City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  “What about your stone?”

  “I dropped it, but then I found it,” Ginny said, nodding. “It was right near the path, still in its box. I picked it up and walked back between the trees. Near the house, I saw that the car was gone. I was alone. You must have done the same thing, Jack. So tell me what I did that made them go away.”

  He still couldn’t answer.

  “Can we slice world-lines?” she asked. “Not just jump between them, but cut them into pieces, kill them?”

  He shook his head. “It’s something to do with the stones summing up. They’re part of us. We can’t lose them unless we die.”

  “I knew that when I pawned the box. It always comes back to me. Did you cut things loose? In the storm.”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think I had time.”

  “Hold my hand,” Ginny said, and held it out.

  He didn’t hesitate. Her fingers were hot and her skin seemed to glow a faint cherry-red like the iron stove in the next room. “You’re burning up,” Jack said, but did not let go.

  “Sometimes I do that. It’ll pass,” Ginny said. “I survived, didn’t I?”

  “You sure did.”

  “I know why they want to catch us,” she said. “Whoever they are.”

  “Whatever they are,” Jack added.

  “They’re afraid of us.”

  He squeezed her fingers and the heat subsided. “Makes you wonder about Bidewell. What are we getting ourselves into?”

  “Bidewell’s not afraid, not of us,” Ginny said. “That’s why I came here. No knots, no fear—just quiet and lots of books. The books are like insulation. I still feel safe here. My stone is safe, too—for now.”

  Jack let out a low whistle. “Okay,” he said.

  “You’re not convinced.”

  “It’s quiet—that’s okay. But I’d like for everything just to get back to normal.”

  “Was it ever normal—for you?” Ginny asked.

  “Before my mother died,” he said. “Well, maybe not normal—but fun. Nice.”

  “You loved her?”

  “Of course. Together, she and my father were…wherever we ended up, we had a home, even if it was just for a day.”

  Ginny looked around the warehouse. “This feels more like home than anyplace I’ve ever been. What about you? What’s your story?”

  “My mother was a dancer. My father wanted to be a comedian and a magician. My mother died, then my father. I wasn’t much more than a kid. They didn’t leave me much—just a trunk, some tricks and some books on magic—and the stone. I didn’t starve—I had learned how to play guitar and juggle, do card tricks, that sort of thing. I fell in with a tough crowd for a while, like you, got out of it…learned the streets, started busking. Managed not to get killed. Two years ago I moved in with a guy named Burke. He works as a sous chef in a restaurant. We don’t see much of each other.”

  “Lovers?” Ginny asked.

  Jack smiled. “No,” he said. “Burke’s as straight as they come. He just doesn’t like living alone.”

  “You’ve met those women before?”

  “I know Ellen pretty well,” Jack said. “I met the others a few days ago.”

  “Did you do those sketches that Miriam found…in your apartment?”

  “I’m a lousy artist. The other one did them. My guest.”

  “Where’s he from, do you think?”

  “‘The city at the end of time,’ of course,” Jack said, trying for sarcasm, but his voice cracked.

  “Mine, too,” Ginny said. “But the last time I dreamed about her, she’s not there. She’s outside, lost somewhere awful.”

  “The Chaos,” Jack said.

  She looked down at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Jack, do they have stones like ours?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe we’re supposed to bring them.”

  “I don’t see how. They’re there—we’re here.” He pushed back, then looked down at a large cardboard box labeled VALDOLID, 1898. “What kind of books does Bidewell collect?”

  “All sorts,” Ginny said.

  Jack pulled up the interleaved flaps and lifted out a dusty volume. The book’s hinges had cracked and the leather left powder on his fingers. The gold-embossed words on the spine still did not mean anything. He looked up. “Gobbledygook Press,” he said. “I guess the stones aren’t finished.”

  “A lot of his books were like that before. Bidewell seems to know the difference.”

