by Greg Bear
“It is,” Daniel said. “The Fremont Troll. Made of concrete.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Max warned. “I hate trolls. Always have.”
CHAPTER 61
* * *
I am informed, our two rivals have lately made an offer to enter into the lists with united forces, and challenge us to a comparison of books, both as to weight and number…Where can they find scales of capacity enough for the first; or an arithmetician of capacity enough for the second?
—Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub
“What are these things, really?” Miriam asked. Her hand hovered over the two gray boxes on the table. “Everything seems to point to them, everyone seems to want them, but I have no idea what they are or what they do.”
“It is not so much what they do as what they will do, given the opportunity,” Bidewell said. “Possibly the best story is how they come down to us, yet even with that, there is no simple explanation.”
“Of course not,” Agazutta said.
Bidewell uncorked the second bottle of wine from Miriam’s handbag. He did seem to enjoy wine. He poured the ladies glasses, but Jack and Ginny demurred. Jack had never liked alcohol.
Bidewell lifted a toast and the ladies did the same. “To survival, against all odds.”
“To survival,” Jack murmured, and raised his empty hand.
“We’d appreciate some certainty, Conan,” Miriam said.
Bidewell spun his glass, eyes on the swirling red liquid. For a moment Ginny’s vision seemed to blur—she saw the glass and the red wine as a swoosh.
“Every little thing makes its trace,” Bidewell said. “That much is intuitive. We can visualize everything leaving a trail. Sometimes we call them world-lines. But world-lines flow into other world-lines, and some join to create an observer line, or fate. The fate of an observer spins together many lines that might otherwise never touch, and that creates difficulties—entanglements.
“More perplexing, not all world-lines or even fates link back to the beginning. For creation does not always begin at the beginning. Creation is—or was—ongoing, and new things appear all the time, some of them implying long, ornate histories. These new creations and their histories need to be reconciled with what has come before. And so it is that Mnemosyne becomes necessary. As soon as she came to be—a most remarkable event, but perhaps only an afterthought, who can say?—she began her work. She found lost lines, entangled contradictions, and began reweaving them—reconciling them back to the beginning. She swept up and cataloged and put things back on the shelf, so to speak, a monumental task which she no doubt has yet to finish, poor thing.
“The creation of new things always implies the destruction of the old. Not all things that are created remain in creation. Some are erased. And so, I believe that Mnemosyne must be supplemented by another, sister force, let us call her Kali, though I’ve never met her, thank goodness. Kali disposes of things that have been left loose or cut away, and which Mnemosyne cannot reconcile—objects, people, fates.”
“My head spins just thinking about it,” Miriam said.
“Is Kali white as chalk?” Ginny asked abruptly. Jack looked at her.
“Kali is often depicted as a shriveled old woman, her skin the color of plagues and death—black,” Bidewell said, watching the pair closely. “But in this role, she might be pale, white as chalk. After all, she removes excess detail and color. She bleaches.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” Farrah said.
Bidewell found this amusing. “I wish I had that luxury. But long ago I discovered I had a knack—I could slip free, for a while, of all the backward-sliding fates and world-lines that were being reconciled. I could see with a peculiar clarity things that no longer were. When I was young, I learned to watch for the signs—learned to watch doomed people, places, and things as they faded, about to become inconsequential—and yet remember them in detail. I have sharp eyes and an ironclad memory.”
“Mind filled with useless junk,” Agazutta murmured, but her eyes were languid. She was enjoying the frisson of so many strange possibilities.
“At first, in my youth, I was confrontational. I tried to trace lost and fading things back to the moment when they began to be erased—or forward, to the moment of their creation. An impossible task, I discovered—though I came dangerously close once or twice.
“Soon, I realized that the last remnants of things lost might be found in records—in the Earth, in geological layers, for example, but also in lost animals, stray children—and scrolls. Books. Texts of all sorts.
