City at the End of Time

  The sometime stone had arrived first—a long, long time before. The stone tied up past and future, called forth protectors, invoked his card number, the number that Glaucous had asked for—probably written on the inside of the puzzle he had not yet learned how to unfold.

  Jack was just a book on a shelf in a library.

  “I’m with him—in the dreams. I’m with the Librarian. He has my catalog number—all the numbers to all the volumes in a library that goes on forever. The Librarian started this.

  “He’s the author of my being. No surprise.”

  He opened the puzzle cleanly, without a single tear.

  One problem.

  As the puzzle kept unfolding, the number rolled across the floor and curled up the walls, surrounding him with ratcheting digits—longer than time.

  Jack laughed out loud. “I was on the bike, right? That’s my real first memory—the first time I appeared. That’s why everyone has such a hard time remembering any of us—we’re new, and you’re still filling in the gaps.”

  Between those who reconcile, and those who see and judge, there is only love. Without you, the muses would not be necessary. And after you give up seeing, there is the joy of matter. But now that fades to nothing.

  Jack wiped his eyes, stared down at the bead of moisture on his fingers. He did not know what the tears meant. A loss greater than death…the joy of what?

  The greatest secret of all, and he would soon forget he had ever heard of it.

  Daniel sat in the chair until the silence seemed to swallow him, and still he felt nothing, heard nothing.

  He stood and walked around, rubbing his hands, and for a moment a bit of Fred came to him—a chain of thoughts about mathematics and physics. Sum of all possible paths is the most efficient, the most probable path. Use the entire cosmos to generate all possible strings in a matrix of permutated texts. A universal library will help generate the most probable path. It’s obvious.

  Daniel smiled grimly. “Good for you. You’re still figuring things out. But none of it makes sense to me. This least of all.”

  Fred’s thoughts bleached away.

  “I’m Daniel!” he shouted to the high ceiling. “I’ve protected these stones since the beginning of time, across all the worlds! You must know me!”

  Silence.

  “I had a family. I had a brother. Lots of brothers. I remember them—some of them. I think one was named John or Sean. I didn’t just jump up out of nowhere. I can tell you about what’s coming—there’s worse coming—if you’re even here. But you’re not here…are you?”

  Falling dust outside, everywhere.

  He slumped in the chair. The others would probably lie and say they’d had a nice chat with whomever, whatever. All a sham. Bidewell was pulling a hoax to get control of their stones. Maybe the old man had locked them in and was going to let them starve.

  He murmured to the still, cool air, “I know who I am, even if you don’t.”

  But now he wasn’t at all sure.

  Something changed in the corners. Daniel stiffened and sat up straight, peering bright-eyed into the shadows.

  Remember. Very far—farther than anyone. From the outer reaches, hidden from all searchers, until you were brought to the main cord.

  Remember.

  His eyelids fluttered, his eyes closed, and he clenched his teeth. He saw a place, a huge construction made of something like stone sitting in a crater on a vast smooth plain, silent—silent for millions of years, if time had any meaning there. He saw himself moving from room to room without actually walking—first as a child, then as an adolescent, feeling so very lonely and empty—his growth not continuous, but accomplished by fading at one age, reappearing elsewhere, older and more complete.

  And outside the house—lining the far, worn hills—huge beings without face or feature, held captive, never moving. Waiting to be summoned.

  The Vale of Dead Gods.

  Daniel was being forced to remember the impossible. He had been re-created and then stashed so far from any main sequence of reality that his earliest memories were an agony. He had passed through so much destruction to get here—but it was his origin that pained him the most.

  Two stones. Why?

  The room changed again, and the confrontation he had dreaded—believed impossible—came and went, so quickly he had to reach back with sharp discipline to even recover it.

  Daniel was freezing. What he did not want to remember—what fogged his will, his intent—rose for an instant into memory and dictated his responses.

  You know me.

  “Yes,” he said.

