocky but not fat. Save for the gray just beginning to show at her temples, she might have been twenty-five.

She gave Guilford a long look, debating something with herself. Finally she said, “You may as well talk about it.”

“What’s that, Abby?”

“For the last month you’ve been nervous as a cat. You hardly touch an evening meal. Now this.” She paused. “The fire chief told me it wasn’t an accident.”

His turn to hesitate. “Tim Mackelroy says a couple of homemade firebombs came through the window.”

“I see.” She folded her hands. “Guilford, why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what’s been bothering you?”

He said nothing.

“Is it something that happened before we met?”

“I doubt it.”

“Because you don’t talk about those times much. That’s all right — I don’t have to know everything about you. But if we’re in danger, if Nick is in danger—”

“Abby, honestly, I don’t know. True, I’m worried. Somebody torched my business, and maybe it was random lunacy or maybe somebody out there is holding some kind of grudge. All I can do is lock up and talk to Sheriff Carlysle in the morning. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you or Nick.”

She gazed at him a long time. “I’ll go to bed, then.”

“Sleep if you can,” Guilford told her. “I’ll sit out here a while.”

She nodded.

The arson.

The stranger at the door.

The picket.

You leave a thing behind, Guilford thought, and time passes, ten, fifteen, twenty-five years, and that ought to be the end of it.

He remembered it all vividly, in all the bright colors of a dream, the killing winter in the ancient city, the agony of London, the loss of Caroline and Lily. But, Christ, that had been a quarter of a century ago — what could be left of that time that would make him worth killing?

If what the picket had told him then was true—

— but he had written that off as a fever dream, a distorted memory, a half hallucination—

But if what the picket had told him was true, maybe twenty-five years was the blink of an eye. The gods had long memories.

Guilford went to the window. The bay was dark, only a few commercial vessels showing lights. A dry wind moved the lace curtains Abby had hung. Stars shivered in the sky.

Time to be honest, Guilford thought. No wishful thinking. Not when your family’s at stake.

It was possible — admit it — that old debts were about to be collected.

The hard question. Could he have prevented this?

No.

Anticipated it?

Maybe. He had wondered often enough if there might not one day be a reckoning. Far as the world knew, the Finch expedition had simply vanished in the wilderness between the Bodensee and the Alps. And the world had got on well enough without him.

But what if that had changed?

Abby and Nicholas, Guilford thought.

No harm must come to them.

No matter what the gods wanted.

He followed Abby to bed a couple of hours before dawn. He didn’t want to sleep, only to close his eyes. The presence of her, the soft music of her breath, eased his thoughts.

He woke to sunlight through the east window, to Abby, fully dressed, her hand on his shoulder.

He sat up.

“He’s back,” she said. “That man.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

He thought of all the ways the continent had changed in the last quarter century.

New harbors, settlements, naval bases. Rail and roads to the interior. Mines and refineries. Airstrips.

The new District system, the elected Governors, the radio networks. Homesteads on the Russian steppes, this side of the volcanic zone that divided Darwinia from Old Asia. Skirmish battles with Arabs and Turks. The bombing of Jerusalem, this new war with the Japanese, the draft riots up north.

And so much land still empty. Still a vastness of forest and plain into which a man might, for all purposes, vanish.

Abby had given the stranger a seat at the breakfast table. He was working his way through a plate of Abby’s flapjacks. He handled the knife and fork like a five-year-old. A dewdrop of corn syrup lingered in his thicket of beard.

Guilford gazed at the man with a torrent of emotion: shock, relief, renewed fear.

The frontiersman speared a last bite of breakfast and looked up. “Guilford,” he said laconically. “Long time.”

“Long time, Tom.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

A fresh briar. A tattered cloth bag of river weed. Guilford said, “Let’s go outside.”

Abby touched Guilford’s arm questioningly. “District police and the fire chief want you to call them. We need to talk to the trust company, too.”

“It’s okay, Abby. Tom’s an old friend. All that other business can wait a while. What’s burned is burned. There’s no hurry now.”

Her eyes expressed grave reservation. “I suppose so.”

“Keep Nick in the house today.”

“Thank you kindly for the meal, Mrs. Law,” Tom Compton said. “Very tasty.”

The frontiersman hadn’t changed in twenty-five years. His beard had been trimmed since that awful winter, and he was stockier — healthier — but nothing fundamental had changed. A little weathering, but no sign of age.

Just like me, Guilford thought.

“You’re looking well, Tom.”

“Both of us are healthy as horses, for reasons you ought to have figured out. What do you tell people, Guilford? Do you lie about your age? It was never a problem for me — I never stayed in one place long enough.”

They sat together on the creaking front-porch of the house. Morning air came up the slopes from the bay, fresh as cool water and scented with growing things. Tom filled his pipe but didn’t light it.

Guilford said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah, you do. You also know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. So let’s not shovel too much shit, okay?”

“It’s been a quarter century, Tom.”

“It’s not that I don’t understand the urge. Took me ten years, personally speaking, before I broke down and said okay, the world’s fucking up and I been tapped to help fix it. That’s not an easy thing to believe. If it’s true it’s fucking frightening, and if it’s not true, then we all ought to be locked up.”

“We all?”

The frontiersman applied match to bowl. “There are hundreds of us. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Guilford sat silently for a time in the morning sunlight. He hadn’t had much sleep. His body ached, his eyes ached. Just about twelve hours ago he had been in Fayetteville staring at the ashes of his business. He said, “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but there’s a lot on my mind.”

