“I’ve dreamed about you,” he says. “You’re name is…” His lips and tongue struggle. “Catth.”
The creature slowly walks around him, inspecting, and then runs off. Not what it was looking for, apparently.
Jebrassy stands up wearing only the clothes he had with him when he left the Kalpa. The ice is cold under his feet. Everything is exceptionally cold. Worse, he feels his weight diminish. This makes him queasy. He hopes everything won’t just drift up and float away.
But he doesn’t know why it shouldn’t. Obviously, the last of the old rules—imitated, remade, and finally ignored and abused—are passing.
CHAPTER 116
* * *
Jack can barely hold the stone, it’s become so hot. But he won’t let it go. It can burn his fingers to char for all he cares. Ginny will be holding hers, he knows—and what about Daniel?
Blue veins rise in the green ice, begin to cut and churn.
There are two paths—there have been only two paths for some time now, at least since he rode the bicycle on autopilot and saw the earwig in the warehouse district.
But he doesn’t know which path this is.
He’s working on autopilot again.
Seeing with other eyes.
Staring down at different feet, naked—and watching a cat walk away with its tail held high.
“Catthh,” he says, his lips numb.
CHAPTER 117
* * *
Tiadba feels almost nothing. She can no longer see her companions—they lie at the edge of her vision, black crumples of flesh and abandoned underclothes, not alive, not dead, not even asleep.
Best if they were dead.
The female presence spreads like an enveloping cloak. But there are now two presences. She can feel them both—
One is cold and frightening, crying out in the darkness, seeking her lost children only to destroy them, surrounded by this swirling prison that is more felt than seen.
And the other—ancient, filled with potential.
The prison will keep one and set the other free.
Animals brush by—sniff her naked feet, rub against her arms, then move on. They are hunting something small and weak.
“Catthh,” she says, then tries the word again. “Cats.”
CHAPTER 118
* * *
Ginny is paying so much attention to the other layer of vision and experience—lost Tiadba—that she does not feel the touch on her shoulder until it is too late.
CHAPTER 119
* * *
Whitlow comes upon the child, kneeling on the ice as if to catch her breath. She does not turn, does not hear, apparently does not see.
Delight perverse and damp gleams on his pale, wrinkled face. He stumps the last few paces. The Moth is everywhere, a gray mist radiating its own triumph.
“For our Livid Mistress,” Whitlow says matter-of-factly as he lifts the girl high with one hand. “A final delivery. Our greatest triumph.”
Glaucous agrees.
With all of his strength, he holds out his fists and plays this game as no game has ever been played, pulling a single steel thread down even through the whirling of the spheres—and with the greatest of grunts, the grunt of birth and death and voiding, the grunt of victory and defeat and infinite pain, this squat gnome, hunter of birds, gambler’s friend, hunter of children, inverts Whitlow, not just his heart but his insides—liver and lights, blood and ouns.
Through the messy cloud, heedless of the thin wail of the dissipating Moth—Whitlow was always his ground and root—Glaucous reaches out to grasp the girl before she simply flies away.
He has pulled down as much of this chosen cord of fate as he can: penance and game, set and match. This is the greatest thing he has ever done, and almost his last—almost.
The fate he has grasped and pulled forward is not a good one, not for him. He knew that from the moment he saw it, near the Crux. He sets the girl upon the ice, oblivious—still seeing with other eyes. “You’re welcome,” he mutters to no one, then crosses himself—an old habit—and kneels beside her.
As the avengers approach, Glaucous uses his thick, ugly hand to gently push her aside.
The wave of cats breaks over him. He is their first prey. Only right, he thinks—one terror of birds to another. Glaucous curls like a hopeless child and with all his remaining will tries not to add to the screaming. His blood spurts onto the ice. The gray tide moves on before he is finished, but the darkness closes in as his pain is chilled and pinched into a single, drawn-out throb.
Something else is about to die.
The cats have found other, more important prey.
CHAPTER 120
* * *
The Typhon knows neither time nor space. It exists without thought in a condensed shapelessness, smaller than the smallest imaginable point. In most ways, it can be described—much as we might describe the muses or Brahma—only by negatives: not this, not that.
But let us simplify things and use human words, ascribing such motives, activities, and emotions as are familiar to humans—much easier to convey, however incorrect.
When the Typhon first became aware of our aging cosmos, it sensed vacancy—and opportunity. The old cosmos had few defenses. Its observers were many but scattered across an immense and thin geometry, worn by long and decadent eons. Like a great tree that falls in a forest, lives on for a while, then slowly leaks away its sap and its will, the cosmos’s heartwood was beginning to crumble.
The Typhon was young, as timeless things go, and untried. Even the smallest, most formless aspirant to rule must prove its quality. This was its chance to take root like a seed falling onto a nursery log. It would rise above the dying realm and grow—and grow—to full nobility.
