City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  My melancholy evaporated. She breathed out newness, freshness—radiated a potential for joy unlike anything I had ever experienced. This glamour had its own adaptive properties, no doubt, but what could she ever be to a Mender?

  She drew close and extended a star-bright hand. “Polybiblios says the captain of the twistfold ship must extend an invitation to join the voyage back to Earth. He tells me there are dangers. It is your decision, Pilgrim.”

  I could feel the ancient forces like a fire heating my eyes and skin.

  What had once been abstruse history and theory—a lost muse, condensed and scattered at the end of the Brightness—stood before me, real and vivid, though transparent.

  “You’re still a kind of ghost,” I said. “You probably won’t take up much space, or consume many units of support.”

  “I don’t eat at all—yet. But I will. I might eat you, Pilgrim.” She seemed very mature now, with eyes bold and deep and golden. “Perhaps I will learn my true name on your ship. Perhaps you will help my father find it for me.”

  I was already more than half in love.

  Exhausted, mind spinning with things she could not possibly understand, Tiadba glanced around the circle of marchers. All looked puzzled, struggling with mysteries and words far beyond their experience. The Pahtun made a low grumbling noise, then shook his great head. “It’s a very old tale,” he said. “Not sure I believe any of it.”

  “That’s the way it reads,” Tiadba said, defensive.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” the Pahtun said. “So many marchers, so many tales. I’ve often wondered how the Eidolons came to be the way they are, and how Ishanaxade came to be what she is…but those are other stories, and maybe I still don’t know the truth of it.”

  “It makes a sort of sense,” Nico said valiantly. “We’ll have to read the books later. See if the stories change.”

  “I don’t know that the stories change,” Tiadba said, not for the first time. “Maybe my understanding changes.”

  “Time to teach us all to read the old letters,” Denbord insisted.

  “We’d like that,” Herza and Frinna said, to Tiadba’s surprise.

  “Fat chance,” Macht said, and yawned.

  “If there’s time,” the Pahtun said. “The armor will be ready soon.”

  Something like a drowse—but far from sleep—came over Tiadba for the first time since they had left the training camp to cross the border of the real. She could not be certain she was having a dream, or finding a strange kind of memory. She thought she was in a large room surrounded by shelves of books, two or three times taller than the shelves in the upper Tiers. She saw four women—large women by her standards, but how was she to judge? She was small—they were large. They moved around her, talking among themselves—deeply concerned.

  She broke her trance with a gasp and looked up to see the Pahtun pulling pieces of armor from the spinning branches at the center of the bower and assembling their new suits. He placed them in standing positions, knitting limbs to trunks using a small sphere gripped by his flower finger. He was blowing air through his lips with a musical succession of notes, not what Tiadba would call a tune. Observed, he finished what he was doing and winked at her, then touched his nose. But he looked worried—if she was any judge of the expressions assumed by Tall Ones.

  As the others gathered beside the reassembled suits, Pahtun—so like his namesake, she decided she could not detect any difference, other than the smudges and ragged apparel—walked around the circle and passed his hands up and down, making each suit glow.

  “They’re finished,” he announced. “Fresher, more informed, as promised. Now, put them on quickly. There’s no time. The trod is shifting, and we will soon find ourselves right in the middle.”

  The marchers quickly donned their new suits, moving about to try the fit. They felt little difference at first; Tiadba’s seemed slightly stiffer, that was all.

  The Pahtun confined the spinning branches. The box reduced itself until he could pick it up, and he slung it in a piece of fabric that hung from his shoulder.

  “You don’t wear a suit,” Tiadba said.

  He waved one hand. “The bower is my armor. Watch yourselves—it’s about to collapse, and I will vanish with it. Stand aside. We will not encounter each other again, I hope. If we do, we will all have failed. Your armor will be more responsive and informative and even stronger, but remember, there is worse to come. Above all, believe I am real. Don’t think I was never here.”

  The bower burned away, exposing the rucked-up sky and the long red-purple arc of fire. Tiadba’s helmet rose around her head and the faceplate colored, tinting the scene orange as all about them the branches broke into violet flame, too bright to look upon.

