Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
He instinctively reached ahead with his feelers. All paths were distorted, tangled. More alarming, he saw an echo float by—a half-seen rebound of Charles Granger, slouching backward toward the freeway, oblivious—
And then, another—Fred. Himself,bouncing back from just a few minutes in the future. Their broken piece of history was rapidly approaching an impenetrable wall—and he had no idea what would happen then.
The piebald dwarf on the porch advanced—and changed. This was no mere solid figure. Daniel had seen such before, in the bad place—forms and figures that defied dimension. Descending the steps, the dwarf grew as if reflected in a curved mirror. The closer it came, the larger it would be—and the more powerful. By the time the figure reached him it would loom high enough to brush the black, swirling clouds.
Daniel looked back and saw the other men in their antiquated suits, cringing at the rain and the ice—human and solid after all, capable of pain. The grass steamed. The air cooled, turned thick as gelatin. All darkened.
He felt heavier—tried desperately to reason, to be smarter than the poor bastards around him. Echoes from the Terminus at the end of this world-line would temporarily increase the local mass quotient. Time would begin to slow. At the Terminus, for most observers, it would stop or echo them back a few days, a few hours, where they would live those brief segments over and over, hapless as robots repeating a programmed loop.
Slices of history were now floating like chunks of meat in a half-digested stew—nothing left of the future, he surmised, but the wall, and around that, a thinned-out, dimensionless vacancy in which nothing could think, nothing could live.
He had worked this out some time and many fates ago—back when he had been Daniel Patrick Iremonk through and through, calculating what it would be like for his time to come, this way or that, to its inevitably mixed and messy conclusion.
The huge piebald figure reached down and brushed at Fred’s—at Daniel’s short brown hair, stroked his high forehead, still bleeding.
The Moth.
He held still—just for the moment.
It told him: Sum-runner. Fetch it.
The others had managed to form a triangle in the yard—no escape. “Do what the Moth says,” instructed the closest, a lithe old man with an experienced face and one distorted foot, standing by the concrete steps cutting up through the overgrown yard.
“Of course,” Daniel said, and tried to walk around the dimensionless figure, to obey, to comply—the only choice he had, really. The rain pounded, streamed, drops curling in the air—hitting from all directions—no straight lines down, so many fundamental rules changing—
Never figure it out.
The Moth blocked him with a massive finger. In warning, it reached back, its hand diminishing to a point, and brushed the house. The house bleached, turned white, its outlines crumbling to calcined powder. Little more than a polite admonition. If Daniel did what they asked, they might let him go, they might not kill or transform him. A pang of disappointment—who could possibly be more important? Who could jaunt as far, calculate, and understand the shape of the end of the world? He was the best. Maybe they knew. They could make him one of their own. A slave. That was likely what they were planning. How gratifying. No thanks.
Two more translucent echoes vibrated past—one of Granger, the other of Fred. The Moth itself seemed to spread, sending ghosts of its unlikely self backward. It was using far too much energy—it would push more rapidly up against the Terminus than anything else near the house. The house reacquired some of its color, but still seemed about to collapse. Even at his highest fever of perception, Daniel had never actually been able to see the multiverse in all its near-infinite variety—until now. You always learn more when something breaks—when it begins to die.He had only one chance—to push past what they called the Moth, to retrieve his stone, and hang onto it with all his strength. Daniel lowered his head and squeezed under the Moth’s distorted legs, through its diminished substance. The piebald giant flickered and whined. Daniel could feel it fading. All illusion now—edges undone, strength gone—losing connection with the source of its power, the Mistress of all the corrupted world-lines that surrounded them.
The three figures in black became agitated, then dismayed, yet the storm was growing weaker and the air was warming. A retreat was under way—the Moth was getting out while the getting was good. The human servants of their Livid Mistress were being discarded, left behind. Apparently, this was not what they had expected.
Daniel stood on the porch, dripping pools around his feet. He slammed against the front door. Wood-rot did half the job, and a crowd of him suddenly flew into the living room, surrounded by puffing dust from a hundred variations of shattered door—motes of dead and dying futures that had once been only seconds away.
Amazed, he realized he could still move.
Dimensions are never exactly perpendicular—never precisely straight—less so now than ever. He turned sideways, screamed as disappointed futurity raised blisters on his face and hands. A crowd of Freds arrived at the fireplace, reached out for the one loose brick—it became hot with the radiated heat of so many hands—and the boxes they all knew were hidden behind that brick. The echoes vanished in a wink.
