City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  Daniel winced. “I don’t remember. Do you?”

  Jack glared.

  “From your family, right?” Daniel asked. “My family’s gone. Not dead—just gone, forgotten, even before this—what’s happening outside.”

  “A bad place,” Glaucous muttered. “And no escape.”

  “That’s what happens to us,” Daniel said. “We get wiped out of the histories.”

  Ginny had come through the aisles and stood in the shadows, watching them. “You’re not in my dreams,” she said to Daniel. She pointed to Glaucous. “Who’s this?”

  “My hunter,” Jack said.

  Bidewell returned with Agazutta and Miriam. The two women inspected the newcomers with expectation and dread. Ellen and Farrah joined them, and Ellen took Ginny’s arm. The circle stood in silence—except for Glaucous, whose breath came in labored, grinding snores, though he was not asleep.

  “We have work,” Bidewell said. “For the moment, there needs to be a truce. Mr. Glaucous, are you fit?”

  Glaucous pushed to his feet with a whistling sigh. He rubbed his nose vigorously. “A dray horse most of my days.”

  “I remember you more as a bull terrier, sent down rat holes,” Bidewell said.

  “Do you still offer a workman’s reward for a workman’s labor? I remember you were fond of drink.”

  Bidewell turned to see that all the ladies had gathered and arranged themselves around Ginny, who stood trembling in their midst.

  Jack found it difficult to restrain himself. “Where’s your fat partner?” he asked again.

  Glaucous smiled obsequiously. “I will miss her.”

  Bidewell startled them by clapping his hands. “Enough. The outside will soon become more demanding,” he said. “We have no choice but to place our strongest defenses where they will do the most good.”

  Glaucous tipped open a box flap and fingered the corner of a book. “I do like a good read.”

  Bidewell flared, “Caution, Mr. Glaucous. These are not mere children. Tease at your peril.” He motioned to the stacks. “We must move boxes and crates to the outer walls.”

  “Your servant, sir,” Glaucous said, and inclined his head.

  Jack approached Bidewell as the others headed off through the stacks. Daniel tossed him an enigmatic, measuring glance. Ginny was quickly hustled away by the book club ladies and did not object; they were off to form their own work detail, Ellen explained.

  “I don’t like any of this,” Jack said to Bidewell when they were alone.

  “Have you noticed, we are not the ones making the arrangements?” Bidewell asked.

  The cacophony outside—like boulders grinding in a giant mixer—had grown louder. Every few hours, following a sharp crackling and slam like falling masonry, deep bell tones would ring, vibrating curtains of dust from the rafters.

  Bidewell walked along the aisles, through the warehouse, saw that his people were sleeping—fitfully. He listened to the low voices of Glaucous and Iremonk in the storage room where they had pitched their cots, set apart for now, and with good reason. Jack could hardly stand the sight of, either. Bidewell mostly held back his own opinions.

  In truth, though, he was puzzled. There was something unusual about Glaucous, very different from his experience of other hunters and servants of the Chalk Princess.

  The voices of the two refugees softened and finally stopped, and Bidewell returned to his desk and the warmth of the iron stove, wide-awake. He truly slept perhaps once a month, to avoid the wretched things that passed for dreams. For Bidewell, a man who never forgot anything, who never shed his brushed connections with all possible histories, dreams were like sick spells or fits of unproductive coughing. The past, all of his pasts, refused to be expelled.

  It was apparent that none of his assembled people—his chosen family—could understand why he had allowed Glaucous into the warehouse. Daniel Patrick Iremonk was more of a conundrum, a fate-shifter, after all, with his own sum-runner; but still unlike Ginny or Jack.

  Bidewell felt the presence even before he saw the man, if man he still was. The hunter appeared a few steps away, wrapped in convenient shadows. “Getting uglier,” Glaucous said, his voice almost lost in a rumble that rose through the floor. “Out there, I mean. You should get out and see. Quite an experience for such as us. Consequences and conclusions.”

  “Make no accusations. You are barely tolerated,” Bidewell said. “I was never a cager of birds.”