  They stood on rolling black ground, and she heard the others stifle cries of dismay. They were back in the Chaos. For a moment Tiadba thought she saw a tall, slender figure move rapidly away, a flash of white limbs—a nimbus of glowing, spinning branches surrounding a Tall One—a lone Mender.

  “Marchers on alert,” their armor warned. “Listen for your beacon.”

  She heard it now—a steady musical pulse, stronger as she faced in one direction, weaker in all the others. And she recognized the armor’s new voice.

  It was Pahtun’s.

  Denbord and Khren approached her, and then the others. They formed a circle, facing outward, and realized each could see what the others were seeing, allowing better judgment of their surroundings—many eyes combined at once, a strange sensation.

  “Did the Tall One squeeze himself into all our suits, or did he just pick up and leave?” Macht asked.

  “Let’s hope he was real,” Nico said, “and we’re not laid out on this black stuff, naked, dinner for monsters.”

  “Follow your beacons,” the armor insisted. “Much distance to cover, and quickly. All this region is uneasy. Silent Ones always seek what defies the Typhon.”

  “March!” Tiadba said, and with greater confidence and greater alertness, they followed the pulsing tones, forming a wavering line that soon drew straight, Tiadba in front, Khren taking up the rear.

  All of them could see what she saw ahead, around: a low green light that flickered and rose in spikes, as if to touch the sky.

  Their steps slowed and they felt oddly heavy. From their right, something loomed and passed too quickly to see—something huge, broad, and flat, flying past on high, slender pillars that pulled up the ground ahead and behind—and then it was gone.

  “It had a face,” Khren said. “A human face. Bigger than a meadow…”

  “Move quickly,” the armor instructed. “Distance will close in, light will move in unfamiliar ways, and things will seem to burn. Above all, follow the beacon.”

  Off to the left, Tiadba saw a swinging gray sword of light, brighter than before: the glowing beam sent out from the Witness.

  “We’re right under it,” Nico said. “How did we get so close? Wasn’t it on the other side?”

  “We should set up our generator and wait for it to go away,” Macht said.

  “No!” the armor insisted. “You are being hunted. There is no shelter here. There is only escape.”

  CHAPTER 77

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  Jack knelt beside Ginny’s bed and put his hand on her arm. She had been sleeping for hours, even after the pewter light of whatever passed for dawn touched the windows beneath the warehouse roof. At his touch, she shifted on the cot, then opened her eyes and looked beyond him. The peace after her time in the room had passed. The gnawing worry and fear were back—especially in sleep. She was sleeping so much now. Jack, on the other hand, was mostly wide-awake. His dreams since being in the empty room had been brief and uneventful.

  “They’re huge,” she murmured. “They’re like stingrays, but they have faces on one side. Arms and legs make dimples in the road as they skim along, like water striders on a pond. They shoot by too fast to see, unless they see you fir
st—and if they catch you, it’s over.”

  Jack wiped a tear from his cheeks, feeling emotions that were not his own, not yet. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “We’re miles from the city—I don’t know how far. It’s always night out here, always dark. The sun doesn’t cast any light—it’s just a glimmer on the edge. We don’t even have real shadows. The armor says the Chaos here is thin—some of the old rules still survive. We can even take off our helmets and breathe the air. But it freezes your lungs if you suck it in. Fur on the nose—good thing.” She looked around, as if trying to locate his face, seeing neither the warehouse nor Jack. “Is anything coming?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his face contorted. “You’re way ahead of me.”

  “The beacon still sings in our helmets, so beautiful…that’s the only thing that guides us. Distance is tricky, but we keep walking. I think it knows we’re here, it just doesn’t care. It’s stuffed full. It’s eaten almost everything…but we’re giving it indigestion. It’s won, but it’s keeping an eye on us—a big, big eye. The Witness is always there. God, I hope we don’t get too near it.”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  “No words for it. The other city isn’t…It isn’t the same. There’s something awful in its place. I know that, but I can’t tell her. Jack…She doesn’t know.”

