City At The End Of Time (40 page)

Lightning whited the facades on his right. Just blocks from the turn to his home, as he walked beside the big lamp shop, all the chandeliers, switched on for the morning trade, suddenly went dark. The air
hissed.

Daniel had to drag his new body by main force toward the abandoned house. Fear was bringing Fred back, unpleasantly strong, and Fred most certainly did not want to go. Daniel could not jaunt again, even had he the strength, the concentration. The corrosion would be everywhere. Nothing but hideous, gray looped worlds bunched up between this dissolving segment of history and whatever lay at the end: tumbled lengths of fate, frayed out, soaked and sour-smoky with decay. Another voice—not his own, not Fred’s. Fred was already being pushed back like a slug under a stone.
Why bother, Mr. Iremonk?

Lightning flew down the street, sizzling, blinding, and struck a fire hydrant. The blast nearly knocked him off his feet and shattered all the glass in the lamp shop windows.

He stumbled on, whining like a kicked dog.

You have an appointment, long delayed.

People on the sidewalks were screaming, running.

He whirled around. An old woman in tight pedal-pushers held an inverted black umbrella in one hand and dragged a terrier along behind her, on its side, legs kicking. Each time the dog got to its feet, she jerked the leash so hard it fell over again. Big splats of rain—drops the size of baseballs, mixed with sharp chips of ice—hurled from the churning sky.

Just a few miles from the center of the storm.

The sweep of her robe, merely that. Nothing compared to the Gape. Remember, Daniel? Poor
bastards, all of you. But especially
you.

Half a block behind him, Daniel saw a small man with oily, slick black hair. Daniel turned left. Across the street waited another—slender, dressed in old black clothes shiny with water and age—and a block east, a third, clutching a dripping, battered bowler hat in one white hand. All were smiling, enjoying the storm—ignoring the rain and the ice.

Where is the net’s fourth corner, Daniel?

Trying to run backward, he almost fell, so he swiveled, arms wind-milling, and lit out—gave it all he had. He wouldn’t look back.

Had to reach the house.

Had to.

CHAPTER 48

West Seattle

The storm had a dead, hollow voice. It had never known hunger, care, passion, or any growl of hormonal surge; its voice had never vented from flesh or form.

The storm was a thousand spins and drafts of wind and water, filled with restless veins of flash and charge, and all it knew—all it could possibly know—was that it had been set free, liberated from probability, and that it had a power no storm had ever before possessed. It could gather, it could kill—
with malice
.

One wet black swirl had almost caught up with the white van.

“My dear, it is our quarry, our cargo!” Glaucous shouted over the roar. He jerked his thumb toward the back. “He trails a
spoor
…”

“Of
thread
?” Penelope shrilled.

“Spoor, not spool! He exudes, he
stinks
of the bad places, not hell—though he must have come very close, dipped an ankle or a knee…
Violet
! Indigo! Blue! Red! Red bolts and orange! All for madam’s delight!”

Jack needed all his strength. He pressed his feet against the doors at the rear of the van, clutched the sack around him, rolled, grunted—

The light from the windshield darkened. Glaucous and Penelope screeched like terrified parrots. Jack peered out of the hole he had pushed through the cinch, between the silhouettes of the massive, cowering woman and the driver—through the van’s windshield. There, he saw something inexplicable. The vision refused to be cataloged or stored away, even in short-term memory.
A seam, a gap, a failure.

A face. Extraordinary beauty—and rage.

Jack immediately forgot what he saw.

Glaucous looked to his terrified partner. In one bright flash he saw the intensity of Penelope’s fear and knew that she knew. A fatal mistake had been made. However long their relationship—whatever her strength and talent—she would have to be the one. Not for the first time, Glaucous would sacrifice a valued partner.

The storm could not wait. It struck with all its pent-up force, spending all its power, everything hidden within, at once.

A black wall of cloud plummeted.

The windshield shattered.

Darkness hammered.

The van flipped and skidded along its side, rolling Jack with a bone-bruising thump onto the ribbed panel. Through the sack, the skin of his back burned as friction heated the metal. Jack rolled and kicked and pushed his head and one arm through the cinch.

