City at the End of Time

  Outside, the noise of the market dwindled. He heard a plaintive whine—a hungry meadow pede tethered in a stall, waiting for its tweenlight supper of stalks and jule.

  The sama poked out her wide lips and fell back from her squat, then stretched her legs and arms and let out a deep, sighing breath. He thought his visit was over, but she did not draw aside the blankets that curtained the booth.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “Quiet,” she advised. “My legs hurt. I’m wearing down, young breed. Not too long before the Bleak Warden comes. Stay a bit longer—for me.” She patted the ground. “I’m not done trying to riddle you. Why come to a poor old sama?”

  Jebrassy sat and gazed uncomfortably at the thatched roof. “This glow, if I get interested in her, and she in me…it won’t be right. She has sponsors. I don’t.”

  “Did you approach her?”

  “No.”

  The sama pulled a sachet of red jule from her robe, wrapped it, and tied it with chafe cord, making a broothe for steeping in hot water. “Drink this. Relax. After you stray, take notes. Do you have a shake cloth?”

  “I can find one.”

  “Ah—you mean, steal one. Borrow one from your friend, if he has one, or from the glow, if you see her again. Write it all down and come back to show me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we both need to know what questions to ask.” The sama stood, drew back the blankets, and let in the failing gray light from the ceil. The market was closed and almost empty. “Perhaps dreams are like flapping a shake cloth—you erase all the words you didn’t choose. Young warrior, we’re done, for now.”

  She pushed him out of her stall.

  A very young glow, fresh from the crèche—tiny red bump still prominent on her forehead, swad-boots wrapped around her tiny feet—stood before a shuttered stall, feeding a hungry pede. The pede curled its glossy black segments around her ankles, wriggling its many legs. The young glow squirmed and looked up at Jebrassy with an expression of tickled delight.

  He touched his nose, sharing the moment.

  To take a partner, inherit or be assigned a niche, live in the Tiers in silent contentment, ignoring things you couldn’t understand…sponsor a young one…

  Why want more?

  He had seen how much the intrusion concerned the wardens. None of this was going to last long, he could feel it in his bones.

  On his way to the Diurns, Jebrassy stopped, peered at the ground, then knelt to examine the quality of the gravel that lined the path. Until now he had never given much thought to the substances that made up his world. He compared the gravel to the material used in most of the bridges, asking himself how this stony stuff differed from his own flesh, from the crops in the fields—and from the flexible stuff of the wardens, which he had had a number of opportunities to feel as he was being hauled away from one or another altercation.

  Gravel, crops, flesh—not the same as the exposed isles beneath the Tiers: silver-gray, neither warm nor cold, but strangely neutral to the touch. Yet that silver-gray stuff constituted the foundation and the walls and probably the ceil, the limits of his world.

  Again, Jebrassy needed desperately to know more—to understand. In that regard, he differed from nearly all the breeds he knew, so much so that he wondered if there had been a mistake in his making, if the umbers had dropped him on his head after hauling him out of the crèche.

  Stork.

  He shook his head sharply at that unknown word, that difficult memory of a sound.

  You’re delivered by the umbers—they’re like storks, right? They leave you under a cabbage leaf.

  “Shut up.”

  His bare feet took him farther down the path.

  You’re like an animal in a zoo. But you don’t even know what a zoo is. Why are they keeping you here?

  Jebrassy did not dislike his visitor, and certainly did not fear him, but these residues offered no answers. When Jebrassy strayed—when the visitor took over—typically, nothing happened, as Khren had pointed out.

  “I don’t know what you are,” Jebrassy growled under his breath. “But I wish you’d go away.”

  He stood by the bridge, looking over the still and covered meadows market and the beginning of the long roads which fanned out to the far limits of fields and walls surrounding the Tiers, their neighborhood—half a day’s brisk journey across, overarched by the ceil, the curtain wall, the moist wall, their vertex at one extremity—and the long round wall opposite—most difficult to reach, but under and through which ran the flood channels.

