The Armageddon Blues

by The Armageddon Blues (new ed) (mobi)

  Henry leaned forward slightly. "Go ... on."

  Jalian watched him quizzically. "The daughter of the Eld ... of the leader of the people I speak of ... this daughter knew more about the outtime technology than any of the rest of her people. For reasons of her own, this daughter stole a portable Gate, and set the Gate to access what is known as a negative entropy timeline. This is a timeline where time"

  "runs backward. An anti-matter timeline," Henry Ellis finished. "How can you know about that? Nigao hasn't even published that section of theor--"

  "This woman," said Jalian grimly, "entered a negative entropy timeline"

  The point of the pencil that Henry was holding snapped. "You can't have done that," he said simply. "You're talking about an anti-matter timeline. You'd blow" He took a deep breath, and exploded, "Christ, you can't even for a minute expect me to believe "

  Jalian d'Arsennette, the daughter of Ralesh who was the daughter of Morine, whose ancestors had ruled Silver-Eyes for more than five centuries, plucked a knife out of nowhere and used it to pin Henry Ellis' tie to his desk top. She slapped him twice, removed the knife from the tie, and made it vanish. Without particular heat, she said, "Do not interrupt me again." She watched, as the stunned, uncomprehending look on the engineer's face gave way to beginning fury. She laid one knife, and another, and then a third, in a parallel row on Henry's side of the desk. "You may attempt to pick up one of these when you choose.... I was saying to you, this woman of ken Selvren enters a negative entropy timeline; her ratio of entry is extremely high, approximately 14 million to one. Her actual interaction with the timeline is minimal; a duration of some two hours. She survives the experience, and reappears on the timeline that she exited in the days before the nuclear war. The year is what you call 1962, and there are forty-five years until Armageddon."

  Henry waited until he was entirely sure she was finished speaking. The light from the overhead fluorescents was shining off the blades on his desktop. His eyes did not waver from hers. "What is your question?"

  She showed the first emotion he had seen in her; a deep, quivering breath. It seemed to him that he could almost hear /after all these years, the answer .../ She was holding the edge of his desk.

  "Is it possible to prevent Armageddon?"

  Sweat was trickling down the back of Henry's neck. He was thinking, this isn't happening, while something deep inside him assured him, yes, it is too happening. "May God help you, whoever the hell you are. I can't. I just don't know. Even Nigao could not answer that question, given your assumed parameters. Our field is very young. It only dates to 1962, when we first started detecting chronons." He looked up swiftly. "Your ... hypothetical person ... time-travelled to 1962." He stumbled getting the words out. "In 1969 the chronon event threshold jumped by a factor of eight and mystics all over the fucking planet went off the deep end and we don't have even the beginnings of a theory to account for it. What happened?"

  Jalian was sitting back in her chair, eyes closed. She wasn't sure what her reaction was, relief or despair; only that it was strong. He had not said yes, but he had not said no. She could still hope.

  Henry Ellis said fiercely, "What happened in '69?"

  Jalian shook her head briefly, and looked at him. "There was a battle. Eight timelines melted together."

  The toothpick that had rested securely in Henry's mouth throughout the interview dropped in two pieces to the blotter. "What?" Jalian stood abruptly. Henry noticed that the steel was no longer on his blotter. He could not remember when it had vanished. "That is what Georges tells me," she said simply. "He may be lying, of course."

  Henry said stupidly, "Who?"

  "Georges. And he should know. It happened inside of him."

  She turned to leave, and Henry said, "Miss d'Arsennette? Where are you going?"

  Jalian pivoted slowly, and smiled at him. Henry felt his perception of everything in the world but those silver eyes fade away, and was thinking with a cool, rational detachment that silver was the most erotic color that he knew, when Jalian said, "I am going to save the world." Her eyelids dropped sleepily, half covered the silver irises. "Good bye."

  The door seemed to close itself behind her.

  Henry Ellis stared at the motionless door.

  It was 1981, and there were twenty-six years left until Armageddon.

  Dateline 1985 Gregorian: December.

