City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  NO ZEROS

  Observers are like tiny muses. They process what they see, based on the logics they are given, but also on what they can assemble for themselves, what they think must be real, based on what they live and see and know, the truths they incorporate in their flesh.

  Every group of observers establishes a kind of local reality. It cannot deviate too far from consensus, from what the muses have ruled must be. But that flexibility allows the cosmos a latitude that makes it more robust than any rigid framework, because it welcomes observers, welcomes their input. And sometimes, very clever observers can influence the muses and the cosmos as a whole, and so, Mnemosyne reconciles on a huge scale, those forward and backward pulses that we’ve already discussed.

  We are not so much made by a creator as deduced. In fact, all creation is collaboration between the great and the small, always interconnected and dependent upon each other. There are no lords, no kings, no eternal gods of all, but there are forces that work across time and fate, and finally, outside our conceit, there is justice.

  To be alive is to be blind. It is hard work to stay alive. And when our work is done and we are unburdened, we are rewarded with the joy of matter, about which only the wisest and the most foolish can know.

  —The Chronicles of the Elders of Lagado

  A lost or spurious work of Spinoza

  CHAPTER 68

  * * *

  The Chaos

  Despite the efforts of their armor, light was a tricky commodity in the Chaos. Distances beyond a few yards tended to foreshorten or lengthen unpredictably. Nico in particular found this unnerving, and lost his balance more often than the others, until finally he lay down in a shallow dip and tried to be sick.

  The armor would not let him.

  Tiadba knelt beside him while Khren and the others circled the depression. All were woozy.

  “If I could just throw up, I’d feel better,” Nico said, wretched behind the golden transparency of his faceplate.

  “That would be a mess, in your helmet,” Tiadba said.

  “I could take off the helmet for a little bit…”

  “Too late for that,” Denbord said, kneeling. “I’m not feeling so hot myself.”

  “Listen. I piss and shit inside here. Why can’t I throw up?”

  “Just don’t think about it,” Tiadba said. “And stop looking at the sky.”

  “I can’t help it. It keeps changing. I look away, look back, and it’s different—except for that thing up there. Always burning, but not in the middle, like a big hole. If it’s on fire, why doesn’t it burn everywhere? What’s it trying to be?” His voice was getting shrill.

  The fearful excitement of a few hours earlier was turning into a sour anxiety next door to panic. Their suits could only give them so much support, and weren’t designed to interfere with their emotions.

  Tiadba was beginning to think that Grayne’s enthusiasm for the luxurious comfort of their adventure might have been overstated.

  She swallowed frequently. Her face stung, her arms itched again, and her feet hurt, though they hadn’t walked very far. She felt confined, trapped, lost, and it took real effort to keep from crying or, worse, screaming.

  “You feel it, I know you do!” Nico called out, and rolled over on his stomach, grabbing at the rock, but the rock in the dip was solid, smooth.

  Khren, Shewel, and Macht stepped down. Herza and Frinna flanked Nico and nudged the reclining breed. They seemed well enough, though still quiet.

  “We haven’t even started yet,” Khren said.

  Sad, Nico said, “Don’t make it worse.”

  “We could swap. I could roll around and act scared for a while, and you could stand up here and be brave and try to see where we’re going.”

  In their helmets, the beacon—a steady, low musical note—faded or increased in volume, depending on whether they kept to their course. But there had already been two broken walls high enough and long enough to force them off the course, and then they trekked about in nervous arcs and circles until they heard the beacon again at maximum melody. They had encountered crumbling barricades in the rolling emptiness, casting odd double bluish shadows in the reddish flare of the ring-fire sun. Tiadba thought it best not to climb over and investigate, and the others agreed—curiosity the first emotion to fade in that first mile. So they had walked around.

  Now she worried they were already losing their will to go on. Swinging between extremes of exaltation and fear in so short a time—most unpleasant. And as yet they had met nothing particularly fearsome or frightening, just what they were trained to expect.

