City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  The journey along the shining pipe took almost no time, the air rushing by so quickly that despite the shield of the warden’s body, Jebrassy’s clothes were nearly torn from him. He felt his exposed skin grow warm—and then they flew from an opening in a far wall. The warden spread its wings and they rose in a gliding curve over the third isle. Jebrassy managed to open his eyes long enough to see how high they were—and was instantly sick.

  He could not see Tiadba now—except for a foot thrust out from under the second wing—but with his stomach empty, a kind of fated calm came over him.

  The first and second isles had been carved open, exposing dozens of levels. He looked with odd dispassion over broken and scalloped walls, whirlpools of retreating darkness—falling breeds.

  The air smelled rotten and burned at once. Half the ceil was gone, exposing something he had never seen before—the city above his sky, bits and pieces of unknown architecture, spirals and silvery arcs, walls and walkways, moving in an intricate dance of remediation, trying to reassemble and re-create safe havens for other citizens—

  Citizens above the Tiers, also suffering—perhaps dying—

  The warden lifted them over a cloud of dissolving darkness, but not without exposing them to a stench so great Jebrassy wanted to be sick again, but could not—

  He heard Tiadba weeping. The warden’s wings and arms rearranged for swifter flight, allowing them to look into each other’s eyes across the short distance, and in her expression there was something outside Jebrassy’s understanding, outside his range of sympathy—

  Tears streamed from her cheeks and blew off behind. But behind the tears, she was laughing—weeping and laughing at once with terror and with glee.

  And then they were struck—something ugly and resentful reached out and pierced the warden, turning it black and crusted—then just touched Jebrassy—and his body filled with a violation unlike anything he had ever known before, and pain—pain so deep he could not give it voice.

  TEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 44

  * * *

  Puget Sound

  The storm began at sea as a tight, dark streak of cloud, like the smear of a giant brush loaded with gray mud. In the early morning hours, it spread quickly over the Olympic Peninsula, sucking in all the dark clouds, tightening and directing its spiral of winds, accumulating and controlling the charges behind the jagged lightning—then flowed across Puget Sound, where it formed the shadowy suggestion of an impossible giant—a female giant.

  The shadow blew inland, then south, and swung back. It could not seem to find what it wanted, and so it lashed its wings against the city. Most frightening was not the continuous deluge of rain, but the lightning, which struck in clusters, in a rainbow of colors, and with a pummel of explosive reports, like the pounding of huge fists on a cathedral organ.

  Heads turned and eyes averted, the citizens watched in mounting fear as the flashes grew more intense and more frequent. Not content with leaping from sky to ground, the lightning began to arc sideways, lancing between skyscrapers, blowing out windows, and crawling along the exterior lines of beams and girders, wrapping the towers in a lace of frustrated electricity—only to erupt again near ground level, stabbing through the tight-packed buildings like sabers through cheese.

  Sirens howled. Fire trucks and police vehicles added to the keening cacophony as far north as Lake Union. The storm compacted and gathered purpose. From above, it now formed a fat arrow paralleling the I-90 bridge, broad fletches over Lake Washington, powerful head probing: dumping, flooding, flashing.

  It had found what it was looking for.

  It followed an old white van.

  CHAPTER 45

  * * *

  Wallingford

  Uh-oh.

  Something unlikely this way comes.

  It took Daniel less than a minute to decide that the storm might be a hunter—but it was not after him. It raged south of his neighborhood, south of downtown.

  As the rain began, then the lightning, he turned away from the morning drivers and their cars, working their way west along Forty-fifth to the freeway. He was done with street corners and begging. This morning, he was no longer just one of a thousand gray men and women standing on the littered curbs of a thousand on-ramps. That life was over. A new one had begun.

  Above all, he was a survivor.

  He looked south to follow the storm’s progress. Not even the flash of lightning and horizontal twists of clouds could break his new sense of physical joy.

