Bidewell lifted one shoulder.

“How could anyone tell if I just popped out of nowhere?” Jack asked.

“As a rule, we cannot,” Bidewell said. “Mnemosyne is the force that keeps it all from crashing into ruin and contradiction. She does her job, and she does it well.”

Jack whistled. “Some lady.”

Even this flippancy did not pique the old man. “You’ll like her,” Bidewell said. “But she is no lady.”

“Sounds like a backward way of doing things,” Ginny said.

“Perhaps, but it results in a cosmos of infinite richness and complexity. For this reason, logically speaking, the universe has no true chronological beginning, out of which all things flow. Every moment, until the end of creation, is a sort of beginning, somewhere.”

“What’s this I’ve heard about a Big Bang?” Jack asked.

“I’m not asking for belief. You’ll see the truth soon enough—my words are preparation. Rays of light, you know, must be set in motion, already entangled, to complete the picture every observer sees or will see from that point on—and before. The wave of reconciliation passes back in time, and then forward again; pulse after pulse, until the refinement is complete.”

“Sounds complicated,” Jack said.

Ginny looked at the tall shelves of books, the opened boxes and crates whose contents had been laid out on the big table in the center of the high-ceilinged library. “You said some of the books you were looking for were odd, impossible, because they have no history. That must mean they were never reconciled, even before…what’s happening outside.”

“Good,” Bidewell said.

“And that means Mnemosyne…well, she’s been distracted, or something is increasing her workload. Or—she’s sick. Maybe dying.”

“Better,” Bidewell said.

“Books, galaxies…What else?” Ginny asked.

Jack suddenly remembered the giant earwig he thought he’d seen scuttling between the warehouses.

“Strange animals?”

Daniel looked both sly and sleepy. “What makes you say that?”

“I’ve seen them,” Jack said. “One, anyway.”

“Oh, my,” Bidewell said, folding his hands. “Yes, those are indicators.”

“Dreams sometimes come out of nowhere,” Ginny said. “Are theyindicators?”

“Mnemosyne can reconcile everything, everywhere, except in the heart and mind of an observer. That territory is forbidden to her. But observers die and their memories die with them—except for the legends, the myths of beginning times, the way things were before creation grew huge and complicated. Those are passed along in speech and dreams, and linger despite Mnemosyne’s hardest labors. For that reason, Mnemosyne rarely concerns herself with dreams.”

“When does she?” Daniel asked.

“When they come true,” Bidewell said.

CHAPTER 70

The Chaos

“What are those?” Denbord asked. He knelt on the crest of a vast ripple in the sea of stone and looked down. The others joined him.

In the trough of the frozen, rocky wave, for as far as they could see into the reddish, murky light, row upon row of cylindrical shapes lay in rough parallel beside their dark cradles, like the broken rungs of a toppled ladder.

“They don’t look that big,” Nico said.

“Big enough,” Shewel said.

Perf assumed a teacher’s tone. “It’s tough to judge size and distance—but if we went down there, I bet we’d be tiny.”

Tiadba tried to remember Sangmer’s description from the stories she had been reading to the breeds, to distract them from the long march, the brief rests, the strain of keeping to the beacon’s line. Whatever these were, they blocked the path the beacon had been drawing for them. “They’re boats,” she concluded. “Like in the nauvarchia.”

“They don’t have sails,” Denbord observed.

“They wouldn’t need them. They’re spaceboats. They travel across space—or they did, back when there was space to cross.”

The others slowly understood her point. “Starboats,” Perf said. “Back when there were stars.”

Until now, the going had been steady though strange—over a monotonous gray landscape, dotted with tiny pores that pinched out pulsing green globules as the breeds approached, then shrank back into the rock.

All around, the rock sweated—the rock oozed light.

Tiadba looked both ways along the crest, then into the trough. “No way to avoid crossing,” she said.

“What if those things roll over on us?” Shewel asked.

Denbord touched his finger to his faceplate. “Quick and easy,” he said.

“What if the Silent Ones are down there?”

“Nobody’s seen them,” Nico said. “Nobody knows where they are or what they look like. Maybe they’re gone. And the armor hasn’t said a peep. We must be doing something right.”

“At least we haven’t stumbled over a trod,” Perf said.

“I’d almost like to see that—or a Silent One,” Denbord said. “Just to know what they are—what to expect, or avoid.”

As Nico had pointed out, their suits had mostly kept quiet. On just one occasion, Perf was warned not to kick at the glowing balls.

Tiadba looked to the other side of the trough, the opposite crest, apparently two or three miles off. The clarity in the distance between the crests was increasing—something she’d noticed earlier, that the light could at times, unpredictably, grow stronger and more coherent, letting them see over a greater distance. Perversely, the lower they were, the farther they could see. Light in this part of the Chaos apparently climbed around and over obstructions, then curved down to meet them—an effect among the most disturbing they had encountered since crossing the zone of lies. From the bottom of this valley, they might be able to see across the Chaos for many hundreds or thousands of miles. If distance still held, still mattered out here.

Nico moved up beside Tiadba, though they did not need to be close to hear each other. “What’ll we do?”

“Climb down and cross over,” she said.

“Can’t we explore?” Perf asked. “I’d like to see inside a spaceboat.”

Macht had walked off to their left. Now he rejoined the group. “They must be old,” he said. “There are thousands of them.”

“If the armor doesn’t stop us, we’ll look around,” Tiadba said.

They spread into an optimized arc, to let their helmets see and process from a wider angle. Their view was now almost too crystalline. Beyond the trough, above the fallen ladder-rungs of the spaceboats, Tiadba saw the outline of edifices at least as large as the bions they had left behind—stark and caved, edged with a greenish fire that flickered as if still burning.

The others sucked in their breaths.

“What are those?” Khren asked.

“That’s the Necropolis—isn’t it?” Denbord asked, ever the studious one. “But I don’t see any dead walking.”

“We’re too far away,” Khren said.

Their armor responded, “There are many ancient cities, collected from many regions and histories. They should not be entered.”

Denbord and Macht looked at each other, then at Tiadba. The others simply stared across the valley at the jumbled ruins, lying out there for no one knew how long.

How far humanity had been pushed back, how much had been destroyed…How little remained, compared to the vastness of the past—how little there was left to lose. Just us.

“Is it dangerous to cross?” Tiadba asked. This time the armor did not answer. “I guess not,” she said. Denbord added, echoing her own irritation, “Kind of rude, isn’t it?”

They began their descent.

The closer they got to the bottom, the hazier became the outlines of the spaceboats and their infrastructure, until they saw only a dancing puzzle of grays and browns cut through by dim arcs of green. However, the ruins of the cities beyond the next rise seemed to loom, and it was tempting to just stop—to halt their steady progress across the valley and contemplate dazzling visions of towers, domes, great rounded shells tens of miles wide, carved open to reveal uncounted interior levels, concavities filled with what must have once been urbs and neighborhoods, most collapsed and covered with irregular encrustations.