City At The End Of Time (18 page)

We might speculate about what would have happened to the Typhon in more fortunate circumstances. Perhaps we should extend pity, those of us who have felt its corrosive touch—every one of us. The bad that traveled from the future, not from the past.

Final sin.

But we are inadequate to such speculations. We are inadequate to feel pity for a failed god. And so—

Let’s not. Let’s not feel pity.

The Typhon—formerly without thought or viscera, without conscience or sympathy—realizes that its puffy carcass can now
feel
. What it feels is a kind of apprehension—even fear. It is no longer more powerful than those it once crushed.

It has become a small, brownish-gray thing, lying in the center of the last of the universe like a metaphysical abortion, pitiful but for its history. And soon there will be no history. No trace of its works, its conclusions.

What it had done its very utmost to stop, to prevent, is advancing. Even the tools it forged across eternity are turning against it. It can feel the last two threads, swirling and twining and trying to cancel, competing and summing against all the Typhon’s efforts.

One of those threads is finally dissolved.

The Typhon experiences another unfamiliar emotion.

A dire, dreadful sense of
hope.

Only one thread will survive. And that in itself is not a healthy condition for any cosmos. The Typhon may pass into true nothingness, but it will at least have the satisfaction of taking every last observer with it—blinding forever those outrageous eyes.

No more memories.

No more stories.

No more.

CHAPTER 121

Jack sees Ginny half swimming through the snow and fog and the rising chunks of ice, toward the blue gleam. With supreme effort, propelling along this last cord of fate, all the other possibilities being pinched and cut to pieces by the armillary shell, he catches up with her. The stone helps—a little.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” She glances at him. “Watch out for the cats. They look pretty mad.”

“Yeah—didn’t think I’d make it.”

“Thought you’d forget about me,” she says.

“Never.”

She reaches out, he reaches out, their hands meet, and then they hug and feel their combined warmth, and something joins them together—far sexier than anything either has experienced—and gives them strength. The sum-runners clink against each other, squeezing their fingers between them, and then separate with a reddish flare.

“We need at least three,” she says. “I remember that much.”

“If the third one isn’t here, we lose everything—right?”

“I guess so. Who’s that?” Ginny asks, pointing at another shape in the fog.

CHAPTER 122

Jebrassy has come to the edge of the brilliant blueness, naked and shivering, his feet and lower legs frozen into stumps. Two tall people—he assumes they are people, mostly enclosed in fog and snow—approach. One reaches down to lift him up by his armpits.

They are tall but not Tall Ones—not like Ghentun. He stares through the greenish storm into a familiar face, and then another. He sees himself through the other, and allows the other to see him, but actually it’s very hard to see anything at all. Constant streams of blue light shoot between them, obscuring outlines but igniting an even greater sense of renewed will—perhaps even energy. They’re speaking but their words are difficult to understand. So he offers up all he has, like a child gifting a toy to new friends, old acquaintances: the sculpted polyhedron with four holes. The piece almost explodes with blue arcs.

The two bring up their own twists of rock, dim red eyes buried in the gnarls, brighter now against the blue. These must be—

The sum-runners jerk inward, lock on, and fit into the sculpted piece, which completes and fills their own puzzle twists. They have traveled across billions of years, then tumbled through a dying universe to find their way back.

But two holes remain unfilled.

Daniel walks past the gory, crystallized remains of Glaucous and Whitlow, and does not know what happened here—or whether it is still happening. He is interested now in what the cats have set upon, just a short distance away. He follows a trail of bloody paw prints steaming on the green, glassy ice. The armillary is cinching in, the bands tightening and whirling faster. A kind of snowy fog covers his feet, his knees, and then his shoulders. The ice is crazing—rising up in chunks. He pushes through, fingers warmed by the sum-runners.

