City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  Jebrassy stood at the edge of an interior volume so large he could not see the other side. The only way he could know there was a roof was that the flaming arc was not visible, nor the ice mountain, nor the seethe of the shrinking sky.

  Tentative, he stepped away from the wall of tunnel exits. Dimly, larger objects took on detail, then smaller. He seemed to be surrounded by immense piles of things he could not identify—huge spheres strung on massive cables, smooth but dusty round lumps rising from the ground between the spheres—more spheres perhaps, half buried—and jagged parts of things that were almost certainly manufactured but looked as if they had been treated badly—dropped, shattered, and then piled up.

  Discarded.

  He approached one of the suspended spheres, many hundreds of feet in diameter and floating no more than a breed’s height above the floor—and reached out with his gloved fingers—only to be pushed back. The longer he looked, the more he saw on the sphere’s surface, until he realized he was looking at a place, a planet, highly developed, covered with cities, roads, things he could not identify—outside even his dream experiences.

  He turned slowly, wondering how these spheres and heaps had come to be brought here. Everywhere, the lost and discarded. He was beginning to think the Chaos was actually a giant litter bin.

  Determined to keep a line of retreat in sight—if you could still see things, and kept them in periodic view, they didn’t go away as often—he ventured farther into the rubble.

  Polybiblios was waiting for him, sitting on a low wall that divided several larger and taller piles. “Good to see you,” the epitome said. “I was beginning to think I had lost my companions.”

  “Where’s the Keeper?” Jebrassy asked.

  “Somewhere back there. It’s humiliating, how much of a puzzle this is. A wasteland of failed efforts. Consider all these worlds, stored here like shrunken heads in a dusty box. But I might have found something—or someone—more interesting.”

  He gestured for Jebrassy to follow. With some misgivings, he did so. Was it possible, having lost sight of the epitome, that a duplicate might have been conjured up, completely different?

  “I’ve spent a pretty long while exploring this space,” the epitome said. “Making maps and then adjusting them for changes—not as many changes here as outside, interestingly. Something seemed to want to keep track of whatever is piled up here. Including…this.”

  They came to a glassy wall. Embedded within the wall, near the surface, was a figure roughly shaped like Jebrassy—but larger, more robust. He wore no armor and a very different style of clothing than that found in the Tiers.

  Farther along, other figures—some much the same, others very different—also lay embedded, caught in moments of shock or anger or surprise. Jebrassy walked from one to the next, then put his gloved hand up against the smooth surface.

  “A fate mire, I believe,” Polybiblios said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Not so easy to conceive of, but perhaps you’ve had enough preparation and training. Tell me what your instincts say.”

  “They’re all like my visitor,” Jebrassy said, thinking so hard—and feeling so many strange emotions—that his head hurt. “But there’s too many of them.”

  “Definitely ancient forms,” Polybiblios said. “If we had been able to access these when we were designing the breeds, we might have done better. Though they do differ in significant respects.”

  Jebrassy saw no signs of life in the embedded figures. “They’re from the past?”

  “Many pasts, more likely. How they got here—that’s harder to conceive. I wonder if my full Eidolon self could solve the riddle. At any rate, that one there…Get closer—hold up your hand. Make as if to touch it through the transparency.”

  Jebrassy stepped up to the body closest to the shining surface and rubbed his glove against the smoothness. Thin bright ribbons of blue light—hundreds, then thousands of them—curled between the outstretched fingers and his own, penetrating his glove. He could feel a tickle, a slight shock, moving up his arm.

  “Dreamers, all of them,” Polybiblios said. “The same matter—in large part—from many times and many different branches of fate, eager to be rejoined.”

  “We’re made of the same stuff?”

  “I’d say so. Entangled atoms are reacquainting, exchanging particles of entrainment, which leave photonic traces—faster than the fastest velocity possible in the Chaos. Or anywhere else, now.”

  “Then none of the visitors have survived? We’ve failed?”

  “Where is that Keeper? He might be able to help us judge the extent of this collection.”

  “There are so many—I don’t think I’ve dreamed about all of them.”

  “Part of my plan was that shepherds and sum-runners would evolve together. But remember, there used to be many world-lines, many pathways leading to the Kalpa. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your visitor has failed to make a connection with you many times before now. Just as marchers have been snared and trapped out in the Chaos. Now the pathways are limited to two. There may be just one opportunity left.”

  “Does that mean you’ve come out here thousands of times before, and failed?” Jebrassy asked.

  “Excellent question. Would it even be possible to remember?” The epitome considered this problem with apparent relish, then smoothed his face and said, “Most unlikely. This is my first and only path.”

  Jebrassy again spread his hand close to the fingers of the embedded other. The ribbons of blue continued to pass. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “It’s almost pleasant.”

  Polybiblios pulled him away. “That’s enough. We don’t want to entrain you with the lost. We need to find the one that is still free, still alive…or arrive at a place where he can find you. I doubt very much he would be here.”

  CHAPTER 103

  * * *

  Ginny walked and then crawled through the tunnels, feeling the stone in her pocket nudge with a gentleness that seemed almost to speak of understanding and sympathy. Or perhaps a touch of apprehension.