“You have to stop this.” The frontiersman’s voice was solemn. “Jesus, Guilford, look at you, living like a mortal man, married, for Christ’s sake, and a kid in there, too. Not that I blame you for wanting it. I might have liked that kind of life myself. But we are what we are. You and Sullivan used to congratulate yourselves for being so fuckin’ open-minded, not like old Finch, making history out of wishes. But here you are — Guilford Law, solid citizen, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, and God help anybody who doesn’t play along.”

“Look, Tom—”

“Look yourself. Your shop burned down. You have enemies. The people inside this house are in danger. Because of you. You, Guilford. Better to face a hard truth than a dead wife and child.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come out here.”

“Well pardon my hairy ass.” He shook his head. “By the way. Lily’s in town. She’s staying at a hotel in Oro Delta. Wants to see you.”

Guilford’s heart did a double beat. “Lily?”

“Your daughter. If you remember that far back.”

Abby didn’t know what the burly backwoodsman said to her husband, but she could read the shock in Guilford’s face when he stepped back through the door.

“Abby,” he said, “I think maybe you and Nick ought to pack a few things and spend a week with your cousin in Palaepolis.”

She came into his arms, composed herself, looked up at him. “Why?”

“Just to be on the safe side. Till we sort out what’s going on.”

You live with a man this long, Abby thought, you learn to listen past the words. There wouldn’t be any debate. Guilford was afraid, deeply afraid.

The fear was contagious, but she kept it tied in a knot just under her breastbone. Nicholas mustn’t see it.

She felt like an actress in a half-remembered play, struggling to recall her lines. For years now she had anticipated — well, not this, certainly, but something, some climax or crisis invading their lives. Because Guilford was not an ordinary man.

It wasn’t only his youthful appearance, though that had become more obvious — strikingly obvious — over the last few years. Not just his past, which he seldom discussed and jealously guarded. More than that. Guilford was set apart from the ordinary run of men, and he knew it, and he didn’t like it.

She’d heard stories. Folktales. People talked about the Old Men, by which they meant the venerable frontiersmen who still wandered through town now and again. (This Tom Compton being a prize example.) Stories told on the long nights between Christmas and Easter: The Old Men knew more than they said. The Old Men kept secrets.

The Old Men weren’t entirely human.

She had never believed these things. She listened to the talk and she smiled.

But two winters ago Guilford had been out back chopping firewood, and his hand had slipped on the haft of the old axe, and the blade had gone deep into the meat of his left leg below the knee.

Abby had been at the frost-rimed window, watching. The pale sun hadn’t set. She had seen it all quite clearly. She had seen the blade cut him — he had wrenched it out of himself, the way he might have wrenched it out of a slab of wet wood — and she had seen the blood on the blade and the blood on the hard ground. It had seemed as though her heart might stop beating. Guilford dropped the axe and fell, his face suddenly white.

Abby ran to the back door, but by the time she crossed the distance to him he had managed, impossibly, to stand up again. The expression on his face was strange, subdued. He looked at her with what might have been shame.

“I’m all right,” he said. Abby was startled. But when he showed her the wound it was already closed — only a faint line of blood where the axe had gone in.

Not possible, Abby thought.

But he wouldn’t talk about it. It was just a scratch, Guilford insisted; if she had seen anything else it must have been a trick of the afternoon light.

And in the morning, when he dressed, there wasn’t even a scar where the blade had cut him.

And Abby had put it out of her mind, because Guilford wanted it that way and because she didn’t understand what she’d seen — maybe he was right, maybe it wasn’t what she had thought, though the blood on the ground had been real enough, and the blood on the axe.

But you don’t see a thing like that, Abby thought, and just forget it. The memory persisted.

It persisted as a subtle knowledge that things were not what they seemed, that Guilford was perhaps more than he had allowed her to know; and that, by implication, their life could never be a wholly normal life. Some morning will come, Abby had told herself, when a reckoning is due.

Was this the morning?

She couldn’t say. But the skin of illusion had been broken. This time the bleeding might not stop.

The two men sat on the grassy slope beyond the elm tree Guilford had planted ten years ago.

Abby packed a bag. Nick packed, too, happy at the prospect of a trip but aware of the change that had overtaken the household. Guilford saw the boy in the doorway, peering at his father and at the bearded apparition with him. Apprehension colored his eyes.

“I didn’t want this either,” Tom Compton said. “Last thing I ever wanted was to have my life fucked up by a ghost. But sooner or later you have to face facts.”

“ ‘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?’ ”

“Wasn’t that one of Sullivan’s sermons?”

“Yes, it was.”

“I miss that son of a bitch.”

Nick brought a baseball and glove out of the house, playing catch with himself while he waited for his mother, tossing the ball high overhead and running to intercept it. His dirty blond hair fell into his eyes. Time for a haircut, Guilford thought, if you want to play center field.

“Didn’t like the look of myself in that ratty army outfit,” the frontiersman said. “Didn’t like this ghost dogging my heels telling me things I didn’t want to hear. You know what I mean.” He looked at Guilford steadily. “All that about the Archive and so-and-so-million-years of this and that. You listen a little while and you’re about ready to kick the fuckin’ gong. But then I talked to Erasmus, you remember that old river rat, and he told me the same damn thing.”

Nick’s baseball traversed the blue sky, transited a pale moon. Abby’s silhouette moved across an upper-story window.

“A whole lot of us died in that World War, Guilford. Not everybody got a knock on the door from a ghost. They came after us because they know us. They know there’s at least a chance we’ll take up the burden, maybe save some lives. That’s all they want to do, is save lives.”

“So they say.”

“And these other assholes, this Enemy of theirs, and the fuckers they recruited, they’re genuinely dangerous. Just as hard to kill as we are, and they’ll kill men, women, children, without thinking twice.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Solid fact. I learned a few things — I haven’t had my head in the ground these last twenty years. Who do you think burned down your business?”

“I don’t know.”

