City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  “But there’s nothing happening,” he complained. “No people.”

  “Be patient. This is just one dimension of search.”

  He pulled back from the lens to study Tiadba. The attention did not embarrass her, but it did annoy—and she took hold of his stubby ear and gently swung his head back in line.

  “There,” she said. “We’re back to the Diurns themselves. Now watch.”

  She made adjustments. The pictures and places suddenly came alive. This utter end of the Tiers—the bridges, the causeway—was filled with thousands of people dressed as if attending a festival—far more colorfully dressed than any of the ancient breed, whose clothes tended toward drabness.

  Whatever had captured the pictures seemed capable of being everywhere at once.

  “They’re all rich,” he said.

  “Move in close,” she suggested. “Look at their faces.”

  Together, they swooped low over the crowds, then picked out several individuals. They were definitely not of the ancient breed—not only smaller, but slighter, more delicate, with longer noses, more sharply defined facial features—particularly chins and ears, the ears being quite large, shaped like little wings—their skin pallid, almost waxy, yet vibrant. The crowds behaved in a choreographed fashion, quite unlike the sustained bumping and crowding, elbowing and bobbing, he would have expected from the ancient breed.

  “Who were they, do you think?” Tiadba asked.

  “The Tall Ones had other toys before us,” he said doubtfully.

  This angered Tiadba. “We are not toys, I told you,” she said. “And neither were they.” She frowned, struggling to voice her concept. “Maybe they’re our…” These ideas were so embarrassing. “What’s the word—these might have been our ancestors.”

  Confined within the cup-shaped booth, they watched the processions until their muscles cramped, and then took turns standing and stretching. Inevitably, this brought them into even closer contact. Each brushing touch, and especially each press of flesh, was electric.

  “There’s no way of knowing anything about them,” Tiadba said, blinking, “unless we can learn their language, read their writing.”

  He squeezed back against the wall, trying to examine his companion in the dim light. She had a ghostly aspect now, the spill of light from the lenses shining against her round chin and full cheekbones, glinting in her beautiful eyes.

  “To cross the border of the real, you need training and equipment,” Tiadba said. “Clothing, machines, things we’ve never seen before. You can’t just go out on your own, or you’ll die.”

  “Who gives the clothes and machines?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many marches has the sama put together?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Is she working with the Tall Ones?”

  Tiadba shook her head again.

  “Who gets to lead and get all the glory?”

  “None of us knows.”

  Jebrassy sucked in a deep breath. It was not nearly as simple and direct as he had hoped. Finally, he squeezed down beside her. “All right,” he said. “I’m ignorant. I admit it. What’s this sama’s name?”

  Tiadba pretended to concentrate on the lenses. “This must have been a kind of celebration,” she murmured. “Maybe they’re getting ready to send out their own marchers. It’s so different now. But you can tell—they’re going down into the flood channels…The channels are clean, there’s no debris—all the walls are covered with dwellings. So many people living in the Tiers! Why did it change?”

  Grudgingly, Jebrassy looked again.

  “There’s a door, opening to a lift—a working lift,” Tiadba said. “Maybe they’re getting ready to send a gift to the Tall Ones—you know, to speed the marchers along.”

  Jebrassy saw all this. Crowds carrying on their shoulders platforms loaded with food, cages full of letterbugs—no different from the ones breeds still kept as pets. And books. He awkwardly zoomed in closer, to see the titles on the spines, but could not read them—the symbols were old, like those on the backs of the oldest letterbugs, and the words they formed made little sense.

  “There are still books like that in the walls—on the upper levels,” he said. “Can’t pull them out.”

  “I know,” Tiadba said with a lift of her brow, an air of mystery.

  The procession crossed the channel and stood before the far wall of the channel, where a large door opened, otherwise invisible. They passed the goods through, the gifts—and the books. Tiadba flicked her cheek and the scene pulled back to a diagram, a three-dimensional drawing or map.

  Their impossible point of view now soared high above the flood channel, passed through the wall, then the ceil, following a glowing dot on a vertical red line—the lift—higher and higher through constructions of dazzling complexity, presumably the upper parts of the Kalpa, now as transparent as glass, far above the three isles of the Tiers.

  Jebrassy saw for the first time their place in things. Three large rounded structures, like great smooth humps, placed side by side—the central hump pushed forward into a walled enclave, open to the…But from this perspective, he could not see the ceil. Maybe this new perspective put them outside the Kalpa. Maybe outside there wasn’t a ceil.

  Their view drew back even farther, and swooped up. The dot traveled along the red line through the rounded top of the middle hump—was that the Kalpa, or were all three humps called the Kalpa? He realized then how huge the whole must be—hundreds of times larger than the Tiers themselves, with the Tiers at the very bottom. Now his head truly hurt.

  The dot slowed and stopped at the base of a tower. The viewpoint continued up the tower’s length, but the dot signifying the gifts from the Tiers remained at the base.

  The tower stood as far above the limits of the Kalpa as they had already traveled from the basement level of the Tiers. And at the top: the tower ended in an abrupt, ragged peak, as if something had snapped it in half.

