Darwinia

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.

Chapter Thirty-Five

They came from the coast and the hinterland, from Tilson and Jeffersonville and New Pittsburgh and a hundred smaller towns; from the Alps, the Pyrenees, the compass points of the Territories. They came together, a secret army, where roads met rail lines, in a dozen villages and nameless crossroad inns. They carried their own weapons: pistols, rifles, shotguns. Ammunition arrived in crates at the railhead towns of Randall and Perseverance, where it was unloaded into trucks and wagons and distributed to tent armories deep in the forest. Artillerymen arrived disguised as farmers, field artillery packed under hay bales.

Guilford Law had spent the last year as an advance scout. He knew these hills and valleys intimately. He followed his own path toward the City of Demons, watching the forest for signs of the enemy.

The weather was clear, cool, stable. The mosque trees didn’t shed their angular foliage, only turned gray as the season passed. The forest floor, a mulch of plant tissue dotted with varicolored mold, disguised his tracks. He moved through cinnamon-scented shadow, among slim fingers of sunlight. His knee-length jacket was of cured wormhide, and underneath it he carried an automatic rifle.

The City of Demons wasn’t marked on any map. Public roads came nowhere near. Topological maps and aerial surveys ignored it, and neither the land nor the climate tempted homesteaders or loggers. Private aircraft, especially the little Winchester float planes popular in the Territories, occasionally passed overhead, but the pilots saw nothing unusual. The wooded valley had been edited out of human perception in the years since it was nearly exposed by the Finch expedition. It was invisible to human eyes.

But not to Guilford’s.

Go carefully now, he told himself. The land rose in a series of semi-wooded ridges. It would be too easy to make himself conspicuous, crossing these spines of ancient rock.

He approached the City, perhaps not coincidentally, from the same hillside where he had first seen it almost fifty years ago.

But no: he had seen it before that… he had seen it in its prime, more than ten thousand years earlier, its granite blocks freshly carved from the meat of the mountain, its avenues crowded with powerful armored bipeds, avatars of the psions. They were the product of an evolution in which invertebrates had taken a longer path toward the invention of the spine, a history that would have obliterated the old earth entirely if not for the intervention of galactic Mind. Battles half lost, Guilford thought, battles half won. In the midst of this new Europe the psions had left a hole in the mantle of the planet, a Well, a machine that communicated directly with the enabling codes of the Archive itself and from which, in due time — soon — the psions would re-emerge, to inhabit the earth even as they devoured it.

Here, and on a million Archival planets.

Now, and in the past, and in the future.

The memories were Guilford’s, in a sense, but vague, transient, incomplete. He was aware of his own limitations. He was a frail vessel. He wondered if he could contain what the god-Guilford was preparing to pour into him.

He lay prone at the top of the ridge and saw the City through a screen of nettle grass. He heard wind gusting among the stalks, felt billyflies settle among the hairs of his arms. He listened to the sound of his own breathing.

The City of Demons was being renewed.