Darwinia

She drew breath through clenched teeth and calculated the hours until morning. People outside want to hurt us, and they’ve cut the power and the telephone lines. We can’t leave and we can’t call for help and we can’t fight back…

Guilford took her aside, along with the young woman Tom Compton had brought to the house. As little as Guilford liked to talk about his past, Abby knew about his daughter, the daughter he had left in London twenty-five years ago. Abby recognized her even before Guilford said, “This is Lily.” Yes, obviously. She had the Law eyes, winter-morning blue, and the same fixed frown.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Abby said; then, realizing how it must sound, “I mean, I wish — under other circumstances—”

“I know what you mean,” Lily said gravely. “Thank you, Mrs. Law.”

And Abby thought: What do you know about the Old Men? Who let you in on their secrets? How much does Guilford know? Who’s out there in the dark wanting to kill my husband, my child?

No time for that now. These things had become luxuries: fear, anger, bewilderment, grief.

Nicholas looked up at his father’s face as Guilford straightened the blanket over him.

The candlelight made everything strange. The house itself seemed larger — emptier — as if it had expanded into the shadows. Nick knew something was very wrong, that the doors and windows were sealed against some threat. “Bad guys,” he had heard Tom Compton say. Which made Nick think of the movies. Claim jumpers, snake rustlers, burly men with dark circles around their eyes. Killers.

“Sleep if you can,” his father said. “We’ll settle this all up in the morning.”

Sleep was a long way off. Nick looked up at his father’s face with a feeling of loss that stabbed like a knife.

“Good night, Nick,” his father said, stroking his hair.

Nicholas heard, “Good-bye.”

Lily took the kitchen watch.

The house had two doors, front and rear, living room and kitchen. The kitchen was better defended, with its single small window and narrow door. The door was locked. The window was locked, too, but Lily understood that neither door nor window would present much of an obstacle to a determined enemy.

She sat on a wooden chair with Guilford’s old Remington rifle cradled in her lap. Because the room was dark, Lily had opened the blinds a crack and scooted her chair closer to the window. There was no moon tonight, only a few bright stars, but she could see the lights of freighters on the bay, an earthbound constellation.

The rifle was comforting. Even though she had never shot anything larger than a rabbit.

Welcome to Fayetteville, Lily thought. Welcome to Darwinia.

All her life Lily had read about Darwinia, talked about Darwinia — dreamed and daydreamed about Darwinia — to her mother’s great distress. The continent fascinated her. She had wanted since childhood to fathom its strangeness for herself. And here she was: alone in the dark, defending herself against demons.

Be careful, girl, what you wish for.

She knew virtually everything natural science had learned about Darwinia — i.e., not much. Detail in abundance, of course, and even some theory. But the great central question, the simple aching human why, remained unanswered. Interesting, though, that at least one other planet in the solar system had been touched by the same phenomenon. Both the Royal Observatory at Capetown and the National Observatory at Bloemfontein had published photographs of Mars showing seasonal differentiation and an indication of large bodies of water. A new world in the sky, a planetary Darwinia.

Her father’s letters had made sense of all this, though he hardly seemed to understand it himself. Guilford and Tom and all the Old Men had done what Guilford’s friend Sullivan couldn’t: explained the Miracle in secular terms. It was an outlandish explanation, certainly, and she couldn’t imagine what sort of experiment might confirm it. But all this strange theography of Archives and angels and demons could not have arisen in so many places or agreed in so many details if it weren’t substantially true.

She had doubted it at first — dismissed Guilford’s notes and letters as the hallucinatory raving of a half-starved survivor. Jeffersonville had changed her mind. Tom Compton had changed her mind. She had been taken into the confidence of the Old Men, and that had not merely changed her mind but convinced her of the futility of writing about any of this. She wouldn’t be allowed to, and even if she succeeded she wouldn’t be believed. Because, of course, there was no ruined city in the Alpine hills. It had never been mapped, photographed, overflown, or glimpsed from a distance, except by the vanished Finch expedition. The demons, Tom said, had sewn it up like a torn sleeve. They could do that.

But it was, at least in some intangible way, still there.

She kept herself awake by imagining that city deep in the Darwinian back country: the ancient soulless navel of the world. Axis of time. The place where the dead meet the living. She wished she could see it, though she knew the wish was absurd; even if she could find it (and she couldn’t; she was only mortal) the city was a dangerous place to be, possibly the most dangerous place on the surface of the Earth. But she was drawn by the idea of its strangeness the way, as a child, she had once loved certain names on the map: Mount Kosciusko, the Great Artesian Basin, the Tasman Sea. The lure of the exotic, and bless that little Wollongong girl for wanting it. But here I am, Lily thought, with this rifle on my knee.

She would never see the city. Guilford would see it again, though. Tom had told her that. Guilford would be there, at the Battle… unless his dogged love of the world held him back.

“Guilford loves the world too much,” Tom had told her. “He loves it like it’s real.”

Isn’t it? she had asked. Even if the world is made of numbers and machines… isn’t it real enough to love?

“For you,” Tom had allowed. “Some of us can’t let ourselves think that way.”

The Hindus spoke of detachment, or was it the Buddhists? To abandon the world. Abandon desire. How awful, Lily thought. An awful thing to ask of anyone, much less of Guilford Law, who not only loved the world but knew how fragile it was.

The old rifle sat across her legs with a terrible weight. Nothing moved beyond the window but the stars above the water, distant suns sliding through the night.

Abby, weaponless, crouched in a corner of the dimly candlelit room. Sometime after midnight Guilford came and hunkered down on the floor beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cool under the heat of his palm.

She said, “We’ll never be safe here again.”

“If we have to, Abby, we’ll leave. Move up-country, take another name…”

“Will we? Even if we do go somewhere else, somewhere no one knows us — what then? Do you watch me grow old? Watch me die? Watch Nicholas grow old? Wait for whatever miracle it was that put you here to come and take you away again?”

He sat back, startled.

“You couldn’t have hidden it much longer. You still look like you’re on the shy side of thirty.”

He closed his eyes. You won’t die, his ghost had told him, and he had watched his cuts heal miraculously, watched the flu pass him by even when it took his baby daughter. Hated himself for it, often enough.

But most of the time he just pretended. And as for Abby, Abby aging, Abby dying…

He healed quickly, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be killed. Some wounds were irrevocable, as even Tom was plainly aware. He couldn’t imagine a future past Abby, even if that meant throwing himself off a cliff or taking the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Everybody was entitled to death. Nobody deserved a century of grief.