City at the End of Time

by Greg Bear

  He struggled to understand.

  Hope for every type of human being or living thing that had ever been. What we live now—what has been lived for more than half an eternity, perhaps all of eternity—is not the only way!

  With the combined skills and knowledge of Ghentun and Polybiblios, they climbed up from the hive of fate-mires and stood overlooking the center of the great bowl, under layer upon layer of collapsed shields and roof, the rubble studded with ruins, but also with crudely remade arenas, boulevards, even neighborhoods where—using the tricks of Chaos light and the concentrated cooperation of their helmets—they could make out the Typhon’s most centralized and concentrated horde of captives.

  Not just marchers. Those the Typhon seemed content, for the most part, to leave out in the Chaos, reenacting their failures—but representatives of all the great civilizations and reaches of human endeavor across the five hundred living galaxies.

  A deathly museum.

  “I have friends down there,” Polybiblios said. “I see the Typhon gathered some of the Shen. And across the lake and sea cores, up against the old gravidity forests—”

  “Stop, you’re making my head hurt,” Ghentun protested.

  “Enough, then. It seems that the Typhon is gathering all its trophies into one location—hoarding them. Let’s visit. In their sad condition, I doubt they’ll even notice us.”

  CHAPTER 105

  * * *

  Despite the risks, Jack forged ahead of the others. The collapsed walls and buttresses and huge, shattered spheres of the interior of Nataraja offered a warren of passageways. The others would have to keep up—but he was not sure he wanted them to.

  He needed to find Ginny. Felt responsible—and something more. He missed her. There had never been a girl he felt at ease with. Those moments in the warehouse had been special. Something he could not have—

  A center.

  Glaucous could still see Daniel, but not Jack—the consequences of separating seemed less here than out in the wastes beyond this double-Dutch jumble.

  He was thinking a great deal now about the old bird-catcher, the slow quelling of their catch in the dawn light as the lurching cart rumbled back through the lanes to London. The clangor of the heavy iron stars in their baskets at each jounce. The smell of bird shite a sour urgent note over the green gassiness of fresh dung and the wet, rank coal smoke pooling in the cool air. Guilt meant nothing to the hungry and the desperate—no more than to a wolf biting down on the neck of a lamb. A merciful shake, snap of the spine: food.

  Businesslike arrangement.

  Now he was concerned with larger things. Even as a child, Glaucous had been dimly aware that nothing was what it seemed. The pretty scrim of seeming was freshly painted each hour for those with money and position, a facade for the privileged, a mask over the cruelty beneath. To the poor, the hungry, the rule of privilege was an acid spew between rotten teeth, hardly worth a hoot in a legless fuddle. War and you go die in a ditch. Lift a loaf to feed your sibs and the rozzers poke you in the ribs and you squat all ashiver in stir, each breath a stab.

  Death and pain and privilege, out of one’s control, keep your eyes on the gutter before the rats bite.

  I know this place. Here is where privilege ends. My luck: the doom of the birds.

  He stopped to catch his breath. A wonder any of them could breathe. Magic in the group, Daniel didn’t call it that—but so it was to him. And yet he would have sold magic Jack into a cage, and then the Gape would have taken him here, along with the girl and so many others—and all hope would have gone.

  Catch the birds. Bite the neck and bleed the lamb. Never my chick. Never my lamb.

  Businesslike.

  But this…

  Even back in the lanes, bobbing on the tail of the cart, even then young Max could draw fortune, steer the cart to the quietest, least hunted fields beneath the biggest, darkest flocks. Even then he could fume out a cloudy seeming of happy birds and berries and bugs, piles of seeds surrounded by safety. An illusion of plenty with no hawks, no hunters.

  Something pushed on his shoulders and he hunched, waiting for a blow. Breathing became more difficult. He might strangle. He couldn’t see Daniel or Jack now.

  But one was never alone.

