City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  The winter’s copies were brought out and displayed to the air, to dry away mildew, and the abbot examined them in the brightness of the abbey garden, his weak but loving eyes vigilant for errors, blemishes, anything that might make them unacceptable to clients present or future. (For many books were stored in the abbey’s stone tower library, against the future demand of a world reborn.)

  And so the abbot was the first to discover that one copy in an entire run of manuscripts bore in its margins a scrawled, clumsy, and unsanctioned poem, thus:

  Between the lines

  A bogey walks

  Eight legs, eight eyes.

  Letters will flee

  Ink will be smeared

  Till it be born

  In ash and dread,

  Wolf ’s eye red,

  Seen by the Three;

  Who spare the mite

  That words make flesh

  Five lost, reborn.

  The abbot ordered this abomination pumiced, and yet within hours the ink on the offending page returned, stubborn and bold. The master of copyists stripped the page, carried it to the trash heap outside the stone walls, and burned the offending vellum, intoning prayers of exorcism before spreading its ashes over the bones and offal.

  But neither spider nor poem would die. Someone had copied those lines, with subtle variations, on scraps of vellum and wood and even on shards of pottery, no one knew how many times, and pressed them into the chinks between the abbey stones and elsewhere. In old structures and homes across the island the copies would continue to be found, now and again, until the Vikings arrived. But before the Vikings, manuscripts from Iona became less and less trustworthy, until copying was stopped and all newer copies were either burned or stored under lock and key, for none could be sure that all copies back to the beginning were not tainted, the minds of even expert readers being imperfect to the task of total recall of so many pages.

  The abbey was closed and the most valuable and beautiful books transported elsewhere.

  No one knew what the poem meant, yet for years, scholars claimed the spider and its errors could be removed for good, if that secret were to be discovered. Who were the three, and why did they live in ash and dread, and what apocalypse would resurrect just five corpses from their graves? (For some versions had as the final line, “Raising five dead.”)

  And why all the concern, why the whispers and stories and frantic efforts to shrive and cleanse? For it was after all only an eight-legged bogey, tiny though fierce; none had been bitten or in any way injured by its journeys over the copied words. And those manuscripts had likely not passed through antiquity unchanged, having been scribed by so many diverse hands through the centuries, in different languages and different nations; even in Saracen lands, where error must be the rule.

  Some—heretics no doubt—still insisted that the spider was a servant of God and simply marked with its legs the proper corrections, based on memories of errors it had witnessed long before.

  But doubtless God would never have assigned such a task to loathsome vermin.

  Ginny closed the book, frowning deeply. That did it. She’d had enough of Bidewell and his obscurities.

  Ignoring her fear, she pulled back the steel bars, undid the bolts, and tugged open the door to the loading dock. The night air was cool and damp and smelled faintly of exhaust. Only a few cars traveled this way after six. Rain had passed several hours before and now the evening sky, still bright with dusk, was clear and intensely blue.

  Ginny stepped onto the ramp and stared up with hungry, grateful eyes, as if she could fold and stash away the entire sky, keep it beside her always…not a book in sight, anywhere.

  She examined the shadows in the small, empty parking lot. Nobody watching. Stiff, still not sure what she would do, she walked like a marionette down the ramp to the open gate, jerking her head to look up, look back.

  A few more feet, a couple of yards…

  Time to regain her strength, her resolve—to do what she was born to do. She had lost all confidence in her ability to walk between raindrops. Why had she ever come here in the first place? The clinic—the doctor—she couldn’t think clearly, her ears were buzzing so, and her heart felt as if it might explode in her chest.

  They never give up, you know. Once you make that call, they’re always waiting.

  She murmured, “I wish I could fly away. They’re keeping me here.”

  You’re keeping me here.

  “Just walk!”

  Down at the corner, beyond the long, dark warehouse wall, a stop-light turned green, yellow, red, then green again. The sky darkened. The street was deserted.

  The air smelled fresh and empty.

  For the first time in two weeks, she searched for a more fortunate side branch—sent ahead her ethereal feelers for the nearest, safest parallel, a colder, fresher stream.

  Something interrupted her concentration. She looked down. Minimus wound between her legs, tail like a soft finger against her calves. The cat looked across the road, then butted her ankle.

  The thin man with the silver dollars, the smoky female. Are they still out there?

  “You don’t know anything,” Ginny said. “Don’t you ever want to get out?”

  The cat bumped her again. Things weren’t so bad—they were friends. Did they not share mice, did she not have those elegantly marked boxes of books to investigate?

  She pushed the gate open and sidled through.

  The feelers upriver reported back: no fresh streams left, not for her, not for anyone. She had to stay on this island of peace or face again the horrible thing, the spinning, swallowing, impossibly white, impossibly female thing to which the pair had tried to deliver her. Tears streaming, Ginny turned to go back in. Then she heard music from miles away, flowing gently south on the breeze.

  Come out and play.

