City At The End Of Time (50 page)

They began.

The halves of the marchers’ helmets swung from their neck-pieces with the rhythm of their steps. Their boots made soft, flat clicks. Together, they sounded like farm pedes crawling over dry, hard dirt. They walked for long miles beneath the huge central arch, one side illuminated by the wakelight of the far ceil, the other…not. The quality of sound changed in a way difficult to describe. Tiadba had spent her entire life in the Tiers listening to the hive-hum of voice and echo, all her fellow breeds speaking, moving,
thinking.
That now fell off into stony quiet and a new quality replaced it: destitute hollowness, bereft, lonely yet somehow proud—and more ancient than any of them could conceive.

The Tiers had always stood apart within the Kalpa, lower than any other level, yet special,
different
. How many marchers had performed this journey already, as scared as they were, as lonely and far from all they had ever known?

“It’s quiet,” Khren said.

Miles to go—hundreds, thousands. Who could know?

We’re leaving the Tiers behind forever.

We’re crossing into the Chaos.

Whether their eyes adjusted to the gloom or the air here was clearer, Tiadba could not say—but suddenly she could make out square, regular shapes lined up on each side of the arch—taller than the tallest of the blocs of Tiers.

“What are those?” she asked, keeping her voice soft. Out here she felt it might be even more important to show respect.

“The inner rank of reality generators,” Pahtun said. “They become active if the outer ranks fail.”

The floor was uneven, broken by periodic ripples as if it had buckled under awesome pressure. Here and there, scars and parallel scuffs marred the otherwise smooth surface. Perhaps intrusions had slipped through this way, touched down…and burned.

Ahead, Tiadba could just make out the far edge of the vault and something else—a slowly shimmering barrier.

As minutes of walking passed into hours, the shimmer did not seem to get any closer. Still, her energy did not flag. The suit’s effect was energizing, electric. Grayne’s words from the early meetings returned to her.

You could walk for thousands of miles across the roughest, most forbidding terrain, yet you’ll
remain fit and strong. It will be the fulfillment of all you are, the adventure of a lifetime. I envy
you.

After dozens of miles and hours of marching, the dark vault overhead still seemed endless. Then—a change. The shimmer appeared distinctly closer. Despite her doubts, she could not help getting excited.
The sky. Pahtun said to be ready for the sky.

“Helmets up. Seal them tight,” the second escort ordered.

Tiadba looked around, took a deep breath. The air—the last
privileged
air of the Tiers—was already bitterly cold. Frost formed on her lower lip and around her nose. Then, as one, the halves of their helmets—which until now had lain on their shoulders like empty fruit skins—rose up and sealed with a hiss that made her ears pop. Her head grew warm and her vision sharpened. The shimmer ahead acquired a life and sparkle she had not noticed before.

“Wonderful,” Perf said. “My ears aren’t cold.”

Pahtun brought them to a halt. The escorts lined up behind them, as if to block escape.
They don’t get it. Pahtun understands—these others don’t, not at all!

The marchers milled restlessly. They stood on the crest of a particularly high ripple in the Kalpa’s outer foundations.

Suddenly, the shimmer fell directly in front of them, then bulged inward as if to push them back. The escorts raised their staffs. Pahtun leaned forward. “Wait for it,” the trainer said. “Don’t walk into it. Let it find you.”

Khren glanced at Tiadba through his faceplate. What she could see of his face looked calm, resigned.

“Wait for it,” Pahtun cautioned again. The breeds cringed inside their armor, as if they might be snatched up and eaten.

The shimmer did not move, but suddenly it was behind them. They had passed through without taking a step, and now saw more miles of uneven ground ahead, and beyond, a wall studded with huge shapes: the Defenders.

The final, outer rank of reality generators.

Beyond those tall, blurred shapes lay the middle lands, the zone of lies. Tiadba looked straight up. They were out from under the vault. The sky loomed.

Open sky.

She captured an impression of endlessly falling curtains, restless color she could not process or accept—no color at all, actually, and probably no motion. Her eyes suddenly lost focus. The sky worked them in ways they had never had to work before.

“You don’t want to see everything at once,” Pahtun said, “even through the faceplates. Look down, shut your eyes if they hurt.”

Her eyes
did
hurt—they wanted to tumble in their sockets and face the back of her skull—but Tiadba did not look down, did not shut them. She had waited too long for this. She rotated on the pads of her boots and looked up along the great curved exterior bulk of the first bion, then left and right, trying to take in the other two huge, dark shapes, both split and cracked—in partial ruins. The Kalpa—what was left of it.

Something above slowly came into view, pushing up and away from behind the first bion: a curving ribbon of painful fire, red and purple at once, fencing in a black, consuming nothingness, empty of thought and life. Tiadba’s mouth hung open and her breath became ragged. It was instantly and obviously wrong—so strange as to push her beyond fright.

“Is that the
sun
?” she asked.

“Depends on what you mean by sun,” Pahtun said. He had fixed his gaze on the ground. “It’s certainly

no longer the sun
we
made.”

Tiadba asked her second question—on behalf of her visitor. “
Where are the stars?
”

“Long gone,” Pahtun answered.

