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Gi
Bidewell suddenly showed her a toothy smile: wood-colored teeth. George Washington’s choppers, but these are real—and they look strong.
“Everything old is bored,” he said. “Hidden away in great piles of sameness, lives and histories laid out, unchanging—wouldn’t youplay a little game, given the chance?” He stared up the aisles between boxes and shrugged, then blew his nose with a crisp, bubbling hoot. “A letter flipped, a word changed or lost—who will ever know? Who even looks or cares? Has there ever been a scientific survey of such tiny, incremental deviations? What weare looking for is not the trivial, the commonplace, but the product of permuted genius: the book that has rearranged its meaningor added meaningwhile no one was looking, no one was reading—and most fascinating of all, the book that has altered its string of text across all editions, throughout all time, such that no one can ever know the truth of the original. The variant becomes the standard. And what this new version has to contribute—that must be interesting.”
“How could you ever find it?”
“I remember what I read,” Bidewell said. “In my lifetime, I have read a lot. Within that significant sampling, I will know if anything changes.” He waved his long fingers over the table and sniffed. “These are of minor interest. They have varied individually, a letter here, a letter there. Their variations are intriguing, perhaps even significant, but of little use in the time left to us.”
“Sorry,” Gi
“Not your fault,” Bidewell said. “Like me, books can be tedious.” He winked. “Let’s get through this shipment by eventide. Then, we will order in takeaway.”
With an impenetrable look of severity, Bidewell stalked away through the aisles to the steel door and closed it behind him, leaving Gi
CHAPTER 120
The Typhon knows neither time nor space. It exists without thought in a condensed shapelessness, smaller than the smallest imaginable point. In most ways, it can be described—much as we might describe the muses or Brahma—only by negatives: not this, not that. But let us simplify things and use human words, ascribing such motives, activities, and emotions as are familiar to humans—much easier to convey, however incorrect.
When the Typhon first became aware of our aging cosmos, it sensed vacancy—and opportunity. The old cosmos had few defenses. Its observers were many but scattered across an immense and thin geometry, worn by long and decadent eons. Like a great tree that falls in a forest, lives on for a while, then slowly leaks away its sap and its will, the cosmos’s heartwood was begi
To Godhead.
It did not expect resistance. This was its flaw. It did not know how to use and incorporate confrontation and defiance, necessary skills for any god. The push back of creation—the freedom of unbridled will—engenders love.
Not for the Typhon. Whenever it encountered things that saw differently, it ended them—with great fear and loathing.
And then with something like amusement.
It enjoyedhating, and there was nothing to stop it—for many trillions of years. It had found its quality.
But now, in all possible dimensions, conclusions are arriving, consequences are falling into place. It is no longer a young god or an infinitesimal point, everywhere and nowhere at once. It has acquired a kind of limitation, an unwanted substantiality condensing out of the ur-nothing, the monobloc beneath all possible creations—rising out of the smallest virtual foam of the tiniest imaginable volume of vacuum. The Typhon acquires dimension and shape—it becomes bloated and sprawled. In its awful, pointless passion for deconstruction and destruction, it finally loses whatever focus it might once have applied to its whims or tasks at hand.
The overextended cosmos—the old, crumbling nurse log—has deteriorated to such a degree that it has turned into a trap. The blades of Brahma’s armillary spin. It is now a very bad place for a bloated, undisciplined god.
All the Typhon can do is flail within the whirling prison, using up the last of its strength to cause more suffering and frustrate any possibility of good outcome. It has stretched its contamination backward across time, perverting creation, causing endless cycles of directionless pain. It is now pressing our cosmos toward a nasty end, dissolving space and time back to the begi
We might speculate about what would have happened to the Typhon in more fortunate circumstances. Perhaps we should extend pity, those of us who have felt its corrosive touch—every one of us. The bad that traveled from the future, not from the past.
Final sin.
But we are inadequate to such speculations. We are inadequate to feel pity for a failed god. And so—
Let’s not. Let’s not feel pity.
The Typhon—formerly without thought or viscera, without conscience or sympathy—realizes that its puffy carcass can now feel. What it feels is a kind of apprehension—even fear. It is no longer more powerful than those it once crushed.
It has become a small, brownish-gray thing, lying in the center of the last of the universe like a metaphysical abortion, pitiful but for its history. And soon there will be no history. No trace of its works, its conclusions.
What it had done its very utmost to stop, to prevent, is advancing. Even the tools it forged across eternity are turning against it. It can feel the last two threads, swirling and twining and trying to cancel, competing and summing against all the Typhon’s efforts.
One of those threads is finally dissolved.
The Typhon experiences another unfamiliar emotion.
A dire, dreadful sense of hope.
Only one thread will survive. And that in itself is not a healthy condition for any cosmos. The Typhon may pass into true nothingness, but it will at least have the satisfaction of taking every last observer with it—blinding forever those outrageous eyes.
No more memories.
No more stories.
No more.
CHAPTER 121
Jack sees Gi
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” She glances at him. “Watch out for the cats. They look pretty mad.”
“Yeah—didn’t think I’d make it.”
“Thought you’d forget about me,” she says.
“Never.”
She reaches out, he reaches out, their hands meet, and then they hug and feel their combined warmth, and something joins them together—far sexier than anything either has experienced—and gives them strength. The sum-ru
“We need at least three,” she says. “I remember that much.”
“If the third one isn’t here, we lose everything—right?”
“I guess so. Who’s that?” Gi