  Her fingers let go of the gate. One backward step and she stood in the middle of the sidewalk, arms spread like wings. The gate tapped the lock. The lock snicked shut.

  Minimus remained behind the wire.

  Whoever Ginny was, wherever she was, this was the act that had always defined her: getting out, leaving, turning onto a different path, whatever the danger.

  The cat watched with round deep eyes.

  “I won’t be long,” Ginny said. “Tell Mr. Bidewell…” And then, flushed, laughing at how silly that was, she wiped her eyes and ran north, following the faintest, most enticing music she had ever heard.

  Bidewell kept an old swayed cot in one corner of his private library. The girl had ignored his advice. There was nothing he could do but wait. She was more important, far more powerful, than he was—in her way, perhaps now the equal of what was left of Mnemosyne.

  He closed his eyes.

  The closest thing to love he had ever known—this search for evidence of the ineffable, the track of the mother of all muses, the one who reconciled—who kept the universe in trim. Now slowly being strangled, fading, unable to fulfill her functions.

  Haunted across the ages by a hideous shadow.

  Bidewell moved through his ritual preparations for sleep, stretching as far as his old muscles would allow, popping joints in spine, shoulders, hips, with grim satisfaction, then slowly lying down, waiting for his pains to negotiate and settle into accord.

  A furious scrape and scuffle interrupted his meditation. Between meows and hisses came a clacking and flipping and several sharp chirrups. A cat was chasing prey around the boxes—not a bird, surely, unless it had plastic wings.

  Minimus appeared atop a high box against the dark outer wall and jumped to snare something the size of one of Bidewell’s pencil cases—something that made an effort at flight, and failed.

  Both cat and catch tumbled behind the boxes with a thump. Triumph was invariably followed by delivery. With delivery must come congratulations and reward, a snack. This was their compact, cat to man, man to cat. Bidewell rose to retrieve the box of kibble he kept on a high shelf, away from boxes. He had le
arned that lesson several times, having to clean up after a sick cat. Minimus, whatever his finer qualities, loved to gorge. Yet he never ate anything that he caught.

  A few minutes passed. Bidewell sat at a small desk reserved for gentle reading on sleepless nights, and turned on the old brass lamp. Here, he kept a compact edition of Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which, with its acerbic rejection of the mundane, he found suitable. This worn volume, of course, had a pair of concluding chapters not found in any other edition.

  Just as Bidewell seated himself, Minimus padded out of the darkness and leaped to the table carrying in his mouth a glistening, jeweled creature. The old man drew in his breath and pushed back his chair. The cat threw him a sidelong look, dropped his catch, and squatted.

  The creature—a kind of insect, though ten inches long and with too many legs—had been shocked into immobility. It slowly flexed its long body and shivered a pair of shining wing cases the color of polished dark oak. On the wing cases—part of its natural design—the insect bore a single, ivory-white mark, like a symbol, or a letter in an alphabet Bidewell did not know. It cocked its large head, like a cicada’s, and its compound eyes glinted with brilliant blue highlights.

  Minimus had done the insect no visible harm, but its movements were feeble. Docile even in distress, it gathered up enough energy to cross to the edge of the desk, where it paused like a clever toy, cocked its head again, and chirped.

  Watched closely by both man and cat, it turned and approached a close-packed row of boxwood pencil cases decorated with large Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  Minimus licked his paw.

  The insect sidled up to the nearest case, then, with a hiss, dropped into an attitude of conformity, of fulfillment—and was still.

  The insect was dead.

  The cat lost interest and jumped to the floor.

  Astonished, Bidewell traced the white symbol with a bony finger. “Not from any time I know,” he said.

  His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deteriorating, coming apart in sections—jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle.

  They could reach the end of their meager supply of time within a few days or weeks, and then: confusion, nightmare, loops of repetition; the final surprising, unpredictable dribbles of false opportunity and hope.

  Terminus.

  Perhaps he was in such a loop now. But the appearance of the girl—the wayward young woman, keeping him moody company—proved he was not. There was still one opportunity, one chance to forestall the inevitable.

  She would return. The stones would gather.

  All his life he had been anticipating and preparing for this occasion. He felt fear—of course. And a kind of joy. There was real and immediate work to do—connections to make, teams to assemble, children to protect—blessed children. Surely they would come to him like a new family to replace the old, the ones that had failed or vanished—children pushing up now like spring flowers, and so improbable! Better by far than any volume of deviating text.

  And of course the predators were here as well.

  FOURTEEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  The Tiers

  Jebrassy felt little regret as he crossed the bridge over the flood channel to the long roads. Having time to himself, time to think, was like leaving a stuffy, crowded niche.

  Beyond the end of the bridge, out in the fallow meadows, two small wardens were hunched over, wings folded, inspecting something in the dirt. Jebrassy scratched the side of his head and glanced sideways. A curtain of pale fog shrouded whatever drew their interest. He seldom saw this style of warden in the Tiers—small, glistening gold bodies—and they certainly never engaged with breeds.

