City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  Nostrils flared in his broken, pudgy nose. Eyes half closed, handkerchief back in its pocket, hands resting on a slender black hook-cane, Glaucous saw as on a magic lantern scrim the old donkey cart stacked high with nets and wicker cages and hung with baskets of heavy iron stars, to weight the nets; the call-bird linnet, muzzy in its small wire coop on the board beside the old crookback catcher; spring’s early morning dark draped over the streets like a towel over a cage. Young Max’s teacher and only family grimaced and plotted which fields to visit and how far to roam. That time of year they usually traveled to Hounslow for bullfinches.

  He had listened to his crippled master’s soft words while tying the ropes, stumbling about half asleep on the broken cobbles. He rode the bouncing tail of the cart, staring pig-eyed at violet dawn.

  Later in the day, on the journey back to London and the waiting shops, Max plucked gray and brown feathers from the nets and balanced the flap-riot baskets, their hundreds of cheeping new captives slowly but steadily falling quiet, bunching like chicks and squeezing shut their frightened eyes. Many of the birds succumbed to shock before ever they were cooed by sentimental housewives. It was his job to pull the dead and dying and toss them to the hedgerows or the gutters. Sometimes, in town, sleek brown rats humped and danced between the cart’s wheels, and feasted.

  In a stuffy basement room, the crookback trained Max to pipe bullfinches, using shrouds and starvation to subdue the new birds, then exposing them to call whistles that sugared the dismal air, with brief shafts of sun and food as reward. In this way, he taught the little creatures by rote to trill London’s most popular tunes.

  The bird-catcher had died of consumption after sixty pain-filled years. Before the catcher’s estranged son kicked Max out of the small angled hovel they called home, Max had freed the last of their stock—raised the wicker doors and shooed a week’s glean into smoky skies. His final act of charity.

  Glaucous had last visited the old crookback’s favorite birding grounds after the opening of the Hounslow Barracks train station, curious but saddened to see the once familiar fields covered over with lanes, yellow brick houses, small gardens. After all these years so much had changed, yet things were much the same for him; still hunting and delivering young creatures to self-assured gents and their Lady. But this Lady—the Chalk Princess—was no mere woman.

  The morning air was much the same, anyway.

  Pocketing his kerchief, Glaucous sucked flame into a small pipe, flipped the match, and left the awning’s shade. He walked south, away from the shining wealth of blue-green glass, red and gray stone, concrete and steel—away from the bustle of young office workers and closer to the haunts of those with empty eyes and outstretched hands. All cities the same, rain or shine—prosperity and wealth pressing down on blinding need.

  Glaucous took a professional interest in some of the dwellers that stood or squatted like dusty dolls on the sidewalks—scammers, jongleurs, sharps, the gypsy draggle of every big city. He paid particular attention to the young ones. Some of these could be Chancers or Shifters, unaware of their low-grade talents—but still of interest, especially if they began to dream.

  Unlike London, at a brisk walk one could actually cross downtown Seattle east to west in less than an hour, working the streets—though he preferred to sit in his apartment and wait. The bird-catcher’s patient facade, so deceptively like repose.

  He found the gray Mercedes in a dingy pay parking lot, its rear windows golden with smoke, the dash littered with twelve receipts, one for each day. Sharp fingernails had clawed paths through the soot near the door locks. So it was true: the Chandler and his incendiary partner were in town.

  Turning east, Glaucous paused to stare at building numbers, until he found the entrance to the Gold Rush Residential Hotel. Here he stopped, tapped his cane, and let out his breath in a low, contemplative moan. Beyond the heavy glass door, pinched between an Oriental antiques shop and an abandoned secondhand store, the hotel’s narrow lobby proffered a dusty, coffee-colored hospitality. Thick paint smothered undecorated walls and lay dirty and cracked over plaster moldings. Two square brown couches and an old chair waited vacant and worn around a cigarette-scarred black table. The table carried stacks of The Stranger and The Seattle Weekly, cut bundle-strings dangling.

