Macht climbed out of the dip. “Tiadba, you’re the leader. Make us go.”
Tiadba looked around, confused. She felt inside her for the visitor—any other voice giving advice, other than her own, so confused. But the visitor was not saying anything. And she could no longer imagine what Jebrassy might tell her.
Then she heard herself speaking, not good words, but words out of an angry little knot right in the center of her chest, above her stomach, below her lungs—she could feel the burning disappointment. “I don’t know what we thought it would be like. Want to turn around and go back? How many of you think the city’s going to last much longer?”
“Not me,” Nico said. “I saw that thing take Mash. I don’t want to go back. Out here—”
“Out here, we can see them coming,” Tiadba said. “Back in the Tiers we die in our sleep. Or worse.”
CHAPTER 69
The Green Warehouse
The book group women sat in the chairs around the iron stove. They had been joined, with more than a degree of awkwardness, by Glaucous and Daniel. Glaucous accepted exile to the far corner, where he sat on a box, like one of Oxford’s stony gargoyles.
Ginny stood apart from them all, and far from the room’s southern door, her eyes downcast—steeled against another ordeal.
“Mnemosyne is special, and always difficult,” Bidewell said. “A certain mental preparation is required before you meet her. I hope you have had time to consider what we’ve discussed.”
“Is she a person, or a thing?” Jack asked.
“Neither. How old is the universe, Jack?”
“Billions of years, I guess. That’s what I’ve been told.”
Agazutta had become subject to fits of shivering and whimpering and now held her hand in front of her mouth. Miriam and Ellen stood on either side, firmly gripping her shoulders.
“And how old do youthink it is?” Bidewell asked.
“Well, I was born twenty-four years ago,” Jack said with a wry face. “That’s how old it is for me.”
“The beginning of a good answer. But we will not dive into solipsism. I wouldn’t approve—more important, Mnemosyne would not approve. She responds best to a certain level of, how should we say, skepticismabout the taught order of things. How old do you think these atoms and molecules are that you eat and breathe, that make up your body and propel the currents of your mind, your observing wit?”
“Same as the universe,” Jack said with more certainty.
“A common error. Not all matter came into existence at the beginning. It is still being made, and will continue to be made for a very long time to come—if we did not face Terminus, of course.”
“Of course,” Miriam said.
“But that is beside my point. In certain parts of space and time, it is supposed that entire galaxies have appeared instantaneously, complete with hundreds of billions of stars burning, planets formed, civilizations alive and busy. Yet their histories have not arrived with them. Reconciliation is thus made an epic task.”
Jack looked to see if Bidewell was joking. The highlights on the old man’s lined face flickered in the warm firelight, but he showed no hint of humor. If anything, he seemed drowsy, wearily repeating an obvious and well-known truth.
“Appeared out of nothing?” Jack asked.
Ginny pulled up enough courage to say, “That doesn’t seem possible.”
Bidewell shrugged. “True, spontaneous creation usually delivers smaller units—particles, atoms, molecules in profusion. Virtual galaxies are difficult to conceive, I admit. But no less real. Once a particle or an object is created, it has always been here.It makes connections with all the particles with which it has interacted, and those connections—that connectedness—must be established, you might say after the fact. Literally,” Bidewell smiled, “the books must be balanced.”
“What about us?” Ginny asked with unexpected archness. “Human beings. Dogs. Cats. I mean, who keeps track of all the people on the streets?” She looked sharply at Daniel, and then at Glaucous, in the shadows.
Bidewell lifted one shoulder.
“How could anyone tell if I just popped out of nowhere?” Jack asked.
“As a rule, we cannot,” Bidewell said. “Mnemosyne is the force that keeps it all from crashing into ruin and contradiction. She does her job, and she does it well.”
Jack whistled. “Some lady.”
Even this flippancy did not pique the old man. “You’ll like her,” Bidewell said. “But she is no lady.”
“Sounds like a backward way of doing things,” Ginny said.
“Perhaps, but it results in a cosmos of infinite richness and complexity. For this reason, logically speaking, the universe has no true chronological beginning, out of which all things flow. Every moment, until the end of creation, is a sort of beginning, somewhere.”
“What’s this I’ve heard about a Big Bang?” Jack asked.
“I’m not asking for belief. You’ll see the truth soon enough—my words are preparation. Rays of light, you know, must be set in motion, already entangled, to complete the picture every observer sees or will see from that point on—and before. The wave of reconciliation passes back in time, and then forward again; pulse after pulse, until the refinement is complete.”
“Sounds complicated,” Jack said.
Ginny looked at the tall shelves of books, the opened boxes and crates whose contents had been laid out on the big table in the center of the high-ceilinged library. “You said some of the books you were looking for were odd, impossible, because they have no history. That must mean they were never reconciled, even before…what’s happening outside.”
“Good,” Bidewell said.
“And that means Mnemosyne…well, she’s been distracted, or something is increasing her workload. Or—she’s sick. Maybe dying.”
“Better,” Bidewell said.
“Books, galaxies…What else?” Ginny asked.
Jack suddenly remembered the giant earwig he thought he’d seen scuttling between the warehouses.
“Strange animals?”
Daniel looked both sly and sleepy. “What makes you say that?”
“I’ve seen them,” Jack said. “One, anyway.”
“Oh, my,” Bidewell said, folding his hands. “Yes, those are indicators.”
“Dreams sometimes come out of nowhere,” Ginny said. “Are theyindicators?”
“Mnemosyne can reconcile everything, everywhere, except in the heart and mind of an observer. That territory is forbidden to her. But observers die and their memories die with them—except for the legends, the myths of beginning times, the way things were before creation grew huge and complicated. Those are passed along in speech and dreams, and linger despite Mnemosyne’s hardest labors. For that reason, Mnemosyne rarely concerns herself with dreams.”
“When does she?” Daniel asked.
“When they come true,” Bidewell said.
CHAPTER 70
The Chaos
“What are those?” Denbord asked. He knelt on the crest of a vast ripple in the sea of stone and looked down. The others joined him.
In the trough of the frozen, rocky wave, for as far as they could see into the reddish, murky light, row upon row of cylindrical shapes lay in rough parallel beside their dark cradles, like the broken rungs of a toppled ladder.
“They don’t look that big,” Nico said.
“Big enough,” Shewel said.
Perf assumed a teacher’s tone. “It’s tough to judge size and distance—but if we went down there, I bet we’d be tiny.”
Tiadba tried to remember Sangmer’s description from the stories she had been reading to the breeds, to distract them from the long march, the brief rests, the strain of keeping to the beacon’s line. Whatever these were, they blocked the path the beacon had been drawing for them. “They’re boats,” she concluded. “Like in the nauvarchia.”