City At The End Of Time (27 page)

Or, the owner was simply responding to a customer who knew about books. The community of book people was used to eccentrics.

“Signs,” Daniel continued, trying to subdue a twitch in his left eye. “Portentous signs hidden in strange animals. Lost in time or place.”

“A title would help—that’s not a title, I take it?”

“I don’t know what the title will be…here. The author is always Bandle, David Bandle.”

“B-A-N-D-L-E?”

“Correct.” Daniel’s throat bobbed. His forehead was damp from the strain of this extended interaction. The owner did not seem fazed. “I remember a book on cryptozoology by someone with a name like that…
Travels in Search of Hidden Beasts
, I think,” the owner said.

“Could be,” Daniel said.

“Don’t have it. I can do a search online.”

“That would be kind. Most recent edition. How much…would it cost? I’m not wealthy.” This body was not used to smiling—bad teeth, worse breath. He succeeded in drawing parenthetical creases around his lips.

“Oh, thirty bucks. Good reading copy. It’s not very old, is it?”

“Perhaps not. I wouldn’t know,” Daniel said.

“Down payment of ten dollars. The rest when I get the book in. Probably take a week or two. Address?”

Daniel shook his head. “I’ll come back.” He removed two smudged fives from his pocket and placed them in neat parallel on the counter.
There goes dinner.

The owner smoothed out the money and wrote up a receipt. “I always liked those sorts of books,” he said. “Adventure in faraway places, hunting down creatures that time forgot. Wonderful stories.”

“Wonderful,” Daniel agreed, and pocketed the receipt.

“We have a good collection of deep-sea books, just in. Beebe, Piccard, that sort of thing.”

“No, thank you.” Daniel backed out of the store with a half bow and a short wave of his right hand.
Very good
, he assured his new body.
A good beginning.

He had come to trust Bandle. Bandle’s report on cryptids had given him essential clues years ago, in another strand, another lifetime. Bandle cataloged sightings of animals that could not exist—sea serpents, half-human beasts, earwigs bigger than rats. Any of those could be indicators. Variations, permutations—warnings—all collected into one authoritative text.

But as he walked along, Daniel suspected he would not be coming back. Something about the way the owner had examined him. It was probably dangerous at this late date to even inquire after Bandle. Ten bucks—wasted.

Daniel stood on a steel-edged curb, blinking at the bright clouds and the low autumn sun. Such a lovely world.

You are what you leave behind.

His grandfather had once said, visiting him in prison,
Where are you going, young man? Is there
anything you will not do to get there? Eventually, you leave so much behind, you show up before
God and you’re as empty as your damned puzzle box—you’re so empty it’s not even you anymore,
and heaven doesn’t matter.

Daniel began to cry.

FOURTEEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 23

The Tiers

The passage had been made for someone smaller than either Jebrassy or Tiadba. Once, green circles spaced every few yards must have provided illumination, but they no longer gave even the feeblest light. Crouched over, then down on hands and knees, they crawled in darkness through the dank tunnel, nothing visible ahead and only a shrinking spot of dimness behind. After a longer time than Jebrassy cared to think about, they still had not reached the vertical shaft. Tiadba said, “Don’t you hate the way time changes? One day, it’s short—the next day, it’s long. Makes me feel like we’ve been crawling since we were born. Even here. You’d think at the Diurns—”

“How long was it for you, the last time?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a small chuff. “Wait. I think it’s just ahead.” She shuffled forward quickly, and then he could see an outline of her legs and feet as she stood. “Come on. The steps begin here.”

The light was weak—dropping from far above, he guessed. “This takes us up to the—what did you call it?”

“The Valeria,” she said. “I don’t know where any of the names come from. They don’t sound like breed speech, do they? The steps are tiny. It’s best to curl up and crawl around—wrap your arms and legs around the center of the spiral. Then…just hump and slither.”

That was easier for her than for him. Another endless time drew them along,
slithering
and on occasion trying other forms of ascent, crouching and taking mincing steps—bumping his head. Tiadba seemed in good humor. His admiration grew, especially as her scent filled the enclosed space.

“Look,” she said. Her hand, a barely visible paleness, brushed over a long chink in the smoothness surrounding the stairs. “Look through this gap and tell me if that isn’t a lift shaft.”

He saw a kind of railing running vertically up a parallel shaft, brighter and wider than the one they were climbing; but no sign of a lift car.

“There’s so much we should be curious about, but aren’t,” Tiadba said from above. Her voice diminished. She had increased their distance; she was thinner, taller, a little stronger…

“Don’t leave me behind,” he called out, only half joking.

Time stretched. His head hurt trying to understand how long it had been. Then a kind of panic set in, and he squeezed against the steps—the surrounding cylinder of wall—with all his strength, until his joints popped and he could feel his flesh bruise. His breath came in husky drags and he felt as if he were dead but still seeing, still hearing…feeling his own flesh rot away.

“I’m there!” Tiadba called. “Hurry up. It’s small, but there’s room for two, if we squeeze.”

Eyes searching for light, Jebrassy clamped his jaw and quickened his crawl. Soon he wriggled into a short horizontal corridor, then pushed forward and through another hatch, into an open booth—the rounded half cup of the Valeria.

“Careful—not much room,” Tiadba told him.

He stood, brushing against her, then slowly peered over the lip of the cup, down hundreds of feet to the littered and dusty stage below. He could make out the curled-up corpse in the rubble. Looking up with equal caution, not to get dizzy and fall out backward, he saw the last of the wakelight from the ceil, even less convincing at this altitude.

