Darwinia

“They’re generous employers,” Crane said.

“Who?”

“The gods. They don’t care what you do on your own time. Morphine, cocaine, women, sodomy, murder, backgammon — it’s all the same to them. But you can’t stupefy yourself when they want your attention, and you certainly can’t inject a lethal overdose into your arm, if that was what you were attempting to do. Stupid thing to try, Elias, if I may say so.”

The car turned a corner. Dismal day was passing into dismal evening.

“This is business now, Elias.”

“Where are we going?” Not that he particularly cared, though he felt the queasy presence of the god inside him, ramping up his pulse, straightening his spine.

“To visit Eugene Randall.”

“I wasn’t told.”

“I’m telling you now.”

Vale looked listlessly at the upholstery of Crane’s brand-new Ford. “What’s in the bag?”

“Have a look.”

It was a leather doctor’s bag, and it contained just three articles: a surgical knife, a bottle of methyl alcohol, and a box of safety matches.

Alcohol and matches — to sterilize the knife? The knife to—

“Oh, no,” Vale said.

“Don’t be priggish, Elias.”

“Randall isn’t important enough for… whatever you have in mind.”

“It’s not what I have in mind. We don’t make these decisions. You know that.”

Vale stared at the blithe young man. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“No. Not that it matters.”

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“Elias, that’s privileged information. I’m sorry if you’re shocked. But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like.”

“You mean to kill Eugene Randall?”

“Certainly.”

“But why?”

“Not for me to say, is it? Most likely the problem is the testimony he plans to give the Chandler Committee. All he needs to do, and I know his dear departed Louisa Ellen already told him so, is to let the committee get on with its work. There are five so-called witnesses who will say they saw English-speaking gentlemen firing mortars and regulation Lee-Enfields at the Weston. Randall would save himself and the Smithsonian a great deal of trouble if he simply agreed to smile and nod, but if he insists on muddying the issue—”

“He believes Finch’s people may still be alive.”

“Yes, that’s the problem.”

“Even so — in the long run, what does it matter? If it’s a war the gods want, Randall’s testimony is hardly a serious impediment. Most likely the papers won’t even report it.”

“But they will report Randall’s murder. And if we’re careful, they’ll blame it on British agents.”

Vale closed his eyes. The wheels turn within the wheels, ad infinitum. For one agonizing moment he yearned for the morphine syringe.

Then a sullen determination rose in him, not precisely his own. “Will this take long?”

“Not long at all,” Crane told him soothingly.

Perhaps it was the lingering effect of the morphine in his bloodstream, but Vale felt the presence of his god beside him as he walked the empty museum corridor to Randall’s office. Randall was alone, working late, and probably the gods had arranged that, too.

His god was unusually tangible. When he looked to his left he could see it, or imagined he saw it, walking next to him. Its body was not pleasant or ethereal. The god was as obnoxiously physical as a full-grown steer, though more grotesque by a long reach.

The god had far too many arms and legs, and its mouth was a horror, sharp as a beak on the outside, wet and crimson within. A ridge of tumorous bumps stitched its belly to its neck, a sort of spine. He disliked the color of the god, a lifeless mineral green. Crane, walking to the right of him, saw nothing.

Smelled nothing. But the smell was tangible, too, at least to Vale’s nose. It was an astringent, chemical smell — the smell of a ta

They surprised Eugene Randall in his office. (But how much more surprised would Randall have been if he could see the hideous god! Obviously he couldn’t.) Randall looked up wearily. He had taken on the position of director since Walcott left the Institution, and the job had worn him down. Not to mention the congressional subpoena and his wife’s postmortem nagging.

“Elias!” he said. “And you’re Timothy Crane, aren’t you? We met at one of Eleanor’s salons.”

There would not be any talking. That time had passed. Crane went to the window behind Randall and opened his medical bag. He brought out the knife. The knife glistened in the watery light. Randall’s attention remained fixed on Vale.

“Elias, what is this? Honestly, I don’t have time for—”

For what? Vale wondered as Crane stepped swiftly forward and drew the knife across Randall’s throat. Randall gurgled and began to thrash, but his mouth was too full of blood for him to make much real noise.

Crane put the bloody instrument back in the bag and withdrew the brown bottle of methyl alcohol.

“I imagined you meant to sterilize the knife,” Vale said. Idiotic notion.

“Don’t be silly, Elias.”

Crane emptied the bottle across Randall’s head and shoulders and splashed the last of it over his desk. Randall dropped from his chair and began to crawl across the floor. One hand was clutched to his throat, but the wound pulsed gobbets of blood between his fingers.

Next, the matches.

Crane’s left hand was alight when he emerged from Randall’s burning office. Crane himself was fascinated, turning his hand before his eyes as the blue flames sighed into extinction for lack of fuel. Both flesh and cuff were unharmed.

“Exhilarating,” he said.

Elias Vale, suddenly queasy, looked for his attendant god. But the god was gone. Nothing left of it but smoke and firelight and the awful stench of burning meat.

Chapter Twenty-One

Guilford rode a fur snake, recovering his strength as Tom Compton led the animals up the slope of the valley. It wasn’t an easy climb. Ice-crusted snow bit at the snakes’ thick legs; the animals complained mournfully but didn’t balk. Maybe they understood what lay behind them, Guilford thought. Maybe they were eager to be away from the ruined city.

After dark, in a sleeting snow, the frontiersman found a glade within the forest and built a small fire. Guilford made himself useful by collecting windfall from the nearby trees, while Preston Finch, cloaked and grim, fed kindling to the flames. The fur snakes huddled together, their winter coats glistening, breath steaming from their blunt nostrils.

Di

Guilford ate sparingly. He wanted desperately to sleep — to sleep off chronic malnutrition, sleep off three days of hypothermia in the well, the shock of Sullivan’s death, the frostbite that had turned his toes and fingertips an ominous china white. But that wasn’t going to happen. And right now he needed to know exactly how bad the situation had become.

He asked the frontiersman how the others had died.

“It was all over by the time I got back,” Tom said. “Judging by their tracks, the attackers came from the north. Armed men, ten or fifteen, maybe spotted Diggs’s kitchen fire, maybe just got lucky. They must have come in shooting. Everybody dead but Finch, who hid out in the stables. The bandits left our snakes behind — they had snakes of their own. Left one of their own men, too, leg-shot, couldn’t walk.”

“Partisans?” Guilford asked.