He had seen it before. World-lines swaying and attempting to reconnect, invisible to all others—forcing time to a crawl, reducing the light outside to a mist of shadows.
They had struck Terminus—and then rebounded.
Everything had been reset, pushing them back a few hours—a few days at most—everything in the city, the world, this segment of the multiverse, bouncing off the cauterized five-dimensional scab that now capped the end of all cords.
On the occasion of the next impact—in a few hours, a few days, no more, he was sure—the bounce would be shorter, and shorter still after that, until finally they would simply freeze in place, pressed flat: no time, no space.
No hope.
Daniel pushed through the thick air to the doorway. Kicked aside dust and debris, stood on the sagging porch. The others—the strong, emaciated men in their soaked black suits—were trying to flee. All but one.
Now he remembered a name. Whitlow.
The memory returned like a sliver of ice shoved into his brain. A memory of compromise, betrayal—the betrayal of an entire world.
The bad shepherd.
Daniel’s lungs emptied in self-loathing.
Whitlow stood on the porch, smiling and unafraid. He had not changed—always the same slender, confident, dignified old man across all of Daniel’s world-lines.
Always the clubbed foot.
Whitlow’s gaze seemed to briefly caress what Daniel held in his hands. The man with the club foot smiled, showing even, ivory-colored teeth. “What’s your name now, young traveler?” he taunted. “Why so eager? Where can any of us flee, but into Her arms?”
Whitlow casually brushed past Daniel, into the house.
And Daniel turned to join him.
CHAPTER 50
West Seattle
The van’s rear doors flung wide. Jack rolled onto the asphalt and tumbled for a dozen yards before slamming into a concrete curb. His exposed hand dipped into a gutter. Water rushed black and silver over his clutching fingers. Dazed, he tore through the abraded sack, spread holes for his other arm, then his torso, kicked his legs through, rose on hands and knees, peeled off the rags…
Stood, head spinning.
For a moment, he wondered if he was losing his sight, or even if he’d died—everything around the accident had skewed, ripped, and was slowly reassembling, like a tossed puzzle reversed in time. He looked up and saw the lightning bolts turn upon themselves and spiral up into a spinning funnel, spitting and hissing like snakes. Rising in the middle of the funnel, he saw a writhing, lumpish form, nearly all middle, with tiny, wriggling arms and legs—falling free, diminishing, flailing, only to be grabbed again by the lightning and lifted higher…all the while crying out, a girlish shriek audible even above the roar. Power lines torn loose from their poles tried to follow, curling and snapping and then straining straight as drawn wire. They broke loose and shot up, then went limp—and fell back like lost pieces of string. The funnel closed. A deluge like the upending of a huge bucket flattened Jack where he lay, pressing his head onto the asphalt until he feared he would drown.
All stopped.
Everything became unnaturally still. Any motion was difficult—painful. He blinked muddy rain from his eyes.
The downpour, the lightning, all of the weirdness—over. For a moment—deep quiet. Nothing but a soft hiss of rising steam and a light, ominous crackle like crushed cellophane. The van had wrecked in a residential neighborhood. Old houses, square and neat, ascended a low hill below a water tower. The houses had blackened—not burned, but converted to a dark, glassy substance, like obsidian. The water tower sprayed liquid from all its seams. Knee-high shining black spikes filled the roadway. As Jack stood by the curb, more spikes shot up, shoving aside his feet, kicking the van around and piercing two of its tires.
The air sparkled with an absence of color, absence of sense. It smelled burned, as did Jack—burnt by a cold, timeless fire.
Inside the van, Glaucous was gasping for air between harsh, guttural yells. The yells became an awful, continuous screech.
Then—nothing.
Everything that Jack looked at hurt his eyes, his brain. The muscles in his neck twisted, fighting over which direction they would or would not turn. He flung up his arm.
Against his better judgment, he looked again.
The not-colors had been filled in like gaps in a coloring book, but the burnt smell remained. The water tower gurgled and spewed its last few thousand gallons. The spikes melted into the asphalt. Rainwater cascaded from overflowing gutters.
The houses had returned to a kind of normality.
Shaking out a bruised shoulder and favoring a wrenched ankle, he lurched toward the van. He knelt by the shattered windshield. Wet and unable to fly, the last of Penelope’s wasps crawled along the crazed edge of glass, twitching and buzzing. Each cast flickering duplicates that peeled away, then returned to merge again.
He looked at his hands—the same stuttering shadows. Something huge had just happened. Time was vibrating like a plucked string.
