City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  Glaucous lowered his gaze. “You want to escape, but all ways seem good. Which way to turn? I am a happy fellow. All ways seem sweet to me—and thus, to you.” He flicked a round shoulder at his companion. “Penelope, he is not convinced. He wishes to leave us. Convince him.”

  The large woman tilted her head back on her short neck and shrugged open her long brown raincoat, let it slide off. Her broad bare shoulders shone moist and dimpled like sweating dough.

  Jack could not look away.

  Beneath the coat she wore no clothes, yet she was not naked. Dark masses covered her lumpish modesty. Her body was swathed in crawling clots of wasps—yellow jackets, thousands of them breaking and rippling in slow waves across her flaccid flesh, draped in buzzing shreds around knees and ankles, a living gown.

  The one real horror of Jack’s existence, the one fate he could not elude: a swarm of angry, stinging insects. He had learned painfully that insect colonies and hives drew their own snarled road maps of fate, thousands of individual world-lines tangled like overcooked spaghetti, knots of furious determination. Wasps, bees, even ants—could fan out and block his decisions, mire his movement from strand to strand among the world’s infinite fates.

  Wasps had helped teach him the limits of his talent, and had also sensitized him to their venom: one more sting would be enough.

  They know what I am!

  The wasps rose like black mist, evaporating from the woman’s body, zipping around the room. Revealed, Penelope was a stack of lumps, rolling heaves set upon legs like trees. She was not shy; her vacant smile did not change as wasps filled the apartment.

  There was no way he could escape all the swooping, darting insects.

  “Penelope, dear, let us do what we do best,” said Glaucous. “Let us help this poor young man.”

  For a creature of her size, Penelope was swift, but Glaucous was even swifter. The room filled with grabbing hands and buzzing wings, small, hard, striped abdomens thrusting long stingers, faceted black eyes searching and hating until insects and humans seemed to become one.

  A noise like giant cards being shuffled, slapping, slamming, snapping into place.

  Jack moved.

  Before Glaucous could grab him with his outsized hands, Jack came unstuck from the treacle and dread and jumped across hundreds, thousands, of fates, whole cords of fates at once, the greatest effort he had ever made, greater by far than the effort in Ellen’s house—just to escape those awful stingers.

  Glaucous stared down at the young man lying limp on the floor, and a fissure of doubt appeared in his squat, craggy features. He remembered how wretched and disheveled the old crookback’s dying birds had looked as he tossed them into the road one by one for the rats to gnaw.

  “Has he fled?” Glaucous asked, bending over the body.

  “He’s right there,” Penelope observed, waving a huge hand on which wasps still crawled.

  Glaucous regarded Jack doubtfully. Jack’s eyes opened wide, filled with empty terror.

  Glaucous reached down and felt the boy’s pockets. In the light jacket—a piece of folded paper. He reached in. A shock tingled up his arm and made his teeth clack. As his hand withdrew, the paper came with it.

  No need for Whitlow to confirm they had the correct prey. But he did not dare remove the box.

  Stone and quarry must be delivered together.

  CHAPTER 35

  * * *

  The first far strand Jack reached shocked him nearly senseless. Seattle was being rocked by an enormous earthquake. He moved off that path with hardly time to feel the uplifting slam and careened through a flash-blur kaleidoscope of alternatives until the colors dulled and the flickering slowed and he hammered up against something he had never experienced—not that he had experienced any of this before: a barricade or glassy membrane. For an instant he could almost see through it—but something pulled him back, protecting—restraining.

  What lay beyond that membrane was worse than where he was, and where he was…

  His flight stopped. He was stunned—he needed time to recover. No world-line had ever been like this.

  It felt dead. At the first breath, soot and ashes seemed to fill his nose and lungs. The apartment building he and Burke had once called home had not changed in size and shape, but all vitality had been sucked from its walls and timbers. A sick unsure light fell through the broken window. Paint dropped in slow flakes from cracked wall-board. The moisture in the air did not refresh his parched throat; it seemed to burn like a mist of acid. Off balance, he kicked out one leg—and stepped on a carpet of steel syringes, hundreds scattered over the floor.