  Moscow, Russia.

  The winter wind was a senseless thing; as cold and meaningless as anything Gregor Pahvernuch knew of outside the works of man.

  Pahvernuch shook his head in disgust. He had just hung up the phone, and stood now looking out his window at the drifting snow, blowing down in random gusts across the streets. When he had calmed himself he turned to survey the three officers standing stiffly before his desk. He was a heavyset man, with an unlit cigar set between lips that were too red and fat. He was still wearing the dark overcoat he'd had on when he entered the hastily set up joint KGB-Militia Headquarters, and gone charging into the Operations Room.

  "You," he said with disdain, as though the words were offal, "you are the best the Committee for State Security can recruit, these days." He glanced at the man sitting in the chair by the door, under the wavering fluorescent lights. "And what of you," he asked with a sudden burst of chill fury, "what have you been doing this last hour?"

  Karien Karchovsky grinned widely, showing his teeth. "I, Comrade Pahvernuch? Watching this American is not my assignment." He uncrossed his legs, and stood. He walked with a measured pace around the three junior KGB agents. They were afraid, it showed in the way they stood and the way they stared straight ahead without meeting their superior's eyes.

  Fear was something they were all very good with.

  Karien stopped, and put an arm around one of the men. "Now, Comrade Shenderev here was, I believe, in charge of the group assigned to watch this, ah, ‘Jill Darsay,' I think her name is."

  Pahvernuch sighed. "I do not think that scaring these children is going to help us in resolving this annoyance, Karien. We must find the woman." He pulled off his overcoat, and dropped it on top of the desk. "You." He pointed at one of the KGB operatives. "Go find Colonel Djarska. If he's not at home he will probably be at the hotel; the Central Committee isn't meeting until tomorrow, but he'll probably be there early." The boy stood there a moment too long, and Pahvernuch screamed at the top of his lungs, "GO!" He glared at the junior agent, and the man fairly fled the room.

  Karien missed most of it; he had turned Nikolai Shenderev to face him. "Why, Nikolai, you're trembling."

  "No, comrade," the boy protested, and then immediately said, "Yes, comrade."

  Karien looked down at him; he was several centimeters taller. "Well, we are not such monsters as all that. Listen, you lost the woman you were to watch." He shrugged expansively. "These things happen. We will find her again; she may simply have stepped out to take dinner."

  Behind them, Gregor Pahvernuch snorted loudly.

  "No, no, I mean that," said Karien kindly. "Take Corporal Deteche and his troops and go screen people at the hotel. I'll be down in an hour or so."

  Nikolai left without protest; the third junior agent went with him, no doubt glad to get out of Pahvernuch's office with his ass in one piece.

  Karien Karchovsky watched them leave with a detached expression.

  Gregor Pahvernuch said after a moment, "Are you quite through kissing that pretty boy's nuts?"

  "The pretty boy's uncle sits on the Politburo, Gregor," said Karien bluntly.

  The news threw Pahvernuch visibly. "Oh?" He bit down hard on the cigar. "Oh. I did not know that."

  "I didn't think so." Karien picked up his overcoat from the chair on which he'd been sitting. "Well, I assume you've got things to do." He smiled without humor. "Certainly I do. If you see Ilya before the morning, send him to the hotel. That's where I'll be."

  Gregor said softly, "With the boychick, eh?"

  Karien lifted an eyebrow. "You could hurt my feelings, frien
d. No, I am simply going to see whether the American woman returns to her room, probably with a perfectly reasonable explanation as to where she has been, as I expect her to."

  "You believe, then, that she is just a tourist."

  Karien shrugged into his overcoat. "Who can say? If she is not, she has certainly done a convincing imitation. That she chose to vanish on the eve of the Central Committee's meeting is suspicious only if she has not returned to her hotel by a reasonable hour. It is not yet ten o'clock," he pointed out.

  Gregor stared at him. "Karien, you are one of my best friends, I tell you truly. But you play things too tight. Some day they're going to shoot you for it. And your protege, too."

