The Armageddon Blues

by The Armageddon Blues (new ed) (mobi)

  From the Pomona Progress Bulletin, July 14, 1973:

  "... and, born to Marienne R. Hammel and Jonathon Hammel, at 6:30 in the morning of July 13; a girl, Margaret Beth, six pounds four ounces, in good health.

  "Jonathon Hammel is an account executive in the Pasadena offices of the corporate and investors relations firm of Jones, Collins & Hammel."

  Dateline 1976 Gregorian: June.

  The child popped up out of nowhere, from a landscape strewn with boulders, wind-cut rock, and mesquite scrub, and onto the dusty path in front of Jalian; one moment he was simply there. Jalian was impressed despite herself. A Silver-Eyes girl, without training from an Elder Hunter, might have done no better. There was noise, and she had smelled him, but had not seen him at all until he chose to let her.

  Not that she'd been trying.

  He examined her gravely, under eyes half lidded against the fierce noonday sun. He was, Jalian guessed, perhaps seven years old. Except for his long, uncombed hair, which was blonde, he looked very much like the other Indian children Jalian had seen in the area--poorly dressed in dusty clothes, shoeless, with clear Indian features that were already stamped with a wariness that seemed an integral part of his person.

  "Are you lost?" His voice was pitched high; more the voice of a girl than a boy.

  Jalian had ceased walking at his appearance; she resumed, slowing slightly to accommodate his smaller legs. Her action seemed to startle him; the boy hurried after her. "I am not lost."

  "Usually white people are lost when they come on this road."

  Jalian glanced down at him; he was looking up at her, not watching where he placed his feet on the rock-strewn path. "I am not a white person," said Jalian carefully, "I do not think this is a road, and I am not lost."

  "Do you have enough water?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because if you're thirsty the creek's only a half hour away, and it isn't dry yet. It will be before the end of summer," he added.

  Jalian nodded. "I have enough water, thank you."

  "What's your name?"

  Jalian drew a slow breath. She was not particularly in the mood for company. Still, he was only a child, even if male. She squatted until her eyes were level with his. "Jalian d'Arsennette y ken Selvren, or, in English, Jalian of the Fires of Clan Silver Eyes. I am the daughter of Ralesh who was the daughter of Morine; Margra Hammel was our mother."

  "Oh." The answer seemed to put him off for a moment. "Mine's Michael. Michael Walks-Far."

  Jalian unslung her canteen and drank from it. Michael was sweating; she offered it to the boy. "Would you like a drink?"

  "How far are you going?"

  "To Needles," she said patiently, still holding out the canteen. "I will be there within a day, and the canteen is half full yet."

  Michael nodded in acceptance, and took a small drink from the canteen. He handed it back to her, and then saw her eyes for the first time. He stared openly. "Are you Huapatanetal?"

  Jalian reslung the canteen, and stood slowly. "I do not understand."

  The child shook his head slowly. "Never mind. Mama tells me of them, the demons with silver eyes, but I think it's a story. They are called Huapatanetal."

  "Walk with me," said Jalian abruptly. The child followed her as she resumed her westward journey. Deep within her memory, the boy had stirred something which she had not thought of in many years, but she could not place it instantly. "How old are you, child?"

  Michael answered with reluctance. "Five. But everybody says I look older," he added instantly. Already, he was sweating again from the effort to keep up with her. Jalian did not slow her pace.

  Jalian nodded. "You do. I would have thought seven."

  "Really?" He looked up at her, and smiled suddenly, and for the first time Jalian realized that he was beautiful.

  "Yes," she said firmly, "I would have said seven."

  They walked in silence after that for nearly ten minutes, until Michael stopped and told her that he couldn't go any further because he had promised his mother.

  "Then you must not break your promise," said Jalian.

  With obvious resentment in his voice, Michael said, "I won't. Mama spanks me when I do."

  At that, Jalian laughed; she could not help herself. "When I was a child, and my mother punished me, it left scars." She knelt next to him and touched his cheek. "Your mother does not sound so bad."

  He nodded, unconvinced. His long white hair, so like her own, fell across his eyes, and he pushed it back. "Are you going to come back this way?"

