City At The End Of Time (67 page)

Now it was Jebrassy’s turn to be embarrassed.

“In a way, I am probably the best part of the Librarian—or at least I will suffer that delusion until I am proved wrong. May I join you, young marchers? I promise to be humble, in my way. And possibly even useful—like that wonderful finger.”

Ghentun sealed his gloves and put his hands behind his back.

The epitome sat in the sand and with an expression of delight, lifted a handful of the gray grit, then let it fall through soft fingers to the channel floor.

Jebrassy had grown strangely fond of the fragment of the Librarian that had offered companionship and teaching in the tower. But seeing him solidly incarnate, similar in size, and out
here
…very confusing.

“How
can
you be useful?” he asked.

“I brought this,” Polybiblios said. He held out a gray box. “Without it…nothing will happen. Nothing important, at any rate. Things will just come to an end. And after so much time, that would be a pity.”

CHAPTER 87

The Chaos

They might have been marching for years. Lifetimes.

The marchers were adapting to the Chaos bit by awful bit. Asserting a new sophistication by breaking the rules, they had become expert at crossing and sometimes even following trods. Trods, it seemed, had a kind of predictability. When there were no travelers about—for there were other and even stranger users than the gliding Silent Ones—the trods were hard and slick, like glass. When travelers approached, and long before the marchers could be seen, the trods would go all gummy and start sucking at their boots. There was usually more than enough time to scramble to one side or the other and hide in the broken rubble.

The entire Chaos was like a garbage heap. Wherever they went out here, stuff had been tossed about, disrupted, discarded—and most often, left in a crumbling, blackened state, its vitality sucked away. There were lots of places a breed could hide.

None of them had been lost since Perf—but that only meant they were lucky. They had seen more than enough evidence of the destroyed, the transformed.

During their short periods of rest, if the Chaos was not too badly mangled and some of the old rules still applied—and if the armor advised them it was safe—they would remove their helmets and breathe what was left of the ancient atmosphere of Earth.

It was not pleasant, but it was different enough to relieve the dragging boredom of the ever-changing, the unpredictable, and often enough the indescribable.

Their journeys had taken them around some of the largest monuments to the Typhon’s dementia. The marchers created their own names for what they saw: the Awful Bumbles, Great Burning Pile, Last Chance Ditch, Glider Dumps. That last had been a kind of miles-wide cemetery of worn-out, discarded Silent Ones, their eyes glazed and probably blind.

But still alive.

No finality, no mercy, no sense.

How many times the marchers had been pursued by things they could not see…beyond count. Their armor—and the Kalpa’s beacon, still pulsing and singing—guided them through ditches and around chasms filled with sluggish, churning liquid. Things seemed to swim or drown deep in that oily ooze. They walked on the flat margins of lakes of blue fire, casting long shadows against brownish cliffs like puppets backlit on a screen. The enervation that had come over them was not so much physical as mental. They were made of old, ordinary matter. Such matter—configured into a breed—could not absorb too much strangeness without throwing it out of memory, or stopping to rest. But there was no chance to stop.

And so much of what they saw, they promptly forgot. Another mercy.

CHAPTER 88

Glaucous grabbed Jack and Daniel and pulled them back into the red-rimmed shadows. “Stalkers,” he said.

Large, sinuous shapes slid over the cobbles and through the streets. Jack squinted to see, first making out what seemed to be several beetles dragging long, bloated worms. Blinking, he saw something else—snakes wagging spadelike heads, their eyes black and deep, crawling on a cluster of appendages and trailing long, bloated bodies. The bodies looped and coiled until these monsters passed out of sight around an eroded corner, yet still, afterimages danced in his eyes, light being what it was out here. Daniel hugged the wall, fingers rubbed raw against the brick and mortar. “What are those?”

Glaucous shook his head. “I’ve never seen their like.”

“Ugly,” Jack said.

“We didn’t escape after all, Jack,” Daniel said. “The bad places have caught up with us.”

They were about to move on again when from another direction, over the shattered walls, they saw seven large, manlike creatures in procession, heads bowed, dressed in robes that fell behind them in pools of blood-colored fabric—but the shapes that bumped and protruded against the fabric could not have been legs, not two legs, at any rate. Their faces were dark, smooth, with long red vertical slits for eyes and slick ropy hair writhing on their shoulders.

Glaucous gave his companions a curious, almost fey look, as a hungry man might look at a banquet he is sure is poisoned, or as someone about to hang will regard his approaching executioners. “They’ll search the ruins of the old cities, wherever they can,” he said. “These places may still be unfriendly to them—not completely digested.”

Daniel covered a disgusted cough. Jack waited for the streets to clear, then jabbed his hands into his jacket pockets and walked ahead on the cracked, twisted roadbed.

They followed.

“Where do they come from?” he asked Glaucous.

“I’m as ignorant as you. The Mistress employs the Moth, and I presume the Moth employs ghosts and such I’ve never seen—not even in a Gape. If they’re the same things that gathered up the shepherds—the children brought to our Mistress—they never revealed themselves, never came out into the open.”

Daniel asked, “Would they recognize you—take orders from you?”

Glaucous laughed into his fist and shook his head, a very amused no. “I am low, very low. If they hunt, they hunt everything that survives and moves about. I presume they are searching and clearing before our Mistress goes out for another tour.”

