City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  Back in the dark house, he carried the book into the living room, where he sat with a groan on the broken cane chair, every bone grinding, and studied the spine. Such a fat edition, larger by far than any he had owned before. Sitting hurt too much, so he stretched out on the floor to read by the light of a candle—then pushed up to elbows and knees, and finally, crouched and rocked slowly on a cushion in the corner.

  Now he had the book, rich and full of detail—bloated, he thought as he thumbed the pages—and he could examine it in his own good time, if he dared. If there was any time left. This was progress of a sort, if learning bad news, very bad news, could be considered progress.

  And the news was awful indeed. Inch-long fleas. Prehistoric mammals found in New Guinea. Real Bigfoot scat and Bigfoot hair found in Canada and analyzed—DNA proof that the old gentleman was real, a distant offshoot of human beings.

  He studied the listing index, skipping to the middle.

  Flying nightmare in New Jersey Pine Barrens; wingspan of two meters, species unknown, perhaps dragonfly.

  Garden of Eden, in New Guinea; three hundred new species found there, fifteen new species of lemur, including fist-sized Gliding lemur.

  Giant true rats, weighing fifty kilograms, found in Borneo.

  Gigantopithecus, skull located in museum collection in Vienna; ten-foot-tall gorilla. Living specimens sighted in Cambodia?

  Hairy fishes, found with mammal-like hair follicles…

  Homo floresiensis, human relative one meter tall; used fire, tools. Hunted pygmy elephants with tiny spears.

  Human-faced crabs in Thailand and Sri Lanka, back of shells bear remarkable likenesses of faces of drowning victims.

  Hymenoptera: bees learn to use sign language in their dance.

  Indigo bat (size of eagle) found in Mexico.

  Kua-Nyu, squirrel-rat species extinct for eleven million years, discovered in Laos.

  Quran frogs, Iraqi marshes, croak “God is Great” in Arabic, with abbreviated suras readable in dorsal skin markings.

  Sea scorpions (eurypterids) found off Madagascar; length, three meters; allegedly extinct for hundreds of millions of years, largest invertebrate ever. Natives prize their flesh, sweet and fragrant; claim to have hunted them “since time began.”

  He flipped to the beginning of the list.

  Aepyornis captured in Tasmania; flightless bird twenty feet tall, eats goats, sheep, lays eggs size of two basketballs.

  Then down:

  Cathedral termites; exported around nation with woodchip debris from hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast; build nests shaped like Chartres, Notre Dame.

  He let the book flop shut, his hands trembling. Cryptids and Lazarids—hidden beasts, and beasts suddenly and unexpectedly resurrected by the thousands from the distant past. The listing index by itself ran for a hundred pages. Given his past reckoning that roughly half of the reports in Bandle were substantially incorrect or falsified, he estimated that there were still over a thousand reliable listings, twice as many as before, when the darkness and dust closed in and he had been forced to flee.

  Unlikely things were gathering like shadows around a guttering campfire, ringing in the bright, rational, scientific world he had always valued—and doubted. He would need to find allies. Allies…and if at all possible, another host. A new body, stronger, healthier. Younger. He thumped his head against the wall, feeling the snake in his guts coil as if angry at this disrespect.

  He could not do it alone; he doubted he had the focus and strength of will to leap so far again, and what was coming would be worse than before.

  He opened the book to the introduction. Bandle wrote:

  This latest edition incorporates well over five hundred new listings, a greater increase than any past edition, gathered in a period of just three years. This brings up a very nonscientific question: Has someone opened a door to the past, jamming us all together—extinct beasts, impossible beasts, unlikely and yet too real?

  Soaked and racked by fever, Daniel reached the physics building on the University of Washington campus at three the next afternoon. He searched the ground-floor directories, then began his hunt through the hallways, peering at nameplates outside office doors, looking for the one fellow who might understand, the most vulnerable fellow he knew—and the most curious.

  An old friend.

