“Listen. I piss and shit inside here. Why can’t I throw up?”

“Just don’t think about it,” Tiadba said. “And stop looking at the sky.”

“I can’t help it. It keeps changing. I look away, look back, and it’s different—except for that thingup there. Always burning, but not in the middle, like a big hole. If it’s on fire, why doesn’t it burn everywhere? What’s it trying to be?” His voice was getting shrill.

The fearful excitement of a few hours earlier was turning into a sour anxiety next door to panic. Their suits could only give them so much support, and weren’t designed to interfere with their emotions. Tiadba was beginning to think that Grayne’s enthusiasm for the luxurious comfort of their adventure might have been overstated.

She swallowed frequently. Her face stung, her arms itched again, and her feet hurt, though they hadn’t walked very far. She felt confined, trapped, lost, and it took real effort to keep from crying or, worse, screaming.

“You feel it, I know you do!” Nico called out, and rolled over on his stomach, grabbing at the rock, but the rock in the dip was solid, smooth.

Khren, Shewel, and Macht stepped down. Herza and Frinna flanked Nico and nudged the reclining breed. They seemed well enough, though still quiet.

“We haven’t even started yet,” Khren said.

Sad, Nico said, “Don’t make it worse.”

“We could swap. I could roll around and act scared for a while, and you could stand up here and be brave and try to see where we’re going.”

In their helmets, the beacon—a steady, low musical note—faded or increased in volume, depending on whether they kept to their course. But there had already been two broken walls high enough and long enough to force them off the course, and then they trekked about in nervous arcs and circles until they heard the beacon again at maximum melody. They had encountered crumbling barricades in the rolling emptiness, casting odd double bluish shadows in the reddish flare of the ring-fire sun. Tiadba thought it best not to climb over and investigate, and the others agreed—curiosity the first emotion to fade in that first mile. So they had walked around.

Now she worried they were already losing their will to go on. Swinging between extremes of exaltation and fear in so short a time—most unpleasant. And as yet they had met nothing particularly fearsome or frightening, just what they were trained to expect.

“I think I’m getting used to some of it,” Macht said, but didn’t sound convinced. “Really,” he added.

“Come on, Nico. Let’s keep moving.”

“We’ll go on a few more miles,” Tiadba said. She began gulping painfully. We’re being poisoned!Yet she was sure nothing was getting in from outside the armor. Surely the Tall Ones would have equipped them better than that!

But the Chaos changes all the time. How could they know what kind of armor to make?

She looked sharply at Khren. He wasn’t feeling the same symptoms. Nor were the others. Each was reacting in his own way.

Nico rolled on his back but kept his eyes closed. “Why are we still stuck here, if everything’s so different? Why don’t we just change the rules and lift up and float away?”

Tiadba suddenly felt a kind of love, and her eyes welled up. That was the sort of question Jebrassy would ask.

“It’s called gravity,” Khren said. “It’s everywhere—even out here. Pahtun told us, remember?”

“Yeah, and where is he, now?” Macht asked darkly. “I don’t even know what gravity is. Gravity orlight.”

“Light is what lets us see,” Shewel said, echoing what they had been taught. He was certainly not the swiftest learner in the group, but what he learned stayed with him in perfect detail. “Gravity is what glues us down.”

“Aren’t you getting bored down there?” Denbord asked Nico. Khren and Macht reached down to grab his hands and lift him up. He stood on wobbly legs, arms out to keep his balance. “Let’s go back. I think we could make it.”

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.