City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  “Where are we?” she asked. “Has the Chaos shrunk?”

  Khren and Macht crawled beside her. Nico had found another wall with better footholds.

  “There has been movement,” the armor’s voice announced to all. “Distances have been reduced.”

  By now the marchers had found vantages to all sides, less interested in the city than in what had happened to the Silent Ones and where the Witness was now situated, almost on top of them.

  Tiadba studied the Witness with a frown. The huge, distorted head—as tall as three or four blocs stacked on top of each other—had been erected on a massive scaffold of old buildings. Its expression seemed frozen in weary despair. Perhaps that half-melted visage revealed its emotions over times longer than the life of a breed. With everything shifting and changing, perhaps the Chaos would accelerate and she could actually see the agony come and go across those ruptured brows, accentuating the rotation of that huge, protruding eye, dull green glimmers winking within its dark pit of a pupil.

  The sweep of the beam had been interrupted, but now the glimmers were focusing, re-forming…and the beam lanced out again over the Chaos, returning to its slow, inevitable rotation.

  Khren and Shewel pulled Tiadba to her feet. None of them had been hurt—yet. They were left untouched in the very shadow of the Witness, wrapped around by labyrinths of broken walls and toppled structures—spirals, towers, ornamental facades.

  The walls had grown up in no time, while the sky had turned a sickly metallic gray and something like wind had rushed over the Chaos, carrying fanned-out clots of black dust. And now the fountains, shooting into the sky, suddenly joined into spinning funnels, then curved over and swooped toward the distorted horizon.

  “Here!” Herza and Frinna called.

  Tiadba pushed Khren back and climbed the opposite angled wall to see. They all watched as the Silent Ones maneuvered on their tracks, hunkering, collapsing their stilts to avoid the funnels, now like thick fingers, with the marchers in the middle of a giant palm. A kind of living smoke shot through with gray and silver rose all around, and the Chaos erupted once more—this time bolts of red light rose up and spread against the wrinkled sky.

  “More intrusions,” the armor explained.

  “I see that,” Tiadba said, and then reached to make sure she still carried the bag in her pouch, with her books. Their books.

  How could Jebrassy ever find them, ever make his way through this?

  “Where’s the beacon?” Nico asked. “I don’t hear anything.” If they lost the beacon, then it did not matter whether they were alive or dead.

  “It’s stopping,” Khren called.

  The fountains fell short, the geysers sputtered, the continuous bedlam of screams and whoops dropped in pitch and intensity to low rumbles.

  “We have to move across the trod,” Tiadba said.

  “There’s something out there, on the other side,” Nico said, pointing. Their suit faces magnified what he had spotted and showed them a different kind of ruin, blocky cubes and rectangular structures laid out in a grid and topped by a lighter swirl of sky.

  Tiadba closed her eyes and tried to remember what her visitor would have called them.

  Streets. Roads.

  “I know a place like this,” she said.

  “We’ll have to make it fast,” Nico advised, and Khren agreed.

  They pushed over the rubble and ran over the dimpled trod, its pale surface spongy, then mucky, like a fallow swale. Behind them the nearest Silent One began to rise up on its thin legs, the mouth in the flat massive face twisting as if in pain.

  “Faster!” the Pahtun-voice commanded, and they pushed, tugged, braced against the suck, and crossed the trod to step out on glazed black crust, dust beneath, and then—

  A road made of square red stones, covered with black ice, but hard—they could run! They could flee as the Silent Ones pulled up their stilt-legs and began to reach out with fluorescing grapples.

  But the marchers were now out of reach.

  They walked in silence, moving what might have been miles through the ruins. The small generator had been sucked down into the rubble on the other side of the trod, pinned between collapsing walls. They had only one clave left between them.

  And Tiadba had her books.

  “Is this place new, or old?” Khren asked.

  “Very old, I think,” Tiadba said as they increased their distance from the both the Witness and the trod.

  “What kind of place is it?” Herza asked. Usually she was the least curious, less even than Frinna, and never asked questions.

  “I think it’s called a ‘town,’” Tiadba said. “Like a bloc, but laid out flat instead of stacked.”

  “Some of the buildings look like they might have been taller,” Khren said. “Maybe something mowed them down.”

  Twisting curls of feeble blue light arced from the Chaos into the flat cityscape, dancing down the roads and caressing the shattered walls. Nico asked what the loops were.

  “Entangled matter,” Pahtun’s voice responded. “These are ring fates, interactions between particles that are the same, once separated by time and fate—but no more.”

  Ring fates. Tiadba shuddered. She had not heard that phrase before, not even from her visitor, but it sounded important, even crucial.

  “Are they dangerous?” Khren asked.

  “Unknown,” the armor replied. “They cannot be avoided. You are made from primordial mass. There may be more entangled recognitions between matter from the past, now joined to itself in the present.”

  They tried to focus on the words they almost understood. Tiadba thought that her and Jebrassy’s visitors might have spoken to them out of just such a past. Did that mean they were connected—made in part at least of the same matter?