  Something moved in the corner of his eye and he spun about, crunching needles—this Jack wore thick-soled boots. He saw no one, nothing alive. The rooms were empty, silent but for the patter of falling flakes of paint. He lifted his bare forearms and held them close, unbelieving—flesh pricked by needle tracks, scabbed over, painful.

  Wherever he was, he was sure he had eluded Glaucous and his giant, doughy partner. But that did not encourage him. He had had a knack lately of going too far afield, of shifting not just his immediate fate, but the quality of his intended world.

  He had, for example, fled from Ellen—and ended up on the line where he felt compelled to dial the phone number in the newspaper ad, without sensing the downside. Not a good plan, not a good circumstance.

  And now his fate had just turned much worse.

  One requirement of his crazy ability—or symptom of his neurotic imaginings of power and control—had always been the conviction that he could tell when things were going to get worse, before they did. Without that precognition, his jumps would be random—of no value at all. Yet now he could detect nothing worse than where he already was—except what lay in wait behind the hard, translucent barricade: corruption itself, a festering discontent mixed with…what?

  Emptiness?

  “Anybody home?” he called, his voice a croak. “Burke?”

  Small things scuttled in what had once been his bedroom. His rats? He crossed gingerly over the warped floor, scuffing through a tinkling scatter, crunching and breaking needles with a sound like falling icicles.

  Peered around the corner.

  In the small room squatted the trunk that had been with him since the death of his father. The trunk where he kept his most valued possessions. Behind which he had found the folio.

  He touched his torn pocket. The box—still there.

  Checking the solidity of the floor with a tapping boot, applying half his weight, then full pressure, he crossed the bedroom. The trunk’s boards had warped. He lifted the lid. The trunk was empty except for a gray, slushy film.

  He let the lid fall and backed out of the room. On the back porch, Jack pushed open the sliding door—broken glass lined the frame—and stepped out. Across the street, all the buildings had collapsed into piles of gray and brown rubble from which beams and boards pointed up like dead fingers. Muddy water streamed down the gutters and over the cracked and heaved asphalt, pooling and swirling in the dips as if there had been a heavy rain and the drains were clogged.

  A dead-end place in a dead-end time. No hope as far as he could see, no life…and for how long? How long had this world been dead? Hours?

  Years?

  By the looks, the smell, it had never been truly alive.

  Wherever and whatever it touches, it takes hold. You’ve seen it before. You will see it again…

  Everywhere he stepped, in every room, needles had been carelessly cast aside. He pulled up the sleeve of the filthy jacket and stared again at the puncture marks. A fresh one oozed a serum-yellow drop. Jack could feel the drugs cloud his mind. He fought the lethargy, the hateful, bitter satisfaction of having just scored—and listened to the noises outside: wind, rain, water, the underlying rasp of falling dust and debris. The very air smelled sour as old vomit. How could anything live here? He needed to find a way down the stairs, away from this comatose neighborhood, across the city—maybe this
was just a local phenomenon, an unfortunate slum.

  But he knew the blight wasn’t local. It was everywhere. He had landed in an awful trap. He had managed to jump to a perverse line of least opportunity, surrounded by an infinity of purgatories—all of them bordering on hell. All adjacent paths were dark—a fecund void smeared across any jumpable distance, tainting vast bundles of world-lines, a metaphysical disease that could not be measured except in billions, trillions, of corroded, corrupted lives.

  The joy of matter is gone.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, something moved—and when he jerked around to look, this time, it was still there.

  CHAPTER 36

  * * *

  Penelope slung the limp, heavy sack over her bare shoulder, then stooped to grab her coat. Huge and still naked, she tugged coat and sack through the door with several hard, bruising bumps, then humped the sack into a better carrying position and hauled it down the steps, dropping it near the yawning rear doors of the old van.

