City at the End of Time

  “How can you be useful?” he asked.

  “I brought this,” Polybiblios said. He held out a gray box. “Without it…nothing will happen. Nothing important, at any rate. Things will just come to an end. And after so much time, that would be a pity.”

  CHAPTER 87

  * * *

  The Chaos

  They might have been marching for years. Lifetimes.

  The marchers were adapting to the Chaos bit by awful bit. Asserting a new sophistication by breaking the rules, they had become expert at crossing and sometimes even following trods. Trods, it seemed, had a kind of predictability. When there were no travelers about—for there were other and even stranger users than the gliding Silent Ones—the trods were hard and slick, like glass. When travelers approached, and long before the marchers could be seen, the trods would go all gummy and start sucking at their boots. There was usually more than enough time to scramble to one side or the other and hide in the broken rubble.

  The entire Chaos was like a garbage heap. Wherever they went out here, stuff had been tossed about, disrupted, discarded—and most often, left in a crumbling, blackened state, its vitality sucked away. There were lots of places a breed could hide.

  None of them had been lost since Perf—but that only meant they were lucky. They had seen more than enough evidence of the destroyed, the transformed.

  During their short periods of rest, if the Chaos was not too badly mangled and some of the old rules still applied—and if the armor advised them it was safe—they would remove their helmets and breathe what was left of the ancient atmosphere of Earth.

  It was not pleasant, but it was different enough to relieve the dragging boredom of the ever-changing, the unpredictable, and often enough the indescribable.

  Their journeys had taken them around some of the largest monuments to the Typhon’s dementia. The marchers created their own names for what they saw: the Awful Bumbles, Great Burning Pile, Last Chance Ditch, Glider Dumps. That last had been a kind of miles-wide cemetery of worn-out, discarded Silent Ones, their eyes glazed and probably blind.

  But still alive.

  No finality, no mercy, no sense.

  How many times the marchers had been pursued by things they could not see…beyond count. Their armor—and the Kalpa’s beacon, still pulsing and singing—guided them through ditches and around chasms filled with sluggish, churning liquid. Things seemed to swim or drown deep in that oily ooze. They walked on the flat margins of lakes of blue fire, casting long shadows against brownish cliffs like puppets backlit on a screen. The enervation that had come over them was not so much physical as mental.

  They were made of old, ordinary matter. Such matter—configured into a breed—could not absorb too much strangeness without throwing it out of memory, or stopping to rest. But there was no chance to stop.

  And so much of what they saw, they promptly forgot. Another mercy.

  CHAPTER 88

  * * *

  Glaucous grabbed Jack and Daniel and pulled them back into the red-rimmed shadows. “Stalkers,” he said.

  Large, sinuous shapes slid over the cobbles and through the streets. Jack squinted to see, first making out what seemed to be several beetles dragging long, bloated worms. Blinking, he saw something else—snakes wagging spadelike heads, their eyes black and deep, crawling on a cluster of appendages and trailing long, bloated bodies. The bodies looped and coiled until these monsters passed out of sight around an eroded corner, yet still, afterimages danced in his eyes, light being what it was out here.

  Daniel hugged the wall, fingers rubbed raw against the brick and mortar. “What are those?”

  Glaucous shook his head. “I’ve never seen their like.”

  “Ugly,” Jack said.

  “We didn’t escape after all, Jack,” Daniel said. “The bad places have caught up with us.”

  They were about to move on again when from another direction, over the shattered walls, they saw seven large, manlike creatures in procession, heads bowed, dressed in robes that fell behind them in pools of blood-colored fabric—but the shapes that bumped and protruded against the fabric could not have been legs, not two legs, at any rate. Their faces were dark, smooth, with long red vertical slits for eyes and slick ropy hair writhing on their shoulders.

  Glaucous gave his companions a curious, almost fey look, as a hungry man might look at a banquet he is sure is poisoned, or as someone about to hang will regard his approaching executioners. “They’ll search the ruins of the old cities, wherever they can,” he said. “These places may still be unfriendly to them—not completely digested.”

