The closer they got to the bottom, the hazier became the outlines of the spaceboats and their infrastructure, until they saw only a dancing puzzle of grays and browns cut through by dim arcs of green. However, the ruins of the cities beyond the next rise seemed to loom, and it was tempting to just stop—to halt their steady progress across the valley and contemplate dazzling visions of towers, domes, great rounded shells tens of miles wide, carved open to reveal uncounted interior levels, concavities filled with what must have once been urbs and neighborhoods, most collapsed and covered with irregular encrustations.
“Not tidy,” Denbord said.
“Do not stop here,” their armor told them. “Move on.”
“What’s wrong?” Tiadba asked.
“Unknown disturbances. We are being followed.”
“By what?” she asked.
“Echoes are possible.”
Tiadba tried to reason through to what that could mean, based on what Pahtun had told them in training. “We’re following ourselves?”
“Unknown.”
CHAPTER 71
* * *
The Broken Tower
Jebrassy looked up from the book he had been reading, stood away from his pretty golden desk, and saw the Great Door open.
Here, he could never tell what was an instructive illusion and what might be solid and real. Fear could not grip him, nor hunger, grief, or anticipation. He was comfortable in both mind and body. All was smoothed and welcome, small challenges and large explorations equally and curiously invigorating.
He was happy.
Sometimes the epitome of the Librarian walked with him, sometimes he explored alone, though he did not feel lonely. It was a new childhood, and it seemed to last a long, long time. He was learning much about the Kalpa, and some of the simpler secrets of those who lived within the upper levels of the city. Mathematics, for example—never his strong suit, beyond the shopkeeper’s necessities trained into all breeds.
But always this door had been shut: the Great Door, more like a wall, easily as tall as a bloc of Tiers; curved like a crest or shield and covered with deeply engraved words, some of which he could read. He seemed to understand many more languages and signs now.
Jebrassy stepped through the breed-sized gap in the door, expecting something marvelous. He was not disappointed. He looked up and up at walls of shelves rising overhead and—he leaned over the parapet on which he stood—dropping down for as far as he could see. All the shelves were packed tight with books, too many to count, not uniformly bound, but a crescendo of colors leaping from the shelves, as if demanding to be inspected. Dark bindings neutral, untouched and unread; pale bindings touched once or twice; colored bindings, particularly blue and red, announcing greater degrees of interest.
These colors attracted the attention of many figures, small and slender, but not breeds. More like the angelins he had already met, but solid and dedicated. They flocked joyously up and down the spiral stairs, searching the shelves along all the levels.
“This must be a Babel,” Jebrassy murmured to himself. “All of it packed inside a minicosm, a Shen invention, no bigger than a pebble. And these people are out exploring.”
Up close—walking the parapet beside and around him, mostly ignoring his presence—their skin was smooth and eternally young, their faces serene or amused. Some glanced at their intruder with welcome but no speech. All here used signs, flashes of fingers and arms, changes of expression, to convey most of what they needed to say to one another.
Within the Babel, all was quiet, until a useful text was found, and then, throughout the immense spaces, along the galleries and the radiant walls of shelves stretching off forever, great songs and shouts would ring out, and all gathered to celebrate. Platforms expanded into circuses, and the searchers—members of the team that had made the discovery—would stand surrounded by admiring crowds. The readable text would be announced, and its binding color-coded.
The volume would then be cataloged, given a number—and that number would roll out like a dazzling silver ribbon across the plaza, only to be magically rewound and reduced to a folded paper octagon, soberly delivered to a shrouded, dark-robed figure that moved sometimes among the bright seekers…
The songs would fade, plazas empty and shrink, spiral stairs grow and reconnect.
All would return to what had been before.
Jebrassy understood this much: to live in a Babel was to be endlessly fascinated by the slow, steady drama of prolonged search. Still, his fingers itched to walk with these happy figures in their knee-length robes, to lose himself in the blessed anonymity of the greatest quest of all, in the greatest library of all—
The library that contained all possible stories. All histories. And all nonsense.
A Babel, a name as old as life itself, out of the Brightness, where all possible languages gathered. A place of confusion, seeking, and very, very rarely, illumination.
He tried to stop one of the searchers, clumsily signing a question: How long? But the seeker shrugged loose and went back to its search. So Jebrassy climbed a spiral stair, then hiked for what could have been days or years along a parapet.
Every now and then, he would stop and tug loose a volume, count through the thousand or more pages, and attempt to read—only to find the seemingly random text impenetrable. That did not disappoint him, not in the least. There was always the next volume. And so he would replace the book and move on. Lovely work, peaceful, fulfilling.
But this existence was not for him.
When he realized he did not know his way back, would never be able to find the Great Door—which in any case might have already closed behind him—somehow, even that did not concern him.
He pulled from his own robes a number folded in an octagon and held the paper over the railing, then tricked it open, letting it unfold and uncoil, laughing as it dropped into the abyss between the walls of shelves.
A searcher approached, queried with signs: Who had assigned him the task of seeking this specific volume?
