by Greg Bear
They walked more quickly now, across what seemed like many miles to Jebrassy, following Polybiblios as he cut through the tight-packed clutter of the condensed and amplified Necropolis. Jebrassy struggled to see where his feet were going—the ground seemed to curve up to meet each bootfall. Soon they were within sight of a great poly-form dome of crazed and warped architecture. To Jebrassy it resembled many bridges set on end, spun about, then dropped, smashed, and finally, as an afterthought, hung with long mossy ribbons.
“Does Nataraja look like that?” he asked.
“Unknown. This particular structure has been here since before the tower was broken, carried from some far galaxy, I seem to recall…There are many such scattered here, there.” He stabbed about with a finger. “Meant perhaps to draw curious marchers. The Typhon…” Polybiblios looked down at his trembling hands. “This body reacts with revulsion. How interesting. I had thought myself beyond such feelings.”
Polybiblios guided them along another dark, crusted path winding around the ruins.
“Of course, without the generators, the Eidolons will cease their existence within the Kalpa—or outside, for that matter—but the Ancient Breed and most of the Menders might still survive.”
Ghentun understood the implication of that. “What about other marchers?” he asked.
“Not to be known,” Polybiblios said, shaking his head. This gave Jebrassy a twinge—he had heard that phrase before…
They crossed many more apparent miles. Ghentun inquired as to whether the epitome knew where they were.
“On the outer boundaries of the Necropolis,” Polybiblios said. “Everything is tighter, shrunken—drawn in. We’re moving faster than we should. And soon…?” Polybiblios closed in, peering at the breed. “What will we soon come to?”
“You’re like a teacher,” Jebrassy said. “Always testing.”
“The houses,” Ghentun answered for him. “Ten of them, at last count, cutting across the strongest path of the beacon.”
“And beyond them?”
“The Vale of Dead Gods. Beyond that, all is conjecture.”
“Just because I am with you, do not think you can let down your guard,” Polybiblios said. “Great men and women have been lost out here, with more ancient conviction and experience. So many marchers, but others as well—Menders. Pilgrims. Many have been sacrificed while we waited.”
“You sent things back,” Jebrassy said. “Now they’re returning.”
“Emerging might be a better word, like something rising from the depths of an ocean.”
“I don’t know what an ‘ocean’ is.” Jebrassy lowered his head as if in pain. “Upside-down rocks…ice and mountains in the sky. That’s where the dreamers are going. Is that an ‘ocean’?”
“No,” Polybiblios murmured, but he did not sound completely convinced. “Worlds falling together. All a desperate gamble, and how many times did we fall into that splendid quag of despair only Eidolons can feel?”
Jebrassy clenched his teeth and pushed ahead.
CHAPTER 91
* * *
Denbold and Macht tested the trod with their boots. “It’s firm,” Denbold said, returning to Tiadba. Herza and Frinna stepped out on the surface together. “We can cross here.”
“The beacon gets weaker that way,” Khren said. “It’s strongest on this course. That’s the path we should be taking. We should follow the trod.”
“It’s a long, wide one,” Shewel said. “It won’t stay firm. And there’s a peculiar bump ahead—we can see over it, or should, the way the light works here, but there’s only darkness.”
“What he calls a bump looks like a…what’s the word?” Khren asked. Tiadba had been reading other stories from her books. Some described features of land and water that the breeds had never experienced.
“A mountain,” Tiadba said. “Lots of them—a mountain range.”
“Well, whatever—that’s where we’re supposed to go.”
“What’s out there at the end of the trod?” Tiadba asked the armor.
Pahtun’s voice responded. “Once there was something called the Vale of Dead Gods. It was a broad-floored rift with ten houses, including the House of Green Sleep, held in a kind of countertwist bowl at its center. Many marchers were lured there and enslaved in a chronic noose. The tower changed the arc of the beacon to avoid the vale. But the last update said there was only shadow—a lack of detail.”
“How long ago came that update?” Nico asked shrewdly.
“Kalpa time, a hundred thousand years,” the armor said. “But out here, in a countertwist, how we approach changes everything. Away from the guidance of the beacon, circling in from another direction, there may still be the vale. The House of Green Sleep is or was a strong lure. If the vale and the house have changed, then there may yet be other traps—or a clear path.”
“Typhon’s lies?” Nico asked, squatting beside the trod and poking at it again with a tripod leg. The surface seemed hard as glass.
“Perhaps,” Pahtun’s voice said. “The trod passes close to the vale. If the beacon guides us along the route of the trod, it might still be safe.”
They all looked to Tiadba. Her weariness had grown. She sensed a cycling sadness in the back of her thoughts, as if she were leading the marchers into a trap even worse than the echoes, worse than the twitching glider dumps and churning graveyard bogs they had already seen. But the beacon was strong. There was nothing else they could do; they had no other guidance.
“We could stay on one side or the other,” Khren said. “But it’s getting rough and there are lots of cracks. Take us much longer.”
They all dreaded the possibility that the Kalpa would fall and the beacon would be silenced—or worse, deceive them, though Pahtun assured them that was not possible.