  For two hours now he had been enjoying freedom from the snake in his gut. What was left of Fred was no longer capable of putting up much resistance. This body was young, relatively healthy—though not in the best of shape.

  Back in the house, Mary was still asleep—and Charles Granger lay dead on the couch, covered with a blanket, pitiful and spent. At least that was not his fault, Daniel thought. The broken-down pile of meat had simply given up.

  Healthy again, Daniel had a fierce, unreasonable pride in his strength, his abilities. As well, he had no doubt now that there were others like him in the city—and they were about to be collected.

  To himself, he cheerfully sang, “Dirus irae.”

  He did not want to be caught in the open when the storm found what it was looking for. Even a few miles away the side effects would be unpleasant.

  And he needed to retrieve his boxes, hidden behind the fireplace in the abandoned house.

  CHAPTER 46

  * * *

  West Seattle

  The van shuddered as it left the West Seattle Bridge. Squat and low in the driver’s seat, pale with tension, Glaucous swerved around a car stalled in the left lane—corrected the van as it rose on one set of wheels, jerked it back on a straighter course, then took the time to wipe sweat from his eyes with scarred knuckles.

  In the back, tied up in a heavy canvas sack, Jack Rohmer had worked his arm through the drawstring and waved his fist as he rolled back and forth over the cold metal floor.

  Glaucous had stopped his trills and whistles of birdsong. Now he was selling things, long ago. “Costards, pippins, starberries, currants!” he called, in the full glory and joy of the old times. Penelope discharged a sharp grunt as lightning blasted a passing utility pole. A transformer sparked and tumbled over their windshield, bounced along behind them.

  All the while, Glaucous was muttering words with no apparent sense or connection to their journey or their peril: “Shoestrings and jute! Oakum and fiber! Paper and rags, any old iron! Scallions! Onions! Leeks! Bones and FAT!” (This as lightning struck again) and “Plasters and pastes! Plasters for all, plasters and poultice, what ails will draw!”

  A stench filled Jack’s nose, rank and oppressive, not just the sweat and confinement of the bag, but a taint from his recent jaunt. He had jumped too far, crossed into a diseased knot of world-strands, dissolving, looping—stinking of something awful.

  He knew that the van was being followed, that his reek was being tracked…

  Glaucous seemed to share the same opinion. In between his pointless calls—he was now working his way through “Bluing! Blue stuffs! Indigo!”—he paused and leaned toward his partner, as if to speak in confidence, then, shaking his head, pulled back and wrenched his spine straight, his shoulders as square as they could be, incredulous he would even think of giving voice to such thoughts, whatever they might have been.

  He could not afford doubts—not now.

  Penelope had broken the armrest from the van’s door and held it out, squeezing the plastic and steel like a banana. Her eyes almost popped from their fat-draped orbits.

  Speckles of weird light danced on their faces.

  Glaucous clapped a hand over his mouth and nose and stared above his thumb, eyes wide.

  “What is that?” Penelope shrieked, her vocal register that of a frightened kindergartener.

  “It is magnificence!” Glaucous shouted. “It is power and promise, a plight, a troth!” His words belied his expression; brow
s low, piggish eyes receding into his skull.

  Jack now had his arm out of the sack up to the shoulder and was squirming to push his head through.

  “What are you saying?” Penelope squealed.

  “Something is hunting us! Too eager, waiting too long!”

  “Hunting what? You promised we would be safe!”

  “I will be safe.” Glaucous gave her a guilty glance, then wheeled the van onto an off-ramp and said, with grim curiosity, sunken eyes on the rearview mirror, “I turn up this road—bolts like giant feet, stamping feet, they follow and turn with me! I have not seen this before, believe that, dear queen of buzz and hum—not before, not ever. We have not called for a delivery, yet I sense something other than a Gape. The Chalk Princess is anxious. More than we bargained for. A large bite, this youngster—more than we can chew!”

