Free City At The End Of Time by Greg Bear Page B

near promised to give what she was seeing proportion and perspective.
    Something—or someone.
    “Hello, crèche-born.”
    Drops of cool, soothing liquid fell into her eyes and then froze them in place—to stare unblinking at a triangle of unformed whiteness.
    A cool, crystalline voice of immense beauty and sadness whirled up and lay on the porches of her ears, then introduced itself word by word, languid, stroking. The words filled her ears and caused a dull, stretching pain.
    “I compelled Shapers and Menders to make you. Do you know me?”
    The shape within the triangular cloud coalesced. Above the middle arrived a face—well-shaped, eyes large and deep—beautiful and sad and commanding. An emotion rose, swelling within Tiadba: deep recognition, built into her at birth, ordained for all her kind ages before. She suddenly wanted to feel glad. This was reunion, what should have been a time of joy. “I know you,” she said.
    “And I know you. I am proud, young breed. You are rich with dream. You have brought time forward…as you were designed to do. But now your connection with what has gone before is a curse. There is only turmoil and torment to come. But in this, our last moment of peace, I am allowed to ask one question of all who are brought here. That is my torture—an instant of anticipation and hope.”
    Tiadba tried to see more clearly the dazzling white face like softly mobile stone, malleable outlines surrounded by other pieces whirling up and falling back again on chill, dust-laden wafts. The face drew close.
    Tiadba tried to pull back—shrink away.
    “Do you know what has become of Sangmer, called the Pilgrim?”
    The voice, so close to Tiadba’s face, carried no hint of breath or moving air—but a strange sweetness surrounded her all the same in that sensual desolation.
    Tiadba felt a stinging shock. She thought of lying beside Jebrassy on the bed, making love and trying to riddle the ancient stories…of moments in the Chaos, reading from the ever-changing books to soothe and inform the marchers—but there had never been a conclusion to those stories, and the words were often obscure.
    However, before this cold, frightening beauty, Tiadba could not help but offer hope. “I might have seen him. Maybe I wouldn’t know,” she said, lips numbing even as she spoke. “Tell me what he looks like.”
    “I don’t remember .” Sadness and zeroing cold fogged between them. “No time remains, no time at all…” Words like falling and dying insects. “You have brought me nothing.”
    “I’m sorry…” Tiadba searched for a word, found it in the memory of her other. “I am so sorry, Mother.
    ”
    “I am sorry, as well, crèche-born. You cannot know my sorrow. It would be a mercy if we both could die.”

    CHAPTER 101
    “We’re never going to find her,” Daniel said. “We’re crazy to even be out here.”
    “Where would you have us go, young master?” Glaucous asked.
    “Everything’s different,” Jack said. “It’ll keep getting more different. Maybe it will get better.”
    The gap between the monstrous statues—the gap that opened into the bowl where stood the most unlikely city of all—had closed behind them as if it had never been.
    “Three choices,” Glaucous said. “This is the best.”
    “You said the Chalk Princess is just around the corner, right?” Daniel said. “Why doesn’t she swoop down and take us?”
    Glaucous stopped. His breath pumped and hissed like a steam engine losing its push. “She’s here,” he said.
    “What do you think will happen?” Daniel asked.
    “She’ll release me,” Glaucous said. “No reward, no punishment. Just put me to an end. I deserve no more—and no less.”
    He resumed walking like a long-suffering beast.
    Daniel could hardly breathe. A feeling of heaviness, and compression, like bricks on his chest…he tried to understand what was going on in terms of physics but only made a bad job of it. “Vacuum energy heading back up