Darwinia

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.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

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?”