  But he knew what they were investigating—the remains left by an intrusion. He wanted to turn aside, but instead squinted through the fog—trying to see the half-imagined, shifting figures, invisible masters of the Tiers—the Tall Ones. Jebrassy felt a sting of shame. He was nothing to them—less than a pede to the farmer who loaded it with packages and baskets for market. The teachers taught only what the Tall Ones wanted them to teach—not what any of the breeds actually needed to know. How he hated them all!

  There was an old sama in the market—he had visited her once already, just to give voice to his questions: Why did time in the Tiers—the cycles of wakes and sleeps—vary so? What was outside the Tiers, if anything, and why didn’t marchers ever return? Questions the teachers never responded to.

  Why am I straying?

  The sama would not carry tales to others—unlike Khren.

  It was growing late, she said; she wouldn’t have much time. She gave no name; samas never gave their names, often moved between isles and levels in the Tiers, their niches unknown, untraceable. Nobody paid them—they performed their work for food left over in the market, telling fortunes, leading prayers, treating minor injuries—the wardens took care of anything more serious. They were generally poorly dressed, often dirty and smelly, and this old female was no exception.

  She drew up the blankets around her narrow market stall—consultations with samas always took place in an awkward crouch, blankets raised to block the light and prying eyes—then she pushed aside her crusted bowl, squatted before Jebrassy, and thrust a thin bright stick into the dirt between them. The stick lit up her brown face and made her experienced black eyes gleam like broken glass.

  Her questions, as always, were blunt. “Did your sponsors kick you out because you fancy yourself a warrior, hanging with punks—or because you are straying?”

  Jebrassy leaned forward and splayed his fingers on the ground. Samas could ask whatever they wanted—they were outside normal expectations. “They aren’t my true sponsors. Mer and Per were taken.”

  “Taken, how?”

  “A nightmare came.” This was a euphemism; Jebrassy was ashamed to use it.

  The sama did not show any sign of understanding—it was not her job to understand. Who could understand what happened during an intrusion? “How sad,” she said.

  “The new ones sponsored me for a few hundred wakes. Then they got tired of me,” Jebrassy said.

  “Why?”

  “My rudeness. My curiosity.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “Sometimes, under a bridge. Other times, I hide out in the clusters on the flood channel walls.”

  “The old Webla neighborhood? High up among the false books?”

  “Nearby. Lots of empty niches. Sometimes I stay with a friend.” He tapped his knee. “I find shelter.”

  “Has anyone ever spoken to your visitor, the other?”

  Jebrassy lifted one finger, yes. “My friend tells me about him, sometimes.”

  “But you don’t remember what was said.”

  Two fingers circling, no.

  “Do you know others who stray?”

  His hairline flexed. “Maybe. A glow I’ve just met once. She…she wants to get together later. I don’t know why.” Jebrassy let that thought hang between them.

  “You have no value?”

  “I’m a warrior, a vagrant, no family.”

  The sama hooted low amusement. “You don’t understand glows, do you?”

  He glared.

  “You say you’re unworthy. But not because you stray. Why, then?”

  “I want to know things. Earlier, if I couldn’t join a march, I thought I would fight the Tall Ones and escape the Tiers.”

  “Huh! Do you ever see Tall Ones?”

  “No,” he said. “But I know they’re there.”

  “You think you’re special, wanting to escape?”

  “I don’t care whether I’m special or not.”

  “Do you think this glow is dim?” the sama asked. She ha
dn’t moved since they squatted and started talking, but his own knees hurt.

  “She doesn’t look dim.”

  “Why do you want to meet with her?” She scratched her arm with a filthy fingertip.

  “It would be interesting to find someone—anyone—who thinks like me.”

  “You’re a warrior,” she observed. “You take pride in that.”

  He looked away and drew back his lips. “War is play. Nothing here is real.”

  “We get delivered by the umbers and we learn from our sponsors and teachers. We work, we love, we get taken away when the Bleak Warden comes. More young are made. Isn’t that real enough?”

  “There’s more outside. I can feel it.”

  She rocked gently on her ankles. “What else do you dream about? When you’re not straying.”

  “The intrusion that took Mer and Per. I saw it. I was just out of crèche. After, the wardens made me sleep for a while, and I felt better, but I still dream about it. I thought it had come for me, but it took them…doesn’t make sense.”

  “No? Why?”

  “Intrusions come and go. The wardens put up shades and fog, clean up, and it’s over. Teachers just keep quiet. Nobody knows where the intrusions come from, what they’re doing here—even why they’re called ‘intrusions.’ Do they come from outside? From the Chaos—whatever that is? I want to know more.”

  “What more is there to know?”

  Jebrassy got up.

  The sama rocked. “I don’t offer comfort. I fix letterbug nips, pede pinches, sometimes I fix bad dreams—but I can’t help these.”

  “I don’t want comfort. I want answers.”

  “Do you even know the right questions?”

  Jebrassy said, too loudly, “Nobody ever taught me what to ask.”