“I’m falling. Hold onto me,” he said, angry that his lips were so thick and clumsy.
“Try to stay, try harder!” Tiadba grabbed his hands, his arms. She was surprisingly strong. But all sense was draining from his head and body and limbs. The last thing he saw was her face, her eyes—brown—her flat, expressive nose—
Jack’s awareness squashed down to a fuzzy point, something whirred and snapped—the point expanded—vertigo turned into blurs of light—and he was back.
He blinked at the fish swimming in their tank, listened woozily to the hum of the waiting room’s heating system. Tried to hang onto what he had experienced—especially the face, the female, and the letterbugs, a weird idea—fun, actually—but by the time he realized where he was, everything slipped away except a sense of panic. Someone was in desperate trouble.
Here, there—now, then?
That urgency faded as well.
Jack looked around. The families had been reduced to a lone mother in a sari and her sleeping infant. An elderly couple had taken seats nearby. Embarrassed, he looked at his watch. He had blanked for thirty minutes. Somehow, he had kept turning the pages.
He folded the newspaper and put it in his satchel.
The attending nurse stood in the door to the waiting room. “Jack Rohmer? Dr. Sangloss will see you now.”
CHAPTER 110
Nataraja was disturbing Daniel’s deepest pools. How did he remember that name? Bidewell had never brought it up. Glaucous had never mentioned it. Neither had Jack or Ginny. But he could see it all with a strange clarity, as if he had witnessed its end with better eyes, connected to a deeper and more subtle brain.
For Daniel, the disposition of the False City was strangely familiar, overlaid by the pattern, if it could be called that, of its awful defeat.
He clambered up an immense curtain-wall, leaning at about thirty degrees to the rest of the rubble: thousands of acres shot through with cracks, rippling tears, wide chasms, and faults. Spheres and stretched, twisted ovoids, bent cylinders and curving sweeps, still clung to the sheet, interconnected by thousands of silver walkways or transportation rails, some still supporting what might have been mobile constructs. When it was alive, when it all worked together, Nataraja must have been a marvel…
Of course it had been a marvel. He could see it. The picture was sharp. After all, coming to Nataraja had made a tremendous impression…
As he climbed, he (and a bit of Fred, still curious) tried to imagine the awesome power of something that could discard the rules of reality—and what that would do to a human construct, relying as it did on engineering, gravity, the basic balances of matter and energy. He did not have to imagine much. The results seemed to pop into his head, more vivid than any recent memory. The city had died like an animal set upon by much larger beasts: smashed down, torn open, shooting out gouts of itself—and then collapsing, squished out around its edges as if stomped by huge boots. A hole big enough to push a small mountain through now let in a shaft of gray light from outside. The shaft moved with a will of its own, touching on great heaps of wreckage, merging with other stray shafts, cutting through thin screens of glow falling through huge rents in the crushed outer skin. The angle and intensity of these cheerless lambencies were never the same.
His own mind—what was left of it—had been scrupulously separated into thick, fluid layers, hot and cold—and now, from depths almost frozen with age, upwelling contents seemed ready to help him reconstruct what he could never have actually experienced.
“I don’t dream. I don’t dream of this city or any other.”
Still, recollections of a multitude of historical cities came forward—linked by what circumstance, he did not yet know. Lost to siege or plague, burned to the ground, reduced to rubble, the rubble raked over and sown with salt: moving from fate to fate, and even from life to life and body to body, he might have actually experienced those things—who could deny that possibility?
But not the end of this place, not the doom of Nataraja. That made no sense at all. But he knew. He felt. In its own way, Nataraja had been the greatest city of its age, greater even than the Kalpa…wherever and whatever that was.
“Tell me who I am!” Daniel shouted as he climbed the fallen curtain. “I don’t dream. I never have. When I sleep, there’s just blackness.”
The Chaos had washed across the surface of the Earth in a wave of many dimensions, surrounding the last enclaves of humanity from above, below, and to all sides, cutting off their lines of fate as well as access in space and time. That was how the Chaos transformed, took control—and reduced its conquests to a misery of confusion and lies.
It burned through most of the threads of causality.
And then, as if exhausted—or uncertain what to do with its new domains—it withdrew, concentrating its efforts on the probing wave front, that membrane which intruded and cut across and around the chords, and which Daniel had experienced so often.
What the Chaos had left behind was the hulk of a city charred not by flames, reduced not by physical destruction—but crisped by lost history and eaten through by paradox. Those who lived here had suffered most. The structures that once supported them in security and comfort had struggled to rebuild, or at least to maintain some part of an upright pile, yet were punished over and over again—dying, rotting, resurrecting in awful new ways—and finally the city had given up. The legacy of everything the Chaos touched.
Daniel climbed to the massive edge of the curtain-wall. The pain and exhaustion this body felt did not matter. The upper portion of the curtain—several miles of it—had bent over and broken off and now lay sprawled across and through other structures, the bottom lost in shadow, all the way to the foundations. Where his hands and feet touched, a few faint blue sparks sizzled from skin, bones, and muscle. Atoms, particles—matter astonished, recognizing itself and attempting to correct a perverse bilocation. But this was not the great recognition his new/old memories, his new instructions, told him to expect. He had come very far, over a very long period of time.
A greater moment of reunion was out there in the ruins.
Daniel sat on the edge, ignoring the small blue lances and sparks, and took his two stones from their boxes. As always, they would not fit together. One looking older than the other, if that was possible. Similar in shape, but destined for other combinations. One of the stones tugged strongly to the left and then down. Simultaneously, he heard a savage, nasty sound, like a beast in pain, echo from all around, and then—perversely—swoop up with a Doppler howl to echo again.
The ruins seemed to enjoy this. They played with that sound, tossed it back and forth. Hanging structures shuddered and sifted corrosion down the slope of the curtain-wall, and then made an attempt to move, as if in response to that unknown command. They managed to shift a few dozen yards along their silvery connecting rails—and then ground to a halt, dropping chunks the size of the old houses in Wallingford.
He suspected this was not the first time Nataraja had echoed with that pain. Daniel replaced the dormant stone and put the box back into his pocket. The other he kept in his hand, where it grew warm and then hot. He hung his head. Everything hurt. The wail…not a beast. A woman.
The stone tugged again. For now, it was the only part of him that showed decision and direction. He had killed and pushed aside so many to come this far. A meeting was coming—a meeting that would resolve nothing.
Never would.
Never had.
CHAPTER 111
The tangle of old Nataraja quivered above them, and the dreaded, all-too-familiar sound of collisions—mountains falling, caverns collapsing, dust swirling and sifting—announced another compression.
Glaucous felt his body cramp inward, as if he were being pinched between a huge finger and thumb. Whitlow continued to lurch ahead, feeling his way through the city’s deadfall like a cockroach through a festering forest—with the occasional guiding touch of the Moth, a presence of gray authority but no real substance or location. Glaucous finally followed him again, breath stacked upon breath, eyes stinging at the way light and shadow torqued through the high, snarled skeleton of the corpse city. Whitlow stopped and touched finger to chin, scratching stubble. He examined Glaucous critically, as if blaming him. “Smaller still,” he said. “Less of everything. Distances change, and directions. Do you feel it?”