City At The End Of Time (71 page)

CHAPTER 95

This was a dream, Ginny was sure of it—a dream someone else was having—and it was lovely. She was two people in one form, standing under a cloudy sky with patches of brilliant blue, and rolling hills stretched like great swabs of a brush to a definite and pleasant horizon. She was in fact in Thule, the great island just a hundred miles north of Ireland, rich with history: the place she had imagined while being visited by Mnemosyne. The place she had been patiently denied.

It was not quite fully formed, of course. She had to stare hard to make things assume a visual, tactual truth. She could look at the foliage near her feet—a rough kind of bush, heather or gorse or something with purple flowers—and with an effort, the flowers would suddenly
pop
and become real. Her lips said, in vague tones, “This is wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Behind those lips, Ginny asked, “Who’s dreaming whom?”

“Maybe it’s you. You must know about sky and hills and bushes—I don’t.”

“What I know, you know. But I don’t remember your name.”

“We don’t have names—for now. I’m in a terrible place. But sometimes I can sleep. So we’re together again.
Come for me, find me, before it’s too late.”

Ginny shook her head and pushed up from a crouch. She felt refreshed, maybe even encouraged—until now, she’d expected only sadness and grief and pain at the end of her peculiar stroll. She rubbed her cold hands and reached out to test the limit of the bubble.

Thus far and no farther.

More real than the dream, and much less pleasant.

She stood before a great opening in the mountains, guarded by two giant figures she did not want to examine too closely. Made for other places, she guessed, and made of other matter, substances that did special things under special circumstances.
Whatever the hell that means.
She turned on her heels twice, like a slow top, as she had when faced with the Gape, and felt the dark gritty landscape pirouette. Now she stood before another cleft in the high jagged rocks, guarded by another pair of frozen figures—just as strange, but different. Spinning twice again, she stood before a third opening and a third distinct set of guardians that didn’t seem able to do much in the way of guarding. Like colorful ceramic figures decorating a door—
but this time, let’s fire the decorator
. Trophies, all of them. Preserved and mounted after something had enjoyed an awful hunt through the galaxies, collecting specimens.

Ginny shivered.

Spinning twice again—a total of six spins—brought her back to the first gap. She recognized the first set of figures, though she still did not want to examine them up close and personal.
Personal
might mean something very different here.

Without doing anything more difficult than spinning on her toes, she was making the entire valley revolve like a lazy Susan platter in a Chinese restaurant. Imagine that. Such power. There were three entrances to the Vale of Dead Gods. She could imagine them evenly spaced around the bowl formed by the mountains, points on a weird kind of super-triangle.
Typhon space. Or the kind of space a dying universe falls into.
Which entrance should she take?

Each, she knew, would lead her on a unique and separate spiral course into the False City where her dream-sister waited. Other people could enter through other gaps and follow other spiral courses, but they would never meet, never see each other, separated by Typhon-time as well as Typhon-space. That thought bothered her. All along, since she had left the green warehouse, she had hoped that Jack and maybe Daniel would come to save her from her persistent foolishness—always deliberately choosing the worst path, leading to disaster. Jack seemed the opposite, shifting toward a pleasant sort of survival, if not genuine fortune.

Daniel…

Daniel she couldn’t figure.
Not a whole number. Irrational.

He has an irrational set of decimals.

Ah. What’s that mean when it’s lying down?

But they would no doubt enter the False City through other gaps, and that meant they’d never find her. Ginny squinted at the guardians, forcing herself to see them for what they were—a matched pair, each with a circlet of ten or more eyes wrapped around otherwise human faces, lips and cheeks skewed in some strange emotion—the head set without a neck above powerful, many-limbed bodies, each limb configured to do something that she could not begin to understand.

She gave up her inspection. No sense adding confusion to madness. She decided that she would call this set of guardians the Welcome Wagon Committee to Hellgate One. She spun around again and named the second pair: WWC to Hellgate Two.

The experience could be repeated. Very scientific. Bidewell would be proud of her. Spinning again, she found the WWC to Hellgate Three.

