Darwinia

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.

You knew this day would come. Too long postponed.

“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.

He’s ridden me like a horse all these years.

But we’re the same.

But we’re not.

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 have seen them before, and they frightened me: Lord, what frightens a man who walks between stars?

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

I remember the way blood looks when it mixes with rain and earth.

I remember blue skies under a sun that died a billion years ago.

I remember too many skies.

Too many worlds.