“We’ll use the trod,” Tiadba said. “Khren, stay as far back as you can and still see the rest of us. Herza and Frinna, go ahead an equal distance. Any sign of softness…”
They spread out and moved toward the “bump” in the land ahead.
They walked on for what seemed a very long time before they were forced to abandon the trod. They then hid in crevices that radiated from the roadway and watched the passage of Silent Ones by the dozens—wave upon wave of gliding monstrosities, moving with even greater speed over the broad milky surface. More time—long, slow, boring time—passed before the surface again became glassy, and they resumed.
The Witness’s beam curved and whipped through the sky. Something was happening again far out in the Chaos—thick scuts of darkness shot up and then fell back like ghostly, smoky heads popping out of the ground.
After another long spell of travel, and another smoky eruption, Khren saw a change in the sky to their left, well off the vector of the beacon’s greatest intensity. None of the others could duplicate his sighting, hard as they tried. “My eyes must be going,” Khren said, downhearted.
“You and me both,” Shewel said.
“What did it look like?” Nico asked, boring in with an angry tone.
“Enough,” Tiadba said. “We’ll force him to make up stuff.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Khren said, indignant.
“We’ll stop here for a while…”
“It’s out there again,” Herza said, and Frinna pointed—they had both seen a blue glow in the dip between two heaves of brownish, crackled ground.
The armor now spoke. “It may be another Pahtun, or this far out, someone else from the Kalpa—older.”
They thought this over skeptically. “A deception?” Nico asked.
No answer. Anything could be a deception—except for the beacon, nothing was certain.
“I’ll sortie,” Macht said. “I’m tired of this monotony. A little climbing and jumping is just the thing.”
CHAPTER 92
* * *
“Does he look different to you?” Glaucous asked Daniel. Jack forged ahead through the ruptured and redrawn streets, walls, buildings. His concern was obviou
s—there was no way to tell what could happen out here, nor how things had changed since Ginny passed.
Or whether they were even following her trail.
“He’s standing straighter,” Daniel said.
“He’s looking older,” Glaucous said. “And bolder. He takes risks, leaving us here. What does the stone tell you?”
“Still tugging,” Daniel said. The urban rearrangement around them muttered and groaned like deep ice settling over a rocky slope. “If the girl feels the tug—and if it’s the same tug…”
“It is,” Glaucous assured him. “Have you seen the like before?” He waved at the dismal scene, apt to change unpredictably, like a show of lantern slides planned by an idiot.
“Once,” Daniel said. “Jack might have seen it, too.”
“Fleeing our Mistress?” Glaucous asked.
“Something like that.”
“She’s back there. Near the old warehouse. I can feel her.”
“Will she use you to find us?”
“If you ask am I notching branches and overturning rocks…no. But the Mistress is ever and always aware of the disposition of her servants. At least, she was on Earth. Here…maybe our oddness blends in.”
“This is Earth,” Daniel said. “Bits of it. Look. You’re old enough—maybe you recognize these buildings.”
“Asian, I’d say.” Glaucous blew his nose, inspected the rag—more streaks of slick black—and shook his head. “I never journeyed to the East. We left your city miles back.”
“Bidewell said it was all getting cinched in.”
“Did he? I missed that.”
“It’s all burned or corroded. Broken time seems to act like fire or acid.”
Silence between them as they worked around a mound of bricks and stones. With a dour twinkle, the stones became shards of concrete and steel—part of a newer wall, but still a jumbled ruin.
“Like a battlefield,” Glaucous said. “I walked the trenches around Ypres, almost a hundred years ago, looking for a particular gent—a fine, strapping fellow and a poet. He dreamed, so I was led to believe, of a place he called the Last Redoubt. He’d written a book before shipping out, detailing his dreams…But the war had already blown him to bits. Lean years for hunters, during wartime.”
On both sides, streets and buildings ascended steep inclines, as if a city map had been draped over another, rougher country. Some of the structures looked more intact than any they had encountered before, despite leaning at awful angles.
Glaucous saw Jack ahead. He was passing under a precarious arch formed of steel and glass.
Daniel shook his head and his eyes darted. “How far does this go on?”
“Don’t know,” Glaucous said. “Just tagging along.”
“You’ve done more than that,” Daniel said. “You scared Ginny. You might as well have pushed her out here.”
“That concerns you?” Glaucous asked.
“I don’t know why you’re with us. Jack knows what you did.”
“Does he?”
Glaucous looked up as they reached the arch, then felt his shoulders draw down and his thick neck stiffen at the thought of thousands of tons choosing to fall at just this moment. “No shame,” he said. “Shifters may have more charm, more romance than Chancers—but what we do is all the same in the end. We grab at happenstance and care little about stealing luck from those around us.”
“I never claimed to be righteous,” Daniel said.
“Well, then,” Glaucous grumbled.
“Just stop trying to make me happy to be here.”
“Apologies. Old habits.”
