City at the End of Time

  “These are echoes,” the armor affirmed.

  The other marchers—whatever sort of marchers they might be—moved with slow, weary steps, yet seemed to make good progress toward them. Khren moaned. They saw quite clearly now that the armor worn by these breeds was falling apart. The helmets lay in shreds over slumped shoulders. The faces of the echoes were wizened, dark, sunken eyes exhausted and desperate—unfocused.

  They seemed to be blind.

  And they were getting nowhere—repeating endless motions. Echoing.

  “Set up the generator, focus the bubble in tight, and huddle,” Tiadba said, realizing that the armor was not speaking but she was receiving instructions nonetheless, quick images in her mind. Her companions quickly did as instructed, and came together within the small, shimmering hemisphere like newly delivered crèche-mates, as close as they could fit, clasping hands, arms, legs, staring outward.

  The blind echoes passed around the bubble, then veered into the thin forest of low trees, where they met the glowing branches—only to pop like soap bubbles, leaving behind drifting, plasticky skins that hung from the branches, then turned to dust and drifted away.

  “Where’s Perf?” Shewel asked. They felt around their group, and Tiadba forced up through the clinging mass to look around. She had not seen him. They shouted and called, but dared not break the hemisphere.

  Then Tiadba saw him, ten steps away, leaning into a cluster of blind marchers, waving his arms slowly as if swimming through thick liquid, trying to stay upright.

  The cracked and broken armor of these gray forms, decayed as it was, clung to his suit wherever they brushed him, changing it from vivid red to dead gray, and then, peeling it back like the skin of a ripe fruit, spinning him about as each shred was tugged loose.

  The breeds inside the bubble watched helplessly, frozen with terror, as Perf twisted and danced and finally stood naked on the black pebbled surface. More of the weary gray echoes passed both around and through him, sanding away his integrity until he became a translucent mannequin, shimmering and wobbling as if made of gelatin.

  And then he simply powdered. His dust flew up, vanishing into the purplish black tatters of the sky.

  “More coming!” Khren shouted, pointing to the ridge crest. Thousands of false marchers—dead marchers—echoes, whatever they might be, had gathered and were now moving in hopeless tides to join in the apparent destruction against the forest of glowing trees.

  “They’re the ones who didn’t make it this far,” Nico said. “Why do they want to kill us?”

  “Pull in tighter!” Tiadba cried, seeing the image very clearly in her mind and feeling her muscles respond, feeling them all respond simultaneously, protected and controlled by their suits.

  The hemisphere shrank and became silvery, sucking down around their forms, ringing against their suits. Tiadba felt herself shoved against the pole that supported the generator—saw sky, horizon, everything, tilt and whirl—no pretense at visual approximation through their faceplates now, all energy devoted to simple survival.

  For the first time they came close to “seeing” the Chaos as it actually was. An impossibility, of course. It hurt so badly they could neither move nor make a sound. The armor replaced these incomprehensible perceptions with wandering blankets of color. Or at least Tiadba thought it might be the armor—there was no way of knowing, hardly any way to think.

  Something, a scrap of concern, seemed to come from her visitor—in the wandering, comfortable sea of colors, she could feel her other, peering in as it were, saying, Before you freeze and die, you feel warm…

  CHAPTER 73

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  Glaucous buttonholed Daniel as Bidewell escorted Jack and Ginny to the southern door. “He has tricks. You were listening when we spoke—you heard him.”

  Daniel smiled. “You’re warning me?”

  “He wants something. He’ll deliver you over, just as I would.”

  “Or will,” Daniel said. “What happens if the Chalk Princess shows up right now?”

  “Lost in the grayness, like Whitlow, like the Moth—but not for long, I see it now,” Glaucous said, and jerked his eyes around nervously. “I can almost sense their return. This is becoming their country again. I need a partner,” he added, more nervous still that Daniel seemed unafraid. “We both need partners. When our Mistress does return…Alone, we’d be unbalanced, unprotected.”

  “You’re the hunter, I’m the prey,” Daniel said, lowering his head to Glaucous’s upturned face, wincing at a musty reek barely masked by the scent of anise. “Remember that.”

