City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  Down the block, a single Thai restaurant spilled a warm glow from its windows and open door.

  She took a hungry half breath and looked up and down the wide street, deserted except for the bus’s dwindling taillights. Shouldering her pack, she crossed and paused in a puddle of sour orange glow cast by a streetlight. Stared up at the green slab wall of the warehouse. She could hide here. Nobody would find her. Nobody would know anything about her.

  It felt right.

  She knew how to erase trails and blank memories. If the old man turned out to be a greasy pervert—she could handle that. She had dealt with worse—much worse.

  On the north end of the warehouse, an enclosure of chain-link fence surrounded a concrete ramp and a small, empty parking lot. At the low end of the ramp, a locked gate barred access from the sidewalk. Ginny looked for security cameras, but none were visible. An old ivory-colored plastic button mounted in green brass was the only way to attract attention. She double-checked the address on the map. Looked up at the high corner of the warehouse. Squeezed her finger through the chain link.

  Pushed the button.

  A few moments later, as she was about to leave, the gate buzzed open. No voice, no welcome.

  Her shoulders slumped in relief—so tired.

  But after all she had been through, no hope could go unchallenged. Quickly, she probed with all her strength and talent for a better way through the confused tangles of outcome and effect. None appeared. This was the only good path. Every other led her back to the spinning, blue-white storm in the woods.

  For months now she had felt her remaining options pinch down. She had never pictured this warehouse, never known she would end up in Seattle, never clearly foreseen the free clinic and the helpful doctor.

  Ginny pulled the gate open and walked up the ramp. The gate swung back with a rasping squeak and locked behind her.

  Today was her eighteenth birthday.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  Jack Rohmer’s body was thirsty. Jack Rohmer’s body was tired.

  Up one street and down another, the bicycle carried the slender, dark-haired young man with hardly any guidance. An occasional push on the handlebars, an uncaring flex of the shoulders, tongue poked through slack lips, brown eyes staring ahead—all that and the steady, monotonous pedaling told both the world and the bike that Jack Rohmer had gone blank.

  Slung over the back fender, a saddlebag full of hammers rattled in the dips.

  By itself, even a young body is interested not in adventure or novelty, but in continuity. It prefers not to make important decisions. A casual turn, leaning into a curve, the slightly startled avoidance of cars and other obstacles—these form the sum of the body’s abilities, given the absence of its owner. It is the wakeful brain that is restless.

  In an hour, Jack’s body had traveled miles from his intended destination. Had there been hills, no doubt by now the body would have slowed and taken a breather. But along the level streets in this harbor district of warehouses and factories, rolling over rough asphalt and brick paving, it was more trouble to stop than to go on.

  The bike swerved around a rut.

  A truck came out of nowhere and bellowed. Jack’s right eye twitched. The driver waved a ham-sized fist out the window. Jack rode on, oblivious. The truck roared through the intersection, missing him by inches.

  Streetlights buzzed pinkish-yellow beneath gathering clouds. Jack’s feet pumped arched cycloids at a reduced rate through the shadows. Three miles per hour. Then two. One. The bicycle became unstable. The body dropped a leg. The leg landed early and he hopped and snagged the toe of his shoe, bending it back.

  “Ow!”

  The body had had enough.

  Jack returned—above the neck. Panic crossed his face. He slid off the slim leather seat and jammed his groin down on the bar. That reunited body and soul in a painful instant. He tumbled and lurched up on both legs before the bicycle collapsed.

  One foot plunged through the spokes of the front wheel.

  “Ow! Damn!”

  His voice echoed from corrugated doors and high, flat gray walls. Stunned, he caught his breath and looked around—he was alone, nobody had witnessed his predicament. Gingerly, he rubbed his aching crotch, then gave his watch a confused glance. He had been absent for an hour and five minutes. He remembered almost nothing.

  There had been a high window and darkness; the most extraordinary darkness, filled with a blinding, knife-edged gray light and something watching.