Shouldn’t just do this all day, however long a day is. Make your choice, Ginny. Even if it’s the
wrong one.

That was her inner voice, nobody else’s. The other had fallen silent. She was alone. Alone, Ginny knew she could always be relied upon to take the wrong path—except when she decided to go to the green warehouse. And even then, she tried to undo her good decision by venturing out. But now it wasn’t just
her
choosing. The sum-runners drew each other together. So where were the others? Were they out searching for her in the mash-up, their stones tugging them along like eager terriers out for a run?

CHAPTER 96

The longer Jebrassy marched with Ghentun and Polybiblios, the more he realized what it was like to live around a Great Eidolon—even a fragment of one.

Polybiblios seemed to radiate knowledge. Some new and significant collection of facts or visions flowed into Jebrassy’s awareness every hour, filling him with history and science until his old self felt misplaced and overlooked.

Ghentun knew the epitome’s influence as well—and spoke his concern. “You’re leaking,” he told Polybiblios as they paused, helmets off, to rest and assess a new disposition in the Chaos around them. The epitome squatted beside them. His movements had grown more certain and less awkward, far from the support of the Broken Tower and all the Librarian’s servants and selves. He was acquiring his own kind of agility, a grace that reminded Ghentun of an angelin—no surprise. “I apologize. I will try to be less generous.”

“I don’t mind much,” Jebrassy said quietly, staring at the changing ripples of stone. “I just need some time to catch up. I have to think about things and make them my own.”

“Of course,” Polybiblios said. “Long ago, philosophers would have played a game of questions with their students—or their servants. Each question, so the philosophers claimed, would coax out prior knowledge, natural instincts born into them. What you feel may not be just my ‘leaking.’ It may be your own quality, emerging right on schedule.”

Ghentun looked aside and shook his head. “You’ve taken us away from the path of the beacon. Why?”

“We will find the beacon again,” Polybiblios said. “It was perverted long ago, you know—shortly after my daughter vanished, and Sangmer disappeared in search of her.”

Jebrassy’s face crinkled in dismay. “Why?” His innermost voice still told him the beacon must be inviolate—the only thing that could guide them to Nataraja, their ultimate goal—their reason for being made in the first place. “That’s impossible. Who would do that?”

Polybiblios met their obvious anger with resigned sadness—an easy enough expression in an offshoot of one so old. He did not give them an answer right away. “I hardly remember my own child,” he said. “As much as she
was
my child, so many had a part in her making.”

“We know the story,” Jebrassy said.

“There are so many versions of the story,” Polybiblios continued. “The truth may lie frozen and buried in the rubble that shores up the foundations of the Kalpa. So many versions to compare with the fragments of memory that I’ve managed to retrieve.”

Jebrassy lowered his voice and his head and circled the epitome, his anger burrowing deep. Polybiblios followed the breed with calm yet not precisely fearless eyes. “My people are out here, dying or worse—

for no reason
?” the breed growled. “Because an
Eidolon
has forgotten, and others have been careless?”

“Not at all,” Polybiblios said. “Between Eidolons, all things have a purpose, sometimes more than one. My greater self knew the lineaments of change the Chaos would undergo over time—its gradual reduction. The beacon now points us to where we need to be. It is finally correct. Sit here.” He patted the ground with his gloved hand.

Jebrassy looked between the epitome and Ghentun, his fury undiminished—but controlled. Did this mean all the previous marchers had never had a chance? That they had been sacrificed to distract, provide cover, and prepare for a future time when only a select few would succeed?

With a supreme effort, Jebrassy sat and stared down at the black dust and sharp, ancient stones.

“The path we are taking fits the best version I’ve pulled from all the stories,” Polybiblios said. “Draw from your emerging qualities—think of Ishanaxade, making this same journey. Think of her long sacrifice, that things will come right again.”

