City at the End of Time

  Glaucous blew out his worries. “We shall give him a fine scrubbing. Hell hath no worse smell.”

  “Not hell,” Penelope said.

  Jack listened from the sack. He did smell—and the smell was foul. Holding his nose did not help, so he tried his best to ignore it.

  With a tremendous effort, gathering all his courage, he dipped a toe back into the currents of fate. All near situations were tense, tight-packed. Under those circumstances, even the strongest world-lines tended to weave in and out. He was traveling in a truck or van. Nothing in the way of accidents, blowouts, mishaps of any useful sort, presented themselves. He was too far down a strongly developed line. All available alternatives kept him here, but perhaps not in a sack so secure, so lacking in rips and seams…

  “Don’t even try it, my fine stinkpot,” Glaucous advised from the driver’s seat, and again, that voice—like a mother soothing an upset child—bathed Jack in cloying sweetness. All would be well…He was too exhausted to fight. He almost welcomed it—the sugary sense of rightness fermented into a spiritual liquor, dulling all hope, all pain. “We’ll be home soon,” Glaucous said. “You’ll like it there.”

  “Will he?” Penelope asked. Her seat creaked miserably as she arranged her bulk. “I don’t.”

  “We will wash away that taint, before something else smells it. Something premature and perhaps too eager.” Glaucous made a chitinous cluck-clicking behind his mouth, sharp and loud. Jack could not see how he did it.

  Like claws snapping.

  PART TWO

  BROKEN LOGOS

  FOURTEEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 39

  * * *

  The First Bion

  His feet planted firmly on a disc of cold, hard light, Ghentun flew up between the glowing silver conduits, through lustrous canyons, between dazzling miles-high walls, to the highest levels of the First Bion—the urbs of the Great Eidolons.

  Once—if the myths could be believed—humans had thought the universe might last no more than a few tens of billions of years. No one in the Brightness—the warm, brilliant womb of the last trillion centuries—could have guessed how long history would drag on, how often its cruel patterns would repeat: wars that filled tens of billions and even trillions of years, eating away at the lives of quadrillions of thinking beings—consuming countless heavens in the idiotic flames of countless hells.

  The inevitable rise to immaterial godhood of billions of civilizations had been followed by the equally inevitable collapse back to individuated bodies in benighted ignorance of what had been lost…A cyclical rise and fall, like a beating heart torn by endless and merciless time.

  Nor could any who lived during the primordial billennia have guessed how decayed and fragmented the aging cosmos would become, its parts requiring redesign, supplanting, replacement—and now, how the lost shards of times past would break loose, drift, and bump up against the present.

  As for the late Trillennium, in the shadow of the Chaos: broad legends described the age of the Mass Wars. Bosonic Ashurs had returned from their mastery of the dark light-years, seeking ascendance over all…and were subdued by the mesonic Kanjurs, who in turn were defeated by the Devas—patterned from integral quarks. Devas were then forced to give way to the noötics. Noötic matter was hardly matter at all—more like a binding compact between space, fate, and two out of seven aspects of time.

  The noötics—calling themselves Eidolons—gathered survivors from the last artificial galaxies and forced nearly all to convert. The last remnants of old matter were preserved and transported to a number of reliquaries with the longest continuous histories—including Earth.

  Only the servants of old Earth—Menders and Shapers mostly—were given dispensation to remain primordial. Many converted anyway. For a time even Ghentun had succumbed—before being recruited as Keeper. Noötic matter guaranteed safer and more cooperative environments, more efficient thought-patterns, and more diverse and minutely controlled utilities. In noötics, each particle was preprogrammed with a variety of behaviors, which could be integrated into unparalleled servitude.

  The complete mental control of one’s noötic self led most such intelligences, over the last ages of the Trillennium, into eccentricities without number—but guaranteed their dominance.

  For Ghentun, the legends of the Mass Wars still contained one great lesson. In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite.

