City at the end of time

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 peopleall 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 arethey, 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 Fri

“Ignorance is bliss,” Fri

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-spa

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 wi

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 Intensityto 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 Trille

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 Intensityfound 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.

Among the Shen he had become known as Curiosity embodied.

The Shen exemplified in all their ways and histories the exalting humility of correcting error, and followed in all their days the smoothly prickled course of knowing one’s blind stupidity. Polybiblios had been among them for a million years, had watched them react—or not react—to the harrowing of the Chaos. When presented with our case, he consulted his Shen teachers, and without ceremony they prepared to cast him out, after a brief, enigmatic explanation. “You will create more error and more confusion,” they told him. “We ca