  She told the others that they needed to find something like shelter, and stay alert. The Chaos had been crunched, compressed—that seemed to be the simplest way of expressing what they had experienced—and perhaps that meant this past had caught up with them, colliding and merging with everything around the Kalpa.

  “What’s next?” Herza asked, her second question of the journey.

  CHAPTER 79

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  Jack leaned over the edge of the roof, looking for people and finding a few still out in the open. But he could not recognize any of the bookgroup witches, and no one else out there moved. They had become obsidian sculptures locked in attitudes of walking, running, or just standing, arms held up as if beseeching someone, something—anything. “Are they all like that?” Jack asked.

  Daniel had no answer but felt a twinge…an unwelcome jab of concern. He could see through many of the buildings, as if their reality had been frozen mid-collision. Some of these were slowly fading, crumbling—turning to more black dust.

  He rubbed his temples vigorously, then bent over, fighting off a headache. “I’m not smart anymore, Jack. This has me squeezed flat. Every secret, every bit of knowledge—it’s right before our eyes, and we don’t know what it means,” he said. “I used to be an arrogant bastard—from what I remember, which isn’t much. Maybe I belong with Glaucous, and you should stay away from both of us. I’m sorry I brought him here with me.”

  Jack could say nothing in response. Their past was gone—literally gone, deleted, absorbed, powdered away. What could they be responsible for now? What sort of freedom of action or choice could they possibly have?

  Ginny took just enough time to pluck her stone out of its box, throw the box between some heavy crates, and pull a bundle of clothes and a can of beans, all she thought they could spare, from under the bed. Enough was more than enough. She couldn’t sit still another second—couldn’t waste any more time waiting for the others to finish their enigmatic preparations.

  She had slept through the departure of the three witches. She did not see Ellen in the stacks or near the outer door. She did not want to see Jack or Daniel, and she certainly did not want to
encounter Glaucous again.

  Or Bidewell.

  She was going to do what she always did best: turn left, move on, make the wrong decision. Leaving the security of Bidewell’s warehouse—if it was secure, which she had always doubted—seemed foolish, but now more than ever she couldn’t stand the thought of falling asleep again and dreaming of her lost other.

  She worked her way through the stacked boxes, smelling their dry mustiness, feeling the strange new cold that wafted through the lofty old building, winding like an invisible vapor down the aisles and between the rooms, chilling the steel doors like frozen hands, reaching in, searching…

  The stone felt warm and heavy in her pocket. All the lightness after her hours in the empty room, the time spent with Mnemosyne, had collapsed under the weight of troubled sleep, and now she felt only leaden desperation.

  She pushed open the outer door, cringing at the squeal it made, and pulled the mechanical lever that released the gate lock now that the city’s electricity was gone. The cold on the ramp was stranger and more intense than in the warehouse, and the brown, dusty darkness beyond the gate more forbidding than she had imagined while making her preparations.

  But this was the way it had to be. Separation, escape, in the hopes of a new uniting—when they were ready, when they were mature.

  Whatever they could have time to grow into.

  With damp fingers she rolled the stone in her jacket pocket—the jacket that Bidewell had given her, a heavy woolen British Air Force coat, sixty years old or more—and used her other hand to pull the wire gate inward.

  The last scatter of writhing clouds were lit with arcs of pale green and yellow flame that flickered and passed overhead, like the northern lights, she thought, but more intense—and not at all lovely. Above the clouds, the sky had become a vault of nothing. She should not look up, she decided. Yet looking at the streets outside—the shaved, dissected, rearranged buildings, covered with crawling black ice, the few people left behind by Terminus, petrified, contorted, filled with that same waxy, crawling ice—awful! So she kept her eyes on her feet and walked as quickly as the thickening air allowed.

  She seemed to fill a kind of bubble, an unseen protected volume that pushed ahead and around her. The bubble might be an effect of the stone, but she couldn’t know for sure. It was like a pocket of air dragged below the surface of a pond by a diving beetle. It might give out at any moment, and the waxy dark ice would fill her veins and then something else would peer out through her blind eyes…

  She looked back, a bad idea, but she couldn’t help herself. The gray air behind could not completely obscure the sharp bluish glow rising from the warehouse, the only building she could see that had not been destroyed or rearranged like a child’s set of blocks. She wished them well.

  The warehouse grew smaller too quickly, as if each step she made were a dozen. A new way to walk: tattered running shoes turned into seven-league boots…

  Ginny lifted her arms, wondering if she could will herself to fly, but nothing happened. She kept walking. The ground changed from cracked cement and asphalt to soft gray dirt, then to something blacker and harder—a kind of ropy crust like old lava, but thin and crunchy. She hoped the fine gray dust that puffed up from beneath the broken crust would not swallow her feet, or swallow her.

  Some of her thoughts as she performed this odd journey were taken up with the protests of a rational, practical young woman who told her that leaving the warehouse was worse than suicide—but who also told her that none of this could possibly be real. In the broken, flat, and listless world of Terminus—a thin coat of paint between life and doom—there had to be an answer to the madness, an escape, a door or hatch through which she could crawl and pull herself into real sunlight, real night, walk under real stars, real moon—

  Real sleep, normal dreams. And a real city, not this broken-down jumble.

