City At The End Of Time (36 page)

Glaucous joined Penelope. “No matter about the boy—I’ll snag him. Let’s move on.”

She had propped the loose, bagged form against a retaining wall, dripping and still. Face expressionless, she drew up her coat and covered her massive nakedness.

Jack Rohmer had fled so far that at first Glaucous could not even smell his spoor. Glaucous was certain that Jack would rejoin their path soon, in sheer desperation. There were now so many moribund pathways, so many diseased lines that led nowhere.

Oh yes, he, Glaucous would fling his sweet net across the black shimmer of broken fates, and with another deft snap, Jack would fly straight back, frightened out of his wits. All would be well. The roommate shouted threats from the third floor.

Glaucous waved his hand at the bag. “Lift. Carry. Bring him along, my dear.”

CHAPTER 37

The apartment’s other occupant took color and texture from the needle-littered floor, the scabbed walls and caved ceiling. It made a sound like hard snow falling on a black evening—never ending, never changing. This was its only voice. It had been waiting, trapped in this room,
forever
, and now it complained to anyone who could listen. Jack had simply not noticed it until now. Looking at it, he was paralyzed.

The occupant took the initiative and moved—without moving. It changed position, Jack was sure of that—but not convinced he
could
be sure. As he turned to track the flaw, the blur, where it now stood between him and the door, he saw that it had been
there
all the time, and nowhere else. He had been mistaken.

He was noticing it again for the first time.

Jack’s eyelids twitched and tried to close. Drugged sleep wanted to drape him like funeral laundry. He needed to stop
seeing
, get away from the impossible thing between him and the door. His mind was not able to process and remember. His engines of memory were shutting down. Soon he would be stuck here just like the other. He would protect himself in the only way left to inhabitants of this purgatory: by gathering up floor, wall, and ceiling, and hiding
in plain sight.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” Jack said, shivering. “I just want to get out of here.”

The sound of hard snow resolved into a grainy, steady weeping—tears of frozen grief—the saddest sound he had ever heard. The other dropped its camouflage, became more solid and human—two arms, a lump for a head, a trunk divided at its base into two legs.

“Where will you go?” it seemed to ask. “Take me with you.”

“I don’t know how.” Jack could just make out a face with a hole for a mouth and two sunken green pits for eyes.

“Take me outside.”

“You can’t leave?” Jack asked, feeling sick.

“No,” it hissed. It came closer—had always stood right beside Jack, would never leave him, limb stretched as if to place a hand on his shoulder—but there was no hand. Not yet.

The trap was closing.

Jack could not jump. No paths, no freedom, nothing but pestilent strands of not-color, not-darkness, each ending in a pulsing, tumorous knot, ready to spread and consume everything.
The fabric here is rotting. Strands have come loose. Their ends double up and stick to make
loops. That’s where I am. I’m in a looped world.

Jack leaned back to scream.

The scream trickled out, no more than the squeal of a small, dying animal, no louder than the crying of his rats.

“Stay…I’ve left some food for you,” the shape said.

Jack suddenly recognized the blurred face.

This was Burke. His roommate.

A hook snagged Jack’s spine and jerked him back with a jolt of unbelievable pain. Before he had time to think about death and speech without voices—about the formless paw on his shoulder, welcoming him to an unchanging forever—he was yanked with considerable force and even more pain. He tried again to scream—really gave it all he had. The strangled noise dopplered across a thousand gray, dead-end paths—and
slam
, he was jerked hard in another direction, through thousands more lines—the fragments of light that reached his eyes growing brighter and warmer, then darker and

colder—and again he was snagged, tugged back—in no time at all. Someone wanted to reel him in and Jack knew who it was—could feel that same sickly sweet, oh so reassuring touch, like the finger of a fly fisherman on a whipped-out filament.

Jack Rohmer was being pulled from rivers of misery by a master fisher of men.

CHAPTER 38

West Seattle

Glaucous drove south in the slow lane, then turned onto the West Seattle Bridge. He blew a piercing trill through his lips, guided by no particular tune. Every now and then he would wince, jerk back his head, and grimace as if clenching something between yellow teeth. “Got you,” he muttered, and wiped his hand across his brow.

Penelope lay against the window, tiny eyes languorous. A lone wasp crawled from her collar and wobbled along a thick fold on her neck. The rain droned on the van’s roof and the wipers swiped. At this hour of the morning the old elevated road was almost deserted. Dawn staked a feeble claim to the east, a vague lightness in the wet gloom.

In the back of the van the sack stirred.

“Ah,” Glaucous said. “Is it no longer a husk, a shill?”

Penelope brushed a wasp from her nose and cracked it under her thumb. Glaucous admired her strength and her steadfastness—but not her personality. She felt no affection for anything, really. His fourth partner, Penelope had stuck with him the longest—over sixty years. In return, she had not aged, but had grown large and unattractive. Others had withered and shrunk. Once, for a time, he had carried his second partner in his pocket. Over a few days, his third had simply faded as if left out in the sun—and then, one morning, had vanished. As far as he knew, she was still dwelling in their old house—not that anyone would ever see her, and not that it mattered.

Penelope’s eyes opened. “
It’s
back, I think.”

He turned judging eyes on her. “How can we be certain?”

“It’s crying,” Penelope said.

