City At The End Of Time (59 page)

Jeremy looked around, suddenly very frightened—more frightened than he’d been in the sack in the back of the van, or sprawled out bruised and wet on the transformed street, his hand sluiced by the storm’s cold runoff.

“You’re supposed to be Mnemosyne, right?”

A breeze blew through the room, cool but not unfriendly, pulling at his shirt, flicking his pants legs. Playful, sad. He blinked and shifted on the chair, then just listened. A quiet rushing hiss came from outside, more like falling sand than wind—and nothing else. Falling sand or endless quick, tiny waves on a beach. The room was dark. No dawn through the high window. Jeremy—no, he was Jack again—had no idea how much time had passed.

He looked over his shoulder. “Hello?”

The lone high window was more pit than window—he couldn’t even see the frame or much of the wall. The room seemed much colder. “Everything I know is wrong.” Jack smiled, crossed his arms. “I get it. I’m ready.”

He would not just get up and leave the room. That would show them he was a coward, that he couldn’t take their stupid test, which didn’t mean anything anyway.

Hours later, “I jump away from bad things. Everybody would if they could.”

Whom do you protect—and whom do you leave behind? Where do you go when you jump—into
another you? How many of you are there?

Jack broke into a sweat. “I don’t know.” He wiped his forehead, then his cheeks. Someone, somewhere, had to be talking quietly through a hole or a speaker. Time to get real. He was willing to give up the illusion that he could jump—that had always seemed crazy—as well as the memory of the dark, crumbling world and what lay beyond the membrane—give it all up, no problem—forget about Glaucous and the huge woman and the wasps—fine by him. Forget about the frozen stuttering city outside the warehouse and the ladies and even Ellen and Dr. Sangloss and Bidewell. He’d dump it all—well, maybe not Ginny. But just don’t ask
those
questions, because he had wondered about the answers for years. How many selves had he betrayed, just by avoiding their pain, by jumping to better, safer lines?

“I can’t be all of us at once.” He tried to laugh. “My head will explode!”

Maybe he was remembering the wrong things. Maybe he had never escaped from the back of the van. Everything between now and then could be a lie, an illusion. Glaucous was torturing him—they were holding him here by spinning out their wasp-winged fates—maybe that was the rushing sound and this tall, narrow room was surrounded by wasps, blacking out the lone window. Who could possibly know?

Jack tried to laugh again but only made a sound like crackling paper. But admitting that Glaucous was real was admitting as well that Jeremy Rohmer—Jack Rohmer—was special, had special talents, dreamed special dreams. Glaucous was no more a sufficient explanation of where he was, of what he was being asked to do, than Bidewell or Mnemosyne—whatever she or it might be. Maybe they were all the same. Madness needed no sequence, no rules. They had not remembered him at the Busker Jam—not even Joe-Jim had remembered Jack at first. That blank look—and then the click of memory.

“You reconciled me, didn’t you?”

Jack was really sweating.

“When was I made? Really.”

What is your earliest memory?

The waterfront, cranes looming, the last light of day falling like burning gold between the gray warehouses—not much different from Bidewell’s warehouse, though not as old. He saw a bumpy asphalt road overlying bricks and patched with gravel and concrete, broken up by bands of light—light, shadow, light, shadow, warming and cooling his face as he rode on his bike. And still, in his pocket, next to the stone…

Jack pulled out the origami puzzle, let his fingers work around the edges, poke through a cupped fold, pull at a tab he had not noticed before.

The sometime stone had arrived first—a long, long time before. The stone tied up past and future, called forth protectors, invoked his card number, the number that Glaucous had asked for—probably written on the inside of the puzzle he had not yet learned how to unfold.

Jack was just a book on a shelf in a library.

“I’m with
him
—in the dreams. I’m with the Librarian. He has my catalog number—all the numbers to

all the volumes in a library that goes on forever. The Librarian started this.

“He’s the author of my being. No surprise.”

He opened the puzzle cleanly, without a single tear.

One problem.

As the puzzle kept unfolding, the number rolled across the floor and curled up the walls, surrounding him with ratcheting digits—longer than time.

Jack laughed out loud. “I was on the bike, right? That’s my real first memory—the first time I appeared. That’s why everyone has such a hard time remembering any of us—we’re new, and you’re still filling in the gaps.”

Between those who reconcile, and those who see and judge, there is only love. Without you, the
muses would not be necessary. And after you give up seeing, there is the joy of matter. But now
that fades to nothing.

Jack wiped his eyes, stared down at the bead of moisture on his fingers. He did not know what the tears meant. A loss greater than death…the joy of
what
?

The greatest secret of all, and he would soon forget he had ever heard of it. Daniel sat in the chair until the silence seemed to swallow him, and still he felt nothing, heard nothing. He stood and walked around, rubbing his hands, and for a moment a bit of Fred came to him—a chain of thoughts about mathematics and physics.
Sum of all possible paths is the most efficient, the most
probable path. Use the entire cosmos to generate all possible strings in a matrix of permutated
texts. A universal library will help generate the most probable path. It’s obvious.
Daniel smiled grimly. “Good for you. You’re still figuring things out. But none of it makes sense to me. This least of all.”

Fred’s thoughts bleached away.

“I’m Daniel!” he shouted to the high ceiling. “I’ve protected these stones since the beginning of time, across
all
the worlds!
You must know me!
”

Silence.

