The Armageddon Blues

by The Armageddon Blues (new ed) (mobi)

  To win that battle, he was forced to reach through eight timelines, to tear power from eight analogues of himself. Purely as a side effect of doing so he destroyed the walls between the worlds, caused eight timelines to coalesce within himself.

  His memories encompassed eight separate existences, of eight separate men. There was no trouble in distinguishing which memory track was "real"; reality held Jalian. There was only one memory track, one timeline, that held Jalian.

  In the months, and years, following the battle in which he lost his eyesight, he waited; waited for his eyes to regenerate, for the scars on his hands to fade. They did not. He had held within his hands energies that warped together eight timelines, and it marked him.

  And the talent, which was always somewhat out of his control, which had guarded and protected him through two hundred and fifty-seven years, turned.

  It flared like a nova.

  Multiplied by a factor of eight.

  They pulled off the road, into a nearly deserted dirt parking lot. A green van and a light blue trailer stood lonely watch under the single hanging floodlight. Jalian pulled in next to the trailer and killed the motor. There was a small brick building at one end of the parking lot. Light spilled from its opening door. A ranger in a heavy jacket approached the car as Jalian and Nigao were getting out. The ranger, a man in his late forties, was tall, and heavily muscled; he reminded Jalian of the farmers of Clan Silver-Eyes. "Ma'am? Can I help you?" He glanced at Nigao with distaste.

  Jalian ignored him. She turned to Nigao. "Come. We are late enough."

  Nigao stared about. "You said we were there."

  The ranger said, more loudly, "Ma'am? You shouldn't be out in weather like this dressed like that. Not him either," he said, gesturing curtly at Nigao's flashy polyester sports jacket and slacks.

  Jalian stepped onto the hood of the car, took a step across it, and came down next to Nigao. She took one of his lapels in her hand, and pulled him into the trees that lined the road. They were well into the dark forest before the ranger, flashlight glowing, caught up with them. Jalian turned to face him. "Lady, there's nothing out the way you're heading. You'll both freeze to death."

  Jalian sighed. Georges kept telling her not to draw attention to herself. She took a step forward, and brought her right knee up hard into the ranger's groin. The man gave a sudden, whistling scream that condensed as fog in the sub-zero air. Jalian stepped around him, plucked a knife from her left shoulder sheath, and struck him in the back of the head with the handle. He dropped heavily. Nigao nodded, without surprise. Jalian vanished momentarily, and returned with a length of wire rope that she'd used twice now in the two days Nigao had been with her. She propped the ranger against a tree, and bound him with the ease of long practice.

  When she was finished, Jalian motioned to the middle-aged physicist, standing with his shoulders stooped in the cold gloom. "Problem solving," she explained. "Come. He is waiting."

  They walked into the night.

  Nigao never remembered that night clearly afterward. They walked for hours, trudging through drifts of snow, slogging on through the sleet that came a few kilometers into their journey. He perceived everything with an unnatural clarity. There was little light, yet he saw with ease the ground that he walked. Jalian was a luminous blob of moving white, and he fancied that he saw a faint, reddish glow from her skin. His sense of smell was very acute; in a calm revery he found himself distinguishing between the spoor of animals, and the scent of various plants. Imagination, he told himself without conviction. The forest changed with shocking abruptness.

  Leafy trees appeared among the pine. Fruit appeared only a score of meters past them. The snow and ice vanished from the ground; the ground itself became soft and grassy.

  Nigao Loos was walking by a cherry tree when the world blurred.

  He stopped abruptly. Jalian continued on a few steps, then turned back. "What is wrong?"

  "I ..." He cleared his throat. "I can't see. I can't see," he repeated with growing alarm.

  Jalian held his face with one hand, and lifted an eyelid to examine his eye. She nodded. "As I thought." She made a quick flicking motion with one finger, and Nigao felt his contact lens lift away from the surface of his eye. She did the same thing with the other eye, and suddenly he could see again.

  "What did you do?" he whispered. He blinked. His contacts were out, and he could see perfectly. "What did you do to me?"