  The photon disc passed swiftly through alternating regions of mass and light, solid dwellings and roads along which solid citizens moved, yet when that motion tired them, the citizens lifted like whirlwinds to whisk off to more ethereal paths—wit-courts pulsing with the arts and challenges of ten trillion years of history.

  The disc flew over ribbon boroughs populated by former Devas, who now refused any but a narrow band of extreme technologies. They insisted that their boroughs be stacked like spools, slowly unwinding ribbons of renewal and locality, each half a mile wide and festooned with pop-up dwellings, experience galleries, and regeneration farms. Crowds of images—projections of the boroughs’ citizens—took shape around Ghentun, exhibiting vague curiosity—but seeing only a lone and lesser Mender, they flattened and faded like cast-aside portraits.

  Sometimes, Ghentun felt that the more advanced urbs in the Kalpa were no less strange than the Chaos outside—until he saw the Chaos again. The high urbs and ribbon boroughs were positively cozy and familiar by comparison.

  Even here it’s difficult to misplace your wit—your soul—but out there, beyond the border of the real…

  The photon disc wove expertly, dancing a pretty path for its own amusement, it seemed, then slowed and communicated across the last miles with the Astyanax’s security detail, swarms of machines little different except in size—and deadly power—from the wardens in the Tiers.

  On the highest level of the Kalpa, surrounding the roots of the Broken Tower, urbs like tremendous jellyfish rose from mountainous foundations, capped by a diffuse blue glow that spread across the ceil. They slowly undulated vertical fins six to eight miles high, glowing purple, green, and red. Looked at more closely, the fins resolved into stacked horizontal dwellings, always shifting with respect to those above and below, never repeating the same perspective.

  Each housed millions of Eidolons.

  Even here, in the last city…

  Boredom, boredom, repetitions of endless amusement, followed by sad forgetting, then fresh delight…

  A tiny bright image appeared among the swarms of sentinels as the disc approached the reception platform—a sphere sporting an equatorial belt of emerald light, the scepter that announced the presence and privileges of the Astyanax of the Kalpa.

  The sentinels verified Ghentun and parted to give way.

  Ghentun stepped onto the platform and the disc vanished with a small pop, liberating a blue glow that spread across the floor, leaving behind red and gold polygons—ritual displays as old as the office of the Astyanax himself.

  The polygons spread to mark the Keeper’s path.

  The path led to a simple door. Through that door, he knew, lay the Astyanax’s most private dwellings and offices. For the first time, this Keeper of the Tiers was being allowed a meeting with the last City Prince in his innermost sanctum.

  CHAPTER 40

  * * *

  The Tiers

  The young breeds returned from their expedition clutching only three books—and Tiadba had found all of them.

  Khren and the others had split off after a few hours and moved on to other amusements.

  Jebrassy accompanied Tiadba to her niche, where she laid out the shake cloths and Grayne’s cape on a table, then arranged three jars packed with borrowed letterbugs.

  He stood back, awed by these proceedings—he had never thought letterbugs would be of much use, had once felt contempt for those who raised and traded them. And now—to use them to read an actual book, in an ancient alphabet—he was not superstitious, but the room already seemed too full
of the ghostly past.

  Beyond the balcony, the first orange light of a new wake spread across the ceil.

  Tiadba looked down on the jars and the books with pride. “My crèche mates have always wanted to know what their old bugs have to say.” Her face gleamed as she glanced over her shoulder at Jebrassy, in the shadows.

  “How long will this take?” he asked.

  “We have less than ten wakes until the march. If we don’t sleep…” She touched the fine fur on her nose, then gave him a taunting, humming whistle. “Frightened, warrior?”

  “You better believe it,” he said. “You should be, too.”

  “We’ve seen and done so much together. We’ve found our books.”

  “You’ve found your books,” Jebrassy corrected.

  “We’re going to be trained for a march. What more could we want—what could possibly frighten us now?”

