City at the End of Time Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  THE KALPA AND ENVIRONS

  A. FOURTEEN ZEROS: PROLOG

  PART ONE FATE SHIFTERS

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 23

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  PART TWO BROKEN LOGOS

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  PART THREE TERMINUS AND TYPHON

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  FOURTEEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  TEN ZEROS: CHAPTER 67

  NO ZEROS: CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  CHAPTER 95

  CHAPTER 96

  CHAPTER 97

  CHAPTER 98

  CHAPTER 99

  CHAPTER 100

  CHAPTER 101

  CHAPTER 102

  CHAPTER 103

  CHAPTER 104

  CHAPTER 105

  CHAPTER 106

  CHAPTER 107

  CHAPTER 108

  CHAPTER 109

  CHAPTER 110

  CHAPTER 111

  CHAPTER 112

  CHAPTER 113

  CHAPTER 114

  CHAPTER 115

  CHAPTER 116

  CHAPTER 117

  CHAPTER 118

  CHAPTER 119

  CHAPTER 120

  CHAPTER 121

  CHAPTER 122

  CHAPTER 123

  CHAPTER 124

  CHAPTER 125

  CHAPTER 126

  CHAPTER 127

  ENTR’ACTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY GREG BEAR

  COPYRIGHT

  For Richard Curtis:

  celebrating thirty years

  a cognizant original v5 release november 12 2010

  A.

  FOURTEEN ZEROS

  PROLOG

  * * *

  Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

  —Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

  “It’s Time,” Alan heard himself whisper. “Time—gone out like a tide and left us stranded.”

  —C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Earth’s Last Citadel

  Everything you know is wrong.

  —Firesign Theater

  The Kalpa

  Coming to the Broken Tower was dangerous.

  Alone at the outer edge of an empty room half a mile wide, surrounded by a brutality of high crystal windows, Keeper Ghentun drew in his cloak against the mordant chill. A thin pool of air bubbled at his feet, and a fine icy mist lingered along the path he had taken from the lifts. This part of the city was not used to his kind, his brand of physicality, and did not adjust willingly to his needs.

  Servants of the Librarian came here rarely to meet with suppliants from the lower levels. Appointments were nearly impossible to obtain. And yet, Ghentun had requested an audience and had been summoned.

  The high windows gave a panoramic view of what lay outside the city, over the middle lands and beyond the border of the real—the Typhon Chaos. In all the Kalpa, only the tower had windows to the outside; the rest of the city had long ago walled itself off from that awesome, awful sight.

  Ghentun approached the nearest window and braced for a look. Directly below, great curves like the prows of three ships seemed ready to leap into the darkness: the Kalpa’s last bions, containing all that remained of humanity. A narrow gray belt surrounded these huge edifices, and beyond that stretched a broad, uneven black ring: the middle lands. That ring and all within was protected by an outward-facing phalanx of slowly revolving spires, blurred as if sunk in silt-laden water: the Defenders, outermost of the city’s reality generators.

  Outside of their protection, four craters filled with wreckage—the lost bions of the Kalpa—swept away in a wide curve to either side and back again, meeting in darkness hundreds of miles away: the city’s original ring.

  Out of the Chaos, the massive orb of the Witness beamed its gray, knife-edged searchlight over the lost bions and the middle lands, blasting against the foggy Defenders, arcing high as if to grasp the tower—too painful to watch.

  Ghentun averted his eyes just as the beam swept through the chamber.

  Sangmer, the first to lead an attempt to cross the Chaos, had once stood on this very spot, mapping the course of his journey. A few wakes later he had descended from the Broken Tower—even then called Malregard—and gone forth on his last quest with five brave companions, philosopher-adventurers all.

  None ever heard from again.

  Malregard, indeed. Evil view.

  He felt a presence behind him and turned, bowing his head. The Librarian had such a variety of servants, he did not know what to expect. This one—a small angelin, female in form—stood barely taller than Ghentun’s knee. He colored his cloak infrared, making the nearest pools of air bubble furiously and vanish. The servant also shifted spectrum, then brought up the temperature in the chamber until finally there was some pressure.

  Ghentun bent to give the angelin a primordial speck of dirt, a crumbled bit of Earth’s basalt—the traditional payment for an audience. These were the old rules, never to be forgotten. The Librarian and all his servants were liable to withdraw at a whisper of rudeness into ten thousand years of silence—something the Kalpa could no longer afford.