  Jalian ignored him, and resumed walking. Nigao followed silently.

  Half a kilometer along, they found growing flowers. Jalian led Nigao through the flowers, and into a dense thicket of orange trees. The spaces between the trees grew narrower and narrower, until Nigao was sure they would be caught, unable to move forward or back, and would die here in this insane forest. He struggled on after the vanishing white form before him. Suddenly the trees were gone.

  They stood at the edge of a vast clearing. Fruit trees of every description stood around its edge. Inside, a garden grew like a jungle. Rows of vegetables reached up two and three meters into the air.

  In the center of the garden, there was a wooden cabin, with a microwave antenna perched incongruously atop it. Sitting on the small porch before the doorway, a rather large man was whittling a piece of wood. He was humming as he worked. As Jalian and Nigao emerged from the woods, he glanced up, said, "Hello, Doctor, Jalian." He went back to carving. A few seconds passed, and he put the knife down, ran his fingers along the wood, and put the wood down with the knife, at the side of the porch.

  Jalian said, "Hello, Georges."

  Georges Mordreaux stood, dusting wood flakes off his pants, and came down to greet them. He took Nigao's outstretched hand, and Nigao felt rather than saw the gloves that covered the hand. His eyes were fixed on Mordreaux's face. Georges had taken his hand without fumbling, and he moved like a sighted man; but Georges Mordreaux's eyes were a blasted ruin.

  Georges tilted his head to one side. "Is it that bad, then, still?"

  Nigao stammered something incoherent. Georges shrugged, and said cheerfully, "Ah, well. Jalian, I hope you drove more carefully this time."

  Jalian said blankly, "I always drive carefully."

  "As I thought," Georges nodded. He took Nigao by the arm, and led him inside. The cabin consisted of a single room, with a small couch, a bed against one wall, and a desk against another. Bookshelves lined the wall, and Nigao looked at them without comprehension; how could the man read a book?

  The floor was simple wood, brightly burnished even though it was slightly green. A woven rug covered most of it. A long wooden table stood over the rug. A three-dimensional chessboard was set up atop it. On the one empty bookshelf, there was a compact stereo, playing a song about a street of dreams.

  A monitor glowed on the desk, and Nigao felt another subtle wave of disorientation. He had no eyes.

  Jalian was leaning over the chess game. "Who's winning?"

  "Dancer," said Georges. He was tapping instructions into the computer, somewhat awkwardly. He finished, and turned down the intensity control on the monitor. He did not attempt to turn it off. "Now, Monsieur Loos, have a seat." He gestured at the bed, and sat himself in the chair before the desk.

  Nigao glanced from Jalian to Georges. He sat uneasily. "Well, as you know, Henry Ellis and I are adding what we hope will be a chronon generator to our research facility. There are some imbalances in our fifth-order equations that have led us to great uncertainty as to whether or not there actually are discrete timelines at all. We have considerable evidence that indicates that there are alternate timelines, and that they do remain discrete; but we are not sure. Many important details of our design depend upon whether or not that assumption is correct. One of my superiors in the Department of Defense suggested that I ask you." Nigao looked at Georges. The man was nodding, and seemed to have followed the explanation so far. Nigao did not look at Jalian, did not see the faint smile. "For example," said Nigao hesitantly, "if the timelines are not discrete, then
the spin number of the chronons will be established randomly. If the timelines are discrete ..."

  "Then the chronon spin number would establish itself toward a higher number if it was traveling from one direction relative to us, and toward a lower number if it was traveling from the other.... It might be helpful to think of the directions as north and south."

  Nigao turned to stare at Jalian. "Yes ... that's correct. What do you mean by north and south?"

  "On the Great Wheel ... never mind." Jalian looked up from the chessboard. "Georges, you can beat it. Take your King's knight up one level to pin its bishop. Then ..."

  Georges said mildly, "No kibitzing, Jalian."

