City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  “It’s a monster. Stay clear.”

  The female tried to reach out and touch this apparition. “Are you a monster?” she asked.

  Ginny did not trust herself to answer. What would her voice sound like to such as these? As if she could be any more real than everything else between the statue-lined mountains. And why couldn’t she see and comprehend those statues? Gigantic, twisted, motionless…might as well be dead…That much she could be sure of.

  A substantial number of marchers—dozens—had slowed and matched their pace with the one that seemed able to keep her in view. “Is it still there?” several asked.

  “You!” the female shouted, rushing in again to touch her—but the bruised, broken hand was gently repelled by Ginny’s bubble. Something bright arced out of Ginny and formed a ring of pale blue between them, then winked out.

  Entanglement. They shared a little matter; they were made of some of the same stuff. But not much of it.

  Ginny looked away, blinking back tears, and concentrated on the broken, stony path. There was nothing she could do and they frightened her. She did not want to end up like them, but she knew Tiadba would suffer a worse fate.

  “You!”

  The female muttered to those around her, and they suddenly stopped and formed a ring, blocking Ginny. She could not pass—she tried and was pushed back. She could not leap or close her eyes and move ahead or do any of the things that might have seemed possible earlier; they had confined her within their circle.

  “What is it? I can barely see it.”

  “It’s a Tall One.”

  “Another Pahtun?”

  “No—don’t break the circle! Keep it here until we know what it is.”

  “We should move on.”

  “Doesn’t anyone remember?” the female cried. “We keep trying to get across the valley and into the city. We keep being sent back and starting over.”

  “That’s not what I remember. We’re almost there. It’s beautiful and bright and close—look! We’ve crossed the Chaos. We’re going to make it…”

  Ginny hugged herself and studied the wan, peeling faces. Some of the figures were little more than wisps floating above the jagged, crusted surface. Who was more or less real here, and what did it matter?

  She finally tried her voice. “I understand you. I know what you’re saying.” Those words startled them—drove them back and widened the circle. Even now she could not be sure what language she used.

  She looked up to the green structure—the city. It seemed closer and much larger, but something about its outline, its margins…it might have been a high mountain viewed through a living, smoky haze, deliberately closing and then revealing. Endlessly teasing, jealous, disappointed, angry.

  Tormenting.

  “It speaks. I hear it,” several figures murmured, and they all closed in, reaching out to touch the bubble. Several more elliptical arcs of blue pulsed between them, wreathed their hands and arms, pulled away in slips and curls, and vanished.

  The marchers withdrew, paler and less defined, as if the interaction had weakened their very existence.

  “What are you?” the female asked. “Where are you from?” Her weary, filmed eyes glanced one way, then another. She could not see Ginny—couldn’t see anything clearly. “Tell us we’re on the right path. Tell us we know where we’re going.”

  Before Ginny could answer, a wave of grainy darkness surged outward from the base of the city. The marchers flinched, hunched their shoulders…then dropped and tried to hug the rugged ground, as if this had happened many times before. So familiar, like a delivery of fresh fire to the damned.

  The wave spread and lifted all, seemed to haul up the very earth. Ginny closed her eyes and rode within her bubble through the wave.

  It shook—spun the sky, then moved on.

  Fell back onto a dark, syrupy foam.

  The foam soaked down into the black surface, hissing.

  After a sickening wait, the ground seemed stable again. Ginny got to her feet and looked around.

  The marchers were gone. On the threshold of what they seemed to think was their salvation, within sight of the place they had been created and trained to reach, they were snatched, shoved back. Tricked. The valley was a place of endless temptation and disappointment.

  “For them, a trap, the wrong city,” Ginny said, shading her eyes against the rising arc of fire. But the green edifice was where she needed to be. The stone tugged her in that direction. This deceptive jumble of walls and shapes, watched over by legions of frozen giants—

  If Tiadba was not already within, then perhaps she soon would be. And what can I do to help? This can’t be real. My nightmare has sucked me in.

