City At The End Of Time (12 page)

With the combined skills and knowledge of Ghentun and Polybiblios, they climbed up from the hive of fate-mires and stood overlooking the center of the great bowl, under layer upon layer of collapsed shields and roof, the rubble studded with ruins, but also with crudely remade arenas, boulevards, even neighborhoods where—using the tricks of Chaos light and the concentrated cooperation of their helmets—they could make out the Typhon’s most centralized and concentrated horde of captives. Not just marchers. Those the Typhon seemed content, for the most part, to leave out in the Chaos, reenacting their failures—but representatives of all the great civilizations and reaches of human endeavor across the five hundred living galaxies.

A deathly museum.

“I have friends down there,” Polybiblios said. “I see the Typhon gathered some of the Shen. And across the lake and sea cores, up against the old gravidity forests—”

“Stop, you’re making my head hurt,” Ghentun protested.

“Enough, then. It seems that the Typhon is gathering all its trophies into one location—hoarding them. Let’s visit. In their sad condition, I doubt they’ll even notice us.”

CHAPTER 105

Despite the risks, Jack forged ahead of the others. The collapsed walls and buttresses and huge, shattered spheres of the interior of Nataraja offered a warren of passageways. The others would have to

keep up—but he was not sure he wanted them to.

He needed to find Ginny. Felt responsible—and something more. He missed her. There had never been a girl he felt at ease with. Those moments in the warehouse had been special. Something he could not have—

A center.

Glaucous could still see Daniel, but not Jack—the consequences of separating seemed less here than out in the wastes beyond this double-Dutch jumble.

He was thinking a great deal now about the old bird-catcher, the slow quelling of their catch in the dawn light as the lurching cart rumbled back through the lanes to London. The clangor of the heavy iron stars in their baskets at each jounce. The smell of bird shite a sour urgent note over the green gassiness of fresh dung and the wet, rank coal smoke pooling in the cool air. Guilt meant nothing to the hungry and the desperate—no more than to a wolf biting down on the neck of a lamb. A merciful shake, snap of the spine: food.

Businesslike arrangement.

Now he was concerned with larger things. Even as a child, Glaucous had been dimly aware that nothing was what it seemed. The pretty scrim of seeming was freshly painted each hour for those with money and position, a facade for the privileged, a mask over the cruelty beneath. To the poor, the hungry, the rule of privilege was an acid spew between rotten teeth, hardly worth a hoot in a legless fuddle. War and you go die in a ditch. Lift a loaf to feed your sibs and the rozzers poke you in the ribs and you squat all ashiver in stir, each breath a stab.

Death and pain and privilege, out of one’s control, keep your eyes on the gutter before the rats bite.
I know this place
.
Here is where privilege ends. My luck: the doom of the birds.
He stopped to catch his breath. A wonder any of them could breathe. Magic in the group, Daniel didn’t call it that—but so it was to him. And yet he would have sold magic Jack into a cage, and then the Gape would have taken him here, along with the girl and so many others—and all hope would have gone. Catch the birds. Bite the neck and bleed the lamb. Never my chick. Never my lamb. Businesslike.

But this…

Even back in the lanes, bobbing on the tail of the cart, even then young Max could draw fortune, steer the cart to the quietest, least hunted fields beneath the biggest, darkest flocks. Even then he could fume out a cloudy seeming of happy birds and berries and bugs, piles of seeds surrounded by safety. An illusion of plenty with no hawks, no hunters.

Something pushed on his shoulders and he hunched, waiting for a blow. Breathing became more difficult. He might strangle. He couldn’t see Daniel or Jack now.

But one was never alone.

Glaucous looked up, wincing at what he knew he would see. Instead, a brown muddle presented itself—like a sky filled with coils of coal smoke: curls and spirals and curves and slow, desperate flashes like drugged lightning. The smoke chunked down like hazy stones caught in the plunge of a landslide, trying to catch and pin the lines and curls. All in utter silence. Through it all flew wide, dusty wings and a wriggling wisp of a man who wasn’t there.

Glaucous fell to his knees, as he always did in the presence of bad power. The Moth.

As well, a thin man with a club foot dressed in sooty black stepped from the murk and held out his arms.

“Last call,” Whitlow said cheerily. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Max.
She
has been harsh, blaming us. But you—
you’re
in her glory and grace. Brought in the pretty birds all by yourself. And one extra. My prize. The bad shepherd.”

Glaucous swallowed his fear. “About them—”

“No apologies, and no going back, Mr. Glaucous. Time to receive your reward.”

The clouded, whirling rocks spun away from an open center.

“Come with us,” Whitlow said. “The Moth leads the way, as always.”

CHAPTER 106

Which of you dreams of the past?

Who carries the book?

The marchers tried to hide Tiadba—and one by one were firmly shunted aside. Khren and Frinna clung with the most conviction. Then they, too, were whisked away.