  Karien grinned. "Probably. But at least I don't threaten the careers of nephews of members of the Politburo. You were about to. "

  "I was not," denied Pahvernuch. A bead of sweat glistened on his upper lip.

  "No?" Karien seemed to consider. "Perhaps not. Perhaps you were merely indulging your temper, and it got out of hand--who can say? Fortunately," he added on his way out the door, "it is not one of my concerns. I'll be back."

  After he was gone, Gregor Pahvernuch grunted, "I'll bet you will be, you flashy son of a bitch." He got back on the phone, and had to yell at the operator for a dial tone.

  At the hotel where the woman who had identified herself as Jill Darsay was staying--conveniently near the buildings where the Politburo was temporarily meeting--Karien Karchovsky checked with the hotel management, to see whether or not Miss Darsay had returned to her room. She had not, they informed him. The lobby held three KGB agents whom Karien recognized, trying to be conspicuous. They were succeeding quite well; after all, he thought cynically, what was the point of being a member of the Committee for State Security if one had to obscure the fact?

  As far as he could tell, none of them recognized him. They were too busy watching a pair of pretty East German women who were sitting together at the hotel bar, and being overcharged for the privilege. Karien could not for the life of him imagine why East Germans would want to vacation in Moscow. They did, though, with some regularity.

  He met Nikolai as he was leaving the elevators on the third floor. The American was in room three-twenty-eight; Nikolai had his soldiers, regular militia, rummaging through her possessions. "Sir!" said Nikolai. "I was just going downstairs to call you." He relaxed slightly, and said, "I tried calling from the hotel room, but the switchboard has gone home, and the phones are useless."

  Karien nodded. "Have you found anything in the room?"

  Nikolai shook his head. "No, nothing of note." He led Karien inside; Karien looked around with some curiosity. He'd never been inside one of the fancy foreign hotel rooms before. It was surprisingly similar to the hotels he was used to. One would think that for the extortionist prices the foreigners were paying they could get something a cut above this.

  The room was clean, with a large single bed, and sparkling white porcelain in the bathroom. There was a perfunctory wet bar, vodka and mixers, against the wall facing the bed. A balcony overlooked Moscow; Karien went into the freezing night air, and looked out over the city. He had been outside Russia many times, but the USSR proper only once, to West Germany, and he still remembered the sight of West Berlin, lit up at night; by comparison, Moscow was a dull city after dark. Even the Kremlin was dark--from where he stood, he could see the ruins where the explosions had brought down the eastern sections. Construction was going on from sunrise to sunset.

  Despite the fact that the government had already executed four persons for the terrorist attack, it was an open secret in high ranks that the truly guilty parties had not been found.

  What was worst about it was that all evidence pointed inward. This was not an act of foreign terrorism, instigated by the West; it was the work of Russians.

  Karien turned, and went back inside. "Nikolai, send your shitkicker soldiers home. We have KGB at the entrance, and you and I will wait here for her. If she is not found by morning we will alert the general militia."

  Nikolai looked at him. "We are just going to wait?"

  "Unless you wish to search all of Moscow in a night."

  "Wash a pig as much as you like, it goes right back to the mud."

  --Russian Proverb

  At 2:00 a.m., Jalian d'Arsennette returned to her hotel room. She had spent the night on the hotel roof, watching the stars, and listening with other senses to the Moscow night. It was an evening well spent, with the colored lenses she had been wearing to disguise her eye color removed; her eyes felt normal for the first time in weeks.

  She truly had come to Russia largely as a tourist. She checked with contacts she'd been given as a matter of course, not because she expected anything to come of it.

  She was sleepy, and not expecting trouble. And cold; even Corvichi metaphysics and Silver-Eyes kartari could not keep her fully warm, in the winter night and winds of Moscow.

  She opened the door, and knew instantly that there were persons inside. Somebody moved toward her in the darkness with surprising speed and coordination. She reached for steel, reflexively, before remembering that her knives were in a safe deposit box in New York. The delay was critical. She found herself slammed back against the door, and a voice said in harshly accented English, "You have made a terrible mistake, Miss Darsay."