Jack peered into the van. The driver’s seat was empty.
Both seats were empty.
Nobody left to save.
CHAPTER 51
Ellen drove Miriam’s old Toyota. Agazutta rode shotgun. Farrah sat in the back with Ginny, who watched a necklace of amber beads swinging from the car’s rearview mirror. They turned up one wet street and down another, searching for someone—someone young and male, Ginny gathered from spare snippets of their talk.
Even now, water slopped along the gutters and spilled from over-passes and off-ramps, slowing their progress.
Things had once again crossed the line from puzzling to inexpressibly weird. She was surrounded by spooky, middle-aged women. They were all so curious, but however much they seemed to care, however much they seemed to have a plan, they were just as reluctant as Bidewell to answer big questions. Too many wait and seemoments. She felt tied to their destinies in a way that made her suffer like a caged animal.
The storm had been hunting. That’s what the women had argued about before taking the West Seattle Bridge. Storms didn’t do that, of course.
Agazutta looked over her shoulder. “What do you feel?” she asked Ginny. Ginny shook her head. There was nothing ahead but a frightening solidity—a flat, looming blankness.
“You tell me. I’m just riding along.”
Ellen said, “The storm might not be the only unusual event today. You might be able to help us save someone else, someone as important as you. So please, Virginia—tell us what you feel.”
“We’re like a log that’s fallen out of the fireplace,” Ginny said, then dropped as low in the seat as she could, miserable and scared.
Farrah rubbed her nose. “It doessmell burned.”
“Are you reallywitches?” Ginny blurted.
Agazutta snorted. “That’s a joke, dear. If we had any realpowers, do you think we’d have allowed this to happen?”
Ellen said, “If anyone has magical powers, it’s probably you, or Bidewell. Not that we’ve seen much evidence of it lately.”
“Those books,” Farrah said.
“Fabricated,” Agazutta said.
“They’re old,” Farrah countered.
Ellen made a sound between a tosh and a splutter. “We have to trust him. We don’t have a choice. And we have to trust Ginny.”
“She’s sullen,” Farrah said.
“So were you, in the beginning,” Agazutta said.
“Hell, I’m stillsullen,” Farrah said.
“Are you a lesbian?” Ginny blurted.
A brief but chilly silence followed. “There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding,” Farrah said.
“Someone explain to the girl.”
“Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter,” Ellen Crowe said. “Except for me—”
“Except for her,” Agazutta emphasized with some resentment.
“…this group is sworn to celibacy,” Ellen finished.
“Which explains why we drink so much and read steamy novels,” Farrah said.
“Why aren’t youcelibate?” Ginny asked Ellen, craning her head forward.
“It has nothing to do with magic, but a lot to do with fishing,” Agazutta said. “You’re not the bait, my dear. Ellenis the bait.”
“No one believes me when I say it’s all—” Ellen began, but Agazutta interrupted.
“Is that him?” she asked.
Ellen peered through the windshield at a skinny young man walking with slumped shoulders and drenched hair over uneven sidewalk. The Toyota slowed. Despite herself, Ginny sat up. The young man was unaware of their presence—or working hard to ignore them.
“Such a bedraggled puppy,” Agazutta said.
From behind he looked like the one Ginny had seen riding a bike through the Busker Jam. As soon as she could see his face, she cried out, “Stop!”
Ellen braked the car with a short squeal. This caught his attention and he looked sharp left, then broke into a run.
“You scared him,” Agazutta said.
“Well, excuseme—”
“He’s getting away!” Farrah cried. “We’ll lose him. He’ll jump!”
They all seemed to know what that meant. Agazutta was glancing up and around as if expecting a 747 to fall from the sky, or a tree to march out in front of them.
“He can’t,” Ginny said.
“Can’t what?” Ellen asked.
“He can’t escape,” Ginny said, recognizing something in the young man’s posture, in his sad response to their presence. “He’s run out of places to go.”
The car caught up and Ginny rolled down her window. “Wait!” she called. The young man glanced left again. A raised block of sidewalk caught his toe. With a startled yawp, he fell on his hands and knees. Ginny banged on the door with her fists. “Let me out! Let me help him!”
Ellen stopped the car.
“Child safety lock,” Farrah reminded her, and she hmmedand pushed the release button. The door swung wide and Ginny spilled out. She straightened, held her head high, and approached the young man slowly, as if he were a wounded leopard. He rose to a squat and glared at her. Something about his outline wavered for just a moment—he fogged and shivered.
“Please don’t,” she said. “Please stay.”
