by Greg Bear
“Books are special,” Miriam said. “They mean something beyond any value I ever gave them. Not that I don’t love books. I mean, look at this place…it’s hardly been touched.”
Agazutta fumbled with the brass latch on her book, but Farrah reached out and stopped her. With a sigh, Agazutta slipped the book back into her bag.
“Whatever protection books give didn’t seem to mean much to the people who worked here.”
“Maybe they left,” Miriam said doubtfully.
“I’d hate to think that we’re all that special,” Farrah said, and when the others looked her way, puzzled or irritated, she added with uncharacteristic sheepishness, “I don’t want to be the last of anything—especially the last old woman.”
“What’s old mean, here?” Agazutta said.
“I want to be in my clinic,” Miriam said.
“Time’s over, except for us,” Farrah said grimly. She pointed to the high, broad windows. They were frosting, black crystalline rime creeping up like a cold shadow.
Farrah had made her way behind the abandoned information desk and held up a thick volume from the Cambridge Ancient History. She opened it and flipped through the pages. A dark silvery fluid spilled out around her feet and gathered into a shining pool. Miriam bent to examine the spill—touched it with her fingers, lifted them. The tips were covered with dark iridescence, alphabet rainbows—hematite words. “Uh-oh,” Agazutta said, and backed away from the nearest flight of stairs.
From the elevator doors a thin dark liquid gushed through the crack, while another, more copious flow cascaded down the steps. The women retreated.
The streams joined on the concrete floor.
Behind the desk, Farrah shook a few last drops from the book of history, then held it up. In the dim light its pages were as pristine as untouched snow.
Miriam’s expression turned from astonishment to resignation—almost to understanding—but then held firm at acceptance. “Keep your things close,” she warned. “It’s what Bidewell has been saying all along. Without readers, books do unpredictable things.”
“Waiting for new characters, new stories,” Agazutta said.
“Us?” Farrah asked, her voice as frightened and gentle as a child’s.
“No, dear,” Miriam said. “We’ve never been very important.”
But Farrah had laid the book on the counter and, like a librarian, was smoothing her palm over the blank pages to press them open. At her touch, letters returned, apparently random, unreadable—embryonic history waiting to be made. This was what had softened her voice. “Are you sure?”
“Oh dear,” Miriam said.
CHAPTER 81
* * *
Ginny
Ginny stumbled as she ascended a low ridge of blackened stone, and then, beyond, saw a thick stream of something iridescent sliding toward her, then curve off to the right—flowing uphill, not down. She would go around that curve to avoid crossing the fluid—whatever it was.
She hadn’t brought much real water—just a plastic quart bottle bumping around in her pack. But she wasn’t thirsty and she didn’t feel hungry or tired. Only a few minutes seemed to have passed, and yet she must have walked many miles.
A practical part of her mind now asked a key question, and Ginny wondered why she hadn’t thought of it earlier: What was guiding her?
She reached into her jacket pocket and touched the stone, felt it roll in her fingers—a new freedom. Yet when she tried to pull it back behind her, even in the narrow confines of her pocket, it resisted.
It had a tendency, a preference.
It pulled in the same direction she was walking.
“I am the stone, the stone is me,” Ginny sang in a hoarse whisper, and felt a kind of reassurance, a counter to her fear.
The flaming arc passed beyond the horizon again. She looked down from the not-sky to keep her eyes from aching. Then it occurred to her and she let out a small cry. She had left the last place on Earth that was not already part of the awful dream.
I’m walking into Tiadba’s Chaos. Where’s her city?
Where’s the Kalpa?
As she held the stone, words streamed into her head—very familiar, that voice she had never heard yet knew so intimately—awakening what she had been made to know all along.
You are here.
You are in its heart.
Find me.
Find your sister.
CHAPTER 82
* * *
The Green Warehouse
In the small storage room, surrounded by collapsed cardboard boxes and piles of broken-down crates, Glaucous lay back on the narrow cot, thinking over all he had seen and done, all those he had caged and put to an end. Birds sold or tossed to the rats; children delivered by the dozens to the Chalk Princess.
In the long run, in the undoubtedly stellar perspective of someone like the Mistress, it came to no difference. He did not feel guilt so much as imbalance. He did not seek understanding—Daniel might understand a little of what was happening outside, but Glaucous worried that he was too old, too much a living fossil. His intellect had been whetted to a dedicated edge more than a century ago, and then blunted by hard use. He could manufacture a semblance of cleverness, summon a pattern of behaviors in response to a more or less familiar challenge—
But not to this. This was a young person’s game. He could only contribute what he had added to the mix so often before: the fog of promise, the taint of lies.
When the three had been isolated in Bidewell’s back rooms, he had felt something moving through the building like a subtle breeze—Mnemosyne herself, he supposed. For a moment his memory had sharpened, put itself in order. Quite the opposite sensation of being around the Devil’s whirlwind, the Queen in White.