CHAPTER 89

The Chaos

Thrusting up hundreds of feet from a cleft that stretched from horizon to horizon, the building was bigger by far than anything the breeds would have thought of as a dwelling, a house: a crystalline heap of shapes and angles, crusted over with what might have been broken pieces of other buildings, and those parts decorated with the petrified remnants of people and animals. The awful whole glowed with a pallid,

putrid light that played tricks even through their faceplates, bending and warping, making their companions seem farther away, or looming close, huge and menacing—and then lulled them into a desire for senselessness, isolation—to run off and be alone, find a trod, just sit and wait. The seductive green emanation seemed to penetrate even their armor’s strongest protections. As they moved in two close groups along the edge of the cleft—avoiding a particularly broad and spongy trod—Macht and Shewel could not help but stare at the ugly, angular pile, as if trying to make sense of its madness.

“Are those
people
all over it?” Shewel asked, squinting, his eyes reflecting the twisted, cluttered image.

“They might be carvings,” Macht offered without conviction. “Too big to be people of any kind we know.”

“Well, what
are
they, then?” Shewel asked sharply, as if angry at the armor’s quiet. Pahtun’s voice echoed in all their helmets. “This is the House of Green Sleep. If you must know, they are the shells of victims gathered from long-dead galaxies, swept up on waves of shrinking space and time, then carried heedless and hated to this last place, to be displayed without pattern or thought.”

Macht grumbled, “You had to ask.”

“Oh,” Shewel said. “Well, now I know.”

Nico glanced back from some distance ahead, walking point with Herza and Frinna. “No more stupid questions,” he said.

“Ignorance is bliss,” Frinna agreed.

They found a small, dry pit deep enough to hide them from both the trod and the sickly light of the house, and paused long enough to rest and set up the portable generator. They pulled aside their helmets and huddled close as Tiadba took a book from her leg pouch.

“Read,” Herza insisted. The sisters were the least critical of the marchers, most enthusiastic about the odd, wandering bits of story Tiadba found or deciphered.

“Yes, read,” Macht said. “Take our minds off that thing out there.”

“I’d prefer softer stories,” Khren said. He’d developed an aversion for these difficult tales and all their odd words.

“This is what I can find,” Tiadba said.

“Just read
anything
,” Nico said, and closed his eyes, lying back on the dark earth within the protection of the generator.

Tiadba opened the book.

We chose our vessel, the
Intensity
, from the last great fleets parked in huge yards all through the twelve cities. She was reputedly the fastest of transports, faster even than the cosmos-spanning portals of the middle Trillennium, but in poor repair. She had not flown for a hundred thousand years. During the Reduction, all these ships had ferried refugees to Earth and her sister planets, as well as to the orbiting web planes, spiral ribbons, and shells set twisting and spinning around the renewed sun. They had carried back to Earth survivors of the Chaos’s desolation, a pitiful fraction of our cosmos’s former glory.

Dealings in my youth with a diversity of Mender ship clans and the more rooted portal clans had taught me the ways of all transport, some outmoded and even then becoming impossible as the Chaos altered the fine anatomy of the cosmos—the swifting ways by which travelers flew. I found my crew among young rebels, deviant Shapers and Menders. In contests, I tested and winnowed from the thousands who volunteered.

And chose my twenty-five, about to become philosopher-adventurers all. All past science had to be adapted, or abandoned, to get around the Typhonic perversions. Nearly all hyperdetics and means of communication and transport were blocked. Superluminosity, transfate reassembly, dark-mass portals—the technologies of almost a hundred trillion years no longer carried us across the cosmos. Only one reliable engine of spatial motion remained—bosonic threadfold, itself rumored to be Shen in origin.

We converted the
Intensity
to threadfold. By itself, the method puts tremendous strain on any crew, for you do not arrive what you started out being—whatever your matter. Fates curl back, traits and lives mix—for a time, the crew becomes the ship, and then the journey, and later, it is difficult to rebuild what once you were.

We would become intimate in ways none could foresee. We accepted this. It was better—to our way of thinking, a unanimity among the perversely disagreeable—than becoming noötic. And so we departed the ports of Earth.

Familiar to all is our passage through the realm of the Spectrals, who first learned to recharge, train, and breed galaxies.

Displayed along the inward-closing membrane of the Chaos, the last of the Spectrals had been enslaved by the Typhon, studied—if that is the correct word—and then vitrified: trapped in a slow, constricted bosonic glaze across millions of light-years while their boundaries were dissolved—an awful end for one-time masters, to whom the Trillennium owes its very existence.

Less familiar because less clearly explainable, even by those of us who were there, were our encounters with the enigmachrons, where fifth-dimensional fates lie spread out like thin bones beneath the rotting flesh of space-time. The
Intensity
found itself caught in a swirling storm of dead futures, tiny whirlpools of despair and repetition, and four of our crew lived horrible lives in scant hours before our eyes, aged in misery, mercifully died—and could not be revived by any recourse to ship memory. Some of their names remain forgotten—their fates erased even back to the Earth.

The Shen, it seems, had accepted their destiny with maddening calm. As we were welcomed to the sixty green suns—and as we were shriven of our Chaotic taints, cured and reborn in ways that both agonized and refreshed in the old, simple, cold stone rooms of the Final School, we met with Polybiblios, a simple figure, plainly made, unusually small for a Deva.