  Jack was beyond fear. The cloying treacle and liquor of Glaucous’s talent had pinched to sour vinegar, stinging in his nostrils and brain, opening up choked glimpses of branching, looping world-lines—none of them good, all of them in fact awful.

  What was happening had never happened before, not in Jack’s experience, nor in the experience of any ancestor who had ever contributed to the sum of the genes ratcheting in his flesh and blood—even as far back as the primordial slime.

  CHAPTER 47

  * * *

  Wallingford

  Daniel drew up Fred’s gray wool jacket and walked west, shoulders hunched, feeling the storm gather its power.

  A sharp jerk of sense had reversed his arrogance and pleasure at his new body. The storm wasn’t after him—but it would work quite well as a distraction. He had been too preoccupied to pay close attention—stupid, stupid!

  There was almost certainly another target nearby—another fate-shifter. Maybe more than one. But someone in the employ of the thing that hunted them could still set his sights on Daniel. He would be special. I no longer dream of the city. I don’t know why—I just don’t.

  A bad shepherd—isn’t that what they call me?

  Lightning whited the facades on his right. Just blocks from the turn to his home, as he walked beside the big lamp shop, all the chandeliers, switched on for the morning trade, suddenly went dark.

  The air hissed.

  Daniel had to drag his new body by main force toward the abandoned house. Fear was bringing Fred back, unpleasantly strong, and Fred most certainly did not want to go. Daniel could not jaunt again, even had he the strength, the concentration. The corrosion would be everywhere. Nothing but hideous, gray looped worlds bunched up between this dissolving segment of history and whatever lay at the end: tumbled lengths of fate, frayed out, soaked and sour-smoky with decay.

  Another voice—not his own, not Fred’s. Fred was already being pushed back like a slug under a stone.

  Why bother, Mr. Iremonk?

  Lightning flew down the street, sizzling, blinding, and struck a fire hydrant. The blast nearly knocked him off his feet and shattered all the glass in the lamp shop windows.

  He stumbled on, whining like a kicked dog.

  You have an appointment, long delayed.

  People on the sidewalks were screaming, running.

  He whirled around. An old woman in tight pedal-pushers held an inverted black umbrella in one hand and dragged a terrier along behind her, on its side, legs kicking. Each time the dog got to its feet, she jerked the leash so hard it fell over again. Big splats of rain—drops the size of baseballs, mixed with sharp chips of ice—hurled from the churning sky.

  Just a few miles from the center of the storm.

  The sweep of her robe, merely that. Nothing compared to the Gape. Remember, Daniel? Poor bastards, all of you. But especially you.

  Half a block behind him, Daniel saw a small man with oily, slick black hair. Daniel turned left. Across the street waited another—slender, dressed in old black clothes shiny with water and age—and a block east, a third, clutching a dripping, battered bowler hat in one white hand. All were smiling, enjoying the storm—ignoring the rain and the ice.

  Where is the net’s fourth corner, Daniel?

  Trying to run backward, he almost fell, so he swiveled, arms wind-milling, and lit out—gave it all he had. He wouldn’t look back.

  Had to reach the house.

  Had to.

  CHAPTER 48

  * * *

  West Seattle

  The storm had a dead, hollow voice. It had never known hunger, care, passion, or any growl of hormonal surge; its voice had never vented from flesh or form.

  The storm was a thousand spins and drafts of wind and water, filled with restless veins of flash and charge, and all it knew—all it could possibly know—was that it had been set free, liberated from probability, and that it had a power no storm had ever before possessed.

  It could gather, it could kill—with malice.

  One wet black swirl had almost caught up with the white van.

  “My dear, it is our quarry, our cargo!” Glaucous shouted over the roar. He jerked his thumb toward the back. “He trails a spoor…”

  “Of thread?” Penelope shrilled.

  “Spoor, not spool! He exudes, he stinks of the bad places, not hell—though he must have come very close, dipped an ankle or a knee…Violet! Indigo! Blue! Red! Red bolts and orange! All for madam’s delight!”