  But then she looked up from her blur of feet, looked around again. She was no longer in the city. The brown and gray air was reddened by the rise of the flaming arc—all that seemed to be left of the sun, wrapped around a cindery disc. This was accompanied by a deep rumbling and trembling beneath her shoes, the black ground itself rebelling against what now passed for day.

  And off in the distance she saw the ghostly hint of a sweeping beam, not precisely a searchlight, more like the blade of a huge sword cutting through the sky.

  I know that. The Witness.

  This made her stop. She found herself actually wringing her hands, a story-time gesture she never would have believed herself capable of. But she took some solace from the repetitive motion and the pressure of her strong, curling fingers.

  Her frown deepened, wrinkles and seams growing across her forehead and cheeks until her face felt like an old, old woman’s. The air seemed to be aging her. Terminus might be pulling her up short, abruptly snipping her world-line like a grim, silent Norn.

  Anything could be happening.

  And so she had to keep walking.

  From the middle of the roof the shelter door creaked and slammed open. Ellen kicked the door again as it swung back, then stepped out onto the wooden pallets. “We weren’t watching her for just a moment…!” she called, and then stopped, sucked in her breath, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes against the aurora glow.

  Jack didn’t say a word, just broke into a run over the wooden path to the shelter. His shoulders bounced from the walls, then he swung onto the ladder and scrambled below like a monkey.

  Daniel followed, more deliberate. Trying to figure an advantage, he thought with the smallest pang. Ellen stared at him as he walked past. She focused on his face—she did not want to see any more of the sky and landscape than she had to.

  “The girl took off?” Daniel asked.

  Ellen’s face was white with accumulated shock, and now this. She folded her arms tight and nodded. “We were supposed to protect her.”

  “We’ll go find her,” Daniel said. “This place isn’t going to last much longer, anyway.”

  CHAPTER 80

  * * *

  Downtown

  The witches could not find any street they recognized.

  The whole downtown area had been fractured and then tossed into a mishmash chronology. The only structures that seemed familiar were bookstores, some shuttered for decades, yet once again presenting faded signs to empty streets; but their interiors were deserted, empty of both books and readers.

  Agazutta, Farrah, and Miriam moved on in a tight huddle, exchanging quiet, hollow jokes—the last little encouragements they could muster—but unable to hide their fear at the appalling state of their once beautiful city.

  “I never imagined it might be like this. I thought I’d die in bed,” Miriam said.

  “Alone and unloved?” Agazutta made a wry face. “Maybe this is better.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Miriam said.

  “Always have.”

  “Girls.” Farrah nudged them around a gray, jagged corner. “This is Fifth Avenue.”

  “My God, have we walked that far?” Miriam asked.

  “I’m not sure what ‘far’ means now,” Agazutta said.

  They stood for a moment, the dusty breeze chilling them like a soft, dead hand.

  “That’s north, I think,” Farrah decided. She wiped grit from her eyes and intensified her frown. “What now?”

  “I recognize something up the block a ways,” Miriam said. “It’s the central library.”

  “Haven’t we had enough of books?” Farrah said.

  Miriam said, “I think it’s our little green books that have got us this far. Maybe we can climb to an upper floor and get our bearings.”

  “I say we go east, that way,” Farrah said, pointing. “I think that’s still east. The freeway isn’t far, if it’s still there.”

  “My house would be north,” Agazutta said.

  “I don’t know if we can make it,” Miriam said. “It’s getting much too cold.” She pulled up the collar of her sensible
gray wool coat—the sort of coat one wore for many seasons in Seattle.

  Agazutta turned toward a window crusted into the wall beside her, its frame cracked, pitch-dark behind the dusty glass. Palm- and fingerprints streaked through the dust, as if people had walked by with hands out, touching the walls, the window, anything solid to guide themselves through the murk—before they vanished.

  She stared into the glass and realized that the reflection staring back was of another face entirely, not hers—and not a happy one. With a little cry, she backed away, and the face faded.

  To the southwest, around Bidewell’s warehouse, a pillar of swirling cloud seemed to be gathering, piping out a thin calliope whistle—the voice of a mad mother crooning to her children.

  “Let’s get off this street,” Farrah said. “Anyplace will do, even a library.”

  They walked through the fragile rubble, crunching like burned meringue beneath their shoes, in the direction that had once been north; toward the big library.

  Inside, the library was remarkably intact—deserted, but only loosely touched by the changes beyond its high, staggered glass and aluminum walls. Quiet filled the lobby and stairwells leading to the upper levels—empty quiet.

  Agazutta leaned against a desk and coughed into her handkerchief. “We’ll get black lung out there.”

  “Dust of ages,” Miriam said, and reached into her cloth bag to pull out her book. She held it up, showed it to her fellow Witches.

  They produced their own volumes—the books that Bidewell had given them years ago, when they began working for him.