The cats are at the center, that much he thinks must be true—and for a brief instant, with a fanning of his hands, he looks down to find them hissing and scratching and biting. The cats are killing a small squirming thing in a pit. The process is slow. The thing keeps shaping itself anew, but it can’t escape. Sizzling, steaming pieces of chewed-over theophany skitter across the ice, drawing etched curls of virtual particle-trails.

The light is failing. Daniel can hardly see. Inside, Fred is wondering how anything can exist at all. They are inside a diminishing spore of space-time, reality pushing its final push against nothingness—that which cannot be seen, thought of, spoken of.

Not this, not that, not anything.

“We’re here because we
will
it, and always have,” Daniel says, and that’s that. The unpleasant shrill vibration in his head abruptly stops. The brown, twisted thing has been destroyed—shredded.

If the spore shrinks to nothing, then the death of the Typhon—Daniel is sure that’s what is down there in the tiny blur of a pit, covered with hissing cats—will mean nothing. It will not be recorded. It will not be reconciled.

The Typhon may randomly return, unexpected, illogical, but just as real as before. Cats push away, many with missing paws and limbs, distorted heads, burned fur, empty eyes. This deed has cost them dearly.

Daniel steps back as well. All this is very familiar—though not always with cats. The stone is tugging him away from the pit, the cats, the remains of the failed, would-be god. Seconds tick with each swipe and whoosh of the shrinking armillary. He reaches into his pocket. He always does this. He always passes along what he is given, to save everything that must be saved, and that ends his chances of uniting with the being he loves more than the entire world—the one he has traveled all this way to be with.

Who—or what. That was always our question, no? What could we ever be to each other?

I crossed the Chaos. The rebel city was dying—surrounded by the Typhon, betrayed by the City
Prince. Despite everything, I joined her. And I did what I had to do. We agreed. I had to go back
to the beginning with a piece of the Babel, the final piece—and at the Librarian’s insistence, a
second, a backup against further betrayal, in case another piece was lost—

And so I flew back with the last sum-runners, and found by brute force a path into the earliest
intelligences of the young cosmos.

The only shepherd who never dreams.

The bad shepherd.

Jack is there beside him, hand on his shoulder.

“Do you know what this is?” Jack asks. “I sure as hell don’t.”

“It’s a mess, that’s what it is,” Daniel says. “Take these.” And gives him the two stones. “I’m done, this time around.”

CHAPTER 123

Tiadba is in the warm embrace of someone she has never known, never met, and yet about whom she knows a great deal. How she was found in pieces around the dying cosmos, and brought by the Shen to a single place, where a brilliant thinker assembled her into a sentient form, which somehow chose to be female.

She has met the Pilgrim sent to retrieve her would-be father, and has spoken with him—and made a key decision, to become flesh and journey back to Earth. And there—

The fear and bitterness have gone—but the grief remains.

The young breed squirms in this embrace, uncomfortable, restless. Someone she knows is approaching. She only half sees what lies around her. Other eyes see from another position—and then Tiadba’s skin erupts with piercing shafts of brilliant blue.

The entire volume around her becomes a sphere of glorious, blinding blue. Her visitor is very near.

Her visitor sees—

Jebrassy!

CHAPTER 124

The armillary accelerates inward at an astonishing rate. But within instants of the end, of infinite compression, squeezing down to zero and then echoing to less than zero, and vibrating that way until all is pulverized—the metric has suddenly expanded.

Something huge is stirring.

The armillary is now miles wide, spinning much more slowly.

The lake of crushed, turbulent ice rises and cascades out in melting waves to fill this new volume. The Chalk Princess has gone—passed away forever with the Typhon. The armillary is no longer a prison.

It is the shell of an egg.

Within, as if a breath is being held, there is waiting.

Another presence—missing or held down for ages—returns in stunned bewilderment to find herself surrounded by some of the very breeds she ordained to be made, long ago. They have found her, as they were designed to do. They have snared and brought others with them—kindred shapes of primordial matter.

As they were designed to do.

There is reunion. Her father’s goal is almost attained.

One thing remains.