  Rain fell in sheets. Lightning flashed like the blink of a huge eyelid.

  Glaucous stood in the empty apartment, chin in scarred hand, thinking over the folded piece of paper pinched lightly between his fingers like a captured butterfly. Best not to meddle, though he had long been curious about how such things were folded and what they actually contained. He slipped it into his coat pocket. Something key was missing. Yes, they had the call number, they had their boy. They even had the box; but not the final part his employer was willing to pay for, in money and dispensation. Despite the wasps, the boy had made his leap, leaving behind a dangerous vacancy. Delivering other than a complete subject could be painful—even fatal.

  Glaucous leaned over the walkway’s iron railing. “Penelope!” he shouted into the rain. “We’ve bagged a shill. He’s gone.”

  “Here he is—he’s here!” his partner wailed.

  “We can’t take any chances. We’ll have to stay and hope the boy returns—or cut him loose.”

  Penelope let out a hollow curse. Then, like a little girl about to cry, “Why didn’t you tell me before I carried him all this way?”

  A balding man with a mustache, in his mid-thirties and tired, was climbing the stairs, raincoat flapping over his white kitchen work coat. He paused at the top and tracked the busted-in door, then turned at the sound of that infantile voice rising through the rain—and caught sight of Glaucous. Slower, more cautious, he tried to sidle around the strong-looking gnome.

  “Begging your pardon,” Glaucous said, leaning in toward the rail.

  “What the hell is this?” the man asked.

  Glaucous pitched him a bizarre smile, then slipped aside and glided down the stairs, feet a blur, using his thick hands as runners. “Sorry!” he called.

  Jack’s roommate poked his head through the broken door. Wasps filled the apartment. Swearing, he swatted about his face.

  Glaucous joined Penelope. “No matter about the boy—I’ll snag him. Let’s move on.”

  She had propped the loose, bagged form against a retaining wall, dripping and still. Face expressionless, she drew up her coat and covered her massive nakedness.

  Jack Rohmer had fled so far that at first Glaucous could not even smell his spoor. Glaucous was certain that Jack would rejoin their path soon, in sheer desperation. There were now so many moribund pathways, so many diseased lines that led nowhere.

  Oh yes, he, Glaucous would fling his sweet net across the black shimmer of broken fates, and with another deft snap, Jack would fly straight back, frightened out of his wits. All would be well.

  The roommate shouted threats from the third floor.

  Glaucous waved his hand at the bag. “Lift. Carry. Bring him along, my dear.”

  CHAPTER 37

  * * *

  The apartment’s other occupant took color and texture from the needle-littered floor, the scabbed walls and caved ceiling. It made a sound like hard snow falling on a black evening—never ending, never changing. This was its only voice. It had been waiting, trapped in this room, forever, and now it complained to anyone who could listen. Jack had simply not noticed it until now. Looking at it, he was paralyzed.

  The occupant took the initiative and moved—without moving. It changed position, Jack was sure of that—but not convinced he could be sure. As he turned to track the flaw, the blur, where it now stood between him and the door, he saw that it had been there all the time, and nowhere else. He had been mistaken.

  He was noticing it again for the first time.

  Jack’s eyelids twitched and tried to close. Drugged sleep wanted to drape him like funeral laundry. He needed to stop seeing, get away from the impossible thing between him and the door. His mind was not able to process and remember. His engines of memory were shutting down. Soon he would be stuck here just like the other. He would protect himself in the only way left to inhabitants of this purgatory: by gathering up floor, wall, and ceiling, and hiding in plain sight.

  “I don’t want to make trouble,” Jack said, shivering. “I just want to get out of here.”

  The sound of hard snow resolved into a grainy, steady weeping—tears of frozen grief—the saddest sound he had ever heard. The other dropped its camouflage, became more solid and human—two arms, a lump for a head, a trunk divided at its base into two legs.

  “Where will you go?” it seemed to ask. “Take me with you.”

