“What kind of a god are you, then?”
“Not a god. I was born of mortal parents, Guilford, just like you.”
“A million years ago.”
“Far more than that. But I can’t manipulate the ontosphere the way you suggest. I can’t rewrite the past… and only you can influence the future.” He stood up. The picket carried himself with a dignity Guilford didn’t recognize as his own. For a moment Guilford seemed to see past him… not through him, but beyond the humble appearance into something as hot and immense as the sun.
This isn’t a human being, Guilford thought. Maybe it used to be a human being; maybe it even used to be Guilford Law. But it was some other kind of creature now. It walks between stars, Guilford thought, the way I might walk into Fayetteville on a sunny day.
“Consider the stakes. If this battle is lost, your daughter will be enslaved and your grandchildren will be used as incubators for something utterly soulless. In a very real sense, Guilford, they will be eaten. It’s a form of death from which there is no resurrection.”
Nick, Guilford thought. Something about Nick. Nick hiding behind the big living room sofa…
“And if all the battles are lost,” the picket said, “then all of this, all past, all future, everything you loved or might have loved, will be food for locusts.”
“Tell me something,” Guilford said. “Just one thing. Please explain why all this depends on me. I’m nothing special — you know that, if you’re what you say you are. Why don’t you go find somebody else? Somebody smarter? Somebody with the strength to watch his kids grow old and die? All I ever wanted — Christ! — is a life, the kind of life people have, fall in love, make babies, have a family that cares enough to give me a decent burial…”
“You have a foot in two worlds. Part of you is identical to part of me, the Guilford Law who died in France. And part of you is unique: the Guilford Law who witnessed the Miracle. That’s what makes this conversation possible.”
Guilford put his head down. “We were alike for what, nineteen or twenty years out of a hundred million? That’s hardly a significant fraction.”
“I’m immensely older than you are. But I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to carry a gun into a muddy trench. And fear for my life, and doubt the sanity of the enterprise, and feel the bullet, feel the pain, feel the dying. I don’t like asking you to walk into an even uglier war. But the choice is forced on us both.” He bowed his head. “I didn’t make the Enemy.”
Nick behind the sofa. Abby curled over him, protecting him. Horsehair and stitched cotton and the smell of gunpowder and — and—
Blood.
“I have nothing to offer you,” the picket said grimly, “but more pain. I’m sorry. If you go back, you take me with you. My memories. Bouresches, the trenches, the fear.”
“I want something,” Guilford said. He felt grief rising in him like a hot balloon. “If I do what you say—”
“I have nothing to offer.”
“I want to die. Not live forever. Grow old and die like a human being. Is that so much to ask?”
The picket was silent for a time.
Turing packets worked tirelessly to shore up the crumbling substructures of the Archive. Psilife advanced, retreated, advanced again on a thousand fronts.
A second wave of viral codes was launched into the Archive, targeted against the psions’ heavily armored clock sequences.
The noospheres hoped to disrupt the psions’ timing, to sever them from the ontosphere’s own Higgs clock. It was a daring plan, if dangerous; the same strategy might be turned against themselves.
Sentience waited: deeply patient, if deeply afraid.
Book Four
Autumn 1965
“Who sees the variety and not the unity, wanders on from death to death.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
There were hundreds of men like him working the trans-Alpine rail line.
They held Railworkers Union cards. They carved mountains with TNT, they bridged gorges, they spiked track. Or they were engineers, porters, oilers, machinists, stevedores.
When work was thin, they vanished into the wilderness for months at a time. Or they vanished, almost as easily, into the smoky urban slums of Tilson and New Pittsburgh along the Rhine.
They were solitary, silent. They had no friends, no family. They didn’t look especially old (their age was hard to place), but age surrounded them like an aura. Their carriage suggested an economy of motion, a terrible and sullen patience.
Karen Wilder knew the type. She’d seen plenty of them. Just lately, she’d seen more than ever.
Karen tended bar at the Schaffhausen Grill in the town of Randall, New Inland Territories. She’d been here five years now, wandered in from a mine town in the Pyrenees, broke and looking for work. She was good at her job and had a no-nonsense arrangement with the owner. The cook kept his hands off her and she didn’t have to go upstairs with the customers. (Though that was less of a problem since she turned forty last year. The offers hadn’t stopped, but they had slowed down some.)
Randall was a whistlestop on the Rhine-Ruhr line. The big freight cars came through every day, heavy with coal for Tilson, Carver, and New Dresden. Below the falls, the Inland Highway crossed the tracks. The railhead had grown enormously in the last few years. Respectable families had moved in. But Randall was still a frontier town, the Homestead and Emigration Laws still funneling in a steady stream of drifters from the cities. The new hands were troublesome, Karen had found; argumentative, quick with their fists. She preferred the company of longtimers, even (or especially) the nontalkative ones, like Guilford Law.
She had known him the day he first walked in — not his name, but his kind.
He was a longtimer of the purest ray serene. Lean, almost skinny. Big hands. Ancient eyes. Karen found herself to tempted to ask what those eyes had seen.
But he wasn’t much of a talker. He’d been a regular for a year, year and a half now. He came in evenings, ate sparingly, drank a little. Karen thought maybe he liked her — he always offered a word or two about the weather or the news. When he talked to her he inclined his body toward her like a shade plant leaning toward the sun.
But he always went upstairs with the whores.
Tonight was a little different.
Mid-September, the Schaffhausen tended to attract strictly locals. The summer crowd, loggers and snake-herders, low-rent tourists riding the rails, found warmer places to go. The owner had hired a Tilson-based jazz band in an effort to attract customers, but the musicians were expensive and hard on the female talent, and the trumpeter liked to play drunken scales in the town square at dawn. So that hadn’t lasted. Come September the Schaffhausen was restored to its usual calm.
Then the longtimers had begun showing up. (The Old Men, some people called them.) It didn’t seem unusual at first. People like that drifted through Randall all the time, renting some dusty old room for a while, moving on. They paid their bills, no questions asked, no questions answered. They were a fact of life, like the wild snakes that roamed the southern hills.
But lately some of these men had stayed longer than usual, and more had arrived, and they sat in clusters in the Schaffhausen arguing about god-knows-what in hushed tones, and Karen’s curiosity was aroused despite her best intentions.
So when Guilford Law sat at the bar and ordered a drink she put it in front of him and said, “Is there a convention in town or what?”
He thanked her politely. Then he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”