“You didn’t let me finish. I want to leave the Kalpa. So do you.”

He regarded her with inebriated wonder. “Who told you all this?”

“Does it matter?”

He smiled. He practically leered. This might turn out to be a mischief after all—two reckless youths, left to their own devices. The glow’s expression did not change, except for a disgusted flip of her lashes. Taken aback, he asked, “What’s the third thing?”

“If you want to know,” she answered, eyes glinting in the last of the tweenlight, “meet me by the Diurns just before next sleep. My name is Tiadba.”

Then she turned and ran toward the ramps and the bridge—faster than he could follow, drunk as he was.

CHAPTER 7

As light ebbed and shadows gloamed, Ghentun arranged his notes—he kept them in a pouch beside a small green book—and strolled through the lower floors of the first isle bloc. Moving still unseen from niche to niche, he wrote in Puretext with a flower finger he willed to be tipped in soft silver, feeling affection and sadness as he monitored the most recent generation of ancient breeds to be delivered.

Ghentun’s mind wandered. Before becoming a keeper, he had been a student of city history—and like all historians in the Kalpa, that meant he knew very little about a great deal. What he knew—but had never seen—began with a blanket of smooth utter blackness, sprayed with trillions of stars: the Brightness. Something less than a memory now, and little more than a dream. Across its first hundred billion years, the cosmos expanded until its fabric stretched thin, opening voids wherein dimension had new or no meaning. Galaxies became distorted, burned out, wrinkled away. Space itself was aging, decaying—some thought dying.

For longer by far than the Diaspora that had flung humans to the fringes of the universe, they survived in the last tight islands of artificial suns, surrounded by a great and growing emptiness. This became the status quo. The early universe was seen as feverish and squalid, abnormal. The Age of Darkness became wreathed in the dignified mantle of a sedate if dwindling maturity—watched over by a gerontocracy of immortals, all convinced of their unsurpassable wisdom. For a few, however, these scattered islands in the abyssal dark were not enough. A minority—not sane, yet certainly not suffering from a deathly complacency—expressed a willingness to journey on, to leave behind the warmth and light of the remaining stars. They were denied, or worse—overwhelmed, quashed, all but exterminated. A handful managed to escape, to sacrifice all they knew, and to make the adaptations necessary to survive in the cosmos’s last frontiers: the crumbling wastes, dejects, and desponds frayed out over a radius of three hundred billion light-years. Out there, in the Far Dark, to the amazement of the gerontocracy, new technologies proliferated. Bold explorers discovered how to take advantage of the once deadly seams and rifts, squeezing huge stores of energy and sustenance from what most had thought a barren, decrepit desert. Those last few pioneers did more than survive. Ever resourceful, they learned to live and prosper and multiply as never before. Empowered, they eliminated or absorbed their oppressors. They built countless empires.

The Age of Darkness was followed by the Trillenium—the greatest period of growth and learning in human record. Zeros stacked upon zeros. Histories were made and lost like the guttering of an infinity of candles. All strangeness was joined, and all life, human and otherwise, was accepted and improved upon, redefining the very idea of humanity and leading to triumph upon triumph, rebirth after rebirth. No matter that the universe was growing ever weaker and thinner. In its prolonged throes, it fed its young handsomely—until humanity’s farthest flung descendants encountered the first evidence of the Typhon.

It took a billion years to gather conclusive proof of the Typhon’s existence—a rapid few millions of years for it to be analyzed and vaguely understood. By the example of its very perversity, it generated a wealth of new mathematics and science—and new ways of going mad.

Nothing like the Typhon had ever been observed. Neither a place nor a thing, the Typhon spread by scavenging aging universes. Some labeled it a pathology, an infection, a parasite—a violently aggressive membrane of change. Others claimed it was a younger, undisciplined creation infiltrating the ruins of the old.

Where the Typhon grew, worse than silence reigned. The knots of this universe were undone: geodesics failed, sightlines achieved fractal terminations, information swallowed by so many varieties of singularity—collapse, estoppage, endvols, countercepts, twistfolds, enigmachrons, fermion dismays—

And it grew faster than signals could convey, tearing through the aged matrix, eating up the rotting fabric, creating regions not of darkness—those at least were familiar—but of inconsistent, lawless misrule. It was said that anything could happen there. Perhaps more accurately, it was widely reported that everythinghappened there.

This, even the hardiest and most stubborn of all Earth’s children—the last wave of the Diaspora—could not tolerate. This, they could not fight. Most succumbed.

The mind-numbing vastness of their reduction defied historical measure. Survivors who still cherished their terrestrial origins finally retreated to the ancient home system, where humanity—its offspring, hybrids, and manifold allies—now cowered in the fastness of old Earth, living under the dwindling light of a rekindled sun and surrounded by the last few dying planets.

Those who had transformed themselves into new kinds of mass and energy were forced to live together, in very reduced circumstances. Difficult times followed—thousands of centuries of pointless violence: the

Mass Wars.

Outside, the Typhon raged—and gained.

In a way, the Kalpa’s last chapter had begun over a million years ago, when the City Princes of the twelve cities of Earth had commissioned Sangmer the Pilgrim to find and retrieve a former citizen called Polybiblios from the realms of the Shen—beings who claimed never to have shared ancestry with anything remotely human. Sangmer had crossed the last tracks of free cosmos to the sixty suns of the Shen, found Polybiblios living and working on the greatest of the Necklace Worlds, and carried him back between the threatened wastes, bearing knowledge he had gained from long study with the Shen. Sangmer also brought back to Earth a most unusual being named Ishanaxade. Some said Ishanaxade was the last of her kind, rescued and protected by the Shen, left to her own progress for a few million years and then given new form by Polybiblios. All the legends of those times—and they varied widely—agreed that Polybiblios adopted Ishanaxade, calling her his daughter, and that on the return journey, or shortly thereafter, she was betrothed to Sangmer, who was richly rewarded for his perilous and timely journey.

Along Sangmer’s return path, the last of the ancient worlds met their doom. The sixty suns of the Shen were consumed by the Chaos—a fate the Shen themselves seemed content to accept. The City Princes took a risk, bringing Polybiblios into their circle of rule—but the cities of Earth had grown desperate, watching sun after sun swallowed and transformed. They hoped that Polybiblios, with his Shen training, might be able to keep the Chaos at bay—and upon his return, he did indeed design the suspension that for so long protected the sun and planets.

The Shen had taught him well.

All surviving humans owed Polybiblios not just their lives, but their sanity. Yet no human could know the limits of his invention. How much had he learned on the far side of that dying sky…?