City At The End Of Time (6 page)

stiffened. The warden apologized in flat, sympathetic tones, but the ointments and glues were not what caused him pain.

A time of parting had arrived. The elderly male, Chaeto, was his second per—his male sponsor. A stocky fellow with the full spiky beard of a breed soon to make the acquaintance of the Bleak Warden, Chaeto and his partner Neb had taken Jebrassy in after his first sponsors vanished. They treated him well, yet Jebrassy had brought them little but grief.

Chaeto approached and stood by him, eyes gray with inner turmoil. They acknowledged each other with finger-taps to their necks, Jebrassy first, as required. Jebrassy then stroked the old male’s extended palm.

The gesture brought little solace.

“You did well out there,” Chaeto said. “As always. You’re a fighter, that’s sure.” He cleared his throat, then looked aside. “Not many more seasons we’ll have to raise young breeds. Mer and I think you’ll benefit no more from our instructions. Already you pay no heed to our pleas.”

Jebrassy stroked his per’s palm again, apologetic supplication. They had affection, but neither could sidestep what the old breed was about to say. “You’re determined to stick with your toughs, aren’t you?”

“My friends,” Jebrassy murmured.

“You still talk of wandering off to die away from the Tiers, without benefit of the Bleak Warden?”

“No change, Per.”

Chaeto looked up at the last glimmer on the ceil. “We’re taking in a new one. Can’t have you spread…your plans…to a fresh umber-born. Can’t have that in your mer’s niche. We’ve done our best. It’s the winding road you’ve chosen. You’ll go on now without us.” Chaeto withdrew his palm, leaving Jebrassy’s finger suspended. “I moved out your stuff. Mer’s broken up, but new young will mend her.”

The elder touched Jebrassy’s neck one last time, then turned and walked off with the limp he had acquired over the last few years. The wardens, having paused as if to listen, went about their repairs to the rest of the injured. The other breeds turned away—little or no sympathy for Jebrassy’s plight. He had delivered too many thumps and jabs.

Chaeto had likely told the high toller of their home level. The high toller would ban him from the neighborhood—even though there were vacant niches.

He was on his own. He would never see either of his sponsors again, except by accident—perhaps in a market—and even then, they wouldn’t acknowledge him. He was what he thought he had always aspired to be—a free breed. And it hurt far worse than any of his slight wounds. Jebrassy got to his feet and looked around for someone, anyone, with a generous jug. After the field had been cleared—seven injured, none seriously, a disappointment for the more

bruise-happy breeds—the walls of the nauvarchia grew high in the Tenebros, between the inner meadows and the first isle, and water gushed into the sinuous shallows. Brightly decorated boats were hoisted and rowed out, and a different set of breeds fought a rough-foot, sink-all sea battle. Those who had fought earlier—and could still walk—gathered along the wall and ate, drank, cheered, and complained, until hardly any had the strength to move. The wakelight dimmed to gray dark. The walls fell and the waters drained. The battered boats were lifted and rolled away, and the spectators who had drunk too deep and could not move were tented by their friends. The rest limped and strolled back over the meadows and fields—waved off by crop-tenders if the fields contained produce. A robust few danced and sang with their last energy across the bridges to their blocs on the three isles, happily convinced that the little wars were fine things, perfect for keeping the ancient breed amused and healthy. Jebrassy pushed himself from the littered wall, winced at the tug of his bandages, steadied himself—he had consumed a fair volume of tork—and realized only then that he was being watched—and by someone he could actually see.

He turned with what he hoped was dignified grace to meet the sharp, half-critical gaze of a glow—a pretty young female. She wore an open vest and flowing pants whose colors revealed that she resided in the middle bloc of the second isle—as had Jebrassy, until now.

The glow approached. Her hair was short and lustrous in the fading light, her eyes fixed and penetrating, so full of intent that he wondered if her mer and per would emerge from the milling crowds and retrieve her, or request an immediate testimonial from the sponsors he no longer had. That would be awkward.

Jebrassy met her gaze with puzzled dignity until she came within a few inches, sniffed him, and smiled.

“You’re Jebrassy…aren’t you?”

“We haven’t met,” he said, mustering all the wit he had left.

“They say you like to fight. Fighting is a waste of time.”

He half stumbled over an empty jug. “Is there anything else worth doing?” he asked, steadying himself.

“We have three things in common. The first is, when we dream, we stray.”

She could not have shocked him more—or come closer to wounding him. Jebrassy had told only Khren, his closest friend, about the straying. His frown turned to dismay, then genuine distress and embarrassment, and he looked over his shoulder, blinking at the crowds as they walked in chattering clusters up the ramps and off the field.

“I’m drunk,” he muttered. “We shouldn’t even be talking.” He started to walk off, but she looped her arm under his and tugged him to a stop.

“You didn’t let me finish. I want to leave the Kalpa. So do you.”