  Jalian started to shake her head no, and then stopped. "I do not know," she said honestly. "I am going to see a mathematician who lives in Needles, and after that I cannot say."

  "Oh." He paused in thought. "If you come back, my Mama and me live on this side of the creek, but on the other side of the hills. If you just walk down the creek you'll see our house. We have chickens and two cows," he said proudly--he was old enough to have seen others who did not have that much. "It's just us there. Mama had a boyfriend once who was a singer for the Sorry Blues, and they had me, but he went away and didn't come back." The boy paused, looking at Jalian, obviously expecting an answer.

  "Perhaps I will come back," said Jalian simply.

  All cheerfulness left his expression. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

  The question surprised Jalian. Without conscious intent she ran her hands over her knives; one knife was missing, a gift to Georges Mordreaux. She was not at all certain that he understood the meaning of that knife; and even if he had, things were so very different now.

  "I don't know," she told Michael Walks-Far. "Probably not."

  He nodded and hugged her around the legs, suddenly and with surprising strength, and then turned and ran back the way they had come, ran until he was out of sight without ever once looking back.

  That night, as she was making her fire before going to sleep, with the city lights of Needles visible in the distance, words that she had not thought of in almost a decade and a half came back to her with a force that brought her springing to her feet, as if to face an enemy.

  Corvichi words; the salch khri, ghess'Rith had called them, the warlike humans from across the Great Wheel of Existence, with technology equal to or surpassing that of the Corvichi themselves.

  The words salch khri translated, very nearly, to Walks-Far.

  Her fire had nearly died before Jalian managed to make herself sleep, and she did not sleep well at all.

  The United States of America was nearly two hundred years old, and Jalian d'Arsennette had no idea whether she had a "boyfriend" or not ...

  ...and there were just thirty-one years left until Armageddon.

  The Armageddon Blues

  "... we have begun. Neither wind nor tide is always with us. Our course on a dark and stormy sea cannot always be clear. But we have set sail--and the horizon, however cloudy, is also full of hope."

  --John F. Kennedy, Introduction, To Turn The Tide, November 8, 1961

  The bombs fell.

  In a nuclear rain that lasted for days, through a peremptory first strike and a retaliatory second strike, through retaliatory third and fourth strikes, until only a few lonely submarines cruised through the ocean to fire their weapons upon an enemy who no longer existed, through all of this the bombs fell, and fell. Billions died, of the planet's seven-and-a-half billion persons, in fire and blasting shock waves and radiation. Billions more died in famine, and the firestorms caused when the bombs went down. But that was not the worst.

  Vast clouds of dust and earth were blasted into the sky. Whole continents disappeared beneath them; and temperatures began to drop. As the glaciers travelled south, the last crumbling pockets of civilization vanished.

  It did not return for over five hundred years.

  Dateline 2007 Gregorian: January.

  (This conversation takes place between Nigao Loos and PRAXCELIS, the Prototype Reduction X-laser Computer, Ellis-Loos Integrated System, in geosynchronous orbit
, at Midway, the Sunflower Orbital Command.)

  "PRAXCELIS, I don't understand this readout."

  "This unit has endeavored to be clear. Where is the area of unclarity?"

  "PRAXCELIS, I requested a readout on the possibility that the tracking lasers were diverging from their assigned grids."

  "Sen Loos, your input, as orally recorded, reads: ‘... and PRAXCELIS, while you're at it, take a look to make sure that the lines aren't diverging with the passage of time.' Unit ENCELIS informs this unit that the lines are diverging."

  (A long stretch of silence.) "You're not supposed to have any contact with SORCELIS and ENCELIS.... and what lines are you talking about?"

  "The timelines, Sen Loos. The timelines are diverging. There have been an estimated nine hundred million events of significant divergence since base divergence 1962."

  "... events of significant divergence ...."

  "Whether this will be sufficient to prevent Armageddon is unknown."

  "Of those to whom much is given, much is required."

  --John F. Kennedy, Speech to the Massachusetts State Legislature, January 9, 1961.

  Dateline 1981 Gregorian: May.

