City At The End Of Time (42 page)

“I saw you at the Busker Jam,” Ginny said.

“Funny I didn’t see you.”

“You were mad at something, I guess.”

“What do you do?”

“I get in trouble, then I run away.” Ginny sat on another box. The corner puffed dust and sagged and she got up, brushed her jeans, and sat in the chair.

“Run away from where?”

“Where
to
is all that matters.” She shrugged. “We’ve met before. I’m sure of it. Not just at the jam. Don’t you remember?”

Jack shivered again, and not just with the cold. He was letting it all down and he didn’t want to, not in this place and not in front of this girl.

They looked up in wonder and fear at the high small windows. Darkness had fallen. Day might never come again. Two stars shone through the glass panes. Jack tried to imagine time stopping, freezing, then bouncing back—whatever it was doing—all the way out to those stars. He couldn’t.

He got up, lifted the curtain, and returned to the back of the warehouse. Ginny followed again.

Jack pounded on the sliding steel door. The voices behind the door droned on as if nothing had

happened.

“They’ll let us in when they’re ready,” Ginny said. “A busker is a street entertainer, right?”

“Yeah,” Jack said.

“Why would a thunderstorm be interested in a juggler?” She covered her mouth. Jack looked at her, bewildered. The way she laughed—fey, dauntless—gave her a radiant, awkward bravery that shamed him. “Who is Bidewell?” he asked.

“His full name is Conan Arthur Bidewell. I think he’s been here for a long time.”

“He’s, like, the Great and Powerful Wizard?”

“He seems to think so. He’s spent his whole life collecting books,” Ginny said. “There are rooms here that haven’t been visited by a human being in over a hundred years. So he says. I think he wants to put us in them and see what happens.”

“You believe him?”

“I don’t think he’s lying,” Ginny said.

The sliding door rumbled opened. Miriam poked her head out. “You can come in now. Jeremy—”

“Jack,” he said.

“Jack…time for you to meet Mr. Bidewell.”

Ginny walked beside him.

“How can you just accept all this?” Jack asked.

“I’ve had my moments,” Ginny said. “I always come back. It’s safe here, for now—the safest place in the whole city, maybe the whole world. Out there…”

No need to say more about the streets, the city, the sky.

The old man—Bidewell, Jack assumed—stood beside a long wooden table on which someone had positioned a short stack of medium-sized hardcover books. He wore a dark brown suit covered with patches and mended holes.

Miriam joined the other women, and they all sat around a wood-burning iron stove whose square mica eye glowed a friendly orange. Agazutta took the single overstuffed chair, lounging like a spoiled movie star.

Jack and Ginny stood at opposite ends of the table like students awaiting an exam. Bidewell studied Jack, then pulled two books from the stack and let them fall open to their middles. He pushed one across the table toward Ginny and the other toward Jack. Both looked down. The pages were incomprehensible; no words, no paragraphs, just random lines of letters and numbers. Jack looked away and closed his book with a sharp crack.

Ginny left hers open. Bidewell had given her
The Gargoyles of Oxford
by Professor J. G. Goyle. She recognized the binding, but could no longer read any of the text, and the pictures seemed muddy and vague.

A third book, the name on its spine also scrambled, was passed among the women.

“You may have noticed the effects of what you experienced outside, what some call the Gape,” Bidewell said as this book was carried back to the table by Agazutta. “Actually, two events have concurred: the Gape, and Terminus. The Gape cuts us off from our past. Terminus cuts us off from any future, and so, by and large, we are cut off from both causality and eventuality, the two pulsing waves of time. The results are obvious, outside. In here, my library is a ruin, but it still offers some protection.”

“
All
the books are ruined?” Miriam asked, incredulous. “I mean, you
do
collect curiosities.”

“As many as I’ve examined, including those with which I’m quite familiar,” Bidewell said. “Outside these walls, every book in our region—perhaps every region we could ever hope to access—has also been scrambled. I’ve not seen this before, not on such a scale.”

Jack set his face in a vacant expression—waiting.

“Virginia, you have regained possession of your odd little stone. Now there are two,” Bidewell said.

“Jack, Ginny, could you remove your stones from their boxes…?”

Jack puzzled open his box. The stone lay inside, twisted and black, shining with a single deep red gleam. Ginny lifted hers. “Both present and accounted for,” she said, trying to be cheerful.

“Given their shapes and the way they appear to nest together—but no, we will
not
attempt that, please keep them separate—I suspect that a third exists, and perhaps more. None of us knows where they might be. None of our sentinels and outriders has reported a third individual with your abilities. But for now, we can’t worry about that. What is outside this warehouse for the time being is beyond our control.”

Agazutta sniffed.

Bidewell nodded. “If they are what I think they are, then they have nearly completed their long journey—they have
summed
. Bring them to the center of the table, please, and give them a slow wave over this volume. I’ve chosen a particularly valuable book, one I’ve kept in reserve for some time—but which is presently unreadable. Children…”

Jack stood beside Bidewell, following Ginny’s lead. Bidewell opened the book to the middle. Both held out their stones. The women crowded the opposite side of the table to see. Jack and Ginny held the stones over the pages.

At first the text remained scrambled. Then, as if caught in a glowing light of reason, the words began to return—a few, then sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs.

No letters moved, nothing visibly rearranged, but the book under the two stones slowly became readable.

