Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
The glow approached. Her hair was short and lustrous in the fading light, her eyes fixed and penetrating, so full of intent that he wondered if her mer and per would emerge from the milling crowds and retrieve her, or request an immediate testimonial from the sponsors he no longer had. That would be awkward.
Jebrassy met her gaze with puzzled dignity until she came within a few inches, sniffed him, and smiled.
“You’re Jebrassy…aren’t you?”
“We haven’t met,” he said, mustering all the wit he had left.
“They say you like to fight. Fighting is a waste of time.”
He half stumbled over an empty jug. “Is there anything else worth doing?” he asked, steadying himself.
“We have three things in common. The first is, when we dream, we stray.”
She could not have shocked him more—or come closer to wounding him. Jebrassy had told only Khren, his closest friend, about the straying. His frown turned to dismay, then genuine distress and embarrassment, and he looked over his shoulder, blinking at the crowds as they walked in chattering clusters up the ramps and off the field.
“I’m drunk,” he muttered. “We shouldn’t even be talking.” He started to walk off, but she looped her arm under his and tugged him to a stop.
“You didn’t let me finish. I want to leave the Kalpa. So do you.”
He regarded her with inebriated wonder. “Who told you all this?”
“Does it matter?”
He smiled. He practically leered. This might turn out to be a mischief after all—two reckless youths, left to their own devices. The glow’s expression did not change, except for a disgusted flip of her lashes. Taken aback, he asked, “What’s the third thing?”
“If you want to know,” she answered, eyes glinting in the last of the tweenlight, “meet me by the Diurns just before next sleep. My name is Tiadba.”
Then she turned and ran toward the ramps and the bridge—faster than he could follow, drunk as he was.
CHAPTER 7
As light ebbed and shadows gloamed, Ghentun arranged his notes—he kept them in a pouch beside a small green book—and strolled through the lower floors of the first isle bloc. Moving still unseen from niche to niche, he wrote in Puretext with a flower finger he willed to be tipped in soft silver, feeling affection and sadness as he monitored the most recent generation of ancient breeds to be delivered.
Ghentun’s mind wandered. Before becoming a keeper, he had been a student of city history—and like all historians in the Kalpa, that meant he knew very little about a great deal. What he knew—but had never seen—began with a blanket of smooth utter blackness, sprayed with trillions of stars: the Brightness. Something less than a memory now, and little more than a dream. Across its first hundred billion years, the cosmos expanded until its fabric stretched thin, opening voids wherein dimension had new or no meaning. Galaxies became distorted, burned out, wrinkled away. Space itself was aging, decaying—some thought dying.
For longer by far than the Diaspora that had flung humans to the fringes of the universe, they survived in the last tight islands of artificial suns, surrounded by a great and growing emptiness. This became the status quo. The early universe was seen as feverish and squalid, abnormal. The Age of Darkness became wreathed in the dignified mantle of a sedate if dwindling maturity—watched over by a gerontocracy of immortals, all convinced of their unsurpassable wisdom. For a few, however, these scattered islands in the abyssal dark were not enough. A minority—not sane, yet certainly not suffering from a deathly complacency—expressed a willingness to journey on, to leave behind the warmth and light of the remaining stars. They were denied, or worse—overwhelmed, quashed, all but exterminated. A handful managed to escape, to sacrifice all they knew, and to make the adaptations necessary to survive in the cosmos’s last frontiers: the crumbling wastes, dejects, and desponds frayed out over a radius of three hundred billion light-years. Out there, in the Far Dark, to the amazement of the gerontocracy, new technologies proliferated. Bold explorers discovered how to take advantage of the once deadly seams and rifts, squeezing huge stores of energy and sustenance from what most had thought a barren, decrepit desert. Those last few pioneers did more than survive. Ever resourceful, they learned to live and prosper and multiply as never before. Empowered, they eliminated or absorbed their oppressors. They built countless empires.
The Age of Darkness was followed by the Trillenium—the greatest period of growth and learning in human record. Zeros stacked upon zeros. Histories were made and lost like the guttering of an infinity of candles. All strangeness was joined, and all life, human and otherwise, was accepted and improved upon, redefining the very idea of humanity and leading to triumph upon triumph, rebirth after rebirth. No matter that the universe was growing ever weaker and thinner. In its prolonged throes, it fed its young handsomely—until humanity’s farthest flung descendants encountered the first evidence of the Typhon.