The van ricocheted off a jersey barrier and flipped again. Suspended in space, Jack drew up his knees, rounded into a ball—all he could do to avoid breaking an arm, a leg, his neck. From the front seats came twin explosions of breath as belts jerked tight. The van slammed down on its roof.

CHAPTER 49

Wallingford

As Daniel ran up the steps of the house, he observed the fourth corner of the net. A small piebald man stood on the porch of the bungalow. Rain fell in such volume, Daniel could barely make out the house, much less the figure waiting for him there—paleness within shadow, shrunken, like a hideous dwarf. Daniel was soaked. The tall grass in the yard lay flat, submissive. Pieces of ice bounced on the sidewalk and the roof, struck his head and shoulders. Blood trickled down his forehead, diluted by rain. Not a good performance for a man used to walking between raindrops. Lightning played to the south, where he supposed the real search was under way—where the main target was being harried.
Assume nothing. Perhaps it is
you,
after all.

He instinctively reached ahead with his feelers. All paths were distorted, tangled. More alarming, he saw an echo float by—a half-seen rebound of Charles Granger, slouching backward toward the freeway, oblivious—

And then, another—Fred.
Himself,
bouncing back from just a few minutes in the future. Their broken piece of history was rapidly approaching an impenetrable wall—and he had no idea what would happen then.

The piebald dwarf on the porch advanced—and changed. This was no mere solid figure. Daniel had seen such before, in the bad place—forms and figures that defied dimension. Descending the steps, the dwarf grew as if reflected in a curved mirror. The closer it came, the larger it would be—and the more powerful. By the time the figure reached him it would loom high enough to brush the black, swirling clouds.

Daniel looked back and saw the other men in their antiquated suits, cringing at the rain and the ice—human and solid after all, capable of pain. The grass steamed. The air cooled, turned thick as gelatin. All darkened.

He felt heavier—tried desperately to reason, to be smarter than the poor bastards around him. Echoes from the Terminus at the end of this world-line would temporarily increase the local mass quotient. Time would begin to slow. At the Terminus, for most observers, it would stop or echo them back a few days, a few hours, where they would live those brief segments over and over, hapless as robots repeating a programmed loop.

Slices of history were now floating like chunks of meat in a half-digested stew—nothing left of the future, he surmised, but the wall, and around that, a thinned-out, dimensionless vacancy in which nothing could think, nothing could live.

He had worked this out some time and many fates ago—back when he had been Daniel Patrick Iremonk through and through, calculating what it would be like for his time to come, this way or that, to its inevitably mixed and messy conclusion.

The huge piebald figure reached down and brushed at Fred’s—at Daniel’s short brown hair, stroked his high forehead, still bleeding.

The Moth
.

He held still—just for the moment.

It told him:
Sum-runner. Fetch it.

The others had managed to form a triangle in the yard—no escape. “Do what the Moth says,” instructed the closest, a lithe old man with an experienced face and one distorted foot, standing by the concrete steps cutting up through the overgrown yard.

“Of course,” Daniel said, and tried to walk around the dimensionless figure, to obey, to comply—the only choice he had, really. The rain pounded, streamed, drops curling in the air—hitting from all directions—no straight lines down, so many fundamental rules changing—

Never figure it out.

The Moth blocked him with a massive finger. In warning, it reached back, its hand diminishing to a point, and brushed the house. The house bleached, turned white, its outlines crumbling to calcined powder. Little more than a polite admonition. If Daniel did what they asked, they might let him go, they might not kill or transform him. A pang of disappointment—who could possibly be more important? Who could jaunt as far, calculate, and understand the shape of the end of the world? He was the best. Maybe they knew. They could make him one of their own. A slave. That was likely what they were planning. How gratifying. No thanks.