  “Makes as much sense as everything else.” Jack was about to put the book down, but something tugged in his arm—the faintest pull on a hidden nerve—and he turned to a middle page. There, surrounded by more nonsense, a paragraph poked up that he could (just barely) read:

  Then Jerem enterd the House and therei found a book all meaningless bu for these words:

  Hast thou the old rock, Jeremy? In your pocket, wihyou?

  Ginny watched him closely as his face flushed, as if he had been prancing around naked. Tongue poking the inside of his cheek, Jack slowly flipped through more of the book. Nothing else made sense.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He showed her the page. She read the lines and her jaw fell like a child seeing a ghost. “All the books are different,” she said. “I’m not in any of them.”

  “Have you looked?” Jack asked.

  She shook her head. “There wasn’t time.”

  FOURTEEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 55

  * * *

  Tenebros Flood Channel

  Pahtun had grown accustomed to living in the perpetual tweenlight of the outer reaches of the old flood channels. He seldom went up into the Kalpa and was content performing his duties on the wide flats, away from the wakelight glow over the Tiers—he called them by their old name, the rookery.

  Pahtun had been training marchers for longer than there had been breeds. A lofty, slender man with an experienced brown face, he strode along the channel floor, eyes silver-gray with caution. He knew the city was dying. It had been dying by degrees since before he had been made. Now, it was likely to finish its dying quickly.

  Wakelight grew fitfully over the distant ceil. Red rings pulsed and flickered around the cracked and battered patches left by the intrusion that had blown through the lower levels of the first bion, directly over his head, and nearly claimed them all.

  He finished his walk of twenty miles from the camp up the Tenebros channel, to the rendezvous between the first and second isles, and waited for the brown wardens to descend with their half-conscious burdens.

  This time there were only nine rather than the usual twenty. “Great destruction,” the lead warden explained. “Many lost. These may be the last.”

  The young breeds crawled into the shade of the low channel trees, moaning softly. Pahtun examined them one by one as the wardens flew away. He lifted their heads, using his flower-finger to sense their vital levels, and found them fit—the wardens never delivered injured or incapable breeds.

  As they recovered, he helped them to their feet, soothing with low crèche songs. His three cohorts had walked across the channels to the sandy stretch by then. More obviously jaded, with much less time on the job, these younger Menders still attended to the recruits with patience and skill. They soon had them walking in a single column toward the dark outer wall and the training camp that had waited there for as long as there had been Tiers or marchers—too long to contemplate, as far as Pahtun was concerned.

  Six males and three females. He watched the dazed breeds and, as always, both envied and pitied them—they were few, they were small, they were confused. He wondered what they would see on their journey.

  Only young breeds were ever sent on the marches—grown of primordial mass, cultured in the Tiers, and afforded the best instincts, some of which would truly awaken only in the Chaos. Personally, this version of Pahtun had never ventured bey
ond the middle lands. If these nine made up the last march to be delivered to his expert care, he might never learn the whole truth about the Chaos and the Typhon.

  He showed the breeds to their tents and made sure they were comfortable. Soon, they were sound asleep.

  The cohorts made their own camp nearby, away from the breeds and away from Pahtun’s solitary tent. They held the trainer in some awe—but considered him old and peculiar. After all, what was the point of all of this?

  Perhaps there was no point. None of the other Pahtuns, sent into the Chaos in violation of the rulings of the Astyanax, had ever reported their discoveries. And none of the marchers he’d trained had ever returned.

  CHAPTER 56

  * * *

  The Broken Tower

  As requested, a living breed, crèche-born of primordial matter, for whatever purpose the Librarian might devise.

  Ghentun stood on one side of the high, empty chamber, a dozen yards from the nearest soaring window, surrounded by a slow, enveloping shimmer. At his waist floated the young male, curled in anesthetic oblivion, injured but already healing—treated and protected by Ghentun’s cloak.

  The Keeper of the Tiers could only feel numb. He could not conceive of any action that would make any difference now.

