Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Daniel’s eyes stung as if brushed with nettles.
The bloody moon shivered, then streamed across the sky like molten, fire-lit silver. It spread and merged with the arc of lurid, pulsing flame, until nothing of it remained.
“Everywhere we look, the Gape swallows the world.” Max dropped next to Daniel on the stone bench, tried to swallow, and choked out, “We’re in herland! God help us!”
The garden grew colder as the arc of flame and its dark heart expanded. “I’ve been here before,” Daniel said. “I jumped right out of my skin to get away.”
Max spat and wiped his mouth.
Daniel felt in his pocket for the boxes. “We can beat it. Work harder!” He stood, grabbed Max’s arm, and hoisted him to his feet. The air had cleared. In the deepening shade, tinted but unrelieved by the arc of fire, and squeezed up adjacent to the massive mounds of the two stadiums—steel and concrete walls, roofs, and arches shriveling like the leaves in the garden—Daniel again saw the bluish glow, faint as a firefly across a desert. He pointed. Max lifted his chin in acknowledgment and wiped his face again with a black-smeared kerchief.
They stumbled on.
CHAPTER 63
In the warmth from the iron stove, Farrah and Ellen had begun to nod off, listening to Bidewell’s steady, droning voice. Miriam and Agazutta remained alert, as did Jack and Ginny.
“I collected books that reflected Mnemosyne’s unfinished labor—mostly forgotten volumes, texts long unread, hidden away in libraries and often enough in old bookstores. When a book is read by many, those copies must be reconciled first. There are few surprises in best-sellers! I presume that if I had become a fossil hunter, or a geologist, I might have found similar curiosities. But I have always been a man of books.”
“Why are observers special?” Ginny asked, diverting his slow, steady river of information back to what interested her most.
“A simple world-line—say, an atom zipping and vibrating through the vacuum of space—needs accounting for only when it encounters something else. Observers have eyes, ears, noses—fingers! Our senses gather and bind far world-lines in a most convoluted and inconvenient way. And of course we talk and tell stories and write books, conveying knowledge over great distances. We inherit some of our fates from our parents in a rather Mendelian fashion—but fates have less to do with our genes and more with where we will go, what we will see, hear, read, and learn. Always, words and texts confound the issue. Texts are special—any texts, any language, in fact, language itself.”
“I can understand that,” Jack said. “When I feel into the future—I only know about things I’m going to experience. Then I try to shift away from the slipstream of negative emotions. I don’t actually know what other people are doing or going to do. Only how I’ll feel, and a little of what I’ll see. As if the emotions my future selves will experience are washing back along the world-lines.”
Bidewell smiled his agreement.
Ginny was concerned with more immediate problems. “How can history just come floating by?” she asked. “Wouldn’t the pieces be too big? How can they slide around each other? If they’re all strung out like beads…I just can’t see it.”
“Excellent questions. A cleavage can occur along and across fates that have reached a blunt or frayed end, sometimes uniting fragments across great times and distances, a ‘sliding around,’ as you phrase it. These rearrangements may be linked by the cords or strings on which your particular beads progress.”
“So everything piles up like a logjam.”
“It seems so. We have been protected by the texts—to a degree. But mostly we are sheltered by your sum-runners, kept in a kind of bubble, at least until the rest of the broken world dissolves away. Then, we may see horrors and wonders on an awful scale.” Bidewell hunched his shoulders. “All beyond my capacity to comprehend. I am humbled.”
“For once,” Agazutta said drowsily.
Bidewell poured himself another glass of wine. “It is the second sister who has gone quite mad. The bleacher, the eraser. Cut loose from all future moorings…coerced or co-opted, enlisted in the hunt for all who bear these marvelous stones. We can hardly recognize her now, and she was grim enough before—but she always served, and now, she works that all will serve her.
“Your sum-runners have protected you against erasure—but they don’t protect everyone. They do not protect all whom you know and love. I will hazard a guess that the two of you are orphans—and that neither of you has ever been able to find records of your birth, or of your mother and father, whom you remember so clearly.
“That is what the sum-runners do—you become difficult to trace, but in turn you are given the talent of fate-shifting. Finally, you dream—you reach out and connect with others who have been chosen, presumably far away—at the end of time, as we have heard. This much I’ve puzzled out, but of course many mysteries remain.”
He looked down into his glass, almost empty.
Ginny sat in stunned silence, trying to remember her mother, her father. Her lip trembled at the thought that she was their last record. Everything else—gone.
