Darwinia (29 page)

“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.”

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.”