To Godhead.
It did not expect resistance. This was its flaw. It did not know how to use and incorporate confrontation and defiance, necessary skills for any god. The push back of creation—the freedom of unbridled will—engenders love.
Not for the Typhon. Whenever it encountered things that saw differently, it ended them—with great fear and loathing.
And then with something like amusement.
It enjoyed hating, and there was nothing to stop it—for many trillions of years.
It had found its quality.
But now, in all possible dimensions, conclusions are arriving, consequences are falling into place. It is no longer a young god or an infinitesimal point, everywhere and nowhere at once. It has acquired a kind of limitation, an unwanted substantiality condensing out of the ur-nothing, the monobloc beneath all possible creations—rising out of the smallest virtual foam of the tiniest imaginable volume of vacuum.
The Typhon acquires dimension and shape—it becomes bloated and sprawled. In its awful, pointless passion for deconstruction and destruction, it finally loses whatever focus it might once have applied to its whims or tasks at hand.
The overextended cosmos—the old, crumbling nurse log—has deteriorated to such a degree that it has turned into a trap. The blades of Brahma’s armillary spin. It is now a very bad place for a bloated, undisciplined god.
All the Typhon can do is flail within the whirling prison, using up the last of its strength to cause more suffering and frustrate any possibility of good outcome. It has stretched its contamination backward across time, perverting creation, causing endless cycles of directionless pain. It is now pressing our cosmos toward a nasty end, dissolving space and time back to the beginning—eating away and corrupting almost everything we could ever possibly know.
We might speculate about what would have happened to the Typhon in more fortunate circumstances. Perhaps we should extend pity, those of us who have felt its corrosive touch—every one of us.
The bad that traveled from the future, not from the past.
Final sin.
But we are inadequate to such speculations. We are inadequate to feel pity for a failed god.
And so—
Let’s not. Let’s no
t feel pity.
The Typhon—formerly without thought or viscera, without conscience or sympathy—realizes that its puffy carcass can now feel. What it feels is a kind of apprehension—even fear. It is no longer more powerful than those it once crushed.
It has become a small, brownish-gray thing, lying in the center of the last of the universe like a metaphysical abortion, pitiful but for its history. And soon there will be no history. No trace of its works, its conclusions.
What it had done its very utmost to stop, to prevent, is advancing. Even the tools it forged across eternity are turning against it. It can feel the last two threads, swirling and twining and trying to cancel, competing and summing against all the Typhon’s efforts.
One of those threads is finally dissolved.
The Typhon experiences another unfamiliar emotion.
A dire, dreadful sense of hope.
Only one thread will survive. And that in itself is not a healthy condition for any cosmos.
The Typhon may pass into true nothingness, but it will at least have the satisfaction of taking every last observer with it—blinding forever those outrageous eyes.
No more memories.
No more stories.
No more.
CHAPTER 121
* * *
Jack sees Ginny half swimming through the snow and fog and the rising chunks of ice, toward the blue gleam. With supreme effort, propelling along this last cord of fate, all the other possibilities being pinched and cut to pieces by the armillary shell, he catches up with her. The stone helps—a little.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” She glances at him. “Watch out for the cats. They look pretty mad.”
“Yeah—didn’t think I’d make it.”
“Thought you’d forget about me,” she says.
“Never.”
She reaches out, he reaches out, their hands meet, and then they hug and feel their combined warmth, and something joins them together—far sexier than anything either has experienced—and gives them strength. The sum-runners clink against each other, squeezing their fingers between them, and then separate with a reddish flare.
“We need at least three,” she says. “I remember that much.”
“If the third one isn’t here, we lose everything—right?”
“I guess so. Who’s that?” Ginny asks, pointing at another shape in the fog.
CHAPTER 122
* * *
Jebrassy has come to the edge of the brilliant blueness, naked and shivering, his feet and lower legs frozen into stumps. Two tall people—he assumes they are people, mostly enclosed in fog and snow—approach. One reaches down to lift him up by his armpits.
They are tall but not Tall Ones—not like Ghentun. He stares through the greenish storm into a familiar face, and then another. He sees himself through the other, and allows the other to see him, but actually it’s very hard to see anything at all. Constant streams of blue light shoot between them, obscuring outlines but igniting an even greater sense of renewed will—perhaps even energy.
They’re speaking but their words are difficult to understand. So he offers up all he has, like a child gifting a toy to new friends, old acquaintances: the sculpted polyhedron with four holes.
The piece almost explodes with blue arcs.
The two bring up their own twists of rock, dim red eyes buried in the gnarls, brighter now against the blue. These must be—
The sum-runners jerk inward, lock on, and fit into the sculpted piece, which completes and fills their own puzzle twists. They have traveled across billions of years, then tumbled through a dying universe to find their way back.
But two holes remain unfilled.