They had spent their whole life within a stage set, he thought…for the entertainment of a cruel and uncaring audience.

With a deep breath, he squeezed around beside her and looked down at the control seat and console. Above the console, a screen barely two hands wide had been set flush against the wall, and below that, a surface with dozens of bumps of various colors.

Above the screen, six glassy lenses glittered like insect eyes.

The single seat before the console would have fit a man half his size. Tiadba risked toppling as she squatted and set her butt on the rim of the cup. Both stared earnestly at the gray blankness on the small display.

“This one doesn’t work, either,” she said. “It took me a couple of trips to learn how to look into the black things. Sit close, and I’ll finger up a catalog. I’ve only seen one or two entries. I didn’t want to watch any more, alone, because I’m not sure these old memories, the records, are going to last. Two observers, two memories…much better.”

Jebrassy stared earnestly at the shining black beads. “I’m looking,” he said, perching in a half squat beside her. “I don’t—”

She raised her hand and bent his head to the proper angle, and he jerked as bright images flooded his eyes. He could see nothing else. The effect was immediate and startling—scenes flew past so quickly he couldn’t make sense of them; intense, sick-making. “I’m going to throw up,” he warned.

“You’ll get used to it, and it’s worth the headache, too. I’m still learning how to look properly. If you want to hazard a guess about all the knobs and bumps, go right ahead.”

“What if we accidentally erase the records?”

Tiadba shrugged. “I doubt they’d let anyone here have that sort of power.”

Jebrassy felt a surge of interest. Ever above the thought of leaving the Kalpa soared the need to know what he was, and what his place might be. No one had yet been able to tell him that, though since childhood he’d been convinced that in the ancient places, in the depths of the walls—even in such illusions as the ceil, and the false bookshelves high in the blocs—there were clues. More than clues…

The story, complete and convincing.

Justification for all he was doing.

“This seems to slow the parade,” he murmured, fingers prodding a dimple. He found that with some practice he could push the dimple to the right or the left. And then he realized that it was not his finger changing the speed, but the way in which he looked at the racing images—the way he darted his attention one way, then the next. Concentration, focus, the flick of an eyelid or facial muscle. The display was controlled by expression more than fingers.

The quickstep parade of scenes slowed to a crawl. Each part of the parade was itself another parade, but moving at relatively normal speed—three-dimensional representations somehow all visible, one through another: visible, dense, and real.

“Getting used to it?” Tiadba asked, pressing her shoulder against his.

“No,” he said, but he was—sort of. “How do you choose?”

She patiently explained what she knew. The combination of the floating sense of other-reality and Tiadba’s voice was hypnotic. After a while Jebrassy realized he was as fascinated by the sounds she made as by the panoramas they were accessing—which, after all, seemed nothing more than surveys of places within the Tiers, many of them already familiar.

All of the programs were devoid of citizens. They revealed only empty places, deserted spaces. The effect was spooky, like peering into a dead city—or visiting the Diurns themselves.

“The person who operated this was smaller,” Tiadba said, and then added in a bare whisper, “But the operator wasn’t expected to be any brighter than you or me…or very different in shape. They must have been people like us, but they were allowed to see these things, and to know some of what was happening to them. We aren’t—not anymore. I wonder why?”

“But there’s
nothing
happening,” he complained. “No people.”

“Be patient. This is just one dimension of search.”

He pulled back from the lens to study Tiadba. The attention did not embarrass her, but it did annoy—and she took hold of his stubby ear and gently swung his head back in line.

“There,” she said. “We’re back to the Diurns themselves. Now watch.”

She made adjustments. The pictures and places suddenly came alive. This utter end of the Tiers—the bridges, the causeway—was filled with thousands of people dressed as if attending a festival—far more colorfully dressed than any of the ancient breed, whose clothes tended toward drabness. Whatever had captured the pictures seemed capable of being everywhere at once.

“They’re all
rich
,” he said.

“Move in close,” she suggested. “Look at their faces.”

Together, they swooped low over the crowds, then picked out several individuals. They were definitely not of the ancient breed—not only smaller, but slighter, more delicate, with longer noses, more sharply defined facial features—particularly chins and ears, the ears being quite large, shaped like little wings—their skin pallid, almost waxy, yet vibrant. The crowds behaved in a choreographed fashion, quite unlike the sustained bumping and crowding, elbowing and bobbing, he would have expected from the ancient breed.

“Who were they, do you think?” Tiadba asked.

“The Tall Ones had other toys before us,” he said doubtfully.

This angered Tiadba. “We are
not
toys, I told you,” she said. “And neither were they.” She frowned, struggling to voice her concept. “Maybe they’re our…” These ideas were so embarrassing. “What’s the word—these might have been our
ancestors
.”

Confined within the cup-shaped booth, they watched the processions until their muscles cramped, and then took turns standing and stretching. Inevitably, this brought them into even closer contact. Each brushing touch, and especially each press of flesh, was electric.

“There’s no way of knowing anything about them,” Tiadba said, blinking, “unless we can learn their language, read their writing.”

He squeezed back against the wall, trying to examine his companion in the dim light. She had a ghostly aspect now, the spill of light from the lenses shining against her round chin and full cheekbones, glinting in her beautiful eyes.

“To cross the border of the real, you need training and equipment,” Tiadba said. “Clothing, machines, things we’ve never seen before. You can’t just go out on your own, or you’ll die.”

“Who gives the clothes and machines?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many marches has the sama put together?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“Is she working with the Tall Ones?”

Tiadba shook her head again.

“Who gets to lead and get all the glory?”