“You don’t know anything,” Ginny said. “Don’t you everwant to get out?”
The cat bumped her again. Things weren’t so bad—they were friends. Did they not share mice, did she not have those elegantly marked boxes of books to investigate?
She pushed the gate open and sidled through.
The feelers upriver reported back: no fresh streams left, not for her, not for anyone. She had to stay on this island of peace or face again the horrible thing, the spinning, swallowing, impossibly white, impossibly femalething to which the pair had tried to deliver her. Tears streaming, Ginny turned to go back in. Then she heard music from miles away, flowing gently south on the breeze. Come out and play.
Her fingers let go of the gate. One backward step and she stood in the middle of the sidewalk, arms spread like wings. The gate tapped the lock. The lock snicked shut. Minimus remained behind the wire.
Whoever Ginny was, wherever she was, thiswas the act that had always defined her: getting out, leaving, turning onto a different path, whatever the danger.
The cat watched with round deep eyes.
“I won’t be long,” Ginny said. “Tell Mr. Bidewell…” And then, flushed, laughing at how silly that was, she wiped her eyes and ran north, following the faintest, most enticing music she had ever heard. Bidewell kept an old swayed cot in one corner of his private library. The girl had ignored his advice. There was nothing he could do but wait. She was more important, far more powerful, than he was—in her way, perhaps now the equal of what was left of Mnemosyne.
He closed his eyes.
The closest thing to love he had ever known—this search for evidence of the ineffable, the track of the mother of all muses, the one who reconciled—who kept the universe in trim. Now slowly being strangled, fading, unable to fulfill her functions.
Haunted across the ages by a hideous shadow.
Bidewell moved through his ritual preparations for sleep, stretching as far as his old muscles would allow, popping joints in spine, shoulders, hips, with grim satisfaction, then slowly lying down, waiting for his pains to negotiate and settle into accord.
A furious scrape and scuffle interrupted his meditation. Between meows and hisses came a clacking and flipping and several sharp chirrups. A cat was chasing prey around the boxes—not a bird, surely, unless it had plastic wings.
Minimus appeared atop a high box against the dark outer wall and jumped to snare something the size of one of Bidewell’s pencil cases—something that made an effort at flight, and failed. Both cat and catch tumbled behind the boxes with a thump. Triumph was invariably followed by delivery. With delivery must come congratulations and reward, a snack. This was their compact, cat to man, man to cat. Bidewell rose to retrieve the box of kibble he kept on a high shelf, away from boxes. He had learned that lesson several times, having to clean up after a sick cat. Minimus, whatever his finer qualities, loved to gorge. Yet he never ate anything that he caught. A few minutes passed. Bidewell sat at a small desk reserved for gentle reading on sleepless nights, and turned on the old brass lamp. Here, he kept a compact edition of Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which, with its acerbic rejection of the mundane, he found suitable. This worn volume, of course, had a pair of concluding chapters not found in any other edition.
Just as Bidewell seated himself, Minimus padded out of the darkness and leaped to the table carrying in his mouth a glistening, jeweled creature. The old man drew in his breath and pushed back his chair. The cat threw him a sidelong look, dropped his catch, and squatted.
The creature—a kind of insect, though ten inches long and with too many legs—had been shocked into immobility. It slowly flexed its long body and shivered a pair of shining wing cases the color of polished dark oak. On the wing cases—part of its natural design—the insect bore a single, ivory-white mark, like a symbol, or a letter in an alphabet Bidewell did not know. It cocked its large head, like a cicada’s, and its compound eyes glinted with brilliant blue highlights.
Minimus had done the insect no visible harm, but its movements were feeble. Docile even in distress, it gathered up enough energy to cross to the edge of the desk, where it paused like a clever toy, cocked its head again, and chirped.
Watched closely by both man and cat, it turned and approached a close-packed row of boxwood pencil cases decorated with large Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Minimus licked his paw.
The insect sidled up to the nearest case, then, with a hiss, dropped into an attitude of conformity, of fulfillment—and was still.
The insect was dead.
The cat lost interest and jumped to the floor.
Astonished, Bidewell traced the white symbol with a bony finger. “Not from any time I know,” he said. His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deteriorating, coming apart in sections—jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle.
They could reach the end of their meager supply of time within a few days or weeks, and then: confusion, nightmare, loops of repetition; the final surprising, unpredictable dribbles of false opportunity and hope.
Terminus.
Perhaps he was in such a loop now. But the appearance of the girl—the wayward young woman, keeping him moody company—proved he was not. There was still one opportunity, one chance to forestall the inevitable.
She would return. The stones would gather.
All his life he had been anticipating and preparing for this occasion. He felt fear—of course. And a kind of joy. There was real and immediate work to do—connections to make, teams to assemble, children to protect—blessed children. Surely they would come to him like a new family to replace the old, the ones that had failed or vanished—children pushing up now like spring flowers, and so improbable! Better by far than any volume of deviating text.
And of course the predators were here as well.
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 16
The Tiers
Jebrassy felt little regret as he crossed the bridge over the flood channel to the long roads. Having time to himself, time to think, was like leaving a stuffy, crowded niche.
Beyond the end of the bridge, out in the fallow meadows, two small wardens were hunched over, wings folded, inspecting something in the dirt. Jebrassy scratched the side of his head and glanced sideways. A curtain of pale fog shrouded whatever drew their interest. He seldom saw this style of warden in the Tiers—small, glistening gold bodies—and they certainly never engaged with breeds. But he knew what they were investigating—the remains left by an intrusion. He wanted to turn aside, but instead squinted through the fog—trying to see the half-imagined, shifting figures, invisible masters of the Tiers—the Tall Ones. Jebrassy felt a sting of shame. He was nothing to them—less than a pede to the farmer who loaded it with packages and baskets for market. The teachers taught only what the Tall Ones wanted them to teach—not what any of the breeds actually needed to know. How he hated them all!
There was an old sama in the market—he had visited her once already, just to give voice to his questions: Why did time in the Tiers—the cycles of wakes and sleeps—vary so? What was outside the Tiers, if anything, and why didn’t marchers ever return? Questions the teachers never responded to. Why am I straying?
The sama would not carry tales to others—unlike Khren.