  “The sama calls this Malregard,” Tiadba said. “Have you ever heard of the Broken Tower?”

  “In children’s stories,” Jebrassy said, his breath coming hard, tears in his eyes. He had just passed above and beyond the knowledge of anyone he had ever met, of his sponsors and of their sponsors…as far back as he could imagine. “Malregard,” he repeated. He tried to swing his point of view to see what surrounded the Kalpa—the Chaos, presumably—but there was only a misty blueness.

  “The sama says that means ‘Evil View,’” Tiadba said. “Makes you wonder what’s out there.” She watched his face.

  “If you get to go on the next march…Would I go with you?”

  “I don’t choose who goes or doesn’t go.”

  “This sama…she decides?”

  “She tells us the decisions.”

  He rubbed his face with his hands and shook his head, overwhelmed. “We’re being played with. No Tall One would ever trust breeds with so much. I need to think,” Jebrassy said. “You can go back to your niche.”

  “I can’t leave you here. They’re waiting on the causeway.”

  “Who?”

  “Some of the team. Now that you know, you can’t just go back and tell others. We couldn’t risk that.”

  Jebrassy was beginning to experience the same panic he had felt in the narrow shaft of spiraling steps. “You’re the bait. I’m the fool. They’ll kill me if I don’t go along.”

  Tiadba looked genuinely shocked. “Breeds don’t kill each other.”

  “Except by accident—in a little war, maybe. How unfortunate. That’s why your sama selected me—because I’m bold, reckless, likely to die or go missing—like that poor fool down there. Was he your last candidate? What did he do wrong?”

  “You’re being dreadful,” she said.

  “I’m thinking out loud.”

  “We’ll be spending a lot of time together,” Tiadba said quietly. “The teams require each participant to have a partner. Don’t you feel it? We’r
e already partners.”

  “What I’m feeling isn’t that clear-cut. Something goes wrong, that’s what I’m feeling.”

  Tiadba swung her arm out to the Diurns. “Who can be sure about anything? What if an intrusion takes us? What if time stops?”

  “I don’t think…I don’t think we would even feel it,” Jebrassy said, but his hair crawled at the possibility—and whatever it was that lay just on the edge of his memory.

  The things that could—that would go wrong, even if they never ventured into the Chaos.

  TEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  Every day, Daniel’s memory lost a little color and depth, until thinking about what had gone before became like looking at a faded negative or an impression in wet sand. Charles Granger—all his ingrained habits and instincts, and the ever-present pain—was gaining strength, a steady tide lapping up over a beached intruder.

  Daniel opened Granger’s carton and lifted out the marker, the blunted pencil, and several sheets of paper. He spread the sheets over the warped wooden floor, avoiding the damp spots, and examined them critically. They were covered with writing—crazy writing mostly, symbols arranged without apparent meaning, rows of repeating words with one letter changed in each word—and numbers, lots of numbers.

  Charles Granger had been an occasional poet, but he had also been a thinker and logician—possibly even a mathematician. There was strange order to his scratchings, though Daniel could not reconstruct that order.

  The stones knew how to pick them. And when to demand a change—perhaps.

  Daniel flipped the sheets over. Some were blank. The time had come to reconstruct his life and thoughts before the last jaunt. He could record this in the blank spaces that remained between Charles Granger’s own ramblings. How appropriate.

  But making this brain, this body, lift the pencil and work with him was far more difficult than finding room between Granger’s lines. Whatever Granger had been trying for, the task—the problem—had overwhelmed him. He had been ripe to be replaced, yet already too ripe to be worth replacing.

  Daniel smiled grimly, but did not show his teeth.

  Still, in the wet darkness, with the candle gleaming on the fireplace mantel and another candle on the floor in a jelly glass, illuminating a fanned circle of pages…

  Daniel began to write. The crabbed script gradually smoothed, became more like his own. There was only so much he could take control of and re-form in the time remaining.

  Granger’s time, and the time left for this world.

  He frowned in concentration as he wrote: Granular space. Locality emphasized.

  And then a series of equations. Not so different from Granger’s scribbles after all; from reading Richard Feynman, Daniel had picked up the trick of creating his own mathematical notation. No one else would know what the symbols meant.

  All fates have become local.

  Space-time has been breaking up/breaking down. The universe is being digested, curdling like spoiled milk with nasty, rotten whey in between—geodetics shortened, jamming up. Chords (cords?) and fundamentals. Light crosses the membranes, and gravity, but material things cannot pass.

  Not yet.

  That’s what I see

  He wrote three more equations, long and inelegant, filled with conceptual lacunae. Trying to quantify and formalize these ideas—trying to make them consistent, useful, to make predictions, was more than difficult. Even when healthy it had been damned near impossible for him. His hand was growing tired—his head hurt. His stomach hurt.

  He needed to reconstruct what he had written just before the nightmare descended. There were certain theories beyond the reach of his equations—not yet quantifiable, but for that reason, in their own way more true. More useful.

  The map is not the territory.