  Daniel covered a disgusted cough. Jack waited for the streets to clear, then jabbed his hands into his jacket pockets and walked ahead on the cracked, twisted roadbed.

  They followed.

  “Where do they come from?” he asked Glaucous.

  “I’m as ignorant as you. The Mistress employs the Moth, and I presume the Moth employs ghosts and such I’ve never seen—not even in a Gape. If they’re the same things that gathered up the shepherds—the children brought to our Mistress—they never revealed themselves, never came out into the open.”

  Daniel asked, “Would they recognize you—take orders from you?”

  Glaucous laughed into his fist and shook his head, a very amused no. “I am low, very low. If they hunt, they hunt everything that survives and moves about. I presume they are searching and clearing before our Mistress goes out for another tour.”

  CHAPTER 89

  * * *

  The Chaos

  Thrusting up hundreds of feet from a cleft that stretched from horizon to horizon, the building was bigger by far than anything the breeds would have thought of as a dwelling, a house: a crystalline heap of shapes and angles, crusted over with what might have been broken pieces of other buildings, and those parts decorated with the petrified remnants of people and animals. The awful whole glowed with a pallid, putrid light that played tricks even through their faceplates, bending and warping, making their companions seem farther away, or looming close, huge and menacing—and then lulled them into a desire for senselessness, isolation—to run off and be alone, find a trod, just sit and wait.

  The seductive green emanation seemed to penetrate even their armor’s strongest protections.

  As they moved in two close groups along the edge of the cleft—avoiding a particularly broad and spongy trod—Macht and Shewel could not help but stare at the ugly, angular pile, as if trying to make sense of its madness.

  “Are those people all over it?” Shewel asked, squinting, his eyes reflecting the twisted, cluttered image.

  “They might be carvings,” Macht offered without conviction. “Too big to be people of any kind we know.”

  “Well, what are they, then?” Shewel asked sharply, as if angry at the armor’s quiet.

  Pahtun’s voice echoed in all their helmets. “This is the House of Green Sleep. If you must know, they are the shells of victims gathered from long-dead galaxies, swept up on waves of shrinking space and time, then carried heedless and hated to this last place, to be displayed without pattern or thought.”

  Macht grumbled, “You had to ask.”

  “Oh,” Shewel said. “Well, now I know.”

  Nico glanced back from some distance ahead, walking point with Herza and Frinna. “No more stupid questions,” he said.

  “Ignorance is bliss,” Frinna agreed.

  They found a small, dry pit deep enough to hide them from both the trod and the sickly light of the house, and paused long enough to rest and set up the portable generator. They pulled aside their helmets and huddled close as Tiadba took a book from her leg pouch.

  “Read,” Herza insisted. The sisters were the least critical of the marchers, most enthusiastic about the odd, wandering bits of story Tiadba found or deciphered.

  “Yes, read,” Macht said. “Take our minds off that thing out there.”

  “I’d prefer softer stories,” Khren said. He’d develope
d an aversion for these difficult tales and all their odd words.

  “This is what I can find,” Tiadba said.

  “Just read anything,” Nico said, and closed his eyes, lying back on the dark earth within the protection of the generator.

  Tiadba opened the book.

  We chose our vessel, the Intensity, from the last great fleets parked in huge yards all through the twelve cities. She was reputedly the fastest of transports, faster even than the cosmos-spanning portals of the middle Trillennium, but in poor repair. She had not flown for a hundred thousand years.

  During the Reduction, all these ships had ferried refugees to Earth and her sister planets, as well as to the orbiting web planes, spiral ribbons, and shells set twisting and spinning around the renewed sun. They had carried back to Earth survivors of the Chaos’s desolation, a pitiful fraction of our cosmos’s former glory.

  Dealings in my youth with a diversity of Mender ship clans and the more rooted portal clans had taught me the ways of all transport, some outmoded and even then becoming impossible as the Chaos altered the fine anatomy of the cosmos—the swifting ways by which travelers flew.

