Darwinia

The rim was close. The spiral of stone steps was intact, though perilously littered with fresh debris. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to take the stairs. Jump and let gravity carry him. There was no bottom to this rabbit hole, only the end of the world. He began to run.

He stopped when a human figure stood up not ten paces in front of him.

No, he realized, not human, only some poor soul less advanced in its destruction. The face in particular looked as if it had been broken long ago, bones shifting along the fault lines like volcanic plates.

This creature struggled to raise its own rifle, its arms shaking with the palsy of transformation.

Guilford took another clip of ammunition from his belt.

“You don’t want to shoot me,” the monster said.

The words cut through the rush of the rain and the distant crack of artillery.

Ignore him, the god-Guilford said.

“There’s someone with me, Guilford. Someone you know.”

He ejected the spent clip. “Who would that be?” Watching the monster struggle with its own rifle. Bad case of the shakes. Keep him talking.

No, the picket insisted.

The monster closed its eyes and said, “Dad?”

Guilford froze.

No.

“Is that you? I can’t see—”

Guilford froze, though he felt the picket’s urgent pleading.

“Dad, it’s me! It’s Nick!”

No, it isn’t Nick, because Nick -

“Nick?”

“Dad, don’t shoot! I’m inside here! I don’t want to die, not again!”

The monster still struggling against its own convulsions to raise the rifle. He saw it but couldn’t make sense of it. He remembered the bright, awful roses of his son’s blood.

The picket was suddenly beside him, faint as mist.

Time slowed to a crawl. He felt his hammering heart beat at half speed, slow timpani notes.

The monster flailed its gun with a glacial imprecision.

The picket said, “Listen to me. Quickly, now. That isn’t Nick.”

“What happens to the dead? Do the demons get them?”

“Not always. And that isn’t Nick.”

“How do I know?”

“Guilford. Do you think I would let them take him?”

“Didn’t you?”

“No. I didn’t. Nick is with me, Guilford. He’s with us.”

The picket held out his hands in a cradling motion, and for a moment — a sweet and terrible moment — Nick was there, eyes closed, asleep, twelve years old and at peace.

“That’s what this is all about,” the picket said. “These lives.”

Guilford said, “I’m so tired… Nick?”

But Nick had vanished again.

“Fire your gun,” the picket said sternly.

He did.

So did the monster.

Guilford felt the bullets pierce him. The pain, this time, was brutal. But that didn’t matter. Close now. He fired and fired again, until the man with the broken face lay shattered on the ground.

Guilford dragged his own broken body to the rim of the Well.

He closed his eyes and fell. Pain ebbed into mist. Free as a raindrop now. Hey, Nick, look at me. And he felt Nick’s somnolent presence. The picket had been telling the truth. Nick was wrapped in timelessness, sleeping until the end of the ontosphere, falling into the luminous waters of the Archive, numbers deeper than any ocean, warm as summer air.

He blinked and saw the god burst out of him. This luminous thing had once been Guilford Law, dead on a battlefield in France, nurtured by Sentience, equipotent with the gods and one of them, inseparable from them, a being Guilford could not begin to comprehend, all fierce light and color and vengeful as an angry angel, binding the demons who howled their frustration across the far and fading borders of the world.

Interlude

They stood a while on the high ground above the ruined City of Demons. The day was uniformly bright, but the sky was full of stars.

“What now?” Guilford asked.

“We wait,” the picket said, infinitely patient.

Guilford saw more men climbing the hillside. The City was silent now, empty once more. Guilford recognized the Old Men, Tom and Erasmus among them, whole and smiling. He was surprised he could see their faces so clearly across this distance.

“Wait for what?”

“The end of all battles,” the picket said.

Guilford shook his head sternly. “No.”

“No?”

“No. That’s not what I want. I want what I wasn’t allowed to have.” He looked hard at the picket. “I want a life.”

“All the life you want — eventually.”

“I mean a human life. I want to walk like a whole man, grow old before I die. Just… human life.”

The picket was silent for a long stretch.

I surprised a god, Guilford thought.

Finally the picket said, “It may be within my power. Are you certain this is what you want?”

“It’s all I ever wanted.”

The ancient Guilford nodded. He understood — the oldest part of him, at least, understood. He said, “But the pain—”

“Yes,” Guilford said flatly. “The pain. That, too.”

Epilogue The End of Summer, 1999