His outline firmed, and he faced her with fingers and arms flexed. “Why?”
“We’ve met before,” Ginny said.
Jack glared at her.
“The storm was chasing you, wasn’t it?” Ginny asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“We can’t escape,” she said. “There’s a warm place and friends—I think they’re friends—not far. Come with us.”
“Your car is full,” Jack observed. “Unless you want me to ride in the trunk.”
Farrah opened her door and thumped her hand on the roof. “Squeeze in. You’re skinny.”
“Get out of the wet, Jack,” Ellen said. She waved with a reassuring smile. Jack stood and peered through the windshield. He pushed aside his wet hair. “Now you’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“I met most of them today,” Ginny said.
“Who are yousupposed to be?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” Ginny said. “Not anymore.”
CHAPTER 52
The Green Warehouse
Jack stood behind the warehouse gate, staring at the gray ghost of First Avenue South and shivering in the ashen chill that oozed through the chain-link fence. Ellen had parked the car and the women had gone up the ramp into the warehouse, leaving him to stand by the fence. He told them he needed a moment to adjust.
Ginny had returned to watch from the door.
In just a few hours, in what passed for personal time, the city outside the green warehouse had turned into a flickering forest of shadows. Clouds roiled too quickly, colliding and shooting up to vanish in the gray sky.
On the way back from West Seattle—theirs was the only car on the road—they had witnessed people walking, echoing back, starting over, half aware. Some seemed to catch on to their awful dilemma, enough to be frightened.
More frightening still, most couldn’t tell the difference.
Somehow, the stones in their boxes, and now the warehouse, smoothed things and protected them all—once they had ricocheted off Terminus. That was what Ellen had called it in the car—Terminus. The end, yet not exactly; more like a ball slowly bouncing and rolling to a stop. The sadness Jack felt was almost beyond bearing. Out there, so many confused, lost people, trying to reclaim their lives in a stuttering time that kept drawing them back, that would ultimately—when the ball stopped bouncing—press them down…Ignorant and immobile, like so many flies stuck in tar. It had happened so suddenly—but not without warning.
Ginny finally could wait no longer. She walked down the ramp and stood beside Jack, arms wrapped around her shoulders. She was younger than him, maybe eighteen, but the look in her eyes told him she was no mere girl. They hadn’t spoken two words since the end of their fitful, gray journey back to the warehouse.
“How did the storm find you?” she asked.
Jack shrugged, embarrassed. “I called a phone number,” he said. “A man and a woman bagged me. After that—I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“It was the Gape,” Ginny said.
“Gate?”
“Gape. It’s what happens when you meet the Queen in White.”
“Who the hell is that? Another old woman?”
“I don’t know. Just one of her names. Let’s go back in. It’s warmer, and you should talk with Bidewell.”
The air in the green warehouse was sweet with the smell of dry wood and old paper. Jack looked around the high walls, unpainted slats lathed over studs, thick beams carved from the hearts of grand old cedars. High windows and skylights cast a gray, filtered light. Stacks of crates and cardboard boxes rose everywhere. Ginny followed him like a little sister as he explored. He didn’t like that at first. He stepped up to the broad metal door and tapped it with his knuckles. On the other side, the book group women were talking with an older man. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. He glanced at Ginny. Her eyes glistened with a quick shyness, like a yearling deciding whether to bolt. “What’s on the other side?” he asked.
“That’s where Mr. Bidewell keeps his office and his library.”
“More books?”
“Lots. Old ones, new ones. He has crates of them shipped from all over the world. Some are impossible. I don’t know where he finds them. I was—am—helping catalog them. The ones who kidnapped you…what were they like?”
“The man called himself Glaucous. There was a big woman—huge. I think her name was Penelope.”
“Another pair came for me back in Baltimore. I got away, but they followed me here. Dr. Sangloss sent me to Bidewell as soon as I arrived.”
“You’re lucky. These two used wasps.”
Ginny’s eye narrowed. “Wasps?”
“Yellow jackets.” He waved one hand, fluttered his fingers. “They buzzed after me when she opened her coat.”
“Oh, my God.”
“What about yours?”
“A man with a silver coin. A skinny woman who started fires with her fingers.”
“I’ve always known things were odd,” Jack said, “but not like this.Not as weird as my dreams.”
“What do you remember about your dreams?”
“Not much,” Jack said. “Do you dream, too?”
She nodded. “All fate-shifters dream. That’s what Mr. Bidewell told me.”