“The second sister—” Bidewell resumed.
Across the warehouse space, a shrill buzzer sounded. They all looked up. Bidewell’s teeth clacked—a tight, hard clack—and vessels strained at his temple. Jack stared. This was the first time he had ever seen the old man frightened.
The dozing women opened their eyes.
No one in the room moved.
“The last people on Earth sat alone in a room,” Miriam said dryly. “There was a knock on the door.”
CHAPTER 64
“Do not allow the ladies to see that we are nervous,” Bidewell cautioned Jack as they threaded the aisles between the high stacks of boxes. “This does not come as a complete surprise. After all, we have only two sum-runners—and three is the minimum, I believe.”
Jack followed him through the outer door and onto the ramp. Except for Ellen’s Toyota, the parking lot stood empty. Beyond the fence stretched a flocking of coal-dust shades, fragments, and vapors, spreading like paint on wet paper toward what had once been the city of Seattle. All Jack could see clearly was a single sooty finger reaching through the fence to push the buzzer’s button.
Bidewell walked down the ramp. As he reached the gate, two shadows condensed from the mottled grayness. He stopped, hands folded, elbows out—reluctant to say or do anything. Jack descended to stand beside the old man. Both looked silently through the wire.
A dirty white face—a man’s face, older than Jack but not by more than a decade—came forward in the murk, eyes first, then nose, cheeks, lips: soft, regular features hardened by fear and exhaustion—eyes sharp and quick.
“I see one,” Bidewell said. “Who’s the other? Come forward, both of you.”
A broad, shorter silhouette emerged and stood beside the first: an older man, heavy and strong, his gray tweed suit filthy. Jack snarled and drew back. He could almost smell the reek of desperate birds and frightened children.
Bidewell squinted and said, “Mr. Glaucous? That is you, isn’t it?”
“Let us in,” the stocky one grunted. “For old times’ sake, mercy on us both, we need warmth and rest. Is it Bidewell, sir? Conan Arthur Bidewell, formerly of Manchester and Leeds, Paris and Trieste? For the sake of decency, of all the sorrow we’ve seen, let us in. We’ve just crossed hell, and I bring a man of value—along with news, discouraging news, it may be said, but news nonetheless!”
The younger man’s lips twitched. He looked up and around, as if measuring the wire fence, the wall, the warehouse itself. His eyes bore into Jack’s. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “You have time here, real time, like a bubble…we could see it glowing from miles away. Tcherenkov radiation, maybe.”
“Are you friends, or partners?” Bidewell asked, making no move to open the gate.
“Of convenience, perhaps neither,” Glaucous said. “Please, Bidewell. It hurts to breathe. We’ve seen fates and places crammed like mince in a pie, worse at every turn. This is no longer your town, no longer our Earth, I fear.”
Daniel removed a gray box from his jacket pocket. He puzzled open the lid and showed Jack and Bidewell the dull wolf’s-eye gleam within. Bidewell’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Jack, go up the ramp, reach inside the door—to the right—and push the button that opens the gate.” His voice was brittle. “I fear our third has arrived.”
“May I come in as well?” Glaucous asked, retrieving with an effort his street urchin’s simper. “I am of service. I have brought what you need.”
“Perhaps,” Bidewell said. “How much longer we can extend hospitality…not to be known.”
“Same old Bidewell!” Glaucous enthused, and clapped his hands. “We are grateful, sir. Many tales, a sharing of jinks and capers over all the sad, lost centuries! Jolly times, such as they must be.”
“You know him?” Jack asked Bidewell, angry and suspicious.
“I do,” Bidewell said. He gathered up what spit he could and expelled it in a thin stream. Glaucous’s eyes sunk inward like a shark’s. His lips pressed together and his cheeks grew red beneath the grit. “Sir,” he murmured.
“Open the gate,” Bidewell ordered. “We have no choice. The stones have gathered, bringing whom they will.”
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 65
The Broken Tower
The warm darkness around Jebrassy cleared in one direction, revealing a bright pathway edged in green. Down this walked a white figure—one of the Librarian’s many epitomes, faceless but no longer frightening. The epitome waited patiently as Jebrassy dressed, then spoke in that familiar, elusive voice—the voice you’ve known forever yet can’t quite remember.
“We are going to the top,” the epitome said. “You are recovered and almost ready.”
“Has she left?” Jebrassy asked, dressing more quickly. “Has the march begun?”
