City at the end of time

Still, they all had to stay close. Their bodies rejected what lay beyond the bubble. One could fall back just six or seven paces—no one dared more—before all suffered exhaustion, closeness of breath, headaches, sneezing—blood from nose, ears, fingertips. They were filthy with soot and streaks of wiped blood. The bubble did allow something like smell—phantom scents, madness and burning, sour and sick. Nobody was supposed to be here. Heredid not tolerate intruders. Now they could see almost nothing—a kind of spot of dim glow for some distance, restless darkness on all sides, a tumbled blankness, gray invalidity, the wholesale lack of anything and everything, only slightly less disturbing than the more defined things they had already seen.

Sometimes the tumbles and wrinkles assumed the crooked aspects of a landscape, then just as easily gave it all up—a bad piece of work—and resumed void.

Something seemed to surround the void and briefly spin, like being caught inside a wheel or a gyroscope. But then it vanished.

It might never have been.

The design on the box.

Jack had almost given up hope for Gi

Whole cities cast aside like broken cadavers, marked and scattered with hatred and confusion. All that wreckage worked over by a starless, pitchy, unhappy thing, totally powerful, yet completely clueless within and without.

His fancies grew.

Glaucous’s rough voice knocked him out of his fugue. “While you two slept, I kept watch. We’ve come around some things like hills or mountains.”

“How could we sleep?” Daniel objected. “We were walking.”

“You sleep, walking or not.”

Jack wrinkled his nose. “Nightmares without sleep,” he suggested.

“Lies without reason,” Daniel countered, and looked left at Glaucous. Their shoes made an unpleasant sound falling on the bubble and pressing it to the uneven black rock—a squeaking trunch, trunch.

“Gentlemen,” Glaucous said, as if urging civility. Then he halted and stared ahead and his eyes grew wide. “Couldn’t be.”

Jack and Daniel moved two paces by reflex before stopping. “Couldn’t be what?” Jack asked.

“I am a sensible fellow,” Glaucous insisted, sleeving sweat from his cheeks. Now it was Jack’s turn to see movement ahead—small, dark shapes, low and sleek, with long curls rising and twitching. Not unfamiliar, certainly not frightening in and of themselves. And yet—here!

“Cats,” Jack said. Daniel turned.

“Amazingly capable, cats,” Glaucous said. “Excellent and powerful Shifters, and some are Chancers. Gods and masters of those who diminish and gnaw.”

The shapes had faded.

Glaucous took a deep breath. “Now, as to those hills and mountains,” he said. “They’ve been described to me. They enclose an unhappy place.” He made as if to dig a furrow in the air with his spaded palm.

“I’ve been told this is where the Moth delivers shepherds and their stones. A long, shallow gouge—like a valley ringed with high peaks, surrounded by unspeakable things taken prisoner in far places. And in the center of it all, a shallow bowl with three fate-braided entrances, confounding to Chancers and Shifters alike.

“This is where the Chalk Princess rules.”

City at the End of Timeis a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Greg Bear

Map copyright © 2008 by Casey Hampton

Impossible armillary sphere design copyright © 1984 by Greg Bear

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DELREYis a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Bear, Greg.

City at the end of time / Greg Bear.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-345-50713-6

1. Young adults—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3552.E157C58 2008

813'.54—dc22 2008006643

www.delreybooks.com

v1.0

For Richard Curtis:

celebrating thirty years

A.

FOURTEEN ZEROS

PROLOG

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

—Thomas Ma

“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.