City At The End Of Time (10 page)

Grabbing, piercing, and burning, then scurrying back into the hollowness. Tiadba curled. If she curled tight enough, perhaps she would simply fold into herself and vanish. Anything could happen here.

She opened her eyes long enough to lift her hand, crusted over by dried blood. Bits of glove—shreds of dead armor that no longer protected or spoke—tried to glimmer on her fingers. But memory and betrayal pushed the shreds apart, finished the task of peeling them away, leaving her totally naked. All were naked.

She could not tell how long it had been before she was lifted and her eyes were brushed clear. She blinked at the immensity of gloom and shadow and dust.

She stood or had been propped stiffly on what might have been the side of a hill under a great canopy. The limits of the canopy seemed to waver, to rise and fall, uncertain not just in color or brightness, but also in distance and dimension. Still, something was arriving, something coming near promised to give what she was seeing proportion and perspective.

Something—or someone.

“Hello, crèche-born.”

Drops of cool, soothing liquid fell into her eyes and then froze them in place—to stare unblinking at a triangle of unformed whiteness.

A cool, crystalline voice of immense beauty and sadness whirled up and lay on the porches of her ears, then introduced itself word by word, languid, stroking. The words filled her ears and caused a dull, stretching pain.

“I compelled Shapers and Menders to make you. Do you know me?”

The shape within the triangular cloud coalesced. Above the middle arrived a face—well-shaped, eyes large and deep—beautiful and sad and commanding. An emotion rose, swelling within Tiadba:
deep
recognition, built into her at birth, ordained for all her kind ages before. She suddenly wanted to feel glad. This was reunion, what should have been a time of joy. “I know you,” she said.

“And I know you. I am proud, young breed. You are rich with dream. You have brought time forward…as you were designed to do. But now your connection with what has gone before is a curse. There is only turmoil and torment to come. But in this, our last moment of peace, I am allowed to ask one question of all who are brought here. That is
my
torture—an instant of anticipation and hope.”

Tiadba tried to see more clearly the dazzling white face like softly mobile stone, malleable outlines surrounded by other pieces whirling up and falling back again on chill, dust-laden wafts. The face drew close.

Tiadba tried to pull back—shrink away.

“Do you know what has become of Sangmer, called the Pilgrim?”

The voice, so close to Tiadba’s face, carried no hint of breath or moving air—but a strange sweetness surrounded her all the same in that sensual desolation.

Tiadba felt a stinging shock. She thought of lying beside Jebrassy on the bed, making love and trying to riddle the ancient stories…of moments in the Chaos, reading from the ever-changing books to soothe and inform the marchers—but there had never been a conclusion to those stories, and the words were often obscure.

However, before this cold, frightening beauty, Tiadba could not help but offer hope. “I might have seen him. Maybe I wouldn’t know,” she said, lips numbing even as she spoke. “Tell me what he looks like.”

“I don’t
remember
.” Sadness and zeroing cold fogged between them. “No time remains, no time at all…” Words like falling and dying insects. “You have brought me nothing.”

“I’m sorry…” Tiadba searched for a word, found it in the memory of her other. “I am so sorry,
Mother.

”

“I am sorry, as well, crèche-born. You cannot know my sorrow. It would be a mercy if we both could die.”

CHAPTER 101

“We’re never going to find her,” Daniel said. “We’re crazy to even be out here.”

“Where would you have us go, young master?” Glaucous asked.

“Everything’s different,” Jack said. “It’ll keep getting more different. Maybe it will get better.”

The gap between the monstrous statues—the gap that opened into the bowl where stood the most unlikely city of all—had closed behind them as if it had never been.

“Three choices,” Glaucous said. “This is the best.”

“You said the Chalk Princess is just around the corner, right?” Daniel said. “Why doesn’t she swoop down and take us?”

Glaucous stopped. His breath pumped and hissed like a steam engine losing its push. “She’s here,” he said.

“What do you think will happen?” Daniel asked.

“She’ll release me,” Glaucous said. “No reward, no punishment. Just put me to an end. I deserve no more—and no less.”

He resumed walking like a long-suffering beast.