  A middle-aged clerk ambled out of his retreat behind the desk and checked out Glaucous, who nodded pleasantly, as if they had met before. “Do you have a Mr. Chandler in residence?” he asked. “I believe he’s expecting me.”

  The clerk scowled. “Use the house phone or just go on up,” he said.

  London—barbed nest for all its poor fledglings—had soon pricked young Max into a burly squint, low, lashed, and ugly. After the death of the bird-catcher, the twelve-year-old, dumped on the streets once again, proved himself a fair hand at penny-toss and cards. Hunger and inexperience led to street fighting, where he acquired scarred knuckles, puffed ears, and three bends in the bridge of his nose. In a music-hall riot, one hard roll down a flight of stone steps dealt the final knock to his bulldog physique, stunting his growth at five-four. Few would tangle with such a glowering brute, and so within a few months he secured work as a bodyguard for well-heeled gents possessed by hungers that would not be sated: cards, whoring, the Fancy. The things and events he now witnessed and the deeds he was called upon to perform were more awful than any he had seen as a bird-catcher’s boy. Clients, associates, and their enemies came to refer to him by a variety of epithets: dandyshield, bone-smith, batbreak, fistfolly; cane snipe, johnny-brute. In two years he learned to keep his mouth shut and skim what he could while his employers lolled senseless with drink or drug.

  During Max’s last stint as a batbreak, his then-master lapsed into the croaking and squeaking of a paretic. Max was instructed by a private nurse how to fit the master’s ruined face with wax and tin parts, to fill fissures and replace lost bits while the syphilitic grotesque whistled his stinking breath through vacant nose holes.

  Soon Glaucous found himself once more at liberty, the master’s house boarded, the last drib of wealth wasted on quack nostrums. Nothing left, nothing gained. And yet…

  Glaucous was becoming aware that he might possess an unusual talent. He hardly believed in it; rarely used it. Yet within a week of being ousted, on the streets again, freshly charged by hunger, he had no other option. He honed his gift, and in the close-knit world of the Fancy, quickly acquired a reputation—a dangerous one. At the heel of one of the “ton,” an ability such as his was tolerated, but on his own, Glaucous was of no use to anyone but himself, and so, no use whatsoever.

  A gentleman of noble blood, his ancestry within hailing distance of Westminster, caught Glaucous “cheating” at cards. The gentleman’s toughs corralled the remorseful, ugly young man. The gentleman ordered him transported to his country estate, caged like a dog.

  There, Glaucous was confined to a series of basement rooms, heavily padlocked, each larger and a little brighter than the last. The housekeeper eventually assigned him to a plump, foppish man named Shank, either to punish for the gentleman’s amusement or to discover and refine whatever genuine talent this rough lad might have. And so it was done.

  In time, Shank informed the young tough that there was a name for his crude ability. Glaucous was a natural-born Chancer. “Else a pug like you would been crushed in the streets and died ere now,” he explained. “Some call it luck, others fortune. We know it here as Chancing, which is great Will, consistently applied to random circumstance to guide favor—for your gentleman and for him alone, of course.”

  Under Shank’s guidance, Glaucous made coins land as desired, reordered cards without touch, directed the plunk of a silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel and the tumble of wooden spheres in a rolling cage. Their handsome and noble master was not himself a gambler, but recognized that many of that persuasion would extend favor and even cash for the company of such a lad in the clubs of the day.

  And so Maxwell Glaucous’s lot improved, wh
ile the company he kept declined in character, if not dress and station.

  Glaucous picked up a copy of The Stranger and lucked it open to the classifieds. There it was…the ad, but not his ad. He dropped the paper on the table and took the hotel stairs with silent footsteps.

  On the second floor, he sniffed and reached out his hand, searching for retrograde fluxes. Two more flights to go. On the fourth, Glaucous paused by a fire door, tested its hinges for squeaks, then pushed. Beyond lay six rooms, three on each side of the hallway, and at the end a milky window reinforced by steel wire. The light from the window quivered. Light resented Chancers, and now there were two in close proximity.