Two more translucent echoes vibrated past—one of Granger, the other of Fred. The Moth itself seemed to spread, sending ghosts of its unlikely self backward. It was using far too much energy—it would push more rapidly up against the Terminus than anything else near the house. The house reacquired some of its color, but still seemed about to collapse. Even at his highest fever of perception, Daniel had never actually been able to see the multiverse in all its near-infinite variety—until now.
You always learn more when something breaks—when it begins to die.
He had only one chance—to push past what they called the Moth, to retrieve his stone, and hang onto it with all his strength. Daniel lowered his head and squeezed under the Moth’s distorted legs, through its diminished substance. The piebald giant flickered and whined. Daniel could feel it fading. All illusion now—edges undone, strength gone—losing connection with the source of its power, the Mistress of all the corrupted world-lines that surrounded them.

The three figures in black became agitated, then dismayed, yet the storm was growing weaker and the air was warming. A retreat was under way—the Moth was getting out while the getting was good. The human servants of their Livid Mistress were being discarded, left behind. Apparently, this was not what they had expected.

Daniel stood on the porch, dripping pools around his feet. He slammed against the front door. Wood-rot did half the job, and a crowd of him suddenly flew into the living room, surrounded by puffing dust from a hundred variations of shattered door—motes of dead and dying futures that had once been only seconds away.

Amazed, he realized he could still move.

Dimensions are never exactly perpendicular—never precisely straight—less so now than ever. He turned sideways, screamed as disappointed futurity raised blisters on his face and hands. A crowd of Freds arrived at the fireplace, reached out for the one loose brick—it became hot with the radiated heat of so many hands—and the boxes they all knew were hidden behind that brick. The echoes vanished in a wink.

He had seen it before. World-lines swaying and attempting to reconnect, invisible to all others—forcing time to a crawl, reducing the light outside to a mist of shadows.

They had struck Terminus—and then rebounded.

Everything had been reset, pushing them back a few hours—a few days at most—everything in the city, the world, this segment of the multiverse, bouncing off the cauterized five-dimensional scab that now capped the end of all cords.

On the occasion of the next impact—in a few hours, a few days, no more, he was sure—the bounce would be shorter, and shorter still after that, until finally they would simply freeze in place, pressed flat: no time, no space.

No hope.

Daniel pushed through the thick air to the doorway. Kicked aside dust and debris, stood on the sagging porch. The others—the strong, emaciated men in their soaked black suits—were trying to flee. All but one.

Now he remembered a name.
Whitlow.

The memory returned like a sliver of ice shoved into his brain. A memory of compromise, betrayal—the betrayal of an entire world.

The bad shepherd.

Daniel’s lungs emptied in self-loathing.

Whitlow stood on the porch, smiling and unafraid. He had not changed—always the same slender, confident, dignified old man across all of Daniel’s world-lines.

Always the clubbed foot.

Whitlow’s gaze seemed to briefly caress what Daniel held in his hands. The man with the club foot smiled, showing even, ivory-colored teeth. “What’s your name now, young traveler?” he taunted. “Why so eager? Where can any of us flee, but into Her arms?”

Whitlow casually brushed past Daniel, into the house.

And Daniel turned to join him.

CHAPTER 50

West Seattle

The van’s rear doors flung wide. Jack rolled onto the asphalt and tumbled for a dozen yards before slamming into a concrete curb. His exposed hand dipped into a gutter. Water rushed black and silver over his clutching fingers. Dazed, he tore through the abraded sack, spread holes for his other arm, then his torso, kicked his legs through, rose on hands and knees, peeled off the rags…

Stood, head spinning.

For a moment, he wondered if he was losing his sight, or even if he’d died—everything around the accident had skewed, ripped, and was slowly reassembling, like a tossed puzzle reversed in time. He looked up and saw the lightning bolts turn upon themselves and spiral up into a spinning funnel, spitting and hissing like snakes. Rising in the middle of the funnel, he saw a writhing, lumpish form, nearly all middle, with tiny, wriggling arms and legs—falling free, diminishing, flailing, only to be grabbed again by the lightning and lifted higher…all the while crying out, a girlish shriek audible even above the roar. Power lines torn loose from their poles tried to follow, curling and snapping and then straining straight as drawn wire. They broke loose and shot up, then went limp—and fell back like lost pieces of string. The funnel closed. A deluge like the upending of a huge bucket flattened Jack where he lay, pressing his head onto the asphalt until he feared he would drown.