Daniel could hardly breathe. A feeling of heaviness, and compression, like bricks on his chest…he tried to understand what was going on in terms of physics but only made a bad job of it. “Vacuum energy heading back up toward zero,” he muttered. “Higgs field collapsing. Too small.”

“What?” Jack asked.

“Nothing. We’re lost.”

It did look as if they were out of options.

The land had never made sense. Now it was little more than a succession of silhouettes, trains and trails of pointless shadow. They had long since passed out of the neighborhoods of compressed and crunched history, through mad playgrounds of whatever passed for time outside their bubble—and now they were simply nowhere.

Fortunately, that nowhere was becoming smaller.

Daniel faced them. “The stones still tug. There’s still direction.”

Jack shook his head and took the lead.

They still had up and down, forward but not back, a kind of sideways…the limited movement a blessing in territory otherwise devoid of any particular quality. There was no going back and starting over. Something would not allow it.

“Whole numbers,” Daniel said.

Jack walked into deeper shadow. For a moment Glaucous and Daniel almost lost sight of him, just two or three steps ahead.

“Jack!” Daniel called.

They caught up. Glaucous chuffed and staggered.

“You’re a whole number,” Daniel said. “An integer.”

“Whatever,” Jack said. His fingers tightened on the stone.

“Your call number,” Daniel said. “However long it is, it’s an integer—it’s not irrational, and it’s not infinite.”

“We always ask for their numbers,” Glaucous affirmed, looking between them. “Not that we know what we’re asking for. Too long to speak aloud, all folded into trick paper. First seventy-five digits crucial, however.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong in any library. Books make me uncomfortable. I don’t have a call number. Never did have a folded piece of paper. Or if I do, it’s not an integer—it’s irrational. I don’t have a story. That’s why you didn’t hunt me.”

“Interesting,” Glaucous said.

“I’ve had a long time to think it through,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong. Someone or something sent me back, stuck me there, but I just don’t fit.”

Jack disappeared into the murk.

Again, something spun all around them—the vanes of a gyroscope—and faded.

“Slow down!” Daniel called.

CHAPTER 102

It took Jebrassy a while to realize that he could no longer see or hear the others. He paused and waited. Drifts of sharp grit slid over the rippled black rock. The ripples had grown deeper—they were now channels in a curved maze that stretched to either side as far as he could see. Ahead, the edges of the ripples had risen up, curled over, and joined—creating a low wall of tunnel entrances, and beyond that, another higher rank, and still more beyond them.

He sat on the rim of a channel and waited some more, but neither Ghentun nor Polybiblios seemed anywhere near. Maybe they had gotten in front of him and already entered the holes. He could not wait. This might be another kind of trap—an eternity of indecision. Tiadba was still waiting. He made up his mind to try one of the closest entrances. Only when he was some distance in, stooped, did he think that now that he was committed, the tunnel might be blocked ahead, and if he turned around, it would be blocked behind. It caused a moment of terror—he ran and pushed deeper into the tunnel, wanting to get it over with, to learn for sure that he was trapped, finally and irrevocably. But nothing in the Chaos ever repeated itself, or was ever what he anticipated. The tunnel continued, growing a little in girth, and finally debouched into a larger space; how much larger, he couldn’t tell, even after his eyes had cleared of sweat.

Jebrassy stood at the edge of an interior volume so large he could not see the other side. The only way he could know there was a roof was that the flaming arc was not visible, nor the ice mountain, nor the seethe of the shrinking sky.

Tentative, he stepped away from the wall of tunnel exits. Dimly, larger objects took on detail, then smaller. He seemed to be surrounded by immense piles of things he could not identify—huge spheres strung on massive cables, smooth but dusty round lumps rising from the ground between the spheres—more spheres perhaps, half buried—and jagged parts of things that were almost certainly manufactured but looked as if they had been treated badly—dropped, shattered, and then piled up. Discarded.

He approached one of the suspended spheres, many hundreds of feet in diameter and floating no more than a breed’s height above the floor—and reached out with his gloved fingers—only to be pushed back. The longer he looked, the more he saw on the sphere’s surface, until he realized he was looking at a
place,
a planet, highly developed, covered with cities, roads, things he could not identify—outside even his dream experiences.

