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.

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.”

“The hell you don’t.”

He gave her a long look. “Karen, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.” Yes, Mr. Been-here-every-night-for-a-year, that’s my name.

“Karen, it’s an awkward question.”

“None of my business, in other words. But something’s up.”

“Is it?”

“Only if you have eyes. Every rail-rat and wood-louse in the Territories must be here tonight. You folks have a look about you, you know.”

Like something starved and beaten that refuses to die. But she wouldn’t tell him that.

For a split second she thought he was going to confide in her. The look that crossed his face was of such purified human loneliness that Karen felt her lower lip begin to tremble.

What he said was, “You’re a very pretty girl.”

“That’s the first time in fifteen years anybody’s called me a girl, Mr. Law.”

“It’s going to be a hard autumn.”

“Is it?”

“You might not see me for a while. Tell you what. If I’m back by spring, I might look you up. If that’s all right, I mean.”

“Okay with me, I suppose. Spring’s a long time off.”

“And if I don’t make it back—”

Back from where? She waited for him to finish.

But he swallowed his drink and shook his head.

Pretty girl, he had said.

She got a dozen spurious compliments a day from men who were drunk or indifferently particular. Compliments meant nothing. But what Guilford Law had said stayed with her through the evening. So simple, she thought. And sad, and curious.

Maybe he would look her up… and maybe that would be all right with her.

But tonight he finished his drink and went home alone, moving like a wounded animal. She challenged him with her eyes. He looked away.