Darwinia (35 page)

Hunger, too, became a thing of the past.

He would need to eat, eventually to eat a great deal, to compensate for the lean times. But not right away.

He did need to drink copious amounts of water. Pipe had been laid from the river, and a steady flow emerged from the crude pipe end at the perimeter of the sacred city, to trickle away down the broken streets into the alpine soil. This water was cold and tasted of stone and copper. Vale drank buckets of it, and so did the other men.

If he should call them men. They were becoming, quite obviously, something else. Their bodies were changing radically. Some of them had grown a second set of arms, stubby nodules emerging from the altered musculature of their ribs, with tiny fingers that grasped blindly at the air.

He drank but didn’t feel the need to urinate. His new body used liquid more efficiently, which was just as well; he had lost his penis sometime during the night. It lay on his mattress like a gangrenous thumb.

But Vale preferred not to think too hard about that. It interfered with his euphoria.

The autumn air was fine and cool.

Elias Vale had foreseen many futures, true and false. He had looked into human souls as if through sparkling glass and seen the things that swim and hover there. The gods had found that capacity quite useful. But the future he could not foresee was his own.

Did that matter?

Once his god had promised him riches, eternal life, the dominion of the Earth. All that seemed terribly in tangible to him now, blandishments offered to a child.

We serve because we serve
, Vale thought, a logic both circular and true.

He felt the Well of Creation beating like a heart at the heart of the sacred city.

The skin of his face had peeled away like the rind of an orange. Vale could only guess what he looked like now. There were no mirrors here.

His god took him deeper into the city, made him a part of the trusted circle of guardians arrayed around the dome of the well.

Elias Vale was honored to assume the duty.

He slept in the chill shadow of the dome that night, his head cradled on a pillow of stone. He woke to the sound of mortar fire.

Guilford Law moved up the ridge under the concussion of artillery.

The sound reminded him of tunnel-blasting on the Alpine railway line. All it lacked was the concussion of falling rock. Unlike tunnel-blasting, it didn’t stop. It went on with a maddening irregularity, like the pulse of a panicked heart.

It reminded him of Belleau Wood and the German cannon.

“They must have known we were coming.”

“They did,” Tom Compton said. The two men crouched behind a rockfall. “Just not how many of us.” He buttoned the collar of his ragged brown overcoat. “The devil’s an optimist.”

“They might bring in reinforcements.”

“Doubt it. We have people at every rail station and airstrip east of Tilson.”

“How much time does that buy us?”

The frontiersman shrugged.

Did it matter? No, of course it didn’t matter. Everything was in motion now; nothing could be stopped or withheld.

A muted daylight touched the ridge tops. Cresting the hill, Guilford beheld chaos. The valley was still in shadow, the streets white with trails of fog. A body of men including the venerable Erasmus had managed to set up trench emplacements within artillery range of at least the nearest buildings, and a predawn bombardment from their motley collection of heavy guns, howitzers and mortars had taken the demon encampment by surprise.

Now, however, the enemy had rallied; the western flank was taking vicious punishment.

Simultaneously, Guilford and a couple of hundred other longtimers began to move downslope from the north. There was pathetically little cover among the clinging reed grass and tumbled rock of the steep valley wall. Their sole advantage was that this terrain had also made difficult the emplacement of fortifications and barbed wire.

Still hopelessly far away was the real objective: the Dome of the Well, where Sentience had imprisoned thousands of half-incarnate demons, and Guilford remembered that war, too…

Because I’m with you
, the picket reminded him.

Guilford carried his ghost inside him now. If he could carry that ghost as far as the Well — if any of the old men fighting with him could — the demons might be bound again.

But he had hardly framed the thought when a hidden sniper opened fire from the scrubby mosque trees clinging to the steep decline. Automatic rifle rounds tore into the men on each side of him…

Into
him
.

He felt the bullets pierce him. He felt their momentum throw him into the dirt. He scrambled for cover behind a wedge of stunted trees.

The advance stalled while a mortarman tried to take out the sniper. Guilford found himself staring at Tom Compton’s wounds. The frontiersman’s right shoulder was notched in a flaring V, and there V’as a gaping hole directly under his lowest left rib.

What occupied these damaged spaces was not ruined flesh but something more vaporous and grotesque, a luminous outline, the frontiersman’s own body configured as petrified flame.

Lose flesh
, Guilford thought,
and your ghost shows through.

He looked reluctantly at his own wounds. Took the inventory.

He had been hit hard. Chest and belly flayed, clothing charred. His torso glimmered like a mad party lantern. He ought to be dead. Was dead, perhaps. He seemed to possess no blood, no viscera, no meat, only this hot and pulsing light.

Deep numbers
, he found himself thinking.
Strange, deep numbers.

He didn’t bleed, but he could feel his heart hammering madly in his damaged chest. Or was that an illusion too? Maybe he had been dead for twenty years… it had felt that way, often enough. Breathe in, breathe out, lift a hammer or twist a wrench; shun love, shun friendship, endure…

Bullets rattled into pebbled soil inches from his ear.

“They’re killing us,” he murmured.

“No,” Tom said. “Maybe that’s what that sniper thinks. You know better. They’re not killing us, Guilford. They can only kill what’s mortal.” He winced as he turned. “They’re hatching the gods out of us.”

“It hurts,” Guilford said.

“That it does.”

He remembered too much, too vividly, all that long morning.

He rolled over a brambled hedge of barbed wire, caught his foot in a snakeroot runner, fell another several yards and landed with his rifle sprawled at arm’s length. Raw stone abraded his cheek. He had reached the outskirts of the City.