The epitome gestured for Jebrassy to follow, and guided him back through places both dark and empty, bright and filled—all attended by many more white figures.
Jebrassy had difficulty comprehending the architecture of the tower. When he looked up, he saw a roof of sorts, but he could make the roof seem to rise higher, or lower, depending on how closely he walked the edge of the path and how he moved his eyes. Were those supporting arches high above, or free-floating shapes of no apparent use—perhaps decorations?
Or was he experiencing a different kind of dream?
The epitome preceded him for what felt like several thousand yards—a welcome hike after his fitful, fact-filled slumber.
They approached a curved wall, high and lined with tall windows—much like the wall near which he had first met the angelin. Now the epitome assumed a face—the face Jebrassy from now on would identify as the Librarian, however incomplete that equation might be. The Librarian seemed to exist all around—spread everywhere throughout the tower, distributed among all the white figures, directing the angelins and probably others he had yet to meet. Were the white figures like remote arms and legs—and the angelins more like servants? So much yet to learn, and frustration that he was stillincapable of even asking the right questions.
The Librarian spoke, using the same voice as before, but rooted—somehow more real and immediate.
“You’ve been patient, a quality I admire.”
“Easy enough. I sleep most of the time.”
“You have recovered admirably,” the Librarian said. “So much to heal. I once did myself an enormous injury, then slept, just to give myself the time to work out a problem never before solved.”
“What problem was that?” Jebrassy asked, sure the answer would make no sense.
“How the universe will die, and what opportunities that death will present. I did not live in the Kalpa at the time, but far across the universe, where I was learning from other masters, not human but natural enough, though doomed…They refused transport back to the Earth. The Chaos ate them. And that’s why we’re here, young breed. Come closer and take a look at what lies outside our poor city.”
Jebrassy drew himself up. All he had seen of the Chaos so far was the strange gray beam that flashed through the high windows.
She might be out there already…
They stood beside each other, much of a height, just able to peer over the lower frame of the window.
“It’s frightening, but it won’t harm you—not here,” the Librarian said. “It’s changed over the last few wakes—more fundamental change than any of us have witnessed since it surrounded the Kalpa.”
There was a horizon of sorts—like the far line of the channel beyond the Tiers. But where the ceil would have faded off into shadow, something else rose up—a sky.The sky made no sense—a tight-scrunched bundle of fabric, its wrinkles burning with a dim, purple fire, dwindling here and there but starting up elsewhere like dying embers.
“It doesn’t like being looked at,” Jebrassy said.
“A fundamental truth. The Chaos is not fond of observers.”
Below the horizon and the wrinkled, burning sky, if he focused hard enough, Jebrassy could make out jumbles of shapes, what might have been faraway, broken buildings, old cities, or perhaps just piles of stone and rubble. He had no scale for comparison—how big, how high, how many were these things, spread out so strangely? How far to the line between “sky” and “ground”? His eyes couldn’t seem to focus—details presented themselves then flashed away, elusive as motes of dust. The Librarian held his shoulder. “This is what your female will soon be seeing.”
“Then she hasn’t left yet?”
“And you will join her. But first we must learn whether we have solved a great problem. Against this problem, I am, and always have been, as humble and troubled as one of your beasts of burden down in the basement Tiers.”
Jebrassy said, “You don’t know how stupid pedes can be.”
The Librarian touched his finger to his nose. “In my world, I can be justthat stupid. Look. Ask. I will try to describe and explain.”
“How big is it, out there?”
“In the Chaos, distance is difficult to measure or judge. That has been the chief obstacle to your pilgrims—how to get from where they think they are to where they think they want to be.”
“It looks confused,” Jebrassy said. “It isn’t finished—feels incomplete. Doesn’t want to be seen undressed.”
“A fair assessment. Though we should not ascribe our own motives to the Typhon. They are not the same—if the Typhon can even be said to have motive. In the simplest terms—applicable to our experience within the Kalpa—we are looking out over a thousand miles, horizon to horizon. Down there—look toward the closer regions just below—you can see a narrow gray circle, stretching out to a broader black border. You might be able to make out a kind of maze, and a low wall.”
Jebrassy followed the Librarian’s pointing finger and saw a gray curve surrounded by what might have been a black smudge of wall, two hand-spans out from the great rounded, shiny shapes immediately below—the word came to him, bions.
The tower rose from the middle bion, which looked damaged. The other two bions appeared to be in even worse condition.