  Sometimes the teachers referred to the round wall as the outer, and the other two as inner.

  All of them—limits.

  Barriers to curiosity.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  The wardens had spread mist and black curtains around the site of the intrusion, at the outer perimeter of a field of chafe sprouts in the shadow of the Moist Wall. They now hovered, awaiting Ghentun’s inspection.

  Behind the curtains, an irregular section of the chafe field measuring about a third of an acre had been turned into fine snowy crystals, primordial matter converted to something different, deadly or useless: the hallmark of the Typhon, perverse, even malevolent. In the middle of the crystals, a male breed—a farmer, judging from his stiff scraps of clothing—had been carelessly rearranged.

  The farmer had still been alive when the wardens found him.

  “Did you kill this one?” Ghentun asked the lead warden.

  “He was suffering, Keeper. We summoned a Bleak Warden and terminated him. No one has touched him since.”

  The Bleak Warden itself—slender, with a red thorax and shiny black lift-wings, now lay deactivated beside the farmer. White crystals cluttered its frozen, bent limbs. It would have to be disposed of, along with the body, the soil, and all else that the intrusion had touched.

  Ghentun glanced toward the straight road that led from the unused inner precincts—the Diurns and the apex bridge—all the way across the meadows and fields to the narrowed, arched haft where the first isle absorbed the Tenebros flood channel. A few breeds were still about in the tweenlight. All of them avoided the fog.

  In the seventy-five city years since he requested his interview with the Librarian, Ghentun estimated he had lost over two thousand breeds. These invasions into the lowest levels of the Kalpa were now occurring once or twice every dozen sleep-wakes. Most seemed to target breeds—those who saw, who perceived, in the oldest ways. More often than not, the wardens investigated and drew their conclusions without his presence, but Ghentun was beginning to doubt their accuracy. He could not discount the possibility that the wardens were being manipulated by the city officers, Eidolons loyal to the Astyanax, who in all these thousands of centuries had paid little attention to the Tiers.

  In the Kalpa’s higher levels and more prosperous urbs, the reality generators seemed better able to protect the vast majority of citizens. Intrusions rarely occurred there, but perhaps it was because the Chaos had no interest in Eidolons. Still, the more intrusions there were in the Tiers, the more danger there might be for the higher urbs—real, metaphysical danger, and political danger for the Astyanax.

  Once the poor farmer had been removed, the whited soil was scraped and stored in sealed containers by small gray wardens. As before, the containers, the victim, and all the wardens who had touched them—tainted by that contact—would be locked away in the vaults deep below the flood channels. Ghentun had visited those vaults several times during the past century. They had been unspeakable in their fermenting, noxious morphing.

  “We will have to export this one, Keeper,” the lead warden confided as Ghentun knelt beside the contorted body. “The vaults are nearly full.”

  This was almost too much for Ghentun to bear. The tainted evidence of the intrusion would have to be shot out into the Chaos.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  The tweenlight had turned tawny gold, ushering in flat wispy clou
ds and the muddy shades that came before a sleep. The lowering flush of light was so diffuse and universal that Jebrassy cast only a faint hint of shadow. Everything around him—old and abandoned—seemed lost in a smoky dream.

  The Diurns lay flush against the curtain wall, accessible by a long and sometimes treacherous hike past the end of the abandoned Apex Causeway where it connected the tips of the three isles—the plateaus that supported the stacked Tiers. The curtain wall, in turn, ascended three miles to the overarching ceil, upon which the lights and darks of wake and sleep played out in endless, faded procession, as they had for tens of thousands of lives.

  All this fell within one sweep of his eye from where Jebrassy now walked along the causeway. He also glanced from side to side to make sure there were no screeches or wardens waiting in the shadows to nab sleep-hikers. The wardens were particularly vigilant after an intrusion.

