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No sequence.
Remember, Mnemosyne!
“I’m confused,” he managed to say, his mouth numb again. “If I stay here…for a while—I’ll need to learn. Could you teach me?”
“That would be my delight,” the female answered. “Though you rarely stay long. Are you from the future, or from the past?”
“I don’t know. Is this…the Kalpa?”
“It is!” she cried out in delight. “The Tiers are inside the Kalpa, at the bottom, I think. We are very humble. You doremember!”
“Only some things…I remember you.”
“We’ve never met, until now,” she said, with pretty concern. “But Jebrassy has told me about you…a little.”
“What’s your name? Wait…it’s Tiadba, isn’t it?”
She was even more delighted, but puzzled. “Did he tell you that? What’s your name?”
“I don’t know. This is where I go when I stray, isn’t it?”
“Where you go, and whom you visit. But where do you come from?”
“I don’t remember. It’s all mixed up.”
Tiadba showed concern. He could see that, but the way her face made expressions, the way her cheek and jaw and lip muscles moved, was strange…Strange and lovely. She had such tiny ears and her eyes were large, almost like the eyes of a…
Another word lost.
He squinted at the ceiling. He could almost read what the letterbugs were spelling out. Insect pets that spelled out words. “What are they doing?” He tried to lean forward, get up, stand again. Too fast, too much. His eyes lost focus and his vision skewed. Shutters seemed to clack and close around him. He did not want to leave, not when he was on the brink of learning more, with this beautiful female to help him. He had been so lonely for so long!
He tried to reach out, but his hands wouldn’t move.
“I’m falling. Hold onto me,” he said, angry that his lips were so thick and clumsy.
“Try to stay, try harder!” Tiadba grabbed his hands, his arms. She was surprisingly strong. But all sense was draining from his head and body and limbs. The last thing he saw was her face, her eyes—brown—her flat, expressive nose—
Jack’s awareness squashed down to a fuzzy point, something whirred and snapped—the point expanded—vertigo turned into blurs of light—and he was back.
He blinked at the fish swimming in their tank, listened woozily to the hum of the waiting room’s heating system. Tried to hang onto what he had experienced—especially the face, the female, and the letterbugs, a weird idea—fun, actually—but by the time he realized where he was, everything slipped away except a sense of panic. Someone was in desperate trouble.
Here, there—now, then?
That urgency faded as well.
Jack looked around. The families had been reduced to a lone mother in a sari and her sleeping infant. An elderly couple had taken seats nearby. Embarrassed, he looked at his watch. He had blanked for thirty minutes. Somehow, he had kept turning the pages.
He folded the newspaper and put it in his satchel.
The attending nurse stood in the door to the waiting room. “Jack Rohmer? Dr. Sangloss will see you now.”
CHAPTER 110
Nataraja was disturbing Daniel’s deepest pools. How did he remember that name? Bidewell had never brought it up. Glaucous had never mentioned it. Neither had Jack or Gi
For Daniel, the disposition of the False City was strangely familiar, overlaid by the pattern, if it could be called that, of its awful defeat.
He clambered up an immense curtain-wall, leaning at about thirty degrees to the rest of the rubble: thousands of acres shot through with cracks, rippling tears, wide chasms, and faults. Spheres and stretched, twisted ovoids, bent cylinders and curving sweeps, still clung to the sheet, interco
Of course it had been a marvel. He could see it. The picture was sharp. After all, coming to Nataraja had made a tremendous impression…
As he climbed, he (and a bit of Fred, still curious) tried to imagine the awesome power of something that could discard the rules of reality—and what that would do to a human construct, relying as it did on engineering, gravity, the basic balances of matter and energy. He did not have to imagine much. The results seemed to pop into his head, more vivid than any recent memory. The city had died like an animal set upon by much larger beasts: smashed down, torn open, shooting out gouts of itself—and then collapsing, squished out around its edges as if stomped by huge boots. A hole big enough to push a small mountain through now let in a shaft of gray light from outside. The shaft moved with a will of its own, touching on great heaps of wreckage, merging with other stray shafts, cutting through thin screens of glow falling through huge rents in the crushed outer skin. The angle and intensity of these cheerless lambencies were never the same.
His own mind—what was left of it—had been scrupulously separated into thick, fluid layers, hot and cold—and now, from depths almost frozen with age, upwelling contents seemed ready to help him reconstruct what he could never have actually experienced.
“I don’t dream. I don’t dream of this city or any other.”
Still, recollections of a multitude of historical cities came forward—linked by what circumstance, he did not yet know. Lost to siege or plague, burned to the ground, reduced to rubble, the rubble raked over and sown with salt: moving from fate to fate, and even from life to life and body to body, he might have actually experienced those things—who could deny that possibility?
But not the end of this place, not the doom of Nataraja. That made no sense at all. But he knew. He felt. In its own way, Nataraja had been the greatest city of its age, greater even than the Kalpa…wherever and whatever that was.
“Tell me who I am!” Daniel shouted as he climbed the fallen curtain. “I don’t dream. I never have. When I sleep, there’s just blackness.”
The Chaos had washed across the surface of the Earth in a wave of many dimensions, surrounding the last enclaves of humanity from above, below, and to all sides, cutting off their lines of fate as well as access in space and time. That was how the Chaos transformed, took control—and reduced its conquests to a misery of confusion and lies.
It burned through most of the threads of causality.
And then, as if exhausted—or uncertain what to do with its new domains—it withdrew, concentrating its efforts on the probing wave front, that membrane which intruded and cut across and around the chords, and which Daniel had experienced so often.
What the Chaos had left behind was the hulk of a city charred not by flames, reduced not by physical destruction—but crisped by lost history and eaten through by paradox. Those who lived here had suffered most. The structures that once supported them in security and comfort had struggled to rebuild, or at least to maintain some part of an upright pile, yet were punished over and over again—dying, rotting, resurrecting in awful new ways—and finally the city had given up. The legacy of everything the Chaos touched.
Daniel climbed to the massive edge of the curtain-wall. The pain and exhaustion this body felt did not matter. The upper portion of the curtain—several miles of it—had bent over and broken off and now lay sprawled across and through other structures, the bottom lost in shadow, all the way to the foundations. Where his hands and feet touched, a few faint blue sparks sizzled from skin, bones, and muscle. Atoms, particles—matter astonished, recognizing itself and attempting to correct a perverse bilocation. But this was not the great recognition his new/old memories, his new instructions, told him to expect. He had come very far, over a very long period of time.