Darwinia

“You said it first.”

“Did I?”

“About five times in the last ten minutes. Shouldn’t we slow down?”

He did. A little. Nick relaxed. Summer-brown wildlands fled past the Ford’s dusty window.

“Son of a bitch,” his father said.

Abby was safe, if concerned, and Guilford felt somewhat foolish for hurrying home. Both the fire chief and the sheriff had telephoned, Abby said. “All of that can wait till morning,” he told her. “Let’s lock up and get some sleep.”

“Can you sleep?”

“Probably not. Not right away. Let’s get Nick tucked in, at least.”

Once Nick was squared away, Guilford sat at the kitchen table while Abby perked coffee. Coffee this close to midnight signified a family crisis. Abby moved around the kitchen with her usual economy. Tonight, at least, her frown resembled Nick’s.

Abby had aged with supreme grace. She was stocky but not fat. Save for the gray just begi

She gave Guilford a long look, debating something with herself. Finally she said, “You may as well talk about it.”

“What’s that, Abby?”

“For the last month you’ve been nervous as a cat. You hardly touch an evening meal. Now this.” She paused. “The fire chief told me it wasn’t an accident.”

His turn to hesitate. “Tim Mackelroy says a couple of homemade firebombs came through the window.”

“I see.” She folded her hands. “Guilford, why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what’s been bothering you?”

He said nothing.

“Is it something that happened before we met?”

“I doubt it.”

“Because you don’t talk about those times much. That’s all right — I don’t have to know everything about you. But if we’re in danger, if Nick is in danger—”

“Abby, honestly, I don’t know. True, I’m worried. Somebody torched my business, and maybe it was random lunacy or maybe somebody out there is holding some kind of grudge. All I can do is lock up and talk to Sheriff Carlysle in the morning. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you or Nick.”

She gazed at him a long time. “I’ll go to bed, then.”

“Sleep if you can,” Guilford told her. “I’ll sit out here a while.”

She nodded.

The arson.

The stranger at the door.

The picket.

You leave a thing behind, Guilford thought, and time passes, ten, fifteen, twenty-five years, and that ought to be the end of it.

He remembered it all vividly, in all the bright colors of a dream, the killing winter in the ancient city, the agony of London, the loss of Caroline and Lily. But, Christ, that had been a quarter of a century ago — what could be left of that time that would make him worth killing?

If what the picket had told him then was true—

— but he had written that off as a fever dream, a distorted memory, a half hallucination—

But if what the picket had told him was true, maybe twenty-five years was the blink of an eye. The gods had long memories.

Guilford went to the window. The bay was dark, only a few commercial vessels showing lights. A dry wind moved the lace curtains Abby had hung. Stars shivered in the sky.

Time to be honest, Guilford thought. No wishful thinking. Not when your family’s at stake.

It was possible — admit it — that old debts were about to be collected.

The hard question. Could he have prevented this?

No.

Anticipated it?

Maybe. He had wondered often enough if there might not one day be a reckoning. Far as the world knew, the Finch expedition had simply vanished in the wilderness between the Bodensee and the Alps. And the world had got on well enough without him.

But what if that had changed?

Abby and Nicholas, Guilford thought.

No harm must come to them.

No matter what the gods wanted.

He followed Abby to bed a couple of hours before dawn. He didn’t want to sleep, only to close his eyes. The presence of her, the soft music of her breath, eased his thoughts.

He woke to sunlight through the east window, to Abby, fully dressed, her hand on his shoulder.

He sat up.

“He’s back,” she said. “That man.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

He thought of all the ways the continent had changed in the last quarter century.

New harbors, settlements, naval bases. Rail and roads to the interior. Mines and refineries. Airstrips.

The new District system, the elected Governors, the radio networks. Homesteads on the Russian steppes, this side of the volcanic zone that divided Darwinia from Old Asia. Skirmish battles with Arabs and Turks. The bombing of Jerusalem, this new war with the Japanese, the draft riots up north.

And so much land still empty. Still a vastness of forest and plain into which a man might, for all purposes, vanish.

Abby had given the stranger a seat at the breakfast table. He was working his way through a plate of Abby’s flapjacks. He handled the knife and fork like a five-year-old. A dewdrop of corn syrup lingered in his thicket of beard.

Guilford gazed at the man with a torrent of emotion: shock, relief, renewed fear.

The frontiersman speared a last bite of breakfast and looked up. “Guilford,” he said laconically. “Long time.”

“Long time, Tom.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

A fresh briar. A tattered cloth bag of river weed. Guilford said, “Let’s go outside.”

Abby touched Guilford’s arm questioningly. “District police and the fire chief want you to call them. We need to talk to the trust company, too.”

“It’s okay, Abby. Tom’s an old friend. All that other business can wait a while. What’s burned is burned. There’s no hurry now.”

Her eyes expressed grave reservation. “I suppose so.”

“Keep Nick in the house today.”

“Thank you kindly for the meal, Mrs. Law,” Tom Compton said. “Very tasty.”

The frontiersman hadn’t changed in twenty-five years. His beard had been trimmed since that awful winter, and he was stockier — healthier — but nothing fundamental had changed. A little weathering, but no sign of age.

Just like me, Guilford thought.

“You’re looking well, Tom.”

“Both of us are healthy as horses, for reasons you ought to have figured out. What do you tell people, Guilford? Do you lie about your age? It was never a problem for me — I never stayed in one place long enough.”

They sat together on the creaking front-porch of the house. Morning air came up the slopes from the bay, fresh as cool water and scented with growing things. Tom filled his pipe but didn’t light it.

Guilford said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah, you do. You also know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. So let’s not shovel too much shit, okay?”

“It’s been a quarter century, Tom.”

“It’s not that I don’t understand the urge. Took me ten years, personally speaking, before I broke down and said okay, the world’s fucking up and I been tapped to help fix it. That’s not an easy thing to believe. If it’s true it’s fucking frightening, and if it’s not true, then we all ought to be locked up.”

“We all?”

The frontiersman applied match to bowl. “There are hundreds of us. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Guilford sat silently for a time in the morning sunlight. He hadn’t had much sleep. His body ached, his eyes ached. Just about twelve hours ago he had been in Fayetteville staring at the ashes of his business. He said, “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but there’s a lot on my mind.”

“You have to stop this.” The frontiersman’s voice was solemn. “Jesus, Guilford, look at you, living like a mortal man, married, for Christ’s sake, and a kid in there, too. Not that I blame you for wanting it. I might have liked that kind of life myself. But we are what we are. You and Sullivan used to congratulate yourselves for being so fuckin’ open-minded, not like old Finch, making history out of wishes. But here you are — Guilford Law, solid citizen, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, and God help anybody who doesn’t play along.”