“Mnemosyne values texts above all things, and saves their editing and reconciliation for the last, perhaps to be savored. And so—I began to find the books she or her dark sister had missed.”
CHAPTER 62
* * *
Daniel had to rest. The walk through murk and confusion left him with no energy, no sense of purpose or progress, and no clear view of where they might be in the city’s jumbled geography. He had the horrible feeling they were retracing steps they had already taken.
He paused before a half-wrecked and leaning house, then pushed through a splintered gate to sit on a stone garden bench, in a place that could no longer properly be called a garden. The plants had become sad, brown-edged things, but before dying, the last flowers had run riot, growing into cancerous clumps of wilted blossoms.
Daniel’s body was filled with a dull fire, which he could only guess might be chemistry struggling against shifts in physical constants. Soon enough he would simply cease to be—as a living human being, at any rate. He could almost see himself clumping and growing out of any sensible pattern, multiplying beyond any possibility of life, like the flowers…
They crumbled into powder in his hand.
He had lost track of the faraway glow. Pewter brightness returned, replacing the bleak umber darkness. Jagged upheavals carved serrated shapes against the southern grayness—not mountains. He did not know what they might be.
But worse than all that—
He felt a chill and looked up. Max seemed to squeeze into his vicinity, more sound and shadow than material being. He, too, looked up—at a certain cool sensation on their skulls and the backs of their necks.
The gnomish man’s thin voice pushed through the freezing air. “Something’s eating the moon.”
Whatever had smeared out the pallid stars and rucked up the voids between had left the moon untouched. Now, the high ivory crescent was turning bloody red, like a half plug stamped in heaven’s flesh. And rising in the east—or rather, blooming and bloating, since there was no apparent motion in that direction—a ring of fire arced almost from one quarter to the other.
Within the ring swam a diseased, turbid blackness.
Daniel’s eyes stung as if brushed with nettles.
The bloody moon shivered, then streamed across the sky like molten, fire-lit silver. It spread and merged with the arc of lurid, pulsing flame, until nothing of it remained.
“Everywhere we look, the Gape swallows the world.” Max dropped next to Daniel on the stone bench, tried to swallow, and choked out, “We’re in her land! God help us!”
The garden grew colder as the arc of flame and its dark heart expanded. “I’ve been here before,” Daniel said. “I jumped right out of my skin to get away.”
Max spat and wiped his mouth.
Daniel felt in his pocket for the boxes. “We can beat it. Work harder!” He stood, grabbed Max’s arm, and hoisted him to his feet. The air had cleared. In the deepening shade, tinted but unrelieved by the arc of fire, and squeezed up adjacent to the massive mounds of the two stadiums—steel and concrete walls, roofs, and arches shriveling like the leaves in the garden—Daniel again saw the bluish glow, faint as a firefly across a desert. He pointed. Max lifted his chin in acknowledgment and wiped his face again with a black-smeared kerchief.
They stumbled on.
CHAPTER 63
* * *
In the warmth from the iron stove, Farrah and
Ellen had begun to nod off, listening to Bidewell’s steady, droning voice. Miriam and Agazutta remained alert, as did Jack and Ginny.
“I collected books that reflected Mnemosyne’s unfinished labor—mostly forgotten volumes, texts long unread, hidden away in libraries and often enough in old bookstores. When a book is read by many, those copies must be reconciled first. There are few surprises in best-sellers! I presume that if I had become a fossil hunter, or a geologist, I might have found similar curiosities. But I have always been a man of books.”
“Why are observers special?” Ginny asked, diverting his slow, steady river of information back to what interested her most.
“A simple world-line—say, an atom zipping and vibrating through the vacuum of space—needs accounting for only when it encounters something else. Observers have eyes, ears, noses—fingers! Our senses gather and bind far world-lines in a most convoluted and inconvenient way. And of course we talk and tell stories and write books, conveying knowledge over great distances. We inherit some of our fates from our parents in a rather Mendelian fashion—but fates have less to do with our genes and more with where we will go, what we will see, hear, read, and learn. Always, words and texts confound the issue. Texts are special—any texts, any language, in fact, language itself.”
