“I’ve reconnoitered,” Ghentun said as they looked out over the cells beyond and—presumably—a multitude of enclosed fate-mires. “There’s still some semblance to the Nataraja of old. The Deva quarters are almost unchanged—though deserted.”
Jebrassy lifted his head. “The Mass Wars,” he said.
Polybiblios reached out to touch his shoulder. “Not our concern. Histories lost and buried.”
“Your kind—Devas—were forced to become Eidolons,” Jebrassy said. “Many fled to Nataraja…Why didn’t you?”
“You’re still leaking,” Ghentun accused the epitome. “He needs to rest.”
“I can’t help it,” Polybiblios said. “My parts have been bathed in knowledge for a billion years.”
“When did it ever work right?” Jebrassy asked. “When did anyone ever respect the heritage and birthright of others?”
“Often enough, for very long periods,” Ghentun said, glancing at the epitome, as if competing over who knew the most history.
“But then, in all our memories: collapse, reversion, strife,” Polybiblios said, unaware of any competition.
“The cosmos has become tainted. History has been distorted by the corruption of the Typhon. In the depths of the Brightness, some might have called it original sin. But it was not original. It creeps back from the end of time. We refused to let the universe die gracefully. We allowed the Typhon to latch onto a weakened and overextended chronology. Brahma still sleeps. Not even an Eidolon will ever know the shape and disposition of the original creation. We gain some insight when we contemplate the joy of matter—now almost lost.”
Ghentun was baffled. He had never heard of the joy of matter.
“We should move on,” Polybiblios insisted. “Our moment is brief.”
“Jebrassy needs to rest, to get back his strength,” Ghentun reminded the epitome, though his motives for saying so were not selfless. Clearly, here were deep and ancient curiosities that deserved to be answered. And he was willing to give up his envy or resentment to learn.
“Not here,” Polybiblios said. “If this Turvy or whatever it is truly does still have some of the old lineaments of Nataraja, there will be a better place…a preserve the Typhon cannot touch. And there we may have time for some explanations.”
“Not bad from the beginning?” Jebrassy asked as Ghentun lifted him to his feet. “Bad from the end?”
“What is lost is lost, young breed,” Polybiblios said. “Let us work with what little remains. The metric is greatly reduced. We’ve already traveled faster than any of our marchers. We can use that to our advantage.”
Like most of the last great cities of old Earth, Nataraja had been a monument of efficiency—not spread out over thousands of miles, but concentrated in a high interlinked erection of spheres intersecting and carried by flowing sheeted curves, neighborhoods and urbs for those of different constructions and persuasions—the entirety enclosed by many different shields to defend against the threats of ages long past. With the passing of those threats and the coming of new ones, the shields had been transformed, incorporated into the city’s matrix, just as cities in the early Brightness had grown and enclosed their old siege walls.
Between his education in the tower and the epitome’s continuing outflow, Jebrassy found renewed strength in the realization that his curiosity was being met—he was learning much of what he had always wanted to learn, secrets withheld from his lower kind. Simply to be where so many breeds had been created to go, in the fabulous city of Tiadba’s storybooks—however dark and awful parts of it were—seemed for a moment at least splendid beyond measure. If Tiadba were still with them—
Then together they could complete the stories, solve the mysteries. The Librarian’s epitome was telling them that things had not always been so bad…and that meant there might be dreamers who would come to them, who could spin such beautiful tales, if those lost pasts could be patched together, refreshed…
All a wonderment of wishful thinking, of course. But his body felt the renewal. Hope for Tiadba—but beyond that, hope for all breeds…
He struggled to understand.
Hope for every type of human being or living thing that had ever been. What we live now—what has been lived for more than half an eternity, perhapsall of eternity—is not the only way!
With the combined skills and knowledge of Ghentun and Polybiblios, they climbed up from the hive of fate-mires and stood overlooking the center of the great bowl, under layer upon layer of collapsed shields and roof, the rubble studded with ruins, but also with crudely remade arenas, boulevards, even neighborhoods where—using the tricks of Chaos light and the concentrated cooperation of their helmets—they could make out the Typhon’s most centralized and concentrated horde of captives. Not just marchers. Those the Typhon seemed content, for the most part, to leave out in the Chaos, reenacting their failures—but representatives of all the great civilizations and reaches of human endeavor across the five hundred living galaxies.
A deathly museum.
“I have friends down there,” Polybiblios said. “I see the Typhon gathered some of the Shen. And across the lake and sea cores, up against the old gravidity forests—”
“Stop, you’re making my head hurt,” Ghentun protested.
“Enough, then. It seems that the Typhon is gathering all its trophies into one location—hoarding them. Let’s visit. In their sad condition, I doubt they’ll even notice us.”
CHAPTER 105
Despite the risks, Jack forged ahead of the others. The collapsed walls and buttresses and huge, shattered spheres of the interior of Nataraja offered a warren of passageways. The others would have to
keep up—but he was not sure he wanted them to.
He needed to find Ginny. Felt responsible—and something more. He missed her. There had never been a girl he felt at ease with. Those moments in the warehouse had been special. Something he could not have—
A center.
Glaucous could still see Daniel, but not Jack—the consequences of separating seemed less here than out in the wastes beyond this double-Dutch jumble.
He was thinking a great deal now about the old bird-catcher, the slow quelling of their catch in the dawn light as the lurching cart rumbled back through the lanes to London. The clangor of the heavy iron stars in their baskets at each jounce. The smell of bird shite a sour urgent note over the green gassiness of fresh dung and the wet, rank coal smoke pooling in the cool air. Guilt meant nothing to the hungry and the desperate—no more than to a wolf biting down on the neck of a lamb. A merciful shake, snap of the spine: food.
Businesslike arrangement.
Now he was concerned with larger things. Even as a child, Glaucous had been dimly aware that nothing was what it seemed. The pretty scrim of seeming was freshly painted each hour for those with money and position, a facade for the privileged, a mask over the cruelty beneath. To the poor, the hungry, the rule of privilege was an acid spew between rotten teeth, hardly worth a hoot in a legless fuddle. War and you go die in a ditch. Lift a loaf to feed your sibs and the rozzers poke you in the ribs and you squat all ashiver in stir, each breath a stab.
Death and pain and privilege, out of one’s control, keep your eyes on the gutter before the rats bite. I know this place. Here is where privilege ends. My luck: the doom of the birds.He stopped to catch his breath. A wonder any of them could breathe. Magic in the group, Daniel didn’t call it that—but so it was to him. And yet he would have sold magic Jack into a cage, and then the Gape would have taken him here, along with the girl and so many others—and all hope would have gone. Catch the birds. Bite the neck and bleed the lamb. Never my chick. Never my lamb. Businesslike.