“They must have figured you were there. They’re not real tidy people. Scattershot, that’s their method. Too bad if somebody else gets in the way.”

Abby came out into the sunlight to pluck laundry from a line. There was a breeze from the sea, billowing bedsheets like mainsails.

“The people we’re up against, the psions took ’em for the same reason our ghosts came after us — because they’re likely to cooperate. They’re not real moral people. They lack some necessities in the conscience department. Some of ’em are con men, some of ’em are killers.”

“Tell me what Lily’s doing in Oro Delta.”

The frontiersman refilled his pipe. Abby folded sheets into a wicker basket, casting glances toward Guilford.

Sorry, Abby, Guilford thought. This isn’t how I wanted it to go. Sorry, Nick.

“She’s here because of you, Guilford.”

“Then she knows I’m alive.”

“As of a couple years ago. She found your notes in her mother’s things.”

“Caroline’s… dead, then.”

“Afraid so. Lily’s a strong woman. She found out her father maybe didn’t die on the Finch expedition, maybe he’s even alive somewhere, and he left her this weird little story about ghosts, murderers, a ruined city… See, the thing is, she believed it. She started asking questions. Which put the bad guys onto her.”

“For asking questions?”

“For asking questions too publicly. She’s not just smart, she’s a journalist. She wanted to publish your notes, if she could authenticate them. Came to Jeffersonville digging up these old stories.”

Abby retreated to the house. Nick tired of his baseball, dropped his glove on the lawn. He scooted into the shade of the elm, looking at Tom and Guilford, curious, knowing he shouldn’t approach them. Adult business, weighty and strange.

“They tried to hurt her?”

“Tried,” Tom Compton said.

“You stopped them?”

“I got her out of the way. She recognized me from your description. I was like the Holy Grail — proof that it wasn’t all lunacy.”

“And you brought her here?”

“Fayetteville would have been her next stop anyhow. You’re the one she’s really looking for.”

Abby carried a suitcase to the car, hefted it into the trunk, glanced at Guilford, walked back to the house. The wind carried her dark hair behind her. Her skirt danced over the contours of her legs.

“I don’t like this,” Guilford said. “I don’t like her being involved.”

“Hell, Guilford, everybody’s involved. This isn’t about you and me and a few hundred guys talking to spirits: this is about whether your kids or your kids’ kids die forever, or worse, end up slaves to those fuckin’ animals out of the Other World.”

A cloud crossed the sun.

“You been out of the game for a while,” the frontiersman said, “but the game goes on. People have been killed on both sides, even if we’re harder to kill than most. Your name came up and you can’t ignore that. See, they don’t care if you decide to sit out the war, that doesn’t matter, you’re a potential danger to them and they want to cross you off the list. You can’t stay in Fayetteville.”

Guilford looked involuntarily down the long dirt road, scouting for enemies. Nothing to see. Only a dust devil stirring the dry air.

He said, “What choice do I have?”

“No choice, Guilford. That’s the hard part. Stay here, you lose it all. Settle down somewhere else, same thing happens sooner or later. So… we wait.”

“We?”

“All us old soldiers. We know each other now, directly or through our ghosts. The real battle’s not yet. The real battle’s up there some years in the future. So we keep apart from people, mostly. No fixed address, no families, anonymous jobs, maybe out in the bush, maybe in the cities, places you can keep to yourself, paying attention, you know, keeping an eye on the bad guys, but mainly… waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“The big fight. The resurrection of the demons. Waiting until we’re called, basically.”

“How long?”

“Who knows? Ten years, twenty years, thirty years…”

“That’s inhuman.”

“That’s a sober fact. Inhuman is what we are.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

He came up the stairs of the Oro Delta hotel and into the dining room with Tom Compton. He was a tall man, plain-faced, not quite homely, by all appearances about her own age, and Lily promptly forgot everything she had planned to say.

Instead she found herself trying to call up a genuine memory of Guilford Law — a memory of her own, that is, not the stories she had heard from her mother or come across in her research. She could summon only a few shadows. A shape at herbed side. The Oz books, the way he used to pronounce “Dorothy” in round, slow syllables. Do-ro-thy.

Clearly he remembered her. He stood at her table, the frontiersman beside him, wearing an expression that combined awe and doubt and — unless she was imagining this — the strictures of an ancient regret. Her heart hammered. She said, idiotically, “Ah, you must be Guilford Law.”

He croaked, “You’re Lily.”

“You two talk,” Tom said. “I need a drink.”

“Watch the door for us,” Lily said.

It didn’t go smoothly, not at first. He seemed to want to know everything and to explain everything: asking questions, interrupting her answers, interrupting himself, beginning reminiscences that trailed into silence. He fumbled a cup of coffee onto the floor, cursed, then blushed and apologized for his language.

She said, “I’m not fragile. And I’m not five. I think I know what you’re going through. This isn’t easy for me, either, but can we start fresh? Two adults?”

“Two adults. Sure thing. It’s just that—”

“What?”

He drew himself up. “I’m just so pleased to see you, Lil.”

She bit her lip and nodded.

This is hard, Lily thought, because I know what he is. He sits there like an ordinary man, fiddling with his cuffs, drumming a finger on the table. But he was no more an ordinary man than Tom Compton was: they had been touched by something so immense it beggared the imagination.

Her half-human father.

She sketched out her life for him. She wondered if he would approve of her work — odd jobs at a Sydney paper, research, some magazine articles, her own byline. She was a thirty-year-old unmarried career girl, not a flattering description. It suggested even in Lily’s mind some hollow-boned spinster, probably with bad makeup and pet cats. Was that what Guilford saw, sitting across the table from him?

He seemed more concerned with her safety. “I’m sorry you had to stumble into this, Lil.”

