Free City At The End Of Time by Greg Bear

far, discussing faster-than-light travel as if it were a fact, for example, or detailing five-dimensional slices and cross sections of fates in space-time. Next to these he placed five books with mostly blank pages—which he referred to as “culls.” Ginny examined the culls carefully and discovered that each had one letter printed on one page, and nothing more—page after page of pristine blankness.
    Whatever mysterious things happened in libraries and bookstores and among the stacked boxes in publishers’ warehouses, it seemed that the mostly blank books were least interesting to Bidewell. “They are at best nulls, voids, spaces between keys. At worst, they are distractions. You may use them for your diary or as notebooks,” he said, and then glanced at the other stack. “Those are for your education, such as it must be, and limited as we are.”
    “Are they defective, too?” she asked. “Should I look for the errors and mark them?”
    “No,” Bidewell said. “Their errors are natural, and unavoidable—the errors of ignorance and youth.”
    Ginny, in her few years of formal schooling, had always enjoyed math and science—coming to an easy understanding of problems that bewildered her classmates—but had never thought of herself as any kind of nerd. “I’d prefer a television or a computer with an Internet connection,” she said. Bidewell shuddered violently. “The Internet is a frightful prospect. All the world’s texts…all the world’s hapless opinions and lies and errors, mutating endlessly, and why? Who can ever keep track or know? It is not the incredible magnitude of human folly that interests me, dear Virginia.”
    She was hardly a prisoner, yet no matter how often she approached the door that led outside, she could not bring herself to pass through. The tension in her head and chest became unbearable, yearning and fear swirling until her stomach knotted. She could not go outside again—not yet.
    “Why are you keeping me here?” she cried one morning, as Bidewell carted in another load of boxes filled with books. “I’m sick of it! Just you and these cats!”

    Bidewell snapped back, “I do not keep you here. Wherever you go, I’m sure you will find your way home—by the long route. That is your talent. The cats might miss you.” And then he walked off, knees snicking, and shut the white warehouse door with its oiled groan of counter-weights and pulleys. Ginny kicked at a crate, then turned to see the smallest cat sitting on the floor, watching her with complacent curiosity.
    “You’ve got everything you want,” she accused.
    The cat’s tail thumped a sealed box. He stood on his haunches and vigorously scratched the cardboard, leaving a catly symbol, like an X with an exclamation mark. Then he marched off, tail high and twitching. Sometimes he even nibbled the corners of the books on the worktable. Bidewell didn’t seem to mind. With the appearance of the girl at his wire gate, Conan Arthur Bidewell had experienced three sharp emotions: irritation, exhilaration, and fear—the last, at his age, almost indistinguishable from joy. The air was thick with change. The girl’s appearance was after all no more miraculous than the condensation of a drop of rain from a moisture-laden cloud.
    Yet now he knew: the work of many lonely years was coming to fruition. Why not joy, along with the inevitable palpitations of coming danger?
    For too many decades, far too many, he had been lost in his books, charting the statistics of improbable change. What could be more desperate or more futile? Waiting for the sum-runners to sow their flowers and produce a new family for him and the warehouse. And now—
    Bidewell had long been noting the changes in the literary climate. More and more significant finds were being sent his way, from all over the planet. (Pity they could not reach out to other planets! For similar events must be happening Out There, as well, puzzling other scholars—if they were as