City At The End Of Time (68 page)

Among the Shen he had become known as Curiosity embodied.

The Shen exemplified in all their ways and histories the exalting humility of correcting error, and followed in all their days the smoothly prickled course of knowing one’s blind stupidity. Polybiblios had been among them for a million years, had watched them react—or not react—to the harrowing of the Chaos. When presented with our case, he consulted his Shen teachers, and without ceremony they prepared to cast him out, after a brief, enigmatic explanation. “You will create more error and more confusion,” they told him. “We cannot allow you to remain on the necklace-worlds, beneath the Green Suns. All should end soon, but because of you it will not. Cosmos will follow upon cosmos, challenge upon challenge, out of any thinkable sequence, but forever and ever nonetheless—for you will misuse what we have taught you. And so it must be. For we are again in error. Perfection is death. For us, that is good—but you reject our purity.”

Even so, they allowed Polybiblios to keep what he had sought for so long, their last and greatest discovery: the secrets of budding minicosms from the quantum foam, finite but incomprehensibly vast seed-sets of new universes.

“I can leave now,” Polybiblios said, and briefly bowed his head and laughed in Shen-like acknowledgment of his joyful grief.

Our return took us through regions briefly unveiled by the Chaos’s cruel recession, the Typhon proudly pulling back its cloak, leaving nakedly visible and scattered over the withered geodesics those systems and civilizations that had not retreated eons before. Billions of contorted suns—the great human fields of the Trillennium—lay across the darkness like embers of burning lace. Signals from these regions came to the Intensity, difficult to translate, but when Polybiblios—against our experienced recommendation—analyzed them, we saw once more how deep and perverse the Typhon’s ruin could be. To the poor monstrosities surviving in these corrupted regions, the roots and laws of former nature still seemed consistent. They still believed a future lay before them, and reasoned that we were the monsters to be hunted and destroyed.

Perhaps we were.

We doubted everything.

Our threadfold engines faltered—the Chaos gnawed at the last technique we could use to spend less than eternity on our return to Earth. Polybiblios applied all his Shen learning, and we proceeded in a dreaming bubble squeezed out of the necrotic flesh of the cosmos, defying predatory shreds that whipped out, breeding insanity and mutation even within our isolation—and forcing us to kill nine more of our crew.

The twisting corridor of our passage, the last geodetic of the old cosmos, constricted tight.

We gave up whatever hope remained.

I entered my own darkness, defeated, maimed in my soul.

But Polybiblios, with his quiet, steady way, saved us. His unceasing ministrations to the
Intensity
pulled us through. We awakened cruising through clean space, alive, saner than we had been for long years—surrounded by our ship’s humming regularities.

We neared Earth’s sun.

Our rescued Deva, who had rescued us in return, celebrated the passing of his masters and teachers, the Shen. We stood with him and listened to his words, though they meant little to us at the time, and even seemed to contradict what we had learned before.

“They will not give in to the Typhon,” he explained. “Nor will they commit suicide. They will reverse their genesis, and return themselves to the libraries from which they were patterned—never to be retrieved by any intelligence, in this or any subsequent cosmos.

“For they have made a pact with the handmaiden of creation, who reconciles all.”

Perhaps he referred to himself more than the Shen. Poor Shen!

After this, Polybiblios retreated into contemplation as we entered the last open gate to our legacy system, returning to the ports of ancient Earth—and mourned our dead, those we could remember. Tiadba closed the book and thrust it back into the bag.

“That’s Sangmer talking again, isn’t it?” Frinna asked. “He doesn’t mention the female, the one on the silvery beach.”

“Maybe she’s part of the secret,” Macht said. “Maybe she’s that handmaiden.”

“No, she became his wife,” Herza said.

Shewel pulled his ear and rolled over.

“How many times did he write this story?” Nico asked.

CHAPTER 90

“The Defenders won’t last much longer,” Polybiblios said as the three marched through the pitchy, uneven middle zone. The snaggled line of remaining obelisks diminished into darkness on either side, spinning fitfully. The nearest leaned and groaned and sparked under the long night. The epitome’s armor made halfhearted attempts to fit but had been fashioned for a breed and did not seem in the mood to adapt. Polybiblios walked at first with a jerking, puffing gait, until, in frustration, the suit seemed to take control and march
him
, and finally he squatted beside a heave of dark reddish stone and looked at his companions through the fogged faceplate with a reasonable simulation of perplexity. “I designed these. I should know how to use them.”

“What else don’t you know?” Ghentun asked, in no mood to pause—or to be generous to a former Eidolon.

“Oh, much, no doubt,” Polybiblios murmured, then concentrated on pushing at the suit’s joints, poking, tugging, muttering some more, and finally requesting their help. “Push this here…and this segment, pull it out, there.”

From both sides, Jebrassy and Ghentun grabbed at his arms and legs, then pushed and tugged until the suit glowed green at the joints and sighed around the epitome’s slight form, fitting as well as it was going to.

“At least now I can walk,” Ploybiblios said, standing and shaking out his arms and legs. “Well, let’s move away from here—this place is dangerous.”

“How much longer?” Jebrassy asked.

“Until we’re in the Chaos—or until the Kalpa dies its inevitable and horrid death?”

“That,” Jebrassy said, swallowing.

“It should have happened already,” Polybiblios said. “The Typhon has failed at building a foundation of rules. It exists only as a foul shadow, a catalog of thefts from the old cosmos. If it absorbs the last bit of our world, it might simply—pop!—cease to exist. Everything will go to nullity. If we fail…well, there is no word for what nullity does or does not do.”