She holds the tiny female breed in her naked lap like a mother and child. The breed writhes in a halo of brilliant blue, some of which leaps out in long arcs to pierce the fog, the mist.

“Have you seen the Pilgrim?” Ishanaxade again asks the breed, who barely hears.

CHAPTER 125

Daniel has never seen anything so beautiful.

He has fought and clawed through countless adversities and fates, and countless bodies, to return to this beginning point. He carries the small rounded piece of green stuff that Mnemosyne left for him in Bidewell’s empty room, an impossible time and distance behind him now. Back then the muse gave him a catalytic remembrance, a trigger of transformation, as if in the future they would meet and know each other again.

What shall he do?

The glowing female pushes through the fog and his knees go weak.

All are here
.
Who are you?

The face is so lovely—the shape, compelling and impossible, alien and comforting at once; so many shapes, so many limbs, so much power. Something very old, long suppressed, a condensation no more or less mysterious than the time-worn piece in his left hand, rises up in him. Daniel tries to speak.

I am Sangmer.

You?

Then,

Where have you gone, Pilgrim? Husband? And what have you brought with you?

Daniel holds up his right hand, empty.

You have delivered them?

He nods.

Then it is done. A quorum of shepherds has arrived.

That time-tumbled ovoid in his other hand is like a hardened and constricted piece of the lake that churns and quakes beneath them. Like the pieces that the Shen gathered from all the galaxies they visited, after the Brightness and the end of creation.

A lost piece of Mnemosyne. It will quicken Ishanaxade and return her to what she must become. He can withhold it, deny it, and claim the woman he sought across the Chaos. Or he can present it and lose her forever.

CHAPTER 126

Ishanaxade looks down upon his sad, ancient body, surrounded and filled by so much pain, travel-worn, cruel, determined to finish his task and return—whatever the cost.

What have we done?
she asks him.

What we always do. What we promise to do. Rebirth.

He holds out his left hand.

Ishanaxade unfolds his fingers and takes the fragment. It is not glass, of course. It is a piece of the mother of all thought, of those who see and think, including Daniel—and Sangmer. It is reconciling, which allows memory, and shapes the creation of the Sleeper, when he chooses not to sleep.
If I take this—I will become what I was. What will we be to each other then?

The body of Daniel is pitiful with fear. Already the lake is rising through the base of the glowing triangle, through her blur of feet and glowing legs.

Every few rounds, out of all infinity, we will meet,
he tells her.
For me, that has to be enough.
The armillary expands again. They cannot see its boundaries.

CHAPTER 127

Ginny and Jack feel the nightmares pass away. They know that no one will forget them unless it should be so. They see Jebrassy and Tiadba nearby—and together they make four points within the storm as ancient matter reacquaints, according to old rules that come into play only within the Sleeper’s spinning fortress—and just for this moment.

Tiadba and Jebrassy have joined in so many ways, Ginny and Jack are confused—and envious. Jack and Ginny collect Daniel’s two sum-runners. Daniel is not with them—they do not know where he is.

“Should we?” Jack asks, and holds up the stones and the polyhedron.

“Bidewell would say we should,” Ginny says. “So much pain and effort.”

Jack juggles the remaining pieces, smiling at Ginny. He is thinking of the last words of the Keeper. “I’m not asking Bidewell. I’m asking
you.
”

“Don’t be arrogant,” she says.

“That’s what I am,” Jack says.

“I do
not
find it charming.”

“The old gods watch. They’ll forgive us—won’t they?”

“I’m not so sure…”

Jack continues to juggle. His smile is infinitely sweet and distracting. “You choose,” he says.

CHAPTER 12

The nurse weighed Jack and guided him to the doctor’s cubicle, a small gray and pink space. She took his pulse with expert fingers, then wrapped his wiry arm in an inflatable cuff and pumped it up to measure his blood pressure.