“I’m not sorry I did. Yes, it’s frightening. But it’s also the answer to a lot of questions. Long before I understood any of this I was fascinated by Darwinia, by the idea of Darwinia, even as a child. I audited some classes at the University — geology, genesis theory, what they call ‘implicit historiography,’ the Darwinian fossil record and such. There’s so much to know about the continent, but always a mystery at the center of it. And nobody has as much as a ghost of an answer, unless you count the theologians. When I came across your notes — and met Tom, later on — well, it meant there was an answer, even if it’s a strange one, even if it’s hard to accept.”

“Maybe you were better off not knowing.”

“Ignorance is not bliss.”

“I’m afraid for your life, Lil.”

“I’m afraid for everybody’s life. I can’t let that stop me.”

He smiled. Lily added, “I’m not joking.”

“No, of course not. It’s just that for a second there you reminded me of someone.”

“Oh? Who?”

“My father. Your grandfather.”

She hesitated. “I’d like to hear about him.”

“I’d like to tell you.”

What he saw in her, truthfully, was a great deal of her mother. Save for her lighter coloring she might have been Caroline — she seemed as willful as Caroline, certainly, but without the hard core of anxiety and doubt. Caroline had always been inclined to turn away from the world. Lily wanted to tackle it head-on.

Tom suggested the hotel dining room was too public for Guilford’s good, especially with the evening crowd heading in. But there was a pebbled beach downhill from the hotel and north of the docks, and Guilford walked there with Lily.

The evening sun made patchwork shadows among the rocks. Ribbons of seaweed clung to a fractured wooden piling. A bright blue salt worm twined its way in pursuit of the ebbing tide.

Lily plucked a wild sandberry from the scrub bushes above the tide line. “The bay is beautiful,” she said.

“The bay’s a mess, Lil. Everything washes up here. Pine tar, sewage, engine oil, diesel fuel. We take Nicholas swimming at the beaches up north of Fayetteville where the water’s still clean.”

“Tom told me about Nicholas. I’d like to meet him sometime.”

“I’d like you to meet him. I just don’t know if it’s wise. If Tom’s right, you’ve put yourself in a dangerous position. So I have to ask, Lil. Why are you here?”

“Maybe I wanted to see you.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s not all.”

“No. That’s not all.”

They sat together on a cracked concrete seawall.

“You were right, you know. My mother thought you were crazy — or she was shocked that you were still alive, which made her, I guess, an adulteress or something like that. She didn’t like to talk about you, even after he left.”

“This Colin Watson, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Was he good to you?”

“He wasn’t a bad man. Just not a very happy one. Maybe he lived in your shadow. Maybe we all did.”

“He left her?”

“After a few years. But we got by.”

“How did Caroline die?”

“The influenza, that year it was so bad. Nothing dramatic, she just… didn’t get better.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But you never came after us.”

“I wouldn’t have done either of you any good.” Just the opposite, Guilford thought. Look at Abby. Look at Nick. “So what’s next? You can’t publish anything about all this. You must know that.”

“I may be mortal, but I’m not powerless. Tom says there’s work for me in the States. Nothing dangerous. Just watching. Telling people what I see.”

“You’ll get yourself killed.”

“There’s a war on,” Lily said.

“I doubt Tokyo can hold out much longer.”

“Not that war. You know what I mean.”

The War in Heaven. Psilife, the Archive, the secret machinery of the world. He felt years of frustration boil up in him. “For your own sake, Lil, don’t get involved. Ghosts and gods and demons — it’s some nightmare out of the Dark Ages.”

“But it’s not!” She frowned earnestly at him. Her frown was a little like Nick’s. “That’s what John Sullivan believed, and he was right: it’s not a nightmare. We live in a real world — maybe not what it appears to be, but a real world with a real history. What happened to Europe, it wasn’t a miracle, it was an attack.”

“So we’re ants in an anthill, and something decided to step on us.”

“We’re not ants! We’re thinking beings—”

“Whatever that means.”

“And we can fight back.”

He stood up stiffly. “I have a family. I have a son. I want to run my business and raise my child. I don’t want to live a hundred years. I don’t want to be broken on a wheel.”

“But you’re one of the unlucky ones,” Lily said softly. “You don’t have a choice.”

Guilford found himself wishing he could wind back the days until his life was intact again. Restore Abby and Nick and the photo shop and the house on the headland, status quo ante, the illusion he had so fervently loved.

He booked a room at the hotel in Oro Delta. He paid cash and used a fake name. He needed time to think.

He called to make sure Abby and Nick were all right at her cousin Antonio’s outside Palaepolis. Tony picked up the phone. Tony ran a vineyard in the hills and owned a rambling brick house near the property, plenty of room for Abby and Nick even with Tony’s own two kids tearing up the place. “Guilford!” Tony said. “What is it this time?”

“This time?”

“Two calls in fifteen minutes. I feel like a switchboard. I think you should explain some of this to me. I couldn’t get a straight story out of Abby.”

“Tony, I didn’t call you earlier.”

“No? I don’t know who I talked to, then, but he sounded like you and he gave your name. Did you have a drink tonight, Guilford? Not that I’d blame you. If there’s something wrong between you and Abby I’m sure you can patch it up—”

“Is Abby there?”

“Abby and Nick went back to the house. Just like you said. Guilford?”

He put down the phone.

Chapter Thirty

The night was dark, the rural roads unlighted. The car’s headlights raked wheat fields and rock walls. They’re out there in the dark, Guilford thought: faceless enemies, shadows out of the inexplicable past or the impossible future.

Tom had insisted on coming along, and Lily with him, over Guilford’s objections. She wouldn’t be any safer in town, the frontiersman said. “We’re her best protection right now.”

