City At The End Of Time (13 page)

The power had long since gone out for these ruins.

The flower—or was it a mushroom?—asserted a ghastly kind of independence below the architectural deadfall. As she walked around it, she noticed that it was made of elongated arms, legs, bodies, with an occasional head poking out. The anatomies within the stalk shivered and the heads opened their eyes, not to see—the eyes were blank, blind—but to express discomfort.

These were not marchers—not like Tiadba. They were more like Ginny. Contemporary to her. And there were many more flower-mushrooms, she saw, sprouting up beneath the hanging ruins. Something had gone about gathering the people, the survivors who had been so unfortunate as to find themselves delivered along with a cross section of endtime.

That’s why all the old parts of the city had seemed deserted when she left the warehouse. There had already been a sweeping, a mopping up. And something—perhaps the servants that moved along the trods—had brought a few or all of them here, where they had been arranged to form awful warnings. Scarecrows.

This gave Ginny both a frightening chill and an odd sensation of encouragement. You didn’t set up scarecrows unless you were afraid something could come and take what you had. She glanced at the towering base of the mushroom, looking for faces she might recognize, anybody she’d known: friends, the witches.

Miriam Sangloss.

Conan Bidewell.

She recognized nobody. But there were so many. Maybe the ones she’d come in contact with had been reserved for a particularly painful punishment.

“
I hate you,
” Ginny said, eyes narrowed, growling her contempt at whatever might be listening.
“I am
not afraid, and I HATE YOU!”

She leaped aside with a small shriek as a velvet softness rubbed against her ankle. When she had gathered enough courage to come out of her crouch and actually look, she saw a small shadow…watched it approach her again in a low, cautious slink.

The shadow resolved into bright and dark splotches against the uniform murk. It made a soft grumbling sound.

Ginny felt her eyes fill and tears spill down her cheeks, slipping salt into the corners of her mouth. She reached down and scooped up the blotchy shadow, rubbed its furry head against her cheek, and began to cry.

It
was
Minimus, six toes on each front paw, and small, ecstatically flexing thumbs! The cat rumbled and climbed and rumbled some more and settled into her arms.

“How?” she managed between childlike sobs. These sounds might or might not have ever left the bubble, might or might not have reached far enough to be heard by the human mushroom-flowers, but it seemed for a moment as if the whole awful foundation of the False City shivered. Something new had arrived. There would be change.

Minimus squirmed and strained his head forward, looking down and around and issuing another urgent meow.

She was surrounded by cats.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands
.

Ginny was not afraid. “What
have
you been hunting?” she asked in a wheedling tone, still oddly certain of the relationship between human and cat. “What
have
you been eating?”

Minimus regarded her with a slow, wise blink, then made a considerable effort, lips contorted, and spoke in a soft, hissing whisper:
“We’re Sminthians, remember? We’re gods of mice and things that
gnaw.”

The cats milled in a gray eddy of fur.

Of all the impossible things she had seen and experienced, this broke the mirror—this totally popped the cork. Ginny narrowed her eyes, blinked—hard—and pinched her finger until it hurt. Reality had just finished its long dying.

CHAPTER 108

Tiadba drifted in and out of the ancient story. She closed her eyes and again imagined words printed in their books. This took her back again to her last solace—remembered moments with Jebrassy, the letterbugs, the shake cloths, their rolling and combining.

The female was not allowed to forget the time when she had fallen in love. She could not leave behind the hope of memory itself.

On one of the far necklace worlds of the Shen, Ishanaxade was found by Sangmer. They spoke on the shores of the silvery vector sea:

“I am not truly anyone’s daughter. Many have given me what form I have. I call Polybiblios father because he has been most patient with me, and in his way has loved me.”

“Where did they find you?”

“I have been gathered from all the inhabited worlds for longer than anyone can recall—some say since the end of the Brightness. Bits and pieces—a gleam here, a quality there, a suspicion or speck…All treasured, transported, traded, by many, and then collected by the Shen, who amassed so much that I would have bulked larger even than the necklace-worlds or the sixty green suns around which they whirl.”

Sangmer found this unlikely, and said so.

“Look at me. Do I appear likely? Am I like any other you have seen?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I am young. How did you become so much smaller?”

“The Shen are very old and exceptionally curious. They worked for a long time to distill me. What was most essential they kept. But then they tired of the puzzle. When Polybiblios arrived, he resumed the task—and made me as you see me now. He believes he understands what I truly am. I do not judge his beliefs.”

“What does he think you are—or were?”

“A muse,” Ishanaxade said.

“Like, an inspiration?”

“Muses were once very important to the cosmos. They labored for a hundred billion years, cleaning up after Brahma, who could not stop creating, could not stop the outpour of his kind of love. The muses allowed memory and the flowering of all the little observers, so beloved of Brahma, who was careless, but vast and full of passion.

“And then, creation stopped. The Trillennium followed—nothing new, just clever rearrangements of the old. Some say Brahma slept. And while he sleeps, there is no need for any muse. We condensed out like snow or rain, a flurry of jewels spread over the dark light-years.”

“An old name, Brahma.”

“Old is not an adequate word. I don’t know whether I served and failed, or was rejected as no longer essential—but I seem to remember scattering everywhere people still lived. After that—until I was brought here—I remember nothing.”

“And now, you’re almost human.”

“Why do you stay and speak with me? Am I attractive? None of the Shen seems to find me attractive.”

When she spoke, her breath was like a refreshing wind, cool and moist, yet when her eyes fell upon him, he was warmed, kept dry and secure. Sangmer studied her some more and considered for a while, on the shore of the great silvery vector sea. “You seem to like helping, taking care of people,” he said. “That is admirable.”