  But not as I am.

  “No.”

  I am changing.

  “Yes.”

  I am lost.

  “You’re dying. But we’ll meet again. We meet on the shore of a silver sea. That’s all I remember.”

  The cold reached down into his bones.

  Daniel sat in the chair, too cold even to shiver.

  On the wooden floor before him lay a small round piece of glass. First green, then blue. Foggy with age, as if it had lain on a beach, rounded by an endless surge of sand and water. Maybe it wasn’t glass. He couldn’t tell what it was, really. He reached down and held it for a moment, turning it in his fingers, then slipped it in his pocket beside the puzzle boxes.

  Daniel looked around the silent, empty room. “Good-bye,” he said.

  Bidewell walked along the high narrow hallway and opened the doors one by one, and out came Ginny first, more at peace than he had seen her before. Next came Jack, thoughtful, but with a new light in his eyes.

  Bidewell hesitated before the open middle door, then walked to Daniel’s chair, where he reached out to shake the man’s hunched shoulder. Daniel stirred and opened his eyes. They were sharp as knives—the wrong eyes for that face. “I fell asleep,” he confessed, then stretched.

  The third shepherd was still an enigma.

  “We’ll convene in a while,” Bidewell said.

  “Pretty interesting—a question—” Daniel began, but Bidewell raised his hand.

  “No need. It’s all private.” Bidewell nodded three times, eyes flicking at three different random points in the high room, before passing through the door.

  The moment is over, Bidewell thought, for which I have prepared for a thousand years.

  CHAPTER 74

  * * *

  The Chaos

  They had no choice. Another wave of dark marchers—dead, dying, or echoing timelessly—swarmed down from the ridge.

  “They are too many and too strong,” their armor told them. “The generator will not protect you.”

  Tiadba pulled up the device. The field dropped back into the ovoid, which sparked and hissed before falling dark. “Into the trees!” she shouted.

  “They’re not trees!” Denbord protested. “They’ll kill us—you heard the armor!”

  But there was no choice. Tiadba pushed her group forward. Denbord took the generator, slung it over his shoulder, and booted the cart aside, then pulled his clave from his belt—the first time they had tried to use this weapon. Tiadba did the same. The mottled black notched blades fanned out, spun, and almost vanished. Two walls of force flashed outward, defined by the angles of the blades—translucent one moment, but where they coincided, silvering like a mirror. In the mirror, which curved and whipped, the ground behind seemed to clear and the dark marchers fell back, fell away.

  “We can kill them!” Denbord shouted, triumphant. He continued to wave his blade. Its field whipped around upon them. Their suits fluoresced a pale green at the near miss.

  “Keep that away from us!” Macht shouted.

  The breeds instinctively pushed toward the shimmering trees—there were simply too many echoes rising and spilling over the ridge, thousands of years of lost marchers massing against those still alive. The more the claves cut, the more there were. Tiadba had sudden doubts their weapons were that effective. She saw that the claves fended off the dark marchers
only temporarily—they broke apart, vanished, then seemed to rise again from the black ground.

  Khren was the first to push between the trees, the pearl-colored balls of light on the branches popping and snapping as he brushed them. Yet the trees did not chew up their armor, in fact wrapped branches and trunks around them, causing great fear—until they saw the branches close up behind, projecting a curtain of glinting drops as delicate as dew. The dark marchers did not follow. This was completely unlike the generator’s bubble shield, but apparently more effective.

  Tiadba, Khren, and Denbord led the others deeper into the forest, until they reached a clearing. Tiadba tumbled over Khren when he stopped, and Macht over them. As they untangled, the others dropped to their knees, murmuring prayers, weeping, then collapsing on the soft gray surface, while all around the trees rose twice as tall as their heads, slender fronds growing up and over, forming a bower and giving them cover as they caught their breath.