To which Lily added, “I’m a farm girl. I can handle a rifle, if it comes to that.”

Guilford took a corner and felt the rear of the car swing wide before he righted it. He gripped the steering wheel fiercely. Very little traffic on the coast road this time of night, thank God. “How many are we up against?”

“At least two. Probably more. Whoever bombed your shop probably wasn’t local or they would have had a better fix on you. But they’re learning fast.”

“Whoever called Tony’s place used my voice.”

“Yeah, they can do that.”

“So they’re — what do you call it? Demon-ridden?”

“That’ll do.”

“And unkillable?”

“Oh, you can kill ’em,” Tom said. “You just have to work a little harder at it.”

“Why go after Abby and Nick?”

“They’re not after Abby and Nick. If they wanted to hurt Abby and Nick, they would have gone out to your cousin’s and raised hell. Abby and Nick are bait. Which gives the bad guys the advantage, unless we found out about it sooner than they expected.”

Guilford leaned into the gas pedal. The Ford’s engine roared, the rear wheels kicked dust into the darkness.

Tom said, “I have a couple of pistols in my sea bag.” Which he’d thrown into the back seat. “I’ll break ’em out. Guilford, any armaments at the house?”

“A hunting rifle. No, two — there’s an old Remington stored in the attic.”

“Ammunition?”

“Lots. Lily, we’re getting close. Best keep your head down.”

She took one of the pistols from Tom. “That would spoil my aim,” she said calmly.

Tony’s car, an old roadster, was pulled up in front of the house, just visible in the sweep of the headlights. Tony’s car. Abby would have borrowed it. How much time had passed since Abby and Nick had arrived? It couldn’t have been much, given the drive from Palaepolis. Forty-five minutes, an hour?

But the house was dark.

“Stop the engine,” Tom said. “Give us a little margin. Coast in — no lights.”

Guilford nodded and twisted the key. The Ford floated into velvety night, no sound but the crush of gravel under tires as they drifted to a stop.

The front door of the house swung open on a flicker of light. Abby in the doorway with a candle in her hand.

Guilford leaped from the car and rushed her back into the house. Lily and the frontiersman followed.

“The lights don’t work,” Abby was saying. “Neither does the phone. What’s going on? Why are we here?”

“Abby, I didn’t call. It was some kind of trick.”

“But I talked to you!”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

Abby put her hand to her mouth. Nick was behind her on the sofa, sleepy and confused.

“Draw those drapes,” Tom said. “I want all the doors and windows locked.”

“Guilford…?” Abby said, eyes wide.

“We’ve got a little trouble here, Abby.”

“Oh, no… Guilford, it sounded like you, it was your voice—”

“We’ll be fine. Just have to keep our heads down for a little while. Nick, stay put.”

Nicholas nodded solemnly.

“Get your rifle, Guilford,” the frontiersman said. “Mrs. Law, you have any more of those candles?”

“In the kitchen,” she said dazedly.

“Good. Lily, open up my bag.”

Guilford glimpsed ammunition, binoculars, a hunting knife in a leather sheath.

Abby said, “Can’t we just — drive away?”

“Now that we’re here,” the frontiersman answered, “I don’t think they’d let us do that, Mrs. Law. But there’s more of us than they expected, and we’re better armed. So the odds aren’t bad. Come morning, we’ll look for a way out.”

Abby stiffened. “Oh, God… I’m so sorry!”

“Not your fault.”

Mine, Guilford thought.

Abby composed herself by devoting her attention to Nick: calming him, making a proper bed for him on the sofa, which Guilford had moved away from the door and into a corner of the room, back facing out. “A fort,” Nick called it. “A fine fort,” Abby told him.

She drew breath through clenched teeth and calculated the hours until morning. People outside want to hurt us, and they’ve cut the power and the telephone lines. We can’t leave and we can’t call for help and we can’t fight back…

Guilford took her aside, along with the young woman Tom Compton had brought to the house. As little as Guilford liked to talk about his past, Abby knew about his daughter, the daughter he had left in London twenty-five years ago. Abby recognized her even before Guilford said, “This is Lily.” Yes, obviously. She had the Law eyes, winter-morning blue, and the same fixed frown.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Abby said; then, realizing how it must sound, “I mean, I wish — under other circumstances—”

“I know what you mean,” Lily said gravely. “Thank you, Mrs. Law.”

And Abby thought: What do you know about the Old Men? Who let you in on their secrets? How much does Guilford know? Who’s out there in the dark wanting to kill my husband, my child?

No time for that now. These things had become luxuries: fear, anger, bewilderment, grief.

Nicholas looked up at his father’s face as Guilford straightened the blanket over him.

The candlelight made everything strange. The house itself seemed larger — emptier — as if it had expanded into the shadows. Nick knew something was very wrong, that the doors and windows were sealed against some threat. “Bad guys,” he had heard Tom Compton say. Which made Nick think of the movies. Claim jumpers, snake rustlers, burly men with dark circles around their eyes. Killers.

“Sleep if you can,” his father said. “We’ll settle this all up in the morning.”

Sleep was a long way off. Nick looked up at his father’s face with a feeling of loss that stabbed like a knife.

“Good night, Nick,” his father said, stroking his hair.

Nicholas heard, “Good-bye.”

Lily took the kitchen watch.

The house had two doors, front and rear, living room and kitchen. The kitchen was better defended, with its single small window and narrow door. The door was locked. The window was locked, too, but Lily understood that neither door nor window would present much of an obstacle to a determined enemy.

She sat on a wooden chair with Guilford’s old Remington rifle cradled in her lap. Because the room was dark, Lily had opened the blinds a crack and scooted her chair closer to the window. There was no moon tonight, only a few bright stars, but she could see the lights of freighters on the bay, an earthbound constellation.