  She was in no mood to be strong-armed. She knew she was close, but she was beginning to feel a deep anger, not at the prospect of failure, but at having achieved some measure of success, having made it this far on her own—yet without actually making a decision. She had never chosen any of this. It had all been forced upon her. Stronger persons and circumstances had always directed her, misdirected her, all her remembered life. Others were no doubt trying to find her and save her—from herself, from bad decisions.

  But they had never actually been her decisions.

  Maybe that was because she could not be trusted. She always turned the wrong way. Always stumbled into a path of disaster.

  Yet she had come this far, ahead of all the others.

  The tunnel had branched so many ways, and she had always gone to the left—gauche, sinister, awkward, but the best way out of this sort of maze. And how could she know that?

  She’d always been awkward—had always turned left.

  Now she crawled out of the tunnel and squatted in the gloom of a cavernous space, listening.

  Silence. Neither disapproval nor applause.

  Completely alone, in a place no one could call home.

  “I’m worn-out,” she said. “I don’t want to be a guided missile anymore.” She felt the stone through the cloth of her pants, then took it out and looked it over in the dim light. Its tug had faded almost to nothing. It turned and rotated freely in her fingers. The knobs and ridges were smooth and cool under the roughened flesh of her fingertips.

  The red wolf’s-eye gleam had also dulled.

  “If you give up on me, I’ll be stuck here, won’t I?” she asked. She stood and felt the bubble draw in so close it might have been a layer of paint over her skin. The game was running down. There might have been some sort of excess of unexpected energy—Bidewell might understand. But now the entire universe, even the dead and dismantled parts ruled over b
y the Typhon, was closing its books, leaving the final accounts in disarray…because it was all going to be zeroed out anyway.

  She moved slowly on numb feet toward a gleam in the distance. Ignored the weird stuff piled all around—not enough energy to pay attention, to show curiosity.

  Alone. Good. She would make her final wrong turn without anyone clucking their disapproval. Out of the maze, straight into…

  A long wall of smoky glass stretched out of sight on both sides. Within the wall, she saw dozens, hundreds…she looked both ways—thousands of contorted, floating, still figures…all young women.

  “Too much,” she whispered, but pressed her bubble in closer, trying to see. Blue lines whipped from her cheeks, chin, and fingers and touched the nearest body locked in the smoky, translucent hardness.

  Familiar. Eyes blank, hopeless, set in a slack face with an expression neither of pain nor despair but of neutrality. A lot like herself, seen in an awful mirror.

  “Is this my other?” she whispered. “Is this Tiadba? She’s trapped somewhere—and this one’s trapped, too.”

  But the figure looked nothing like Tiadba, as Ginny remembered the dreams. No…it was a version of herself. And…

  The body was holding something in its hand. Or rather, suspended within loose fingers, not quite touching or being touched, the grasp having been loosened in despair or surrender just before the embedding, this floating, timeless preservation.

  “You turned the wrong way, you got tired, you gave up,” she said to her alternate self, beginning to feel a kind of attraction, a familiarity and warmth not just with the figure, but with its fate. So comfortable, never thinking or moving or feeling again. No more stupid decisions. A gentle conclusion. Not what she would have expected out here in the Chaos, on the outskirts of the False City.

  Not so much cruel as just neutral—blank.

  The blue ribbons of light streamed from her fingers and face, caresses of energy. They tingled. She could get used to that tingling. It was friendly. She was close to the family of all her alternate selves, all the ones who had failed and then…had been forgiven.

  She had found her way here to reacquaint.

  Somehow, there was a style about this that separated itself from the blundering cruelty of the rest of the Chaos. A kind of pity.

  She recognized the sadness, the gentleness combined with the power and strangeness. This was what she had felt when confronted by the whirling storm in the woods, the great, desperate, swirling triangle of seeking.

  This was where the Chalk Princess took her captives. Or where they came of their own accord, to join with their lost selves in continuous, never-ending self-pity and empty satisfaction.

  The ribbons grew brighter. The wall seemed to soften.

  The figure directly before her—inches away in the smoky substance—seemed to recede, and Ginny’s last bit of unhappiness was painted over with a cool, complacent acceptance of all she had ever been: all her failures, her losses.

  This was her story. Her life finally had a conclusion, however unsatisfying.

  Perversely, the farther into the glass the other girl receded, the clearer her features and circumstances became—as if the ribbons of blue light were completing her, filling her out.

  Ginny could easily make out the nature of the object in the other girl’s hand. It was another stone—its gleam extinguished. A dead sum-runner, its course through all of time aborted, its shepherd snared.

  The ribbons became blinding in their intensity. With them, something essential was being transferred, carried away, grounded against the frozen girl inside the smoky glass, useless, finished.

  Ginny drew back her hand. Not quickly—not with revulsion or fear. She simply pulled with all her remaining strength. All these girls—young women—were just like her. But they’d had the luxury of multitudes. They could all fail and it would not be finished—more might come and join them.

  Not her. Not this Ginny.

  “I’m the last one, aren’t I?” she muttered to this gentle and accepting tomb of hope.