Daniel walks past the gory, crystallized remains of Glaucous and Whitlow, and does not know what happened here—or whether it is still happening. He is interested now in what the cats have set upon, just a short distance away. He follows a trail of bloody paw prints steaming on the green, glassy ice.
The armillary is cinching in, the bands tightening and whirling faster. A kind of snowy fog covers his feet, his knees, and then his shoulders. The ice is crazing—rising up in chunks. He pushes through, fingers warmed by the sum-runners.
The cats are at the center, that much he thinks must be true—and for a brief instant, with a fanning of his hands, he looks down to find them hissing and scratching and biting.
The cats are killing a small squirming thing in a pit. The process is slow. The thing keeps shaping itself anew, but it can’t escape. Sizzling, steaming pieces of chewed-over theophany skitter across the ice, drawing etched curls of virtual particle-trails.
The light is failing. Daniel can hardly see. Inside, Fred is wondering how anything can exist at all. They are inside a diminishing spore of space-time, reality pushing its final push against nothingness—that which cannot be seen, thought of, spoken of.
Not this, not that, not anything.
“We’re here because we will it, and always have,” Daniel says, and that’s that.
The unpleasant shrill vibration in his head abruptly stops. The brown, twisted thing has been destroyed—shredded.
If the spore shrinks to nothing, then the death of the Typhon—Daniel is sure that’s what is down there in the tiny blur of a pit, covered with hissing cats—will mean nothing. It will not be recorded.
It will not be reconciled.
The Typhon may randomly return, unexpected, illogical, but just as real as before.
Cats push away, many with missing paws and limbs, distorted heads, burned fur, empty eyes. This deed has cost them dearly.
Daniel steps back as well. All this is very familiar—though not always with cats. The stone is tugging him away from the pit, the cats, the remains of the failed, would-be god.
Seconds tick with each swipe and whoosh of the shrinking armillary.
He reaches into his pocket. He always does this. He always passes along what he is given, to save everything that must be saved, and that ends his chances of uniting with the being he loves more than the entire world—the one he has traveled all this way to be with.
Who—or what. That was always our question, no? What could we ever be to each other?
I crossed the Chaos. The rebel city was dying—surrounded by the Typhon, betrayed by the City Prince. Despite everything, I joined her. And I did what I had to do. We agreed. I had to go back to the beginning with a piece of the Babel, the final piece—and at the Librarian’s insistence, a second, a backup against further betrayal, in case another piece was lost—
And so I flew back with the last sum-runners, and found by brute force a path into the earliest intelligences of the young cosmos.
The only shepherd who never dreams.
The bad shepherd.
Jack is there beside him, hand on his shoulder.
“Do you know what this is?” Jack asks. “I sure as hell don’t.”
“It’s a mess, that’s what it is,” Daniel says. “Take these.” And gives him the two stones. “I’m done, this time around.”
CHAPTER 123
* * *
Tiadba is in the warm embrace of someone she has never known, never met, and yet about whom she knows a great deal. How she was found in pieces around the dying cosmos, and brought by the Shen to a single place, where a brilliant thinker assembled her into a sentient form, which somehow chose to be female.
She has met the Pilgrim sent to retrieve her would-be father, and has spoken with him—and made a key decision, to become flesh and journey back to Earth. And there—
The fear and bitterness have gone—but the grief remains.
The young breed squirms in this embrace, uncomfortable, restless. Someone she knows is approaching. She only half sees what lies around her. Other eyes see from another position—and then Tiadba’s skin erupts with piercing shafts of brilliant blue.
The entire volume around her becomes a sphere of glorious, blinding blue.
Her visitor is very near.
&nb
sp; Her visitor sees—
Jebrassy!
CHAPTER 124
* * *
The armillary accelerates inward at an astonishing rate. But within instants of the end, of infinite compression, squeezing down to zero and then echoing to less than zero, and vibrating that way until all is pulverized—the metric has suddenly expanded.
Something huge is stirring.
The armillary is now miles wide, spinning much more slowly.
The lake of crushed, turbulent ice rises and cascades out in melting waves to fill this new volume.
The Chalk Princess has gone—passed away forever with the Typhon. The armillary is no longer a prison.
It is the shell of an egg.
Within, as if a breath is being held, there is waiting.
Another presence—missing or held down for ages—returns in stunned bewilderment to find herself surrounded by some of the very breeds she ordained to be made, long ago. They have found her, as they were designed to do. They have snared and brought others with them—kindred shapes of primordial matter.
As they were designed to do.
There is reunion. Her father’s goal is almost attained.
One thing remains.
She holds the tiny female breed in her naked lap like a mother and child. The breed writhes in a halo of brilliant blue, some of which leaps out in long arcs to pierce the fog, the mist.
“Have you seen the Pilgrim?” Ishanaxade again asks the breed, who barely hears.