“I can understand that,” Jack said. “When I feel into the future—I only know about things I’m going to experience. Then I try to shift away from the slipstream of negative emotions. I don’t actually know what other people are doing or going to do. Only how I’ll feel, and a little of what I’ll see. As if the emotions my future selves will experience are washing back along the world-lines.”
Bidewell smiled his agreement.
Ginny was concerned with more immediate problems. “How can history just come floating by?” she asked. “Wouldn’t the pieces be too big? How can they slide around each other? If they’re all strung out like beads…I just can’t see it.”
“Excellent questions. A cleavage can occur along and across fates that have reached a blunt or frayed end, sometimes uniting fragments across great times and distances, a ‘sliding around,’ as you phrase it. These rearrangements may be linked by the cords or strings on which your particular beads progress.”
“So everything piles up like a logjam.”
“It seems so. We have been protected by the texts—to a degree. But mostly we are sheltered by your sum-runners, kept in a kind of bubble, at least until the rest of the broken world dissolves away. Then, we may see horrors and wonders on an awful scale.” Bidewell hunched his shoulders. “All beyond my capacity to comprehend. I am humbled.”
“For once,” Agazutta said drowsily.
Bidewell poured himself another glass of wine. “It is the second sister who has gone quite mad. The bleacher, the eraser. Cut loose from all future moorings…coerced or co-opted, enlisted in the hunt for all who bear these marvelous stones. We can hardly recognize her now, and she was grim enough before—but she always served, and now, she works that all will serve her.
“Your sum-runners have protected you against erasure—but they don’t protect everyone. They do not protect all whom you know and love. I will hazard a guess that the two of you are orphans—and that neither of you has ever been able to find records of your birth, or of your mother and father, whom you remember so clearly.
“That is what the sum-runners do—you become difficult to trace, but in turn you are given the talent of fate-shifting. Finally, you dream—you reach out and connect with others who have been chosen, presumably far away—at the end of time, as we have heard. This much I’ve puzzled out, but of course many mysteries remain.”
He looked down into his glass, almost empty.
Ginny sat in stunned silence, trying to remember her mother, her father. Her lip trembled at the thought that she was their last record. Everything else—gone.
“The second sister—” Bidewell resumed.
Across the warehouse space, a shrill buzzer sounded. They all looked up. Bidewell’s teeth clacked—a tight, hard clack—and vessels strained at his temple. Jack stared. This was the first time he had ever seen the old man frightened.
The dozing women opened their eyes.
No one in the room moved.
“The last people on Earth sat alone in a room,” Miriam said dryly. “There was a knock on the door.”
CHAPTER 64
* * *
“Do not allow the ladies to see that we are nervous,” Bidewell cautioned Jack as they threaded the aisles between the high stacks of boxes. “This does not come as a complete surprise. After all, we have only two sum-runners—and three is the minimum, I believe.”
Jack followed him through the outer door and onto the ramp. Except for Ellen’s Toyota, the parking lot stood empty. Beyond the fence stretched a flocking of coal-dust shades, fragments, and vapors, spreading like paint on wet paper toward what had once been the city of Seattle.
All Jack could see clearly was a single sooty finger reaching through the fence to push the buzzer’s button.
Bidewell walked down the ramp. As he reached the gate, two shadows condensed from the mottled grayness. He stopped, hands folded, elbows out—reluctant to say or do anything. Jack descended to stand beside the old man. Both looked silently through the wire.
A dirty white face—a man’s face, older than Jack but not by more than a decade—came forward in the murk, eyes first, then nose, cheeks, lips: soft, regular features hardened by fear and exhaustion—eyes sharp and quick.
“I see one,” Bidewell said. “Who’s the other? Come forward, both of you.”