  Ginny’s hand had never left the surface of the sum-runner. And the stone’s strong pull had never lessened or wavered—until now. It tugged her sideways, on a different course than the marchers—into the valley, perhaps to circle around and approach the bowl from a different angle.

  She did not dare look behind her. The marchers would be lining up on the crest of the rise, memories spun back in a barbed circle. They would look down into the valley, filled with relief, sure of their victory, then run forward once more in a ghostly, decrepit horde.

  There was nothing she could do for them. Not here, and not yet. If she was too afraid to move, the same female might repeat their scene and dialogue all over again.

  Ginny walked on alone, drawing closer to the stony giants that looked down from the peaks of the surrounding mountains, locked in perpetual silence—always watching but never seeing.

  CHAPTER 94

  * * *

  An awful suspicion grew within Tiadba. They had come so far, lost only one of their company—Perf, near the beginning of their journey—and yet she felt no closer to Nataraja and could not escape a terrible sense that disaster was looming. Worse, she was coming to distrust the beacon—the musical note that pulsed out of the Kalpa and sang in their helmets when they were on the true path, and faded when they deviated from that path. Some shade of knowledge pestered the back of her weary thoughts—a phantom of foreboding.

  The marchers rested now in the protection of the portable generator, on the top of another inverse ridge—a hill from one side, a valley from the other, light sweeping in devious curves from whatever direction they chose to look; mirages everywhere, only slightly corrected and straightened by the faceplates of their armor. From the inverted valley side, they looked out over a wide, lightly traveled trod that led straight into an enormous, sandy plain ringed by high, jagged mountains. A few travelers, swift and low to the ground—a variety of the Silent Ones—swooped along the trod and vanished behind outcrops. None could be seen to travel all the way out onto the plain.

  On all sides, nestled among the mountains like carelessly dropped toys, great frozen things towered, facing inward toward a greenish architectural mass—if such could be said to have faces.

  The Pahtun voice suggested this might be the Vale of Dead Gods—occasionally seen from the Broken Tower. No Pahtun had ever explored this far. The mountains surrounded the House of Green Sleep—though that had likely changed, compressed into an illusion or disguise wrapped around the ancient rebel city of Nataraja. They might be near their destination after all, if Nataraja was still worth finding.

  Once, while they rested—or dragged their feet, more truthfully—Khren said he saw motion on the far side of the vale, at an unknown distance, like a horde of insects swarming over the rim of the vale—perhaps more echoing marchers, lost and pitiful. And when Tiadba stared in that direction—trying to see through the tricks and deceptions of the light—she caught a brief glimpse of something pinpoint brilliant, blue—almost hurting the eyes, even through the filter of her faceplate.

  Sometime later Khren saw it again—exactly the same—and Macht, Nico, and Denbord all agreed it must be more echoes, captured and distorted marchers repeating their frustration by the tens of thousands. It was a sobering prospect that even now, having come t
his far, breeds just like themselves had somehow become imprisoned in an illusion of triumph; or so Nico speculated. “They might even think they’ve succeeded. Over and over again. A twisty prison.”

  Herza and Frinna listened without comment. They had said little for some time now—many cycles of the flaming arc. Yet even those cycles were slowing. No way to calculate how long they were gone, how much distance they’d covered—not even Pahtun’s voice knew.

  “We’ve walked halfway to nowhere,” Nico said, slumping in a split of black rock, holding his gloved hands to the sides of his helmet. There had been no chance to breathe outside air for many cycles.

  “What are those things in those mountains?” Shewel asked.

  “Nightmares,” Denbord said. “Perf was lucky. He wouldn’t have liked any of this.”

  Tiadba sat between Denbord and Nico, who had a thoughtful expression, as near as she could tell through the dusty golden glow of the faceplate. The armor was not offering much more in the way of explanation. “I think I understand,” Nico said cautiously. “It’s like a shelf of prizes—trophies from a little war. Only much bigger.”