  Jack needed all his strength. He pressed his feet against the doors at the rear of the van, clutched the sack around him, rolled, grunted—

  The light from the windshield darkened. Glaucous and Penelope screeched like terrified parrots.

  Jack peered out of the hole he had pushed through the cinch, between the silhouettes of the massive, cowering woman and the driver—through the van’s windshield. There, he saw something inexplicable. The vision refused to be cataloged or stored away, even in short-term memory.

  A seam, a gap, a failure.

  A face. Extraordinary beauty—and rage.

  Jack immediately forgot what he saw.

  Glaucous looked to his terrified partner. In one bright flash he saw the intensity of Penelope’s fear and knew that she knew. A fatal mistake had been made. However long their relationship—whatever her strength and talent—she would have to be the one. Not for the first time, Glaucous would sacrifice a valued partner.

  The storm could not wait. It struck with all its pent-up force, spending all its power, everything hidden within, at once.

  A black wall of cloud plummeted.

  The windshield shattered.

  Darkness hammered.

  The van flipped and skidded along its side, rolling Jack with a bone-bruising thump onto the ribbed panel. Through the sack, the skin of his back burned as friction heated the metal. Jack rolled and kicked and pushed his head and one arm through the cinch.

  The van ricocheted off a jersey barrier and flipped again. Suspended in space, Jack drew up his knees, rounded into a ball—all he could do to avoid breaking an arm, a leg, his neck.

  From the front seats came twin explosions of breath as belts jerked tight.

  The van slammed down on its roof.

  CHAPTER 49

  * * *

  Wallingford

  As Daniel ran up the steps of the house, he observed the fourth corner of the net. A small piebald man stood on the porch of the bungalow. Rain fell in such volume, Daniel could barely make out the house, much less the figure waiting for him there—paleness within shadow, shrunken, like a hideous dwarf.

  Daniel was soaked. The tall grass in the yard lay flat, submissive. Pieces of ice bounced on the sidewalk and the roof, struck his head and shoulders. Blood trickled down his forehead, diluted by rain. Not a good performance for a man used to walking between raindrops. Lightning played to the south, where he supposed the real search was under way—where the main target was being harried.

  Assume nothing. Perhaps it is you, after all.

  He instinctively reached ahead with his feelers. All paths were distorted, tangled. More alarming, he saw an echo float
by—a half-seen rebound of Charles Granger, slouching backward toward the freeway, oblivious—

  And then, another—Fred. Himself, bouncing back from just a few minutes in the future. Their broken piece of history was rapidly approaching an impenetrable wall—and he had no idea what would happen then.

  The piebald dwarf on the porch advanced—and changed. This was no mere solid figure. Daniel had seen such before, in the bad place—forms and figures that defied dimension. Descending the steps, the dwarf grew as if reflected in a curved mirror. The closer it came, the larger it would be—and the more powerful. By the time the figure reached him it would loom high enough to brush the black, swirling clouds.

  Daniel looked back and saw the other men in their antiquated suits, cringing at the rain and the ice—human and solid after all, capable of pain. The grass steamed. The air cooled, turned thick as gelatin. All darkened.

  He felt heavier—tried desperately to reason, to be smarter than the poor bastards around him. Echoes from the Terminus at the end of this world-line would temporarily increase the local mass quotient. Time would begin to slow. At the Terminus, for most observers, it would stop or echo them back a few days, a few hours, where they would live those brief segments over and over, hapless as robots repeating a programmed loop.

  Slices of history were now floating like chunks of meat in a half-digested stew—nothing left of the future, he surmised, but the wall, and around that, a thinned-out, dimensionless vacancy in which nothing could think, nothing could live.

  He had worked this out some time and many fates ago—back when he had been Daniel Patrick Iremonk through and through, calculating what it would be like for his time to come, this way or that, to its inevitably mixed and messy conclusion.