His lips moved. In the lowest, softest voice, he tried to remember his story differently, to speak of a young boy treated well—not showered with riches, but trained to fulfillment and not servitude, his potential shaped by firm, gentle, if not expert hands—fine propensities nurtured, bad tendencies discouraged…
Maturing into a normal life. A homely but honorable woman might have taken him to be her husband. Children might have come that he—they—would protect and never, ever deliver up to her. He could not imagine love, not after all these years, but he could summon a vague picture of mutual respect and understanding.
He clenched his teeth, got up from the old cot, and put on his jacket.
The door opened.
Daniel and Jack stood in the gray light.
“The girl’s gone,” Daniel said. Behind them, ice grew over the boxes and crates, up the walls and ceiling. Near the concrete floor the ice was slowly staining black.
“Ah,” Glaucous said, head inclined, eyes mere cracks. He rubbed his hands against the cold. He was used to moving in the dark.
“We can’t find her,” Jack said. Glaucous searched the boy’s face and found only nervous excitement. A fog of promise. He would unite these two. They would become like brothers. His last contribution to the game—perversely, the creation of a bond of trust.
“I heard three of the women leave,” Glaucous said. “Where’s the fourth?” She stayed here for you, Jack. Do you care?
“She’s with Bidewell in the office,” Jack said.
“If we are here,” Glaucous said, “and we do seem to be here, and moving about and speaking, then I assume Terminus has…I’m at a loss for words, young masters. Has Bidewell navigated us through that impassable barrier?”
Neither Daniel nor Jack answered.
Glaucous pushed past them. “She will come soon,” he said. “The Chalk Princess hates bookish sanctuaries.”
“Doesn’t matter what the Chalk Princess does now,” Jack said. “We’re where we’re supposed to be.”
“Ah, did Bidewell tell you that?” Glaucous asked.
“Jack dreams, remember?” Daniel said with a sharpness that made Glaucous uneasy. “He might know more about what’s going to happen than we do.”
“Then by all means, we should go after the girl, and Jack will guide us,” Glaucous said.
They will take their stones with them—all will be gone from the warehouse. Our Livid Mistress will come to claim Bidewell—his books alone cannot protect him here.
And then, what has always been promised to her servants…
That promise had been revealed to him just once, over a century before. He could hardly remember the details, only the lingering aura of a glorious triumph, control, wealth—unimaginable victory over all adversity. A complete absence of guilt. And what would he be, then? Perhaps not even Max Glaucous anymore.
For the first time in decades a note of a conscience played somewhere in his chest, sharp and painful despite its tiny size. He peered at Jack, then at Daniel, and felt the muscles in his face turn waxy, freezing his expression into an amateur parody of a smile.
How ugly I am, he thought. How old and cruel and full of lies.
CHAPTER 83
* * *
The Kalpa
In the tower, waiting…
The fusillade of intrusions had scorched deep into the Kalpa, high and low, practically destroying the two outer bions and leaving the first bion—and the Broken Tower—in a highly unstable condition. A third of the Defenders had dissolved into fiery clouds. It was apparent that the conclusion of the Typhon’s vendetta would not long be delayed.
Ghentun had put his affairs in order, surveyed the damage in the Tiers, and determined what could be done for those ancient breeds that still lived, who did not require the ministry of the Bleak Warden—a small remainder cowering in their niches, moaning songs and prayers, watched over by the few samas brave enough to walk the hallways.
Nothing more could be done.
He had left the Tiers for the last time and returned to the Broken Tower, not at the bidding of the Librarian, but for the sake of his own conscience. Even then he was well aware that any course he chose was likely already embedded in the scheme of one or another Great Eidolon, and he was filled with loathing for them all.
Enslavement. How could you enslave a dying cosmos? What could any of these Eidolonic schemes mean to a being like himself, no longer capable of the evanescent noötic shimmer, much less of passing signal and sense from epitome to epitome, incapable of even approaching what passed for thought among those powers who still claimed to be human?
Waiting to be noticed by the servants of the Librarian.
Ghentun looked down from a high window cracked and smoking, blackened at the edges, rimed inside and out with crystalline densities that crawled and rearranged, trying to heal the crack on this inward side, while on the outer, black otherness crept and sought a point through which to pry entry.
The angelins finally appeared and filed into the wide, once empty chamber—not one this time, but thousands of many different shapes and sizes, all blue, all cold, settling themselves in concentric curves with Ghentun and the high window at their focus.
He glanced back at them, unmoved, then returned to his contemplation of what now lay beyond the border of the real. Few in the bions below would ever witness what he was seeing; Eidolons and Menders and Shaper alike preferred ignorance to the certainty of this swiftly approaching doom. The Chaos had fundamentally changed, no doubt about it. Nothing like what surrounded the Kalpa had ever been seen before.
How the ancient emotion of curiosity had declined to a deathly, classic superiority—the triumph of blind satisfaction! This must have been what it was like for so many across the five hundred living galaxies during the last of the Mass Wars…awaiting transformation or destruction by the Eidolons. Not so very long after, many of those same Eidolons were now giving way to the Chaos.
The Chaos had even less mercy for Eidolons, so it was said. Ghentun took grim satisfaction in having this history lesson pressed home so vividly. It stung him deeply that he had once abandoned his primordial mass, given up his Mender heritage for a few thousand years of hopeful integration into the upper urbs…A betrayal of high degree, he thought.
