City At The End Of Time (53 page)

“I sought not the lost genius of antiquity, but the marvels of impossibility.”

Glaucous snorted two nose-blows into his kerchief. “Whitlow’s stories fascinated me.” He raised his hand, snot rag draped from his palm, and poked a thick finger into the air. “Boccaccio, spinner of bawdy tales, redeemed himself searching for bits of Tully. A fine pair of noses for tales lost—or perverted.”

“You date yourself. Tully is now properly known as Cicero.”

Glaucous grinned. “I am surprised to find you confined to this box.”

Bidewell got up to tend to the stove.

“Still fond of wine,” Glaucous observed. “Always have been. Mr. Whitlow—”

Bidewell clanged shut the stove’s iron gate.

Glaucous thinned his lips. His hand started tapping one knee and he looked up, pinched his nose, snuffed again, glanced sideways at Bidewell. “Whitlow set his trap for Iremonk. The Moth made an appearance. I have never had such tools at my disposal. Always on the margins, forced to catch the wax dripping from all the sad dim candles of our night, forced to trim their pitiful wicks. My partner…” His expression faded into gloom, and to revive his spirits, he struck his knee with a fist. “Came close to the prize, I did—snagging Mr. Jack Rohmer, fine young Shifter. Painfully close. Ever and always flashers with a net.”

“Was your mistress too frightened to accept your gift?”

Glaucous changed the subject. “How solid is your fortress, Conan?”

“Firm foundations, carefully laid.”

“I suspect you’ve prepared three clean, pure spaces. So much easier to find emptiness in this wilderness than on the old continent, where the very turf is thick with bones. How long vacant?”

“One hundred years,” Bidewell said.

“Is that sufficient? Mr. Whitlow once claimed—”

“Conclusions are upon us, Glaucous. Much depends on your employer. Will she gather courage and return—as a shrieking
Harpy
, do you think?”

Glaucous scowled.

“Failed you, didn’t she? Eater of eaters, hunter of the hunt. We called her Whirlwind’s Bride, and some named her Whore of the South Wind…”

Glaucous leaped up at another shuddering slap-clap from outside. The walls hummed.

Bidewell poked a chunk of firewood into the stove. “Notice a thickening of motion and thought?”

Glaucous lifted an eyebrow.

“We’ll soon be caught between the adamantine walls of Alpha and Omega. It’s not just Terminus your Mistress was fleeing. There’s little or nothing left between us and the beginning, or the end. All of history, eaten away. Skeins pinched to threads, stripped to fibers—compressed to points. I wonder what
that
will be like.” He slowly squeezed his fingers—down to nothing. “A sudden brightness, I imagine, and great heaviness, as all remaining light and gravity bounce back and forth through a compressed pellicle of time—and the noise!—
shattering,
old nemesis.”

“Do you suspect, or do you
know
?” Glaucous asked.

Bidewell nodded at his books. “I’ve absorbed bits and pieces of past and future, sorting and combining until they make an inevitable sense.”

Glaucous flexed his hands and clasped his knees, rocking. “Joints ache,” he said. “Cold, even in here.”

“We’d better go up while there’s still something worth seeing,” Daniel whispered, and walked away. This time Jack followed, his face heating.

The ladder was made of boards hammered onto the close-spaced studs on an outer wall. Jack looked up into the darkness and made out the outline of a hatch below the roof. Daniel was already halfway up. The hatch was not locked. He shoved it open and clambered into a sloped shelter. A warped wooden door opened stiffly to an expanse of tar paper, sealed and repaired by stripes of uneven asphalt, and crisscrossed by walkways of weathered shipping pallets. The roof sloped from a low peaked center, bordered by a knee-high wall cut through at intervals with rectangular drains. Over the wall, outside, all around: what was left of Seattle.

Daniel stood silhouetted by the northern perspective, a lighter shadow against the rippling, ripping curtain. Jack joined him at the edge. Breaks in the curtain revealed a mélange of buildings industrial and domestic—houses, warehouses; to the west a forest of masts, and in the streets, dirt, ballast cobbles, brick, asphalt, wood, and concrete sidewalks. People dressed in dated fashions had been caught mid-stride, where they juddered like broken clockworks—going nowhere with painful slowness. The torn curtain parted to reveal other streets, other buildings, a puzzle thrown together from ill-fitting pieces of time, poured from the box of the sky onto a half-seen landscape that surrounded the warehouse. The thick, chilled air was choked with grit—what sort of grit, Jack didn’t want to know. Daniel coughed and waved his hand. “Everything left behind finds its place,” he said. “Just like you and me. I’ll bet if we had picture books, we’d recognize neighborhoods from before this warehouse was built. People, too.”

“What’s happening?”

“Who knows? But think it through.” Daniel gave Jack a wry grin. “We’re ants clinging to the last gobbets in the stew. Most of the chunks have already been chewed and swallowed—most of our universe is gone. Otherwise…why
that
?”

He pointed through a luminous rip in the curtain at an immense, flaming arc, rimming a painfully black center. It stretched across almost two-thirds of the sky. “That’s not our sun. And
that
is not our city. Not anymore.”

NO ZEROS

Observers are like tiny muses. They process what they see, based on the logics they are given, but
also on what they can assemble for themselves, what they think must be real, based on what they
live and see and know, the truths they incorporate in their flesh.
Every group of observers establishes a kind of local reality. It cannot deviate too far from
consensus, from what the muses have ruled must be. But that flexibility allows the cosmos a
latitude that makes it more robust than any rigid framework, because it welcomes observers,
welcomes their input. And sometimes, very clever observers can influence the muses and the
cosmos as a whole, and so, Mnemosyne reconciles on a huge scale, those forward and backward
pulses that we’ve already discussed.

