City At The End Of Time (56 page)

“Too much,” Denbold muttered.

The marchers formed a line a few dozen steps from the first of the trees, to consider their options.

“It doesn’t look dangerous,” Shewel said, squirming within his armor. He apparently hadn’t found all the places that needed scratching.

“Is it dangerous?” Tiadba asked her suit. Sometimes the armor responded to a direct question—if it had an answer. This time, when she thought she saw small things moving between the trees, there came no reply for some uncomfortable moments.

“Evolution is occurring here,” her helmet finally said. “This should be reported.”

“Good luck,” Shewel said. “Doesn’t it know we can’t do that?”

“What’s evolution?” Frinna and Herza asked simultaneously.

“Adjustments that promote survival in changing conditions. Sometimes, the adjustments stabilize the conditions.”

Macht snorted.

“What’s that mean when it’s lying down?” Shewel asked.

“There could be opportunity here. Conditions of reality and stability are being maintained without machines or tools. These could either interfere with armor and generators or strengthen them.”

“That’s definitive,” Shewel said, and added his own snort.

“Turn around,” Tiadba’s armor said.

They all swiveled and saw figures some way off, armored marchers very like themselves—thirty or forty, coming down the ridge, but leaning forward as if to climb, not descend. They approached—came within an apparent hundred steps or so.

“More marchers from the city!” Khren said happily, and began to jog toward them. Tiadba grabbed his arm.

“Prepare to flee,” their armor advised. “The danger behind you is greater than the danger ahead.”

“Echoes?” Tiadba asked.

“These are echoes,” the armor affirmed.

The other marchers—whatever sort of marchers they might be—moved with slow, weary steps, yet seemed to make good progress toward them. Khren moaned. They saw quite clearly now that the armor worn by these breeds was falling apart. The helmets lay in shreds over slumped shoulders. The faces of the echoes were wizened, dark, sunken eyes exhausted and desperate—unfocused. They seemed to be
blind.

And they were getting nowhere—repeating endless motions.
Echoing.

“Set up the generator, focus the bubble in tight, and huddle,” Tiadba said, realizing that the armor was not speaking but she was receiving instructions nonetheless, quick images in her mind. Her companions quickly did as instructed, and came together within the small, shimmering hemisphere like newly delivered crèche-mates, as close as they could fit, clasping hands, arms, legs, staring outward. The blind echoes passed around the bubble, then veered into the thin forest of low trees, where they met the glowing branches—only to pop like soap bubbles, leaving behind drifting, plasticky skins that hung from the branches, then turned to dust and drifted away.

“Where’s Perf?” Shewel asked. They felt around their group, and Tiadba forced up through the clinging mass to look around. She had not seen him. They shouted and called, but dared not break the hemisphere.

Then Tiadba saw him, ten steps away, leaning into a cluster of blind marchers, waving his arms slowly as if swimming through thick liquid, trying to stay upright.

The cracked and broken armor of these gray forms, decayed as it was, clung to his suit wherever they brushed him, changing it from vivid red to dead gray, and then, peeling it back like the skin of a ripe fruit, spinning him about as each shred was tugged loose.

The breeds inside the bubble watched helplessly, frozen with terror, as Perf twisted and danced and finally stood naked on the black pebbled surface. More of the weary gray echoes passed both around and
through
him, sanding away his integrity until he became a translucent mannequin, shimmering and wobbling as if made of gelatin.

And then he simply powdered. His dust flew up, vanishing into the purplish black tatters of the sky.

“More coming!” Khren shouted, pointing to the ridge crest. Thousands of false marchers—dead marchers—echoes, whatever they might be, had gathered and were now moving in hopeless tides to join in the apparent destruction against the forest of glowing trees.

“They’re the ones who didn’t make it this far,” Nico said. “Why do they want to kill us?”

“Pull in tighter!” Tiadba cried, seeing the image very clearly in her mind and feeling her muscles respond, feeling them all respond simultaneously, protected and controlled by their suits. The hemisphere shrank and became silvery, sucking down around their forms, ringing against their suits. Tiadba felt herself shoved against the pole that supported the generator—saw sky, horizon, everything, tilt and whirl—no pretense at visual approximation through their faceplates now, all energy devoted to simple survival.

For the first time they came close to “seeing” the Chaos as it actually was. An impossibility, of course. It hurt so badly they could neither move nor make a sound. The armor replaced these incomprehensible perceptions with wandering blankets of color. Or at least Tiadba thought it might be the armor—there was no way of knowing, hardly any way to think.

Something, a scrap of concern, seemed to come from her visitor—in the wandering, comfortable sea of colors, she could feel her other, peering in as it were, saying,
Before you freeze and die, you feel
warm…

CHAPTER 73

The Green Warehouse

Glaucous buttonholed Daniel as Bidewell escorted Jack and Ginny to the southern door. “He has tricks. You were listening when we spoke—you heard him.”

Daniel smiled. “You’re warning
me
?”

“He wants something. He’ll deliver you over, just as I would.”

“Or will,” Daniel said. “What happens if the Chalk Princess shows up right now?”