  Jack laid his head on Ginny’s chest, put his hand over her eyes. That searching, distant gaze…

  “I’ll be there,” he whispered.

  “Too late,” she said. “They’ve found us.”

  She fell back on the cot. Jack stroked her forehead, then stood. He couldn’t bear watching her suffer and being so powerless. He bumped the boxes on his way out of the cubicle.

  Bidewell was sitting in a chair near the stove, reading a slender green book. The old man’s face looked ethereal, as if it might turn to mist or glass. Ellen stepped out of the main warehouse, carrying a knitted bag with the outline of her own small book weighting one corner.

  “Where are the others?” Jack asked.

  “There’s nothing they can do here,” Bidewell said. “They’re trying to reach their loved ones.”

  “I thought they were alone,” Jack said.

  “Only you are ever truly alone,” Bidewell said, with a strange twist of envy. “Our time is almost over, for this cycle. Yours is just beginning.”

  Ellen looked at Jack, at once hopeful and stricken. He saw that both of them had been crying and felt uncomfortable, so he moved on and found Daniel sitting under the almost bare shelves in the annex room, paging through a large, thick book. Daniel looked as exhausted as Jack felt. Somehow, that made him more sympathetic.

  Daniel put the book aside as Jack approached. “I heard the door open,” he said.

  “Three of the women took off,” Jack said. He examined Daniel’s expression, looking for any sign of strangeness, but could not find anything to dislike or even be suspicious of. That was Glaucous’s doing, he suspected. He recognized the symptoms, more subtle but still the same. Why would Glaucous protect Daniel?

  Shaping him as a new partner, perhaps?

  “I don’t hear much outside,” Daniel said. “And there’s certainly nothing new in here. Let’s go topside for another look.”

  For the moment, the curtains and wrinkles above the city had parted, leaving an inky blackness and a sky full of stars, but something was very wrong. The stars, like the moon, had smeared, twisted, wrapped themselves in rainbow-colored rings—and were growing dimmer.

  One by one they were winking out like spent fireflies.

  “They’re being eaten,” Jack said. “The moon, the stars…”

  “You got that right,” Daniel said. “But we have to think it through—what’s being eaten? When is it being eaten? I can believe the moon being sucked up by whatever that is, that ugly sun-arc thing—we’d see that almost right away, but the stars are too distant. Unless…” He wiped his forehead. “Unless the past was chewed up first. That would mean everything behind us has already been eaten, space and time…Those stars are already gone, the last wave of their light is bouncing off the Terminus—and now it’s fading. We’re like the core of an apple, the seeds, being saved for last.”

  “Seeds,” Jack said. “That’s what Bidewell calls the stones.”

  “None of what he says makes sense, Jack.”

  Jack persisted. “Still, things are reaching back from somewhere.”

  Daniel thought this through, brow wrinkled, plump cheeks growing pale. He gave Jack a pinched look, part disbelief, part envy. “Okay, magic boy. You know something.”

  “It’s obvious. We’re being messed with—someone sent the stones back, like Bidewell says.”

  “Like he hints,” Daniel corrected.

  “And the thing that controls the hunters—the Chalk Princess, Glaucous’s Livid Mistress—that could be from the future, too. But what’s messing with us is no longer in the future. We’re being shoved up against the future—what’s left of it. Right?”

  “With you so far,” Daniel said, intrigued that Jack was suddenly engaging in theory.

  “So we’re just getting the last ripples of aftereffect. Whatever’s going to happen, has happened—here. Except for the warehouse—and us.”

  “Because of the stones, or Bidewell’s weird library?”

  They both stared at the fragmented city, beyond shock, even beyond wonder, and then stared at each other, expressing their only remaining surprise: that they were still alive, still thinking, still speaking.

  “Maybe both,” Jack said. “We’re saved—for the moment. But that moment is going to be awfully short. And then we’re going to have to do something.”

  “What?” Daniel asked.

  Jack shook his head.