  “I don’t know how.” Jack could just make out a face with a hole for a mouth and two sunken green pits for eyes.

  “Take me outside.”

  “You can’t leave?” Jack asked, feeling sick.

  “No,” it hissed. It came closer—had always stood right beside Jack, would never leave him, limb stretched as if to place a hand on his shoulder—but there was no hand.

  Not yet.

  The trap was closing.

  Jack could not jump. No paths, no freedom, nothing but pestilent strands of not-color, not-darkness, each ending in a pulsing, tumorous knot, ready to spread and consume everything.

  The fabric here is rotting. Strands have come loose. Their ends double up and stick to make loops. That’s where I am. I’m in a looped world.

  Jack leaned back to scream.

  The scream trickled out, no more than the squeal of a small, dying animal, no louder than the crying of his rats.

  “Stay…I’ve left some food for you,” the shape said.

  Jack suddenly recognized the blurred face.

  This was Burke. His roommate.

  A hook snagged Jack’s spine and jerked him back with a jolt of unbelievable pain. Before he had time to think about death and speech without voices—about the formless paw on his shoulder, welcoming him to an unchanging forever—he was yanked with considerable force and even more pain.

  He tried again to scream—really gave it all he had. The strangled noise dopplered across a thousand gray, dead-end paths—and slam, he was jerked hard in another direction, through thousands more lines—the fragments of light that reached his eyes growing brighter and warmer, then darker and colder—and again he was snagged, tugged back—in no time at all. Someone wanted to reel him in and Jack knew who it was—could feel that same sickly sweet, oh so reassuring touch, like the finger of a fly fisherman on a whipped-out filament.

  Jack Rohmer was being pulled from rivers of misery by a master fisher of men.

  CHAPTER 38

  * * *

  West Seattle

  Glaucous drove south in the slow lane, then turned onto the West Seattle Bridge. He blew a piercing trill through his lips, guided by no particular tune. Every now and then he would wince, jerk back his head, and grimace as if clenching something between yellow teeth. “Got you,” he muttered, and wiped his hand across his brow.

  Penelope lay against the window, tiny eyes languorous. A lone wasp crawled from her collar and wobbled along a thick fold on her neck. The rain droned on the van’s roof and the wipers swiped. At this hour of the morning the old elevated road was almost deserted. D
awn staked a feeble claim to the east, a vague lightness in the wet gloom.

  In the back of the van the sack stirred.

  “Ah,” Glaucous said. “Is it no longer a husk, a shill?”

  Penelope brushed a wasp from her nose and cracked it under her thumb. Glaucous admired her strength and her steadfastness—but not her personality. She felt no affection for anything, really. His fourth partner, Penelope had stuck with him the longest—over sixty years. In return, she had not aged, but had grown large and unattractive. Others had withered and shrunk. Once, for a time, he had carried his second partner in his pocket. Over a few days, his third had simply faded as if left out in the sun—and then, one morning, had vanished. As far as he knew, she was still dwelling in their old house—not that anyone would ever see her, and not that it mattered.

  Penelope’s eyes opened. “It’s back, I think.”

  He turned judging eyes on her. “How can we be certain?”

  “It’s crying,” Penelope said.

  The canvas sucked up against Jack’s mouth. His own harsh breath clung to his face with a stale, comforting certainty. He might suffocate. He might die. Anything would be better than where he had been—the shoddy lands, where rot and despair ruled.

  And Jack was crying, quietly and steadily. Having been jerked from purgatory, having come so near to hell, his tears had nothing to do with bravery or fear, but with grief greater than anything he had ever experienced.

  The joy of matter is gone.

  And when he reluctantly remembered that which he had nearly broken through—a barrier like a scab over an open wound—

  “He smells like burning,” Penelope said.

  “Leave him be,” Glaucous said, but a worried cast came into his eyes. He glanced out the window at the rain, the lightning. The air seemed more turgid, gray light pulsing under the storm in broad, thick waves. Or was that the blood pumping through his chunky, hard heart?