City At The End Of Time (9 page)

She had told no one about her ability—until Bidewell took her in. Only last week, listening to her story, for once the old man had opened up enough to render an opinion. “Sounds very like someone lost, enslaved, in the Chaos. Whatever that may be, not to be known, not to be known.”

He had pinched his lips between two thin fingers and reiterated several times that he could only guess, he was no expert.

Exasperating man.

“What
do
you know, Mr. Bidewell?” Ginny blurted, slamming shut the heavy book. The clap echoed from the ceiling.

“Call me Conan, please,” Bidewell encouraged. “My
father
was Mr. Bidewell.”

“And how old was
he
when you were born?”

“Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.

“And how old are you?”

“One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”

“Years?”

“Of course.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself.

“Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Ginny—volume twelve of the complete works of David Copperfield. The Dickens character, you see—who was actually a writer. Not the magician—though it would be interesting to meet
him
, sometime. I wonder what his dreams are like? A few choice questions…My dear, if you have time, could you check for a small fault on Chapter 103?

This print is tiny, and my eyes are not what they used to be.”

He held out the book.

Ginny stood and took it from Bidewell’s outstretched, gnarled hand. She was tiring of this constantly mutating nonsense—how could fictional characters write a book, much less fill a set of twelve or more volumes?—yet she felt safe here. A bitter contradiction.

She remembered when Bidewell had first lightly clasped her fingers, welcoming her to the warehouse and provoking—at once—a shudder and an odd sense of comfort.

“What sort of fault?” she asked.

“Anything, really—a typo, misspelling, lacunae, rivering. We must note the fault—but we must not make any corrections, or try to hide the apparent defects. They could be more important than thou canst know, young lady, to that Citie. Whatever and wherever that Citie may be.”

Another week passed, and Ginny’s restlessness grew. She could feel the foul currents Bidewell had spoken of—and something even more alarming. The river up ahead—her river—seemed to come to an abrupt end. She could not tell how far ahead—weeks, months, a year. But beyond that—nothing. Bidewell refused to tell her more, and most of their conversations ended with his crackling, “Not to be known, not to be known!”

Bidewell’s warehouse was home to over 300,000 books. Ginny estimated the numbers on the shelves by quick count, and the numbers in the boxes by quicker calculation. Besides the two of them, seven cats called the warehouse home, all polydactyl—with many toes, and two with what appeared to be little thumbs.

These two were black and white. The smaller, a young male just out of kittenhood, silently padded up to her as she sorted and read, and rubbed against her ankles until she picked him up, placed him on her lap,

and stroked him. Warm and loose-rubbery beneath soft fur, with a blaze on his chest and one white paw, he purred approval until she stopped, then leaned up on her chest and tapped her chin with a wide paw. She felt a light pinch.

He would not share any of her sandwich when she offered a bite, but instead, as a kind of hint or example, lay at the foot of her bed that night an intact but very dead mouse. All the cats were independent, and seldom responded to her chit-chits and here-kitties, but during the long nights, she would find one or two or sometimes three on the end of her cot, feet curled under, eyes slitty, watching her with warm, rumbling contentment. They seemed to approve of Bidewell’s new visitor. The cats, of course, were essential to the safety of the warehouse. Bidewell did not consider mouse-nibble edits at all helpful.

Time passed a little quicker after she met the cats. Curled one after another on her lap, they even made up for Bidewell’s suggested reading list: he put aside, near her worktable, a stack of books on mathematics, physics, and several texts on Hindu mythology. Three of the books on physics seemed more advanced than she thought science had progressed so far, discussing faster-than-light travel as if it were a fact, for example, or detailing five-dimensional slices and cross sections of fates in space-time. Next to these he placed five books with mostly blank pages—which he referred to as “culls.” Ginny examined the culls carefully and discovered that each had one letter printed on one page, and nothing more—page after page of pristine blankness.

Whatever mysterious things happened in libraries and bookstores and among the stacked boxes in publishers’ warehouses, it seemed that the mostly blank books were least interesting to Bidewell. “They are at best nulls, voids, spaces between keys. At worst, they are distractions. You may use them for your diary or as notebooks,” he said, and then glanced at the other stack. “Those are for your education, such as it must be, and limited as we are.”

“Are
they
defective, too?” she asked. “Should I look for the errors and mark them?”

“No,” Bidewell said. “Their errors are natural, and unavoidable—the errors of ignorance and youth.”

Ginny, in her few years of formal schooling, had always enjoyed math and science—coming to an easy understanding of problems that bewildered her classmates—but had never thought of herself as any kind of nerd. “I’d prefer a television or a computer with an Internet connection,” she said. Bidewell shuddered violently. “The Internet is a frightful prospect. All the world’s texts…all the world’s hapless opinions and lies and errors, mutating endlessly, and why? Who can ever keep track or know? It is not the incredible magnitude of human folly that interests me, dear Virginia.”