  Tiadba pinned up the shake cloth, already marked with the common symbols and the words most often spelled out by younger letterbugs. Their task would be to make notes of the words that the old bugs formed from their unfamiliar letters; compare them to the new—find similarities; then transliterate.

  Perhaps then they could puzzle through the books, like Grayne and her sisterhood before them.

  “The books won’t let us know what’s out there now, more’s the pity,” Tiadba said. “Your visitor said last sleep…”

  “What else did my visitor say?” Jebrassy asked, face wrapped in a scowl. “Did you make love with him?”

  “One question at a time,” Tiadba said, touching both her ears. Jebrassy liked that elevated, tutorial gesture least of all among this glow’s mannerisms. The trouble was, her other gestures and touches he did like…too much.

  There was no going back, with or without visitors, with or without a book.

  “He said very little,” Tiadba remembered. “He wasn’t cheerful. There seemed to be trouble in his world. He was facing a challenge. And no, we did not make love. We’re much too disoriented when we stray. What he said was, the book talks about a journey far outside the Kalpa, toward the stars, whatever that means.”

  “I’m getting tired of being taken,” Jebrassy said, using the word for a squatter’s habitation of someone else’s niche. “And even more tired of being ignorant.” He hitched up his short curtus before squatting on a stool next to the table. “So, down the chute with it. Spread the bugs.”

  Tiadba handed him a soft gray stick to be used on the finely woven shake cloth, then opened the first jar and tipped it out. The bugs—long and shiny black, with five legs on each side and brilliant blue eyes, dropped out and chittered, none the worse for being tightly packed, but eager to spread out, team up, and resume their endless wordplay.

  In the two adjacent jars, letterbugs had been arranged in bundles, heads up beneath the pierced lid, twitching short feelers. She dumped them out as well. The more bugs, the longer the words.

  Tiadba took up her stick and sat beside Jebrassy. As the old bugs pushed together in parallel rows, he was already recording the simplest combinations.

  Tiadba reverentially opened the first book.

  Two wakes of hard, weary work passed before she would allow them to make any guesses about the text. Jebrassy already knew the name Sangmer was there—he turned out to be more skilled than Tiadba at transliterating from the old alphabet. But it soon became apparent the book was not just about Sangmer, it had been written by him—a new concept for both.

  “What would it be like to actually write about one’s adventures?” Tiadba wondered as they shook out an edge of their cloths, where their transliterations and thus their translations had been proved wrong. Gray stick dust fell in a fine cloud to the floor.

  “First, you have to have adventures,” Jebrassy observed dryly. “Ancient breeds are too humble to presume.” He lay back with a yawn and a half stretch, inviting seduction.

  “Nonsense,” Tiadba said. “I’m a breed, and I’m not humble. Neither are you.”

  “No,” Jebrassy admitted. “But I’d be embarrassed to write my life from start to finish. It wouldn’t be interesting—not yet. It wouldn’t be proper.”

  “Presumably you’d only write the good parts,” Tiadba mused. “Otherwise, your readers…did I just make up a word?” She looked pleased. “Your readers would find they had better things to do. Like…”

  She lay down beside him, and Jebrassy was gratified to learn he still could distract her from their work—however briefly.

  Before the ceil brightened with the fourth wake, they could make out with some clarity the book’s opening paragraphs.

  Not quite knowing how to use a book, they had tried starting from both ends, and then, confused, thumbed through to the middle. Gradually they realized that this book was unlike the stories breeds told their children, which always began in the middle, at a perilous moment, and only after more adventures returned to the beginning, to explain what those adventures meant. Breed tales had a puzzlelike quality.

  This book actually began at the beginning—opening the cover from the right—continued through to the middle, and then concluded at the end, near the left. Once transliterated, the language was not very different, which struck Jebrassy as odd—so much time had passed. “This is supposed to be old. Why do we all tongue with so many of the same words?”

