“I chose to become noötic,” the Keeper confesses. “When I was young. My only betrayal. I reconverted when I became Keeper. But my fate-lines were cut and remade, and tied up with the Kalpa. I won’t be going any farther.”
Ghentun touches the breed’s hand, feeling Jebrassy’s solidity, then moves his fingers to his own nose and makes that strange, explosive sound that signifies humor. “Let me see what he gave you.”
Jebrassy holds out the box.
“Open it for me. Show me.”
Jebrassy touches the top and turns it one way, then another, shaking it. He knows instinctively how to open it. The lid pulls away, and within there is a new, bright twist of gray metal, cradling a small reddish stone. The stone gleams within, like a star growing on the tweenlight ceil.
“Four is the minimum,” Ghentun says, and his sunken eyes turn away. “Some say three. But it isfour. Enough. They have had enough time and power. At the very end, the City Prince wins all.”
Dying eyes now focused on the young breed, with his last strength the Keeper pulls the stone up and away from Jebrassy’s suddenly frantic, grabbing hands, and smashes it against the littered floor. It does not break but makes a strange squeal and tries to pull away from the Mender’s armor. As if remembering something obscure, a last bit of instruction, Ghentun nods, then with his other hand reaches for the lid of the box—and examines the design engraved there. “Why play Eidolon games, young breed?”
Holding both away from Jebrassy, he lurches to his feet and clasps them to his breast, then closes his eyes.
There is nothing Jebrassy can do. He turns between the Keeper and Polybiblios, like a child caught in a tormenting game played by cruel adults.
The incarnate fragment of the Librarian seems at first to share Jebrassy’s horror, then holds up one hand, as if waving good-bye, or dismissing all further effort. Polybiblios crumbles to gray dust within the armor. The armor falls inward, shrinks to a wrinkled pebble.
No more words, no more information.
Trillions of years of memories—gone.
The Keeper turns white eyes upward, and then passes—becomes dust. His armor likewise shrinks, and pieces roll on the ground, sparking, sizzling around the box and the stone. All crumble.
Jebrassy tries to gather the remains in his gloved hands, but at this touch, the destruction begun by Ghentun’s passing is complete. Nothing but fine sand sifts through his fingers. All pointless.
Jebrassy gets to his feet. He is learning for the first time what it means to be utterly and completely alone. The False City, like his heart, is filled with a terrible screaming. He knows that voice, recognizes it from his dreams—from his origins.
Someone throws a rock. The rock continues on its arc to a destination. So long as it flies, a life goes on—a fate remains in play.
But now the purpose is gone, and there is only the fate.
Why play Eidolon games, young breed?
One last glance at the piles of sand.
Something new has formed there—a larger, polyhedral shape with seven sides and four holes, made of the same substance as the gray box.
His fingers twitch. He touches it—the armor does not interact. It is inert. Jebrassy picks it up and carries it with him, as a pede carries nesting material even after its clutch of eggs has been stolen and eaten.
He walks the last remaining distance under the deadfall, through a storm of whispering shadows—
The central shape of his most hidden dreams is gathering, he can feel its motion—a great revolving, spinning thing, like the design on the lid of the box: the symbol of the Sleeper. This geometric fortress will hold back the end for one last moment, until Brahma decides whether or not to awaken. Jebrassy passes through just as a great rotating band swooshes behind him. There is no going back, of course.
He has stepped onto a lake of translucent blue-green, the same color as the pieces of the muse collected by the Shen and gathered into humanlike form by Polybiblios.
The final part of his journey begins.
Toward the screaming.
CHAPTER 113
Jack has reached the center of the city. It looks like a center—everything spins out around it—though the scene is cockeyed and difficult to define, and so he turns, looks back over his shoulder, then bends over and stares between his legs—through the last iridescent film of bubble. The stone is hot in his hands, quivering with its own excitement. But everything else…very cold.
The center is a circular, emerald-green lake surrounded by revolving and whirling circular bands: the ever-moving, ever-slicing and parsing bars of a special prison. He is inside them. Somehow he has passed through the cut and slice. The bands are flat, of no thickness, and smooth, reflecting light with a brazen, defiant sheen.
A cross formed of two straight ribbons meets above the lake. From one angle the revolving bands move behind the cross—from another angle they surround it—and from a third angle they whirl in front. This is very like the symbol carved into the puzzle box. So he is where he should be, finally. And the others?
All he really wants now is to find Ginny. If she’s here, he’s certain she’s very afraid—that seems to define Ginny. Courage through fear. Jack—just a little afraid, but not like Ginny. Even this little fear comes close to paralyzing him.
Time to see things better. He turns around again, refreshing the polarity of his perception, and this creates a kind of clarity.
Curls of pale gray dart down and around, forming particle-chamber tracks through the distance above the frozen green lake, like greenish snow—all the snow in the world, summing to a peculiar blizzard here at the end of time.
The lake might be made of ice—greenish, glassy ice.
And at the center of the lake—
The Crux or heart…
A blurry black point. Too far off, too small to see any details from where he stands—just a foggy, dimensionless darkness. Nearby, another hollow opens up, carved out of the ice. Within the hollow he sees a lovely actinic glow—a billion arcs of brilliant blue. Vague shapes move there, small enough to be human—all but one, a nacreous cone with a brilliant luminosity at its apex—a face. Even from here he sees it is the face of a woman—or at least some sort of magnificent female. Looking through the blue light at that shape, Jack shivers. He knows where this is—and what thatis, or was. The icy surface of the lake is scored all around, as if giant skaters have carved deep pathways, gouges that would rise over his head if he went down there and fell into one. The tortured tracks of the Queen in White.
And so he isgoing. The sum-runner is hot and pulls him along. If he doesn’t hold on tight and go with it, it seems likely to just skitter down by itself, leaving him behind, and he will freeze, like all those giants he now sees gathered just outside the whirl of the bands—the ribbon sections of so many spheres—an armillary. That’s what they’re called. He saw something like it in a museum once. The armillary paradox is the symbol of the sum-runners—broad, interlaced fates rising forward and slipping back.
Now about those giants. Were they there before? He sees them on the opposite side of the whirling bands, gathered like extraordinary chess pieces, waiting in timeless judgment. They are horrifyingly beautiful—he is inadequate to the task of assessing their grandeur, their former power. Seeing them carries by itself a kind of knowledge, access to what had once been a tremendous future history. Once, they were judges, he guesses, builders and movers of galaxies—and then they became prisoners, held in thrall to witness the fumbling, inane destruction of everything they had ever lived and loved. Now they are gathered to await another judgment, another conclusion. The mighty and glorious await the arrival of the tiny and insignificant.
He has an audience.
He holds onto the sum-runner despite all of its enthusiasm. Jack never drops anything. As he steps onto the slippery surface, white and black shapes move around his feet, precede him onto the green ice—a river of silent, vengeful fur.