  The laboratory lay secluded in the low hills overlooking the Irwindale gravel pits. It was a complex of eight interconnected buildings, with a small cafeteria, and a parking lot that accommodated sixty-one cars. The 210 freeway ran less than four hundred meters away from the laboratory's south entrance. Earlier that year they'd had private on-and off-ramps installed to service the lab.

  It was quiet, and as secluded as you could reasonably get while remaining within working distance of UCLA. (There were major cities within a half hour's drive on the 210 east or west. But they could not be seen.)

  As far as Henry Ellis was concerned, it was ideal. He liked the location, liked the early morning drive in the near-desert. He even liked the buildings, the plain unadorned brick and cement; the clean brass lettering that proclaimed:

  TRANS-TEMPORAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION.

  (Underneath the sign, somebody had taped a hand-written placard; Home of the UCLA-famous Experimental Number Cruncher, Ellis-Loos Integrated System.)

  Henry Ellis came in early that Monday morning. Fog shrouded the grounds and it was cool enough that he wore a tan poncho over his work clothes for warmth. He was of just less than average height, with a calm, easy manner, and graceful, contained movements.

  Unlocking the main doors, he paused only long enough to pull the sheet of paper from the wall. He wadded it into a ball and tossed it toward the outer office's wastebasket, left-handed over his right shoulder, without looking. He continued on to his office, not glancing back.

  It was just after seven, only a short while since sunrise. As far as Henry knew, the only other person on the premises was the janitor. In his office, he flipped on the lights, and turned on his coffee-maker. There was a brief hum from the machine, which ceased with a sharp click, and was replaced by a trickling sound from the machine's innards. Henry put his coffee cup under the spigot, shed his poncho and hat and hung them by the door, and seated himself behind his desk to wait for the water to boil. From his shirt pocket he took a dozen toothpicks, individually wrapped in cellophane, and placed them in an even row next to the desktop intercom.

  He flipped on the intercom.

  The voice that addressed him was uninflected. "Good morning, Mister Ellis."

  Henry was unlocking drawers. "Good morning, ENCELIS. How far are you on the processing I left you last night?" He unlocked the final drawer and hung the keys on a hook protruding from the side of the desk.

  "This unit has processed 83.8 percent of the data input to it."

  Henry nodded out of habit. "Excellent. With what primary results?"

  "There is a tentatively assigned probability of six nines that the chronon event threshold is secure within the range of energy usage that this facility is capable of applying."

  Henry spread hardcopy over the desktop without paying conscious attention to it. His mind was elsewhere.... If we assume a straight line proportional to energy input, then a steady event threshold implies discrete timelines....

  Behind him, the intercom said, "Mister Ellis, you asked this unit to remind you that you have an appointment this morning, at ten o'clock, with one Jalian d'Arsennette. Have you been reminded?"

  Henry scowled. "Yes, ENCELIS. Thank you." He leaned over his desk and turned his memo pad to the date, a week and a half ago, that the appointment had been made.

  In his characteristically neat handwriting, the memo said, Monday next, woman from DoD: Jeremy Carson recommends handle lightly.

  Below that, in block letters, underlined twice, was a single word.

  WHY?

  Jalian d'Arsennette y ken Selvren pulled into the parking lot at 9:56. She was driving a cherry-red Porsche with a long scratch down the left fender. The clouds were burning away as she arrived, and the day was growing warm. There were two other people in the parking lot when she arrived; the janitor, who was going home, and a short, dark-skinned man whom her briefing identified as Nigao Loos, the theoretical physicist on whose work and reputation the Trans-Temporal Research Foundation was built.

  The janitor simply stared at her openly; the world's foremost research physicist scowled in the general direction of the sun, and hurried indoors.

  The stare did not bother Jalian; she was used to it. When you wore a white jumpsuit, and a white tailor-cut silk business coat, when your skin was the color of milk and your hair the color of ice and your eyes were silver--when all these were as they were, people stared.

  Mostly it was the men who stared, and them Jalian simply ignored. They were after all men.

  Leaving the confines of the Porsche was a relief. She drove because she had no choice, but she did not like it; she would never like it. She slammed the door to the car, wondering whether Georges appreciated the things she put up with. Cars, indeed. She left the door unlocked, hoping that somebody would steal the machine while she was gone.

