Darwinia

by Robert Charles Wilson

Tonight was a little different.

  Mid-September, the Schaffhausen tended to attract strictly locals. The summer crowd, loggers and snake-herders, low-rent tourists riding the rails, found warmer places to go. The owner had hired a Tilson-based jazz band in an effort to attract customers, but the musicians were expensive and hard on the female talent, and the trumpeter liked to play drunken scales in the town square at dawn. So that hadn’t lasted. Come September the Schaffhausen was restored to its usual calm.

  Then the longtimers had begun showing up. (The Old Men, some people called them.) It didn’t seem unusual at first. People like that drifted through Randall all the time, renting some dusty old room for a while, moving on. They paid their bills, no questions asked, no questions answered. They were a fact of life, like the wild snakes that roamed the southern hills.

  But lately some of these men had stayed longer than usual, and more had arrived, and they sat in clusters in the Schaffhausen arguing about god-knows-what in hushed tones, and Karen’s curiosity was aroused despite her best intentions.

  So when Guilford Law sat at the bar and ordered a drink she put it in front of him and said, “Is there a convention in town or what?”

  He thanked her politely. Then he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The hell you don’t.”

  He gave her a long look. “Karen, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.” Yes, Mr. Been-here-every-night-for-a-year, that’s my name.

  “Karen, it’s an awkward question.”

  “None of my business, in other words. But something’s up.”

  “Is it?”

  “Only if you have eyes. Every rail-rat and wood-louse in the Territories must be here tonight. You folks have a look about you, you know.”

  Like something starved and beaten that refuses to die. But she wouldn’t tell him that.

  For a split second she thought he was going to confide in her. The look that crossed his face was of such purified human loneliness that Karen felt her lower lip begin to tremble.

  What he said was, “You’re a very pretty girl.”

  “That’s the first time in fifteen years anybody’s called me a girl, Mr. Law.”

  “It’s going to be a hard autumn.”

  “Is it?”

  “You might not see me for a while. Tell you what. If I’m back by spring, I might look you up. If that’s all right, I mean.”

  “Okay with me, I suppose. Spring’s a long time off.”

  “And if I don’t make it back—”

  Back from where? She waited for him to finish.

  But he swallowed his drink and shook his head.

  Pretty girl, he had said.

  She got a dozen spurious compliments a day from men who were drunk or indifferently particular. Compliments meant nothing. But what Guilford Law had said stayed with her through the evening. So simple, she thought. And sad, and curious.

  Maybe he would look her up… and maybe that would be all right with her.

  But tonight he finished his drink and went home alone, moving like a wounded animal. She challenged him with her eyes. He looked away.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Lily left work at four-thirty and rode a bus to the National Museum.

  The day was cool, clear, brisk. The bus was crowded with grim wage earners, middle-aged men in worsted suits and crumpled hats. None of them understood the imminence of celestial war. What they wanted, in her experience, was a cocktail, dinner, an after-dinner cocktail, the kids asleep, television tuned to one of the two national networks, and maybe a nightcap before bed.

  She envied them.

  There was a theme exhibit at the Museum, advertised on immense banners like baronial flags suspended above the doors.

  THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

  Understanding a Miracle

  “Miracle,” she supposed, to appease the religious lobbies. She still preferred to think of the continent as Darwinia, the old Hearst nickname. The irony was lost now; most people acknowledged that Europe had a fossil history of its own, whatever that might mean, and she could well imagine the young Charles Darwin collecting beetles in the Rhine marshes, puzzling out the continent’s mystery. Though perhaps not its central mystery.

  Off the bus, through cool air into the fluorescent inner chambers of the museum.