Paleness and sadness descended upon her alone once more. She was surrounded again by the procession of female forms that just eluded clarity. The sadness settled. The females, like jewels carved from different stages of the motion of a real being, folded together, combined—

Became one woman, her face illuminated from within like a lantern. Skin white as ice, eyes silver and gray and green, her body lost in something that wrapped her like a map of golden rivers and green fields—limbs long, graceful, fingers tipped with gripping flowers, and between these flowers, letters, symbols, numbers, written in flame, always changing, casting glows on Tiadba’s face, writing with warm but not consuming fire.

The woman still seemed familiar, though they had never met.

Tiadba had already called her
Mother
.
Mothers
were a kind of parental—females who come before you and directly pass along their stories, which have recombined to make your own. Great chains of past experience—mistakes made in terror and joy, loss and triumph—all conveyed to the next experiments in the line of time: children.

Writing on and within the female, other partners—in some cases males, in others teams of male and female—sometimes just other females, sometimes sexual designations outside Tiadba’s experience—Shapers, adjuvescents, conscribers, genesens—created many delicate flavors of offspring. Once, even entire cities had submitted their stories to quicken a female, then gathered to celebrate the birth of a single child, raised up and cherished, then doubled, tripled, and sent out to other cities as magnificent gifts…

A city like the Kalpa: woman, mother.

Ashurs and Devas—different varieties of human—all had their own ways of becoming partners and mothers, more than could easily be counted. In all the possible ways found over a hundred trillion years, stories combined and were sent forth to be read by others, to shape new stories. Compared to Tiadba, the woman was tall—taller than anyone she had ever met in the Tiers, much taller even than Pahtun. And her shape was lovely, though challenging. But Tiadba was not frightened.
Only I am allowed to remember. It is my punishment for trying to destroy the Typhon. Once, I
was so much more.

This, then, was what remained of Ishanaxade—born of all stories. A dreaming vastness flowed out of her, into Tiadba, more than any book could carry—and yet still made of words.
Child. You are my last. My father made it so—the circling bands that pass around and through.
The end is here. Our lives echo, and I am lost.

Once, Nataraja had been beautiful—more graceful in its antiquities than any of Earth’s other cities, rich and lovely with its acceptance of the human past. Nataraja sat out the Mass Wars until the very end, welcoming all, trying to stay neutral, until the City Princes of the remaining cities—and most of all, the Kalpa—forced her to choose sides.

The Chaos was swallowing galaxies, worlds and stars—and still, humans fought humans. Nataraja, seeing the folly, had cut loose of the last alliances, accepting all who fled the noötics and the Eidolons—until the Kalpa drew in and concentrated its defenses, leaving the other six cities stranded. Five cities fell.

Nataraja—as if saved for last—faced the advancing front of the Chaos alone. Ishanaxade had been sent there just before the city was overcome. Those had been dreadful days, when all seemed lost, yet the citizens went about their lives—Devas, Menders, Shapers, Ashurs, and even a

few noötics of conscience.

The Librarian’s daughter had watched Nataraja and its people do what they could to defy the Typhon, that unknown quality—powerful, simple, perverse—which had transformed the rest of the cosmos. They had set up their own barricades and shields—had surrounded the city with all of its ancient texts, hastily engraved on stone, written in light and stored in the metric that underlay all energy and matter—scribed onto molecules and atoms and all other known varieties of matter—projected into the skies against the advancing membrane of misrule—all that remained of the libraries of a hundred trillion years of history. Not enough.

Memories changed. That was the first symptom of the Typhon’s triumph. The Ashurs and the few noötics disappeared almost immediately. Records and texts throughout the city faded. People began to misremember their lives, then to lose them—distortion of the fate-lines, forgetting, then falling away into gritty black dust, a final kind of mercy for a blessed few.

Until the last instants of freedom, Nataraja’s philosophers tried to comprehend the new order, but there was nothing to comprehend, only a boil of ceaseless disorder. Change without purpose. Human senses seemed to cause the Typhon both puzzlement and pain.

The Typhon probed the remaining minds, the memory stores, the souls of all living things, posing questions that in themselves tilted some into madness. To see was pain. To remember was a new kind of forgetting.

To the Typhon, this was simple curiosity. Even after trillions of years of effort, it had not found its recipe for cosmos. This made it redouble its efforts—and quicken its failures. The Chaos was a piecework, poorly conceived and poorly assembled—failing everywhere except along its vast membrane of change, the many-dimensional front along which the old cosmos was being gnawed and absorbed. Ishanaxade alone—as her father had anticipated from the beginning, from his time among the Shen—was spared to remember all.

CHAPTER 107

Ginny thought it might have been a gigantic flower. Much taller than her, it rose from a cracked, rolling pavement in the shadow of the dangling, treacherous remains of the heart of this city, hanging like gigantic, moldy Christmas trees left behind by a receding flood, tossed into an awful heap, somehow still wearing their ornaments. But these ornaments seemed wider than entire towns on Earth. And no lights, of course.