  Glaucous looked up, wincing at what he knew he would see. Instead, a brown muddle presented itself—like a sky filled with coils of coal smoke: curls and spirals and curves and slow, desperate flashes like drugged lightning. The smoke chunked down like hazy stones caught in the plunge of a landslide, trying to catch and pin the lines and curls. All in utter silence. Through it all flew wide, dusty wings and a wriggling wisp of a man who wasn’t there.

  Glaucous fell to his knees, as he always did in the presence of bad power.

  The Moth.

  As well, a thin man with a club foot dressed in sooty black stepped from the murk and held out his arms. “Last call,” Whitlow said cheerily. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Max. She has been harsh, blaming us. But you—you’re in her glory and grace. Brought in the pretty birds all by yourself. And one extra. My prize. The bad shepherd.”

  Glaucous swallowed his fear. “About them—”

  “No apologies, and no going back, Mr. Glaucous. Time to receive your reward.”

  The clouded, whirling rocks spun away from an open center.

  “Come with us,” Whitlow said. “The Moth leads the way, as always.”

  CHAPTER 106

  * * *

  Which of you dreams of the past?

  Who carries the book?

  The marchers tried to hide Tiadba—and one by one were firmly shunted aside. Khren and Frinna clung with the most conviction. Then they, too, were whisked away.

  Paleness and sadness descended upon her alone once more. She was surrounded again by the procession of female forms that just eluded clarity. The sadness settled. The females, like jewels carved from different stages of the motion of a real being, folded together, combined—

  Became one woman, her face illuminated from within like a lantern. Skin white as ice, eyes silver and gray and green, her body lost in something that wrapped her like a map of golden rivers and green fields—limbs long, graceful, fingers tipped with gripping flowers, and between these flowers, letters, symbols, numbers, written in flame, always changing, casting glows on Tiadba’s face, writing with warm but not consuming fire.

  The woman still seemed familiar, though they had never met.

  Tiadba had already called her Mother. Mothers were a kind of parental—females who come before you and directly pass along their stories, which have recombined to make your own. Great chains of past experience—mistakes made in terror and joy, loss and triumph—all conveyed to the next experiments in the line of time: children.

  Writing on and within the female, other partners—in some cases males, in others teams of male and female—sometimes just other females, sometimes sexual designations outside Tiadba’s experience—Shapers, adjuvescents, conscribers, genesens—created many delicate flavors of offspring. Once, even entire cities had submitted their stories to quicken a female, then gathered to celebrate the birth of a single child, raised up and cherished, then doubled, tripled, and sent out to other cities as magnificent gifts…

  A city like the Kalpa: woman, mother.

  Ashurs and Devas—different varieties of human—all had their own ways of becoming partners and mothers, more than could easily be counted. In all the possible ways found over a hundred trillion years, stories combined and were sent forth to be read by others, to shape new stories.

  Compared to Tiadba, the woman was tall—taller than anyone she had ever met in the Tiers, much taller even than Pahtun. And her shape was lovely, though challenging. But Tiadba was not frightened.

  Only I am allowed to remember. It is my punishment for trying to destroy the Typhon. Once, I was so much more.

  This, then, was what remained of Ishanaxade—born of all stories. A dreaming vastness flowed out of her, into
Tiadba, more than any book could carry—and yet still made of words.

  Child. You are my last. My father made it so—the circling bands that pass around and through. The end is here. Our lives echo, and I am lost.

  Once, Nataraja had been beautiful—more graceful in its antiquities than any of Earth’s other cities, rich and lovely with its acceptance of the human past. Nataraja sat out the Mass Wars until the very end, welcoming all, trying to stay neutral, until the City Princes of the remaining cities—and most of all, the Kalpa—forced her to choose sides.

  The Chaos was swallowing galaxies, worlds and stars—and still, humans fought humans.

  Nataraja, seeing the folly, had cut loose of the last alliances, accepting all who fled the noötics and the Eidolons—until the Kalpa drew in and concentrated its defenses, leaving the other six cities stranded.