It took a billion years to gather conclusive proof of the Typhon’s existence—a rapid few millions of years for it to be analyzed and vaguely understood. By the example of its very perversity, it generated a wealth of new mathematics and science—and new ways of going mad.
Nothing like the Typhon had ever been observed. Neither a place nor a thing, the Typhon spread by scavenging aging universes. Some labeled it a pathology, an infection, a parasite—a violently aggressive membrane of change. Others claimed it was a younger, undisciplined creation infiltrating the ruins of the old.
Where the Typhon grew, worse than silence reigned. The knots of this universe were undone: geodesics failed, sightlines achieved fractal terminations, information swallowed by so many varieties of singularity—collapse, estoppage, endvols, countercepts, twistfolds, enigmachrons, fermion dismays—
And it grew faster than signals could convey, tearing through the aged matrix, eating up the rotting fabric, creating regions not of darkness—those at least were familiar—but of inconsistent, lawless misrule. It was said that anything could happen there. Perhaps more accurately, it was widely reported that everythinghappened there.
This, even the hardiest and most stubborn of all Earth’s children—the last wave of the Diaspora—could not tolerate. This, they could not fight. Most succumbed.
The mind-numbing vastness of their reduction defied historical measure. Survivors who still cherished their terrestrial origins finally retreated to the ancient home system, where humanity—its offspring, hybrids, and manifold allies—now cowered in the fastness of old Earth, living under the dwindling light of a rekindled sun and surrounded by the last few dying planets.
Those who had transformed themselves into new kinds of mass and energy were forced to live together, in very reduced circumstances. Difficult times followed—thousands of centuries of pointless violence: the
Mass Wars.
Outside, the Typhon raged—and gained.
In a way, the Kalpa’s last chapter had begun over a million years ago, when the City Princes of the twelve cities of Earth had commissioned Sangmer the Pilgrim to find and retrieve a former citizen called Polybiblios from the realms of the Shen—beings who claimed never to have shared ancestry with anything remotely human. Sangmer had crossed the last tracks of free cosmos to the sixty suns of the Shen, found Polybiblios living and working on the greatest of the Necklace Worlds, and carried him back between the threatened wastes, bearing knowledge he had gained from long study with the Shen. Sangmer also brought back to Earth a most unusual being named Ishanaxade. Some said Ishanaxade was the last of her kind, rescued and protected by the Shen, left to her own progress for a few million years and then given new form by Polybiblios. All the legends of those times—and they varied widely—agreed that Polybiblios adopted Ishanaxade, calling her his daughter, and that on the return journey, or shortly thereafter, she was betrothed to Sangmer, who was richly rewarded for his perilous and timely journey.
Along Sangmer’s return path, the last of the ancient worlds met their doom. The sixty suns of the Shen were consumed by the Chaos—a fate the Shen themselves seemed content to accept. The City Princes took a risk, bringing Polybiblios into their circle of rule—but the cities of Earth had grown desperate, watching sun after sun swallowed and transformed. They hoped that Polybiblios, with his Shen training, might be able to keep the Chaos at bay—and upon his return, he did indeed design the suspension that for so long protected the sun and planets.
The Shen had taught him well.
All surviving humans owed Polybiblios not just their lives, but their sanity. Yet no human could know the limits of his invention. How much had he learned on the far side of that dying sky…?
The suspension blocked Typhonian misrule—but only inside an oblate zone that reached just past the groaning gray ball of stone and ice that had once been Neptune. Beyond the suspension, light stopped as if glued to a page, matter dissolved like blood in water.
Earth, little more than a cold cinder, was now thought to be—had to be—sufficient. There would be no recovery of the lost light-years. So ended the dominance of living, thinking beings in the cosmos. Some called it a final golden age—life’s long arrogance finally tempered by the incomprehensible. Scant years later, the Chaos pushed through the suspension and sucked up the sun and the other worlds, then threatened the last twelve cities of Earth. The suspension was pulled tight, severely weakened, almost destroyed. Yet even now the Mass Wars continued. The City Princes—noötic Eidolons all—forced conversion upon all but one of the cities. Those who did not agree fled a thousand miles across the cinereous desert to Nataraja.
Both history and legends were sketchy about the ensuing age. These things were accepted by most, though sequence was vague:
Nearly all but Menders and Shapers—the engineers and underclasses of the Kalpa—were made of noötic mass, far more convenient, reliable, and powerful. But Polybiblios was still primordial. To better understand and control him, the City Princes forced him to convert as well—making him a Great Eidolon like themselves, which they must have considered a tremendous honor. In return, the City Princes vowed not to interfere with his strange, Shen-inspired researches. But conversion did not make Polybiblios more tractable or sensitive to their concerns. If anything, he became more distant and reclusive, speaking only with Ishanaxade through his new Eidolon parts—angelins and epitomes. He moved into the tower that rose a hundred miles above the first bion of the Kalpa, and continued working.