He regarded her with inebriated wonder. “Who told you all this?”

“Does it matter?”

He smiled. He practically leered. This might turn out to be a mischief after all—two reckless youths, left to their own devices. The glow’s expression did not change, except for a disgusted flip of her lashes. Taken aback, he asked, “What’s the third thing?”

“If you want to know,” she answered, eyes glinting in the last of the tweenlight, “meet me by the Diurns just before next sleep. My name is Tiadba.”

Then she turned and ran toward the ramps and the bridge—faster than he could follow, drunk as he was.

CHAPTER 7

As light ebbed and shadows gloamed, Ghentun arranged his notes—he kept them in a pouch beside a small green book—and strolled through the lower floors of the first isle bloc. Moving still unseen from niche to niche, he wrote in Puretext with a flower finger he willed to be tipped in soft silver, feeling affection and sadness as he monitored the most recent generation of ancient breeds to be delivered.

Ghentun’s mind wandered. Before becoming a keeper, he had been a student of city history—and like all historians in the Kalpa, that meant he knew very little about a great deal. What he knew—but had never seen—began with a blanket of smooth utter blackness, sprayed with trillions of stars: the Brightness. Something less than a memory now, and little more than a dream. Across its first hundred billion years, the cosmos expanded until its fabric stretched thin, opening voids wherein dimension had new or no meaning. Galaxies became distorted, burned out, wrinkled away. Space itself was aging, decaying—some thought dying.

For longer by far than the Diaspora that had flung humans to the fringes of the universe, they survived in the last tight islands of artificial suns, surrounded by a great and growing emptiness. This became the status quo. The early universe was seen as feverish and squalid, abnormal. The Age of Darkness became wreathed in the dignified mantle of a sedate if dwindling maturity—watched over by a gerontocracy of immortals, all convinced of their unsurpassable wisdom. For a few, however, these scattered islands in the abyssal dark were not enough. A minority—not sane, yet certainly not suffering from a deathly complacency—expressed a willingness to journey on, to leave behind the warmth and light of the remaining stars. They were denied, or worse—overwhelmed, quashed, all but exterminated. A handful managed to escape, to sacrifice all they knew, and to make the adaptations necessary to survive in the cosmos’s last frontiers: the crumbling wastes, dejects, and desponds frayed out over a radius of three hundred billion light-years. Out there, in the Far Dark, to the amazement of the gerontocracy, new technologies proliferated. Bold explorers discovered how to take advantage of the once deadly seams and rifts, squeezing huge stores of energy and sustenance from what most had thought a barren, decrepit desert. Those last few pioneers did more than survive. Ever resourceful, they learned to live and prosper and multiply as never before. Empowered, they eliminated or absorbed their oppressors. They built countless empires.

The Age of Darkness was followed by the Trillenium—the greatest period of growth and learning in human record. Zeros stacked upon zeros. Histories were made and lost like the guttering of an infinity of candles. All strangeness was joined, and all life, human and otherwise, was accepted and improved upon, redefining the very idea of humanity and leading to triumph upon triumph, rebirth after rebirth. No matter that the universe was growing ever weaker and thinner. In its prolonged throes, it fed its young handsomely—until humanity’s farthest flung descendants encountered the first evidence of the Typhon.

It took a billion years to gather conclusive proof of the Typhon’s existence—a rapid few millions of years for it to be analyzed and vaguely understood. By the example of its very perversity, it generated a wealth of new mathematics and science—and new ways of going mad.

Nothing like the Typhon had ever been observed. Neither a place nor a thing, the Typhon spread by scavenging aging universes. Some labeled it a pathology, an infection, a parasite—a violently aggressive membrane of change. Others claimed it was a younger, undisciplined creation infiltrating the ruins of the old.

Where the Typhon grew, worse than silence reigned. The knots of this universe were undone: geodesics failed, sightlines achieved fractal terminations, information swallowed by so many varieties of singularity—collapse, estoppage, endvols, countercepts, twistfolds, enigmachrons, fermion dismays—

And it grew faster than signals could convey, tearing through the aged matrix, eating up the rotting fabric, creating regions not of darkness—those at least were familiar—but of inconsistent, lawless misrule. It was said that anything could happen there. Perhaps more accurately, it was widely reported that
everything
happened there.

This, even the hardiest and most stubborn of all Earth’s children—the last wave of the Diaspora—could not tolerate. This, they could not fight. Most succumbed.

The mind-numbing vastness of their reduction defied historical measure. Survivors who still cherished their terrestrial origins finally retreated to the ancient home system, where humanity—its offspring, hybrids, and manifold allies—now cowered in the fastness of old Earth, living under the dwindling light of a rekindled sun and surrounded by the last few dying planets.

Those who had transformed themselves into new kinds of mass and energy were forced to live together, in very reduced circumstances. Difficult times followed—thousands of centuries of pointless violence: the