  Over the roof of a warehouse he saw tall stacks of empty blue, brown, and white steel containers marked with the names of shipping companies. Somehow, he had pedaled deep into Sodo—south downtown—almost in sight of the docks and their huge red-painted cranes.

  Something skittered under a row of big Dumpsters.

  Jack pulled his foot from the spokes and inspected the old running shoe and torn sock. The wheel was ruined but his leg was barely scratched. He lifted the bike and turned it around, ready to roll it back the way he had come.

  A soft chirrup in the shadows—another scrape—and something long and low scuttled between strapped bales of cardboard boxes. Jack’s eyes went wide. For a moment he thought he had seen a snake—a snake with pliers on its tail. Curious, he walked toward the piles, bent over, and lifted a soggy layer from the concrete.

  A staccato tapping vibrated a wide, flat bale on his left. With a grimace, he jerked the bale aside and let it flop over—just in time to see something long and shiny black, with many legs, and tail pincers the size of a lobster claw, scurry into a hole in some metal siding.

  Jack leaped back with a yelp.

  He thought he had seen an earwig as big as his forearm.

  In the next hour, as he pushed the wobbling bike beneath the high-arching free way, as the sky turned dark and drizzle soaked him to the skin, he half convinced himself that what he had seen near the docks was the shadow of a rat, not a giant bug.

  He returned to the third-floor apartment, replaced the bike’s wheel, stowed it in the storage locker, changed out of his wet clothes, and ate a quick supper of canned chili. Burke, his roommate, had brought up a stack of mail before going to work. Burke was a sous chef at a fancy steak house. He worked six days a week until midnight and came home smelling of steaks, wine, and brandy: the perfect roommate—seldom there, and Burke left him alone.

  Jack moved stuff around the apartment to keep Burke’s memory fresh—if he rearranged things, Burke did not try to rent out his room. He sorted through the stack. Nothing but bills, all in Burke’s name.

  With returning confidence, Jack stood in the middle of his small bedroom and practiced juggling three of his four rats, along with two hammers. The rats took this with accustomed patience, and when he returned them to their cage, they squeaked happily. He fed them. They were bright-eyed. Their whiskers twitched.

  Satisfied his reflexes had not been affected, he packed the hammers back in a lower dresser drawer, blinked to adjust his eyes, and watched the drawer fill in with bowling pins, Bocce and billiard balls, bricks, and rubber chickens.

  With some difficulty, he managed to push the drawer shut.

  Just two weeks ago an attractive older woman, Ellen Crowe, had invited him to her house on Capitol Hill. Food—conversation—sympathy. Jack was used to the attention of older women.

  He felt the stiffness of her note in his shirt pocket, pulled it out, and rubbed his finger over the silver curlicue design on fancy cream board. The card carried a second invitation to dinner, no date specified. When you’re ready, Ellen had written. On the back, she had neatly penned the phone number of a free clinic.

  Perhaps he had told her too much over the shrimp risotto. He rubbed the card again, feeling for misfortune and feeling none—not from the card, not from Ellen.

  Sitting on the back porch, he tracked a receding V of identical gray and brown porches under low, rapid black clouds, sipped a cup of chamomile tea steeped from a thrice-used bag, and listened to the
steady rain. Jack had come to think he was finally happy. Poor, but that didn’t matter. Now a real worry clouded his cheer. He was blanking out too often. He had even mentioned it to Ellen Crowe.

  And he was seeing things. Giant earwigs.

  He balanced the second hammer on one finger, tossed it, and caught the flat of its handle on the tip of his thumb, where it stayed with hardly a wiggle.

  Jack laid the hammer on his lap and sighed.

  “Tomorrow I will visit a doctor,” he announced, and pulled up a woolen blanket. When the wind wasn’t blowing, he liked to sleep on the porch. For a moment he stared at the blanket’s felted fibers, magnified them in his mind’s eye, saw them hooked to each other every which way, packing off in all directions. Life was less like the felt and more like a bundle of cables, crammed up against other bundles with hardly any distance between. Some cables were short. Some ran on for ages. All hooked up with others in ways few could predict. But Jack could feel those hookups, those points of crossing, long before they arrived.