“You enjoy being nurtured?”

“Well, that isn’t all you promise. When you touch me, I feel a fire at my center. You want me to grow and find my true story, my purpose. You seem to want to be there when I see new things. You want to

share and enjoy my discoveries.”

“I discover what anyone discovers,” Ishanaxade said. “That’s a truth. But if I become human—what you see now is not all that is left of me. I am two.”

“What other is there?”

“She is always with me—not separate. Polybiblios might have warned you.”

“He did not.”

“The Shen did not mention this?”

“They mentioned nothing about you. My crew has had a difficult journey—perhaps they did not want to alarm us.”

“Well, some of the Shen find me most alarming. They would be happy to see my puzzle resolved—or to send me away. I not only inspire, I correct.”

“What’s so wrong with that?”

“Some things cannot be corrected. Those things, I make disappear. As if they had never been.”

Sangmer watched her closely—what he could see of her—and thought he spied a shadowy other-self within the beautiful and changing margins. “Then you should make the Chaos disappear!”

“Oh, my destructive side is no more effective than my inspirational side, so long as Brahma sleeps. So I have been told, and so I believe.”

Sangmer frowned. “Well, whatever you are, you’re the most extraordinary, almost-human female I’ve ever encountered. And I’ve known some wonderfully different females—and many that were not female at all, like the Ashurs—”

Ishanaxade seemed to condense more as he spoke. “Tell me about them,” she said. “You thought they were beautiful. I’d like to learn how they pleased you.”

This hurt. A shriek of eternal despair filled the vast dark hall, and was lost without echo in the smother of wreckage.

Where is he? Why does he not come?

CHAPTER 109

Jack looked over his shoulder. For some time now he had been trying to stay ahead of Glaucous and Daniel, and simply follow the tug of his stone. Whether he trusted them or not—he did not, of course—simply didn’t matter. He wanted to test himself and see what he could accomplish on his own. The endless miles of wreckage had its own silence, a quality deeper than simple lack of sound. Here, for a moment alone, he tried to think and remember where he’d been, what he’d seen and heard—and fit it all together without distraction or interruption.

Somehow, that made seeing and thinking easier as well.

A low tuneless whistle found its way between his lips. He held the stone out before him, trying to interpret its subtle tugging. And gradually, over a time of no time, he was guided beneath a huge, vertical sheet that stretched up into high shadow—a warped, bumpy sheet that might have been the size of Manhattan, turned on its nose and hung from a hook, covered with huge, broken ornaments, each with its own distinct cast, a grayish-silver sheen.

What would it mean if he believed that he was actually walking through—or beneath—the suspended ruins of a future city? That people had once lived here, and that what had invaded and sucked the life out of Seattle had also sucked away their lives, squeezing it all together, making them equal…?

Jack had never been much for philosophy, but this was a poser. He could walk, whistle, see—wonder—but there wasn’t really anything, including time, that made sense in the old way. There was
his
personal time—he was still making memories—

And wasn’t that how one defined time anyway?

He kept walking, kept whistling, but decided that thinking was almost useless. Humility was easy when mystery threatened to crush you at every turn.

“I am that I am,” he muttered. “I think, therefore I am. I remember, therefore I am. I’ve chosen my own name, therefore I am. I’m hungry, therefore I am. I worry about my friends, therefore I am. I’d like to see what’s about to happen, therefore I am. I want to go on and finish my story—make more memories—never enough memories—therefore I am.”

I am alone, and things haven’t just winked out.

Therefore I am.

I want to set it all right again, therefore…

Far away, he heard a terrible sound—not exactly human. A banshee wail of despair and pain that seemed to drizzle down from above.

“Ginny,” he said, and licked his lips to keep them from cracking.

Something touched his ankles—whiskers or feelers. Thinking of giant earwigs, he jerked and looked down, almost dropping the sum-runner.

A cat rubbed his leg, arched its back, looked up—and opened its mouth as if to make a sound. But the cat, too, was silent. He thought he recognized it—him—one of the cats in Bidewell’s warehouse, and for once did not wonder for an instant what he was doing here. There could be nothing more improbable than Jack’s own presence. He knelt and stroked the soft head, palmed the closed eyes and pushed back the velvety ears, and immediately felt a surge of comfort, normality, self-assurance. Cats could do that. Despite their apparent aloofness, or because of it, simply by their acceptance one acquired solid value.

“Well, maybe I don’t hold everything together all by my lonesome,” Jack said. “Maybe you have something to contribute, too.” The cat purred agreement, then lightly nipped his finger and ran off a few yards, stopped, sat on its haunches; waited. Jack consulted the sum-runner, holding it over his head. The cat ran off.

Cat and stone agreed. Both were leading him in the same direction.

CHAPTER 10

Seattle

A busker must satisfy all of his customers. To women, he must be young, charming, and funny; an amusement hiding a brief yearning. To men, he must appear ragged and clownish—not a threat despite his youth and good looks. To children, he must be like one of them—if they could only sing and dance and juggle hammers and rats.

Jack was making decent money, about twenty-eight dollars in three hours, deposited by members of his occasional audience into a floppy canvas hat planted on the sidewalk outside the downtown Tiffany’s. Today, as he had for two years, Jack was working with live rats. They were used to his tricks and he never dropped them—never. The rats may not have relished flying through the air, twisting their tails and heads, beady black or pink eyes flashing, seeing in spinning succession sky and ground and Jack’s hand, but there it was; they were gently caught and gently tossed, and then they were fed, and there was always something interesting to look at through the mesh of the cage as they groomed themselves. Rats had led worse lives.