In time he became known as the Librarian.
The Librarian soon specified that a new class—or underclass—of citizens be made of primordial matter, a whim assumed to have implications both philosophical and personal. The City Princes now completely controlled Earth’s supply of this ancient stuff—the last in the universe. They usually released their stores in small quantities to replenish the few remaining Menders and Shapers who served them, and for ritual exchanges between Eidolons. Somehow, the Librarian persuaded them to allocate to his control a much larger supply.
Without specifying their intentions, the Librarian and his daughter began to fashion their first prototypes of ancient humans. Since histories of the early Brightness had long since been lost, their designs were conjectural at best. Some scraps of ancient data suggested that early humans could not live without being surrounded by leaping and flying insects—and so, insects and arthropods were designed and incorporated as well.
Ishanaxade oversaw the opening of the lowest levels of the Kalpa’s first bion and the repositioning of the foundation piers that divided the ancient flood channels, creating three islands. Upon completion of the empty blocs and the landscaping of the primitive but eerily attractive meadows—overarched by a false sky that divided time into bright and dark, wakes and sleeps—an allotment of primordial matter was moved from the holdings of the City Princes. The first of the ancient breeds began their hidden lives. But the Librarian’s plans were interrupted.
The Chaos pushed in again. Ten of Earth’s last cities were consumed—transformed, played with, tortured. Their former citizens even now haunted the vast broken deserts, parodies and playthings of the Typhon—monsters beyond the imagination of even an Eidolon.
Only the Kalpa and Nataraja remained. And then communications between these two cities were severed.
The Astyanax of the Kalpa, the last City Prince, lost what little faith he still had in their erstwhile savior. Ishanaxade was exiled—or left the Kalpa to go to Nataraja—though none could say why, and none even knew whether Nataraja still survived.
From the Tower, Sangmer studied the new configuration of Earth—and crossed the freshly roiling Chaos to find his wife. He was never seen again.
A terrible conflict now broke out. Some believed the Librarian vented his wrath at the Astyanax for banishing his daughter. He reduced power to the suspension. Four of the Kalpa’s seven bions were surrendered to the Typhon. In return, the Astyanax sterilized the Tiers and ended the first population of ancient breeds—those nurtured and taught by Ishanaxade.
The Tower was almost destroyed—broken in half. But the Librarian survived. And it finally became horrifyingly clear that the last humans, whatever their shape or construction, whatever their philosophy or ambitions, could no longer fight.
Under extraordinary pressure from his fellow Eidolons, the Astyanax conceded. Joining forces with the Kalpa’s finest minds, and using more than half of the city’s resources, the Librarian reconstructed a much smaller, more concentrated ring of reality generators—the Defenders—and thus pushed back the Typhon one last time.
Exiled it beyond the border of the real.
Most believed Nataraja and its rebels did not survive.
After Sangmer’s final pilgrimage and disappearance, the Astyanax banned all attempts to leave. The outward windows of the last three bions were sealed shut—all but in the Broken Tower, still the preserve of the greatest and most curious Eidolon of all.
Work on the Tiers resumed, with a new, redesigned population of ancient breeds set in place of the old. A young Mender of no special distinction, Ghentun was summoned to Malregard, interviewed by angelins, and chosen to be Keeper of the Tiers—and that was that. There was no contest, no list of applicants.
Like many of the young Menders of that era, he had converted to noötic mass—fashionably giving up his gens inheritance. Yet to accept the position of keeper, the Librarian’s epitomes insisted he must reconvert—he must become primordial again.
In the process, something went wrong. While retaining his knowledge of history, he lost all personal memories. The old Ghentun vanished; the new was born. Yet how could he have regrets? Mere Menders did not question the decisions of Great Eidolons.
Sometimes, when Ghentun watched his breeds sleep, they would shiver with a strange resonance, as if listening to death-cries out of the deep and broken past—sensing their compatriots, made of the same ancient matter, flesh of the same flesh, crawling along their mashed and bundled fates, until they reached the severed ends—and fell into the dimensionless maw of the Typhon. As they had been designed to do. Canaries in a coal mine.