  Glaucous brushed the knob of the first door on his left. Harsh music competed with the grating voices of overgrown children—television. Quiet as a cat, he crossed the hall and felt the opposite door. Room empty but not silent—not to his questing fingers. Someone had allowed himself to be murdered. The knots of bad luck still vibrated with a singing whine.

  Glaucous slid down the hall. Behind the next door, he found what he was after: soft, steady breathing, comparative youth—the Chandler was less than a fifth his age—and strength, but profligate and poorly managed.

  Again his nostrils quivered—this time at a smell like candle smoke. This had to be the Chandler’s partner—a veiled woman, very dangerous. Glaucous leaned in and heard the flip of a coin—a Morgan silver dollar, judging by the muted ring as it bounced off the room’s thin carpet. The Chandler was practicing. The dollar landed heads. Anyone could do such a trick, but he was not counting the coin’s spins. He was drawing down the coin’s lines. From different heights—including a ricochet from the ceiling and another from a wall—the dollar always landed heads.

  Glaucous matched his breath to the man’s. He also matched other rhythms: pump of blood, drip of lymph and bile. He made himself a shadow.

  Squatted back to the wall, eyes shut.

  Waited.

  Shortly after his last visit to Hounslow, at the height of his employment as a gambler’s companion—his fame beginning to spoil prospects—the noble gentleman had informed him it was time to move on. Glaucous’s gambling days were over, in London at any rate, and probably across Europe.

  “You should try Macao, young friend,” Shank suggested, but then added, in a low voice and with eyes averted, that a special appointment might be arranged—if he desired, at long last, a secure and permanent position.

  Glaucous had long since grown leery of the streets.

  As if in a dream, he went where Shank directed—down a pinched and filthy road near the market in Whitechapel—and at the end of a blind alley, met an odd, twisted man, small, pale as death, and musty as a wet mop. The mop-dwarf fumbled him a card embossed with a single word or name: WHITLOW. On the other side, an appointment had been scrawled in pencil—and the warning:

  This time, forever. Our Livid Mistress expects her due.

  Glaucous had heard incomplete and confused reports of this personality in his travels. Reputedly the leader of a small cadre of men with exceptionally dubious reputations, she was whispered about, but seldom if ever witnessed. She had many names: our Livid Mistress, the Chalk Princess, the Queen in White. No one knew her true business, but it seemed a singular ill fortune invariably found the creatures sought by the men and women in her employ—ill fortune, and something referred to as “the Gape,” to be avoided at all cost.

  Now at liberty for the first time in a decade, and suffering from a perverse curiosity, Glaucous took the train and then walked to Borehamwood, and there was met by a young-looking fellow with a club foot and waxy smooth skin, narrow nose, wispy ghost-blond hair, and deep blue eyes. He wore a tight black suit and gave his name, last name only.

  This was Whitlow.

  Whitlow carried a silver-tipped black lacquered cane and a small gray box with a curious design on the lid. “This is not for you,” he told Glaucous. “I have a meeting with another later this day. Let’s move on.”

  Out of Glaucous’s memories of that meeting—a palette reduced to dim grays and browns—he recalled unsteady nerves and embarrassment at his ill-fitting wool suit. (Shank had insisted he return all his master’s fine clothes. “What monkey owns his livery, I ask you?”)

  Whitlow shared a tot of brandy from a silver flask, then escorted him up the hedgerow drive to the main house, a mouse’s holiday of neglect, one wing caved, rooms filled with roosting pigeons. Whitlow gained entry using a huge old key, then, with quiet humor, pushed Glaucous down a hall littered with broken furniture and the bones of mice and cats, arranged in rings and whorls, toward a special sort of room where, Whitlow said, none had lived or visited for several hundred years. Such rooms—difficult to find these days—best suited the closest servants of their Lady, who—he explained in a whisper, opening an inner door—ultimately paid their bills.

  Whitlow locked the door behind Glaucous.

