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.”