  Her eyes, beneath brown eyebrows, shut briefly just before she entered the building. When they opened again the pupils had expanded to twice their previous diameter.

  There was a secretary working in the outer office, a young, dark-haired, rather pretty woman in a modest black and green dress. If she found Jalian's appearance odd, she did not show it. "Ms. d'Arsennette?" she inquired.

  Jalian smiled at her, and got a startled flash of a smile back in response. "Yes," she said. Her voice was so liquid that for a moment the secretary--her name plate read Theresa--seemed unsure that Jalian had actually spoken a complete word.

  Theresa blinked after a moment, and then touched a finger to the intercom. She did not take her eyes from Jalian. "Mister Ellis? Your--guest--is here."

  The voice that answered was abrupt, and very male; Jalian frowned. "Good. Send her in." Theresa removed her thumb from the intercom, and started to rise from her chair. Jalian stopped her with a gesture.

  "I can follow directions, I think."

  The girl looked flustered. "Well, down the hall. Third door on the left. His name is on it."

  Jalian inclined her head slightly. "Thank you, Theresa." She pronounced the name with a soft th. Theresa was looking up at her, unblinking, and Jalian smiled softly. The girl looked away suddenly, blushing furiously, and Jalian left her there.

  Henry Ellis glanced up at the opening of his door. He shifted the toothpick in his mouth from the right corner to the left. "Dear, did anybody ever teach you how to knock?"

  The door still swinging slowly away from her, Jalian paused, and studied Henry. "Actually, no. No," she said after a moment, "I don't think so. Why do you ask?" She seated herself in the right-most visitor's chair, close to the door.

  Henry studied her curiously. She was strange; stark. She spoke in a harsh, clipped manner, as though she wished to destroy the beauty of her voice. "You're from the Department of Defense?"

  Jalian ignored his question. "I have come here to ask your
opinion, as the second-best physicist at our disposal. The information I require concerns the theory of multiple time tracks that you and Nigao Loos published several months ago." She withdrew a creamy white envelope from the inside pocket of her dress jacket, and laid it on Henry's blotter.

  Henry picked it up, and tore it open with a wooden letter opener that sat next to his out box. He scanned it briefly. Its contents were fairly normal; answer questions, don't ask questions, don't talk about whatever questions she asks. It was signed by his superiors in DoD. (Both he and Nigao held reserve commissions in Aerospace; it was the price they had been forced to pay for the applications technology for ENCELIS.)

  He handed the letter back to Jalian. "Okay. What do you want to know?"

  Jalian put the letter away and sat up straighter in her chair. What she told Henry Ellis then, only two others had ever heard before, and only one of those was certain he believed her. The first was Jeremy Carson, a theoretical physicist and Undersecretary of Defense to President Kennedy the Third; Georges was the other.

  "I will," she said, choosing her words carefully, "have you listen to a hypothetical situation. There is a question that arises from this situation, and you will answer that question."

  Henry Ellis was scratching on a blank pad of paper with a pencil. He wasn't looking at the pad of paper, though, he was looking at Jalian. At her eyes. At the silver in her eyes.

  "Stop that!" Jalian snapped irritably, with sudden sharpness, and Henry whipped his eyes away from hers. He froze for a moment, and then said, "Excuse me. That was rude."

  Jalian shrugged. "It does not matter. Are you listening?"

  "I'm listening." The words came hard; Henry felt, for the first time since childhood, the breath of the old unknown, like a wind on the back of his neck. Since his early days in college he had dedicated himself to the study of the new unknown; but now this specter sat before him, with those erotic silver eyes . . . Henry forced himself to meet her gaze, and said roughly, "Go ahead."

  Jalian spoke with amusement; her words were little more than a whisper, and Henry had to strain to listen. "The hypothetical situation that I relate to you is as follows. In the year 2007 there is a nuclear war which destroys civilization. In the centuries following that war, humanity barely survives. Eventually, a primitive social order is re-established by ..." She used the silverspeech words, "... ken Selvren, a group of people who call themselves ken Selvren. Near the beginning of the twenty-eighth century of your Gregorian calendar, these people learn to travel from one alternate timeline to another, in search of resources that were depleted by those who tried to destroy their world."