The only higher betrayal—
He contemplated the still vague outlines of the deep knowledge given to him by the City Prince. Not to be trusted, of course. And when that knowledge did emerge, would it transform him into the Kalpa’s avenging agent?
The angelins did not move—did not disturb his thoughts. Perhaps the Librarian was preparing for his final moments as well.
The Keeper wondered what had become of the young breed male he had delivered. Analyzed, partitioned, dissected by a crazed Eidolon with an intense and pointless lust for telling detail? Or kept in seclusion, a prize lost among all the other failed and cataloged experiments?
What Ghentun was seeing, outside the border of the real, visible through the broken, leaning sentinels that still tried to surround and protect—
The Chaos had burned through almost all of Earth’s old reality, twisting time and fate into blackened cinders, but along the way, choice bits had been perversely encapsulated, preserved, and now trophies were being arranged as if in a bizarre museum. The shattered artifacts of ancient times and ancient cities terrestrial and otherwise had been collected, somehow transported, and laid out around the last bions of the Kalpa, closer than ever before, as if for the horrified awareness of the next victims—soon to be melted and disfigured and distributed in their own turn across the dark lands of the Chaos.
Who could doubt that the Typhon hated all that lay within this huge broken circle of protection? Who could ever doubt that the Typhon’s entire existence had consisted of dismantling and rearranging—but always failing to understand—the secrets of creation?
The Witness lay sprawled like a gray, ghastly mountain in the midst of this heap of murdered history, its gigantic battered head and slumped features still pushing forward the prominent, slowly rotating eye that swung a gray beam across the heights of the tower.
Ghentun could only acknowledge at his core a vacancy of emotion. To learn the nature of one’s lifelong enemy—the enemy of all the scattered galaxies, all those who had once called themselves human—the enemy that had shaped and distorted his life, and yet had provoked the creation of the creatures he so dearly loved, yet now had to abandon…
Vacancy.
Only vacancy.
Ghentun looked for the channels that had always wormed through the Chaos’s reactive scablands, spread around the Kalpa: the trods, along which, it was said—if you watched closely from the city’s sheltering heights—you might see Silent Ones skimming and darting, huge and swift, no doubt seeking breeds, marchers; dispatching or delivering all they caught to those awful repositories: the Necropolis, the House of Sounds, the House of Green Sleep, the Fortress of Fingers, the Vale of Dead Gods, the Wounding River, the Plain of Pits…or any of the other stations of mutation and doom that had been gouged, erected, morphed from the landscape beyond the border of the real over the times since the tower had been shattered.
How do I know these names, these identifications?
Ghentun looked back again at the angelins and realized he was being played with. Was this the City Prince’s gift? Or were the Librarian’s servants sharing some of their knowledge? Either way, the Keeper was being given a lesson in Chaography—what he needed to survive in a land without law.
A single angelin broke from the ranks and drifted forward. It extended a slender, tiny blue hand to caress Ghentun’s cloak. Jewels of singing snow fell before his face.
The runners have summed. They are all here.
The dreamer is ready.
The angelins parted and a white epitome escorted the young male breed into Ghentun’s presence. The breed approached the high window and stared out, eyes bright with fear and longing.
He knew what Ghentun knew, saw what he saw.
Jebrassy looked up at the Keeper, then turned back to the Chaos. “You sent her out there. I have to go find her.”
“Not alone,” Ghentun said.
CHAPTER 84
* * *
The Green Warehouse
Another kind of slowness and darkness was approaching. Bidewell peered up at the skylight as he pulled on his gloves and walked between the aisles to his library and the fitful heat of the stove, the last bottle of wine. Ellen was waiting there, his final companion in this cosmos, he presumed. And bearing down upon them both—something he could only sense, not explain.
Another part of the broken chain—as usual, out of sequence.
Or something worse. Perhaps the wall of Alpha, come to squeeze them against Omega. If that was the way of it, then they had not failed. There had never been any way to succeed. Dark thoughts indeed.
Ellen sat and stared at the dim orange glow within the stove’s isinglass window.
“Perhaps you should have gone with them,” Bidewell said. “The women, I mean.”
“I thought Ginny would want company,” she said.
Bidewell made a sound at once dubious and sympathetic and sat across from her.
“Are we done? I mean, there’s nothing more we can do?”
“Not at all,” Bidewell said. “Assuming there is still a move to be made in this endgame, we are making such a move now.”
“Care to explain that to me?”
“Of course. The Chalk Princess will come to collect a former servant, now a turncoat. That desire for vengeance might delay her in the pursuit of our young shepherds.”
Ellen peered at him, beyond fear—almost beyond curiosity. “What would it be like, to be collected?” She looked deep into the isinglass. “What is the Queen in White?”
“An awful force. A multidimensioned storm of pain and fear, carrying a retrograde wave of hatred.”
“What is it that hates us so much?”
Bidewell shook his head.
“Satan?”
“Ah.”
“What’s that mean?”
“How often have we asked ourselves that question?” Bidewell said.
“Is there an answer?”