  The cityscape around the warehouse had congealed into a bleakness of broken buildings, sluggish flows of muddy water, torn, ragged clouds barely obscuring the battered sky. The last limb of the hideous arc of fire dropped below the horizon and the clouds glowed blood-red, then dimmed to somber brown, their undersides fitfully illuminated by curling wisps of orange and green.

  “The whole city is a grab bag of past and present,” Daniel said. “If you’re right, it could mean this Chalk Princess is still out there—waiting for things to settle before she comes and gets us. Glaucous has a weird confidence.”

  “He’s protecting you,” Jack said.

  “Is he? How strange. I don’t need protecting.” He poked and rubbed one temple with a thumb. “I don’t see any sign of the women who left. Your friends.”

  Glaucous made sure Daniel and Jack were out of the way, then approached Ginny’s cubicle. With batlike acuity, he could hear her moving about from across the warehouse.

  Ginny blinked and looked confused as he drew back the flimsy curtain. “I don’t want you near me,” she warned, her tongue thickened by the long, hard sleep. “I’ll call for help.”

  “Abject apologies for my crude appearance and manners,” Glaucous said. He glanced up. “The young men are on the roof, satisfying curiosity. They seem to be learning to trust each other.”

  “Jack knows better,” Ginny said, still blinking—whether from nerves or irritation, she couldn’t tell. Everything felt gritty. Everything seemed to be running down—even her brain.

  “Perhaps. At any rate, I am no threat,” Glaucous said softly. “In fact, I eliminated the ones who came here to hunt you. The man with his coin, the woman with her flames and smoke. A dreadful pair. I have my allegiances, of course—and they may not match yours. But with no leadership, I am no more a threat than one of these warehouse cats. You are not my mouse. Whom would I deliver you to? And why?”

  “Please go away,” Ginny said.

  “Not before I salve my conscience. You have misplaced your trust, and now I fear the worst. Bidewell has hidden himself for many decades, but we—my kind, hunters all—knew him long before that. He was legendary among us.”

  “He’s been kind to me.”

/>   “We do have that ability, to be charming when we wish, despite all other appearances. Can you feel that between us, even now?” He looked down, raised his hand to his forehead as if ashamed. “Pardon. It’s an instinct, misplaced no doubt. I will withdraw it immediately.” He shut down the treacle ambience.

  Ginny stepped back, even more confused.

  “I will come no closer, and I will leave soon. But I must tell you…in the spirit of an honorable hunt, which must soon resume. Bidewell brought you all here for the same reason I attached myself to the one who calls himself Daniel—a strange fellow, don’t you feel it? Not what he seems. Very ancient. We call his like bad shepherds—but no matter. Whoever possesses a stone exudes an atmosphere of protection, and provides others a pass to the next level of this astonishing endgame. As do you, young Virginia. Here’s the pattern, the picture of our next few blinks of time. I will complete my part in the game, and Bidewell will complete his. He will deliver you to his mistress, and I will deliver Daniel and Jack to mine.”

  “I don’t believe anything you say,” Ginny murmured, but her eyes indicated otherwise. She had never been good at trust.

  “Pardon me for speaking truth,” Glaucous said. “But even among my kind, there are rules.”

  Glaucous backed out and let the curtain fall, then returned to the storage room, his face stony and gray.

  CHAPTER 78

  * * *

  The Chaos

  Under the Witness’s eternal gaze, the Silent Ones had almost skimmed down upon the breeds when the entire land seemed to erupt with geysers and fountains of sooty darkness. The huge, flattened faces with their darting, ever-searching eyes—reminiscent of Tall Ones, breeds, and other varieties unknown to the marchers—had suddenly pulled away, leaving Tiadba and her companions spilled on the black ground, waiting for doom…doom delayed.

  Tiadba withdrew her arm from her faceplate and saw that Khren and Shewel were already up on their knees. Herza and Frinna had risen as well. Still vibrating with shock, Tiadba managed to push into a crouch, and listened to the shrieks and wails shooting skyward from all around. The compressed ruins of a dead city had either risen around the Witness or been pushed into place like a pile broomed up for burning.