We are not so much made by a creator as deduced. In fact, all creation is collaboration between
the great and the small, always interconnected and dependent upon each other. There are no
lords, no kings, no eternal gods of all, but there are forces that work across time and fate, and
finally, outside our conceit, there is justice.

To be alive is to be blind. It is hard work to stay alive. And when our work is done and we are
unburdened, we are rewarded with the joy of matter, about which only the wisest and the most
foolish can know.

—The Chronicles of the Elders of Lagado

A lost or spurious work of Spinoza

CHAPTER 68

The Chaos

Despite the efforts of their armor, light was a tricky commodity in the Chaos. Distances beyond a few yards tended to foreshorten or lengthen unpredictably. Nico in particular found this unnerving, and lost his balance more often than the others, until finally he lay down in a shallow dip and tried to be sick. The armor would not let him.

Tiadba knelt beside him while Khren and the others circled the depression. All were woozy.

“If I could just throw up, I’d feel better,” Nico said, wretched behind the golden transparency of his faceplate.

“That would be a mess, in your helmet,” Tiadba said.

“I could take off the helmet for a little bit…”

“Too late for that,” Denbord said, kneeling. “I’m not feeling so hot myself.”

“Listen. I piss and shit inside here. Why can’t I throw up?”

“Just don’t think about it,” Tiadba said. “And stop looking at the sky.”

“I can’t help it. It keeps changing. I look away, look back, and it’s different—except for that
thing
up there. Always burning, but not in the middle, like a big hole. If it’s on fire, why doesn’t it burn everywhere? What’s it trying to be?” His voice was getting shrill.

The fearful excitement of a few hours earlier was turning into a sour anxiety next door to panic. Their suits could only give them so much support, and weren’t designed to interfere with their emotions. Tiadba was beginning to think that Grayne’s enthusiasm for the luxurious comfort of their adventure might have been overstated.

She swallowed frequently. Her face stung, her arms itched again, and her feet hurt, though they hadn’t walked very far. She felt confined, trapped, lost, and it took real effort to keep from crying or, worse, screaming.

“You feel it, I know you do!” Nico called out, and rolled over on his stomach, grabbing at the rock, but the rock in the dip was solid, smooth.

Khren, Shewel, and Macht stepped down. Herza and Frinna flanked Nico and nudged the reclining breed. They seemed well enough, though still quiet.

“We haven’t even started yet,” Khren said.

Sad, Nico said, “Don’t make it worse.”

“We could swap. I could roll around and act scared for a while, and you could stand up here and be brave and try to see where we’re going.”

In their helmets, the beacon—a steady, low musical note—faded or increased in volume, depending on whether they kept to their course. But there had already been two broken walls high enough and long enough to force them off the course, and then they trekked about in nervous arcs and circles until they heard the beacon again at maximum melody. They had encountered crumbling barricades in the rolling emptiness, casting odd double bluish shadows in the reddish flare of the ring-fire sun. Tiadba thought it best not to climb over and investigate, and the others agreed—curiosity the first emotion to fade in that first mile. So they had walked around.

Now she worried they were already losing their will to go on. Swinging between extremes of exaltation and fear in so short a time—most unpleasant. And as yet they had met nothing particularly fearsome or frightening, just what they were trained to expect.

“I think I’m getting used to some of it,” Macht said, but didn’t sound convinced. “Really,” he added.

“Come on, Nico. Let’s keep moving.”

“We’ll go on a few more miles,” Tiadba said. She began gulping painfully.
We’re being poisoned!
Yet she was sure nothing was getting in from outside the armor. Surely the Tall Ones would have equipped them better than that!

But the Chaos changes all the time. How could they know what kind of armor to make?

She looked sharply at Khren. He wasn’t feeling the same symptoms. Nor were the others. Each was reacting in his own way.

Nico rolled on his back but kept his eyes closed. “Why are we still stuck here, if everything’s so different? Why don’t we just change the rules and lift up and float away?”

Tiadba suddenly felt a kind of love, and her eyes welled up. That was the sort of question Jebrassy would ask.

“It’s called gravity,” Khren said. “It’s everywhere—even out here. Pahtun told us, remember?”

“Yeah, and where is
he
, now?” Macht asked darkly. “I don’t even know what gravity is. Gravity
or
light.”

“Light is what lets us see,” Shewel said, echoing what they had been taught. He was certainly not the swiftest learner in the group, but what he learned stayed with him in perfect detail. “Gravity is what glues us down.”

“Aren’t you getting bored down there?” Denbord asked Nico. Khren and Macht reached down to grab his hands and lift him up. He stood on wobbly legs, arms out to keep his balance. “Let’s go back. I think we could make it.”

Macht climbed out of the dip. “Tiadba, you’re the leader. Make us go.”

Tiadba looked around, confused. She felt inside her for the visitor—any other voice giving advice, other than her own, so confused. But the visitor was not saying anything. And she could no longer imagine what Jebrassy might tell her.

Then she heard herself speaking, not good words, but words out of an angry little knot right in the center of her chest, above her stomach, below her lungs—she could feel the burning disappointment. “I don’t know what we thought it would be like. Want to turn around and go back? How many of you think the city’s going to last much longer?”

“Not me,” Nico said. “I saw that thing take Mash. I don’t want to go back. Out here—”

“Out here, we can see them coming,” Tiadba said. “Back in the Tiers we die in our sleep. Or worse.”

CHAPTER 69

The Green Warehouse

The book group women sat in the chairs around the iron stove. They had been joined, with more than a degree of awkwardness, by Glaucous and Daniel. Glaucous accepted exile to the far corner, where he sat on a box, like one of Oxford’s stony gargoyles.

Ginny stood apart from them all, and far from the room’s southern door, her eyes downcast—steeled against another ordeal.