Jack sucked on his teeth and tried to look calm. “Fate-shifters?”
“You and me. We shift when the odds aren’t in our favor.” She drew her hand across the level of her shoulders. “Sideways. You know that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know it had a name,” Jack said.
“But it doesn’t make our lives easy,” Ginny said. “I still make mistakes. Sometimes I think…” Again the furtive look.
Jack began pacing the perimeter of the warehouse. Ginny followed, uninvited. “Why wasps?” she asked.
“There’s no way out of a room full of wasps. The odds are against you everywhere.” He did not feel like describing the world-line he had been forced onto, or how that might have distracted the storm—the Gape. “What are they talking about? Us?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
They completed a circuit to where Ginny had made her little square among the boxes, and she lifted the curtain she had hung for privacy, inviting him in. Jack sat on a small crate, reluctant to take the single wooden chair—more reluctant to sit on the bed. He crossed one leg. “I’m a busker,” he said.
“I saw you at the Busker Jam,” Ginny said.
“Funny I didn’t see you.”
“You were mad at something, I guess.”
“What do you do?”
“I get in trouble, then I run away.” Ginny sat on another box. The corner puffed dust and sagged and she got up, brushed her jeans, and sat in the chair.
“Run away from where?”
“Where tois all that matters.” She shrugged. “We’ve met before. I’m sure of it. Not just at the jam. Don’t you remember?”
Jack shivered again, and not just with the cold. He was letting it all down and he didn’t want to, not in this place and not in front of this girl.
They looked up in wonder and fear at the high small windows. Darkness had fallen. Day might never come again. Two stars shone through the glass panes. Jack tried to imagine time stopping, freezing, then bouncing back—whatever it was doing—all the way out to those stars. He couldn’t.
He got up, lifted the curtain, and returned to the back of the warehouse. Ginny followed again.
Jack pounded on the sliding steel door. The voices behind the door droned on as if nothing had
happened.
“They’ll let us in when they’re ready,” Ginny said. “A busker is a street entertainer, right?”
“Yeah,” Jack said.
“Why would a thunderstorm be interested in a juggler?” She covered her mouth. Jack looked at her, bewildered. The way she laughed—fey, dauntless—gave her a radiant, awkward bravery that shamed him. “Who is Bidewell?” he asked.
“His full name is Conan Arthur Bidewell. I think he’s been here for a long time.”
“He’s, like, the Great and Powerful Wizard?”
“He seems to think so. He’s spent his whole life collecting books,” Ginny said. “There are rooms here that haven’t been visited by a human being in over a hundred years. So he says. I think he wants to put us in them and see what happens.”
“You believe him?”
“I don’t think he’s lying,” Ginny said.
The sliding door rumbled opened. Miriam poked her head out. “You can come in now. Jeremy—”
“Jack,” he said.
“Jack…time for you to meet Mr. Bidewell.”
Ginny walked beside him.
“How can you just accept all this?” Jack asked.
“I’ve had my moments,” Ginny said. “I always come back. It’s safe here, for now—the safest place in the whole city, maybe the whole world. Out there…”
No need to say more about the streets, the city, the sky.
The old man—Bidewell, Jack assumed—stood beside a long wooden table on which someone had positioned a short stack of medium-sized hardcover books. He wore a dark brown suit covered with patches and mended holes.
Miriam joined the other women, and they all sat around a wood-burning iron stove whose square mica eye glowed a friendly orange. Agazutta took the single overstuffed chair, lounging like a spoiled movie star.
Jack and Ginny stood at opposite ends of the table like students awaiting an exam. Bidewell studied Jack, then pulled two books from the stack and let them fall open to their middles. He pushed one across the table toward Ginny and the other toward Jack. Both looked down. The pages were incomprehensible; no words, no paragraphs, just random lines of letters and numbers. Jack looked away and closed his book with a sharp crack.
Ginny left hers open. Bidewell had given her The Gargoyles of Oxfordby Professor J. G. Goyle. She recognized the binding, but could no longer read any of the text, and the pictures seemed muddy and vague.
A third book, the name on its spine also scrambled, was passed among the women.
“You may have noticed the effects of what you experienced outside, what some call the Gape,” Bidewell said as this book was carried back to the table by Agazutta. “Actually, two events have concurred: the Gape, and Terminus. The Gape cuts us off from our past. Terminus cuts us off from any future, and so, by and large, we are cut off from both causality and eventuality, the two pulsing waves of time. The results are obvious, outside. In here, my library is a ruin, but it still offers some protection.”
