City At The End Of Time by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online

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 everything happened 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