A few minutes later the doctor entered and closed the door. Miriam Sangloss was in her early forties, slender and strong-jawed, with short brown hair. She wore a white lab coat and a gray wool skirt that fell below her knees. Black socks with pumpkin-colored clocks and sensible black running shoes completed her wardrobe. On her left hand, he noticed, she wore a garnet ring, at least two carats. She flashed a knowing flicker of a smile and looked him over with sharply focused brown eyes. “How’s our rat man today?” she asked. He wondered how she knew—perhaps Ellen had told her.

“Fine. Losing bits of my day,” he said. He hated to admit to being sick. Being sick meant he was losing his touch. Soon he would become slow and wrinkled and stooped-shouldered and no one would want to watch him perform. “Going blank,” he added.

“For how long?” Sangloss asked.

“How long am I blacking out?”

“How long have you been losing bits of your day?”

“Two months.”

“And you’re how old—twenty-five, twenty-six?” She turned the page of the chart on her clipboard. He wondered how she had put together so many notes.

“Twenty-four,” Jack said.

“Much too old. Stop it right now.”

“Too old for what?”

Look at you. Handsome as a young devil. Strong and agile. Fit. You don’t get sick. You live life
on your own terms. You always will—we expect that of you. So what’s
really
wrong with you?

He could almost see Dr. Sangloss’s lips moving, telling him that, but she hadn’t spoken aloud, of course. It was all contained in the long look she gave him. Over a brief sigh, she bent her gaze to the tablet and said, “Tell me what you experience.”

“It’s probably nothing. I drop out for a few minutes or as long as an hour. Two or three times a day. Sometimes I’m fine for a week, but then it happens again. Last week I rode my bike on autopilot all afternoon. Ended up near the loading docks.”

“No bumps or bruises?”

Jack shook his head.

“Any recent trauma, lapses of judgment, odd behavior—hallucinations?”

Again, no.

“You’re sure?”

He looked at a poster on the far wall—a medical artist’s rendering of a male head in profile, cut in half, framed and mounted beside a corkboard. The poster reminded him of learning how to swallow and disgorge Ping-Pong balls and small oranges. “A kind of dream. A place. A mood.”

“Any smells or tastes or sounds before or after these episodes?”

“No. Well—sometimes. Bad tastes.”

“Mostly just the lingering sensation of a forgotten dream. Is that it?”

“I don’t know.” To her skeptical gaze, “Really.”

“No drugs? Marijuana?”

He solemnly denied this. “Cuts back on my timing.”

“Right.” She inspected his left hand, spread the fingers, stared curiously at the calluses. “Any family history of epilepsy? Narcolepsy? Schizophrenia?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know much about my mother’s side of the family. She died when I was twelve.”

“Did your father smoke like a chimney?”

“No. He was large—fat, really. He wanted to be a stand-up comedian.” Jack gave her a squint. Sangloss waved that aside. “We should do a follow-up. No insurance, correct?”

“Zero.”

“Street entertainer’s union? Teamsters?”

Jack smiled.

“Maybe we can get you a pro bono appointment at Harborview. Would you show up if, if I arranged that?”

He looked uncertain. “What, like a biopsy?”

“MRI. Brain scan. Petit mal epilepsy usually occurs in children, drops off at puberty. Kids can have dozens of small seizures each day, sometimes hundreds, but rarely lasting more than a few seconds. That diagnosis doesn’t quite fit, does it? Narcolepsy—possible, but that doesn’t fit, either. Has anyone seen you black out?”

“I just did, in the waiting room. I kept turning pages. Nobody seemed to notice.” He pointed to the chair, where the
Weekly
poked out of his jacket pocket.

“Ah.” She shined a small bright light into each of his eyes. “Phone number?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your phone number, for the appointment.”

He gave her Burke’s phone number. Dr. Sangloss wrote it down on his chart. “I’ll ask Dr. Lindblom to get you into Harborview. Do this—for my sake, if not for yours, okay?”

Jack nodded solemnly, but his eyes were elusive.