  “Why are you here, Keeper?” the angelin asked. “Has there been progress this side of the real?
”

  “That is for the Librarian to judge. All honor to its servants.”

  The angelin silvered and froze—simply stopped, for no reason Ghentun could fathom. All the forms had been observed. Ghentun switched his cloak and plasma to slow mode so he might maintain some disciplined comfort. Clearly, this was going to take a while.

  Two wakes passed.

  Nothing around them changed except that out of the Chaos the Witness’s gray knife-edge beam swept three times through the chamber.

  The angelin finally cleared its silvery shell and spoke. “The Librarian will receive you. An appointment will be made available in fewer than a thousand years. Pass this information to such successors as there may be.”

  “I will have no successor,” Ghentun said.

  The angelin’s reaction came with surprising swiftness. “The experiment is concluded?”

  “No. The city.”

  “We have been out of touch. Explain.”

  Ghentun observed sharply, “We do not have the luxury of time. Decisions must be made soon.”

  The angelin expanded and became translucent. “Soon” could be interpreted as an affront to any Eidolon, but particularly a servant of the Librarian. It was difficult to believe that such beings still lay claim to the honor of humanity—but it was so.

  “Explain to me what you can,” it said, “without denying the privilege of the Librarian.”

  “There are troubling results. They may be harbingers. The Kalpa is the last refuge of old reality, but our influence is too small. As the Librarian anticipated, history may be corroding.”

  “The Librarian does not anticipate. All is permutation.”

  “No doubt,” Ghentun said. “Nevertheless, world-lines are being severed and unnaturally rejoined. Others may have been dissolved. Whole segments of history may already be lost.”

  “The Chaos has crept backward—in time?”

  “Something like that is being felt by a few of the ancient breed. They are our indicators, as they were designed to be.”

  Intrigued, the angelin reduced and solidified. “Canaries in a coal mine,” it said.

  Ghentun did not know what canaries were, and only vaguely understood the implications of a coal mine.

  “Do any of the ancient breed experience unusual dreams?” the angelin asked.

  Ghentun drew his cloak tight. “I’ve revealed what I can, all honor to the Librarian. I need to make the rest of my report in person—directly. As instructed.”

  “From Malregard, we watch your breeds crossing the border of the real—violating city law. They seem determined to lose themselves in the Chaos. None have been observed to return. Is your report an admission of failure?”

  Ghentun carefully considered his position. “By nature, they are a sensitive and determined folk. I am humble before the Eidolons—I leave those observations to your kind, and seek criticism from the Librarian, if it is due—directly.”

  Another long pause.

  The Witness’s gray beam again swept the chamber. As it passed through the angelin, Ghentun observed a lattice of internal process—the highly refined, jewel-like structure of sapphire-grade noötic matter. The angelin oscillated before Ghentun’s face. Its lips did not move but its bubble of cold shimmered. “Induce an individual affected by these dreams to accompany you to the Broken Tower.”

  “When?”

  “You will be notified.”

  Ghentun felt a flush of frustration. “Do you understand urgency?” he asked.

  “No,” the angelin said. “You can either stay and explain it to me, or carry out these instructions. In seventy-five years there will be an interview with the Librarian. Is that soon enough?”

  “It will have to do,” Ghentun said.

  “Peace and permutation be upon you, Keeper.”

  The angelin darted off, leaving a trail of silvery vectors that quickly summed and vanished. Once, the vector trail of an angelin would have been a glorious thing to behold. Now it seemed pale and constricted.

  Reduced fates, narrowing paths.

  Ghentun gathered up his cloak and departed Malregard. He had not answered the angelin’s question about dreams, because he needed to hold back as much as he could, to be revealed only later—to the central mind of the Librarian himself, he fervently hoped. At any rate, his level of optimism about this whole endeavor had never been high.

  The end of all history, of everything human and worthy—consumption in the malign insanity of the Chaos that had been looming for ages—was now upon them.

  After a hundred trillion years, it was likely that the Kalpa was beyond saving.

  PART ONE

  FATE SHIFTERS

  TEN ZEROS

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Seattle

  The city was young. Unbelievably young.

  The moon rose sharp and silver-blue over a deck of soft gray clouds, and if you looked east, above the hills, where the sun would soon rise, you saw a brightness as yellow and real as natural butter.

  The city faced the coming day with dew cold and wet on new green grass, streaming down windows, beaded on railings, chill against swiping fingers.

  Waking up in the city, no one could know how young it was and fresh; all had activities to plan, living worries to blind them, and what would it take to finally smell the blessed, cool newness, but a whiff of something other?