  His eyes grew heavy. As the sky darkened, he napped right there on the porch, cradling the hammer in his lap, under the blanket. His sleep was deep and normal. He snored. For once, oblivion.

  His legs slumped, but the hammer did not fall.

  Jack never dropped anything.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Wallingford

  Something huge slammed the beggar into the low, wet gray brush. He rolled on his side and stared up at the flat steel panel of a big green garbage truck. The truck’s diesel grumbled and belched black smoke. The driver poked his bald head out of the cab. “Hey, freeloader! Get a job!”

  The blow had left the beggar with a knuckling throb in his gut. His head hurt, too. He couldn’t remember his name, only that he’d been running from something painful and ugly. That much sang like a tuning fork in the middle of tangled thoughts—

  He had stretched, reached out too far.

  Trying to escape.

  The beggar decided that the garbage truck driver wouldn’t act so cocky if he had actually struck a pedestrian—even a freeloader. Nothing had hit him. He was just here, lying unexpectedly by the side of a road, one booted foot stretched to the curb, the other bent almost to his butt—owlishly observing a line of traffic backed up at an intersection.

  His thoughts came together like a puzzle—but something rose up and tried to blow them apart again, something sharing the tight volume behind his eyes…another mind, scared, resentful.

  The beggar expertly crushed this companion as he would an insect, and focused on important details. First, where was he? A thick branch snapped and he crunched deeper into the brush. He felt a bundle dig into his back—knapsack, coat, sweatshirt, plastic bottle. Part of him—the part he was trying to suppress—still remembered stashing them there. He felt like a half sweater, somehow mated to another half, the yarns two different colors and everything in the middle—in between—unraveling. What would he be doing in any better world, stashing clothes and water in the bushes?

  His left arm came into view, the dirty green coat sleeve crusted with what looked like snot.

  The garbage truck turned left and rumbled on. He knew the area—a street fed by an off-ramp from Interstate 5, near Forty-fifth. Once, he had driven it every day to get home, turning at this very corner.

  But these cars looked wrong.

  He got to his feet, stiff and sore. His stomach throbbed with a snaky, coiling pain—something this body was used to. That shook him. This body. Chronic pain.

  Two names circled like prize fighters, until one punched the other down—sheer experience and stubbornness winning out over dismay and indignation. A whimpering inside, then—silence.

  None of it felt right. Something had gone wrong.

  I am Daniel.

  I am Daniel Patrick Iremonk.

  The snake did flip-flops. He whirled and was sick in the bushes. He refused to look at what came up.

  Other cars whizzed past, their designs sleek, bubbled, chopped—slick magazine parodies of the cars he knew. Their drivers stared in disgust or did not see him at all—eyes on the upcoming turn.

  This was scary—Daniel was frightened. The other fellow was beyond caring. Not too strong to begin with, he had quickly been beaten down into a set of mud-colored memories. It had never been this way before. Of course, Daniel had never tried to jump so far. Look around. Maybe you haven’t left the Bad Place after all.

  Daniel—Daniel Patrick Iremonk—had always escaped—jaunted, that was the word he used—long before the situation went totally sour. That was his talent. He had never before waited for things to get so awful. Make sure it isn’t still after you—the dust, slime, scrambled books, the hundreds of cryptids—all the impossible things happening at once, and everyone staring at you, like you’ve walked into a horrible, hushed surprise party.

  They drag you in, lock the door, start with the nasties…fun and games…

  I need to remember, I really do—but I don’t want to.

  Daniel wiped his mouth and rotated slowly, orienting himself. Sunshine, clouds, mud from recent rain. Across the street stood a wide, blocky beige building, three stories tall—condos on top, shops on the bottom. He knew it well. Minutes ago, it had been a run-down hotel.

  Cars burped and jerked to a stop again as the traffic light changed.