  Nigao said, "You're playing 3-D chess with an ‘it'?" He glanced at the computer. "I didn't think there were any programs for--"

  Georges was shaking his head. "Dancer is one of the sentients at the Red Spot. It's quite bright about spatial relationships." A beeping sound came from just behind Georges. He reached behind without looking, and depressed a keypad. Conversationally, he said to Nigao, "I read your paper on chronon encoding, about how you intend to alter chronons into their high and low probability states as a method of binary encoding. Why do you sign your papers as Nigao Loos and Henry Ellis?"

  Nigao felt increasingly bewildered. "Lennon and McCartney ... Henry files his patent applications for his computer designs as Henry Ellis and Nigao Loos. Look, uh, could you please turn down that stereo?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  Nigao took a deep breath. "Very well, sir ... can you answer my question?"

  "Oh, yes," said Georges. "There are alternate timelines. Jalian has been in some."

  Nigao looked at Georges. "Yes?" He glanced at Jalian, who was ignoring them. He returned to Georges. "That is your answer?" He glared in near speechless outrage. "You don't by any chance have, have, proof for that claim?"

  Georges Mordreaux smiled at him. Nigao Loos lost his anger instantly. He thought to himself in horror, What did I just yell at?

  And then something moved, deep within his mind. Meaning imprinted itself silently upon his awareness. /listen with other senses./

  Nigao stared at Georges, like a rabbit caught in the beams of an oncoming car.

  /Remember./

  He had time for only a moment of fear. The last thing he saw was Georges smiling at him without even a touch of malice, and memories rushed in upon Nigao, of a night spent in a dirt parking lot in 1969, and there was a flaring light, the last light he ever saw, ever saw, ever ...

  Nigao's eyes fluttered closed, and he slipped from the edge of the bed, to the floor.

  Georges looked tired. "Jalian ..."

  "Oh, no," she interrupted. "I brought him here and I'll take him back, but I will not pick him up off the floor. He's your body."

  "Jalian, he's not a body."

  "He is too," she said flatly. "I don't ask you to pick up my bodies."

  "Jalian, my hands hurt."

  Jalian sighed. She looked indecisive. "He looks comfortable," she offered. "And he'll wake up in a few hours anyway."

  /Jalian./

  With a swift, vicious movement, Jalian stooped, picked the small man off the floor and dumped him unceremoniously on the bed. "It's not fair," she said aloud. "I don't ask you to pick up my bodies."

  "Thank you, Jalian."

  Jalian folded her arms over her chest. "It's okay," she said finally.

  Jalian awoke in the hours before dawn. She was not sure what woke her. She sat up on the couch, stretching slowly, without yawning, without closing her eyes. The computer was still glowing, the stereo was still playing. She found both mildly distracting, but knew better than to attempt to turn them off. As silent as the stereo was, it was probably turned off now.

  She rose from the couch with an economy of movement that was out of place in a woman who looked as young as she did; a lack of wasted effort that came from doing nothing on impulse. She checked her knives without thinking about it, placement, accessibility. She no longer even noted particularly the two knives in her left shoulder sheath, the knives she had killed her mother with. Only five of the six sheaths held weapons. The sixth knife she had given to Georges nearly two decades ago. Even with her memories to help him, she doubted still that he understood what accepting a knife from her would have meant to a male ken Selvren.

  But that was another thing she no longer thought much about. A mutual need, a mutual goal, a degree of friendship that she had not found with any other person in this kisirien forsaken time; these were the elements of her relationship with Georges Mordreaux.

  The door to the cabin was open. Jalian could see, in the dark, the infra-red radiation from Georges, sitting on the porch with his back to her. Her feelings concerning this man were something that she had not sought to explain to herself in many years. It was close to seventeen years now since Georges had lost his eyesight.

  In seventeen years, neither of them had spoken of love.

  From the porch, Georges Mordreaux's voice drifted back to her. "Will you come sit with me?"

  Jalian glanced to her left. Nigao Loos was huddled on the bed, lying curled in a tight ball against the cold. She hesitated a moment, shrugged, and drew the blanket up to cover him. She went out to Georges.

