Darwinia

But the person she had so painstakingly created, this dutiful secretarial drone, the unloved middle-aged woman married to her work — that person wouldn’t ignore the summons.

She thought briefly of what Guilford had told her about her grandfather during their brief time in Fayetteville. Her grandfather had been a Boston printer so firmly attached to his sense of duty that he had been killed while attempting to reach his print shop — which hadn’t seen a paying customer for a month — in the midst of that city’s food riots.

Hey, grandfather, Lily thought. Is this what it felt like, fighting the crowd?

The receiver was already in her hand. “Yes?”

“Please come in,” Matthew Crane said.

His voice was hoarse and in articulate. Lily looked with deep foreboding at the closed inner door.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Elias Vale approached the sacred city, leaving bloody tracks in the loam beneath the sage-pine trees.

He wasn’t accustomed to this raw Darwinian wilderness. His god guided his steps, had steered him from the train yard at Perseverance past primitive mine heads, down dirt and gravel roads, at last into the unfenced forest. His god warned him away from the white-bone coral of the insect middens, found him fresh water to drink, sheltered him from the chill of the clear autumn nights. And it was his god, Vale supposed, who infused in him this sense of purpose, of wholeness, of clarity.

His god, to date, had not explained the rapid loss of his hair and nails, nor the way his immortal skin lacerated and sloughed away after any minor injury. His arms were a patchwork of weeping sores; his shoulders throbbed with pain; his face — which he had last seen reflected in a pool of icy water — seemed to be coming apart along its fractured seams. His clothes were stiff with dried fluids. He stank, a piercing chemical reek.

Vale climbed a wooden ridge, leaving his pink worm-trail in the dry soil, his excitement flaring to a crescendo. Close now, his god whispered, and as he crested the hill he saw the city of redemption, the sacred city glittering darkly in its hidden valley, vast and imperial and ancient, long uninhabited but alive now with god-ridden men. The city’s heart, the Well of Creation, still beat beneath a fractured dome. Even at this distance Vale could smell the city, a mineral fragrance of steam and sunlight on cold granite, and he wanted to weep with gratitude, humility, exaltation. I am home, he thought, home after too many years in too many lightless slums and dark alleys, home at last.

He ran gladly down the wooded slope, breathless but agile, until he reached the barbed-wire perimeter where men like himself, half gods seeping pink-stained plasma, greeted him wordlessly.

Wordlessly because there was no need to speak, and because some of these men might not have been able to speak even if they had wanted to, considering the way their skin drooled from the faces like rotten papier-mâché. But they were his brothers and Vale was immensely pleased to see them.

They gave him an automatic rifle and a box of ammunition, showed him how to sling these things over his blistered shoulder and how to arm and fire the rifle, and when the sun began to set they took him to a ruin where a dormitory had been installed. There was a thin mattress for Vale to sleep on, deep in the stony darkness, wrapped in the organic stench of dying flesh and acetone and ammonia and the subtler odor of the city itself. Somewhere, water dripped from stone to stone. The music of erosion.

Sleep was elusive, and, when he did sleep, he dreamed. The dreams were nightmares of powerlessness, of being trapped and slowly suffocated in his own body, smothered and submerged in the effluvia of his flesh. In his dreams Vale longed for a different home, not the sacred city but some abandoned home that had slipped from his grasp long ago.

He woke to find his body covered in delicate green pustules, like pebbled leather.

He spent a day on a makeshift firing range with those among his mute companions who could still hold and operate a rifle.

Those who could not — whose hands had become ragged claws, whose bodies were racked with convulsions, who had budded new appendages from their enlarged spines — made their war plans elsewhere.

And Vale understood, by way of his god’s silent communication, some of the truth of the situation. These changes were natural but had come too soon, had been provoked by sabotage in the realm of the gods.

His gods were powerful, but not all-powerful; knowing, but not all-knowing.

That was why they needed his help.

And it was a pleasure to serve, even if some fraction of himself cried out against his captivity, even if he felt, from time to time, a painful nostalgia for the part of him that was merely human.