For Jack, listening to the voices behind him, the dread sense of approaching conclusions made the shadowy ruins fade to insignificance. He had seen this before—or something like it, less dead. Only now that it was all broken could he piece together a picture of what his cosmos—his small part of the cosmos—had been like, and how he had managed to skip through it with fewer consequences than most; and fewer advancements, fewer of the milestones of common life.
His inability to feel strong affection—that puzzled him. In the dreams, there had been an almost surreal, childlike passion, but for Ginny, only a liking…and nothing more he could pull to the surface. He was less a man in all this than the figure in his dreams.
Jack never dropped anything, because he never held anything for very long: Ellen, who settled for a few hours with him, had been content with his ghost of affection. But before her…
His mother—a pale outline on a pillow under the bright spot of a hospital lamp. His father, even less defined—big, tried to be funny, tried to love him. How could those who controlled their destinies settle for so little? Ginny was like him in that regard. Fate-shifters did not seem capable of great things. They wandered, but left attachments, love, even memory behind.
How could he find fault with Daniel or Glaucous? They were all alike, selfish in the utmost. Both those who held the stones and who sought the stones were diminished—shriveled to points of darting consciousness, without breadth or depth.
Not even the favor or Mnemosyne had lifted Jack’s gloom. He stalked on through the guttering relics of human history, blackened middens revealed one after another like images sketched in ghostly embers. Where was he going—where could he go?
After Ginny. A dream-sister. Who was chasing what?
And along the way, they would meet with—
Daniel called him back.
“Slow down. We’re leaving the city stuff behind.” All three gathered, and their protection merged with a hollow smooch. Jack looked around and pressed his temples with two fingers.
“Do you remember anything like this?” Daniel asked.
“Do you?” Jack asked, still pressing.
“My fate was chewed to pieces, so I jumped closer to your lines. You probably came up against the corruption before it actually closed in. All different. This is all that’s left now—fallen bits, colliding chunks.”
“Memories of history?”
“Oh, they used to be real enough…” Daniel’s lips worked, as if he were trying to stifle another voice. “Sorry. I’ve got a frightened, curious landlord to deal with.”
Jack stared at him, not so much shocked as disgusted. “Putting it politely, you’re a hermit crab.”
“Putting it crudely, I’m a tapeworm, a leech,” Daniel shot back.
Glaucous watched both through red-rimmed eyes.
“But I’m not useless, and I’m not so cruel. What did you leave behind for Bidewell and your woman friend?”
Jack shook his head.
“I thought about giving them a stone of their own,” Daniel said. “I have two. Something to protect them when the Chalk Princess comes.”
Glaucous’s eyes grew wide. “That’s impossible,” he said. “No shepherd has ever carried two.”
“No shepherd has ever been as monstrous as me,” Daniel said. He swiveled his head to watch thin blue arcs loop between gray rocks and scattered ruins. Always in pairs—a kind of cosmic handshake. “In the end, I knew Bidewell would turn down the offer. Three is the minimum—four is safety.”
Jack turned away. He had no idea what this information meant. “This is like where we go in our dreams,” he said. “Where Jebrassy goes after he leaves the city.”
“Who’s Jebrassy?”
“I think we’re going to find out soon enough. We’re supposed to meet.”
“Past and future self? How’s that going to work?”
Jack shook his head.
“I’m not going to meet anyone,” Daniel said. “More or less of a puzzle…can’t say.”
“We’re living in text-time,” Jack said.
“Something Bidewell talked about before we arrived, presumably,” Glaucous grumbled.
“Maybe,” Jack said. “Can’t you feel it? We’re just shells filled with explosive. When we land—we’re done with. This text is finished. Close the book.”
“And open another,” Daniel said.
>
CHAPTER 93
* * *
Ginny walked with the waves of haunted marchers into the valley, observing them with pity and wonder; they hardly seemed solid, much less alive, their armor in strips, feet worn and bloody, the blood long dried—like walking corpses, yet they spoke to each other in high, sapped, tinny tones of triumph and enthusiasm, though harsh with fatigue.
To them, she might have been a wisp, a vapor. Yet one or two stopped to watch her pass, their pale eyes weak and blinking. She could barely make out their words, but some of Tiadba returned to her, and she began to recognize the breed speech of her dreams. What little she could understand told her they were happy, that they thought they were arriving at the conclusion of a long-destined journey, and for a while, surrounded by their shambling, rushing forms, she wondered if they were right; perhaps the dark green edifice rising from the bowl in the middle of the valley was where they all needed to be.
The journey had been hard, the marchers were simply worn down; but in the dreams, Tiadba had never heard of thousands joining in a march. How could they all arrive on the edge of the valley at once, all together?
One of the marchers, a female breed—not Tiadba; Ginny would have known the connection—tried to watch her more closely. She had a broad face, large eyes, and a blunt, simian nose bearing a scut of fine fur, now crusted and patchy.
“Something’s there. Is it a monster?” another asked.
“I’m not sure,” the female answered. “The armor’s silent.”
“The armor’s dead. We’re dead.”
“Hush with that! It’s as big as a Tall One. If it’s really there.”