The rifle was comforting. Even though she had never shot anything larger than a rabbit.

Welcome to Fayetteville, Lily thought. Welcome to Darwinia.

All her life Lily had read about Darwinia, talked about Darwinia — dreamed and daydreamed about Darwinia — to her mother’s great distress. The continent fascinated her. She had wanted since childhood to fathom its strangeness for herself. And here she was: alone in the dark, defending herself against demons.

Be careful, girl, what you wish for.

She knew virtually everything natural science had learned about Darwinia — i.e., not much. Detail in abundance, of course, and even some theory. But the great central question, the simple aching human why, remained unanswered. Interesting, though, that at least one other planet in the solar system had been touched by the same phenomenon. Both the Royal Observatory at Capetown and the National Observatory at Bloemfontein had published photographs of Mars showing seasonal differentiation and an indication of large bodies of water. A new world in the sky, a planetary Darwinia.

Her father’s letters had made sense of all this, though he hardly seemed to understand it himself. Guilford and Tom and all the Old Men had done what Guilford’s friend Sullivan couldn’t: explained the Miracle in secular terms. It was an outlandish explanation, certainly, and she couldn’t imagine what sort of experiment might confirm it. But all this strange theography of Archives and angels and demons could not have arisen in so many places or agreed in so many details if it weren’t substantially true.

She had doubted it at first — dismissed Guilford’s notes and letters as the hallucinatory raving of a half-starved survivor. Jeffersonville had changed her mind. Tom Compton had changed her mind. She had been taken into the confidence of the Old Men, and that had not merely changed her mind but convinced her of the futility of writing about any of this. She wouldn’t be allowed to, and even if she succeeded she wouldn’t be believed. Because, of course, there was no ruined city in the Alpine hills. It had never been mapped, photographed, overflown, or glimpsed from a distance, except by the vanished Finch expedition. The demons, Tom said, had sewn it up like a torn sleeve. They could do that.

But it was, at least in some intangible way, still there.

She kept herself awake by imagining that city deep in the Darwinian back country: the ancient soulless navel of the world. Axis of time. The place where the dead meet the living. She wished she could see it, though she knew the wish was absurd; even if she could find it (and she couldn’t; she was only mortal) the city was a dangerous place to be, possibly the most dangerous place on the surface of the Earth. But she was drawn by the idea of its strangeness the way, as a child, she had once loved certain names on the map: Mount Kosciusko, the Great Artesian Basin, the Tasman Sea. The lure of the exotic, and bless that little Wollongong girl for wanting it. But here I am, Lily thought, with this rifle on my knee.

She would never see the city. Guilford would see it again, though. Tom had told her that. Guilford would be there, at the Battle… unless his dogged love of the world held him back.

“Guilford loves the world too much,” Tom had told her. “He loves it like it’s real.”

Isn’t it? she had asked. Even if the world is made of numbers and machines… isn’t it real enough to love?

“For you,” Tom had allowed. “Some of us can’t let ourselves think that way.”

The Hindus spoke of detachment, or was it the Buddhists? To abandon the world. Abandon desire. How awful, Lily thought. An awful thing to ask of anyone, much less of Guilford Law, who not only loved the world but knew how fragile it was.

The old rifle sat across her legs with a terrible weight. Nothing moved beyond the window but the stars above the water, distant suns sliding through the night.

Abby, weaponless, crouched in a corner of the dimly candlelit room. Sometime after midnight Guilford came and hunkered down on the floor beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cool under the heat of his palm.

She said, “We’ll never be safe here again.”

“If we have to, Abby, we’ll leave. Move up-country, take another name…”

“Will we? Even if we do go somewhere else, somewhere no one knows us — what then? Do you watch me grow old? Watch me die? Watch Nicholas grow old? Wait for whatever miracle it was that put you here to come and take you away again?”

He sat back, startled.

“You couldn’t have hidden it much longer. You still look like you’re on the shy side of thirty.”

He closed his eyes. You won’t die, his ghost had told him, and he had watched his cuts heal miraculously, watched the flu pass him by even when it took his baby daughter. Hated himself for it, often enough.

But most of the time he just pretended. And as for Abby, Abby aging, Abby dying…

He healed quickly, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be killed. Some wounds were irrevocable, as even Tom was plainly aware. He couldn’t imagine a future past Abby, even if that meant throwing himself off a cliff or taking the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Everybody was entitled to death. Nobody deserved a century of grief.

Abby seemed to read his thoughts. She took his hand and held it in hers. “You do what you have to, Guilford.”

“I won’t let them hurt you, Abby.”

“You do what you have to,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-One

The first shot fractured a living-room window.

Nicholas, who had been dozing, sat upright on the sofa and began to cry. Abby ran to him, pressed his head down. “Curl up,” she said. “Curl up, Nicky, and cover your head!”

“Stay with him,” Guilford shouted. More bullets flashed through the window, whipping the curtains like a hurricane wind, punching holes the size of fists in the opposite wall.

“Guard this room,” Tom said. “Lily, upstairs with me.”

He wanted an east-facing window and some elevation. Dawn was only twenty minutes away. There would be light in the sky by now.

Guilford crouched behind the front door. He fired a couple of blind shots through the mail slot, hoping to discourage whoever was out there.

An answering volley of bullets tore through the mosquewood door above him. He ducked under a shower of splinters.

Bullets fractured wood, plaster, upholstery, curtains. One of Abby’s kitchen candles winked out. The smell of charred wood was pungent and intense.

“Abby?” he called out. “Are you all right?”

The east-facing room was Nick’s. His balsa-wood airplane models were lined up on a shelf with his crystal radio and his seashell collection.