“Lost in the grayness, like Whitlow, like the Moth—but not for long, I see it now,” Glaucous said, and jerked his eyes around nervously. “I can almost sense their return. This is becoming their country again. I need a partner,” he added, more nervous still that Daniel seemed unafraid. “We both need partners. When our Mistress does return…Alone, we’d be unbalanced, unprotected.”

“You’re the hunter, I’m the prey,” Daniel said, lowering his head to Glaucous’s upturned face, wincing at a musty reek barely masked by the scent of anise. “Remember that.”

“I’ve let birds go, in my time,” Glaucous said, wiping his mouth. “I’ve done good deeds in my time, I have.”

Daniel shook his head, then turned back to the door.

Glaucous called after him, “I’m not the only hunter. And
she
is not the only danger.”

Daniel joined the three at the door. “I hope your Mr. Bidewell knows what he’s talking about.”

Bidewell watched them together, resigned. “I’m sure Mr. Iremonk knows of these matters at a practical level.” He pulled a ring of keys from his apron pocket. A black iron lock hung from the door’s steel hasp. As the ladies waited some distance back and Glaucous moved closer, hands stretched out to the warmth of the small stove, Bidewell lifted the ring and jingled three keys.

“These are my instructions. Follow them precisely.

“Jack, go to the far wall and open the door on the left—the left, not the middle or the right. Ginny, you enter after Jack and open the door on the right—not the middle door and not Jack’s door. Leave those be. Jack, left—Ginny, right. Daniel—”

“Middle door. Got you.”

“The rooms should be comfortable—neither warm nor cold. A small window, just enough light to see. No one has been inside for a hundred years. No observer has witnessed anything therein. Except for an old chair and—I imagine—some dust, your rooms are empty and clean.”

Jack looked at Ginny. An odd girl, she returned his look with wide, blank eyes, as if she did not recognize him—as if they had never met, and she wanted nothing from him. She was lost in the moment, it seemed, deeper than he was.

Daniel’s look said:
We’re all crazy, let’s humor the old man.

“Your time with Mnemosyne will be difficult to judge—but from our perspective, out here, it will go by quickly. A few minutes at most. For you—years may seem to pass.”

Bidewell took a big brass key, green with age, and opened the lock. As the book group ladies watched from their far pool of warmth and security, surrounded by high shelves and ladders—the highest shelves lost in the receding gloom above the stove and the green-shaded lamps on the desk—Bidewell opened the wooden door. It creaked, and bits of paint flaked from the top of the jamb. Cold air slid past Jack’s feet like the ghost of an impatient dog.

“You first, young Jack.”

He felt the pressure of the eyes fixed on his back, and with a shudder, he passed through.

“
Bonne chance
,” Glaucous murmured, as Bidewell closed the door behind him. The high, long room beyond the door was dark but for a window-fed shaft of purplish sky-glow that crossed from his left, above his head, and painted a pale square on the far wall. The between-space was high and narrow and empty, the old boards ancient and gray.

Squinting, Jack could just make out the rectangles of three doors on the opposite wall. His eyes adjusted. The sounds outside seemed to fall from the sky, softened, less important. Jack walked across and to his left and stood in that corner, considering the way the high walls and beamed ceiling in the long room joined. Normally, he could reach out and grab world-lines the way Tarzan grabbed vines, great clumps of them. But all the possible paths had been cut away or converged to
I enter, I do not enter
—an angular choice.

He had reached his zero point. The zero moment.

He took a step away from the safety of the corner. Laughed to himself, uncertain, but the laugh died and he almost stopped breathing. The between room was empty, but he was not alone. Something waited for a choice to be made. Waited, measuring the beats of his heart with infinite patience, and yet…

“What do you want me to do?” Jack whispered.

Three doors, six decisions.

But still—only two fates. Not really an answer, and it didn’t make sense. What each of them did seemed disconnected, did not add up.

Still, he took the two steps necessary to stand before his door. The knob was crusted with verdigris. He inserted his key. Old brass—hard to turn. He gripped it tight, twisted from his shoulder, and after several attempts something let loose, the old mechanism broke free, and his door opened with just a small scrape.

Remarkable that there had been so little change all these years.

He could barely hear the dead or dying city outside, could almost believe he was on a ship sailing over a far, soft ocean, listening to a radio playing in someone else’s cabin, tuned to an obscure indie station—he managed a grin—KRAK, Ragnarock AM.

Peace welled up, and all his guilt, indecision, worries, and fears vanished, leaving behind just Jeremy Rohmer. No need even for the pretense of
Jack.
Jeremy, the name his mother had given him. The room behind the door was narrow, long and high. Bidewell had divided this end of the warehouse into three equal rectangles. High in the wall at the far end, a single window let in wisps of uneasy light. The way the light fell contradicted the angle of the source in the between-room. Jack approached the plain white chair, thick-daubed paint on its flat seat and back cracked with age. He turned around, looked up, then slowly sat.

Folded his arms.

Raised his eyebrows at the high corners.

After a while he yawned. The sound of his ears hummed with the pressure of the yawn, and his jaw popped, obscuring a sound, a voice deep in his head.

—your first memory?

Jeremy jerked, wondering if he’d dozed off. But he was still alone, the door shut tight. He jerked again at the sensation of fingers brushing down his arms. Then he pressed back in the chair. He could feel it beginning. His self was breaking up like a crust of ice, and memories gushed through like