  Everyone went about their business.

  The day passed into dusk.

  Hardly anyone noticed there was a difference.

  A hint of loss.

  With a shock that nearly made her cry out, Ginny thought she saw the old gray Mercedes in the wide side mirror of the Metro bus—stopped the next lane over, two car lengths behind, blocking traffic. The smoked rear windows, the crack in its mottled windshield—clearly visible.

  It’s them—the man with the silver dollar, the woman with flames in her palms.

  The bus’s front door opened, but Ginny stepped back into the aisle. All thoughts of getting out a stop early, of walking the next few blocks to stretch her legs and think, had vanished.

  The Metro driver—a plump black woman with ivory sclera and pale brown eyes, dark red lipstick, and diamonds on her incisors, still, after a day’s hard work, lightly perfumed with My Sin—stared up at Ginny. “Someone following you, honey? I can call the cops.” She tapped the bus’s emergency button with a long pearly fingernail.

  Ginny shook her head. “Won’t help. It’s nothing.”

  The driver sighed and closed the door, and the bus drove on. Ginny took her seat and rested her backpack in her lap—she missed the weight of her box, but for the moment, it was someplace safe. She glanced over her shoulder through the bus’s rear window.

  The Mercedes dropped back and turned onto a side street.

  With her good hand, she felt in the pack’s zippered side pocket for a piece of paper. While unwrapping the filthy bandage from her hand, the doctor at the clinic had spent half an hour gently redressing her burns, injecting a big dose of antibiotics, and asking too many questions.

  Ginny turned to the front of the bus and closed her eyes. Felt the passengers brush by, heard the front door and the middle door open and close with rubbery shushes, the air brakes chuffing and sighing.

  The doctor had told her about an eccentric but kind old man who lived alone in a warehouse filled with books. The old man needed an assistant. Could be long-term. Room and board, a safe place; all legit. The doctor had not asked Ginny to trust her. That would have been too much.

  Then, she had printed out a map.

  Because Ginny had no other place to go, she was following the doctor’s directions. She unfolded the paper. Just a few more stops. First Avenue South—south of the two huge stadiums. It was getting dark—almost eight o’clock.

  Before boarding the bus—before seeing or imagining the gray Mercedes—Ginny had found an open pawnshop a block from the clinic. There, like Queequeg selling his shrunken head, she had hocked her box
and the library stone within.

  It was Ginny’s mother who had called it the library stone. Her father had called it a “sum-runner.” Neither of the names had ever come with much of an explanation. The stone—a hooked, burned-looking, come-and-go thing in a lead-lined box about two inches on a side—was supposed to be the only valuable possession left to their nomadic family. Her mother and father hadn’t told her where they had taken possession of it, or when. They probably didn’t know or couldn’t remember.

  The box always seemed to weigh the same, but when they slid open the grooved lid—a lid that only opened if you rotated the box in a certain way, then back again—her mother would usually smile and say, “Runner’s turned widdershins!” and with great theater they would reveal to their doubting daughter the empty interior.

  The next time, the stone might stick up from the padded recess as solid and real and unexplained as anything else in their life.

  As a child, Ginny had thought that their whole existence was some sort of magic trick, like the stone in its box.

  When the pawnbroker, with her help, had opened the box, the stone was actually visible—her first real luck in weeks. The pawnbroker pulled out the stone and tried to look at it from all directions. The stone—as always—refused to rotate, no matter how hard he twisted and tugged. “Strong sucker. What is it, a gyroscope?” he asked. “Kind of ugly—but clever.”

  He had written her a ticket and paid her ten dollars.

  This was what she carried: a map on a piece of paper, a bus route, and ten dollars she was afraid to spend, because then she might never retrieve her sum-runner, all she had to remember her family by. A special family that had chased fortune in a special way, yet never stayed long in one place—never more than a few months, as if they were being pursued.

  The bus pulled to the curb and the doors sighed open. The driver flicked her a sad glance as she stepped down to the curb.

  The door closed and the bus hummed on.

  In a few minutes the driver would forget the slender, brown-haired girl—the skittish, frightened girl, always looking over her shoulder.

  Ginny stood on the curb under the lowering dusk. Airplanes far to the south scraped golden contrails on the deep blue sky. She listened to the city. Buildings breathed, streets grumbled. Traffic noise buzzed from east and west, filtered and muted between the long industrial warehouses. Somewhere, a car alarm went off and was silenced with a disappointed chirp.