  After a time of stuffy silence—long enough to feel pangs of hunger—Glaucous was joined, through no door he could detect, by an insubstantial being—a gentleman, judging by his soft voice and odor or lack of same. This nebulous figure, wrapped in a deeper cloak of shadows, never assumed definite form or size. Judging by the tapping of his hands around Glaucous’s face and shoulders—fingers like batting flies—the gentleman might have been blind. “I never go anywhere,” he whispered. “I am here always. Here moves where I need to be. I am called the Moth. I transport and recruit for our Mistress.”

  He spoke for what seemed a long time, his voice suggestive, modulated, indistinct. He spoke of books and words and permutations, and of a great war—greater than any dreary combat between imagined heavens and hells. “Our hells are real enough,” he said. “And our Mistress controls them all.” This Lady, he said, sought Shifters and dreamers. Chancers, properly instructed, were ideal hunters and collectors. The Moth handed him a crust of bread, dusty with mold, then tapped Glaucous’s temple with a flitting finger. “If you serve well, you will never lack work,” came his muffled words. Apparently, having come this far, no refusal was permitted. “We pay in more than coin. Time no object. Different birds, different cages, Mr. Glaucous. Listen close, and I will pipe you all the songs you need ever sing.”

  After some hours, the door opened, spearing the room with a broken shaft of sun. Glaucous blinked like a mole. Whitlow reappeared to usher him out. Behind, the room keened a wretched, pain-filled sound like none he had ever heard, and reclaimed its emptiness: spent.

  Back on the hedgerow drive, dazed and exhausted, Glaucous asked, “Will I meet ever the Mistress?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Whitlow admonished. “We never hope for that. The Moth is bad enough, and he’s less than the tip of her pinky.”

  For the next hundred twenty years Glaucous traveled from city to city across the United Kingdom, and then the United States…working as a diversion in carnival pitches, card parlors, side shows…always seeking, keeping a low profile, and wherever he went, posting ads in newspapers, ads that never varied except for an address, or later, a phone number—

  Always asking the same question:

  Do you dream of a City at the end of Time?

  Glaucous kept deathly still. He could feel any vibration along the boards and beams. All was quiet. There would be no visitors for the next few minutes.

  The collector behind the door—endlessly tossing his silver dollar—had failed in certain courtesies. He had not alerted Glaucous to his presence, nor had he shared information. He was poaching.

  Glaucous rapped a callused knuckle on the door, then fluted his voice, young and uneasy, the same voice he had used on the phone to answer the Chandler’s ad. “Hello? It’s Howard. Howard Grass.”

  The slender man who opened the door held up his silver dollar between thumb and middle finger. His pupils were large, black, and steady. He presented a cold, surprised smile—and then a superior grin. “Mr. Glaucous. How nice to see you.”

  Glaucous knew the signs of a Chancer about
to strike. There was no time to lose.

  In the slender man’s fingers, the head of the crowned silver woman on the Morgan faced north. Glaucous rolled up one eye, drew down a contrary strand, bent it sideways—and the head faced south.

  The Chandler’s heart also flipped, instantly filling his chest with blood. His fingers twitched and he released the coin. Falling, the stamped ounce of gray metal landed flat on the carpet—eagle side up. His face turned sickly green. Silent, he toppled facedown, stiff as a plank, and covered the coin.

  Also tails.

  In the bathroom, the veiled woman began to shriek. Without the Chandler, her talent and passion flowered unchecked. Fire shot from around and under the bathroom door. Glaucous lent his assistance.

  She achieved her heart’s desire.

  That afternoon, wrapped in melancholy, Glaucous sat in his warm apartment, shades drawn, the only light in the cramped living room focused on a phone sitting on a table next to his chair. Behind the closed door to the bedroom, his own partner, Penelope, sang in a low, childlike voice. Around her song flowed a steady buzz, like an electric bulb about to go dark.

  Glaucous’s eyes turned sleepy. An hour before, he had eaten a spare lunch—an apple and a piece of wheat bread with three thin slices of salami. In those first days in London, it would have been a feast.

  He stared at the phone in its oblong of golden light. Something was stirring. He could feel a strong tug on the triggering thread that announced prey. Always before, his employers had informed him of a new rule, changes in the game. This awareness was arriving without warning. Perhaps there had not been time.