  “Yet I’ve completed your set, Conan. He might never have come here without my guidance.”

  “It seems you need him more than the reverse.”

  “No doubt. He has never been caught, never come close to being caught—and until now, never attracted the attention of her hunters. But it seems Mr. Iremonk is made all the more crucial by his exceptions.”

  Glaucous found a chair, sat, and somehow managed to cross his short, thick legs. He had insubstantial feet, tiny for a man of such bulk, and the shoes he wore were narrow, with pointed toes abruptly squared. The effect was bitterly comic—grossness combined with delicacy, like a Cruikshank caricature. “Wish I’d brought my tobacco. You wouldn’t happen to…?”

  Bidewell shook his head. One didn’t offer a personage such as Glaucous anything more than was necessary, and Bidewell hadn’t smoked in more than four hundred years.

  Jack did not sleep—could not find sleep. Something inside kept trying to connect with something outside. He sat up on the edge of his cot, fists clenching the blankets, and thought of all the people stranded in Bidewell’s insulated fortress—people, cats, and what else?

  What was Glaucous, really, or for that matter, Daniel?

  What am I?

  His muscles ached from moving so many boxes. He was not used to blunt, heavy labor. He stood, brushing down the rumples in his clothes. They all slept in their clothes. Asked himself when was the last time he had dreamed or been visited. A couple of weeks.

  Maybe that was done with.

  He listened to Ginny’s soft, steady breathing on the opposite side of the wall of books. He peered around the crates, pulled aside the ragged sheet that served as a curtain. She had wrapped herself in one of Bidewell’s old brown woolen blankets—army surplus, probably. But which army, which war?

  Knees curled up, back to him, her shoulders quivered. She still dreamed.

  Then she became still. He stood in that makeshift entry, his expression snagging on successive thorny branches as it fell: pain, exasperation, puzzlement, before it settled into a blank stare. So many expectations, so little understanding of now, next, never.

  Ginny opened her eyes, turned her head, and blinked. Her lips twitched. Jack backed away, bumping into a wall of boxes, before he realized she was still asleep. Quietly, with great respect, he stooped over her, brought his head closer, turned one ear. Wherever she was, whatever she was experiencing—whatever she was saying, in a language that itched at the back of his head—she was not happy. He was powerless to help, here or there.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  Her eyes looked beyond and through him, and her brows knit in supreme effort. Speaking English seemed difficult. “Following us.”

  “Who?”

  “Echoes. I think they’re dead. Walked right through him. He’s gone.”

  She squeezed her eyes and curled up tighter.

  Jack wiped tears from his cheeks. The rumbling had intensified—outside, under, around the warehouse. After a moment, he returned to his own space and took a swig of water from the plastic bottle he kept in his backpack.

  Lay down, drew up his legs.

  Tried to will himself to sleep, to dream, to cross over—go to where Ginny was.

  Then, before he could grab hold and control himself, he willed another, very different sort of move—a shift. The effort rebounded from something incredibly hard and knocked him half off his cot. He felt as if he’d been slugged with a hammer. His muscles spasmed and he lay back twitching and sweating.

  St
upid. Everything squashed, corroded, and trimmed down to at most two or three fates, rammed up against what Bidewell called the Terminus—Jack knew that, but still, his fear and disappointment were intense.

  He was trapped along with everybody else.

  All the ones I’ve always left behind. Fear leading to jumping leading to being forgotten. How in hell can I believe I deserve any better?

  He sat up on one elbow, rubbing his neck and ribs.

  At the very least he had confirmed something important.

  Out beyond the walls of the warehouse, in the time-shivered, ash-fall gloom, Burke had become a helpless ghost. Needles lay over the soggy floor of their apartment like a pricking lawn of steel, and through the curtainless windows, the city-etched horizon curled up like an old rug, crimped and threadbare.

  There were now two cities at the end of time.

  Seattle was the second.

  “Can’t sleep?” Daniel stood in the opening to Jack’s cubicle, arms folded. Jack turned and stared at the plumpish, pasty-faced man. He had a soft nose and soft green eyes. What looked out of those eyes did not match the face—a feral sharpness out of place in an habitual expression of contented curiosity. “Feeling guilty that you survived, and they didn’t?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Not exactly.”