  The exhibit was immense. Abby ignored the majority of it and walked directly to the glass case devoted to the Finch Expedition of 1920 and the brief Anglo-American conflict. Here were examples of old-time compasses, plant-presses, theodolites, a crude memorial retrieved years after the event from the Rhinelands below the Bodensee: In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany. Photographs of the members of the expedition: Preston Finch, ridiculously stiff in a solar topee; gaunt Avery Keck; luckless Gillvany; poor martyred John Watts Sullivan… Diggs, the cook, wasn’t represented, nor was Tom Compton, but here was her father, Guilford Law, with a day’s beard and a flannel shirt, from his earlier Gallatin River expedition, a frowning young man with a box camera and dirty fingernails.

  She touched the glass case with the tip of a finger. She hadn’t seen her father for twenty years, not since that dreadful morning in Fayetteville, the sun rising, it had seemed to her, on an ocean of blood.

  He hadn’t died. Grave as his wounds were, they healed rapidly. He had been held in the Oro Delta County Hospital under surveillance: the Territorial Police wanted him to explain the gunshot deaths of Abby, Nicholas, three anonymous out-of-towners, and Sheriff Carlyle. But he was ambulatory long before the doctors anticipated; he left the hospital during the midnight shift after overpowering a guard. A warrant was issued, but that was hardly more than a gesture. The continent swallowed fugitives whole.

  He was still out there.

  She knew he was. The Old Men contacted her from time to time. Periodically, she told them what she learned from her secretarial job in the office of Matthew Crane — a demon-ridden Department of Defense functionary — and they reassured her that her father was still alive.

  Still out there, unmaking the Apocalypse.

  The time, they insisted, was close at hand.

  Lily paused before an illuminated diorama.

  Here was a Darwinian fossil biped — she couldn’t remember or pronounce its Latin name — a two-legged and four-armed monster that had hunted the European plains as recently as the Ice Age, and a formidable beast it was. The skeleton in the diorama stood eight feet tall, with a massive ventral spine to which dense bands of muscle had once been attached, a domed skull, a jaw full of flint-sharp teeth. And here beside it a reconstruction, complete with chitinous skin, glass eyes, serrated claws long as kitchen knives, tearing the throat of a fur snake.

  A museum exhibit, like the photograph of Guilford Law; but Lily knew neither her father nor the beast was truly extinct.

  “We’re closing down shortly, Ma’am.”

  It was the night guard, a short man with a slack paunch, nasal voice, and eyes far more ancient than his face. She didn’t know his name, though they had met often before, always like this. He was her contact.

  As before, she pressed a book into his hand. She had bought the book yesterday at a chain store in Arlington. It was a popular science book, The Martian Canals Reconsidered, with the latest photographs from Palomar, but Lily had only glanced at it. Interleaved between its pages were documents she had photocopied from work.

  “Someone must have left this,” she said.

  The guard accepted the book into his beefy hands. “I’ll see it gets to the Lost and Found.”

  He had exchanged this pleasantry with her often enough that she had begun to think of it as another name for the Old Men, the Veterans, the Immortals: the Lost and Found.

  “Thank you.” She was brave enough to smile before she walked away.

  Growing old, Matthew Crane thought, is like justice. It must not only happen, it must be seen to happen.

  He had devised a number of techniques to ensure that he didn’t appear conspicu
ously young.

  Once a year — every autumn — he retired to the privacy of his marbled bathroom, showered, toweled himself dry, and sat before the mirror with a pair of tweezers, plucking hairs from his head to create the effect of a receding hairline. The gods were not kind enough to anesthetize him during this procedure, but he had grown accustomed to the pain.

  When that was finished, he etched few new lines into his face with the edge of a straight razor.

  The technique was delicate. It was a question of cutting deeply (but not too deeply) and often. This area at the corner of the eye, for instance. He took care not the slice the eye itself, drawing the blade firmly outward along the cheek. Blood welled up, briefly. Dab and repeat. After the third or fourth cut, the stubbornly immortal flesh yielded a permanent scar.

  Artistry.

  He knew, of course, how all this would look to an untutored individual, i.e., quite ghastly. Slice, daub, slice again, like a doctor practicing cranial surgery on a corpse, and beware the nerves that ran beneath the skin. He had once given himself a droopy lip that lasted three days and prompted one of his aides to inquire whether he might have had a stroke. It was delicate work that required patience and a steady hand.

