The sea wheel, a fragile thing, would be black and rotted by tomorrow noon. Guilford turned to walk home, but the pain beneath his ribs took him and he chose to rest a moment. He wetted a handkerchief in a tide pool and mopped his face, tasting the salt tang on his lips. His breath came hard, but that was to be expected. Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.
Forced to sit a while, he admired the strangeness of the sea wheel, its heady incongruity. A strange thing washed up on a strange shore: well, I know how that feels.
Last night’s storm had cleared the air. He watched the glossy sea give back the sky its blue. He whistled tunes between his teeth until he felt fit enough to start the journey back.
Karen would be waiting. He hadn’t told her what the doctor had said, at least not the full story, though she obviously suspected something. She would be all right about it, but he dreaded the phone calls from friends, perhaps especially the inevitable call from Lily and all the attendant consequences: a last visit, old sins and old grief hovering in the air like voiceless birds. Not that he wouldn’t like to see her again, but Lily herself was frail these days. At least he wouldn’t outlive her. Small mercies, Guilford thought.
Given these dark musings, he was not especially surprised, when he stood up and turned away from the stranded sea wheel, to find the picket waiting for him some yards down the rocky beach.
Guilford approached the phantom amiably. Skinny and boyish, the picket looked. This wasn’t his double, not anymore. This was someone else. Younger. Older.
He assayed the faintly flickering apparition. “Tell me,” Guilford said, “don’t you get tired of wearing those old Army rags?”
“They were my last human clothes. It wouldn’t seem right to wear something else. And too conspicuous if I don’t wear anything at all.”
“Been a while,” Guilford said.
“Thirty years,” the god said, “give or take.”
“So is this like one of those movies? You show up to unroll the heavenly red carpet? Out of my deathbed into the clouds and violin music?”
“No. But I’ll walk you back to the house, if that’s all right.”
“You don’t have any particular purpose, being here? Out slumming? Not that it isn’t nice to see you…”
“There’s a question I want to ask. But not just yet. Shall we walk? I always did think better on my feet.”
They talked haphazardly as they followed the path through the woods. Guilford wasn’t afraid of the picket, but he did feel a certain nervous excitement. He found himself rambling about Darwinia, how the continent had changed, how the cities and railways and airplanes had civilized it, though there was still plenty of back country for those who like to get lost… as if the picket didn’t know these things.
“You prefer the coast,” the phantom said.
He did. It suited him. Maybe he liked it because it was a place where opposite elements met and meshed: the old and new worlds; the sea and the land. Past and future.
The picket listened patiently, and Guilford was lulled for a while. Then it struck him. “This is the first one, isn’t it?”
“First what?” the picket asked.
“First sympathy visit. Drop in on the old bastard before he buys the farm.”
“This isn’t a sympathy visit.”
“Then why—?”
“Think back,” the picket said. “Thirty years ago, Guilford, I offered you a life like mine.”
“After the Binding,” Guilford agreed. “When both of us were dead.”
“And do you remember what you answered?”
“Vaguely.” A lie. He remembered every word.
“You said, ‘I want what I wasn’t allowed to have. I want to grow old before I die.’ ”
“Uh-huh.”
“It wasn’t easy. Bones from dust. Flesh from air. An aging, mortal, human body.”
“It’s true, I’ve been resurrected from the dead more than most people I know.”
“I came to ask whether it was worth it.”
“That’s your question? That’s the purpose of this little visit?”
They were nearing the house. The picket hung back in the shadow of the trees, as if he didn’t want Karen to see him. In the deep shade he was almost invisible, a true phantom, barely more tangible than a breeze.
“I was born a human being,” the picket said, “but I haven’t been simply human since the stars were young. And you’ve done something I never did. You grew old. You chose to grow old. So tell me. Was it worth it?”
Guilford wondered what to say. He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries. But he thought of his life since the Binding, both its general shape and its isolated events — getting to know his daughter Lily; marrying Karen and making a home for her; watching the general ebb and flow of babies born, lives lost, people inventing themselves in the sad, desperate way people do. I was born in 1898, Guilford thought: more than a century ago.
That might not mean much to a god, but it impressed Guilford a great deal.
Simple question, simple answer.
“Of course it was worth it.”
He turned to look for the picket, but the picket was gone, as if there had never been anything among the trees more substantial than the sunlight and the shade.
Karen wept when he told her what the doctor had said, but in the evening he wiped her tears and she firmed up. After all, she said, he wasn’t dead yet. She made death sound like a promissory note from a card shark: a debt not certain to be collected.
He loved this hardness in her, like the tart crispness of a fresh apple. She broke out the special-occasion bottle of Territory whiskey — the wedding and funeral bottle, she usually called it, though not tonight — and drank a fair portion of it before wheeling off to bed. He loved her intensely. He decided he had never loved her more.
But he couldn’t sleep.
He sat alone on the porch and looked at the sky.
Was that dot on the horizon Mars? He had never been good about celestial matters. Astronomy, that was one of Dr. Sullivan’s hobbies. Dr. Sullivan could have pointed him at Mars without blinking.
Mars would be trouble soon. The photographic probe last winter had only hinted at the problem. On Mars, the psions had broken out of their Wells and were enslaving the natives — a gentle, almost human people, Guilford knew, though he couldn’t say how or why he knew this. They would need help. More Bindings to come before the end of the World, and it was still anyone’s guess how the world would end. Not even the gods knew for sure.
The Martians needed help, but Guilford couldn’t supply it. That battle would have to go on without him.
Unless this was a clarion call, he thought, this burgeoning pain in his chest, a sort of trumpet note. If he died, perhaps he would find Nick, find Caroline and Abby (if they were speaking to each other), find Tom Compton for that matter… walk that long road from Belleau Wood to the stars. Become a god, and the gods would be called to battle, which meant…
He sighed and listened to the bugs humming in the night. Billyflies probed the porch light, lives briefer than a day, generation after generation aimed like arrows into the dark. Ecclesiastes: All the rivers run into the sea, but the sea is not full…
The sea, Guilford thought, is full of life.
And no time for grief, and too much to do. And only a moment to rest, to close his eyes, to sleep.