  Five cities fell.

  Nataraja—as if saved for last—faced the advancing front of the Chaos alone.

  Ishanaxade had been sent there just before the city was overcome. Those had been dreadful days, when all seemed lost, yet the citizens went about their lives—Devas, Menders, Shapers, Ashurs, and even a few noötics of conscience.

  The Librarian’s daughter had watched Nataraja and its people do what they could to defy the Typhon, that unknown quality—powerful, simple, perverse—which had transformed the rest of the cosmos. They had set up their own barricades and shields—had surrounded the city with all of its ancient texts, hastily engraved on stone, written in light and stored in the metric that underlay all energy and matter—scribed onto molecules and atoms and all other known varieties of matter—projected into the skies against the advancing membrane of misrule—all that remained of the libraries of a hundred trillion years of history.

  Not enough.

  Memories changed. That was the first symptom of the Typhon’s triumph. The Ashurs and the few noötics disappeared almost immediately. Records and texts throughout the city faded. People began to misremember their lives, then to lose them—distortion of the fate-lines, forgetting, then falling away into gritty black dust, a final kind of mercy for a blessed few.

  Until the last instants of freedom, Nataraja’s philosophers tried to comprehend the new order, but there was nothing to comprehend, only a boil of ceaseless disorder. Change without purpose.

  Human senses seemed to cause the Typhon both puzzlement and pain.

  The Typhon probed the remaining minds, the memory stores, the souls of all living things, posing questions that in themselves tilted some into madness. To see was pain. To remember was a new kind of forgetting.

  To the Typhon, this was simple curiosity. Even after trillions of years of effort, it had not found its recipe for cosmos. This made it redouble its efforts—and quicken its failures. The Chaos was a piecework, poorly conceived and poorly assembled—failing everywhere except along its vast membrane of change, the many-dimensional front along which the old cosmos was being gnawed and absorbed.

  Ishanaxade alone—as her father had anticipated from the beginning, from his time among the Shen—was spared to remember all.

  CHAPTER 107

  * * *

  Ginny thought it might have been a gigantic flower. Much taller than her, it rose from a cracked, rolling pavement in the shadow of the dangling, treacherous remains of the heart of this city, hanging like gigantic, moldy Christmas trees left behind by a receding flood, tossed into an awful heap, somehow still wearing their ornaments. But these ornaments seemed wider than entire towns on Earth. And no lights, of course.

  The power had long since gone out for these ruins.

  The flower—or was it a mushroom?—asserted a ghastly kind of independence below the architectural deadfall. As she walked around it, she noticed that it was made of elongated arms, legs, bodies, with an occasional head poking out. The anatomies within the stalk shivered and the heads opened their eyes, not to see—the eyes were blank, blind—but to express discomfort.

  These were not marchers—not like Tiadba. They were more like Ginny. Contemporary to her. And there were many more flower-mushrooms, she saw, sprouting up beneath the hanging ruins.

  Something had gone about gathering the people, the survivors who had been so unfortunate as to find themselves delivered along with a cross section of endtime.

  That’s why all the old parts of the city had seemed deserted when she left the warehouse. There had already been a sweeping, a mopping up. And something—perhaps the servants that moved along the trods—had brought a few or all of them here, where they had been arranged to form awful warnings.

  Scarecrows.

  This gave Ginny both a frightening chill and an odd sensation of encouragement. You didn’t set up scarecrows unless you were afraid something could come and take what you had.

  She glanced at the towering base of the mushroom, looking for faces she might recognize, anybody she’d known: friends, the witches.

  Miriam Sangloss.

  Conan Bidewell.

  She recognized nobody. But there were so many. Maybe the ones she’d come in contact with had been reserved for a particularly painful punishment.

  “I hate you,” Ginny said, eyes narrowed, growling her contempt at whatever might be listening. “I am not afraid, and I HATE YOU!”

