Darwinia

The psions had not yet emerged from their Well, but the streets were inhabited once more, this time by demon-ridden men. More old war buddies, Guilford thought. Like the Old Men gathering in the forest, these men had died at Ypres or the Marne or at sea — died in one world, lived in another. They were conduits for the transit between the Archive and its ontosphere. Lacking conscience, they were perfect vehicles for the psions. They were the Defenders of the City of Demons and they carried their own weapons. They had been arriving singly or in pairs for many months.

Guilford counted their tents and tried to spot their entrenchments and artillery positions. Clear, delicate sunlight cast cloud-shadows over the City. The Dome of the Well had been cleared of extraneous rubble. It stood distinctly visible now, a plume of moist air rising from its broken shell into the autumn afternoon.

Guilford sketched the entrenchments in a pocket notebook, marking points of vulnerability, possible avenues of attack from the wooded hillside. Their clock is running fast, he reminded himself. The Turning packets had done their work. They’re not as prepared as they should be.

But the defenders had dug in solidly, in concentric layers of entrenchments and barbed wire ranging from the City’s crumbled perimeter to the Dome of the Well.

It wouldn’t be an easy fight.

He watched the City as the afternoon waned but saw nothing more… only those sundial streets, counting hours against the earth.

He returned as cautiously as he had come. Shadows pooled like water among the trees. He found himself thinking of Karen, the barmaid at the Schaffhausen Grill back in Randall. What could she possibly see in him? I am as old as leather, Guilford thought. Dear God, I’m barely human anymore.

Still, it attracted him, the familiar fantasy of human warmth… it attracted him; but it reeked of nostalgia and pain.

Daylight had faded by the time he arrived at camp. Dinner was tinned rations, probably misappropriated from some freighter bound for the China Sea. Ancient men milled among the darktrees. Ghost Soldiers, some of them called themselves. This was an infantry unit, and the unit commander was Tom Compton, who sat pipe in hand by the bank of a stony creek contemplating the last blue of the evening sky.

Guilford could not look at Tom without a sensation of double exposure, of layered memory, because Tom had been with him at Belleau Wood, their battalion marching slow cadence into enemy fire, two fresh American soldiers determined to rout the Boche the way their grandfathers had routed Jeff Davis’s armies, not quite believing in the bullets even as the bullets decimated their lines like the blade of an invisible scythe.

Other memories, other enemies: Tom and Lily and Abby and Nick…

No innocence left between us, Guilford thought, only the stink of blood.

He reported what he had seen at the City.

“The weather should hold fair,” the frontiersman said, “at least for another day. I doubt that favors us.”

“We move out tonight?”

“Caissons are already rolling. Don’t count on getting much sleep.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

In her fifteen years at the Department of Defense, Lily thought she had taken the measure of Matthew Crane.

He was a civilian “consultant” who spent most of his time lunching with congressional overseers and signing his name to duplicate copies of appropriations paperwork. He was tall, gaunt, personable, and well-connected. His staff of three secretaries and a half dozen aides was not overtaxed. His salary was generous.

He was, of course, demon-ridden, and for the last fifteen years Lily’s real work had consisted of observing Mr. Matthew Crane and occasionally passing her observations to the Old Men. She didn’t know how useful or important any of this was. Possibly she would never know. Her most private fear was that she had wasted years performing trivial espionage in aid of a final Battle that might not happen in her lifetime and would probably not be resolved for ages — eons.

She was fifty years old, and she had never married, seldom even come close. She had learned to live with her solitude. It had its consolations.

The irony, perhaps, was that she had come to feel a kind of fondness for Matthew Crane. He was polite, reserved, and punctual. He wore tailored suits and was meticulous, even vain, about his clothing. She detected a vestige of human uncertainty buried under that glaze of absolute emotional control.

He was also, at least in part, a creature calculating, ruthless, and not at all human.

This morning he came into the office disheveled, clutching his left arm against his body, and brushed past the secretarial staff wordlessly. Lily exchanged a concerned look with Barb and Carol, the younger secretaries, but said nothing.