City at the End of Time

  “Then why bother?”

  “Curiosity. Guilt.” Ghentun made a short grumble—Mender embarrassment, Mender humor. “Aren’t you curious what the Librarian has in store for them?”

  The Shaper simply snorted. “We could start over. Improvements are still possible.” She seemed unwilling to give up her work, however much its results, or its cruel necessity, scratched at her sympathies. “What do you think we have, a few thousand years?”

  “I doubt it,” Ghentun said. He motioned for her to return the book. Reluctantly, she did so, with finger-marks pressed into its binding. Slowly, resentfully, the book began to heal itself.

  “This is our last crop,” he said. “It’s these breeds, or nothing.”

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  First Isle

  “Do you think I’d tell a glow your secrets?” Khren asked, and from his shocked expression, Jebrassy instantly knew his friend’s guilt.

  They both lounged as casually as their present mood allowed in Khren’s niche, surrounded by colorful and meaningless prizes from the skirmish—captured pennants, two padded but heavy stravies, marked with curling leaves on which were scratched wishes for luck and strength—and a magnificent jug of tork that Khren had won in a bet on the nauvarchia.

  “What else did you blab?” Jebrassy asked. He and Khren had known each other since being delivered by the umbers, fresh out of the crèche.

  “She was curious. She asked questions. I answered. She has her ways, you know that.”

  Jebrassy narrowed his eyes and smiled. “You fancy her?”

  Khren lay back and gazed at the ceiling, irritated that this pairing might be thought unlikely. “Of course not. I’ve got my eye on another.”

  Jebrassy had yet to meet this other, or even hear her name.

  “If she were anything to me,” Khren said, “I would have told her a youth march is nonsense and dangerous besides. It’s already got you disinherited.”

  “What could I ever inherit here?” Jebrassy asked.

  “There’s nothing wrong with here,” Khren said. “We made out pretty well in the skirmish. Why fight if there’s nothing to fight for? And it looks like you attracted the attentions of a fine glow—by showing off your muscles and dealing a few good thwacks. All very intellectual and rebellious, I’m sure.”

  “We have no protection against anything the Tall Ones want to do to us. We’re toys, nothing more”

  “I prefer to think of us as experiments,” Khren said, and then shrugged, having brushed up against the zenith of his philosophical abilities.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Ancient breed, ancient quality. If we’re experiments, we’ll exceed all the others, and they’ll reward us for our courage by liberating the Tiers. Then, we can go anywhere we like—even the Chaos, if that’s worth a visit. And nobody knows if it is.”

  “It is,” Jebrassy said. “I’m sure of it. I’ve got my sources…”

  Khren lifted his small ears, showing mild amusement. “So learned.”

  “Well, I do.” Jebrassy had worked his way around to the second point of contention. “Why did you have to tell her about my straying?”

  “I didn’t volunteer. She asked—as if she knew already. She’s very persuasive.” His voice fell off and he gave Jebrassy as lewd and suggestive a glance as his broad, chiseled face allowed.

  “Unlike me, she still has sponsors,” Jebrassy said. “I doubt she’ll talk with either of us again.”

  “Ah.” Khren got up and poured himself another tumbler, then flumped back into the cushions—without spilling a drop—and examined the color of his drink in the warm light of the ceiling.

  “I don’t need a partner,” Jebrassy said. “I need to get out of here and see how things really are, beyond the gates.”

  “You haven’t seen the gates,” Khren said. “You can’t even describe them—all that out there is just empty words and names. Even if you believe the stories, nobody’s ever gotten that far and come back to tell, and that says something.”

  “What?” Jebrassy said. “If we shame the wardens, and they tattle to the officers, those who escape the Tiers but get caught are handed over to the Bleak Warden? Or put in cages for the Tall Ones to enjoy?”

  “That sounds pretty cruel even for Tall Ones,” Khren said.

  “I hate being ignorant! I want to see things, new things. I hate being taken care of.”

  With this outburst, the air between them settled a little and Khren returned to his accustomed role—of being a sounding board. In truth, Khren found Jebrassy’s plans intriguing—he regarded them with a fascinated mock horror, as if, having played them over in his own mind, he had reached an impasse—a wall beyond which he could not foresee making any personal decisions. Khren at times seemed unwilling to believe that these plans meant any more to Jebrassy than they did to him—intriguing but empty talk.

  “What did your visitor leave behind the last time?” Khren asked, savoring a final drib of tork. Jebrassy had kept his friend company in drink through two previous tumblers, but no more—he needed a clear head for tomorrow. For the meeting he knew couldn’t possibly happen.

  “He’s a fool,” Jebrassy muttered. “Helpless. He knows nothing. An aaarp.” He belched to emphasize that degraded status. The concept of insanity did not exist among the ancient breed. Eccentricity, whims, and extremes of personality, yes, but insanity was not part of their mix, and therefore no one accused another of having lost touch with reality—except as a vague concept, an uncomfortable joke—suitable for belching.

  “Well, did he tell you anything more?”

  “I wasn’t there. When he comes, I go. You know that.”

  “The drawings on the shake cloth.”