  “How’s that?” Khren asked.

  “Who’s collecting?” Macht asked simultaneously.

  “We’ve seen a lot since we left the Tiers,” Nico said. “We’ve met Tall Ones, and things out in the Chaos that might or might not be breeds…We know that people don’t always look like us, not now and certainly not long ago. So…the world outside the Tiers was once bigger than we can imagine. If we just stretch out and think about all the people…so many peoples, all different, all strange but somehow us, like in the stories in Tiadba’s books, if the stories are real…”

  “They seem real,” Khren said.

  “They contradict each other,” Shewel said.

  “True,” Nico said. “But imagine…for once, do more than a breed can do and think outside. Think of all the time and all the people, how different they must have been, and think of the Typhon burning and shrinking everything, playing and destroying at the same time—filled with hatred…”

  “Or filled with nothing,” Khren said.

  Nico nodded. “The emptiest of empties. Think of all the times past and all the stories we haven’t heard, and all the people who lived those stories and didn’t look anything like us, big and small—giants bigger than the Tall Ones, smaller than anyone we know, and stranger than anything in the Kalpa, wakes and sleeps beyond count between them, but still us…” He let out a sad, soughing breath. “Maybe some of them were like gods. But all were defeated. Their stories were stripped away, mangled, burned, but their images and maybe even their bodies might have been collected and carried here, put out on the mountains as prizes, or maybe just to scare us. But if we think of it this way,” he concluded, “they’re not dead gods. They’re just people. They’re us.”

  “We might be stuck out there right beside them,” Khren said. “More trophies.”

  “We’d be with family,” Nico said.

  Tiadba felt her chest fill and her breath catch.

  “They’re still scary,” Herza said softly.

  “If they get up and scoot around, they might not remember we’re kin,” Frinna added. “Do we have to get close?”

  Tiadba sat up and tuned her faceplate to define something she saw gathering over the vale—a cloud that blurred the arc of fire, a mist that dropped from the ruckled sky. “Do you all see that?” she asked.

  They gathered in the harsh, high rocks, and their helmets took multiple points of view and worked to discern a pattern, an image, above the greenish mass at the center of the vale.

  “It’s like an upside-down mountain, just hanging there,” Khren said.

  “A mountain made of ice,” Denbord said.

  “A Turvy,” the Pahtun voice said. “This can be dangerous.”

  “What’s a Turvy?” Tiadba asked.

  “No one in the Kalpa knows much about them. They jumble positions in the Chaos. Turvies are dangerous because all the forces in the Chaos will concentrate around them—new trods will form, the Typhon’s servants will gather, and prisoners will awaken to a new level of slavery. It will bring rapid change and great unknowns.”

  “More monsters?” Frinna asked, drawing close to Herza, and then dragging Denbord toward both of them. He did not struggle.

  Macht had turned to walk a few paces away from the group, looking behind at the land they had crossed.

  “Everything’s shrinking again!” he called. “I can see the Kalpa. The Witness…there it is, too!”

  Tiadba turned and felt herself go dizzy. Light was bending in screw-like loops, and it was certainly possible—even likely—that the Chaos had begun another great deflating, like a toy balloon. If they had all waited…would they have had to walk so far to get where they were now?

  Frinna screamed, “We’re on a trod!”

  The rocks smoothed and become sticky, trapping their boots with shocking speed. They seemed to plummet with the flat, pale surface to the level of the floor of the vale. All around the vale, gaps were opening in the mountains and trods were flowing down toward the greenish mass in the center.

  Khren lifted their one remaining clave, but before it could activate, a whip shot out and grabbed it away.

  No escape.

  Already shadows loomed over them, half-blind eyes sweeping and twisted, bruised faces spread flat beneath high, arched bodies…and surrounding them, the slender limbs that glided, pulling and pricking at the surface of the trod.

  Tiadba watched, paralyzed, as the others were grabbed and raised one by one in flickering, half-seen talons, then held clutched and squirming in the air.