  I found my crew among young rebels, deviant Shapers and Menders. In contests, I tested and winnowed from the thousands who volunteered.

  And chose my twenty-five, about to become philosopher-adventurers all.

  All past science had to be adapted, or abandoned, to get around the Typhonic perversions. Nearly all hyperdetics and means of communication and transport were blocked. Superluminosity, transfate reassembly, dark-mass portals—the technologies of almost a hundred trillion years no longer carried us across the cosmos. Only one reliable engine of spatial motion remained—bosonic threadfold, itself rumored to be Shen in origin.

  We converted the Intensity to threadfold. By itself, the method puts tremendous strain on any crew, for you do not arrive what you started out being—whatever your matter. Fates curl back, traits and lives mix—for a time, the crew becomes the ship, and then the journey, and later, it is difficult to rebuild what once you were.

  We would become intimate in ways none could foresee. We accepted this. It was better—to our way of thinking, a unanimity among the perversely disagreeable—than becoming noötic.

  And so we departed the ports of Earth.

  Familiar to all is our passage through the realm of the Spectrals, who first learned to recharge, train, and breed galaxies.

  Displayed along the inward-closing membrane of the Chaos, the last of the Spectrals had been enslaved by the Typhon, studied—if that is the correct word—and then vitrified: trapped in a slow, constricted bosonic glaze across millions of light-years while their boundaries were dissolved—an awful end for one-time masters, to whom the Trillennium owes its very existence.

  Less familiar because less clearly explainable, even by those of us who were there, were our encounters with the enigmachrons, where fifth-dimensional fates lie spread out like thin bones beneath the rotting flesh of space-time. The Intensity found itself caught in a swirling storm of dead futures, tiny whirlpools of despair and repetition, and four of our crew lived horrible lives in scant hours before our eyes, aged in misery, mercifully died—and could not be revived by any recourse to ship memory. Some of their names remain forgotten—their fates erased even back to the Earth.

  The Shen, it seems, had accepted their destiny with maddening calm. As we were welcomed to the sixty green suns—and as we were shriven of our Chaotic taints, cured and reborn in ways that both agonized and refreshed in the old, simple, cold stone rooms of the Final School, we met with Polybiblios, a simple figure, plainly made, unusually small for a Deva.

  Among the Shen he had become known as Curiosity embodied.

  The Shen exemplified in all their ways and histories the exalting humility of correcting error, and followed in all their days the smoothly prickled course of knowing one’s blind stupidity. Polybiblios had been among them for a million years, had watched them react—or not react—to the harrowing of the Chaos. When presented with our case, he consulted his Shen teachers, and without ceremony they prepared to cast him out, after a brief, enigmatic explanation. “You will create more error and more confusion,” they told him. “We cannot allow you to remain on the necklace-worlds, beneath the Green Suns. All should end soon, but because of you it will not. Cosmos will follow upon cosmos, challenge upon challenge, out of any thinkable sequence, but forever and ever nonetheless—for you will misuse what we have taught you. And so it must be. For we are again in error. Perfection is death. For us, that is good—but you reject our purity.”

  Even so, they allowed Polybiblios to keep what he had sought for so long, their last and greatest discovery: the secrets of budding minicosms from the quantum foam, finite but incomprehensibly vast seed-sets of new universes.

  “I can leave now,” Polybiblios said, and briefly bowed his head and laughed in Shen-like acknowledgment of his joyful grief.

  Our return took us through regions briefly unveiled by the Chaos’s cruel recession, the Typhon proudly pulling back its cloak, leaving nakedly visible and scattered over the withered geodesics those systems and civilizations that had not retreated eons before. Billions of contorted suns—the great human fields of the Trillennium—lay across the darkness like embers of burning lace. Signals from these regions came to the Intensity, difficult to translate, but when Polybiblios—against our experienced recommendation—analyzed them, we saw once more how deep and perverse the Typhon’s ruin could be. To the poor monstrosities surviving in these corrupted regions, the roots and laws of former nature still seemed consistent. They still believed a future lay before them, and reasoned that we were the monsters to be hunted and destroyed.