“I had a family. I had a brother. Lots of brothers. I remember them—some of them. I think one was named John or Sean. I didn’t just jump up out of nowhere. I can tell you about what’s coming—there’s worse coming—if you’re even here. But you’re
not
here…are you?”

Falling dust outside, everywhere.

He slumped in the chair. The others would probably lie and say they’d had a nice chat with whomever, whatever. All a sham. Bidewell was pulling a hoax to get control of their stones. Maybe the old man had locked them in and was going to let them starve.

He murmured to the still, cool air, “I know who I am, even if
you
don’t.”

But now he wasn’t at all sure.

Something changed in the corners. Daniel stiffened and sat up straight, peering bright-eyed into the shadows.

Remember. Very far—farther than anyone. From the outer reaches, hidden from all searchers,
until you were brought to the main cord.

Remember.

His eyelids fluttered, his eyes closed, and he clenched his teeth. He saw a place, a huge construction made of something like stone sitting in a crater on a vast smooth plain, silent—silent for millions of years, if time had any meaning there. He saw himself moving from room to room without actually walking—first as a child, then as an adolescent, feeling so very lonely and empty—his growth not continuous, but accomplished by fading at one age, reappearing elsewhere, older and more complete. And outside the house—lining the far, worn hills—huge beings without face or feature, held captive, never moving. Waiting to be summoned.

The Vale of Dead Gods.

Daniel was being forced to remember the impossible. He had been re-created and then stashed so far from any main sequence of reality that his earliest memories were an agony. He had passed through so much destruction to get here—but it was his origin that pained him the most.
Two
stones. Why?

The room changed again, and the confrontation he had dreaded—believed impossible—came and went, so quickly he had to reach back with sharp discipline to even recover it. Daniel was freezing. What he did not want to remember—what fogged his will, his intent—rose for an instant into memory and dictated his responses.

You know me.

“Yes,” he said.

But not as I am.

“No.”

I am changing.

“Yes.”

I am lost.

“You’re dying. But we’ll meet again. We meet on the shore of a silver sea. That’s all I remember.”

The cold reached down into his bones.

Daniel sat in the chair, too cold even to shiver.

On the wooden floor before him lay a small round piece of glass. First green, then blue. Foggy with age, as if it had lain on a beach, rounded by an endless surge of sand and water. Maybe it wasn’t glass. He couldn’t tell what it was, really. He reached down and held it for a moment, turning it in his fingers, then slipped it in his pocket beside the puzzle boxes.

Daniel looked around the silent, empty room. “Good-bye,” he said.

Bidewell walked along the high narrow hallway and opened the doors one by one, and out came Ginny first, more at peace than he had seen her before. Next came Jack, thoughtful, but with a new light in his eyes.

Bidewell hesitated before the open middle door, then walked to Daniel’s chair, where he reached out to shake the man’s hunched shoulder. Daniel stirred and opened his eyes. They were sharp as knives—the wrong eyes for that face. “I fell asleep,” he confessed, then stretched. The third shepherd was still an enigma.

“We’ll convene in a while,” Bidewell said.

“Pretty interesting—a question—” Daniel began, but Bidewell raised his hand.

“No need. It’s all private.” Bidewell nodded three times, eyes flicking at three different random points in the high room, before passing through the door.

The moment is over, Bidewell thought, for which I have prepared for a thousand years.

CHAPTER 74

The Chaos

They had no choice. Another wave of dark marchers—dead, dying, or echoing timelessly—swarmed down from the ridge.

“They are too many and too strong,” their armor told them. “The generator will not protect you.”

Tiadba pulled up the device. The field dropped back into the ovoid, which sparked and hissed before falling dark. “Into the trees!” she shouted.

“They’re not
trees
!” Denbord protested. “They’ll kill us—you heard the armor!”

But there was no choice. Tiadba pushed her group forward. Denbord took the generator, slung it over his shoulder, and booted the cart aside, then pulled his clave from his belt—the first time they had tried to use this weapon. Tiadba did the same. The mottled black notched blades fanned out, spun, and almost vanished. Two walls of force flashed outward, defined by the angles of the blades—translucent one moment, but where they coincided, silvering like a mirror. In the mirror, which curved and whipped, the ground behind seemed to clear and the dark marchers fell back, fell away.

“We can kill them!” Denbord shouted, triumphant. He continued to wave his blade. Its field whipped around upon them. Their suits fluoresced a pale green at the near miss.

“Keep that away from us!” Macht shouted.

The breeds instinctively pushed toward the shimmering trees—there were simply too many echoes rising and spilling over the ridge, thousands of years of lost marchers massing against those still alive. The more the claves cut, the more there were. Tiadba had sudden doubts their weapons were that effective. She saw that the claves fended off the dark marchers only temporarily—they broke apart, vanished, then seemed to rise again from the black ground.

Khren was the first to push between the trees, the pearl-colored balls of light on the branches popping and snapping as he brushed them. Yet the trees did not chew up their armor, in fact wrapped branches and trunks around them, causing great fear—until they saw the branches close up behind, projecting a curtain of glinting drops as delicate as dew. The dark marchers did not follow. This was completely unlike the generator’s bubble shield, but apparently more effective. Tiadba, Khren, and Denbord led the others deeper into the forest, until they reached a clearing. Tiadba tumbled over Khren when he stopped, and Macht over them. As they untangled, the others dropped to their knees, murmuring prayers, weeping, then collapsing on the soft gray surface, while all around the trees rose twice as tall as their heads, slender fronds growing up and over, forming a bower and giving them cover as they caught their breath.