  CHAPTER 25

  * * *

  Capitol Hill

  Penelope seldom emerged from her bedroom, and Glaucous never intruded unless it was strictly necessary. The low, constant buzz and his partner’s gentle murmurs of control and consolation told him all he needed to know. What lay beyond that closed and locked door was not safe, even for him.

  Perhaps the hardest task he faced most days was keeping his partner happy. The changes within Glaucous were subtle, but Penelope had lost so much over the past thirty years, not just the lure of her femininity—her beauty and her youth—but the last feeble spark of her intellect, as Glaucous had shaped her into the wondrous, compliant tool she now was.

  Glaucous flipped out the London Times he had bought at the newsstand on University Way, sucked his cigar with slit-eyed satisfaction, and read through the headlines. A large black leather lounge chair supported his relaxed, chunky torso, one short, thick leg bent at the knee, slippered foot on the floor, the other leg propped on the ottoman—small, precise toes twitching slowly as he read.

  In over a century and a half, he had acquired an eye for many sorts of patterns—economic, political, philosophical, even scientific. The instincts he had learned as a Chancer and companion to the rich and ambitious still served him; over the decades, he’d laid up riches. One had to be prudent. All employers failed in the end—failed their employees and usually failed in their manifold endeavors, leaving one without means. Unless one was prudent. Unless one recognized patterns and knew what to do with them.

  Ashes dropped to his silk jacket. He flicked and smeared and brushed them with thick fingers thatched with curly gray hairs to the first knuckle and beyond and around that hair, calluses of varying size, density, and shape, which no doubt Mr. Sherlock Holmes would have enjoyed analyzing. Glaucous had in his long life earned a living in so many different ways—accumulating scars from cock spurs, dog bites, rat bites, the nicks and marks and slams of human teeth. Bites—and strikes.

  Fighting had also cocked his nose and thickened his ears.

  Perhaps most interesting to a consulting detective: layered on the tips and sides of his fingers like tree rings were the calluses of a mortal man’s lifetime of the concealing, switching, rotating, and rolling of coins and cards. And he no longer possessed fingerprints; had lost them before the turn of the previous century.

  Decades of waiting in the half-dark had added fat all the way up his pink and pale olive arms, across his rolled back and thickened hips and legs. So many reminders of use and abuse, scars never quite fading. How much longer could it go on? Still wheezing along, his body an engine blessed with incredible fortitude, but his breath shallow, conserved; he might live forever, but he had been smoking for decades and his lungs were not happy, no, quite clogged, in fact.

  There might soon come a time of purging and revival—no more vices, long weeks of hiking and exercise, eating little, smoking not at all, clearing his tissues of the dross of the last fifty years—a monkish process which he loathed on general principle.

  Might, but he doubted it.

  Glaucous’s life had been extended by misdirection and cheat—and of course by the Mistress’s touch. So much history, so much insight, and for what? He saw himself as the ugly main exhibit in a museum of oddities. When would Maxwell Glaucous be cut loose, his fortitude excised, gift withdrawn as a condition of unemployment?

  The room was dark but for the light that shined directly on the creamy paper now creased over his lap. The phone had been silent all day, and before that there was nothing but crank calls from the curious and the rude, the drunken, the bored, and the unsound of mind—his usual correspondent
s.

  Still, he knew the patterns. There was a reason Maxwell Glaucous had come to the Northwest and settled in Seattle. He could feel all the ripples in the local human ocean, like the passages of tiny, sharp-prowed boats through the general swirl and stir of mismanaged destinies.

  Seven years of travel across the continent, driving endless miles beside his solitary and unlovely partner…

  His eyelids slumped. He was slipping into his morning nap. He would awaken in a few minutes, refreshed and alert…but for now, there was only the drowse, an overwhelming need for a brief swim across Lethe. The buzzing in the bedroom, the silence of his own stuffy room, the soft comfort of a leather chair. He stared vaguely at the black phone on its stand, watery gray eyes turning in toward the bulbous nose, vision blurring…

  Both eyes suddenly shot wide and his spine stiffened. Someone had brushed the front door to their apartment.