  “Glaucous is talking to Bidewell. The girl’s asleep. She doesn’t look happy.”

  “Her name is Virginia.” Jack swallowed his indignation that Daniel had looked into Ginny’s cubicle. “You don’t dream?”

  “It’s just black—maybe I dream of a big, deep nothing. How about you?”

  Something seemed very wrong with this man who stared out of another’s eyes, but how could he know that? Jack wondered. Just because Daniel had arrived with Glaucous, more seabirds fleeing a storm…

  “Ginny and I dream about the same place,” Jack said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  Daniel made an agreeing noise that also indicated he didn’t much care. “We should spy on those two, listen in, I mean, then go up to the roof and see for ourselves. I’ve found a ladder.”

  Jack considered, then pushed to his feet. “All right.” He could play along—for now.

  As they walked through the labyrinth of crates toward the sliding steel door, Minimus fell in behind. Daniel looked down. “Cats are natural Shifters,” he said. “Nine lives, right? I studied them when I was a kid. They move fast, and they don’t care what they leave behind. I don’t think this one likes Glaucous.”

  Minimus sat. They paused to wait, but the cat blinked and slunk off through a gap.

  Daniel brushed his fingers along the boxes. “I hate being surrounded by books. Give me one or two—not thousands.”

  They came to the door. Daniel applied his ear to the cold metal. Jack did the same, though he did not like being led.

  Two voices sounded faintly through the steel. The deeper voice—Glaucous—was saying, “…combined, might do what two could not.”

  Bidewell cleared his throat. “You’ve done me no favor, bringing the bad shepherd here.”

  Daniel curled his lip and smiled at Jack.

  Glaucous: “Three rooms. Three Shifters. As described long ago, my friend. The role I play is positive.”

  A noncommittal noise from Bidewell, some words below their hearing, then Glaucous, louder, setting the hook: “I’ve always asked myself, what and why, what is it that produces these children, sweeps up memory in their wake—and why put them through such torment? We both torment them, Conan. You promise them answers we do not have.”

  “And you hook them and reel them in,” Bidewell said.

  “And should they escape, on the bounce, they come to you.”

  “And if they don’t escape, you deliver them to—”

  Daniel pushed back from the door with an expression of disgust. “We can’t trust either of them,” he whispered.

  Jack held his finger to his lips, ear against the steel.

  “Whitlow once told me about your years on the continent, long before my time,” Glaucous said. “What larks, tramping after mouse-nibbled manuscripts across the Alps and around old Italy—and no doubt seeking lost children.”

  “Whitlow hunted, not me.”

  “Well, no matter. He’s out there stuttering to his doom in an old shipwreck of a house, beached and hove to. Best forgotten. Still, you rubbed shoulders with famous folk. Petrarch, past his days of young love, became devoted to the sport of resurrecting classics. You and Whitlow were with him when he died, weren’t you?”

  “I sought not the lost genius of antiquity, but the marvels of impossibility.”

  Glaucous snorted two nose-blows into his kerchief. “Whitlow’s stories fascinated me.” He raised his hand, snot rag draped from his palm, and poked a thick finger into the air. “Boccaccio, spinner of bawdy tales, redeemed himself searching for bits of Tully. A fine pair of noses for tales lost—or perverted.”

  “You date yourself. Tully is now properly known as Cicero.”

  Glaucous grinned. “I am surprised to find you confined to this box.”

  Bidewell got up to tend to the stove.

  “Still fond of wine,” Glaucous observed. “Always have been. Mr. Whitlow—”

  Bidewell clanged shut the stove’s iron gate.

  Glaucous thinned his lips. His hand started tapping one knee and he looked up, pinched his nose, snuffed again, glanced sideways at Bidewell. “Whitlow set his trap for Iremonk. The Moth made an appearance. I have never had such tools at my disposal. Always on the margins, forced to catch the wax dripping from all the sad dim candles of our night, forced to trim their pitiful wicks. My partner…” His expression faded into gloom, and to revive his spirits, he struck his knee with a fist. “Came close to the prize, I did—snagging Mr. Jack Rohmer, fine young Shifter. Painfully close. Ever and always flashers with a net.”