  “I’ve let birds go, in my time,” Glaucous said, wiping his mouth. “I’ve done good deeds in my time, I have.”

  Daniel shook his head, then turned back to the door.

  Glaucous called after him, “I’m not the only hunter. And she is not the only danger.”

  Daniel joined the three at the door. “I hope your Mr. Bidewell knows what he’s talking about.”

  Bidewell watched them together, resigned. “I’m sure Mr. Iremonk knows of these matters at a practical level.” He pulled a ring of keys from his apron pocket. A black iron lock hung from the door’s steel hasp. As the ladies waited some distance back and Glaucous moved closer, hands stretched out to the warmth of the small stove, Bidewell lifted the ring and jingled three keys.

  “These are my instructions. Follow them precisely.

  “Jack, go to the far wall and open the door on the left—the left, not the middle or the right. Ginny, you enter after Jack and open the door on the right—not the middle door and not Jack’s door. Leave those be. Jack, left—Ginny, right. Daniel—”

  “Middle door. Got you.”

  “The rooms should be comfortable—neither warm nor cold. A small window, just enough light to see. No one has been inside for a hundred years. No observer has witnessed anything therein. Except for an old chair and—I imagine—some dust, your rooms are empty and clean.”

  Jack looked at Ginny. An odd girl, she returned his look with wide, blank eyes, as if she did not recognize him—as if they had never met, and she wanted nothing from him. She was lost in the moment, it seemed, deeper than he was.

  Daniel’s look said: We’re all crazy, let’s humor the old man.

  “Your time with Mnemosyne will be difficult to judge—but from our perspective, out here, it will go by quickly. A few minutes at most. For you—years may seem to pass.”

  Bidewell took a big brass key, green with age, and opened the lock. As the book group ladies watched from their far pool of warmth and security, surrounded by high shelves and ladders—the highest shelves lost in the receding gloom above the stove and the green-shaded lamps on the desk—Bidewell opened the wooden door. It creaked, and bits of paint flaked from the top of the jamb. Cold air slid past Jack’s feet like the ghost of an impatient dog.

  “You first, young Jack.”

  He felt the pressure of the eyes fixed on his back, and with a shudder, he passed through.

  “Bonne chance,” Glaucous murmured, as Bidewell closed the door behind him.

  The high, long room beyond the door was dark but for a window-fed shaft of purplish sky-glow that crossed from his left, above his head, and painted a pale square on the far wall. The between-space was high and narrow and empty, the old boards ancient and gray.

  Squinting, Jack could just make out the rectangles of three doors on the opposite wall. His eyes adjusted. The sounds outside seemed to fall from the sky, softened, less important.

  Jack walked across and to his left and stood in that corner, considering the way the high walls and beamed ceiling in the long room joined. Normally, he could reach out and grab world-lines the way Tarzan grabbed vines, great clumps of them. But all the possible paths had been cut away or converged to I enter, I do not enter—an angular choice.

  He had reached his zero point. The zero moment.

  He took a step away from the safety of the corner. Laughed to h
imself, uncertain, but the laugh died and he almost stopped breathing. The between room was empty, but he was not alone. Something waited for a choice to be made. Waited, measuring the beats of his heart with infinite patience, and yet…

  “What do you want me to do?” Jack whispered.

  Three doors, six decisions.

  But still—only two fates. Not really an answer, and it didn’t make sense. What each of them did seemed disconnected, did not add up.

  Still, he took the two steps necessary to stand before his door. The knob was crusted with verdigris. He inserted his key. Old brass—hard to turn. He gripped it tight, twisted from his shoulder, and after several attempts something let loose, the old mechanism broke free, and his door opened with just a small scrape.

  Remarkable that there had been so little change all these years.

  He could barely hear the dead or dying city outside, could almost believe he was on a ship sailing over a far, soft ocean, listening to a radio playing in someone else’s cabin, tuned to an obscure indie station—he managed a grin—KRAK, Ragnarock AM.