  Delay, decadence, conspiracies beyond counting or comprehension—the inevitable sapping of the city’s vitality in the face of millions of years of warding off the unthinkable—had brought the end closer than even he had imagined.

  Upon arrival, Ghentun had circled the chamber to look down through the high windows at the Kalpa’s three remaining bions. The intrusion had severely damaged the lowest levels of the first bion, whose foundations enveloped the Tiers and from whose rounded crown rose the Broken Tower. It also wreaked tremendous destruction on the southern and the tertian bions. Both sent up dismal, spiraling plumes of silvery smoke to the limits of the inner pressure barrier.

  Outside the border of the real, the monstrosities drew closer, as if warming themselves on the Kalpa’s fires of destruction. The Witness’s eternally spinning beam had accelerated, and its huge mountain of solidified flesh—once human, now ageless and beyond pity—pushed in toward the Defenders, anticipating another sacrifice.

  The Tiers had always attracted the strongest, most destructive intrusions. Now Ghentun wondered if one reason for this attention was floating beside him. He comprehended that since the creation of the Tiers, the Typhon had been probing the city as if with special knowledge—if such a thing could know or make plans.

  He looked to the east, away from the Witness, for the last party of marchers, hoping they might leave before the final collapse, before the Typhon’s triumph.

  The Librarian had dallied for millions of years. Mind beyond measure—how could Ghentun criticize or even understand? But there had never been a plan that he could discern—certainly not one that could be explained to a Mender or a breed. He was really no better than his charges, no better than this brash, crèche-born youngster, who had persisted despite all the deceptions and intellectual barricades set in his path.

  Like Menders—like Ghentun—breeds understood shame, as if their primordial stuff preserved a heritage of that ancient emotion lost to the Great Eidolons.

  An angelin approached, appearing at first as a tiny speck silvering outward from the center of the chamber, then suddenly nearby—a few feet away. As before, it was female in form, pale blue, and no taller than Ghentun’s knee—but this time it seemed to prefer the appearance of walking rather than drifting about or flying.

  It might be the same angelin he had spoken with before—and it might not. Identity was of little importance to this class of servants.

  Ghentun nudged the breed. Jebrassy raised his head and blinked, looked around, but remained curled, as if savoring a few last moments of warmth and sanity.

  “All honor to the Librarian,” the angelin sang, its voice like trickling water. “Is the experiment concluded?”

  “Yes,” Ghentun replied.

  “You’ve brought the requested specimen from the Tiers?”

  “I have. Does the Librarian request my presence?” Ghentun asked doubtfully.

  “You will accompany the young breed.”

  Jebrassy pushed out his legs and slowly dropped to the bottom of the cloak, where he stood on his own, beneath the gaze of the Tall One. He turned to stare in awe at the blue form a few feet beyond, radiating deep cold despite the cloak’s protection.

  Jebrassy had moved well beyond confusion or fear. Anything could happen. He almost hoped it would—all of it, just to get it over with.

  Then he thought of Tiadba. He shuddered at the realization that he had just emerged from a dark sleep. But for how long? Where was she? Had she been sucked into the intrusion? Was she even alive?

  Jebrassy growled and shoved his hands against the shimmer.

  A small voice spoke in his ear like the high chirrup of a letterbug. “Don’t do that. It’s cold out here, and the Librarian wishes you comfort and health. Both of you will follow this silly blue form. It is my pleasure to escort you to the most wonderful place in all the Kalpa. Possibly the most wonderful place left to humans in all the cosmos.”

  Jebrassy looked up at the Tall One, then back to the small blue figure, puzzled—they thought they were all humans, despite appearances, was that the secret? He began to move his feet in a shuffle and discovered that the shimmer followed him—and so walked at a normal pace, keeping up with the naked blue image. Ghentun stayed beside him.

  Not even the sweep of a knife-edged beam of gray light across the smooth roof of the chamber—like a threat of instant blindness—slowed their progress, though it made Jebrassy cringe.