A broad, shorter silhouette emerged and stood beside the first: an older man, heavy and strong, his gray tweed suit filthy. Jack snarled and drew back. He could almost smell the reek of desperate birds and frightened children.
Bidewell squinted and said, “Mr. Glaucous? That is you, isn’t it?”
“Let us in,” the stocky one grunted. “For old times’ sake, mercy on us both, we need warmth and rest. Is it Bidewell, sir? Conan Arthur Bidewell, formerly of Manchester and Leeds, Paris and Trieste? For the sake of decency, of all the sorrow we’ve seen, let us in. We’ve just crossed hell, and I bring a man of value—along with news, discouraging news, it may be said, but news nonetheless!”
The younger man’s lips twitched. He looked up and around, as if measuring the wire fence, the wall, the warehouse itself. His eyes bore into Jack’s. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “You have time here, real time, like a bubble…we could see it glowing from miles away. Tcherenkov radiation, maybe.”
“Are you friends, or partners?” Bidewell asked, making no move to open the gate.
“Of convenience, perhaps neither,” Glaucous said. “Please, Bidewell. It hurts to breathe. We’ve seen fates and places crammed like mince in a pie, worse at every turn. This is no longer your town, no longer our Earth, I fear.”
Daniel removed a gray box from his jacket pocket. He puzzled open the lid and showed Jack and Bidewell the dull wolf’s-eye gleam within. Bidewell’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Jack, go up the ramp, reach inside the door—to the right—and push the button that opens the gate.” His voice was brittle. “I fear our third has arrived.”
“May I come in as well?” Glaucous asked, retrieving with an effort his street urchin’s simper. “I am of service. I have brought what you need.”
“Perhaps,” Bidewell said. “How much longer we can extend hospitality…not to be known.”
“Same old Bidewell!” Glaucous enthused, and clapped his hands. “We are grateful, sir. Many tales, a sharing of jinks and capers over all the sad, lost centuries! Jolly times, such as they must be.”
“You know him?” Jack asked Bidewell, angry and suspicious.
“I do,” Bidewell said. He gathered up what spit he could and expelled it in a thin stream.
Glaucous’s eyes sunk inward like a shark’s. His lips pressed together and his cheeks grew red beneath the grit. “Sir,” he murmured.
&n
bsp; “Open the gate,” Bidewell ordered. “We have no choice. The stones have gathered, bringing whom they will.”
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 65
* * *
The Broken Tower
The warm darkness around Jebrassy cleared in one direction, revealing a bright pathway edged in green. Down this walked a white figure—one of the Librarian’s many epitomes, faceless but no longer frightening. The epitome waited patiently as Jebrassy dressed, then spoke in that familiar, elusive voice—the voice you’ve known forever yet can’t quite remember.
“We are going to the top,” the epitome said. “You are recovered and almost ready.”
“Has she left?” Jebrassy asked, dressing more quickly. “Has the march begun?”
The epitome gestured for Jebrassy to follow, and guided him back through places both dark and empty, bright and filled—all attended by many more white figures.
Jebrassy had difficulty comprehending the architecture of the tower. When he looked up, he saw a roof of sorts, but he could make the roof seem to rise higher, or lower, depending on how closely he walked the edge of the path and how he moved his eyes. Were those supporting arches high above, or free-floating shapes of no apparent use—perhaps decorations?
Or was he experiencing a different kind of dream?
The epitome preceded him for what felt like several thousand yards—a welcome hike after his fitful, fact-filled slumber.
They approached a curved wall, high and lined with tall windows—much like the wall near which he had first met the angelin. Now the epitome assumed a face—the face Jebrassy from now on would identify as the Librarian, however incomplete that equation might be. The Librarian seemed to exist all around—spread everywhere throughout the tower, distributed among all the white figures, directing the angelins and probably others he had yet to meet. Were the white figures like remote arms and legs—and the angelins more like servants? So much yet to learn, and frustration that he was still incapable of even asking the right questions.