“I’ve seen this before,” he murmured. “My visitor told me.” His face wrinkled in frustration, but the Librarian seemed to understand.
“Go on.”
Jebrassy tried to finish his thought. “There’s a shifting place…I think it’s called the zone of lies.”
“Very dangerous,” the Librarian said. “Many breeds have had their journeys ended there before fairly begun. I believe the Menders have improved your education and training since those times.”
“You’re talking about our lives,” Jebrassy said.
“No need to get testy. Tell me you aren’t already attracted to what you see.”
“I am!”Jebrassy shouted, and tried to turn away, but couldn’t. He was fascinated. He yearned, said almost in a whimper, “I always have been.”
“I have my inclinations, and you have yours. Right now we’re working together—but when you go out there, to join your mate, as you have dreamed, you will carry to her information no one else possesses. Information that might help you both survive, and succeed. And if you do not succeed, then my half an eternity of labor will pass away, without conclusion—without product—a failure.
“All that I am, then, rests on your small shoulders, young breed. The Typhon is absorbing the old universe, from beginning to end. Our time and history are being broken up, dissolved—look out the window. The Chaos is just beyond the border of the real, waiting.”
Jebrassy forced himself to look over the curved, darkened, jumbled landscape. Outside the zone of lies, great high shapes stood up against the Chaos, difficult to make out, as if surrounded by fog. Defenders.
“Only three threads connect us to the broken past that will soon be upon us—your female, who will soon travel into the Chaos; you, and one other, a driven being, forced to abandon all principle, who cares little for any sort of existence—but who must return.”
Jebrassy frowned, trying to retrieve an elusive memory of hatred and pity. The epitome tapped the crystal window with a white finger. “The lives of you and your dream-partners are strung like beads on the cosmos’s remaining threads—heading for a collision. If all goes well, that collision will happen in Nataraja. That is where you will go—where all marchers have tried to go. There is no other destination.
“You must succeed where Sangmer failed.”
Jebrassy thought of the books and stories that Grayne had guided them to. “You’re the one who put the shelves in the Tiers—aren’t you?” he asked.
“One of me,” the epitome said. “Not very long ago.”
“How long?” Jebrassy asked, defiant.
“What if I said a hundred million wakes—could you count them, remember them all, even begin to understand how long that is?”
Jebrassy tried to stare a challenge. Finally, he glanced aside. “No,” he said.
“We are adapted to our time as well as our space. Even this epitome can hardly conceive of a hundred million wakes without external assistance, so don’t be embarrassed. And it was longer ago than that.”
CHAPTER 66
The Border of the Real
She was always going to do this.
She would always be doing this.
Tiadba had wanted to join a march long before she met Jebrassy; long before Grayne had instructed her to recruit the young breed warrior, long before she fell in love. And long before she lost her warrior. And here she was, wearing a suit of supple orange armor, feeling no fear, only that ache of grief and loneliness that would never go away—and the realization that this was what she had been made to do. To leave the Tiers, the city itself, and cross over the border of the real, beyond the reach of the Kalpa’s great generators…
To cross the Chaos and see what lay on the other side.
Pahtun took Tiadba and Khren aside and told them they were group leaders. “I’ll go as far as I can with you. But I will not go beyond the zone of lies. I must return. Our final battle is upon us.”
Tiadba looked to Khren and saw that he was intent on the trainer’s words. No sign remained of Jebrassy’s buffoonish young friend. He, too, was always going to do this. She wondered: Had all breeds been made this way?
Assisted by the four escorts, the marchers prepared to roll out the small wheeled cart that carried their claves and two portable generators.
Pahtun got to his feet and repeated what he had said earlier, so often it was almost soothing in its familiarity. “The beacon from the Kalpa is perpetual. From its pulse you will always know where lies the city. There are moments when the Witness seems to interfere with the beacon—perhaps deliberately—but you will regain the signal if you persist. All your suits possess the means. There can be no communication sent tothe city, ever—you must not alert the Chaos to your presence. There are vigilants, of all sizes and strengths, always changing but constant in their watchfulness. The Chaos is hungry.”
Khren stood beside Tiadba and glanced at her through his golden-colored face pane.
“And now—the time has come to tell you your destination,” Pahtun said. “It is the destination of all pilgrims since the time of Sangmer—the only other point on Earth where sense may still rule and where there may be help for the Kalpa. It is the rebel city called Nataraja. There, if all goes well, you will connect with whomever remains free of Typhonian rule. You will work with them and tell what you know, and follow their instructions. Believe me, young breeds, if I could go with you, I would.”