  Usually, when he jaunted—willed himself from one strand to another—only one thing or a few subtle things were different: the circumstances that he wished to change. Daniel had never moved into a version of himself that had gone so far downhill.

  The window of the nearest car rolled down and an elderly woman smiled and held out a one-dollar bill. A whiff of gardenia and stale cigarettes curled out with the warm air. He blinked but did not move.

  The elderly woman scowled and pulled in her arm.

  The light turned green.

  The beggar shoved his hands into his pockets, allowing this body to show him where the important things were—the motions its muscles made every day. Filthy fingers clenched a wad of cash. He withdrew a plastic bag containing a tight roll of ones, a five, and some change.

  On the opposite corner stood a woman in layers of sweaters and vests and a long skirt over faded jeans. Her fuzzy, cherry-cheeked doll’s head poked up from a smudged collar. Her arms and legs resembled a bundle of sticks wrapped in felt. She clutched a sign asking for money, but ignored the one driver who had stopped and waved a dollar bill out the window. The driver honked. She seemed to wake up, snatched his money, and the car veered right to merge with the traffic on the freeway.

  Cheap bastards. Dollar bills. You eat nothing but burgers and hot dogs and feel your gut rot.

  Daniel wasn’t wearing glasses, but even across the intersection, he had clearly made out the denomination. He felt the bridge of his nose, cringing at the touch of his grimy fingers. No creases—no mark where glasses had ever perched. This body, whatever its problems, boasted decent eyesight. In every strand Daniel had visited, he—and all the other Daniels—had been plagued with miserable eyes—but good health. Fingernails—on these hands, worn and encrusted, but not bitten to the quick. All Daniels bit their nails.

  Except for the money in the bag, his pockets were empty. No wallet. No ID.

  The dirty woman turned to stare at him. But she was not scary—not part of the awful, silent party.

  He felt an urgent need to get to a bathroom, but where? No Porta-Potties in sight. He thought he knew where he lived—a dozen blocks or so west, in Wallingford—but doubted he would make it, given the snake twitch in his bowels. Still, he had to try. The last thing he wanted was to fill his pants during his first hour in a strange new world.

  He reached back, grabbed the knapsack, coat, and bottle, and took off at a run, having jaunted just far enough that the WALK sign flashed without the push of a button.

  Several cars braked, almost hitting him—but none did.

  One thing’s the same. I still have the knack. B
etter living through physics.

  He broke into a jerky, knee-slamming run.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  Seattle

  The clouds filled in and rain grayed the pavement. He liked this city. It reminded Max Glaucous of London, where he had been born and where as a boy he helped catch and sell songbirds—plentiful bullfinches, hardy goldfinches, delicate linnets sweeter than canaries.

  Glaucous still likened himself to a bird-catcher—a plump, finicky bird-catcher. He had spent most of his life moving in the night across England and the United States from city to flyspeck town to city again, casting his net and waiting with infinite patience for the rarest, the most correct sort of feathery morsel; unwilling to snare and deliver to his employers just any bird, for that would be unworthy of his craft—and could also bring a fatal conclusion to his long and benighted existence.

  His employers sometimes stationed two or more collectors in the same region, the same city. Place and privilege did not matter to them. And then it behooved him to find and eliminate the competition, usually not a difficult task; so many had been recruited lately, and rarely did Glaucous encounter anyone with his experience.

  And so here he was, answering an ad in a newspaper—not his ad—striding up Fifth Avenue as if he had any business going out by day: a short, broad, hard-packed man of indeterminate years. He wore a salesman’s gray suit over a plain white shirt. A black tie cinched his thick neck like a noose. Sweat beaded on his pale, pocked face. He paused in the shade of a long theater overhang and removed a kerchief from his pocket. His hands were thick and strong and he curled his fingers to hide scarred knuckles. The air was cool but the day’s low deck of clouds had opened a fissure, and he did not like the sun. Its warmth and glow on the wet street reminded him of things lost—among them, his capacity to have regrets. The brightness shone into his small black eyes and illuminated spaces in his head like gaps in a shelf of old books.