  If she were another type of shepherd, with another type of story, she might have entered the city through another opening into the bowl, crawled through the tunnel labyrinth in another instinctively natural fashion, making other types of unlikely and wrong turns…and found another smoky glass wall, infinitely deep, trapping another multitude of lost alternates.

  There might be a wall of Jacks out there, a wall of Daniels—perhaps not Daniel—

  Ginny now stood several paces back from the glass. The force of blue leaking from her skin, piercing the bubble and sucked into the suspension, faded. The ribbons curled back in livid disappointment.

  “No wrong turn this time,” she said. “I’ve got friends who need me. I’m alone, but not for long.”

  She spun around again, then turned the other gauche—not adroit, not her style—and made her way through the rest of the incomprehensible, accumulated garbage ransacked from a dying cosmos.

  She knew she was making the wrong decision yet again—toward more misery and challenge—but for all the right reasons.

  CHAPTER 104

  * * *

  Jebrassy walked with a slow step beside Polybiblios, his strength like a guttering fire. He felt less than half the breed he had been before he and Tiadba were separated.

  Ghentun rejoined them beyond the fate-mire, on top of a high wall angled up against other walls that seemed to form an immense octagon. Below the walls: sharply curved perspectives relieved only by faraway glimmers of blue light—as if other beings made of primordial matter were being tested and compared.

  Captured marchers. Tiadba!

  “What’s wrong?” Ghentun asked.

  “A premature encounter,” Polybiblios said. They paused to allow Jebrassy to recoup some of his strength. The armor seemed barely up to the task.

  “I’ve reconnoitered,” Ghentun said as they looked out over the cells beyond and—presumably—a multitude of enclosed fate-mires. “There’s still some semblance to the Nataraja of old. The Deva quarters are almost unchanged—though deserted.”

  Jebrassy lifted his head. “The Mass Wars,” he said.

  Polybiblios reached out to touch his shoulder. “Not our concern. Histories lost and buried.”

  “Your kind—Devas—were forced to become Eidolons,” Jebrassy said. “Many fled to Nataraja…Why didn’t you?”

  “You’re still leaking,” Ghentun accused the epitome. “He needs to rest.”

  “I can’t help it,” Polybiblios said. “My parts have been bathed in knowledge for a billion years.”

  “When did it ever work right?” Jebrassy asked. “When did anyone ever respect the heritage and birthright of others?”

  “Often enough, for very long periods,” Ghentun said, glancing at the epitome, as if competing over who knew the most history.

  “But then, in all our memories: collapse, reversion, strife,” Polybiblios said, unaware of any competition. “The cosmos has become tainted. History has been distorted by the corruption of the Typhon. In the depths of the Brightness, some might have called it original sin. But it was not original. It creeps back from the end of time. We refused to let the universe die gracefully. We allowed the Typhon to latch onto a weakened and overextended chronology. Brahma still sleeps. Not even an Eidolon will ever know the shape and disposition of the original creation. We gain some insight when we contemplate the joy of matter—now almost lost.”

  Ghentun was baffled. He had never heard of the joy of matter.

  “We should move on,” Polybiblios insisted. “Our moment is brief.”

  “Jebrassy needs to rest, to get back his strength,” Ghentun reminded the epitome, though his motives for saying so were not selfless. Clearly, here were deep and ancient curiosities that deserved to be answered. And he was willing to give up his envy or resentment to learn.

  “Not here,” Polybiblios said. “If this Turvy or whatever it is truly does still have some of the old lineamen
ts of Nataraja, there will be a better place…a preserve the Typhon cannot touch. And there we may have time for some explanations.”

  “Not bad from the beginning?” Jebrassy asked as Ghentun lifted him to his feet. “Bad from the end?”

  “What is lost is lost, young breed,” Polybiblios said. “Let us work with what little remains. The metric is greatly reduced. We’ve already traveled faster than any of our marchers. We can use that to our advantage.”

  Like most of the last great cities of old Earth, Nataraja had been a monument of efficiency—not spread out over thousands of miles, but concentrated in a high interlinked erection of spheres intersecting and carried by flowing sheeted curves, neighborhoods and urbs for those of different constructions and persuasions—the entirety enclosed by many different shields to defend against the threats of ages long past. With the passing of those threats and the coming of new ones, the shields had been transformed, incorporated into the city’s matrix, just as cities in the early Brightness had grown and enclosed their old siege walls.

  Between his education in the tower and the epitome’s continuing outflow, Jebrassy found renewed strength in the realization that his curiosity was being met—he was learning much of what he had always wanted to learn, secrets withheld from his lower kind. Simply to be where so many breeds had been created to go, in the fabulous city of Tiadba’s storybooks—however dark and awful parts of it were—seemed for a moment at least splendid beyond measure. If Tiadba were still with them—

  Then together they could complete the stories, solve the mysteries. The Librarian’s epitome was telling them that things had not always been so bad…and that meant there might be dreamers who would come to them, who could spin such beautiful tales, if those lost pasts could be patched together, refreshed…

  All a wonderment of wishful thinking, of course. But his body felt the renewal. Hope for Tiadba—but beyond that, hope for all breeds…