  The strangest and largest Silent One of all—three joined faces, sharing four whited, frosted eyes with black pinprick pupils—moved up to bend over her and leer. An arm with a hand like a thorn bush snatched her.

  From the center of the vale—the frosted, uncertain green edifice and the icy mountain now hanging over it—came an awful, squealing trill, like millions of things lost beyond hope of rescue, all forced to demonstrate their joy, their happiness…

  Forced to sing.

  From the mountains all around, the huge frozen shapes quickened in a way that did not involve life, beyond a breed’s understanding—reluctantly juddering down from the mountains, gathering as if by decree to watch and perhaps participate in the Turvy.

  One by one, as Tiadba watched, her companions were stripped of their armor. And then came her turn. First the Silent One with three faces and four eyes exposed her arms and legs, all the while the eyes vibrating and shivering, and then thorn-claws pulled at her helmet, which split and gave way just as the Pahtun voice spoke its final message:

  “This is not the destination. The beacon—”

  Tiadba felt no pain. Yet a kind of vacuum sucked all hope from her mind—then searched, cut, pushed aside…and found what it was looking for.

  Your sister.

  Not a voice, not a presence…the emptiest of empties, the quietness of a thing that did not have a voice, but used thousands of other voices to express its message.

  You shall not be joined.

  Your stories shall not be told.

  Her companions were not dead. They were very little changed, in fact still struggled despite the loss of their armor—dangling and squirming, moving their lips without being heard. The Silent Ones swifted these tiny burdens along the new trod toward the center of the vale. Tiadba spun slowly, saw in flashes of spiraling light the giants gather, saw the central greenish mass resolve, take on rough edges and serrated shapes beneath the hovering whiteness…an ancient, shimmering illusion now profaned, and mocked, its translucent jade towers and domes spreading throughout the vale, and she knew it, recognized it for what it had once been and was no longer.

  I’ve been journeying here since the beginning.

  The marchers were carried into lost and haunted Nataraja—the False City.

  CHAPTER 95

  * * *


  This was a dream, Ginny was sure of it—a dream someone else was having—and it was lovely.

  She was two people in one form, standing under a cloudy sky with patches of brilliant blue, and rolling hills stretched like great swabs of a brush to a definite and pleasant horizon. She was in fact in Thule, the great island just a hundred miles north of Ireland, rich with history: the place she had imagined while being visited by Mnemosyne. The place she had been patiently denied.

  It was not quite fully formed, of course. She had to stare hard to make things assume a visual, tactual truth. She could look at the foliage near her feet—a rough kind of bush, heather or gorse or something with purple flowers—and with an effort, the flowers would suddenly pop and become real.

  Her lips said, in vague tones, “This is wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Behind those lips, Ginny asked, “Who’s dreaming whom?”

  “Maybe it’s you. You must know about sky and hills and bushes—I don’t.”

  “What I know, you know. But I don’t remember your name.”

  “We don’t have names—for now. I’m in a terrible place. But sometimes I can sleep. So we’re together again. Come for me, find me, before it’s too late.”

  Ginny shook her head and pushed up from a crouch. She felt refreshed, maybe even encouraged—until now, she’d expected only sadness and grief and pain at the end of her peculiar stroll. She rubbed her cold hands and reached out to test the limit of the bubble.

  Thus far and no farther.

  More real than the dream, and much less pleasant.

  She stood before a great opening in the mountains, guarded by two giant figures she did not want to examine too closely. Made for other places, she guessed, and made of other matter, substances that did special things under special circumstances. Whatever the hell that means.

  She turned on her heels twice, like a slow top, as she had when faced with the Gape, and felt the dark gritty landscape pirouette. Now she stood before another cleft in the high jagged rocks, guarded by another pair of frozen figures—just as strange, but different. Spinning twice again, she stood before a third opening and a third distinct set of guardians that didn’t seem able to do much in the way of guarding. Like colorful ceramic figures decorating a door—but this time, let’s fire the decorator.