  Peace welled up, and all his guilt, indecision, worries, and fears vanished, leaving behind just Jeremy Rohmer. No need even for the pretense of Jack. Jeremy, the name his mother had given him.

  The room behind the door was narrow, long and high. Bidewell had divided this end of the warehouse into three equal rectangles. High in the wall at the far end, a single window let in wisps of uneasy light. The way the light fell contradicted the angle of the source in the between-room.

  Jack approached the plain white chair, thick-daubed paint on its flat seat and back cracked with age. He turned around, looked up, then slowly sat.

  Folded his arms.

  Raised his eyebrows at the high corners.

  After a while he yawned. The sound of his ears hummed with the pressure of the yawn, and his jaw popped, obscuring a sound, a voice deep in his head.

  —your first memory?

  Jeremy jerked, wondering if he’d dozed off. But he was still alone, the door shut tight.

  He jerked again at the sensation of fingers brushing down his arms. Then he pressed back in the chair. He could feel it beginning. His self was breaking up like a crust of ice, and memories gushed through like water.

  Jeremy’s father was driving them from Milwaukee, in search of a new place to live—six months after his mother died, three months after a brief and, as it turned out, final gig at Chuck’s Comedy Margin—one month after Jeremy had broken his leg trying to juggle while riding a unicycle.

  He had been fifteen.

  “You ever hear of the Bleak Warden?” his father asked.

  “What’s that, a band?” Jeremy asked.

  “Nope.”

  The land unrolled outside the windows: flat desert and low brown desert towns, sunsets tan and pink, afternoon sky dazzling with thunderheads, and between the storms, sheeplike clouds grazing on endless blue fields.

  Broke my leg?

  In the empty room, his leg suddenly ached. He reached down to rub it.

  Bidewell opened the door for the second time, and Ginny entered. If he spoke, she did not hear him. The high hallway beyond stretched across the width of the warehouse. The air smelled cool and stuffy. She glanced at the leftmost door—Jack’s door. Shut, quiet. Whatever was happening there, it wasn’t noisy.

  Bidewell closed the door behind her. With a short breath, almost a hiccup, she walked slowly to the right, inserted and turned the key, and grasped the knob, but hesitated before entering her room. Odd that she accepted that possessive without argument.

  No one else had been through this door for a hundred years. What waited inside must be hers.

  Outside, the low, hollow destruction continued to grind time and the Earth like wheat beneath a stone mill, and she did not care. In this room, she thought, it might soon be over. What she knew—the nightmare that her other knew—could not be reconciled, not even by a master muse or whatever Mnemosyne was supposed to be. God. Goddess. Demiurge. Housewife of the creator, sweeper-up of unresolved messes. Kindhearted sister to the awful Chalk Princess, who was white but should have been black: Kali, kala—Sanskrit for time, both bleacher and blackener. Ginny had read some of the books Bidewell chose for her, pulled from a bookcase labeled NUNC, NUNQUAM—Greek and Hindu mythology, mostly. But none of their tales quite seemed to match what Bidewell was describing.

  Old time is at an end, or soon will be. New memories must be made. New time will be forged. Who will fire the forge?

  Memory begins and ends with time.

  These words or impressions, less than words but more deeply felt, suddenly made Ginny angry. Bidewell made her angry. Jack and Daniel made her angry. None of them fit into any sort of life she had ever wanted. She wanted out. She had to leave. She wanted to jump between the lines, cut them all loose—let them float away.

  Instead of turning to run, however, she again grasped the knob to her door, forced it around—it stuck, she grimaced—and then the door opened and she looked across the length of the room beyond, perpendicular to the hallway, stretching to the back of the warehouse.

  A window mounted high in the rear wall showed a curling, flaring lick from the broken sun that had eaten the dying moon.

  In the middle of the room stood the old white chair, as Bidewell had promised. The paint on its seat and back had cracked after a century of quietly heating and cooling.

  Ginny swallowed and said, “I’m here.” She stood beside her chair, laying one hand on the curved back. Then she realized she had not closed the door, and turned to go back. But the door had never been opened.

