They headed west, retracing their steps.
The pewter glow came and disappeared again.
What was left of their part of the big world—their small portion of space and time—was rapidly shaking itself to pieces.
They came to a large, long bridge, still intact but wavering and ghostly in the gloom. They started to cross. Daniel looked over the side. Below, water had turned to rippling mist, gray-green and ominous.
“This isn’t the one with the troll underneath, is it?” Max asked.
“It is,” Daniel said. “The Fremont Troll. Made of concrete.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Max warned. “I hate trolls. Always have.”
CHAPTER 61
I am informed, our two rivals have lately made an offer to enter into the lists with united forces, and challenge us to a comparison of books, both as to weight and number…Where can they find scales of capacity enough for the first; or an arithmetician of capacity enough for the second?
—Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub
“What are these things, really?” Miriam asked. Her hand hovered over the two gray boxes on the table.
“Everything seems to point to them, everyone seems to want them, but I have no idea what they are or what they do.”
“It is not so much what they do as what they willdo, given the opportunity,” Bidewell said. “Possibly the best story is how they come down to us, yet even with that, there is no simple explanation.”
“Of course not,” Agazutta said.
Bidewell uncorked the second bottle of wine from Miriam’s handbag. He did seem to enjoy wine. He poured the ladies glasses, but Jack and Ginny demurred. Jack had never liked alcohol. Bidewell lifted a toast and the ladies did the same. “To survival, against all odds.”
“To survival,” Jack murmured, and raised his empty hand.
“We’d appreciate some certainty, Conan,” Miriam said.
Bidewell spun his glass, eyes on the swirling red liquid. For a moment Ginny’s vision seemed to blur—she saw the glass and the red wine as a swoosh.
“Every little thing makes its trace,” Bidewell said. “That much is intuitive. We can visualize everything leaving a trail. Sometimes we call them world-lines. But world-lines flow into other world-lines, and some join to create an observer line, or fate. The fate of an observer spins together many lines that might otherwise never touch, and that creates difficulties—entanglements.
“More perplexing, not all world-lines or even fates link back to the beginning. For creation does not always begin at the beginning. Creation is—or was—ongoing, and new things appear all the time, some of them implying long, ornate histories. These new creations and their histories need to be reconciled with what has come before. And so it is that Mnemosyne becomes necessary. As soon as she came to be—a most remarkable event, but perhaps only an afterthought, who can say?—she began her work. She found lost lines, entangled contradictions, and began reweaving them—reconciling them back to the beginning. She swept up and cataloged and put things back on the shelf, so to speak, a monumental task which she no doubt has yet to finish, poor thing.
“The creation of new things always implies the destruction of the old. Not all things that are created remain in creation. Some are erased. And so, I believe that Mnemosyne must be supplemented by another, sister force, let us call her Kali, though I’ve never met her, thank goodness. Kali disposes of things that have been left loose or cut away, and which Mnemosyne cannot reconcile—objects, people, fates.”
“My head spins just thinking about it,” Miriam said.
“Is Kali white as chalk?” Ginny asked abruptly. Jack looked at her.
“Kali is often depicted as a shriveled old woman, her skin the color of plagues and death—black,”
Bidewell said, watching the pair closely. “But in this role, she might be pale, white as chalk. After all, she removes excess detail and color. She bleaches.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” Farrah said.
Bidewell found this amusing. “I wish I had that luxury. But long ago I discovered I had a knack—I could slip free, for a while, of all the backward-sliding fates and world-lines that were being reconciled. I could see with a peculiar clarity things that no longer were. When I was young, I learned to watch for the signs—learned to watch doomed people, places, and things as they faded, about to become inconsequential—and yet remember them in detail. I have sharp eyes and an ironclad memory.”
“Mind filled with useless junk,” Agazutta murmured, but her eyes were languid. She was enjoying the frisson of so many strange possibilities.
“At first, in my youth, I was confrontational. I tried to trace lost and fading things back to the moment when they began to be erased—or forward, to the moment of their creation. An impossible task, I discovered—though I came dangerously close once or twice.
“Soon, I realized that the last remnants of things lost might be found in records—in the Earth, in geological layers, for example, but also in lost animals, stray children—and scrolls. Books. Texts of all sorts.
“Mnemosyne values texts above all things, and saves their editing and reconciliation for the last, perhaps to be savored. And so—I began to find the books she or her dark sister had missed.”
CHAPTER 62
Daniel had to rest. The walk through murk and confusion left him with no energy, no sense of purpose or progress, and no clear view of where they might be in the city’s jumbled geography. He had the horrible feeling they were retracing steps they had already taken.
He paused before a half-wrecked and leaning house, then pushed through a splintered gate to sit on a stone garden bench, in a place that could no longer properly be called a garden. The plants had become sad, brown-edged things, but before dying, the last flowers had run riot, growing into cancerous clumps of wilted blossoms.
Daniel’s body was filled with a dull fire, which he could only guess might be chemistry struggling against shifts in physical constants. Soon enough he would simply cease to be—as a living human being, at any rate. He could almost see himself clumping and growing out of any sensible pattern, multiplying beyond any possibility of life, like the flowers…
They crumbled into powder in his hand.
He had lost track of the faraway glow. Pewter brightness returned, replacing the bleak umber darkness. Jagged upheavals carved serrated shapes against the southern grayness—not mountains. He did not know what they might be.
But worse than all that—
He felt a chill and looked up. Max seemed to squeeze into his vicinity, more sound and shadow than material being. He, too, looked up—at a certain cool sensation on their skulls and the backs of their necks.
The gnomish man’s thin voice pushed through the freezing air. “Something’s eating the moon.”
Whatever had smeared out the pallid stars and rucked up the voids between had left the moon untouched. Now, the high ivory crescent was turning bloody red, like a half plug stamped in heaven’s flesh. And rising in the east—or rather, blooming and bloating, since there was no apparent motion in that direction—a ring of fire arced almost from one quarter to the other. Within the ring swam a diseased, turbid blackness.
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.”