Sangloss brandished a tongue depressor. “Open wide,” she said. When he could not talk, merely issue round vowels, she said, “I saw you downtown three weeks ago. Does anyone complain when you juggle rats?”

“Awm,” Jack said. She lifted the wooden stick. He poked his mouth square between two fingers, then released it, letting it flop loose, and smiled. “Some. They pet the rats. I show them how I handle them.”

“What else do you juggle? That’s alive, I mean.”

“I used to juggle a kitten.”

“Really? Why did you stop?”

“Got big. I gave him to a friend. Not many cats like to be juggled—that one was special. And I had a snake, once. Snakes are tricky.”

“I bet.” Sangloss made more notes.

Jack clamped his jaw. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing obvious,” she said. “Keep a little notebook handy. Record each episode—frequency, sensations, aura, whatever you can remember. They’ll ask at Harborview.”

“All right.”

“And stop tossing your rats, okay? Until we figure this out.”

Dr. Sangloss finished her clinic hours, said good-bye to the receptionist and the nurses, then locked the doors, turned down the heat, checked the taps in the bathrooms and the lab, briefly inventoried all the locks and security cameras in the pharmacy, and stood for a moment, looking around the front office. The clinic served many different kinds of patient. Not all were responsible. The office was quiet, the street outside the half-shuttered window deserted. A light wind sent a whistling note through a crack somewhere. An old, drafty building.

She walked down the hall to her small rear office, where she filed a few folders and unlocked the lower desk drawer. As she plucked out her cell phone, she felt a chill—strange, since the old furnace had just finished its final blast of heat for the evening.

Almost strange enough to make her open the book that Conan Arthur Bidewell had given her, with instructions never to read it, or even to carry it in her hands for very long. Bidewell was an odd man but a compelling one—and he paid the clinic’s bills.

Five years’ worth.

Tonight was the fourth anniversary of their first meeting at the green warehouse down in Sodo. Green warehouse, green leather binding on her small old book, half hidden by textbooks and journals on a metal shelf.

She stared at its short, cracked leather spine, imprinted only with a number on the nub—
1298
. A number, or a date.

What would she learn if she
did
read it?

Dr. Sangloss jerked loose from the book’s spell and punched in a number on her phone. A woman answered. “Ellen? Miriam. I’ve examined your young man. No doubts. You have his address, don’t you?…Not implying a thing, dear. I’m sure we’ll all feel motherly. Say hello to the Witches. I don’t think I’ll make it tonight. Might spook the poor fellow. Let me know what they think.”

CHAPTER 13

Wallingford

The living room windows were covered in plastic. Someone—perhaps the real owner, years before—had tried to remodel and given up. Lath and plaster had been pulled out, old paper-wrapped wiring lay in bent, ragged coils. The roof leaked and water warped the wooden floor, seeping down to flood the basement.

The house had been deserted long enough for a homeless beggar to find his way in and set himself up in crude comfort—no heat, no power, nothing but running water left on for the gardeners who no longer came. The beggar had added a few sticks of furniture and a mattress, probably snuck in with exhausting effort during the night.

When he could stand up without retching—for the first time in days—Daniel searched the house all over again.

And this time…

In a hole just behind the upstairs bathroom sink, he found a carton tied with string. He cut the string and poured out the contents. A battered wallet flopped on the cracked tile floor, driver’s license visible behind a yellowed plastic window. The photo confirmed that this body had once belonged to a man named Charles Granger, age 32 at the time the license was issued. Another shake tossed out sheets of typing paper, a black marker, and a blunted pencil.

A small, dense gray box, taped to the bottom, fell out last—and he knew this was what he’d been looking for all along.

His sum-runner. The sometime stone.

The box was the same, with the same sigil carved in bas-relief on the lid: a circular design with interlinked bands or hoops wrapped around a cross. How likely was that? Another connection between Daniel and Charles Granger. He did not try to open it—not yet. With a low whistle, he put it in his pocket, then flipped through the papers. Random scrawls, odd symbols—terrible handwriting, yet familiar, in its way.