Tom Compton tore the drapes away from the window and kicked the glass out of the lower pane.

The house was still ringing with the sound of breaking glass.

The frontiersman ducked under the sill, raised his head briefly and ducked back.

“I see four of ’em,” he said. “Two hiding back of the cars, at least two more out by the elm. Are you a good marksman, Lil?”

“Yes.” No sense being modest. Although she had never fired this Remington.

“Shoot for the tree,” he said. “I’ll cover the close targets.”

No time for thought. He didn’t hesitate, simply gripped the window frame with his left hand and began to fire his pistol in a steady, rapid rhythm.

The pearly sky cast a dim light. Lily came to the window, exposing her head as little as possible, and drew a bead on the elm, and then on the rough shape beside it. She fired.

This was not a rabbit. But she could pretend. She thought of the farm outside Wollongong, shooting rabbits with Colin Watson back when she still called him “Daddy.” In those days the rifle had seemed bigger and heavier. But she was steady with it. He taught her to anticipate the noise, the kick.

It had made her queasy when the rabbits died, spilling themselves like torn paper bags over the dry earth. But the rabbits were vermin, a plague; she learned to suppress the sympathy.

And here was another plague. She fired the rifle calmly. It kicked her shoulder. A cartridge rattled across the wooden floor of Nick’s room and lodged under the bed.

Had the shadow-figure fallen? She thought so, but the light was so poor…

“Don’t stop,” Tom said, reloading. “You can’t take these people out with a single shot. They’re not that easy to kill.”

Guilford had lost the feeling in his left leg. When he looked down he saw a dark wetness above his knee and smelled blood and meat. The wound was healing already, but a nerve must have been severed; that would take time to repair.

He crawled toward the sofa, trailing blood.

“Abby?” he said.

More bullets pounded through the ruined door and window. Across the room Abby’s cloth curtains began to smolder, oozing dark smoke. Something banged repeatedly against the kitchen door.

“Abby?”

There was no answer from the sofa.

He heard Tom and Lily’s gunfire from upstairs, shouts of pain and confusion outside.

“Talk to me, Abby!”

The back of the sofa had been struck several times. Particles of horsehair and cotton stuffing hung in the air like dirty snow.

He put his hand in a puddle of blood, not his own.

“I count four down,” Tom Compton said, “but they won’t stay down unless we finish ’em. And there might be more out back.” But no second-story window faced that direction.

He hurried down the stairs. Lily followed close behind him. Her hands were shaking now. The house stank of cordite and smoke and male sweat and worse things.

Down to the living room, where the frontiersman stopped short in the arched doorway and said, “Oh, Christ!”

Someone had come in through the back door.

A fat man in a gray Territory Police uniform.

“Sheriff Carlyle,” Guilford said.

Guilford was obviously wounded and dazed, but he had managed to stand up. One hand clasped his bloody thigh. He held out the other imploringly. He had dropped his pistol by the sofa—

By the blood-drenched sofa.

“They’re hurt,” Guilford said plaintively. “You have to help me take them to town. The hospital.”

But the sheriff only smiled and raised his own pistol.

Sheriff Carlyle: one of the bad guys.

Lily struggled to aim her rifle. Her heart pumped, but her blood had turned into a cold sludge.

The sheriff fired twice before Tom got off a shot that sent him twisting against the wall.

The frontiersman stepped close to the fallen Sheriff Carlyle. He pounded three bullets into the sheriff at close range until the sheriff’s head was as red and shapeless as one of Colin Watson’s rabbits.

Guilford lay on the floor, fountaining blood from a chest wound.

Abby and Nicholas were behind the useless fortress of the sofa, unspeakably dead.

Interlude

Guilford woke in the shade of the elm, in the tall grass, in a patch of false anemones blue as glacial ice. A gentle breeze cooled his skin. Diffuse daylight held each object suspended in its even glow, as if his perception had been washed clean of every defect.

But the sky was black and full of stars. That was odd.

He turned his head and saw the picket standing a few paces away. His shadow-self. His ghost.

Probably he should have been afraid. Mysteriously, he wasn’t.

“You,” he managed to say.

The picket — still young, still dressed in his tattered uniform — smiled sympathetically. “Hello, Guilford.”

“Hello yourself.”

He sat up. At the back of his mind was the nagging sensation that something was wrong, terribly wrong, tragically wrong. But the memory wouldn’t yield itself up. “I think,” he said slowly, “I’m shot…”

“Yes. But don’t worry about that right now.”

That sky, the sky full of stars crisp as electricity and close as the end of his arm, that bothered him, too. “Why am I here?”

“To talk.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk. Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. You can cover your ears and whistle ‘Dixie,’ if you want. Wouldn’t you rather hear what I have to say?”

“You’re not exactly a font of good news.”

“Take a walk with me, Guilford.”

“You walk too much.”

“I think better on my feet,” the picket said.

Just as in burned London a quarter century ago, there was a forced calm inside him. He ought to be terrified. Everything was wrong… worse than wrong, some surge of memory suggested. He wondered if the picket was able to impose an emotional amnesia on him, to smother his panic.

Panic would be easy, maybe even appropriate.

“This way,” the picket said.

Guilford walked with the picket up the trail beyond the house, among the brush and wind-twisted trees. He looked back at his house, small and alone on its grassy headland, and saw the ocean beyond it, glass-flat and mirroring the stars.

“Am I dead?”

“Yes and no,” the picket said.

“That could be a little clearer.”

“It could go either way.”

Despite the unearthly calm Guilford felt a feather touch of dread.

“Depending on what?”

“Luck. Resolve. You.”

“Is this a riddle?”

“No. Just hard to explain.”