Jack couldn’t help glancing at the first paragraphs to become clear—reading upside down, a trick he had learned years ago.

Language is as fundamental as energy. To be observed, the universe must be reduced—encoded. An unobserved universe is a messy place. Language becomes the DNA of the cosmos. He looked up. Ginny had been reading as well.

“I am humbled by the power you children possess,” Bidewell said reverently. “I’ve waited centuries to observe this effect. It confirms so much that has been, until now, mere philosophy.”

“What
are
the stones?” Ginny asked, her hand and the stone trembling. “I’ve had mine as long as I can remember. My parents had it before me. I’ve never been away from it for very long. But I have no idea what it is.”

“Jack?” Bidewell inquired, watching him closely, but with a confident air.

“My mother called it a sometime stone. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not. Once, she called it a library stone.”

“Curious.
Library
stone. As if she might have known.”

“Known what?” Jack asked.

“For now, these are still just partial shells—journey finished, full and strong, but immature. Even so…as you can see, they have remarkable powers.” Bidewell gripped both their extended hands and pulled them slowly apart. The text below remained comprehensible. In fact, the patch of legibility continued to grow.

“There have been many such over the ages. Some failed and became lumps of useless rock. Some were captured—along with their guardians—and we assume those were sequestered or destroyed. In the names given to them, I suspect, we have clues as to their ultimate nature and function. You may put them away for now.”

“If something has scrambled all order—how can we think or see?” Miriam asked. “Why isn’t our flesh scrambled?” Her voice rose. “Everything should just fall apart!”

Her disturbing observation was met with grim silence.

Bidewell flipped the book’s restored pages one by one. The old man actually had tears in his eyes—tears of relief and awe. “We are just beginning to see how deep the mystery is. For better or worse, all time, everywhere, is now subjective. All fates are local.” He lifted his gaze to a large electric clock mounted over the sliding steel door. The hands were bent and jammed as if invisible fingers had reached inside and twisted them—and the second hand lay at the bottom of the glass. “No timepiece will tick out our remaining seconds. If we end flattened and frozen against Terminus—we are lost. Even these stones will be useless. But we cannot rush the tasks that remain for us. First, we must get to know each

other.” Bidewell pulled a folding chair forward, gripped its seat, and smiled at Jack. Jack sat, eyes sharp.

“Just for this occasion,” Bidewell said, “I have laid in a small feast. Ginny knows where cans of soup and the makings for sandwiches are stored. Ellen, will you begin?”

They sat down to pastrami on rye and tomato soup warmed on the stove. Farrah produced a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew from her capacious handbag. “Wonder what Terminus does to wine?” she asked. She poured a small amount of the dark ruby liquid into a tumbler, sipped it, and lifted an eyebrow in approval, then poured around. “It’s hard to spoil a cheap merlot.”

Ellen lifted her glass and swirled its contents. “The four of us really did start out as a book group,” she said. “We still get together twice a month to eat and drink and discuss literature.”

“We’re well-off,” Farrah said. “Leisure becomes an attractive nuisance.”

Ellen resumed. “Anyway,
ladies,
after Agazutta’s father passed away, she cleaned out his house. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years. In the attic, she saw an old, dusty box pushed far back into a corner. Inside, she found an unusual book. It had probably been there since before her grandfather’s time.”

Bidewell rubbed his hands, then leaned against the edge of the table. For all his apparent age, he seemed flexible—not spry, but flexible. And tough.

Agazutta seemed bored by this recounting. “Blame it all on me,” she said.

“Agazutta brought it to our group. After a bottle of pinot gris and a fine melon salad with pine nuts and prosciutto, we all agreed the book might be rare—though it was not in English, nor in any language we knew. It seemed to be part of a set. So we thought it would be fun to take it to a dealer in such things—a man I know, John Christopher Brown.”

“They dated in college,” Farrah broadcast to the room.

“We did,” Ellen confirmed, with a short stare. “Can I tell this my way?”

Farrah smiled sweetly.

Jack hunched down in the folding chair.

“Mr. Brown owns an antiquarian bookstore on Stone Way. He seems to know everything about books and a little bit about everyone involved in books—old books, odd books. He knew of a local buyer interested in just this sort of item.”

Bidewell listened as attentively as a child.

“Our dear Conan,” Ellen said.

“Ah,” Bidewell said. “I am drawn into the picture.”

“You drew
us
in. At any rate, you bought our book. At first, Mr. Brown kept you anonymous, but passed along a portion of the sum Conan paid—a suspiciously large sum, enough to make us happy to continue to search through our attics, our basements, even the walls of our houses.”

“Farrah found another,” Agazutta said.

“In my basement, in a shoe box. I had never seen it before. Really—it might have just popped up like a coat hanger in a closet. It wasn’t old—from the 1950s—a paperback, in fact.” She added, eyebrow raised, “With a lurid cover.”

“A lurid cover—and every single word misspelled, except on one page,” Agazutta said, “which it turned out was transliterated Hebrew. Mr. Brown sold that book for an even larger sum.”

“Remarkable ladies,” Bidewell said, “to have located two such curious volumes in their immediate environs. They obviously had a knack. I gave Mr. Brown permission to refer the ladies to me. Such finds do not arrive entirely by chance.”

“How
do
they arrive?” Ginny asked.