Darwinia

But the replica world was permanently changed. Lives which had been cut short — such as Guilford’s — warped into new, autonomous, wholly sentient shapes. Many of these were permeable conduits from the substructure of the Archive into its core ontology. Roads, that is, through which spirits — such as Guilford’s, or the parasitical nodes of psilife — might enter and alter the plenum of history.

The seed-consciousness which was Guilford Law felt rage at the damage already done. And fear: fear for the new seed-minds created by the psilife invasion, who might not be salvageable: who might face, in other words, the horror of utter extinction.

Entities who had been no more than reconstructions of the past had become hostages — vulnerable, perhaps doomed, if the psilife incursion into the ontosphere continued unresisted.

As a seed-sentience, isolated from his noosphere, Guilford could not hope to comprehend more than a fraction of the War. He wasn’t meant to. He had come, with others, for the sole purpose of intervening in the battle for the Earth.

He understood the Earth well enough.

In Europe, the psions had been bound (but only temporarily) in their abortive access point: a well, as it appeared in this plenum, linking the hidden structures of the Archive to the ontological Earth. The psions had used huge insectile creatures as their avatars, invested their means and motives in these animals, used them to build a crude stone city to protect their access point.

That city had fallen in an earlier battle. The passageway had been effectively sealed.

For now.

New activity had drawn him. The Higgs field, sweeping the Archive to create ontological time, clocked toward a new psilife diaspora. Another Armageddon. Another battle.

All this he sensed directly: the well, and his own avatar Guilford Law, the continent some called Darwinia; even the altered Martian landscape. Crises past and crises future.

He could not intervene, not directly. Nor could he simply capture and rule an avatar, as the psions did. He respected the moral independence of the seed-lives. He approached his avatar tentatively. He struggled to narrow himself to the avatar’s mental range… to become the purely mortal thing he had once been.

It was strange to rediscover that core of self, the chaotic bundle of fears and needs and aspirations that was the embryo of all sentience. Among his thoughts:

This once was me. This once was all that existed of me, naked and alone and afraid, no other Self. A mote on a sea of inanimate matter.

He was suffused with pity.

He entered the avatar’s perceptions as a phantom, which was all that he could manifest of himself in the Archive’s ontosphere. There is a battle coming, he told his avatar. You have a role to play. I need your help.

His avatar listened through Guilford’s plodding explanation. The words were clumsy, primitive, barely adequate.

And then his avatar refused him.

“I don’t care what you say.” The younger Guilford’s voice was frank and final. “I don’t know what you are or whether you’re telling the truth. What you’re describing, it’s medieval — ghosts and demons and monsters, like some tenth-century morality play.”

The infant sentience was bitter. He had been abandoned by his wife. He had seen far more than he could comprehend. He had watched his compatriots die.

The elder Guilford understood.

He remembered Belleau Wood and Bouresches. He remembered a wheat field red with poppies. He remembered Tom Compton, cut down by machine-gun fire. He remembered grief.

Book Three July 1945

“For each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.”

— A. W. E. O’Shaughnessy

Chapter Twenty-Six

In the Campanian Lowlands many of the old names had been revived. The Bay of Naples still opened to the Tyrrhenian Sea, was still bounded by Cape Miseno and the Sorrento Peninsula, was still dominated by the active volcano Vesuvius (though the first settlers commonly called it “Old Smoky”). The land was arable, the climate reasonably gentle. The dry spring wind blowing from Asia Minor was still known as the scirocco.

Settlements on the slopes and hills took ideosyncratic names. Oro Delta, Palaepolis, Fayetteville, Dawson City. Disciples of the utopian Upton Sinclair had founded Mutualville on the island once called Capri, though commerce had moderated their strict communal regimen. The harbor had been improved to promote trade. It was common now to see freighters from Africa, refugee ships from the tumbled lands of Egypt and Arabia, American oil tankers where there had once been only fishing boats and trawlers.