Guilford moaned involuntarily as the monster deftly nipped Tom’s head from his body.
The sheeting rain concealed all else. The air smelled of ozone and lightning.
He shouldn’t have stopped. The second monster had spotted him and was moving now at terrifying speed toward the Well, long legs pumping as efficiently as a leopard’s. Running, it made no sound audible over the hiss of the rain; but when it stopped it released a cloud of stinging solvent vapors, waste products of some unimaginable body chemistry. Its eyes, expressionless and strange, focused tightly on him.
He lifted his rifle and fired two rapid shots at the creature.
The bullets chipped its gleaming armor, perhaps cracked an exposed rib, caused it to stumble back a step. Guilford fired again, fired until his clip was empty and the monster lay motionless on the ground.
Tom, he thought.
But the frontiersman was beyond repair.
Guilford turned back to the Well.
The rim was close. The spiral of stone steps was intact, though perilously littered with fresh debris. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to take the stairs. Jump and let gravity carry him. There was no bottom to this rabbit hole, only the end of the world. He began to run.
He stopped when a human figure stood up not ten paces in front of him.
No, he realized, not human, only some poor soul less advanced in its destruction. The face in particular looked as if it had been broken long ago, bones shifting along the fault lines like volcanic plates.
This creature struggled to raise its own rifle, its arms shaking with the palsy of transformation.
Guilford took another clip of ammunition from his belt.
“You don’t want to shoot me,” the monster said.
The words cut through the rush of the rain and the distant crack of artillery.
Ignore him, the god-Guilford said.
“There’s someone with me, Guilford. Someone you know.”
He ejected the spent clip. “Who would that be?” Watching the monster struggle with its own rifle. Bad case of the shakes. Keep him talking.
No, the picket insisted.
The monster closed its eyes and said, “Dad?”
Guilford froze.
No.
“Is that you? I can’t see—”
Guilford froze, though he felt the picket’s urgent pleading.
“Dad, it’s me! It’s Nick!”
No, it isn’t Nick, because Nick—
“Nick?”
“Dad, don’t shoot! I’m inside here! I don’t want to die, not again!”
The monster still struggling against its own convulsions to raise the rifle. He saw it but couldn’t make sense of it. He remembered the bright, awful roses of his son’s blood.
The picket was suddenly beside him, faint as mist.
Time slowed to a crawl. He felt his hammering heart beat at half speed, slow timpani notes.
The monster flailed its gun with a glacial imprecision.
The picket said, “Listen to me. Quickly, now. That isn’t Nick.”
“What happens to the dead? Do the demons get them?”
“Not always. And that isn’t Nick.”
“How do I know?”
“Guilford. Do you think I would let them take him?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t. Nick is with me, Guilford. He’s with us.”
The picket held out his hands in a cradling motion, and for a moment — a sweet and terrible moment — Nick was there, eyes closed, asleep, twelve years old and at peace.
“That’s what this is all about,” the picket said. “These lives.”
Guilford said, “I’m so tired… Nick?”
But Nick had vanished again.
“Fire your gun,” the picket said sternly.
He did.
So did the monster.
Guilford felt the bullets pierce him. The pain, this time, was brutal. But that didn’t matter. Close now. He fired and fired again, until the man with the broken face lay shattered on the ground.
Guilford dragged his own broken body to the rim of the Well.
He closed his eyes and fell. Pain ebbed into mist. Free as a raindrop now. Hey, Nick, look at me. And he felt Nick’s somnolent presence. The picket had been telling the truth. Nick was wrapped in timelessness, sleeping until the end of the ontosphere, falling into the luminous waters of the Archive, numbers deeper than any ocean, warm as summer air.
He blinked and saw the god burst out of him. This luminous thing had once been Guilford Law, dead on a battlefield in France, nurtured by Sentience, equipotent with the gods and one of them, inseparable from them, a being Guilford could not begin to comprehend, all fierce light and color and vengeful as an angry angel, binding the demons who howled their frustration across the far and fading borders of the world.
Interlude
They stood a while on the high ground above the ruined City of Demons. The day was uniformly bright, but the sky was full of stars.
“What now?” Guilford asked.
“We wait,” the picket said, infinitely patient.
Guilford saw more men climbing the hillside. The City was silent now, empty once more. Guilford recognized the Old Men, Tom and Erasmus among them, whole and smiling. He was surprised he could see their faces so clearly across this distance.
“Wait for what?”
“The end of all battles,” the picket said.
Guilford shook his head sternly. “No.”
“No?”
“No. That’s not what I want. I want what I wasn’t allowed to have.” He looked hard at the picket. “I want a life.”
“All the life you want — eventually.”
“I mean a human life. I want to walk like a whole man, grow old before I die. Just… human life.”
The picket was silent for a long stretch.
I surprised a god, Guilford thought.
Finally the picket said, “It may be within my power. Are you certain this is what you want?”
“It’s all I ever wanted.”
The ancient Guilford nodded. He understood — the oldest part of him, at least, understood. He said, “But the pain—”
“Yes,” Guilford said flatly. “The pain. That, too.”
Epilogue
The End of Summer, 1999
Karen, back from her morning walk, told Guilford a huge sea wheel had washed up on the beach. After lunch (sandwiches on the veranda, though he couldn’t eat more than a bite) he went to have a look at this nautical prodigy.
He took his time, hoarding his energy. He followed a path from the house through dense ferns, through bell trees dripping August nectar. His legs ached almost at once, and he was breathless by the time he saw the ocean. The Oro Delta coast possessed as benign a climate as Darwinia could boast, but summer was often crippling humid and always hot. Clouds stacked over the windless Mediterranean like great marbled palaces, like the cathedrals of vanished Europe.
Last night’s storm had stranded the sea wheel high on the pebbled margin of the beach. Guilford approached the object tentatively. It was immense, at least six feet in diameter, not a perfect circle but a broken ellipse, mottled white; otherwise it looked remarkably like a wagon wheel, the flotsam of some undersea caravan.
In fact it was a sort of vegetable, a deep-water plant, typically Darwinian in its hollow symmetry.
Odd that it had washed up here, to grace the beach behind his house. He wondered what force, what tide or motion of the water, had detached the sea wheel from its bed. Or perhaps it was more evidence of the ongoing struggle between Darwinian and terrestrial ecologies, even in the benthic privacy of the ocean.
On land, in Guilford’s lifetime, the flowering plants had begun to conquer their slower Darwinian analogues. At the verge of the road from Tilson he had lately discovered a wild stand of morning glories, blue as summer. But some of the Darwinian species were returning the favor; skeleton lace and false anemones were said to be increasingly common south of the Mason-Dixon Line.