  He could see or imagine knuckles lifted, poised—and then a sharp rap, followed by a quick, deep voice, like gravel rolling at the bottom of a muddy stream, “I know you’re in there, Max Glaucous! Open to me. Old times and old rules.”

  Glaucous expected no visitors.

  “Coming,” he said, and rose swiftly to his feet. Before answering, he rapped lightly on Penelope’s door.

  The buzzing stopped.

  “Someone’s here, my darling,” he said. “Are we proper?”

  CHAPTER 26

  * * *

  University District

  “I don’t know you. I don’t know anyone by that name,” Fred Johnson said to the wasted, sick-looking man leaning on his porch.

  “I understand,” Daniel said. “I know you, though—or someone a lot like you.” His voice was rough and shallow. He was exhausted after his hike from the university.

  The former Charles Granger rose two inches taller than Fred Johnson, who stood about five-ten, including a shock of black hair arching back from a high forehead. Johnson looked up at his unexpected visitor with as much patience as Daniel could have expected from any man, under the circumstances.

  “I need a few minutes to explain,” Daniel said. “You probably won’t believe me, so I’ll leave after I’m done, but I thought if anyone might understand, it would be you. I’m glad you’re still here. That’s pretty amazing, actually.”

  “You looked me up in the phone book, right?”

  “I went by the university,” Daniel said. “Maybe all physicists stay the same, in all possible worlds. Maybe physicists tie up the important threads.” He held out his long arms, pulled back dirty sleeves, and grinned, showing rotten teeth.

  Johnson looked him over, trying to hide his disgust, and decided he was not a threat, just peculiar. “I don’t do a lot of physics,” he said. “Tell me what you need. A little money?”

  “It’s not about money. It’s about knowledge. I know things you’ll want to know.”

  Johnson snapped his fingers. “You’re the guy off the freeway. The beggar.” His expression reverted to contempt. “Don’t tell me you’re shaking us down in our houses.”

  “I need someone to listen. Someone who might know what I’m talking about. You can help me figure out whether it’s going to happen—or more likely, when.”

  Johnson’s cheeks were pinking. Impatient, irritated, more than a little concerned. Feeling protective of someone else in the house, someone important to him.

  “Most people don’t know what the indicators are,” Daniel said. “But things in this strand are definitely going wrong.”

  Johnson screwed up his face. “If you don’t want money, we’re done. I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “None of us do, Fred.”

  Johnson lowered his voice and glanced left, toward the kitchen. “Get off my porch.”

  Daniel tried to read this reaction—the words were strong, but Johnson was not a violent man. Daniel knew he couldn’t afford to be punched in the face or hauled in by the cops. He wasn’t at all well. At the very least, he needed a hospital, a good doctor—and at the most—

  He needed Fred.

  A woman walked up behind Johnson, curious—younger, late twenties, with reddish-blond hair cut short, high cheeks, a long chin, fresh-looking, pretty. “Who’s come calling, honey?” she asked, and put both hands on Fred’s shoulder, sizing up Daniel.

  Daniel blinked aside tears and tried desperately to focus. “Mary,” he said. “My God, you married him. That’s different. That’s great.”

  Her eyes changed instantly. “How do you know us?” she asked, voice hard. “Close the door, Fred.”

  “Mary, it’s me, Daniel.” His knees buckled and he leaned on the doorjamb.

  “Jesus,” she said. “He’s going to be sick.”

  Sliding slowly, trying to hang on, Daniel said, “Just get me some water, let me rest. I know it’s crazy, I might be out of my head, but I know both of you.”

  “I sure as hell don’t know you,” Mary said, but she went to fetch some water while Johnson helped prop Daniel up.

  “Why’d you pick our porch, buddy?” Fred asked. “You don’t look good, and you sure as hell don’t smell good. We should just call an ambulance—or the cops.”

  “No,” Daniel said, emphatic. “I’ve been walking all day. I’ll go away—after we talk, please.” He reached into his big jacket pocket and brought out the Bandle. He fanned the pages. “Look at this. Cryptids. Lazarids. So many. It won’t be long.”