  She leaped aside with a small shriek as a velvet softness rubbed against her ankle. When she had gathered enough courage to come out of her crouch and actually look, she saw a small shadow…watched it approach her again in a low, cautious slink.

  The shadow resolved into bright and dark splotches against the uniform murk.

  It made a soft grumbling sound.

  Ginny felt her eyes fill and tears spill down her cheeks, slipping salt into the corners of her mouth. She reached down and scooped up the blotchy shadow, rubbed its furry head against her cheek, and began to cry.

  It was Minimus, six toes on each front paw, and small, ecstatically flexing thumbs! The cat rumbled and climbed and rumbled some more and settled into her arms.

  “How?” she managed between childlike sobs. These sounds might or might not have ever left the bubble, might or might not have reached far enough to be heard by the human mushroom-flowers, but it seemed for a moment as if the whole awful foundation of the False City shivered.

  Something new had arrived. There would be change.

  Minimus squirmed and strained his head forward, looking down and around and issuing another urgent meow.

  She was surrounded by cats.

  Hundreds of them.

  Thousands.

  Ginny was not afraid. “What have you been hunting?” she asked in a wheedling tone, still oddly certain of the relationship between human and cat. “What have you been eating?”

  Minimus regarded her with a slow, wise blink, then made a considerable effort, lips contorted, and spoke in a soft, hissing whisper: “We’re Sminthians, remember? We’re gods of mice and things that gnaw.”

  The cats milled in a gray eddy of fur.

  Of all the impossible things she had seen and experienced, this broke the mirror—this totally popped the cork. Ginny narrowed her eyes, blinked—hard—and pinched her finger until it hurt.

  Reality had just finished its long dying.

  CHAPTER 108

  * * *

  Tiadba drifted in and out of the ancient story. She closed her eyes and again imagined words printed in their books. This took her back again to her last solace—remembered moments with Jebrassy, the letterbugs, the shake cloths, their rolling and combining.

  The female was not allowed to forget the time when she had fallen in love. She could not leave behind the hope of memory itself.

  On one of the far necklace worlds of the Shen, Ishanaxade was found by Sangmer. They spoke on the shores of the silvery vector sea:

  “I am not truly anyone’s daughter. Many have given me what form I have. I call Polybiblios father because he has been most patient with me, and in his way has loved me.”

  “Where did they find y
ou?”

  “I have been gathered from all the inhabited worlds for longer than anyone can recall—some say since the end of the Brightness. Bits and pieces—a gleam here, a quality there, a suspicion or speck…All treasured, transported, traded, by many, and then collected by the Shen, who amassed so much that I would have bulked larger even than the necklace-worlds or the sixty green suns around which they whirl.”

  Sangmer found this unlikely, and said so.

  “Look at me. Do I appear likely? Am I like any other you have seen?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But I am young. How did you become so much smaller?”

  “The Shen are very old and exceptionally curious. They worked for a long time to distill me. What was most essential they kept. But then they tired of the puzzle. When Polybiblios arrived, he resumed the task—and made me as you see me now. He believes he understands what I truly am. I do not judge his beliefs.”

  “What does he think you are—or were?”

  “A muse,” Ishanaxade said.

  “Like, an inspiration?”

  “Muses were once very important to the cosmos. They labored for a hundred billion years, cleaning up after Brahma, who could not stop creating, could not stop the outpour of his kind of love. The muses allowed memory and the flowering of all the little observers, so beloved of Brahma, who was careless, but vast and full of passion.

  “And then, creation stopped. The Trillennium followed—nothing new, just clever rearrangements of the old. Some say Brahma slept. And while he sleeps, there is no need for any muse. We condensed out like snow or rain, a flurry of jewels spread over the dark light-years.”

  “An old name, Brahma.”

  “Old is not an adequate word. I don’t know whether I served and failed, or was rejected as no longer essential—but I seem to remember scattering everywhere people still lived. After that—until I was brought here—I remember nothing.”