“My head spins just thinking about it,” Miriam said.

“Is Kali white as chalk?” Ginny asked abruptly. Jack looked at her.

“Kali is often depicted as a shriveled old woman, her skin the color of plagues and death—black,”

Bidewell said, watching the pair closely. “But in this role, she might be pale, white as chalk. After all, she removes excess detail and color. She bleaches.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Farrah said.

Bidewell found this amusing. “I wish I had that luxury. But long ago I discovered I had a knack—I could slip free, for a while, of all the backward-sliding fates and world-lines that were being reconciled. I could see with a peculiar clarity things that no longer were. When I was young, I learned to watch for the signs—learned to watch doomed people, places, and things as they faded, about to become inconsequential—and yet remember them in detail. I have sharp eyes and an ironclad memory.”

“Mind filled with useless junk,” Agazutta murmured, but her eyes were languid. She was enjoying the frisson of so many strange possibilities.

“At first, in my youth, I was confrontational. I tried to trace lost and fading things back to the moment when they began to be erased—or forward, to the moment of their creation. An impossible task, I discovered—though I came dangerously close once or twice.

“Soon, I realized that the last remnants of things lost might be found in records—in the Earth, in geological layers, for example, but also in lost animals, stray children—and scrolls. Books. Texts of all sorts.

“Mnemosyne values texts above all things, and saves their editing and reconciliation for the last, perhaps to be savored. And so—I began to find the books she or her dark sister had missed.”

CHAPTER 62

Daniel had to rest. The walk through murk and confusion left him with no energy, no sense of purpose or progress, and no clear view of where they might be in the city’s jumbled geography. He had the horrible feeling they were retracing steps they had already taken.

He paused before a half-wrecked and leaning house, then pushed through a splintered gate to sit on a stone garden bench, in a place that could no longer properly be called a garden. The plants had become sad, brown-edged things, but before dying, the last flowers had run riot, growing into cancerous clumps of wilted blossoms.

Daniel’s body was filled with a dull fire, which he could only guess might be chemistry struggling against shifts in physical constants. Soon enough he would simply cease to be—as a living human being, at any rate. He could almost see himself clumping and growing out of any sensible pattern, multiplying beyond any possibility of life, like the flowers…

They crumbled into powder in his hand.

He had lost track of the faraway glow. Pewter brightness returned, replacing the bleak umber darkness. Jagged upheavals carved serrated shapes against the southern grayness—not mountains. He did not know what they might be.

But worse than all that—

He felt a chill and looked up. Max seemed to squeeze into his vicinity, more sound and shadow than material being. He, too, looked up—at a certain cool sensation on their skulls and the backs of their necks.

The gnomish man’s thin voice pushed through the freezing air. “Something’s eating the moon.”

Whatever had smeared out the pallid stars and rucked up the voids between had left the moon untouched. Now, the high ivory crescent was turning bloody red, like a half plug stamped in heaven’s flesh. And rising in the east—or rather, blooming and bloating, since there was no apparent motion in that direction—a ring of fire arced almost from one quarter to the other. Within the ring swam a diseased, turbid blackness.

Daniel’s eyes stung as if brushed with nettles.

The bloody moon shivered, then streamed across the sky like molten, fire-lit silver. It spread and merged with the arc of lurid, pulsing flame, until nothing of it remained.

“Everywhere we look, the Gape swallows the world.” Max dropped next to Daniel on the stone bench, tried to swallow, and choked out, “We’re in herland! God help us!”

The garden grew colder as the arc of flame and its dark heart expanded. “I’ve been here before,” Daniel said. “I jumped right out of my skin to get away.”

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.