Jebrassy expressed some confusion. The searcher helped him read the first few digits printed on the long strip, then led him to that very volume, which had been discovered and cataloged quite early on.
Jebrassy pulled down the book, opened the sturdy blue cover, and read. At that moment, the dark figure approached and pulled back its hood and Jebrassy saw that it was the Librarian—the epitome he was most familiar with, at any rate.
“It’s all an illusion, isn’t it?” Jebrassy asked.
“I thought you’d appreciate the adventure,” the epitome said.
Jebrassy scowled at the approaching end of this blissful adventure. “Why did I find this particular book?” he asked.
The epitome took the volume from his hands and seemed to weigh it. “A biography,” he explained. “Not all the text is accessible. Some is garbled. Perhaps there is another volume that completes it—somewhere!” He waved at the endless shelves. “But no matter. This volume, for you—is you, for now, until we find the others—and thus holds great interest.”
“Is it my story?” Jebrassy asked.
“Not precisely. And not completely.”
Then Jebrassy understood. “It’s his story, too,” he said. “The one I’m entangled with.”
“I wondered how easily you might find it,” the epitome said, and waved a hand at the immensity. “You have excellent instincts.”
“How does anybody find anything here?” Jebrassy asked. “I mean, is this really all compressed into something the size of a pebble? A small place, to hold so much.”
“True. All these seekers—their greatest joy is to perform their task over and over, across lengths of their own special chronology so vast even my full self can hardly imagine them. But all this—within the pebble, as you say—is not infinite. It is limited. Like the Babel itself.”
“There’s a number called pi,” Jebrassy said, proud of this knowledge. “It begins three decimal one four one five…and so on, forever. It isn’t repr
esented in here, is it?”
“Nothing infinite can be represented completely in here. There are segments of pi, of course, printed in a great many of these books—I suppose you could find them all, arrange them end to beginning, and then keep carrying some of the volumes to a place in the line, push them in—over and over again, but that would take you forever, longer even than time within the pebble. No. Pi is not contained here, nor any other infinite number or constant—not even infinitely long stories, which have been assumed to exist somewhere.” The epitome again showed breed amusement, finger to nose. “A story in need of an infinite editor, no? But all the equations that can produce pi exist here. And if you desired, you could take one such equation—or all of them—and generate that number to whatever length, without further benefit of what is printed in these books. And that is both the glory and the sadness of this Babel. It is unfinished. The stories it contains are not alive—they do not reverberate with the unpredictability, the infinity, the repetition of a true existence. Even in its immensity, a Babel is only a seed. A map. As a master lost in the mists of the Brightness once said, ‘The map is not the territory.’”
Jebrassy thought this over. Slowly, his face lit up.
The epitome appreciated his reaction, and took a book from the shelf, hefting it. “Actually, we do not generate such large volumes all at once. That would be wasteful. We generate much shorter strings of symbols—optimal lengths—and then we whirl them through analyzers that search for grammatical connections, using simple rules. That helps us assemble and spin out longer texts—and all their variants. Only then do we chart and catalog them. Suggestive texts—texts with extended meaning—have a way of being compressible, you know. They can be encoded and reduced, without loss. More random or meaningless texts cannot be so reduced.
“Thus, from my exterior perspective, the Babel within the pebble shows regions of density—and we seek them, though finding is just the beginning. Pi for example is completely random—I proved that myself some ages ago—and cannot be compressed, but only collapsed into an equation—and an equation is like a factory. Interestingly, pi at the circumference of minicosm is very simple—just 2. Can you tell me why?”
Jebrassy blinked. He had not studied these matters yet. The epitome went on without pause. “And of course, there is symmetry—many kinds of symmetry. For example, half the library is a mirror of the other half—the same texts, but reversed. We can eliminate those. There are many, many other techniques, some quite simple, others extremely difficult, devised over half an eternity, some by me, most by others whose identities have long since been forgotten.”
“So much has been forgotten,” Jebrassy said. “Why? If you can make Babels, can’t real histories be preserved for all to find?”
The epitome was pleased by this question. “Perhaps. Though we should not underestimate that task—knowing everything, everywhere, is impossibly difficult. But the Shen did not reveal their techniques until long after the cities of Earth had found their records burdensome. Beneath the Kalpa, the ground-up libraries of Earth’s history supply the foundations for the bions that remain—memories and records crushed and buried, no better than ancient bedrock. The only way to access parts of that past, tragically, is to watch it be digested by the Typhon, cut into pieces, and drift back toward our final moments—guided by the entangling associations between you and your visitors. Our dreamers.”
“How sad,” Jebrassy said. “But that means the Typhon serves a purpose.”
“I see you would make an excellent searcher,” the epitome said. “But you would not be happy. Indeed, I’m no longer happy here. Something is missing.”
“Life?”
“Surprise. Unpredictability. The territory. All is laid out in these shelves, waiting to be discovered—but fixed. When the seed is planted and these texts become part of a new cosmos, everything will change. The nonsense will become as valuable as the stories. For a multiverse builds itself mostly out of unreadable nonsense, and none can ever know for sure which text is truly useless.”
