City At The End Of Time (17 page)

“Unknown.”

“Anything else you care to tell me?”

“Yes.”

The armor’s voice becomes a gentle rush in his ears, like sifting sand. He does not want to be completely alone out here. The lake and the whirl change perspective whichever way he turns. So he looks straight ahead at the blue light. He still clutches the small piece of sculpture given to him by Polybiblios.

Barely audible, the armor’s voice says, “You have arrived. Finish the journey naked.”

“Won’t I die?”

No response.

The sandy rush fades to silence.

He squats on the ice, takes a deep breath behind the faceplate, and begins to remove his armor, first the helmet, then the torso, and finally the sleeves and leggings. It comes off easily, like peeling an overripe tork.

As he strips down, a creature unlike anything in the Kalpa walks up to him. It is barely as long as his arm and has four legs and is covered with black and white stuff that looks as soft as the fur on Tiadba’s nose.

“I’ve dreamed about you,” he says. “You’re name is…” His lips and tongue struggle. “
Catth.
”

The creature slowly walks around him, inspecting, and then runs off. Not what it was looking for, apparently.

Jebrassy stands up wearing only the clothes he had with him when he left the Kalpa. The ice is cold under his feet. Everything is exceptionally cold. Worse, he feels his weight diminish. This makes him queasy. He hopes everything won’t just drift up and float away.

But he doesn’t know why it shouldn’t. Obviously, the last of the old rules—imitated, remade, and finally ignored and abused—are passing.

CHAPTER 116

Jack can barely hold the stone, it’s become so hot. But he won’t let it go. It can burn his fingers to char for all he cares. Ginny will be holding hers, he knows—and what about Daniel?

Blue veins rise in the green ice, begin to cut and churn.

There are two paths—there have been only two paths for some time now, at least since he rode the bicycle on autopilot and saw the earwig in the warehouse district.

But he doesn’t know which path this is.

He’s working on autopilot again.

Seeing with other eyes.

Staring down at different feet, naked—and watching a cat walk away with its tail held high.

“
Catthh,
” he says, his lips numb.

CHAPTER 117

Tiadba feels almost nothing. She can no longer see her companions—they lie at the edge of her vision, black crumples of flesh and abandoned underclothes, not alive, not dead, not even asleep. Best if they were dead.

The female presence spreads like an enveloping cloak. But there are now
two
presences. She can feel them both—

One is cold and frightening, crying out in the darkness, seeking her lost children only to destroy them, surrounded by this swirling prison that is more felt than seen.

And the other—ancient, filled with potential.

The prison will keep one and set the other free.

Animals brush by—sniff her naked feet, rub against her arms, then move on. They are hunting something small and weak.

“Catthh,” she says, then tries the word again. “
Cats
.”

CHAPTER 118

Ginny is paying so much attention to the other layer of vision and experience—lost Tiadba—that she does not feel the touch on her shoulder until it is too late.

CHAPTER 119

Whitlow comes upon the child, kneeling on the ice as if to catch her breath. She does not turn, does not hear, apparently does not see.

Delight perverse and damp gleams on his pale, wrinkled face. He stumps the last few paces. The Moth is everywhere, a gray mist radiating its own triumph.

“For our Livid Mistress,” Whitlow says matter-of-factly as he lifts the girl high with one hand. “A final delivery. Our greatest triumph.”

Glaucous agrees.

With all of his strength, he holds out his fists and plays this game as no game has ever been played, pulling a single steel thread down even through the whirling of the spheres—and with the greatest of grunts, the grunt of birth and death and voiding, the grunt of victory and defeat and infinite pain, this squat gnome, hunter of birds, gambler’s friend, hunter of children,
inverts
Whitlow, not just his heart but his insides—liver and lights, blood and ouns.

Through the messy cloud, heedless of the thin wail of the dissipating Moth—Whitlow was always his ground and root—Glaucous reaches out to grasp the girl before she simply flies away. He has pulled down as much of this chosen cord of fate as he can: penance and game, set and match. This is the greatest thing he has ever done, and almost his last—almost. The fate he has grasped and pulled forward is not a good one, not for him. He knew that from the moment he saw it, near the Crux. He sets the girl upon the ice, oblivious—still seeing with other eyes.

“You’re welcome,” he mutters to no one, then crosses himself—an old habit—and kneels beside her. As the avengers approach, Glaucous uses his thick, ugly hand to gently push her aside. The wave of cats breaks over him. He is their first prey. Only right, he thinks—one terror of birds to another. Glaucous curls like a hopeless child and with all his remaining will tries not to add to the screaming. His blood spurts onto the ice. The gray tide moves on before he is finished, but the darkness closes in as his pain is chilled and pinched into a single, drawn-out throb. Something else is about to die.

The cats have found other, more important prey.

CHAPTER 11

First Avenue South

Ginny pushed a handcart stacked high with boxes down aisles formed by more boxes, having caught the knack of steering with the single long handle, like a backward toy wagon—anticipating the turns, working everything in reverse. These boxes arrived two days ago and had been dumped unceremoniously on the warehouse’s cold but dry loading dock, beneath a corrugated tin overhang. So many boxes—where did they all come from? Where did Bidewell get the money to send out all his scouts, buy all these books, have them shipped from around the world?

More mysterious still,
why
?

She pushed the handcart to the sorting table in the same corner as her sleeping area. She had walled off her bed with crates and boxes.
Books do make a room
.

The warehouse was heated, fortunately—everything maintained at a steady sixty-five degrees, and dry. Bidewell may have been mad, but he did not collect just to collect, then allow his items to mildew and spoil.