“ Allthe books are ruined?” Miriam asked, incredulous. “I mean, you docollect curiosities.”
“As many as I’ve examined, including those with which I’m quite familiar,” Bidewell said. “Outside these walls, every book in our region—perhaps every region we could ever hope to access—has also been scrambled. I’ve not seen this before, not on such a scale.”
Jack set his face in a vacant expression—waiting.
“Virginia, you have regained possession of your odd little stone. Now there are two,” Bidewell said.
“Jack, Ginny, could you remove your stones from their boxes…?”
Jack puzzled open his box. The stone lay inside, twisted and black, shining with a single deep red gleam. Ginny lifted hers. “Both present and accounted for,” she said, trying to be cheerful.
“Given their shapes and the way they appear to nest together—but no, we will notattempt that, please keep them separate—I suspect that a third exists, and perhaps more. None of us knows where they might be. None of our sentinels and outriders has reported a third individual with your abilities. But for now, we can’t worry about that. What is outside this warehouse for the time being is beyond our control.”
Agazutta sniffed.
Bidewell nodded. “If they are what I think they are, then they have nearly completed their long journey—they have summed. Bring them to the center of the table, please, and give them a slow wave over this volume. I’ve chosen a particularly valuable book, one I’ve kept in reserve for some time—but which is presently unreadable. Children…”
Jack stood beside Bidewell, following Ginny’s lead. Bidewell opened the book to the middle. Both held out their stones. The women crowded the opposite side of the table to see. Jack and Ginny held the stones over the pages.
At first the text remained scrambled. Then, as if caught in a glowing light of reason, the words began to return—a few, then sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs.
No letters moved, nothing visibly rearranged, but the book under the two stones slowly became readable.
Jack couldn’t help glancing at the first paragraphs to become clear—reading upside down, a trick he had learned years ago.
Language is as fundamental as energy. To be observed, the universe must be reduced—encoded. An unobserved universe is a messy place. Language becomes the DNA of the cosmos. He looked up. Ginny had been reading as well.
“I am humbled by the power you children possess,” Bidewell said reverently. “I’ve waited centuries to observe this effect. It confirms so much that has been, until now, mere philosophy.”
“What arethe stones?” Ginny asked, her hand and the stone trembling. “I’ve had mine as long as I can remember. My parents had it before me. I’ve never been away from it for very long. But I have no idea what it is.”
“Jack?” Bidewell inquired, watching him closely, but with a confident air.
“My mother called it a sometime stone. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not. Once, she called it a library stone.”
“Curious. Librarystone. As if she might have known.”
“Known what?” Jack asked.
“For now, these are still just partial shells—journey finished, full and strong, but immature. Even so…as you can see, they have remarkable powers.” Bidewell gripped both their extended hands and pulled them slowly apart. The text below remained comprehensible. In fact, the patch of legibility continued to grow.
“There have been many such over the ages. Some failed and became lumps of useless rock. Some were captured—along with their guardians—and we assume those were sequestered or destroyed. In the names given to them, I suspect, we have clues as to their ultimate nature and function. You may put them away for now.”
“If something has scrambled all order—how can we think or see?” Miriam asked. “Why isn’t our flesh scrambled?” Her voice rose. “Everything should just fall apart!”
Her disturbing observation was met with grim silence.
Bidewell flipped the book’s restored pages one by one. The old man actually had tears in his eyes—tears of relief and awe. “We are just beginning to see how deep the mystery is. For better or worse, all time, everywhere, is now subjective. All fates are local.” He lifted his gaze to a large electric clock mounted over the sliding steel door. The hands were bent and jammed as if invisible fingers had reached inside and twisted them—and the second hand lay at the bottom of the glass. “No timepiece will tick out our remaining seconds. If we end flattened and frozen against Terminus—we are lost. Even these stones will be useless. But we cannot rush the tasks that remain for us. First, we must get to know each
other.” Bidewell pulled a folding chair forward, gripped its seat, and smiled at Jack. Jack sat, eyes sharp.
“Just for this occasion,” Bidewell said, “I have laid in a small feast. Ginny knows where cans of soup and the makings for sandwiches are stored. Ellen, will you begin?”
They sat down to pastrami on rye and tomato soup warmed on the stove. Farrah produced a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew from her capacious handbag. “Wonder what Terminus does to wine?” she asked. She poured a small amount of the dark ruby liquid into a tumbler, sipped it, and lifted an eyebrow in approval, then poured around. “It’s hard to spoil a cheap merlot.”