She was hardly a prisoner, yet no matter how often she approached the door that led outside, she could not bring herself to pass through. The tension in her head and chest became unbearable, yearning and fear swirling until her stomach knotted. She could not go outside again—not yet.

“Why are you keeping me here?” she cried one morning, as Bidewell carted in another load of boxes filled with books. “I’m sick of it! Just you and these cats!”

Bidewell snapped back, “I do not keep you here. Wherever you go, I’m sure you will find your way home—by the long route. That
is
your talent. The cats might miss you.” And then he walked off, knees snicking, and shut the white warehouse door with its oiled groan of counter-weights and pulleys. Ginny kicked at a crate, then turned to see the smallest cat sitting on the floor, watching her with complacent curiosity.

“You’ve got everything you want,” she accused.

The cat’s tail thumped a sealed box. He stood on his haunches and vigorously scratched the cardboard, leaving a catly symbol, like an X with an exclamation mark. Then he marched off, tail high and twitching. Sometimes he even nibbled the corners of the books on the worktable. Bidewell didn’t seem to mind. With the appearance of the girl at his wire gate, Conan Arthur Bidewell had experienced three sharp emotions: irritation, exhilaration, and fear—the last, at his age, almost indistinguishable from joy. The air was thick with change. The girl’s appearance was after all no more miraculous than the condensation of a drop of rain from a moisture-laden cloud.

Yet now he knew: the work of many lonely years was coming to fruition. Why
not
joy, along with the inevitable palpitations of coming danger?

For too many decades, far too many, he had been lost in his books, charting the statistics of improbable change. What could be more desperate or more futile? Waiting for the sum-runners to sow their flowers and produce a new family for him and the warehouse. And now—

Bidewell had long been noting the changes in the literary climate. More and more significant finds were being sent his way, from all over the planet. (Pity they could not reach out to other planets! For similar events must be happening Out There, as well, puzzling other scholars—if they were as vigilant.) The moods of his books had darkened and clouded over.
This is the way the world ends—not with a
bang, but a misprint.

He had noted other changes in the neighborhood—a decrease in mice and an increase in cats. The warehouse contained two more cats than it had before the girl’s arrival. They seemed to get along well with Minimus, his favorite. No doubt they all belonged to Mnemosyne—in their independent way. And now Bidewell and the cats had a girl to keep them company, an unremarkable girl mostly, moody, guarding her emotions, as well she should. She was in a precarious situation. She believed she was eighteen years old. Bidewell knew better, but did not have the heart to tell her. Let them all discover the truth when they came together, for inevitably—despite the predators that searched them out and suppressed them, much as the cats reduced the warehouse’s population of mice—there would be others. Their time had come.

A time of conclusions.

Ginny had survived a downward spiral and a terrible shock. He saw that she needed to recuperate and so did not load her overmuch with chores. The girl performed her jobs well enough. She opened boxes and weeded through the least promising collections, and was becoming a discerning reader, no surprise, considering her origins. She might eventually be of real help, but Bidewell wondered whether they would have the time for her skills to develop to where she could make a real difference. The work in the warehouse proceeded, though he already knew what he needed to know: that the past was responding like a barometer to a tremendous decrease in pressure. So little past remained, and hardly any future.

What one thought one remembered was not a reliable guide to what had actually occurred—not anymore.

History truly was bunk.

CHAPTER 100

The False City

Tiadba had been wrapped in a cocoon of dust and fiber, like sweepings neglected in a corner. Her eyes stung and pricked but she did not dare lift her fingers to wipe them—hands and skin were both crusted with sharp grit.

Often enough, over hours like beads strung on endless necklaces, she had felt the grit crawl on her skin as if alive…Could not imagine what it might be.

Living, consuming decay.

Did not much care.

Here, beyond exhaustion, trapped—one bead of the necklace cold, the next neither cold nor warm—drained and burned to a crisp yet still capable of pain, not caring whether there was pain, only now and then could she rouse memory of her companions—her fellow marchers—and when she did, the grit jabbed all the more sharply. Memories and regrets had become tiny shards, sharp and glassy, caked on her skin and jabbing into her eyes.

Tiadba had seen her marchers carried along the glowing, fluid trod through a hole like spreading lips rimmed with sores, into a great dingy hollowness…had seen bloated, slavering things, long and malevolent, hurry from far walls to dangle from squirming legs and stab with scimitar jaws. Jaws that smoked and sparked.