Proving—if true—that the Tiers were not the idle toy of a demented Great Eidolon, but the one last, true chance to save their tiny scrap of universe.
Finished with his inspection, Ghentun ascended in secured lifts through the outer thick walls to the source of all breeds, the crèche, high above the Tiers.
At the outer circle of the crèche, the Keeper made his signs of respect before the fluid, light-absorbing draperies. Beyond lay the Shaper’s rotating nurseries, where hundreds of new-made breeds slept in quiet rows, awaiting their nativity—should it ever arrive. The curtains swung wide and a golden light spilled over, warming the Keeper’s skin. He had always enjoyed seeing where his breeds were formed, nurtured, and subliminally instructed through infancy, then prepared for transport to the Tiers by the umbers—slender grayish-brown wardens, low and swift.
Several of these umbers met Ghentun beneath the wide sweep of the Shaper’s pallid caul. Two escorted him through the caul—proceeding without escort might subject him to unpredictable fields and pressures—and higher still, between green curtains of gel and tall, eerily still cylinders of primordial ice—into the lambent mist of the vitreion, the Shaper’s inner sanctum—where machines could not go. Here, on natal pads arranged in counterrotating spheres, the golden glow intensified. Spin-foundries like frantic bushes—all silvery vector-curves and whirling branches—surrounded and refined a dozen half-formed infants, their motions so rapid Ghentun could not track them at his highest frequency. The last Shaper in the Kalpa, the crèche’s mistress of birth stood on six slender legs beside an elevated natal pad. At Ghentun’s approach, her small head popped up from a radiance of dark, field-wrapped tool-arms. Shapers and Menders had long since parted ways in physical appearance. She acknowledged his presence, then finished imprinting an early layer of mental properties into a small, quivering thing covered in fine white fur, its large eyes tightly shut, though its lips moved continuously, as if it might awake at a whisper.
The Shaper put away her kit and joined Ghentun on a walk through the prototypes annex.
“I’m not sure what more can be done,” she said as they slid between the history pallets, on which were suspended most of the second-stage proposals for the inhabitants of the Tiers—a sobering record of extended development, indecision, and failure. Ghentun himself had made a number of significant mistakes early in his tenure.
He transferred his notes to the Shaper, who read them with several of her many eyes.
“No instructions. No orders,” she complained.
“Am I to make last-minute improvements—if they areimprovements—at my own discretion? We’ve already given a few the capacity to reproduce—outside my control. That’s dangerous enough—though it increases their sensitivity. If we make them any more sensitive, they’ll tremble at a breeze—and die of stress. And if we make them any smarter, they’ll die of boredom.” She made a small whirring sound of irritation. “One could hardly call all those booksamusing.”
Ghentun touched the outline of the single book in his bag. “They’re smart enough,” he said. “The Librarian wishes to examine an exceptional specimen.” He projected an image—a young male breed, bristling with aggression. “I saw this one first when they were sport-fighting along the fallow meadows. And once, I caught him staring in my direction as I walked past, almost as if he could see me.”
The Shaper thrust two arms forward, grasped the image, spun it, and let it go. It flew off and faded to nothing. She had an aversion to images. “His name is Jebrassy. I tuned him a bit hot. He’s a born marcher—he’ll join one of your suicide groups soon enough.”
“Reproduction?”
“He’s one of the new maters, if some fertile female will have him—which I doubt. He rings like a bell—even on the natal pad, something came to him, took his voice, and changed him. A strong dreamer, I suspect. The breeds call it straying—blank eyes, vacant stares, troubled sleep. Puts off the others.” The Shaper regarded Ghentun with a slant of her three mid-distance eyes—accusing, amused, impatient. “Do youstray, friend Ghentun?”
Ghentun did not dignify this absurdity with an answer. “This one seems right. I’ll confer with Grayne, arrange something…”
“Grayne? She’s still with us? Now there’s a piece of work. One of my finest—just goes on and on…”
“She’s a sama now, and march leader.”
“She was so fine in her youth. Shame on us all, sending our pretty children into that wasteland. I’ve never been proud of my labors here, Keeper.”
“No one else requires your talents, Shaper.”
She acknowledged as much. “The Librarian should be pleased. These breeds vibrate to the slightest trembling of the lines. While the Eidolons ride their endless circles of amusement, trying to ignore the obvious—down here, the breeds have become exquisitely sensitive to something I can’t perceive—though I do wonder. Perhaps it is the past…twisting, knotting, in agony. Am I right, Keeper?”