Tiadba brushed the leg pouch that contained her bag of books.
Pahtun seemed nervous, even guilty. He was repeating his instructions. “No one knows what awaits you. Your armor has reactive protection—it can learn faster than you, and will do all in its power to adapt and to protect you against the Typhon’s perversions. Your face panes will convert whatever passes for radiation into photons you can see, and that will do you no harm. Sometimes they may fail to find anything they know how to convert—and so you will see darkness or approximations based on recent events. The closer you are as a team, the more your suits can communicate and coordinate. It is unwise to straggle or scatter too far—but distance out there is difficult to judge, even with the best equipment.
“Temptations may exist. The vigilants will try to get you to switch off your generators and strip away your armor. Should you find their temptation irresistible, you will no longer be a breed, but become part of the Typhon’s misrule—an atrocity like those exhibited across so much of the Chaos. And some who have failed—even the greatest, the bravest—are used by the Typhon against the Kalpa.”
Pahtun struggled for words. “It is possible that the Defenders will fail, and you will lose the beacon’s guidance. The last option then is destruction. The armor will bestow this mercy.”
Tiadba’s suit no longer itched or chafed. She could not feel her skin—the furry bits that had bunched here and there and itched seemed to have been soothed. No doubt the armor was taking charge of all her sensations—perhaps she would soon become just a suit and not a living creature. What would Grayne think, seeing them now? How could they have been better prepared, better educated?
“We need to get moving,” Pahtun said, one hand touching his shoulder. The four escorts straightened and held out their staffs. “We have a brief opening, and we must pass through the gate before it closes.”
They began.
The halves of the marchers’ helmets swung from their neck-pieces with the rhythm of their steps. Their boots made soft, flat clicks. Together, they sounded like farm pedes crawling over dry, hard dirt. They walked for long miles beneath the huge central arch, one side illuminated by the wakelight of the far ceil, the other…not. The quality of sound changed in a way difficult to describe. Tiadba had spent her entire life in the Tiers listening to the hive-hum of voice and echo, all her fellow breeds speaking, moving, thinking.That now fell off into stony quiet and a new quality replaced it: destitute hollowness, bereft, lonely yet somehow proud—and more ancient than any of them could conceive.
The Tiers had always stood apart within the Kalpa, lower than any other level, yet special, different. How many marchers had performed this journey already, as scared as they were, as lonely and far from all they had ever known?
“It’s quiet,” Khren said.
Miles to go—hundreds, thousands. Who could know?
We’re leaving the Tiers behind forever.
We’re crossing into the Chaos.
Whether their eyes adjusted to the gloom or the air here was clearer, Tiadba could not say—but suddenly she could make out square, regular shapes lined up on each side of the arch—taller than the tallest of the blocs of Tiers.
“What are those?” she asked, keeping her voice soft. Out here she felt it might be even more important to show respect.
“The inner rank of reality generators,” Pahtun said. “They become active if the outer ranks fail.”
The floor was uneven, broken by periodic ripples as if it had buckled under awesome pressure. Here and there, scars and parallel scuffs marred the otherwise smooth surface. Perhaps intrusions had slipped through this way, touched down…and burned.
Ahead, Tiadba could just make out the far edge of the vault and something else—a slowly shimmering barrier.
As minutes of walking passed into hours, the shimmer did not seem to get any closer. Still, her energy did not flag. The suit’s effect was energizing, electric. Grayne’s words from the early meetings returned to her.
You could walk for thousands of miles across the roughest, most forbidding terrain, yet you’ll remain fit and strong. It will be the fulfillment of all you are, the adventure of a lifetime. I envy you.
After dozens of miles and hours of marching, the dark vault overhead still seemed endless. Then—a change. The shimmer appeared distinctly closer. Despite her doubts, she could not help getting excited. The sky. Pahtun said to be ready for the sky.
“Helmets up. Seal them tight,” the second escort ordered.
Tiadba looked around, took a deep breath. The air—the last privilegedair of the Tiers—was already bitterly cold. Frost formed on her lower lip and around her nose. Then, as one, the halves of their helmets—which until now had lain on their shoulders like empty fruit skins—rose up and sealed with a hiss that made her ears pop. Her head grew warm and her vision sharpened. The shimmer ahead acquired a life and sparkle she had not noticed before.