  When they came to the center—a walk of what seemed only minutes—he looked back and studied the far curved rank of high windows and suddenly understood where they were—remembering the stories in the books.

  “We’re in Malregard, aren’t we?” he asked Ghentun.

  “Some once called it that,” Ghentun said. “We’re both of us far above our neighborhoods and rank, young breed. In the region of the Great Eidolons. They neither think nor act as we do.”

  “But we’re all humans,” Jebrassy said.

  The Keeper touched his nose with amusement—a breed gesture.

  “Watch your step,” the angelin warned. “You should close your eyes. We’re vectoring to the top of the tower—what’s left of it, of course.”

  “What broke the tower?” Jebrassy asked.

  Ghentun made a small, ambiguous sound. “You needn’t concern yourself with the past. There’s far too much of it. You should only look ahead. For once, the future is scaled to fit you.”

  Jebrassy did not know whether to be insulted.

  Silvery curves danced around them, as if they were moving, yet he saw no change. And then—they stood beneath a terrible sky, filled with hoops of flame and spinning worlds. Something looked down upon them, impossible to actually see or measure—and Jebrassy thrust his clenched fists to his eyes.

  He thought he was falling—that he was back with Tiadba flying over the Tiers, and the warden had let him go—

  Voices sounded all around, saying nothing he could understand, and a deep booming buffeted his body.

  Jebrassy could not stand the thought of falling without seeing where he was going to hit. He had to know. He lowered his arms, but for a moment his eyes refused to open. He had seen too much already—something bright and multicolored, and from it great sweeps of silver rising high into an arched grayness, grasping and moving brilliant red shapes, like farmers using tongs to swing bales of chafe…

  Above—below—he couldn’t tell which—thousands of white figures were arrayed in positions of restful waiting, hands clasped behind their backs. Each had two arms, two legs, and a round white head. They had no faces, no features, nothing but smooth whiteness.

  He wasn’t falling. He was floating—upside down, it seemed—over an immense tangle of causeways, along whic
h the many white figures stood in rows or moved about in astonishingly different ways. Some of the figures walked, many drifted close to the roads, a few zipped up and over the whole expanse with dizzying speed, swooping soundlessly and shedding more of those beautiful silvery curves. Still others simply vanished, and the rest, tens of thousands—in long rows that stretched off into obscurity—awaited instructions, like an enormous army of blanks.

  The angelin came into view and gave Jebrassy a nudge. Even through the shimmer its touch nearly iced his toes, but he came right again with a slow rotation to face the rainbow brilliance and the tongs that reached up and out, grasping flame-colored luminosities and pulling them down.

  “The Keeper has delivered a breed,” the angelin announced, its voice so sweet it made Jebrassy’s ears hurt. And then, another message—not from the Tall One nor from the blue form, and not so much a voice as a beam of words half seen in the shimmer that protected him.

  Let the primordial find a place where he can heal. We will meet when he is whole again and calmer. I would not wish to dismay him. He is, after all, the most important citizen in the Kalpa.

  Jebrassy looked up at the Tall One who stood by his side.

  “So be it,” Ghentun said. “After five hundred thousand years, I have fulfilled my duty to the Eidolons.”

  CHAPTER 57

  * * *

  Tiadba stood on the outskirts of the training camp, along the broad, flat outer reach of the channel, lost in melancholy. She could barely make out the distant shapes of the three tablelike isles where she had spent her entire life. Blocs were stacked high on each table like jumbled cards, softened and shaded by the mist that puffed from the channel floor.

  As the light over the blocs dimmed, drawing those far Tiers into sleep, she turned toward the overarched blackness beyond which lay—so they had been told—the outer works of the Kalpa and the reality generators that protected them from the Chaos. Her body felt like a coiled whip about to be snapped. She was ready. Time was flowing too quickly—not quickly enough.