Ghentun did not answer this, either. They both knew it was likely—and the main reason for the existence of the Tiers.
“Yet wake by wake the generators fade—and the Chaos has no patience,” she said. “How long until you get the Librarian’s attention?”
“Soon,” Ghentun said.
“There’s no pleasing Eidolons. I’ve known that all my long life. If the Librarian’s still not happy—” The Shaper reached into Ghentun’s bag, swifter than he could think, and lifted out the green book with fingers so strong they threatened to crush it. “Archaic little treasure. You’ve stolen this from your sama,” she accused.
“Her predecessor, actually.”
“Enlightening?”
“It’s in breed-text. It changes whenever I read it—so I assume it’s not for our eyes.”
“Then why bother?”
“Curiosity. Guilt.” Ghentun made a short grumble—Mender embarrassment, Mender humor. “Aren’t you curious what the Librarian has in store for them?”
The Shaper simply snorted. “We could start over. Improvements are still possible.” She seemed unwilling to give up her work, however much its results, or its cruel necessity, scratched at her sympathies. “What do you think we have, a few thousand years?”
“I doubt it,” Ghentun said. He motioned for her to return the book. Reluctantly, she did so, with finger-marks pressed into its binding. Slowly, resentfully, the book began to heal itself.
“This is our last crop,” he said. “It’s these breeds, or nothing.”
CHAPTER 8
First Isle
“Do you think I’d tell a glowyour secrets?” Khren asked, and from his shocked expression, Jebrassy instantly knew his friend’s guilt.
They both lounged as casually as their present mood allowed in Khren’s niche, surrounded by colorful and meaningless prizes from the skirmish—captured pennants, two padded but heavy stravies, marked with curling leaves on which were scratched wishes for luck and strength—and a magnificent jug of tork that Khren had won in a bet on the nauvarchia.
“What else did you blab?” Jebrassy asked. He and Khren had known each other since being delivered by the umbers, fresh out of the crèche.
“She was curious. She asked questions. I answered. She has her ways, you know that.”
Jebrassy narrowed his eyes and smiled. “You fancy her?”
Khren lay back and gazed at the ceiling, irritated that this pairing might be thought unlikely. “Of course not. I’ve got my eye on another.”
Jebrassy had yet to meet this other, or even hear her name.
“If she were anything to me,” Khren said, “I would have told her a youth march is nonsense and dangerous besides. It’s already got youdisinherited.”
“What could I ever inherit here?” Jebrassy asked.
“There’s nothing wrong with here,” Khren said. “We made out pretty well in the skirmish. Why fight if there’s nothing to fight for? And it looks like you attracted the attentions of a fine glow—by showing off your muscles and dealing a few good thwacks. All very intellectual and rebellious, I’m sure.”
“We have no protection against anything the Tall Ones want to do to us. We’re toys, nothing more”
“I prefer to think of us as experiments,” Khren said, and then shrugged, having brushed up against the zenith of his philosophical abilities.
“What’s the difference?”
“Ancient breed, ancient quality. If we’re experiments, we’ll exceed all the others, and they’ll reward us for our courage by liberating the Tiers. Then, we can go anywhere we like—even the Chaos, if that’s worth a visit. And nobody knows if it is.”
“It is,” Jebrassy said. “I’m sure of it. I’ve got my sources…”
Khren lifted his small ears, showing mild amusement. “So learned.”
“Well, I do.” Jebrassy had worked his way around to the second point of contention. “Why did you have to tell her about my straying?”
“I didn’t volunteer. She asked—as if she knew already. She’s very persuasive.” His voice fell off and he gave Jebrassy as lewd and suggestive a glance as his broad, chiseled face allowed.
“Unlike me, she still has sponsors,” Jebrassy said. “I doubt she’ll talk with either of us again.”
“Ah.” Khren got up and poured himself another tumbler, then flumped back into the cushions—without spilling a drop—and examined the color of his drink in the warm light of the ceiling.
“I don’t need a partner,” Jebrassy said. “I need to get out of here and see how things really are, beyond the gates.”
“You haven’t seenthe gates,” Khren said. “You can’t even describe them—all that out there is just empty words and names. Even if you believe the stories, nobody’s ever gotten that far and come back to tell, and that says something.”
“What?” Jebrassy said. “If we shame the wardens, and they tattle to the officers, those who escape the Tiers but get caught are handed over to the Bleak Warden? Or put in cages for the Tall Ones to enjoy?”