All their lives they had been protected by the warm, limiting light of the ceil, hardly varying through its pleasant, soothing cycles of wake and sleep—but no more. What lay beyond the walls and above the city was majestic but cruel, self-involved, producing not light but something that the transparent faces of their helmets had to
translate
for any sense to come of it. The Chaos.

“Wait for it,” Pahtun warned again, studying the ground. Tiadba had no idea what they were waiting for now. How could it get any stranger, any more challenging?

Something reached down, even though they were still within the border of the real—reached down and tried to casually flick them away, like brushing letterbugs off a table. Four of the marchers screamed at once, then fell and rolled into a shallow valley between the foundation’s ripples, trying to hide. Khren and Nico crumpled to their knees and clung, leaving Tiadba alone beside the trainer, the only one still looking up.

The sky—what had once been the sky—seemed to know that it was being watched. It tried to reach into her eyes, plunge through her mind, subvert everything that defined her as a breed—as an observer, a thinker, a separate being.

It refuses to be understood—it will certainly not be mastered.
Tiadba slowly lowered her gaze to the uneven, fractured ground, then blinked, of her own will. Somehow she had fought off what lay above the Kalpa, fought it to a standoff. Pahtun looked upon this young female breed with new respect. He took some small satisfaction in their distress, and professional interest in their slow recovery.

“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “No way to prepare you. No way at all.”

They neared the outer rank of generators—high, narrow monuments sliding back and forth slowly along the perimeter—pale, shining, and indistinct, like towering glass giants surrounded by fog. Shapes buried inside these obelisks moved with slow deliberation, as if tracking outside forces. Between the generators lay a misty darkness broken by a maze of low walls, barely knee-high to a breed. Tiadba could not believe those walls would keep out anything that really wanted to get in. Pahtun and the escorts accompanied the nine breeds over the last five miles to the inner wall. Distance still meant something here, sixty miles out from the training camp in the flood channel. They had learned to level their gaze upon the dark gray horizon and not look up unless they had to.

“There used to be seven bions to the Kalpa, and twelve cities on the Earth,” Pahtun told them, his voice clear in their helmets. He walked ahead on the hard surface, crazed with cracks and crevices, his boots raising puffs from fine dust that had somehow streamed into tiny dunes. The dust lay over the ancient foundation like fine ash—perhaps it was ash. “The reality generators worked for millions of years to protect all the bions. Then—war. The Chaos took the spoils. Now there are only three bions—and soon, perhaps just two, or one. You might find the rest of that story in your books, young breeds. How the Ashurs and Devas and Eidolons fought among themselves, and the cities were sacrificed to their godlike stupidity.”

“What’s a ‘god’?” Khren asked. Nico, Shewel, and Denbord walked on Tiadba’s left, Khren and Macht on her right. Perf, as always, straggled behind with Frinna and Herza. Nobody answered. “Just thought a Tall One might know,” Khren murmured. Tiadba felt no hunger, no pain—hardly felt the exertion of walking for long miles over the ancient, dead surface. She was beginning to feel beyond all real pain or care, all emotions except for curiosity, which never failed her. If Jebrassy were here, she knew he would be as curious as she, and as eager to see what lay beyond the border of the real.

Their only hope for freedom, they had once believed, lay outside the Kalpa, far from the stifle of history and tradition. The books, their trainer, the sky itself, such as it was—all told a different story. They were once again being used. As they had always suspected, they were just tools, means to an end. Still, Pahtun seemed concerned for their welfare. Now that the training was almost over, his gruffness had tempered to patient instruction about last-minute details. He repeated himself often, and this irritated Tiadba, but when she looked at the other breeds, she understood the necessity. Especially for Herza and Frinna, who never asked questions. They needed the stories told over and over for a reason. How could they possibly survive in the Chaos?

“The middle lands are most difficult,” Pahtun said for the hundredth time. “The zone of lies is called that for a reason—intrusions can happen at any moment. You must cross quickly. Should the Chaos launch an assault through the sector you are crossing, the battle between the Kalpa’s generators and the intrusion will create intense whirlpools of fractured time and space, almost invisible and deadly. Get caught in one and you will never reach the border of the real. Your suits will not become fully active in this region. Listen to them—they will tell you when an intrusion and its effects are near, and whether your perceptions, or your decisions, are being clouded.”

Their own spoken words reached each other directly, right in their ears—but the way the armor communicated was difficult to get used to. It only rarely used audible words. Much of the time they simply “knew better.” Tiadba was not sure whether she resented this subtlety. It could certainly prove useful beyond the gates and the border of the real—though Pahtun and the other escorts had warned them that the suits could not know everything.

Pahtun said, “Don’t underestimate your instincts—you are
observers
, made of ancient matter, and observers are primary even out in the Chaos. The Typhon is envious of your senses. This is the first principle—out there, to look, to perceive, is to be
hated
. Later, when you’ve acquired direct experience of the Chaos, you will learn to rely more and more on your own judgment, above all things. But at first, and certainly in the zone of lies, rely upon your suits.”

“How can something inside the borders be worse than what’s outside?” Nico asked.

“Not worse—just treacherous,” Khren said. “Like being bitten by a tame pede. You don’t expect it.”

“Oh,” Nico said.

“A meadow pede bit me once, when I stepped on its tail,” Shewel said.