  Mary returned with a glass of water. Daniel drank quickly. She had curled her right hand into a fist and he couldn’t see a ring. “I won’t make a mess. Mary, I’m so happy to see you…are you two married? Living together?”

  “None of your business,” Mary said. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m your brother. I’m Daniel.”

  Mary’s face turned red and her brows wrinkled. Her eyes went flat. She was no longer pretty. “Get out of here,” she demanded. “Goddamn it, get off our porch.”

  “You better move along, buddy,” Fred said. “What the lady says.”

  “Something must have happened,” Daniel said, looking between them, his vision fogging. “What was it? What happened to me?”

  “If you mean my brother, he died when he was nineteen years old,” Mary said. “And good riddance, the bastard. I’m calling the police.”

  CHAPTER 27

  * * *

  Mr. Whitlow had changed considerably across the long century. To the young and desperate Max Glaucous, he had once been friendly enough and kind in his stern way. In those faded brown days, Mr. Whitlow (Glaucous never learned his first name) had been a tidy but conservative dresser, slight in stature but with a good, strong voice; physically strong as well, for all his apparent middle years.

  And of course that club foot, which still didn’t seem to slow him down.

  Now Mr. Whitlow’s face appeared pinched and pale in the hallway’s yellow light, and his eyes loomed large and black as a moonless night. He wore a tight gray suit with a narrow collar, white cuffs, links studded with large garnets, narrow black shoes. He had cut his glossy black hair straight across, and the white flesh of his neck skinnied above an awkward and hastily knotted bow tie. He carried a fedora now rather than a bowler, and stood at the front door with an air of nervous submission, lips wormed into an angular smile that pushed up his high cheeks but somehow did not pinch his eyes, giving him the look of a ghost-train maniac.

  “Do you remember me, Max?” he asked.

  “Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous said. “Please come in.”

  His visitor did not enter, even as Glaucous stood back. Instead, his wide eyes slowly surveyed the room beyond.

  It was Shank who had referred him to Mr. Whitlow, and Whitlow who introduced him to the Moth—the elusive blind man in the old empty manor in Borehamwood, outside London. The blind man had approved him for service to the Livid Mistress.

  “I am here at the behest of Mr. Shank,” Whitlow said. “He informs me you have recently arrived, and already you have flipped the
heart of one of our operatives.”

  “Ah,” Glaucous said, feeling his body go gelid. The Mistress’s implied disapproval could do that to the strongest of men. “I have never been punished for weeding our fertile ground.”

  “Circumstance changes,” Whitlow said. “You have reduced our company in a crucial time.”

  “I work my territory alone, Mr. Whitlow,” Glaucous restated with low dignity. Slowly, he was coming to realize the dreamlike impropriety of this meeting, and what that might signal—that his intuition had been correct. A noose was being cinched. Otherwise, why reveal so much? For now he knew that Mr. Shank still lived, still worked, and still found favor with the Chalk Princess—despite his apparent absorption in the most dreadful Gape that Glaucous had ever experienced, that dark day of August 9, 1924, in Rheims.

  “There are discreet ways to make inquiries,” Whitlow said.

  Glaucous knew he was being toyed with. “I have worked unsupervised for nine decades. I speak with my employer only when there is a delivery. My last delivery was several years ago, and there was no mention of change.”

  Penelope watched through the crack of her bedroom door.

  Sensing Glaucous’s quiet anger, Whitlow still refused to enter. Hunters always visit with caution, approach with deliberation. His smile had not changed, however. Glaucous wondered if the elder collector had become a marionette—a dandled sacrifice to hostility—not that he had ever witnessed such a thing, or even heard of it. But nothing could be ruled out where their Livid Mistress was concerned.

  “How has it been for you, my boy?” Whitlow said, his throat bobbing.

  “Fair to middling,” Glaucous said. “And you, sir?”

  “Brambles, thorns, and nettles,” Whitlow said. “So many have been recalled, and yet…here we are. Have you visited the home country?”

  “Not for years. Built up, I hear.”