  “They never make sense.”

  “Maybe your visitor has met her visitor, and that’s how she knows so much about you.”

  “You’ve talked with him. You know him better than I do,” Jebrassy said, slumping deeper into the cushions.

  “You—he—could barely talk at all,” Khren said. “He looked in my mirror and made sounds. He said something like, ‘They got it all wrong!’—except slurred. Then he—you, your visitor—just stumbled over and sat right where you are now, and closed his eyes—your eyes—until he went away.”

  Khren waggled his finger. “If that’s what straying is all about—better you than me, mate.”

  TEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  Seattle, South Downtown

  To pass the long gray time, as the rain patted and blew against the skylight over the shadowy, high-ceilinged room, Virginia Carol—Ginny to her friends—paged through a thick, sturdy volume called The Gargoyles of Oxford, by Professor J. G. Goyle, published in 1934. And was Professor Goyle’s middle name Garth, or just plain Gar?

  The remains of a half-eaten sandwich, still in its waxy wrapper, awaited her attention on the bare brass table beside a high-backed reading chair. She had been hiding in the green warehouse for two weeks, waiting for an explanation that never seemed to come. Her fright had faded, but now she was growing bored—something that two weeks ago she would never have thought possible.

  The pictures in the gargoyle book were amusing—leering, perverse figures designed, scholars said, to scare off evil spirits—but what caught her eye was a grainy photo embedded in a chapter on the university town’s older buildings. On the inside of a stone parapet high in a clock tower, someone had clearly incised, in proper schoolboy Roman majuscule, cutting through a centuries-old black crust of grime and soot:

  DREAMEST THOU OF A CITIE AT THE END OF TYME?

  And beneath that, 1685. Another inscription below the date, presumably a name or address, had been vigorously scratched out, leaving a pale brown blotch.

  Conan Arthur Bidewell pushed through the door at the far end of the room, carrying more books to be returned to the high wooden shelves. He observed her choice of reading. “That’s a real one—not one of my odditie
s, Miss Carol,” he said. “But it does reflect unpleasant truths.” His cheeks were sunken and thin wisps of hair covered a leathery, shiny pate. He resembled a well-preserved mummy, or one of those people found in bogs. That’s it, Ginny thought. And yet—he’s not exactly ugly.

  She showed him the picture. “It’s like the ad in the newspaper.”

  “So it is,” Bidewell said.

  “This has been going on for centuries,” she said.

  He peered through his tiny glasses. “Far longer than that.” Under his arm he carried two folded newspapers—The Stranger and The Seattle Weekly. He laid them out on the reading table. One paper was a week old, the other from the day before. Sticky tabs marked ads in the classifieds. The ads were almost identical.

  Do you dream of a city at the end of time?

  There are answers. Call—

  Only the phone numbers were different.

  “Same people?” she asked.

  “Not to be known. Though in our neighborhood, I believe where once there were two, there is now only one. But soon there will be more.” Bidewell stretched and cracked the knuckles of his free hand, then ascended a tall ladder that rolled along a high, horizontal track fastened to the cases. The track extended over doors and a boarded-up window, all the way around the room. Bidewell replaced the books he had been studying, his thick corduroy pants hissing as he bent and straightened his spindly legs.

  “They’ve been looking for people like me, all this time? They would have to be very old,” Ginny said.

  “Some still survive and do their work, if we should call it that. There are so many foul currents in these young, deep waters. Were you followed here?”

  Perhaps deliberately, he had not asked this question until now. Whatever his peculiarities, Bidewell seemed sensitive to her fears.

  Ginny still did not want to remember the Mercedes, the coin-tossing man, the burning woman. “I think so,” she said quietly. “Maybe.”

  “Mmm.” Bidewell finished fitting the books back into their gaps and descended the ladder, making small chuck-chuck sounds with lips and cheeks. From the last rung, he glanced over his shoulder and squinted at the broad milk-glass globe light hanging from a bronze ceiling fixture. “I should be changing out those bulbs, shouldn’t I?”

  “The ones who place the ads, who scratched this…” She tapped the picture from Oxford. “Are they human?”

  Bidewell nodded quickly, like a bird. “That particular inscription was carved by a schoolboy, on the dare of another schoolboy…who was paid by an older man. But to answer your question, most are human—yes.”

  “Why don’t they die?”

  “They have been touched,” he said. “Their lives improbably extended. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be obscure.”

  Ginny was still not clear on these details—not even clear on whether she would just leave Bidewell’s warehouse, abandon any hope of explanations—in due time, in due time—and take her chances outside.

  At the age of sixteen, Ginny had begun to experience periods of abstraction. When walking, riding on a bus, or just before sleep, she would lose a snip of time and memory. After these lapses, she sometimes experienced a lightness of heart, a sense of returned affection not otherwise found in her erratic adolescence. Other times she felt a suffocating sense of dread, of loss—along with a bad smell of something beyond burning, and a gritty, dusty, bitter taste of something beyond decay.

  At the same time, she became aware that she could will herself into different situations—though her efforts often seemed to backfire. Since losing her family, Ginny had persisted in making wrong moves—as if determined, at any fork in the road, to take the wrong path.