  Tiadba rolled on her back, still expecting to die—or worse. All her marcher training and instincts seemed unreliable, blacked out by fear that reached deep into the old matter that made her. What had they gotten themselves into? How many more terrors would they face, much worse than this?

  Were they even safe here, with cover and apparent protection, the Chaos held back, frustrated?

  Macht wept for Perf. “He went just like the Tall One. Just sparked away.”

  “He was slow,” Denbord said.

  Macht took offense and moved on him with fists clenched, but Herza and Frinna held him back, and together they all collapsed to the ground once more, coughing out little howls of misery.

  Tiadba sat apart, too exhausted to join in. Nico recovered first and looked around through his faceplate, unable to believe they weren’t still being followed.

  “What is this place?” Tiadba asked the armor. No answer.

  “The armor doesn’t want to help us,” Macht said. “It’s useless.”

  “Maybe it can’t talk about what it doesn’t know,” Shewel said.

  “The armor didn’t save Perf—it didn’t tell him what to do!”

  “Everything out here changes,” Nico said. “The trainer said—”

  “Then why let it speak at all?” Macht shouted. “What use is it to any of us?” He kicked and thumped his arms and hands on the gray ground, a crèche-born gesture of anger and irritation that they understood too well.

  Denbord crawled over and flopped down beside Tiadba. “I don’t know whether we’re safe or just in the belly of something different.”

  Tiadba felt the gray surface and noticed that her armored fingers did not produce the faint glow of adjustment they had observed in the Chaos. “The suits aren’t working very hard,” she said. “Maybe there’s a generator nearby.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Nico said. “Just the purple, and those branches. I don’t like the way they glow.”

  Shewel joined them and lay on his back. They all seemed to want to stay low and not touch the branches, growing ever thicker.

  One positive: they could no longer see the burning crescent.

  “Nobody said this would be easy,” Denbord offered, his voice quavering, not at all convinced a show of bravery was appropriate—certainly not false bravery. Macht stared at them all with large, round eyes. Herza and Frinna sat beside each other, clutching hands.

  They all sucked in their breaths.

  Silence—no more words—seemed best. Tiadba examined her gloved fingers, felt the suit drying and soothing her twitching, itching skin, the most comfortable clothing she had ever worn. The armor was still working, then.

  Slowly she let her fear burn itself out, leaving only a hollow grief and, like Macht, disappointment. If the others looked up to her as some sort of example, a leader…

  After a while the branches stopped growing and everything became still.

  “If we’re in a belly, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Tiadba said. “Better here than out there.”

  “We can’t stay here forever,” Denbord said.

  “We know that,” Macht said. “Just shut up and let us be sad.”

  “Maybe this is a mourning place,” Nico said, ever the philosophical one.

  Tiadba looked left, to the edge of the clearing, just a few yards away, between the smooth brown trunks that had so quickly branched out. The glowing tips gave off a dim yellow light. She wasn’t sure they would be able to escape through that thicket.

  No shadows, no motion, no threat—and no promise.

  Then she thought she must be dreaming. The branches parted, the glowing tips formed an arch—and through them stepped a Tall One, wearing nothing but a kind of curtus—smudged, torn, mended with what might have been lengths of twig.

  The Tall One approached close enough in the dim light that they could see him clearly. All of them stared in astonishment.

  “What is this?” Tiadba whispered, but again the suit had no answer.

  He looked a great deal like their trainer, Pahtun, but then, to breeds, Tall Ones tended to resemble one another. He approached and knelt, his dirty face impassive, eyes examining but incurious, as if he was not surprised to find them in this place but felt no immediate concern over their intentions.

  “What is this?” Tiadba asked, louder. “Where are we?”

  The Tall One shook his head. Then he spoke.

  Their helmets suddenly split and fell around their shoulders, making Denbord cry out and cover his eyes and mouth, until he realized he was not dying.

  The breeds gasped—the air was thin but sweet enough.