“Wonderful,” Perf said. “My ears aren’t cold.”
Pahtun brought them to a halt. The escorts lined up behind them, as if to block escape. They don’t get it. Pahtun understands—these others don’t, not at all!
The marchers milled restlessly. They stood on the crest of a particularly high ripple in the Kalpa’s outer foundations.
Suddenly, the shimmer fell directly in front of them, then bulged inward as if to push them back. The escorts raised their staffs. Pahtun leaned forward. “Wait for it,” the trainer said. “Don’t walk into it. Let it find you.”
Khren glanced at Tiadba through his faceplate. What she could see of his face looked calm, resigned.
“Wait for it,” Pahtun cautioned again. The breeds cringed inside their armor, as if they might be snatched up and eaten.
The shimmer did not move, but suddenly it was behind them. They had passed through without taking a step, and now saw more miles of uneven ground ahead, and beyond, a wall studded with huge shapes: the Defenders.
The final, outer rank of reality generators.
Beyond those tall, blurred shapes lay the middle lands, the zone of lies. Tiadba looked straight up. They were out from under the vault. The sky loomed.
Open sky.
She captured an impression of endlessly falling curtains, restless color she could not process or accept—no color at all, actually, and probably no motion. Her eyes suddenly lost focus. The sky worked them in ways they had never had to work before.
“You don’t want to see everything at once,” Pahtun said, “even through the faceplates. Look down, shut your eyes if they hurt.”
Her eyes didhurt—they wanted to tumble in their sockets and face the back of her skull—but Tiadba did not look down, did not shut them. She had waited too long for this. She rotated on the pads of her boots and looked up along the great curved exterior bulk of the first bion, then left and right, trying to take in the other two huge, dark shapes, both split and cracked—in partial ruins. The Kalpa—what was left of it.
Something above slowly came into view, pushing up and away from behind the first bion: a curving ribbon of painful fire, red and purple at once, fencing in a black, consuming nothingness, empty of thought and life. Tiadba’s mouth hung open and her breath became ragged. It was instantly and obviously wrong—so strange as to push her beyond fright.
“Is that the sun?” she asked.
“Depends on what you mean by sun,” Pahtun said. He had fixed his gaze on the ground. “It’s certainly
no longer the sun wemade.”
Tiadba asked her second question—on behalf of her visitor. “ Where are the stars?”
“Long gone,” Pahtun answered.
All their lives they had been protected by the warm, limiting light of the ceil, hardly varying through its pleasant, soothing cycles of wake and sleep—but no more. What lay beyond the walls and above the city was majestic but cruel, self-involved, producing not light but something that the transparent faces of their helmets had to translatefor any sense to come of it. The Chaos.
“Wait for it,” Pahtun warned again, studying the ground. Tiadba had no idea what they were waiting for now. How could it get any stranger, any more challenging?
Something reached down, even though they were still within the border of the real—reached down and tried to casually flick them away, like brushing letterbugs off a table. Four of the marchers screamed at once, then fell and rolled into a shallow valley between the foundation’s ripples, trying to hide. Khren and Nico crumpled to their knees and clung, leaving Tiadba alone beside the trainer, the only one still looking up.
The sky—what had once been the sky—seemed to know that it was being watched. It tried to reach into her eyes, plunge through her mind, subvert everything that defined her as a breed—as an observer, a thinker, a separate being.
It refuses to be understood—it will certainly not be mastered.Tiadba slowly lowered her gaze to the uneven, fractured ground, then blinked, of her own will. Somehow she had fought off what lay above the Kalpa, fought it to a standoff. Pahtun looked upon this young female breed with new respect. He took some small satisfaction in their distress, and professional interest in their slow recovery.
“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “No way to prepare you. No way at all.”
They neared the outer rank of generators—high, narrow monuments sliding back and forth slowly along the perimeter—pale, shining, and indistinct, like towering glass giants surrounded by fog. Shapes buried inside these obelisks moved with slow deliberation, as if tracking outside forces. Between the generators lay a misty darkness broken by a maze of low walls, barely knee-high to a breed. Tiadba could not believe those walls would keep out anything that really wanted to get in. Pahtun and the escorts accompanied the nine breeds over the last five miles to the inner wall. Distance still meant something here, sixty miles out from the training camp in the flood channel. They had learned to level their gaze upon the dark gray horizon and not look up unless they had to.