  “If it was too strange, we couldn’t read it,” Tiadba said. “And somebody wants us to read. Or, maybe we’ve been held back,” she said. “We’re not natural.” Here, she used a word that usually described a young one’s easy introduction into a sponsoring group. “Let’s read out loud what we’ve got so far. It’s not that hard, actually.”

  After a while another doubt struck Jebrassy. “Sangmer’s not a breed,” he said as they fed the bugs from a small bag of dried cutsloop and pars. The bugs sang softly as they chewed. The older bugs apparently did not like pars, for they separated the dried grains and nudged them over the edge of the table.

  “So?” Tiadba said. “Maybe he was a Tall One.”

  “Some of these new words are strange. I can barely sound them. What’s this one?”

  “I think it’s a number. A very big number.”

  “And what’s a ‘light-year’?”

  “Just read…We’ll figure it out as we go. Read,” she ordered, flicking his small ear with her finger.

  Jebrassy began again in earnest. Tiadba took up when he faltered, and together they read the preamble—the introductory pages—and assumed, like innocents new from the crèche, that what they read was true, though so much of it was beyond their understanding…mere sounds rising from the pages, but sounds that conveyed a creepy, compelling sort of sense, as if they shared something innately with the author and the people he described.

  We traversed a ruined course between broken galaxies in a demented ship—died, revived, and wished to die again—and came home along an even harder track, carrying Earth’s salvation—and when we returned, we found ourselves splintered by our triumph, celebrated in our madness, surrounded and adored by those we had once hated as mortal enemies.

  Through this, I achieved power and a small measure of freedom—and then gave it all up for love, and lost that as well. So much for my voyage to the Realm of the Shen, who claimed no human descent, nor any gens relation with the five hundred galaxies.

  I tell this now to arouse enthusiasm in a Kalpa that cares little for what lies outside its walls, seeking a second dispensation—permission, if not a commission, to make one last journey, far shorter, far more dangerous, from which little doubt none of us will return.

  Jebrassy sucked in his breath. “This is not going to be a happy story,” he said.

  “I think you’re right,” Tiadba said.

  Jebrassy gently pushed aside a letterbug that had crawled up on the book, and together, fingers intertwined, they turned to the next page.

  They found what followed tougher going, especially as the bugs tired of being rearranged and neglected to form useful rows
.

  Eventually, Jebrassy closed his eyes and napped. Checking to make sure he was asleep, Tiadba jumped ahead through a finger’s width of pages. She thought she could feel the book—its connections, its shape—and that left to her own devices, she would instinctively open to pages that could almost answer her questions.

  My wife, condensed out of lost principles—

  Bright nimbus, eternal shadow—

  Ishanaxade—the most willful, intelligent, and powerful female I have ever known—ever reconciled, even made flesh. In our life, she sought perfection through conflict, honing through strife, correction through victory and defeat—Gens Simia’s greatest contribution to the human triumph of the Trillennium, so she claimed, with a strange knowledge I dared not dispute.

  And like all Devas, she linked herself to Gens Simia. Even the daughter of a Great Eidolon, unique of her kind, clung to the families of a past—however manufactured they might be, certainly in her case.

  My parentals, equally irrationally—and like all Menders—claimed descent from Gens Avia, a heritance reaching far back into the Brightness, associations none now understands—but what threads remain are cherished.

  In the middle of our wedding, my parentals insisted on collecting the traditional fee for the legendary devouring and swallowing once carried out against us by Gens Simia: the Consumption. Perversely, Ishanaxade reveled in this myth. She paid the fee with enthusiasm, and I soon learned why; when she asserted this dominance in our marital chamber.

  This became the cause of our first dispute as bound partners, a foolish argument over the Feast of Parts and Nests. In the midst of all those archaic, ritual distractions, I submitted—and endured, keeping my silence as she nibbled at my “drumstick” and my “wing,” and then began on my “thigh.” I had to subdue all my natural responses to maintain dignity.