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

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…?
    The suspension blocked Typhonian misrule—but only inside an oblate zone that reached just past the groaning gray ball of stone and ice that had once been Neptune. Beyond the suspension, light stopped as if glued to a page, matter dissolved like blood in water.
    Earth, little more than a cold cinder, was now thought to be—had to be—sufficient. There would be no recovery of the lost light-years. So ended the dominance of living, thinking beings in the cosmos. Some called it a final golden age—life’s long arrogance finally tempered by the incomprehensible. Scant years later, the Chaos pushed through the suspension and sucked up the sun and the other worlds, then threatened the last twelve cities of Earth. The suspension was pulled tight, severely weakened, almost destroyed. Yet even now the Mass Wars continued. The City Princes—noötic Eidolons all—forced conversion upon all but one of the cities. Those who did not agree fled a thousand miles across the cinereous desert to Nataraja.

    Both history and legends were sketchy about the ensuing age. These things were accepted by most, though sequence was vague:
    Nearly all but Menders and Shapers—the engineers and underclasses of the Kalpa—were made of noötic mass, far more convenient, reliable, and powerful. But Polybiblios was still primordial. To better understand and control him, the City Princes forced him to convert as well—making him a Great Eidolon like themselves, which they must have considered a