They walked more quickly now, across what seemed like many miles to Jebrassy, following Polybiblios as he cut through the tight-packed clutter of the condensed and amplified Necropolis. Jebrassy struggled to see where his feet were going—the ground seemed to curve up to meet each bootfall. Soon they were within sight of a great poly-form dome of crazed and warped architecture. To Jebrassy it resembled many bridges set on end, spun about, then dropped, smashed, and finally, as an afterthought, hung with long mossy ribbons.

“Does Nataraja look like that?” he asked.

“Unknown. This particular structure has been here since before the tower was broken, carried from some far galaxy, I seem to recall…There are many such scattered here, there.” He stabbed about with a finger. “Meant perhaps to draw curious marchers. The Typhon…” Polybiblios looked down at his trembling hands. “This body reacts with revulsion. How interesting. I had thought myself beyond such feelings.”

Polybiblios guided them along another dark, crusted path winding around the ruins.

“Of course, without the generators, the Eidolons will cease their existence within the Kalpa—or outside, for that matter—but the Ancient Breed and most of the Menders might still survive.”

Ghentun understood the implication of that. “What about other marchers?” he asked.

“Not to be known,” Polybiblios said, shaking his head. This gave Jebrassy a twinge—he had heard that phrase before…

They crossed many more apparent miles. Ghentun inquired as to whether the epitome knew where they were.

“On the outer boundaries of the Necropolis,” Polybiblios said. “Everything
is
tighter, shrunken—drawn in. We’re moving faster than we should. And soon…?” Polybiblios closed in, peering at the breed.

“What will we soon come to?”

“You’re like a teacher,” Jebrassy said. “Always testing.”

“The houses,” Ghentun answered for him. “Ten of them, at last count, cutting across the strongest path of the beacon.”

“And beyond them?”

“The Vale of Dead Gods. Beyond that, all is conjecture.”

“Just because I am with you, do not think you can let down your guard,” Polybiblios said. “Great men and women have been lost out here, with more ancient conviction and experience. So many marchers, but others as well—Menders. Pilgrims. Many have been sacrificed while we waited.”

“You sent things back,” Jebrassy said. “Now they’re returning.”

“Emerging might be a better word, like something rising from the depths of an ocean.”

“I don’t know what an ‘ocean’ is.” Jebrassy lowered his head as if in pain. “Upside-down rocks…ice and mountains in the sky. That’s where the dreamers are going. Is that an ‘ocean’?”

“No,” Polybiblios murmured, but he did not sound completely convinced. “Worlds falling together. All a desperate gamble, and how many times did we fall into that splendid quag of despair only Eidolons can feel?”

Jebrassy clenched his teeth and pushed ahead.

CHAPTER 91

Denbold and Macht tested the trod with their boots. “It’s firm,” Denbold said, returning to Tiadba. Herza and Frinna stepped out on the surface together. “We can cross here.”

“The beacon gets weaker that way,” Khren said. “It’s strongest on this course. That’s the path we should be taking. We should follow the trod.”

“It’s a long, wide one,” Shewel said. “It won’t stay firm. And there’s a peculiar bump ahead—we can see over it, or should, the way the light works here, but there’s only darkness.”

“What he calls a bump looks like a…what’s the word?” Khren asked. Tiadba had been reading other stories from her books. Some described features of land and water that the breeds had never experienced.

“A
mountain
,” Tiadba said. “Lots of them—a mountain
range
.”

“Well, whatever—that’s where we’re supposed to go.”

“What’s out there at the end of the trod?” Tiadba asked the armor. Pahtun’s voice responded. “Once there was something called the Vale of Dead Gods. It was a broad-floored rift with ten houses, including the House of Green Sleep, held in a kind of countertwist bowl at its center. Many marchers were lured there and enslaved in a chronic noose. The tower changed the arc of the beacon to avoid the vale. But the last update said there was only shadow—a lack of detail.”

“How long ago came that update?” Nico asked shrewdly.

“Kalpa time, a hundred thousand years,” the armor said. “But out here, in a countertwist, how we approach changes everything. Away from the guidance of the beacon, circling in from another direction, there may still be the vale. The House of Green Sleep is or was a strong lure. If the vale and the house have changed, then there may yet be other traps—or a clear path.”

“Typhon’s lies?” Nico asked, squatting beside the trod and poking at it again with a tripod leg. The surface seemed hard as glass.

“Perhaps,” Pahtun’s voice said. “The trod passes close to the vale. If the beacon guides us along the route of the trod, it might still be safe.”

They all looked to Tiadba. Her weariness had grown. She sensed a cycling sadness in the back of her thoughts, as if she were leading the marchers into a trap even worse than the echoes, worse than the twitching glider dumps and churning graveyard bogs they had already seen. But the beacon was strong. There was nothing else they could do; they had no other guidance.

“We could stay on one side or the other,” Khren said. “But it’s getting rough and there are lots of cracks. Take us much longer.”

They all dreaded the possibility that the Kalpa would fall and the beacon would be silenced—or worse, deceive them, though Pahtun assured them that was not possible.

“We’ll use the trod,” Tiadba said. “Khren, stay as far back as you can and still see the rest of us. Herza and Frinna, go ahead an equal distance. Any sign of softness…”

They spread out and moved toward the “bump” in the land ahead.