Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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.