  He kept the gear in a leather bag in the medicine cabinet, the Immortal’s Makeup Kit: fresh razors, a whetting stone, cotton balls, tweezers.

  To approximate the roughness of aged skin, he found sandpaper handy.

  He preferred a number ten grit, applied until the pores grew bloody.

  Obviously, the illusion couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. But it wouldn’t have to be. Soon the war would take another, different turn; disguises would be shed; in six months, a year… well, everything would be different. He had been promised as much.

  He finished with the razor, cleaned it, rinsed droplets of blood from the sink, flushed bloody wads of cotton down the toilet. He was satisfied with his work and about to leave the bathroom when he noticed something peculiar about himself. The nail of his left index finger was missing. The space where it should have been was blank — a moist, pink indentation.

  That was odd. He didn’t remember losing the nail. There had been no pain.

  He held both hands in front of him and inspected them with a deep uneasiness.

  He discovered two more loose nails, right thumb and right pinky. Experimentally, he teased the thumbnail up. It parted from the flesh with a gluey, nauseating smack and dropped into the basin of the sink, where it glistened like a beetle’s wing on the steamy porcelain.

  Well, he thought. This is new.

  Some kind of skin disease? But surely it would pass. The nails would grow back. That was how things worked, after all. He was immortal.

  But the gods were silent on the subject.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Elias Vale’s last client was a Caribbean woman dying of cancer.

  Her name was Felicity, and she had come through the autumn rain on her stick-legs to Vale’s shabby suite in the Coaltown district of New Dresden. She wore a flower-print shift that hung on her hollow body like a collapsed tent. The tumors — as his god perceived them — had already invaded her lungs and bowel.

  He closed the shutters on a view of wet streets, dark faces, industrial stacks, sour air. Felicity, seventy years old, sighed at the dimming of the light. She had been shocked, at first, by the broken contours of Vale’s face. That was all right, Vale thought. Fear and awe were comfortable neighbors.

  Felicity asked, in a faint voice still ripe with Spanish Town inflections, “Will I die?”

  She didn’t need a psychic for that diagnosis. Any honest layman would know at once she was dying. The wonder was that she had been able to climb the flight of stairs to Vale’s consulting room. But of course she hadn’t come to hear the truth.

  He sat across from her at a small wooden table, its short leg propped on a book of astrological charts. Felicity’s yellow eyes glistened in the watery light. Vale offered his hand. His hand was soft, plump. Hers was gaunt, parchment skin framing a pale palm. “Your hand is warm,” he said.

  “Yours is cold.”

  “Warm hands are a good sign. That’s life, Felicity. Feel it. That’s all the days you lived, all running through your body like electricity. Spanish Town, Kingston, the boat to Darwinia… your husband, your babies, they’re there, all your days together under the skin.”

  She said sternly, “How many more?”

  Vale’s god had no interest in this woman. She was important only for the fifteen-dollar consultation fee. She existed to top off his purse before he hopped a train to Armageddon.

  Ready or not.

  But he felt sorry for her.

  “Do you feel that river, Felicity? That river of blood? River of iron and air running from high mountain heart down to the delta of fingers and toes?”

  She closed her eyes, wincing slightly at the pressure of his hand on her wrist. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “That’s a strong old river, Felicity. That’s a river as wide as the Rhine.”

  “Where does it go to — in the end?”

  “The sea,” Vale said, gently. “Every river runs into the sea.”

  “But… not yet?”

  “No, not yet. That river hasn’t run dry.”

  “I feel very poorly. Some mornings I hardly can drag myself from bed.”

  “You’re not a young woman, Felicity; Think of the children you raised. Michael, building bridges in the mountains, and Constance, with her own young ones almost grown.”

  “And Carlotta,” Felicity murmured, her sad eyes closed.

