Darwinia

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.”

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.

Fayetteville was not the largest settlement hugging the bay. It was less an independent town these days than it was a finger of Oro Delta stretched down the coast, catering to farmers and farmworkers. The lowlands produced rich crops of corn, wheat, sugar beets, olives, nuts, and hemp. The sea provided docketfish, curry crabs, and salt lettuce. No native crops were cultivated, but the spice shops were well stocked with dingo nuts, wineseed, and ginger flax foraged from the wildlands.

Guilford approved of the towm. He had watched it grow from the frontier settlement it had been in the twenties into a thriving, relatively modern community. There was electricity now in Fayetteville and all the other Neapolitan townships. Streetlights, pavement, sidewalks, churches. And mosques and temples for the Arabs and Egyptians, though they mainly congregated in Oro Delta down by the waterfront. A movie theater, big on Westerns and the preposterous Darwinian adventures churned out by Hollywood. And all the less savory amenities: bars, smokehouses, even a whorehouse out on Follette Road past the gravel pit.

There was a time when everybody in Fayetteville knew everybody else, but that time had passed. You were liable to see all kinds of strange faces on the streets nowadays.

Though the familiar ones were often more disturbing.

Guilford had seen a familiar face lately.

It paced him along the hilly roads when he went walking. All this spring he had seen the face at odd moments: gazing from a wheat field or fading into sea fog.

The figure wore a tattered and old-fashioned military uniform. The face looked like his own. It was his double: the ghost, the soldier, the picket.

Nicholas Law, who was twelve years old and keen to enjoy what remained of the summer sunlight, excused himself and bolted for the door. The screen clattered shut behind him. Through the window Guilford caught a glimpse of his son, a blur in a striped jersey heading downhill. Past him, there was only the sky and the headland and the evening blue sea.

Abby came from the kitchen, where she had taken dessert out of the refrigerator. Something with ice cream. Store-bought ice cream, still a novelty in Guilford’s mind.

She stopped short when she saw the abandoned plate. “He couldn’t wait for dessert?”

“Guess not.” Stickball at twilight, Guilford thought. The broad green lawn in front of the Fayetteville school. He felt a pang of dislocated nostalgia.

“You’re not hungry either?”

She was holding two desserts. “I’ll take a taste,” he said.

She sat across the table, her pleasant face skeptical. “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

“A little. Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“Off by yourself too often.” She sampled the ice cream. Guilford noticed the fine filaments of gray at her temples. “There was a man here today.”

“Oh?”

“He asked if this was Guilford Law’s house, and I said it was, and he asked if you were the photographer with the shop on Spring Street. I said you were and he could probably reach you there.” Her spoon hovered over the ice cream. “Was that right?”

“That was fine.”

“Did he come to see you?”

“May have. What did this gentleman look like?”

“Dark. He had odd eyes.”

“Odd in what way, Abby?”

“Just — odd.”

He was unsettled by the story of this stranger at the door and Abby alone to greet him. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not worried,” Abby said carefully. “Unless you are.”

He couldn’t bring himself to lie. She wasn’t easily fooled. He settled for a shake of his head. Plainly she wanted to know what was wrong. Plainly, he couldn’t tell her.

He had never spoken of it — not to anyone. Except in that long-ago letter to Caroline.

At least the man at the door had not been Guilford’s double. You forget, he thought, after so many years. When a memory is so strange, so foreign to the rigor of daily life, it falls right out of your head… or it rattles there, half-noticed, like a pea in a whistle. Until something reminds you. Then it comes back fresh as an old dream stored in ice, unwrapped and glinting in the light of day.

So far there had only been glimpses — harbingers, perhaps; omens; rogue memories. Maybe it meant nothing, that youthful face tracking him in a crowd and then gone, gazing like a sad derelict from evening alleyways. He wanted to think it meant nothing. He feared otherwise.

Abby finished dessert and carried away the dishes. “Mail came from New York today,” she said. “I left it by your chair.”

He was grateful to be released from this dark chain of thought. He moved into what Abby called “the living room,” though it was only the long south end of the plain rectangular house Guilford had built, largely by hand, a decade ago. He had framed the structure and poured the foundations; a local contractor had plastered and shingled it. Houses were easier in a warm climate. It was Abby and Nicholas who had brought the house to life, with framed pictures and tablecloths and antimacassars, with rubber balls and wooden toys lurking under the furniture.

The mail amounted to several back issues of Astounding, plus a stack of New York papers. The newspapers looked depressing: details of the war with Japan, better reporting than the wire-service coverage in the Fayetteville Herald but more dated.