  Behind him, the causeway stretched more than a mile toward the bridges that had once carried the old neighborhood’s traffic over the Tartaros, the larger of the two channels that separated the blocs. Four slender, twisted spires flanked the conclusion of the causeway, five hundred feet tall and needled through with fluted pipes that, it was said, had once produced deep and awesome sounds—music. Whether the spires were original to the Diurns or had been added later was unknown—there were so many tottering, muddled layers of old breed construction here, contributing to the dangers of the entire precinct, which had long ago been condemned and blocked by debris and screech sentinels. Most of these had themselves long since collapsed, failed, or were simply forgotten, and were no longer necessary, since few of the ancient breed felt the urge to come here. There was enough faded grandeur in the inhabited parts of the Tiers to satisfy anybody.

  At the apex where the Curtain Wall met the Moist Wall, spread an amphitheater that could once have seated thirty or forty thousand of the ancient breed. As a stripling, Jebrassy had been here twice, demonstrating his bravery or at least his persistence—climbing the debris, evading the few sentinels that were still active, making his way down the dirt-encrusted, sloping aisles between the risers to the gallery, a roofed labyrinth that stretched for several hundred yards to the proscenium.

  The Diurns were visible from several points in the gallery where the roof had fallen. Jebrassy, working his way once more through the stone maze, speculated as he had before that this might have been the site of old initiation rituals, and was certainly not part of the original construction. Even upon his first visit, the labyrinth had proved simple enough to solve—a left-handed maze with a distal twist, made easy by ages of decay.

  Is the glow testing my resolve? Poor test.

  Retracing the path he had taken before, still clear in memory—any adventure, however disappointing, was etched deep—he came to a huge gap in the gallery roof. This rewarded him with an unobstructed view of the Sounding Wall, a name that meant nothing to him—a mottled gray expanse hundreds of feet high, blank but for eroded holes and corroded extrusions where large things had once been set or fastened.

  A few more minutes of climbing and threading the last of the gallery’s barriers brought him to the base of the amphitheater’s Sounding Wall, and from there it was just a snap until he stood in the immense, glimmering shadow of the curved Wall of Light.

  Jebrassy took a moment to catch his breath. The immense screen was streaked and crusted top to bottom with dust and soot—not from smoke, but from the accumulated miasma of thousands of generations of living beings. At the far end, an ornate and partly collapsed partition of stone and masonry—its highest remnant still towering hundreds of feet above the gallery—had left a pile of rubble that spilled onto the proscenium and the lowest sweep of the amphitheater, where all the seats had long since been stripped or rotted away. Clearly, many ancient breeds had tried to solve the mystery of this place—or to use it for their own purposes, adding their own masonry structures. Most of their efforts, like the original, had come to ruin—even greater ruin, since, Jebrassy thought, it wouldn’t take much to scrub the screen, rebuild or replace the seats in the galleries, and restore at least the outward appearance of the original design.

  But no one now living could match the endurance and ingenuity of the Wall of Light’s original builders.

  And who were they? Tall Ones?

  “I don’t know,” Jebrassy murmured to the residue’s soft question. “Be quiet.”

  High above and beyond the amphitheater, a breeze across the pipes embedded in the four spires blew a low, breathy chuckle, like hundreds of amused voices.

  The Diurns themselves were just left of the screen—three merging ellipses, each over a hundred yards across, on which various displays still labored, it was said, to tell the time in ways that no one alive could fathom, even if anyone could have read the moving and broken and scattered lines of symbols within each ellipse.

  This was the only theory that had ever made sense—that the Diurns had once been a huge timekeeper, attached to the side of an even larger public and ceremonial display that had ages before fallen into disuse.

  To the right of the Diurns, the immensity of the Wall of Light—a thousand feet wide and half that in height—still gleamed with softly passing gleams, haphazard attempts at images, all repeating at hourly intervals, broken by faults that no longer even attempted to flicker, but hung dark and dead.