“That sounds pretty cruel even for Tall Ones,” Khren said.
“I hatebeing ignorant! I want to see things, newthings. I hate being taken care of.”
With this outburst, the air between them settled a little and Khren returned to his accustomed role—of being a sounding board. In truth, Khren found Jebrassy’s plans intriguing—he regarded them with a fascinated mock horror, as if, having played them over in his own mind, he had reached an impasse—a wall beyond which he could not foresee making any personal decisions. Khren at times seemed unwilling to believe that these plans meant any more to Jebrassy than they did to him—intriguing but empty talk.
“What did your visitor leave behind the last time?” Khren asked, savoring a final drib of tork. Jebrassy had kept his friend company in drink through two previous tumblers, but no more—he needed a clear head for tomorrow. For the meeting he knew couldn’t possibly happen.
“He’s a fool,” Jebrassy muttered. “Helpless. He knows nothing. An aaarp.” He belched to emphasize that degraded status. The concept of insanity did not exist among the ancient breed. Eccentricity, whims, and extremes of personality, yes, but insanity was not part of their mix, and therefore no one accused another of having lost touch with reality—except as a vague concept, an uncomfortable joke—suitable for belching.
“Well, did he tell you anything more?”
“I wasn’t there. When he comes, I go. You know that.”
“The drawings on the shake cloth.”
“They never make sense.”
“Maybe your visitor has met hervisitor, and that’s how she knows so much about you.”
“You’ve talked with him. You know him better than I do,” Jebrassy said, slumping deeper into the cushions.
“You—he—could barely talk at all,” Khren said. “He looked in my mirror and made sounds. He said something like, ‘They got it all wrong!’—except slurred. Then he—you, your visitor—just stumbled over and sat right where you are now, and closed his eyes—your eyes—until he went away.”
Khren waggled his finger. “If that’s what straying is all about—better you than me, mate.”
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 9
Seattle, South Downtown
To pass the long gray time, as the rain patted and blew against the skylight over the shadowy, high-ceilinged room, Virginia Carol—Ginny to her friends—paged through a thick, sturdy volume called The Gargoyles of Oxford, by Professor J. G. Goyle, published in 1934. And was Professor Goyle’s middle name Garth, or just plain Gar?
The remains of a half-eaten sandwich, still in its waxy wrapper, awaited her attention on the bare brass table beside a high-backed reading chair. She had been hiding in the green warehouse for two weeks, waiting for an explanation that never seemed to come. Her fright had faded, but now she was growing bored—something that two weeks ago she would never have thought possible. The pictures in the gargoyle book were amusing—leering, perverse figures designed, scholars said, to scare off evil spirits—but what caught her eye was a grainy photo embedded in a chapter on the university town’s older buildings. On the inside of a stone parapet high in a clock tower, someone had clearly incised, in proper schoolboy Roman majuscule, cutting through a centuries-old black crust of grime and soot:
DREAMEST THOU OF A CITIE AT THE END OF TYME?
And beneath that, 1685. Another inscription below the date, presumably a name or address, had been vigorously scratched out, leaving a pale brown blotch.
Conan Arthur Bidewell pushed through the door at the far end of the room, carrying more books to be returned to the high wooden shelves. He observed her choice of reading. “That’s a real one—not one of my oddities, Miss Carol,” he said. “But it does reflect unpleasant truths.” His cheeks were sunken and thin wisps of hair covered a leathery, shiny pate. He resembled a well-preserved mummy, or one of those people found in bogs. That’s it, Ginny thought. And yet—he’s not exactly ugly. She showed him the picture. “It’s like the ad in the newspaper.”
“So it is,” Bidewell said.
“This has been going on for centuries,” she said.
He peered through his tiny glasses. “Far longer than that.” Under his arm he carried two folded newspapers– The Strangerand The Seattle Weekly. He laid them out on the reading table. One paper was a week old, the other from the day before. Sticky tabs marked ads in the classifieds. The ads were almost identical.
Do you dream of a city at the end of time?
There are answers. Call—
Only the phone numbers were different.
“Same people?” she asked.
“Not to be known. Though in our neighborhood, I believe where once there were two, there is now only one. But soon there will be more.” Bidewell stretched and cracked the knuckles of his free hand, then ascended a tall ladder that rolled along a high, horizontal track fastened to the cases. The track extended over doors and a boarded-up window, all the way around the room. Bidewell replaced the books he had been studying, his thick corduroy pants hissing as he bent and straightened his spindly legs.