It was me
, he thought,
at Belleau Wood, I
do
remember. Ah, Christ: the wheat field overgrown with poppies and the men falling on every side, leaving the wounded behind for the medics, if the medics weren’t cut down, too, and men calling out over the roar of gunfire and sour smoke in rolling waves… Look at us
, Guilford thought. Nearly two hundred half-human old men followed behind him, in snakeskin longcoats, dungarees, slouch hats for helmets, wearing holes the size of apples where the bullets had passed them through. Yet not immortal after all. The vessel of the body could bear only a certain degree of pain and magic. Some wounds could kill, some men had been left lifeless on the ridge, dead as the men at Belleau Wood.

Stripped of much of his flesh, loping now between eroded columns of stone, Guilford remembered.

Memory boiled out of the City of Demons like steam.

Once these structures had stood white and blank as marble, filled with provender and home to a blindly virulent and immensely powerful species groomed as instruments for the penetration of psilife into Archival time. They had lived like insects, brainless builders. Immersed at adulthood into the Well of Creation, they emerged as mortal gods.

It was one pathway into the ontosphere of the Archive. There were, of course, thousands of such points of entry. Psilife was both relentless and ingenious.

I remember Caroline
, he thought grimly.
I remember Lily. I remember Abby and Nicholas.

He remembered, unwillingly, the thousand Byzantiums of the ancient galaxy.

He moved deeper into these rubbled alleys, places where the noon sun couldn’t reach, where shadow’s rivered into oceans of darkness.

He thought,
Am I dying?

What did dying mean, when the world was made of numbers?

Tom Compton joined him, the two men walking side by side for several paces. “Look sharp,” the frontiersman said. “They’re close.”

Guilford closed his eyes on stars, opened them on carved and eroded stone.

The smell
, he thought. Acrid. Like solvent. Like something gone terribly bad. Ahead of him, where the mist lifted, he saw the bright body and razor claws of the enemy.

“Don’t show yourself,” Tom Compton whispered. “We’re too close to the dome to risk a fight.”

Ten thousand years ago, as the ontosphere measured time, the demons had been bound in their Well.

Their earthly avatars were animals. Psilife had written dangerous code into their DNA, but they posed no direct threat to the Archive unless they were god-ridden. Guilford had fought them as a god, invisible and powerful as the wind.

They would emerge from the well wearing the same powerful bodies, and the demon-ridden men defending the well were subject to the same monistic logic, their human bodies surrendering to alien genetic programs.

Sooner than the demons had expected. Fresh Turing packets had disrupted their timing. The enemy was hindered by its own clumsy metamorphosis.

But it would all be for nothing unless one of these seed-sentiences carried his ancient ghost into the deeps of the well.

Guilford Law felt the mortal Guilford’s fear — after all, it was his own. He pitied this small replica of himself, this unwitting axis on which the world turned.

Courage, little brother.
the thought echoed between Guilford and Guilford like a beam of light between flawed mirrors.

The demon-ridden men — even those so utterly transformed that they could no longer handle a rifle — were still lethally dangerous. Even now, hurt as he was, Guilford felt the enormous energy that was being expended to keep him alive.

The sound of artillery had faded to the west.
Running out of ammunition
, Guilford thought.
More hand-to-hand fighting now.

The city had been different in winter, with Tom and Sullivan trudging beside him, the sound of human voices and the mournful baying of the fur snakes and the softening curvature of the snow, back when we were ignorant enough to believe in a sane and ordered world.

He thought unhappily of Sullivan struggling to make sense of the miracle of Darwinia… which was, after all, not a miracle, only a technology so monstrously advanced that no single human being could make sense of it or recognize its signature.
But Sullivan wouldn’t have liked this haunted world
, Guilford thought,
any more than Preston Finch did; this world wasn’t kind to skeptics or zealots.

Small-arms fire rattled nearby. Up ahead, Tom Compton waved Guilford forward along a dark stone wall scabbed with moss. The morning’s clear skies had given way to tumbled, leaden cloud and fits of rain. The frontiersman’s ravaged body gloved faintly — about a candle’s worth — in the shadow’s. Tough for night-fighting.
Might as well hang out a sign
, Guilford thought.
Kill me quick, I’m only half-dead.

But the enemy were easy to see, too.

A dozen of them moved along the silent avenue a few yards away. He crouched behind tumbled stone and watched them after they passed, their knobby backs shining like hammered metal and their long heads swiveling querulously. They were grotesquely bipedal, almost a deliberate parody of the human beings they had recently, been. Some of them wore tattered remnants of clothing over their bony hips and shoulders.

The mortal fraction of Guilford Law was frightened to the point of panic.

But the mortal fraction of Guilford Law swallowed his fear.

He moved among fractured stone walls toward the center of the City, the way he had come that dreadful winter almost half a century ago, toward the Dome of the Well, the absolute edge of the phenomenal world.

Matthew Crane had turned off his overhead light. He sat in a darkened corner of the office. He had left his desk light on.

The desk itself had been cleared. In the illuminated circle of the lamp resided a single object: a pistol, an old-fashioned revolver, polished and clean.

Lily stared at it.

“It’s loaded,” Matthew Crane said.

His voice was gelatinous and imprecise. He gurgled when he spoke. Lily found herself calculating the distance to the desk. Could she beat him to it? Was the risk worth taking? What did he want from her?

“Don’t worry, Little Flea,” Crane said.

Lily said, “Little Flea?”

“Thinking of the poem.
Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have littler fleas, and so ad infinitum
. Because you were my Little Flea, weren’t you, Lily?”