  The Diurns had looked thus since the earliest times known to the ancient breeds.

  Jebrassy leaned back as far as his neck would allow, to take in the whole of the screen, then turned swiftly and stared out over the amphitheater, as if to glimpse forty thousand ghosts—the citizens who had once sat or stood there, transfixed by what must have once been a magnificent gathering place, a crowded exchange of stories.

  This theory grew in him as he absorbed the setting through older, presumably more sophisticated eyes: that once information and gossip had been shared communally, thousands attending at once, receiving instructions, warnings, and (possibly) news about events in the Tiers—headlines and banners, visions of the world beyond the Kalpa, now denied.

  Just a guess, but it felt right.

  The inner voice expressed no opinion.

  The ruins, with their grime and patina of age—common in the abandoned precincts behind the Tiers—conveyed their own special message. Along with the flickering quality of time itself, the intrusions, and declining populations—evident from empty niches and long-deserted neighborhoods—the architectural decay proved that whatever the Kalpa might once have been, it was no longer in its prime.

  The Tall Ones were getting weaker. The long bondage of the ancient breeds might soon come to an end. Then, all who wished could pass under the round wall, through the pumping stations at the outflow of the flood channels, walk beneath the arches and through the gates, cross the border of the real, into the final freedom of the Chaos…

  A beautiful dream.

  The shuffle of Jebrassy’s feet as he padded back and forth, glancing high at the vague, fragmented words…these small sounds bounced back from the walls with portentous distortions.

  A loud crack and rumble to the left of the screen announced another fall of masonry. Large stones and pieces of rusted metal rolled and thumped in a dusty sift at the far side of the gallery. The whole prospect angered and frustrated him—lost knowledge, failed communications, pretenses to educating the masses…like all the false books that taunted breeds who searched the deserted hallways of the high levels in the Tiers—endless shelves, their titles fascinating, when he could read them. But none could be pried loose. He had tried thousands of times since childhood. The books were solid, cold, useless.

  If we’re toys or tools, he thought, nobody much cares anymore what we do or think. Maybe they don’t even care if we live or die…

  He did a slow dance, listening for the echoes, and touched his nose at this folly.

  Better folly than boredom and safety.

  “Hello!”

  The single word drifted hi
gh and leaped back, acquiring a spooky rattle. Jebrassy turned to see a shadowy female perched on the edge of the proscenium.

  She stood up in the dim light cast by the screen.

  Jebrassy let out his breath in a relieved grunt.

  “What did you think I was?” Tiadba asked.

  “You’re late.”

  “Nice dance. Why did you come here—just because I asked?”

  “I’ve been here before,” he said. “It’s no big deal. Do I get to ask questions, too?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Breed females like sturdy, normal men with sturdy, normal attitudes. What makes you different?”

  Tiadba strolled along the base of the screen, skirting the piles of rubble. “Not all of us have slow blood,” she said. She looked down at something by her feet, stopped, and sucked in her breath. Her shoulders tensed.

  Jebrassy joined her. She had found a shriveled body—a young breed, probably male. It lay curled in the rubble, covered with dust and flakes of crusted veneer that had drifted down from the screen.

  Tiadba knelt to brush the dead breed’s clothing. “Some of us go seeking…a few dozen each generation, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace,” she said. “Not even the Bleak Warden found this one. You and I could end the same way. Does that frighten you?”

  Jebrassy twirled two fingers clockwise.

  Tiadba did the same, agreeing. “It might frighten us,” she said firmly, “but it wouldn’t stop us.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Some say we’re toys or pets. I know we’re more important than that. We’re the end of a long experiment. That’s why we stray. The Tall Ones want us to.”

  “And how can you know—how can you be sure?”

  “If I show you, you must make three promises.”

  “You like things in threes, don’t you?”

  “Triangles are stable. Females seek stability—you said so yourself.”