  Quickly, fighting Granger’s crabwise style, Daniel managed to remember and record this much:

  Fundamental: world-lines can be bundled into larger fundamentals. Below the fundamental are the component lines, which can be elevated to fundamentals by observation; and below these, the harmonics and polyharmonics—which defy observation under usual circumstances, but which rise to prominence in the decaying multiverse. We usually access harmonics and polyharmonics in meditative, imaginative, or dreaming states—but they do not usually rise up to absorb our fundamental line of progress.

  Yet they contribute. They fill in the sum-runners. All stories, all things.

  Fundamental Observers arose in the early multiverse, to fix and shore up the most efficient results of sums-over-history, and to refine the self-propagating nature of the multiverse and create logical simplicity.

  They are “intelligent” in a selfless way, but as they do not create, merely justify and refine, they can’t be considered gods.

  Fundamental Observers like Mnemos…

  His thoughts suddenly boiled over and steamed off in a crater field of pain and agitation. He dropped the pencil and slammed his fist on the floor, until the pain let up again. He had been trying to remember a name, something to do with memory, apparently…Not a god.

  A muse.

  He struggled to retrieve the pencil, and forced his trembling fingers to scrawl more words before they faded completely:

  Sums-over-history.

  Lines, cords, braids, cables, fundamentals…

  Fates.

  All the possible pathways a particle can take—or a human—an infinite number, spread out through all space and time, weak where improbable, strong where probable—all, in the end, collapsing into a single, energy-efficient path, the most resourceful and simplest world-line.

  No more. Efficiency is turned on its head.

  The rules are broken.

  He looked up, lips and jaw slack despite the display of rotting teeth. He could no longer make sense out of what he had just written. He had to act quickly.

  He had to find a more fortunate strand, a place where Granger lived a stronger, healthier existence. For days Daniel had been reluctant to even make the attempt—had shrunk from it with a dreamlike recollection of infinite loss and horror, remembering only vaguely what had propelled him out of his self, his home, in the first place—what had sent him flying like a gull from a hurricane.

  Dusk fell over Forty-fifth Street as he stalked west into the fading light, marching to the origin of the long shadows, head still spinning. He stopped at the last used bookstore in the area—he had investigated all the others to exhaustion—and now he paced in front of the storefront, the last window display, dusty and unorganized.

  Following the ache in his gut, he crossed the threshold and tripped the door’s hanging bell.

  The owner, a small, plump woman with white hair and a round face—like a toy granny made of dried apples—got up from her stool and came around the waist-high glass case that served as a counter, making sure he knew she was vigilant. The bookstore cat—orange and fat—looked up from its bed by the cash register and stretched.

  The register sat on one end of the case, in which books of value—more value than the cracked-spine romance novels and best-sellers that made up the store’s stock-in-trade—had been arranged in proud display: a volume of Richard Halliburton’s travels; Nancy Drew mysteries, with dust wrappers; an old Oxford Bible bound in scuffed leather.

  Daniel’s gaze moved slowly to the last volume in the case, propped on the far right of the bottom shelf: a thick trade paperback. The title and author, in faded red letters, were almost invisible, but he squinted and read: Cryptids and Their Discoverers, by David Bandle.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He could almost see the book through his eyelids, glowing like a coal. Bending over, he tapped the glass case with a dirty finger. “How much for that one?” he asked.

  “I don’t bargain,” the apple granny said, still suspicious. She made no move to open the case. “Do you have money?”

  He did—nine dollars from standing by the freeway until his back knotted, his legs
went numb, and his head turned to clay. His breath smelled like gas fumes. “Some. I hope it’s not too expensive.”

  “It’s a first edition,” the apple granny claimed, her eyes like blue flints.

  “How much?” Daniel persisted.

  “Probably too much.”

  “Could you look—please?”

  The owner wrinkled her nose, shrugged, lifted the lace shawl from her shoulder, and slid open the back of the case. Stooping with an expressive grunt, she drew out the book and straightened, clutching it to her bosom.

  Daniel had never seen Bandle’s volume so thick. The gray stratum of plates was as wide as a finger.

  Lifting her glasses, the woman opened the cover with plump, dry fingers. “Fifteen dollars,” she said.

  “I have nine. I’ll pay you nine.”

  “I don’t bargain,” she repeated with a sniff.

  Daniel afforded the woman an apologetic, tight-lipped smile. “It’s dusty. Looks like it’s been there awhile.”

  She squinted at the date penciled below the price. Something relented—a little stiffness went out of her. “Do you really want this book?”

  He nodded. “A childhood favorite. Takes me back to better days.”

  “This book has resided in my special case for precisely three years,” she said. “It’s dusty, but I’ve never seen another copy. I’ll let you have it for fifteen.”

  “Nine is all I have,” Daniel said. “Honest.”

  She leaned back. Her eyes wizened to piggish slits. “You’re the fellow begs up by the freeway, aren’t you?”

  It seemed that everyone knew Charles Granger. Daniel smiled wide, showing all his teeth—uneven, brown, and cracked—and coughed out a fetor.

  The owner’s moment of compassion instantly faded, but to get him out of the store, she sold him the book. And all it cost was all the money he had in the world.