  “And little Carlotta, round and beautiful as the day she died. She’s waiting for you, Felicity, but she’s patient. She knows the time is not yet.”

  “How long?”

  “All the time in the world,” Vale said. Which wasn’t much.

  “How long?”

  The urgency in her voice was chastening. There was still a strong woman in this sack of bone and rotten tissue.

  “Two years,” he said. “Maybe three. Long enough to see Constance’s little ones out on their own. Long enough to do the things you have to do.”

  She sighed, a long exhalation of relief and gratitude. Her breath smelled like the butcher shop on Hoover Lane, the one with goat carcasses strung in the window like Christmas decorations. “Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.”

  She would be dead by the end of the month.

  He folded the money into his pocket and helped her down the stairs.

  New Dresden’s rail yard was a vast, sooty wasteland illuminated by harsh industrial lights on steel poles. The city’s towers rose up behind the longhouses like tombstones, steamy with rain.

  Vale wore dark clothing. He carried a cloth bag with a few possessions in it. His money was on a belt cinched around his waist. He carried a pistol in the folds of his trousers.

  He crawled under a torn section of chain-link fence, drenching his knees on the muddy ground. The soil of compressed dirt and cinders and coal fragments harbored pools of rainwater on which oil floated in rainbow slicks. He had been shivering for most of an hour, waiting while an inland train was shunted onto the nearest track. Now the diesel engine began to speed up, its headlight beaming through the rain-streaked darkness.

  Go, Vale thought. Run.

  He felt his god’s sense of urgency coursing through him, and it wasn’t about catching this particular train. Human history was spiraling down to the zero point, perhaps even faster than the gods had anticipated. Vale had work to do. He had come to this desolate place for a reason.

  He tossed his bag through the open door of a flatcar and hurled himself after it. He landed rolling, bending back the fingers of his left hand. “Shit,” he whispered. He sat up against the wooden slats of the far wall. The car was dark and stank of ancient cargo: moldy hay, snakes and cattle bound for slaughter. Rail-yard lights strobed past the open door.

  He was not alone. There was another man huddled in the far corner of the car, visible
in flashes. Vale’s hand went instinctively to his pistol. But he saw in a flicker of hard light that the man was old, shabby, hollow-eyed, and probably drunk on aftershave or antiseptic. A nuisance, perhaps, but not a threat.

  “Hey, stranger,” the old man said.

  “Leave me alone,” Vale said crisply.

  He felt the burden of his days. He had passed many anonymous years since Washington, had led a marginal life in the marginal districts of too many towns. New Orleans, Miami, Jeffersonville, New Pittsburgh, New Dresden. He had learned a few things useful to the gods and he had never lacked for food or accommodation, though he was sometimes poor. He had been, he suspected, held in reserve, waiting for the final summons, the last trumpet, the ascension of the gods over mankind.

  And always there had been the fear: What if that battle never came? What if he was condemned to an endless round of cheap rooms, the confessions of impotent men and dying women and grieving husbands, the shallow consolations of discount liquor and Turkish heroin?

  Soon, his god whispered. Or perhaps it was his own secret voice. Lately, the distinction escaped him.

  Soon. Soon.

  The train rattled deep into the countryside, past dripping mosque trees and sage-pine forests, across steel bridges slick with autumn mist, toward the wild East, toward Armageddon.

  He woke in a wash of sunlight with the hobo looming over him. He scooted away from the evil-smelling old man and reached for his pistol.

  The hobo backed off, holding up his grimy hands in an appeasing gesture. “No harm done! No harm done!”

  The train clacked through daylight forest. Beyond the open door, a ridge declined toward a mossy river.

  “Just keep the fuck away from me,” Vale said.

  “You hurt your hand, my friend,” the hobo said.

  “That’s my problem.”

  “Looks bad.”

  “It’ll heal.” He had twisted it coming into the train last night. It didn’t hurt. But it did look a little odd.

  Four of the five nails were missing. The flesh beneath was pale and strange.