  It took her a long moment to realize on an emotional level what had happened; this man was touching her.

  Jalian d'Arsennette blinked in wonder, in the darkness; she could not even see the warmth of their figures, the room was too warm and she too recently in from the frozen night.

  She remembered, later, thinking clearly, KGB; and then she killed the man who had dared touch her.

  The lights came on. One of her contacts, a young man named Nikolai Shenderev, was removing his hand from the light switch next to the bed.

  Sprawled on the floor, with his neck at an unlikely angle, was a man whom Jalian did not recognize.

  Shenderev's mouth was working. "He ... he didn't suspect you. He was just going to ... throw a scare into you."

  Jalian knelt slowly, and touched fingers to the dead man's temple. She stood abruptly, and said without humor, "He succeeded." She thought to shut the door, and said over the sound of the lock latching, "He did not suspect me, you are correct. He suspected you; you show your fear far too easily." She gestured. "Help me with the body."

  "What?" He was shaking his head in a daze. "You don't understand. I'm going to be shot now."

  Jalian crossed the distance between them in two steps. "No, you will not. But you must do as I say. Exactly as I say."

  With agonizing hesitation, he nodded. "Very well. I have little to lose at this point."

  "‘Life is unbearable, but death is not so pleasant either,'" Jalian said.

  "What?"

  "You have everything to lose, idiot."

  "Peace and freedom do not come cheap, and we are destined--all of us here today--to live out most if not all of our lives in uncertainty and challenge and peril."

  --John F. Kennedy, Address at the University of North Carolina, October 12, 1961.

  Dateline 1986 Gregorian: February.

  Saskatchewan, Canada.

  The forest spoke. It was quiet and hushed, yet never wholly silent. There was no wind, and the animals were still; but the bows of the trees creaked under the weight of the snow. Occasional limbs, weighted beyond their strength, snapped with the sharpness of a rifle shot. The sound of the break echoed a long distance before dying.

  In late evening, a silver, gull-wing twelve-cylinder sports car drove through the gathering darkness. It flashed through the dark forest at insane speeds, along winding roads made slick by snow and ice. Inside the car, music played.

  Well, the man he gotta whisper

  When he tell you 'bout the news

  ICBM's are comin in;

  You know those bombs don't know the blues.

  Nigao Loos, sitting in the passenger seat, was thinking with a calm born of t
error that he did not really like reggae, and had never liked the Armageddon Blues Band to begin with, and if he had, then the last two days of traveling would have cured him of it; Radioactive, to all appearances, was the only cassette in the car.

  He'd tried to turn the radio on. Once. His hand was still sore.

  In the driver's seat, with one hand resting lightly on the wheel, Jalian drove north along Provincial Highway 102. The digital readout told her that the car was doing 108 kph. Some time ago a sign had told them they were driving past McClellan lake.

  Nigao had almost despaired of ever arriving wherever they were going. Two days ago he'd been in Southern California; now he was in Saskatchewan. Two days from now he'd probably be in the Arctic Circle.

  Jalian's hand moved briefly. The music died. A sign at the side of the road flashed by them: Brabant Lake Campground. Without the music her voice seemed unnaturally loud. "You may cease being scared. We have arrived."

  Nigao nodded wordlessly.

  Somewhere out there was the man he was being taken to meet.

  Georges Mordreaux.

  Consider the man.

  He was born in 1712, with a talent. Entropy tended to decrease in his vicinity; objects became more orderly, more energetic. He survived two and a half centuries and then some, despite three incidents that should have killed him, and then he battled a device from seven and a half centuries in his future.

  He won that battle, and because he won it, he spent the next fifteen years alone, in a cabin in the wilds of north Canada. For a little under three minutes, on a warm summer night in 1969, in the dirt parking lot of a 7-11, he stood with a small device glowing in his cupped hands, a device that looked like a hand grenade and would have been a one-way ticket to oblivion for any human who had ever lived except Georges Mordreaux. The device burned itself out, as it burned Georges' eyes out of his skull, as it melted in his hands and cooked them to the bone.