He turned slowly, wondering how these spheres and heaps had come to be brought here. Everywhere, the lost and discarded. He was beginning to think the Chaos was actually a giant litter bin. Determined to keep a line of retreat in sight—if you could still see things, and kept them in periodic view, they didn’t go away as often—he ventured farther into the rubble.

Polybiblios was waiting for him, sitting on a low wall that divided several larger and taller piles. “Good to see you,” the epitome said. “I was beginning to think I had lost my companions.”

“Where’s the Keeper?” Jebrassy asked.

“Somewhere back there. It’s humiliating, how much of a puzzle this is. A wasteland of failed efforts. Consider all these worlds, stored here like shrunken heads in a dusty box. But I might have found something—or someone—more interesting.”

He gestured for Jebrassy to follow. With some misgivings, he did so. Was it possible, having lost sight of the epitome, that a duplicate might have been conjured up, completely different?

“I’ve spent a pretty long while exploring this space,” the epitome said. “Making maps and then adjusting them for changes—not as many changes here as outside, interestingly. Something seemed to want to keep track of whatever is piled up here. Including…this.”

They came to a glassy wall. Embedded within the wall, near the surface, was a figure roughly shaped like Jebrassy—but larger, more robust. He wore no armor and a very different style of clothing than that found in the Tiers.

Farther along, other figures—some much the same, others very different—also lay embedded, caught in moments of shock or anger or surprise. Jebrassy walked from one to the next, then put his gloved hand up against the smooth surface.

“A fate mire, I believe,” Polybiblios said.

“What’s that?”

“Not so easy to conceive of, but perhaps you’ve had enough preparation and training. Tell me what your instincts say.”

“They’re all like my visitor,” Jebrassy said, thinking so hard—and feeling so many strange emotions—that his head hurt. “But there’s too many of them.”

“Definitely ancient forms,” Polybiblios said. “If we had been able to access these when we were designing the breeds, we might have done better. Though they do differ in significant respects.”

Jebrassy saw no signs of life in the embedded figures. “They’re from the past?”

“Many pasts, more likely. How they got here—that’s harder to conceive. I wonder if my full Eidolon self could solve the riddle. At any rate, that one there…Get closer—hold up your hand. Make as if to touch it through the transparency.”

Jebrassy stepped up to the body closest to the shining surface and rubbed his glove against the smoothness. Thin bright ribbons of blue light—hundreds, then thousands of them—curled between the outstretched fingers and his own, penetrating his glove. He could feel a tickle, a slight shock, moving up his arm.

“Dreamers, all of them,” Polybiblios said. “The same matter—in large part—from many times and many different branches of fate, eager to be rejoined.”

“We’re made of the same stuff?”

“I’d say so. Entangled atoms are reacquainting, exchanging particles of entrainment, which leave photonic traces—faster than the fastest velocity possible in the Chaos. Or anywhere else, now.”

“Then none of the visitors have survived? We’ve failed?”

“Where is that Keeper? He might be able to help us judge the extent of this collection.”

“There are so many—I don’t think I’ve dreamed about all of them.”

“Part of my plan was that shepherds and sum-runners would evolve together. But remember, there used to be many world-lines, many pathways leading to the Kalpa. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your visitor has failed to make a connection with you many times before now. Just as marchers have been snared and trapped out in the Chaos. Now the pathways are limited to two. There may be just one opportunity left.”

“Does that mean
you’ve
come out here thousands of times before, and failed?” Jebrassy asked.

“Excellent question. Would it even be possible to remember?” The epitome considered this problem with apparent relish, then smoothed his face and said, “Most unlikely. This is my first and only path.”

Jebrassy again spread his hand close to the fingers of the embedded other. The ribbons of blue continued to pass. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “It’s almost pleasant.”

Polybiblios pulled him away. “That’s enough. We don’t want to entrain you with the lost. We need to find the one that is still free, still alive…or arrive at a place where he can find
you.
I doubt very much he would be here.”