Jebrassy opened his book to read, but the letters began to blur.
The epitome cautioned, “Not yet, young breed. There is a true indicator, an unfailing marker of the real.” All was beginning to swirl and blur, but the epitome’s words stayed clear in his mind as he was swept back down the spiral stairs, as if by a great but gentle wind; along the shelves, down and down and sideways and down again, back to the Great Door, swinging shut just after he squeezed through.
The epitome’s voice followed him to the small golden desk:
“When you open a book within a Babel, the text is pristine, pure—black marks on white paper. Nothing will mar the texts or interrupt your concentration. But out there, in what is left of the old universe and what will become the new, in the territory to come, you will open a book, you will read a page…
“And a living thing, tiny, surprising and perverse, will crawl across that page, that story, startling you—until you recognize it and smile. It is alive—a mere bogle, a bug, but it is thinking, living in its own way, and most pointedly, it is not reading. It is not part of the library. It walks over the text, unexpected and vital.”
“Until I slam the book,” Jebrassy said.
“Ah, but you won’t. This creature is the ultimate symbol of she who reconciles, who allows memory and thus time to spin out. A friend of the mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne, and the first sign of a new cosmos.
“True creation unfolding—that which lives and walks over the words—that is quickened by the spider between the lines.”
CHAPTER 72
* * *
The Chaos
There was no way to tell how far they had walked, but they could no longer see the Kalpa. The three bions and the Broken Tower had vanished, not visible even when they descended into the stony trough.
The return path would have to be different—if they could ever return, or would ever want to.
The gray, knife-edged beam swung overhead, causing a tingle in Tiadba’s scalp. Pahtun had said it came from the Witness—something or someone to be avoided if at all possible.
The starboats—the hundreds and perhaps thousands of hulks they saw from the opposite crest—had also vanished. All they found, once they reached the bottom of the trough, were broken, jagged rows of blackened shards, outlines of oblong hulls almost obscured by drifts of gray and black gravel. So much for exploring and satisfying their curiosity.
They rested in the trough, setting up a reality generator and producing a bubble of warmth and protection while they unzipped their hoods, removed their armor, scratched where necessary, and tried to feel normal.
Frinna and Herza played a small game of leapcheck, scooping hollows in the drift and arranging circles of alternate gray and black pebbles.
Within the bubble of the small generator, their view of the surrounding landscape took a disturbing lurch. The broken cities on the other side of the trough swam like reflections in water. Only when they put on their armor and helmets again, and shut down the generator, did the huge hemispheric shells and their exposed levels return with any clarity.
Tiadba took some encouragement that the light-oozing pores had become fewer and many steps between; they did not have to deal with so many of the globules.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Denbold complained as they resumed their march.
“We follow the beacon,” Khren said, pretending stoicism. Tiadba had noticed him rubbing his feet and grumbling quietly during their rest under the bubble.
“Where are those echoes?” Nico asked. His quiet had been almost unbroken, perhaps to hide disappointment at not being able to see the starboats up close. “We were promised dangerous echoes, right? And we’d learn something new.”
No one responded to his poor jest. They walked over the top of the rise and turned to see, behind them, that the trough had inverted to become a high ridge—a long, continuous hill—and that the line of huge starboats had returned, cradl
es and all. Furthermore, looking ahead, the broken cities were gone, replaced by a glittering orchard of small trees dotted over low black hills.
“Too much,” Denbold muttered.
The marchers formed a line a few dozen steps from the first of the trees, to consider their options.
“It doesn’t look dangerous,” Shewel said, squirming within his armor. He apparently hadn’t found all the places that needed scratching.
“Is it dangerous?” Tiadba asked her suit. Sometimes the armor responded to a direct question—if it had an answer. This time, when she thought she saw small things moving between the trees, there came no reply for some uncomfortable moments.
“Evolution is occurring here,” her helmet finally said. “This should be reported.”
“Good luck,” Shewel said. “Doesn’t it know we can’t do that?”
“What’s evolution?” Frinna and Herza asked simultaneously.
“Adjustments that promote survival in changing conditions. Sometimes, the adjustments stabilize the conditions.”
Macht snorted.
“What’s that mean when it’s lying down?” Shewel asked.
“There could be opportunity here. Conditions of reality and stability are being maintained without machines or tools. These could either interfere with armor and generators or strengthen them.”
“That’s definitive,” Shewel said, and added his own snort.
“Turn around,” Tiadba’s armor said.
They all swiveled and saw figures some way off, armored marchers very like themselves—thirty or forty, coming down the ridge, but leaning forward as if to climb, not descend.
They approached—came within an apparent hundred steps or so.
“More marchers from the city!” Khren said happily, and began to jog toward them. Tiadba grabbed his arm.
“Prepare to flee,” their armor advised. “The danger behind you is greater than the danger ahead.”
“Echoes?” Tiadba asked.