They climbed the trails steadily. Ordinarily Guilford would have been winded by the hike, but his lungs worked more efficiently here, or the air was thicker, or he was as invulnerable as a dream. Before long they reached the high summit of the hill. The picket said, “Let’s sit a while.”

They found a mosque tree and put their backs against it, the way Guilford sometimes sat with Nick on a summer night, looking at the stars. Stars in the ocean, stars in the sky. More stars than he had imagined there could be. The stars were visibly rotating — not around the northern axis but around a point directly overhead.

“Those stars,” he said, “are they real?”

“ ‘Real’ is a word that means more than you think, Guilford.”

“But this isn’t really the hill back of my house.”

“No. Just a place to rest.”

This is his ground, Guilford thought. Ghost territory. “How does it feel, being a god?”

“That’s not what I am.”

“The difference is subtle.”

“If you turn on an electric light, does that make you a god? Your own ancestors might have said so.”

Guilford blinked at the vault of the sky. “Hell of a light bulb.”

“We’re inside the Archive,” the picket said. “Specifically, we’re enclosed in a nodular logic packet attached to the procedural protocols of the Terrestrial ontosphere.”

“Well, that explains it,” Guilford said.

“I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, we’re still inside in the Archive — we can’t leave it, at least not yet — but we’re not exactly on Earth.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I can’t take you out of the Archive, but I can show you what the Archive looks like from the outside.”

Guilford wasn’t sure what he was being offered — and the buried sense of urgency still pricked at him — but since he had no real choice, he nodded. “Show me,” he said.

As suddenly as that, the sky began to shift. It ceased to spin. The stars moved in a new direction, south to north, the southern horizon dropping at a dizzying speed. Guilford gasped and wanted to cling to the ground even though there was no sensation of motion. The breeze persisted, warm and gentle from the sea.

“What am I looking at?”

“Just watch,” the picket said.

More stars scrolled up from the horizon, countless stars, and then retreated at a shocking speed, became blurs and bands of light… the arms, the disk of a galaxy. The starlight stabilized, became a vast and luminous wheel in the sky.

“The Archive’s ontosphere,” the picket said quietly. “It’s isness.”

Guilford couldn’t frame a response. He felt awe like a band across his chest, tightening.

Now the galaxy itself began to blur together, to form an undifferentiated sphere of light.

“The ontosphere in four dimensions.”

And that faded as suddenly. Now the sky was an immensity of rainbow-colored lines on velvet black, iridescent, parallel, stretching in every direction to infinity until he couldn’t bear to look, until looking threatened his sanity—

“The Higgs structure of the Archive,” the picket said, “visualized and simplified.”

Simplified! Guilford thought.

That faded, too.

For a moment the sky was utterly dark.

“If you were outside the Archive,” the picket said, “this is what you would see.”

The Archive: a seamless, sealed sphere of sullen orange light that filled the western horizon and was reflected in the still water of the bay.

“It contains all that the galaxy once was,” the picket said softly. “It did, at least, until the psions corrupted it. That smudge of red light over the hills, Guilford, is all that remains of the original galaxy, with all its stars and civilizations and voices and possibilities — an immense black hole devouring a few lifeless cinders.”

“Black hole?” Guilford managed to ask.

“A singularity, matter so compacted that nothing can escape from it, not even light. What you see is secondary radiation.”

Guilford said nothing. He felt a great fear battering at this envelope of calm which contained him. If what the picket had told him was true then this mass in the sky contained both his past and his future; time all fragile, tentative, vulnerable to attack. That smoldering cinder was a slate on which the gods had written worlds. Misplace an atom and planets collide.

And on that slate they had written Lily and Caroline and Abby and Nicholas… and Guilford. He had been extracted from it, temporarily, a number fluctuating between zero and one.

Souls like chalk dust, Guilford thought. He looked at the picket. “What do you want from me?”

“We talked about this once before.”

“You want me to fight your battle. To be a soldier.”

“Strange as it may seem, there are things you can do in the ontosphere that I can’t. I’m asking for your help.”

“My help!” He stared at the dully radiant image of the Archive. “I’m not a god! Even if I do what you want, what difference can it possibly make?”

“None, if you were the only one. But there are millions of others, on millions of other worlds, and millions more to come.”

“Why waste time on me, then?”

“You’re no more or less important than any of the rest. You matter, Guilford, because every life matters.”

“Then take me home and let me look after Abby and Nick.”

They were all right, weren’t they? He struggled with vague, disquieting shards of memory. Memory like broken glass…

“I can’t do that,” the picket said. “I’m not omnipotent. Don’t make the mistake of thinking so.”

“What kind of a god are you, then?”

“Not a god. I was born of mortal parents, Guilford, just like you.”

“A million years ago.”

“Far more than that. But I can’t manipulate the ontosphere the way you suggest. I can’t rewrite the past… and only you can influence the future.” He stood up. The picket carried himself with a dignity Guilford didn’t recognize as his own. For a moment Guilford seemed to see past him… not through him, but beyond the humble appearance into something as hot and immense as the sun.

This isn’t a human being, Guilford thought. Maybe it used to be a human being; maybe it even used to be Guilford Law. But it was some other kind of creature now. It walks between stars, Guilford thought, the way I might walk into Fayetteville on a sunny day.

“Consider the stakes. If this battle is lost, your daughter will be enslaved and your grandchildren will be used as incubators for something utterly soulless. In a very real sense, Guilford, they will be eaten. It’s a form of death from which there is no resurrection.”

Nick, Guilford thought. Something about Nick. Nick hiding behind the big living room sofa…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood.

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

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

“I have nothing to offer.”

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

The picket was silent for a time.

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

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

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

Sentience waited: deeply patient, if deeply afraid.