  Perhaps we were.

  We doubted everything.

  Our threadfold engines faltered—the Chaos gnawed at the last technique we could use to spend less than eternity on our return to Earth. Polybiblios applied all his Shen learning, and we proceeded in a dreaming bubble squeezed out of the necrotic flesh of the cosmos, defying predatory shreds that whipped out, breeding insanity and mutation even within our isolation—and forcing us to kill nine more of our crew.

  The twisting corridor of our passage, the last geodetic of the old cosmos, constricted tight.

  We gave up whatever hope remained.

  I entered my own darkness, defeated, maimed in my soul.

  But Polybiblios, with his quiet, steady way, saved us. His unceasing ministrations to the Intensity pulled us through. We awakened cruising through clean space, alive, saner than we had been for long years—surrounded by our ship’s humming regularities.

  We neared Earth’s sun.

  Our rescued Deva, who had rescued us in return, celebrated the passing of his masters and teachers, the Shen. We stood with him and listened to his words, though they meant little to us at the time, and even seemed to contradict what we had learned before.

  “They will not give in to the Typhon,” he explained. “Nor will they commit suicide. They will reverse their genesis, and return themselves to the libraries from which they were patterned—never to be retrieved by any intelligence, in this or any subsequent cosmos.

  “For they have made a pact with the handmaiden of creation, who reconciles all.”

  Perhaps he referred to himself more than the Shen. Poor Shen!

  After this, Polybiblios retreated into contemplation as we entered the last open gate to our legacy system, returning to the ports of ancient Earth—and mourned our dead, those we could remember.

  Tiadba closed the book and thrust it back into the bag.

  “That’s Sangmer talking again, isn’t it?” Frinna asked. “He doesn’t mention the female, the one on the silvery beach.”

  “Maybe she’s part of the secret,” Macht said. “Maybe she’s that handmaiden.”

  “No, she became his wife,” Herza said.

  Shewel pulled his ear and rolled over.

  “How many times did he write this story?” Nico as
ked.

  CHAPTER 90

  * * *

  “The Defenders won’t last much longer,” Polybiblios said as the three marched through the pitchy, uneven middle zone. The snaggled line of remaining obelisks diminished into darkness on either side, spinning fitfully. The nearest leaned and groaned and sparked under the long night.

  The epitome’s armor made halfhearted attempts to fit but had been fashioned for a breed and did not seem in the mood to adapt. Polybiblios walked at first with a jerking, puffing gait, until, in frustration, the suit seemed to take control and march him, and finally he squatted beside a heave of dark reddish stone and looked at his companions through the fogged faceplate with a reasonable simulation of perplexity. “I designed these. I should know how to use them.”

  “What else don’t you know?” Ghentun asked, in no mood to pause—or to be generous to a former Eidolon.

  “Oh, much, no doubt,” Polybiblios murmured, then concentrated on pushing at the suit’s joints, poking, tugging, muttering some more, and finally requesting their help. “Push this here…and this segment, pull it out, there.”

  From both sides, Jebrassy and Ghentun grabbed at his arms and legs, then pushed and tugged until the suit glowed green at the joints and sighed around the epitome’s slight form, fitting as well as it was going to.

  “At least now I can walk,” Ploybiblios said, standing and shaking out his arms and legs. “Well, let’s move away from here—this place is dangerous.”

  “How much longer?” Jebrassy asked.

  “Until we’re in the Chaos—or until the Kalpa dies its inevitable and horrid death?”

  “That,” Jebrassy said, swallowing.

  “It should have happened already,” Polybiblios said. “The Typhon has failed at building a foundation of rules. It exists only as a foul shadow, a catalog of thefts from the old cosmos. If it absorbs the last bit of our world, it might simply—pop!—cease to exist. Everything will go to nullity. If we fail…well, there is no word for what nullity does or does not do.”