As Ginny unloaded the boxes, Bidewell stepped in through the rolling steel door that led to his library and private rooms. In the same dark brown suit he always wore, his ancient body made a gentle question mark against the door’s dingy whiteness. He paused, then took a shuddering breath, as if lost in weary contemplation, perhaps of a job never to be completed; work beyond anyone’s power to finish. He turned his head slowly and said, “These are all paperbacks?”

Ginny noticed for the first time that this was true; she’d been working on autopilot for the last hour, letting her thoughts go as she repeated the mechanics and motions. “So far,” she said. Bidewell clasped his hands. “Books produced in quantity seem to enjoy mutation, especially in the great piles that modern publishers stack in their vast warehouses. Packed together, compressed, unread—they reach a critical mass and start to change. A symptom of boredom, don’t you think?”

“How can books be bored?” Ginny asked. “They’re not alive.”

“Ah,” Bidewell said.

She spread the books out on the table in stacks five high. All of them had been printed in English; all were less than twenty years old. Many were in sorry condition; others appeared brand-new, except for browned paper and the occasional chipped or dinged corner or spine. They smelled musty. She was coming to hate the smell of books.

Bidewell approached. Ginny never felt threatened or afraid in his presence, but all the same, could not help thinking that he needed watching.

He studied the stacks she had made. Like a dealer of cards, he worked through them, fanning the pages of each book with his thumb, lifting them to his nose to sniff, barely glancing at what was on the aromatic pages. “Once a text is printed, there are no new books, only new readers,” he murmured. “For such a book—for such a text, a long string of symbols—there is no
time
. Even a new book, freshly printed, stored in a box with its identical compatriots—all the same—even that book can be old.”

Ginny crossed her arms.

Bidewell suddenly showed her a toothy smile: wood-colored teeth.
George Washington’s choppers,
but these are real—and they look strong.

“Everything old is
bored
,” he said. “Hidden away in great piles of sameness, lives and histories laid out, unchanging—wouldn’t
you
play a little game, given the chance?” He stared up the aisles between boxes and shrugged, then blew his nose with a crisp, bubbling hoot. “A letter flipped, a word changed or lost—who will ever know? Who even looks or cares? Has there ever been a scientific survey of such tiny, incremental deviations? What
we
are looking for is not the trivial, the commonplace, but the product of permuted genius: the book that has rearranged its
meaning
or added
meaning
while no one was looking, no one was reading—and most fascinating of all, the book that has altered its string of text across all editions, throughout all time, such that no one can ever know the truth of the original. The variant becomes the standard. And what this new version has to contribute—that must be interesting.”

“How could you ever find it?”

“I remember what I read,” Bidewell said. “In my lifetime, I have read a lot. Within that significant sampling, I will know if anything changes.” He waved his long fingers over the table and sniffed. “These are of minor interest. They have varied individually, a letter here, a letter there. Their variations are intriguing, perhaps even significant, but of little use in the time left to us.”

“Sorry,” Ginny said, petulant.

“Not your fault,” Bidewell said. “Like me, books can be tedious.” He winked. “Let’s get through this shipment by eventide. Then, we will order in takeaway.”

With an impenetrable look of severity, Bidewell stalked away through the aisles to the steel door and closed it behind him, leaving Ginny to her endless task of sorting and stacking. She opened the next box on the handcart, pulled out a paperback, and lifted the pages to her nose. The odor of rotting pulp made her sneeze.

CHAPTER 120

The Typhon knows neither time nor space. It exists without thought in a condensed shapelessness, smaller than the smallest imaginable point. In most ways, it can be described—much as we might describe the muses or Brahma—only by negatives: not this, not that. But let us simplify things and use human words, ascribing such motives, activities, and emotions as are familiar to humans—much easier to convey, however incorrect.

When the Typhon first became aware of our aging cosmos, it sensed vacancy—and opportunity. The old cosmos had few defenses. Its observers were many but scattered across an immense and thin geometry, worn by long and decadent eons. Like a great tree that falls in a forest, lives on for a while, then slowly leaks away its sap and its will, the cosmos’s heartwood was beginning to crumble. The Typhon was young, as timeless things go, and untried. Even the smallest, most formless aspirant to rule must prove its quality. This was its chance to take root like a seed falling onto a nursery log. It would rise above the dying realm and grow—and grow—to full nobility.

To Godhead.

It did not expect resistance. This was its flaw. It did not know how to use and incorporate confrontation and defiance, necessary skills for any god. The push back of creation—the freedom of unbridled will—engenders love.

Not for the Typhon. Whenever it encountered things that saw differently, it ended them—with great fear and loathing.

And then with something like amusement.

It
enjoyed
hating, and there was nothing to stop it—for many trillions of years. It had found its quality.

But now, in all possible dimensions, conclusions are arriving, consequences are falling into place. It is no longer a young god or an infinitesimal point, everywhere and nowhere at once. It has acquired a kind of limitation, an unwanted substantiality condensing out of the ur-nothing, the monobloc beneath all possible creations—rising out of the smallest virtual foam of the tiniest imaginable volume of vacuum. The Typhon acquires dimension and shape—it becomes bloated and sprawled. In its awful, pointless passion for deconstruction and destruction, it finally loses whatever focus it might once have applied to its whims or tasks at hand.

The overextended cosmos—the old, crumbling nurse log—has deteriorated to such a degree that it has turned into a trap. The blades of Brahma’s armillary spin. It is now a very bad place for a bloated, undisciplined god.

All the Typhon can do is flail within the whirling prison, using up the last of its strength to cause more suffering and frustrate any possibility of good outcome. It has stretched its contamination backward across time, perverting creation, causing endless cycles of directionless pain. It is now pressing our cosmos toward a nasty end, dissolving space and time back to the beginning—eating away and corrupting almost everything we could ever possibly know.