Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “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 Thirt
y-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.