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He resumed walking like a long-suffering beast.
Daniel could hardly breathe. A feeling of heaviness, and compression, like bricks on his chest…he tried to understand what was going on in terms of physics but only made a bad job of it. “Vacuum energy heading back up toward zero,” he muttered. “Higgs field collapsing. Too small.”
“What?” Jack asked.
“Nothing. We’re lost.”
It did look as if they were out of options.
The land had never made sense. Now it was little more than a succession of silhouettes, trains and trails of pointless shadow. They had long since passed out of the neighborhoods of compressed and crunched history, through mad playgrounds of whatever passed for time outside their bubble—and now they were simply nowhere.
Fortunately, that nowhere was becoming smaller.
Daniel faced them. “The stones still tug. There’s still direction.”
Jack shook his head and took the lead.
They still had up and down, forward but not back, a kind of sideways…the limited movement a blessing in territory otherwise devoid of any particular quality. There was no going back and starting over. Something would not allow it.
“Whole numbers,” Daniel said.
Jack walked into deeper shadow. For a moment Glaucous and Daniel almost lost sight of him, just two or three steps ahead.
“Jack!” Daniel called.
They caught up. Glaucous chuffed and staggered.
“You’re a whole number,” Daniel said. “An integer.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. His fingers tightened on the stone.
“Your call number,” Daniel said. “However long it is, it’s an integer—it’s not irrational, and it’s not infinite.”
“We always ask for their numbers,” Glaucous affirmed, looking between them. “Not that we know what we’re asking for. Too long to speak aloud, all folded into trick paper. First seventy-five digits crucial, however.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong in any library. Books make me uncomfortable. I don’t have a call number. Never did have a folded piece of paper. Or if I do, it’s not an integer—it’s irrational. I don’t have a story. That’s why you didn’t hunt me.”
“Interesting,” Glaucous said.
“I’ve had a long time to think it through,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong. Someone or something sent me back, stuck me there, but I just don’t fit.”
Jack disappeared into the murk.
Again, something spun all around them—the vanes of a gyroscope—and faded.
“Slow down!” Daniel called.
CHAPTER 102
It took Jebrassy a while to realize that he could no longer see or hear the others. He paused and waited. Drifts of sharp grit slid over the rippled black rock. The ripples had grown deeper—they were now cha
He sat on the rim of a cha
Jebrassy stood at the edge of an interior volume so large he could not see the other side. The only way he could know there was a roof was that the flaming arc was not visible, nor the ice mountain, nor the seethe of the shrinking sky.
Tentative, he stepped away from the wall of tu
He approached one of the suspended spheres, many hundreds of feet in diameter and floating no more than a breed’s height above the floor—and reached out with his gloved fingers—only to be pushed back. The longer he looked, the more he saw on the sphere’s surface, until he realized he was looking at a place,a planet, highly developed, covered with cities, roads, things he could not identify—outside even his dream experiences.
He turned slowly, wondering how these spheres and heaps had come to be brought here. Everywhere, the lost and discarded. He was begi
Polybiblios was waiting for him, sitting on a low wall that divided several larger and taller piles. “Good to see you,” the epitome said. “I was begi
“Where’s the Keeper?” Jebrassy asked.
“Somewhere back there. It’s humiliating, how much of a puzzle this is. A wasteland of failed efforts. Consider all these worlds, stored here like shrunken heads in a dusty box. But I might have found something—or someone—more interesting.”
He gestured for Jebrassy to follow. With some misgivings, he did so. Was it possible, having lost sight of the epitome, that a duplicate might have been conjured up, completely different?
“I’ve spent a pretty long while exploring this space,” the epitome said. “Making maps and then adjusting them for changes—not as many changes here as outside, interestingly. Something seemed to want to keep track of whatever is piled up here. Including…this.”
They came to a glassy wall. Embedded within the wall, near the surface, was a figure roughly shaped like Jebrassy—but larger, more robust. He wore no armor and a very different style of clothing than that found in the Tiers.
Farther along, other figures—some much the same, others very different—also lay embedded, caught in moments of shock or anger or surprise. Jebrassy walked from one to the next, then put his gloved hand up against the smooth surface.
“A fate mire, I believe,” Polybiblios said.
“What’s that?”
“Not so easy to conceive of, but perhaps you’ve had enough preparation and training. Tell me what your instincts say.”
“They’re all like my visitor,” Jebrassy said, thinking so hard—and feeling so many strange emotions—that his head hurt. “But there’s too many of them.”
“Definitely ancient forms,” Polybiblios said. “If we had been able to access these when we were designing the breeds, we might have done better. Though they do differ in significant respects.”
Jebrassy saw no signs of life in the embedded figures. “They’re from the past?”
“Many pasts, more likely. How they got here—that’s harder to conceive. I wonder if my full Eidolon self could solve the riddle. At any rate, that one there…Get closer—hold up your hand. Make as if to touch it through the transparency.”
Jebrassy stepped up to the body closest to the shining surface and rubbed his glove against the smoothness. Thin bright ribbons of blue light—hundreds, then thousands of them—curled between the outstretched fingers and his own, penetrating his glove. He could feel a tickle, a slight shock, moving up his arm.