  Never quite certain how she accomplished any of this, she began to read books about parallel worlds—and found them fascinating but unsatisfying. She did what she did, but still without explanation as to why and how she could do it.

  She had told no one about her ability—until Bidewell took her in. Only last week, listening to her story, for once the old man had opened up enough to render an opinion. “Sounds very like someone lost, enslaved, in the Chaos. Whatever that may be, not to be known, not to be known.”

  He had pinched his lips between two thin fingers and reiterated several times that he could only guess, he was no expert.

  Exasperating man.

  “What do you know, Mr. Bidewell?” Ginny blurted, slamming shut the heavy book. The clap echoed from the ceiling.

  “Call me Conan, please,” Bidewell encouraged. “My father was Mr. Bidewell.”

  “And how old was he when you were born?”

  “Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.

  “And how old are you?”

  “One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”

  “Years?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself. “Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Ginny—volume twelve of the complete works of David Copperfield. The Dickens character, you see—who was actually a writer. Not the magician—though it would be interesting to meet him, sometime. I wonder what his dreams are like? A few choice questions…My dear, if you have time, could you check for a small fault on Chapter 103? This print is tiny, and my eyes are not what they used to be.”

  He held out the book.

  Ginny stood and took it from Bidewell’s outstretched, gnarled hand. She was tiring of this constantly mutating nonsense—how could fictional characters write a book, much less fill a set of twelve or more volumes?—yet she felt safe here. A bitter contradiction.

  She remembered when Bidewell had first lightly clasped her fingers, welcoming her to the warehouse and provoking—at once—a shudder and an odd sense of comfort.

  “What sort of fault?” she asked.

  “Anything, really—a typo, misspelling, lacunae, rivering. We must note the fault—but we must not make any corrections, or try to hide the apparent defects. They could be more important than thou canst know, young lady, to that Citie. Whatever and wherever that Citie may be.”

  Another week passed, and Ginny’s restlessness grew. She could feel the foul currents Bidewell had spoken of—and something even more alarming. The river up ahead—her river—seemed to come to an abrupt end. She could not tell how far ahead—weeks, months, a year. But beyond that—nothing. Bidewell refused to tell her more, and most of their conversations ended with his crackling, “Not to be known, not to be known!”

  Bidewell’s warehouse was home to over 300,000 books. Ginny estimated the numbers on the shelves by quick count, and the numbers in the boxes by quicker calculation. Besides the two of them, seven cats called the warehouse home, all polydactyl—with many toes, and two with what appeared to be little thumbs.

  These two were black and white. The smaller, a young male just out of kittenhood, silently padded up to her as she sorted and read, and rubbed against her ankles until she picked him up, placed him on her lap, and stroked him. Warm and loose-rubbery beneath soft fur, with a blaze on his chest and one white paw, he purred approval until she stopped, then leaned up on her chest and tapped her chin with a wide paw. She felt a light pinch.

  He would not share any of her sandwich when she offered a bite, but instead, as a kind of hint or example, lay at the foot of her bed that night an intact but very dead mouse. All the cats were independent, and seldom responded to her chit-chits and here-kitties, but during the long nights, she would find one or two or sometimes three on the end of her cot, feet curled under, eyes slitty, watching her with warm, rumbling contentment. They seemed to approve of Bidewell’s new visitor.

  The cats, of course, were essential to the safety of the warehouse. Bidewell did not consider m
ouse-nibble edits at all helpful.

  Time passed a little quicker after she met the cats. Curled one after another on her lap, they even made up for Bidewell’s suggested reading list: he put aside, near her worktable, a stack of books on mathematics, physics, and several texts on Hindu mythology. Three of the books on physics seemed more advanced than she thought science had progressed so far, discussing faster-than-light travel as if it were a fact, for example, or detailing five-dimensional slices and cross sections of fates in space-time.

  Next to these he placed five books with mostly blank pages—which he referred to as “culls.” Ginny examined the culls carefully and discovered that each had one letter printed on one page, and nothing more—page after page of pristine blankness.

  Whatever mysterious things happened in libraries and bookstores and among the stacked boxes in publishers’ warehouses, it seemed that the mostly blank books were least interesting to Bidewell. “They are at best nulls, voids, spaces between keys. At worst, they are distractions. You may use them for your diary or as notebooks,” he said, and then glanced at the other stack. “Those are for your education, such as it must be, and limited as we are.”

  “Are they defective, too?” she asked. “Should I look for the errors and mark them?”

  “No,” Bidewell said. “Their errors are natural, and unavoidable—the errors of ignorance and youth.”

  Ginny, in her few years of formal schooling, had always enjoyed math and science—coming to an easy understanding of problems that bewildered her classmates—but had never thought of herself as any kind of nerd. “I’d prefer a television or a computer with an Internet connection,” she said.

  Bidewell shuddered violently. “The Internet is a frightful prospect. All the world’s texts…all the world’s hapless opinions and lies and errors, mutating endlessly, and why? Who can ever keep track or know? It is not the incredible magnitude of human folly that interests me, dear Virginia.”