  Georges moved over slightly on the porch, motioned to her to sit. Jalian settled down next to him. Georges was silent for a moment. His glove-covered hands were folded one over the other in his lap. "What have you been doing?"

  Jalian pulled her jacket more tightly closed. It was cold out, though not as cold as a winter night of her childhood. The weather was different in this time, before the Fires changed everything. The areas that got as hot as the Selvren valley of her childhood never got as cold; those that got as cold never came close to getting as hot. "Many things," she answered Georges. Her breath plumed white into the night air, under the stars and half moon. "I killed a man in the USSR. It was an accident." She shivered. "I have never killed a person before, even a male, accidentally."

  "How many have you killed, now?"

  Jalian said distantly, "It would be more trouble than it is worth to count."

  Georges sighed. "Ah, well.... It solves nothing, you know."

  She shook her head. "I do not know. I have no love for these Americans, Georges. They are arrogant beyond words. But ... but they are better than their alternatives. The Russians, the Chinese--they are horrors, Georges." She started to say something else, stopped. "I have not been to China. I have only studied it. It is better perhaps than Russia, because it is less efficient. I have been to Russia. I would not wish such a home on Real Indians."

  "I know.... I visited them in the mid 1930's." He shook his head. "They have not changed, I think. Only grown more practiced in their inhumanity."

  Jalian said in a small voice, "I do not say I like it, Georges. I take no pleasure in killing." She smiled, a hesitant ghost smile in the night. "Neither do I avoid it when necessary; and I make my own decisions. I work with the Americans, not for them. I see no better course. There are too many persons alive in this time. I can do nothing alone."

  Georges grew very still. Beside him, Jalian looked at him for the first time. "Georges? Your thoughts?"

  Georges voice stumbled slightly getting the words out. "I think ... it seems to me that there must always be alternatives."

  Jalian said curiously, "You are not specific."

  Georges shook his head decisively. "It is not a specific thought. Only ...." He moved one crippled hand in a dismissing motion. "It is not important. But think: those in control of the atomic weapons, they are not the American people, nor the Russian people, nor the Chinese or Indian or French or English people. It is not the politicians who control the weapons. It is," said Georges, "the soldiers who control the weapons."

  Jalian said without inflection, "That is true."

  Georges chuckled warmly. "Jalian, if I say something you find silly"

  "Obvious," said Jalian. "Perhaps it was a bit obvious."

  Ge
orges smiled. "Ah, well. Tell me more of what you have done."

  Jalian leaned against him, let her eyes close. She did not comment when his arm pulled her closer. She was drowsy, she had not slept in two days aside from the last few hours, and he was a warmth that protected her from the slight breeze from the south. "It is not so much," she said sleepily. "I have seen some movies, read many books, and killed a man by accident. I tried to learn math again, to translate Corvichi physics into human physics. I cannot do it ... there is almost nothing I find in common between the systems. I have taught myself to regress my memory back to when ghess'Rith was teaching me, but even with all the memories I possessed as a child, I cannot solve the equations that suggest themselves concerning what we are attempting." She rested quietly against Georges. "We can change time, certainly," she said very softly. "We already have. We can stop Armageddon from happening ... perhaps. I do not know. None of the cycles complete."

  She said nothing more after that, and in a while Georges became aware that she was asleep. He sat upright on the porch, with Jalian in his arms. He reached into her mind once, and withdrew like a man who had touched a live wire.

  In her dream, she was being held by ghess'Rith.

  For over an hour, he sat with her. He made a note to ask her whether she'd brought him any new seeds, and to ask her to remember to bring him some birds, next time she came. Or bees, perhaps, for honey.

  His position did not tire him. He did not grow tired in the conventional sense of the word; he dreamed, but rarely slept. Sometimes, though, sometimes it seemed to him that the world and all that were in it were only insubstantial ghosts that affected him in the most minor of ways, and then his ennui grew so great that it was almost unendurable.

  Only recently had it occurred to him that he was vastly old.

  Georges shivered, and chased the thoughts away. Jalian stirred in his arms, and he held her more tightly.