  “Was your mistress too frightened to accept your gift?”

  Glaucous changed the subject. “How solid is your fortress, Conan?”

  “Firm foundations, carefully laid.”

  “I suspect you’ve prepared three clean, pure spaces. So much easier to find emptiness in this wilderness than on the old continent, where the very turf is thick with bones. How long vacant?”

  “One hundred years,” Bidewell said.

  “Is that sufficient? Mr. Whitlow once claimed—”

  “Conclusions are upon us, Glaucous. Much depends on your employer. Will she gather courage and return—as a shrieking Harpy, do you think?”

  Glaucous scowled.

  “Failed you, didn’t she? Eater of eaters, hunter of the hunt. We called her Whirlwind’s Bride, and some named her Whore of the South Wind…”

  Glaucous leaped up at another shuddering slap-clap from outside. The walls hummed.

  Bidewell poked a chunk of firewood into the stove. “Notice a thickening of motion and thought?”

  Glaucous lifted an eyebrow.

  “We’ll soon be caught between the adamantine walls of Alpha and Omega. It’s not just Terminus your Mistress was fleeing. There’s little or nothing left between us and the beginning, or the end. All of history, eaten away. Skeins pinched to threads, stripped to fibers—compressed to points. I wonder what that will be like.” He slowly squeezed his fingers—down to nothing. “A sudden brightness, I imagine, and great heaviness, as all remaining light and gravity bounce back and forth through a compressed pellicle of time—and the noise!—shattering, old nemesis.”

  “Do you suspect, or do you know?” Glaucous asked.

  Bidewell nodded at his books. “I’ve absorbed bits and pieces of past and future, sorting and combining until they make an inevitable sense.”

  Glaucous flexed his hands and clasped his knees, rocking. “Joints ache,” he said. “Cold, even in here.”

  “We’d better go up while there’s still something worth seeing,” Daniel whispered, and walked away. This time Jack followed, his face heating.

  The ladder was made of boards h
ammered onto the close-spaced studs on an outer wall. Jack looked up into the darkness and made out the outline of a hatch below the roof. Daniel was already halfway up. The hatch was not locked. He shoved it open and clambered into a sloped shelter. A warped wooden door opened stiffly to an expanse of tar paper, sealed and repaired by stripes of uneven asphalt, and crisscrossed by walkways of weathered shipping pallets. The roof sloped from a low peaked center, bordered by a knee-high wall cut through at intervals with rectangular drains. Over the wall, outside, all around: what was left of Seattle.

  Daniel stood silhouetted by the northern perspective, a lighter shadow against the rippling, ripping curtain. Jack joined him at the edge. Breaks in the curtain revealed a mélange of buildings industrial and domestic—houses, warehouses; to the west a forest of masts, and in the streets, dirt, ballast cobbles, brick, asphalt, wood, and concrete sidewalks. People dressed in dated fashions had been caught mid-stride, where they juddered like broken clockworks—going nowhere with painful slowness.

  The torn curtain parted to reveal other streets, other buildings, a puzzle thrown together from ill-fitting pieces of time, poured from the box of the sky onto a half-seen landscape that surrounded the warehouse. The thick, chilled air was choked with grit—what sort of grit, Jack didn’t want to know.

  Daniel coughed and waved his hand. “Everything left behind finds its place,” he said. “Just like you and me. I’ll bet if we had picture books, we’d recognize neighborhoods from before this warehouse was built. People, too.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Who knows? But think it through.” Daniel gave Jack a wry grin. “We’re ants clinging to the last gobbets in the stew. Most of the chunks have already been chewed and swallowed—most of our universe is gone. Otherwise…why that?”

  He pointed through a luminous rip in the curtain at an immense, flaming arc, rimming a painfully black center. It stretched across almost two-thirds of the sky. “That’s not our sun. And that is not our city. Not anymore.”