Clearly he remembered her. He stood at her table, the frontiersman beside him, wearing an expression that combined awe and doubt and — unless she was imagining this — the strictures of an ancient regret. Her heart hammered. She said, idiotically, “Ah, you must be Guilford Law.”
He croaked, “You’re Lily.”
“You two talk,” Tom said. “I need a drink.”
“Watch the door for us,” Lily said.
It didn’t go smoothly, not at first. He seemed to want to know everything and to explain everything: asking questions, interrupting her answers, interrupting himself, beginning reminiscences that trailed into silence. He fumbled a cup of coffee onto the floor, cursed, then blushed and apologized for his language.
She said, “I’m not fragile. And I’m not five. I think I know what you’re going through. This isn’t easy for me, either, but can we start fresh? Two adults?”
“Two adults. Sure thing. It’s just that—”
“What?”
He drew himself up. “I’m just so pleased to see you, Lil.”
She bit her lip and nodded.
This is hard, Lily thought, because I know what he is. He sits there like an ordinary man, fiddling with his cuffs, drumming a finger on the table. But he was no more an ordinary man than Tom Compton was: they had been touched by something so immense it beggared the imagination.
Her half-human father.
She sketched out her life for him. She wondered if he would approve of her work — odd jobs at a Sydney paper, research, some magazine articles, her own byline. She was a thirty-year-old unmarried career girl, not a flattering description. It suggested even in Lily’s mind some hollow-boned spinster, probably with bad makeup and pet cats. Was that what Guilford saw, sitting across the table from him?
He seemed more concerned with her safety. “I’m sorry you had to stumble into this, Lil.”
“I’m not sorry I did. Yes, it’s frightening. But it’s also the answer to a lot of questions. Long before I understood any of this I was fascinated by Darwinia, by the idea of Darwinia, even as a child. I audited some classes at the University — geology, genesis theory, what they call ‘implicit historiography,’ the Darwinian fossil record and such. There’s so much to know about the continent, but always a mystery at the center of it. And nobody has as much as a ghost of an answer, unless you count the theologians. When I came across your notes — and met Tom, later on — well, it meant there was an answer, even if it’s a strange one, even if it’s hard to accept.”
“Maybe you were better off not knowing.”
“Ignorance is not bliss.”
“I’m afraid for your life, Lil.”
“I’m afraid for everybody’s life. I can’t let that stop me.”
He smiled. Lily added, “I’m not joking.”
“No, of course not. It’s just that for a second there you reminded me of someone.”
“Oh? Who?”
“My father. Your grandfather.”
She hesitated. “I’d like to hear about him.”
“I’d like to tell you.”
What he saw in her, truthfully, was a great deal of her mother. Save for her lighter coloring she might have been Caroline — she seemed as willful as Caroline, certainly, but without the hard core of anxiety and doubt. Caroline had always been inclined to turn away from the world. Lily wanted to tackle it head-on.
Tom suggested the hotel dining room was too public for Guilford’s good, especially with the evening crowd heading in. But there was a pebbled beach downhill from the hotel and north of the docks, and Guilford walked there with Lily.
The evening sun made patchwork shadows among the rocks. Ribbons of seaweed clung to a fractured wooden piling. A bright blue salt worm twined its way in pursuit of the ebbing tide.
Lily plucked a wild sandberry from the scrub bushes above the tide line. “The bay is beautiful,” she said.
“The bay’s a mess, Lil. Everything washes up here. Pine tar, sewage, engine oil, diesel fuel. We take Nicholas swimming at the beaches up north of Fayetteville where the water’s still clean.”
“Tom told me about Nicholas. I’d like to meet him sometime.”
“I’d like you to meet him. I just don’t know if it’s wise. If Tom’s right, you’ve put yourself in a dangerous position. So I have to ask, Lil. Why are you here?”
“Maybe I wanted to see you.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not all.”
“No. That’s not all.”
They sat together on a cracked concrete seawall.
“You were right, you know. My mother thought you were crazy — or she was shocked that you were still alive, which made her, I guess, an adulteress or something like that. She didn’t like to talk about you, even after he left.”
“This Colin Watson, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Was he good to you?”
“He wasn’t a bad man. Just not a very happy one. Maybe he lived in your shadow. Maybe we all did.”
“He left her?”
“After a few years. But we got by.”
“How did Caroline die?”
“The influenza, that year it was so bad. Nothing dramatic, she just… didn’t get better.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But you never came after us.”
“I wouldn’t have done either of you any good.” Just the opposite, Guilford thought. Look at Abby. Look at Nick. “So what’s next? You can’t publish anything about all this. You must know that.”
“I may be mortal, but I’m not powerless. Tom says there’s work for me in the States. Nothing dangerous. Just watching. Telling people what I see.”
“You’ll get yourself killed.”
“There’s a war on,” Lily said.
“I doubt Tokyo can hold out much longer.”
“Not that war. You know what I mean.”
The War in Heaven. Psilife, the Archive, the secret machinery of the world. He felt years of frustration boil up in him. “For your own sake, Lil, don’t get involved. Ghosts and gods and demons — it’s some nightmare out of the Dark Ages.”
“But it’s not!” She frowned earnestly at him. Her frown was a little like Nick’s. “That’s what John Sullivan believed, and he was right: it’s not a nightmare. We live in a real world — maybe not what it appears to be, but a real world with a real history. What happened to Europe, it wasn’t a miracle, it was an attack.”
“So we’re ants in an anthill, and something decided to step on us.”
“We’re not ants! We’re thinking beings—”
“Whatever that means.”
“And we can fight back.”
He stood up stiffly. “I have a family. I have a son. I want to run my business and raise my child. I don’t want to live a hundred years. I don’t want to be broken on a wheel.”
“But you’re one of the unlucky ones,” Lily said softly. “You don’t have a choice.”
Guilford found himself wishing he could wind back the days until his life was intact again. Restore Abby and Nick and the photo shop and the house on the headland, status quo ante, the illusion he had so fervently loved.
He booked a room at the hotel in Oro Delta. He paid cash and used a fake name. He needed time to think.
He called to make sure Abby and Nick were all right at her cousin Antonio’s outside Palaepolis. Tony picked up the phone. Tony ran a vineyard in the hills and owned a rambling brick house near the property, plenty of room for Abby and Nick even with Tony’s own two kids tearing up the place. “Guilford!” Tony said. “What is it this time?”