The canvas sucked up against Jack’s mouth. His own harsh breath clung to his face with a stale, comforting certainty. He might suffocate. He might die. Anything would be better than where he had been—the shoddy lands, where rot and despair ruled.

And Jack
was
crying, quietly and steadily. Having been jerked from purgatory, having come so near to hell, his tears had nothing to do with bravery or fear, but with grief greater than anything he had ever experienced.

The joy of matter is gone.

And when he reluctantly remembered that which he had nearly broken through—a barrier like a scab over an open wound—

“He smells like burning,” Penelope said.

“Leave him be,” Glaucous said, but a worried cast came into his eyes. He glanced out the window at the rain, the lightning. The air seemed more turgid, gray light pulsing under the storm in broad, thick waves. Or was that the blood pumping through his chunky, hard heart?

Glaucous blew out his worries. “We shall give him a fine scrubbing. Hell hath no worse smell.”

“Not hell,” Penelope said.

Jack listened from the sack. He
did
smell—and the smell was foul. Holding his nose did not help, so he tried his best to ignore it.

With a tremendous effort, gathering all his courage, he dipped a toe back into the currents of fate. All near situations were tense, tight-packed. Under those circumstances, even the strongest world-lines tended to weave in and out. He was traveling in a truck or van. Nothing in the way of accidents, blowouts, mishaps of any useful sort, presented themselves. He was too far down a strongly developed line. All available alternatives kept him
here
, but perhaps not in a sack so secure, so lacking in rips and seams…

“Don’t even try it, my fine stinkpot,” Glaucous advised from the driver’s seat, and again, that voice—like a mother soothing an upset child—bathed Jack in cloying sweetness. All would be well…He was too exhausted to fight. He almost welcomed it—the sugary sense of rightness fermented into a spiritual liquor, dulling all hope, all pain. “We’ll be home soon,” Glaucous said. “You’ll like it there.”

“Will he?” Penelope asked. Her seat creaked miserably as she arranged her bulk. “
I
don’t.”

“We will wash away that taint, before something else smells it. Something premature and perhaps too eager.” Glaucous made a chitinous cluck-clicking behind his mouth, sharp and loud. Jack could not see how he did it.

Like claws snapping.

FOURTEEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 39

The First Bion

His feet planted firmly on a disc of cold, hard light, Ghentun flew up between the glowing silver conduits, through lustrous canyons, between dazzling miles-high walls, to the highest levels of the First Bion—the urbs of the Great Eidolons.

Once—if the myths could be believed—humans had thought the universe might last no more than a few tens of billions of years. No one in the Brightness—the warm, brilliant womb of the last trillion centuries—could have guessed how long history would drag on, how often its cruel patterns would repeat: wars that filled tens of billions and even trillions of years, eating away at the lives of quadrillions of thinking beings—consuming countless heavens in the idiotic flames of countless hells. The inevitable rise to immaterial godhood of billions of civilizations had been followed by the equally inevitable collapse back to individuated bodies in benighted ignorance of what had been lost…A cyclical rise and fall, like a beating heart torn by endless and merciless time. Nor could any who lived during the primordial billennia have guessed how decayed and fragmented the aging cosmos would become, its parts requiring redesign, supplanting, replacement—and now, how the lost shards of times past would break loose, drift, and bump up against the present. As for the late Trillennium, in the shadow of the Chaos: broad legends described the age of the Mass Wars. Bosonic Ashurs had returned from their mastery of the dark light-years, seeking ascendance over all…and were subdued by the mesonic Kanjurs, who in turn were defeated by the Devas—patterned from integral quarks. Devas were then forced to give way to the noötics. Noötic matter was hardly matter at all—more like a binding compact between space, fate, and two out of seven aspects of time. The noötics—calling themselves Eidolons—gathered survivors from the last artificial galaxies and forced nearly all to convert. The last remnants of old matter were preserved and transported to a number of reliquaries with the longest continuous histories—including Earth.

Only the servants of old Earth—Menders and Shapers mostly—were given dispensation to remain primordial. Many converted anyway. For a time even Ghentun had succumbed—before being recruited as Keeper. Noötic matter guaranteed safer and more cooperative environments, more efficient thought-patterns, and more diverse and minutely controlled utilities. In noötics, each particle was preprogrammed with a variety of behaviors, which could be integrated into unparalleled servitude. The complete mental control of one’s noötic self led most such intelligences, over the last ages of the Trillennium, into eccentricities without number—but guaranteed their dominance. For Ghentun, the legends of the Mass Wars still contained one great lesson. In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite.

The photon disc passed swiftly through alternating regions of mass and light, solid dwellings and roads along which solid citizens moved, yet when that motion tired them, the citizens lifted like whirlwinds to whisk off to more ethereal paths—wit-courts pulsing with the arts and challenges of ten trillion years of history.

The disc flew over ribbon boroughs populated by former Devas, who now refused any but a narrow band of extreme technologies. They insisted that their boroughs be stacked like spools, slowly unwinding ribbons of renewal and locality, each half a mile wide and festooned with pop-up dwellings, experience galleries, and regeneration farms. Crowds of images—projections of the boroughs’ citizens—took shape around Ghentun, exhibiting vague curiosity—but seeing only a lone and lesser Mender, they flattened and faded like cast-aside portraits.