  “I think I’m getting used to some of it,” Macht said, but didn’t sound convinced. “Really,” he added. “Come on, Nico. Let’s keep moving.”

  “We’ll go on a few more miles,” Tiadba said. She began gulping painfully. We’re being poisoned! Yet she was sure nothing was getting in from outside the armor. Surely the Tall Ones would have equipped them better than that!

  But the Chaos changes all the time. How could they know what kind of armor to make?

  She looked sharply at Khren. He wasn’t feeling the same symptoms. Nor were the others. Each was reacting in his own way.

  Nico rolled on his back but kept his eyes closed. “Why are we still stuck here, if everything’s so different? Why don’t we just change the rules and lift up and float away?”

  Tiadba suddenly felt a kind of love, and her eyes welled up. That was the sort of question Jebrassy would ask.

  “It’s called gravity,” Khren said. “It’s everywhere—even out here. Pahtun told us, remember?”

  “Yeah, and where is he, now?” Macht asked darkly. “I don’t even know what gravity is. Gravity or light.”

  “Light is what lets us see,” Shewel said, echoing what they had been taught. He was certainly not the swiftest learner in the group, but what he learned stayed with him in perfect detail. “Gravity is what glues us down.”

  “Aren’t you getting bored down there?” Denbord asked Nico. Khren and Macht reached down to grab his hands and lift him up. He stood on wobbly legs, arms out to keep his balance. “Let’s go back. I think we could make it.”

  Macht climbed out of the dip. “Tiadba, you’re the leader. Make us go.”

  Tiadba looked around, confused. She felt inside her for the visitor—any other voice giving advice, other than her own, so confused. But the visitor was not saying anything. And she could no longer imagine what Jebrassy might tell her.

  Then she heard herself speaking, not good words, but words out of an angry little knot right in the center of her chest, above her stomach, below her lungs—she could feel the burning disappointment. “I don’t know what we thought it would be like. Want to turn around and go back? How many of you think the city’s going to last much longer?”

  “Not me,” Nico said. “I saw that thing take Mash. I don’t want to go back. Out here—”

  “Out here, we can see them coming,” Tiadba said. “Back in the Tiers we die in our sleep. Or worse.”

  CHAPTER 69

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  The book group women sat in the chairs around the iron stove. They had been joined, with more than a degree of awkwardness, by Glaucous and Daniel. Glaucous accepted exile to the far corner, where he sat on a box, like one of Oxford’s stony gargoyles.

  Ginny stood apart from them all, and far from the room’s southern door, her eyes downcast—steeled against another ordeal.

  “Mnemosyne is special, and always difficult,” Bidewell said. “A certain mental preparation is required before you meet her. I hope you have had time to consider what we’ve discussed.”

  “Is she a person, or a thing?” Jack asked.

  “Neither. How old is the universe, Jack?”

  “Billions of years, I guess. That’s what I’ve been told.”

  Agazutta had become subject to fits of shivering and whimpering and now held her hand in front of her mouth. Miriam and Ellen sto
od on either side, firmly gripping her shoulders.

  “And how old do you think it is?” Bidewell asked.

  “Well, I was born twenty-four years ago,” Jack said with a wry face. “That’s how old it is for me.”

  “The beginning of a good answer. But we will not dive into solipsism. I wouldn’t approve—more important, Mnemosyne would not approve. She responds best to a certain level of, how should we say, skepticism about the taught order of things. How old do you think these atoms and molecules are that you eat and breathe, that make up your body and propel the currents of your mind, your observing wit?”

  “Same as the universe,” Jack said with more certainty.

  “A common error. Not all matter came into existence at the beginning. It is still being made, and will continue to be made for a very long time to come—if we did not face Terminus, of course.”

  “Of course,” Miriam said.