“You had us search for the stories, then take them with us. You wanted us to find the real story by testing them
all
. Because you had lost the truth. You were
careless.
”

“I don’t deny carelessness,” Polybiblios said. “But putting the past—even could it have been perfectly recorded and stored for tens of trillions of years—packing all that into a microcosm, would have taken far more time and energy than creating and searching a Babel, practically speaking. And had we made that choice, preserving one history—or an ambiguous few—would not be enough to quicken a new cosmos. Not enough to seduce and distract Mnemosyne and awaken the Sleeper.”

“Sleeper?” Ghentun sat across from the epitome and the breed. “That’s an ancient idea. The Sleeper is supposed to have died at the end of the first creation.”

“The Father of Muses,” Polybiblios said. “Brahma, some called him very long ago. Not dead. But bored—and so, sleeping.”

“That sounds like nonsense,” Jebrassy said, fighting his own growing comprehension. He did
not want
to know
anything that would blunt his anger.

Tiadba was out there. They might never find her—

But Polybiblios was still overflowing, and this time they were brushed by the emotion of a Great Eidolon.
Ishanaxade.

Jebrassy and Ghentun looked at each other and felt a kind of sadness they had never known before—not the sadness a breed or a Mender could ever feel, but loss and betrayal that could only spread and age and mellow and sharpen all at once, among thousands of millions of epitomes and angelins, through the heights and inner recesses of the Broken Tower…across half a million years.

“The City Princes. They reset the beacon. They betrayed
you
,” Ghentun said.

“They betrayed my daughter,” Polybiblios said, looking away from them, as if he could not bear any kind of mirror. “We may have all betrayed her. What she must feel, after all this time—hiding out there, waiting. Or worse—captured.”

“If you know all the stories, then you know all the endings,” Jebrassy said. “Which one is true?”

“There are far more endings to a story than there are beginnings,” Polybiblios said. “The best stories start in the middle, then return to the beginning, then come to a conclusion that nobody can foresee. Sometimes, when you return to the middle, the story will change again. At least, they did when I was young.”

His voice seemed to hypnotize them. They saw a whirling lattice of fates surrounding a tiny and indistinct shape, barely remembered after so many ages.

“The City Princes,” the Keeper said, making it a kind of curse.

“They agreed to send Ishanaxade on a secret journey, without your knowing,” Jebrassy said. “But why?”

Ghentun placed his hands together as if in prayer. “Ishanaxade offered herself up to save the Librarian. She carried away the key to the most complete Babel the Librarian had created in the Broken Tower.”

“That much seems true,” Polybiblios said. “Whatever our disagreements, the Astyanax and all the other City Princes knew—”

“That a complete Babel, with all its parts brought together, would dissolve what remained of the old cosmos,” Ghentun said—and then saw that this knowledge did not come from Polybiblios. This was part of the image the Astyanax had placed inside his mind. “The muses, what little was left of them, would revive to examine the greatest wealth of stories—all possible stories, and all possible nonsense.”

“Both nonsense and story necessary for any creation, though, as always, there is a vastly greater proportion of nonsense,” the epitome said, and got to his feet. “My daughter sacrificed herself, when others wished only to see my project come to an end, incomplete.”

Ghentun said, “The Great Eidolons wanted to live whatever sort of life was left to them, trapped in the Kalpa, repeating their amusements, lost in decadent boredom but also extraordinary comfort—they wanted this to go on
forever
.” He stood, fists in the air. “
You
wanted to jumpstart creation. That would have been the end of us all.”

Polybiblios looked between them, guileless as a child—an exceedingly old child. “That was my expectation.”

“The Eidolons allowed Ishanaxade to cross the Chaos,” Jebrassy murmured. “But they knew Nataraja was already dead.”

“The City Princes made a deal with the Typhon,” Polybiblios concluded. “We were all betrayed. But that does not mean we failed. Far from it.”

The air in this part of the Chaos was growing stuffy and unpleasant. Together, as if in silent agreement that there must be a pause in this conversation, they sealed up their helmets and prepared to move on. Jebrassy asked after they had resumed walking, “What is the Typhon, that it can make bargains?”