  The Tall One said, “They recognize me and they follow my orders. Poor things.” He stroked Tiadba’s shoulder—not her, but the armor she wore. “Out of date. Obsolete, actually. Breaking down under the stress.”

  Khren said, “One of us has already died.”

  They stood and their heads were of a height with the Tall One’s shoulders.

  “I am Pahtun,” he said.

  “Pahtun is dead,” Macht said.

  “There will always be Pahtuns,” the Tall One said. “Where did he die?”

  “In the zone of lies,” Nico said. They all nodded agreement.

  The Tall One nodded. “A grand object lesson—don’t you think? I made many copies and broke many rules to help the marchers. If breeds reach my cache, they deserve rest, instruction, better forecasts of Chaos weather…knowledge not available in the Kalpa. And we should refresh and upgrade your armor, don’t you think?”

  “That would be good,” Macht said. “But I don’t believe you—not one bit. Pahtun told us not to trust things like you.” He spoke reasonably, without anger, but his face was tense.

  The Tall One reached up, touched his own nose, and made the sound Pahtun had made when amused—a rumbling, crackling exhalation, somewhat upsetting to a breed. “Good instincts,” he said. “But if I were a monster, even your poor old damaged armor would have warned you. How are things back in the city? We can’t see it from here, of course.”

  “Bad,” Tiadba said. “Very bad.”

  “Well, it had to be. The Typhon grows restless, ever stronger, and wants to have done with us. Any more breeds coming after you?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “Maybe not.”

  “Then all the more reason to get this thing done,” Pahtun said. “These shrubs will only last a short while. I trained them myself—grew them from old ground. They’re primordial matter, just like you—and me. Good thing you broke through…if you had gone around, you would have crossed a trod, and the Silent Ones have been busy of late. Follow me.”

  He got to his feet, towering over them, and held out his arms. “Congratulations, one and all! You’ve made it this far.”

  CHAPTER 75

  * * *

  The Green Warehouse

  Throughout the warehouse the book group women were arranging their own cots in preparation for the night that was not even remotely a night. For though dark had fallen, and Ginny could see tw
o stars gleaming through the skylight, they were the same two stars. The Earth was not moving. Sun and moon had not changed their positions in the sky.

  Ginny reluctantly arranged the blankets on her cot and sat, surrounded by her pitiful cubicle of stacked boxes, exhausted, ready for sleep—but she knew what would happen if she laid down and closed her eyes. She dreaded this part of the dream: the separation (though Jack was asleep just a few yards away—she could hear him faintly snoring); the journey through the…she couldn’t remember what it was. Great gray walls and dusty floors.

  If only I could put it all in sequence!

  Minimus crept through a crack between the boxes and leaped onto the cot. Ginny let the cat lie across her lap, purring contentment and watching her with the royal concern only a cat can show—aloof, alert, curious only out of politeness.

  With Minimus she felt safer, but the cat could not go with her into the dark behind her eyelids—the unwanted world that opened just a crack and rustle beyond.

  Finally, she could stay awake no longer. She heard the cat jump down but did not care. She was so tired of trying to understand and take control of her life.

  And so, for a few unclocked moments—a brief interlude in a slice of world bereft of real time—she gave up, gave in. She let the out-of-sequence existence she so dreaded wash over her, fill her up. Every time she closed her eyes—anytime she had to rest, to sleep—until her two lives were combined and reconciled—this would be her sacrifice, her misery.

  Yes, yes—I’ve dreamed those things before. Move on!

  Take me out into the Chaos—send me to the False City—abandon me—get it over with!

  The women gathered around the stove. None could sleep. “How long do we have?” Agazutta asked Bidewell. She had recovered her dignity, but there were dark circles under her eyes, and her red hair was in complete disarray.

  Bidewell handed them all cups of chamomile tea.

  Miriam came last into the darkened, stove-lit room, having checked on Jack and Ginny, and—she murmured to Ellen—having made sure that Daniel and Glaucous were in their closet.