  “But that is beside my point. In certain parts of space and time, it is supposed that entire galaxies have appeared instantaneously, complete with hundreds of billions of stars burning, planets formed, civilizations alive and busy. Yet their histories have not arrived with them. Reconciliation is thus made an epic task.”

  Jack looked to see if Bidewell was joking. The highlights on the old man’s lined face flickered in the warm firelight, but he showed no hint of humor. If anything, he seemed drowsy, wearily repeating an obvious and well-known truth.

  “Appeared out of nothing?” Jack asked.

  Ginny pulled up enough courage to say, “That doesn’t seem possible.”

  Bidewell shrugged. “True, spontaneous creation usually delivers smaller units—particles, atoms, molecules in profusion. Virtual galaxies are difficult to conceive, I admit. But no less real. Once a particle or an object is created, it has always been here. It makes connections with all the particles with which it has interacted, and those connections—that connectedness—must be established, you might say after the fact. Literally,” Bidewell smiled, “the books must be balanced.”

  “What about us?” Ginny asked with unexpected archness. “Human beings. Dogs. Cats. I mean, who keeps track of all the people on the streets?” She looked sharply at Daniel, and then at Glaucous, in the shadows.

  Bidewell lifted one shoulder.

  “How could anyone tell if I just popped out of nowhere?” Jack asked.

  “As a rule, we cannot,” Bidewell said. “Mnemosyne is the force that keeps it all from crashing into ruin and contradiction. She does her job, and she does it well.”

  Jack whistled. “Some lady.”

  Even this flippancy did not pique the old man. “You’ll like her,” Bidewell said. “But she is no lady.”

  “Sounds like a backward way of doing things,” Ginny said.

  “Perhaps, but it results in a cosmos of infinite richness and complexity. For this reason, logically speaking, the universe has no true chronological beginning, out of which all things flow. Every moment, until the end of creation, is a sort of beginning, somewhere.”

  “What’s this I’ve heard about a Big Bang?” Jack asked.

  “I’m not asking for belief. You’ll see the truth soon enough—my words are preparation. Rays of light, you know, must be set in motion, already entangled, to complete the picture every observer sees or will see from that point on—and before. The wave of reconciliation passes back in time, and then forward again; pulse after pulse, until the refinement is complete.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Jack said.

  Ginny looked at the tall shelves of books, the opened boxes and crates whose contents had been laid out on the big table in the center of the high-ceilinged library. “You said some of the books you were looking for were odd, impossible, because they have no history. That must mean they were never reconciled, even before…what’s happening outside.”

  “Good,” Bidewell said.

  “And that means Mnemosyne…well, she’s been distracted, or something is increasing her workload. Or—she’s sick. Maybe dying.”

  “Better,” Bidewell said.

  “Books, galaxies…What else?” Ginny asked.

  Jack suddenly remembered the giant earwig he thought he’d seen scuttling between the warehouses. “Strange animals?”

  Daniel looked both sly and sleepy. “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve seen them,” Jack said. “One, anyway.”

  “Oh, my,” Bidewell said, folding his hands. “Yes, those are indicators.”

  “Dreams sometimes come out of nowhere,” Ginny said. “Are they indicators?”

  “Mnemosyne can reconcile everything, everywhere, except in the heart and mind of an observer. That territory is forbidden to her. But observers die and their memories die with them—except for the legends, the myths of beginning times, the way things were before creation grew huge and complicated. Those are passed along in speech and dreams, and linger despite Mnemosyne’s hardest labors. For that reason, Mnemosyne rarely concerns herself with dreams.”

  “When does she?” Daniel asked.

  “When they come true,” Bidewell said.

  CHAPTER 70

  * * *

  The Chaos

  “What are those?” Denbord asked. He knelt on the crest of a vast ripple in the sea of stone and looked down. The others joined him.

  In the trough of the frozen, rocky wave, for as far as they could see into the reddish, murky light, row upon row of cylindrical shapes lay in rough parallel beside their dark cradles, like the broken rungs of a toppled ladder.

