Darwinia

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lily left work at four-thirty and rode a bus to the National Museum.

The day was cool, clear, brisk. The bus was crowded with grim wage earners, middle-aged men in worsted suits and crumpled hats. None of them understood the imminence of celestial war. What they wanted, in her experience, was a cocktail, di

She envied them.

There was a theme exhibit at the Museum, advertised on immense ba

“Miracle,” she supposed, to appease the religious lobbies. She still preferred to think of the continent as Darwinia, the old Hearst nickname. The irony was lost now; most people acknowledged that Europe had a fossil history of its own, whatever that might mean, and she could well imagine the young Charles Darwin collecting beetles in the Rhine marshes, puzzling out the continent’s mystery. Though perhaps not its central mystery.

Off the bus, through cool air into the fluorescent i

The exhibit was immense. Abby ignored the majority of it and walked directly to the glass case devoted to the Finch Expedition of 1920 and the brief Anglo-American conflict. Here were examples of old-time compasses, plant-presses, theodolites, a crude memorial retrieved years after the event from the Rhinelands below the Bodensee: In Memory of Dr. Thomas Markland Gillvany. Photographs of the members of the expedition: Preston Finch, ridiculously stiff in a solar topee; gaunt Avery Keck; luckless Gillvany; poor martyred John Watts Sullivan… Diggs, the cook, wasn’t represented, nor was Tom Compton, but here was her father, Guilford Law, with a day’s beard and a fla

She touched the glass case with the tip of a finger. She hadn’t seen her father for twenty years, not since that dreadful morning in Fayetteville, the sun rising, it had seemed to her, on an ocean of blood.

He hadn’t died. Grave as his wounds were, they healed rapidly. He had been held in the Oro Delta County Hospital under surveillance: the Territorial Police wanted him to explain the gunshot deaths of Abby, Nicholas, three anonymous out-of-towners, and Sheriff Carlyle. But he was ambulatory long before the doctors anticipated; he left the hospital during the midnight shift after overpowering a guard. A warrant was issued, but that was hardly more than a gesture. The continent swallowed fugitives whole.

He was still out there.

She knew he was. The Old Men contacted her from time to time. Periodically, she told them what she learned from her secretarial job in the office of Matthew Crane — a demon-ridden Department of Defense functionary — and they reassured her that her father was still alive.

Still out there, unmaking the Apocalypse.

The time, they insisted, was close at hand.

Lily paused before an illuminated diorama.

Here was a Darwinian fossil biped — she couldn’t remember or pronounce its Latin name — a two-legged and four-armed monster that had hunted the European plains as recently as the Ice Age, and a formidable beast it was. The skeleton in the diorama stood eight feet tall, with a massive ventral spine to which dense bands of muscle had once been attached, a domed skull, a jaw full of flint-sharp teeth. And here beside it a reconstruction, complete with chitinous skin, glass eyes, serrated claws long as kitchen knives, tearing the throat of a fur snake.

A museum exhibit, like the photograph of Guilford Law; but Lily knew neither her father nor the beast was truly extinct.

“We’re closing down shortly, Ma’am.”

It was the night guard, a short man with a slack paunch, nasal voice, and eyes far more ancient than his face. She didn’t know his name, though they had met often before, always like this. He was her contact.

As before, she pressed a book into his hand. She had bought the book yesterday at a chain store in Arlington. It was a popular science book, The Martian Canals Reconsidered, with the latest photographs from Palomar, but Lily had only glanced at it. Interleaved between its pages were documents she had photocopied from work.

“Someone must have left this,” she said.

The guard accepted the book into his beefy hands. “I’ll see it gets to the Lost and Found.”

He had exchanged this pleasantry with her often enough that she had begun to think of it as another name for the Old Men, the Veterans, the Immortals: the Lost and Found.

“Thank you.” She was brave enough to smile before she walked away.

Growing old, Matthew Crane thought, is like justice. It must not only happen, it must be seen to happen.

He had devised a number of techniques to ensure that he didn’t appear conspicuously young.

Once a year — every autumn — he retired to the privacy of his marbled bathroom, showered, toweled himself dry, and sat before the mirror with a pair of tweezers, plucking hairs from his head to create the effect of a receding hairline. The gods were not kind enough to anesthetize him during this procedure, but he had grown accustomed to the pain.

When that was finished, he etched few new lines into his face with the edge of a straight razor.

The technique was delicate. It was a question of cutting deeply (but not too deeply) and often. This area at the corner of the eye, for instance. He took care not the slice the eye itself, drawing the blade firmly outward along the cheek. Blood welled up, briefly. Dab and repeat. After the third or fourth cut, the stubbornly immortal flesh yielded a permanent scar.

Artistry.

He knew, of course, how all this would look to an untutored individual, i.e., quite ghastly. Slice, daub, slice again, like a doctor practicing cranial surgery on a corpse, and beware the nerves that ran beneath the skin. He had once given himself a droopy lip that lasted three days and prompted one of his aides to inquire whether he might have had a stroke. It was delicate work that required patience and a steady hand.

He kept the gear in a leather bag in the medicine cabinet, the Immortal’s Makeup Kit: fresh razors, a whetting stone, cotton balls, tweezers.

To approximate the roughness of aged skin, he found sandpaper handy.

He preferred a number ten grit, applied until the pores grew bloody.

Obviously, the illusion couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. But it wouldn’t have to be. Soon the war would take another, different turn; disguises would be shed; in six months, a year… well, everything would be different. He had been promised as much.

He finished with the razor, cleaned it, rinsed droplets of blood from the sink, flushed bloody wads of cotton down the toilet. He was satisfied with his work and about to leave the bathroom when he noticed something peculiar about himself. The nail of his left index finger was missing. The space where it should have been was blank — a moist, pink indentation.

That was odd. He didn’t remember losing the nail. There had been no pain.

He held both hands in front of him and inspected them with a deep uneasiness.

He discovered two more loose nails, right thumb and right pinky. Experimentally, he teased the thumbnail up. It parted from the flesh with a gluey, nauseating smack and dropped into the basin of the sink, where it glistened like a beetle’s wing on the steamy porcelain.

Well, he thought. This is new.

Some kind of skin disease? But surely it would pass. The nails would grow back. That was how things worked, after all. He was immortal.