  A shade made way, removed itself from the chair…trick of the eyes.

  She was the shade.

  She sat.

  Bidewell opened the door.

  “Hurry,” he told Daniel. Around them the entire warehouse rattled with the stuttering havoc outside.

  Daniel felt supremely confident. Never more so. He could beat this. He could even beat Terminus. Someone would get through—otherwise, why would they all be gathered here, what would the point be of this rigmarole?

  There were the two young people—younger than Fred—and in a pinch there was always Glaucous, ageless in his way, and no doubt a tough subject. But Daniel knew instinctively he could not transfer to Bidewell whatever happened. He did not want to be stuck in the warehouse, and Bidewell would not leave this place and likely would not survive its destruction.

  Nor could Daniel choose any of the older ladies. With a twinge, he had seen one of their little green books poking from a handbag, the spine marked 1298. The woman in the doctor’s coat, Sangloss, seemed to take a clinical interest in him. The others simply ignored him. He could almost smell their suspicion. In their way, they were stronger and perhaps more armored even than Glaucous.

  Not for him.

  Glaucous sat on a low bench, watching this little drama with a fixed smile. “Go on,” he said. “There’s nothing for you out here.”

  How right he was. Once the door was closed, Bidewell and Glaucous and the ladies might fade away completely. The whole warehouse might just lift up like a burning feather. Anything could happen, but he would survive.

  Daniel walked through. Bidewell closed the outer door. The inner left-hand door and the door on the right were both shut and quiet. He could picture Ginny and Jack sitting in those two rooms, bored, waiting for enough time to pass so Bidewell would call them out and apologize. The old man clearly had no idea what was going on.

  The warehouse hummed like a sympathetic string. It wanted to join in the vast crumbling. It wanted to die.

  Daniel went to the middle door, turned the key, and grasped the knob. He made sure to latch the door behind him. Nobody would sneak in. He had to observe the forms.

  In the long room beyond, he sat in the white chair, hunched forward, and waited.

  Afraid.

  The old Dodge was coming up on low hills, and soon there would be mountains, but Jeremy did not know wh
ere they were and did not much care.

  He lay squished into the corner of the backseat, cast stretched almost full length across the old car. He was in a lousy mood. Not so much a mood as an unyielding concrete tunnel with no end, no exit. Ryan, his father, was dying, and that meant he would finally have no one, nothing but his rudimentary skills: mediocre patter and the poor, blunt magicks Ryan had managed to teach him.

  “I had a dream about this Bleak Warden. It’s a kind of flying robot,” Ryan said. “It comes when you’re dead. Takes you away. Kind of like a garbage man, I guess.”

  “Comes for you. Not for me,” Jeremy said, and then wished he could take it back.

  Ryan grinned like a raccoon. “Riiiight. There was this place in my dream, a kind of big cavern with a bright sky, filled with different people. Small ears, bushy fur instead of hair. I only remember a little. I’ve been there a couple of times. That’s what they call death, the people in the dream—they call it the Bleak Warden. Pretty scary, except in this place it never takes the living—and nobody is ever sick. They fight, but they don’t kill each other. They never steal. They raise kids, but they don’t have them—kids are delivered like packages. Like storks leaving you under a cabbage leaf. Weird, huh?”

  Jeremy sat up in the backseat, rearranged his cast, nudged by a phantom memory. Tried to remember where he really was. Could not grasp it—

  His father continued:

  “They hold festivals and what they call little wars, where tough guys get the crap kicked out of their system. Interesting, huh?”

  “Dreams are showstoppers, Dad. You told me that.”

  “Well, this one is actually exciting. I keep wondering what will happen the next time I dream. And it’s consistent—except last night, in the motel in Moscow, it changed. I was in a different part of the same place. Some of the people were taller. They were handing out these suits, red and yellow and green, like soft armor, to the smaller ones. Self-contained, like spacesuits, except not only do they give you air and heat, but…this is tough to describe. They keep body and soul together.” Ryan’s voice became reverent, as if he totally believed, was totally reliving that moment.