  “They don’t look that big,” Nico said.

  “Big enough,” Shewel said.

  Perf assumed a teacher’s tone. “It’s tough to judge size and distance—but if we went down there, I bet we’d be tiny.”

  Tiadba tried to remember Sangmer’s description from the stories she had been reading to the breeds, to distract them from the long march, the brief rests, the strain of keeping to the beacon’s line. Whatever these were, they blocked the path the beacon had been drawing for them. “They’re boats,” she concluded. “Like in the nauvarchia.”

  “They don’t have sails,” Denbord observed.

  “They wouldn’t need them. They’re spaceboats. They travel across space—or they did, back when there was space to cross.”

  The others slowly understood her point. “Starboats,” Perf said. “Back when there were stars.”

  Until now, the going had been steady though strange—over a monotonous gray landscape, dotted with tiny pores that pinched out pulsing green globules as the breeds approached, then shrank back into the rock.

  All around, the rock sweated—the rock oozed light.

  Tiadba looked both ways along the crest, then into the trough. “No way to avoid crossing,” she said.

  “What if those things roll over on us?” Shewel asked.

  Denbord touched his finger to his faceplate. “Quick and easy,” he said.

  “What if the Silent Ones are down there?”

  “Nobody’s seen them,” Nico said. “Nobody knows where they are or what they look like. Maybe they’re gone. And the armor hasn’t said a peep. We must be doing something right.”

  “At least we haven’t stumbled over a trod,” Perf said.

  “I’d almost like to see that—or a Silent One,” Denbord said. “Just to know what they are—what to expect, or avoid.”

  As Nico had pointed out, their suits had mostly kept quiet. On just one occasion, Perf was warned not to kick at the glowing balls.

  Tiadba looked to the other side of the trough, the opposite crest, apparently two or three miles off. The clarity in the distance between the crests was increasing—something she’d noticed earlier, that the light could at times, unpredictably, grow stronger and more coherent, letting them see over a greater distance.

  Perversely, the lower they were, the farther they could see. Light in this part of the Chaos apparently climbed around and over obstructions, then curved down to meet them—an effect amon
g the most disturbing they had encountered since crossing the zone of lies. From the bottom of this valley, they might be able to see across the Chaos for many hundreds or thousands of miles. If distance still held, still mattered out here.

  Nico moved up beside Tiadba, though they did not need to be close to hear each other. “What’ll we do?”

  “Climb down and cross over,” she said.

  “Can’t we explore?” Perf asked. “I’d like to see inside a spaceboat.”

  Macht had walked off to their left. Now he rejoined the group. “They must be old,” he said. “There are thousands of them.”

  “If the armor doesn’t stop us, we’ll look around,” Tiadba said.

  They spread into an optimized arc, to let their helmets see and process from a wider angle. Their view was now almost too crystalline. Beyond the trough, above the fallen ladder-rungs of the spaceboats, Tiadba saw the outline of edifices at least as large as the bions they had left behind—stark and caved, edged with a greenish fire that flickered as if still burning.

  The others sucked in their breaths.

  “What are those?” Khren asked.

  “That’s the Necropolis—isn’t it?” Denbord asked, ever the studious one. “But I don’t see any dead walking.”

  “We’re too far away,” Khren said.

  Their armor responded, “There are many ancient cities, collected from many regions and histories. They should not be entered.”

  Denbord and Macht looked at each other, then at Tiadba. The others simply stared across the valley at the jumbled ruins, lying out there for no one knew how long.

  How far humanity had been pushed back, how much had been destroyed…How little remained, compared to the vastness of the past—how little there was left to lose.

  Just us.

  “Is it dangerous to cross?” Tiadba asked. This time the armor did not answer. “I guess not,” she said.

  Denbord added, echoing her own irritation, “Kind of rude, isn’t it?”

  They began their descent.