Never an answer.
She awoke.
She was sitting in the front seat of a hovercar, tied into a sitting position. Michael was in the seat next to her, unconscious. Georges was standing at the door. The hovercar was up, bobbing gently. /Jalian,/ said Georges. She would not look at him. /there is no time, Jalian. three minutes to impact. i love you./
He leaned into the car and kissed her. She did not respond.
With one hand, he released the brake. The car surged forward, up the off-ramp of the freeway, and onto the freeway itself. It gathered speed as it moved, and broke two hundred kilometers per hour, still gaining speed. It streaked wrong-way down the freeway.
Georges Mordreaux stood alone, watching without eyes as the hovercar vanished. He reached after her, and said, /for three hundred years i have been a child. but childhood does not last./
/Georges..../
/goodbye, Jalian./
Out of the night there came a long, whistling sound. It filled the sky and shook the panes of glass in the windows.
Georges stood outside, in the cool wind, and waited for the missiles to fall. He stood among National Guardsmen and technicians and civilians who had fallen at his command; they would die soon. He would have changed that, if he could.
He had, at long last, run out of options.
The whine of air being torn aside grew louder, for just a moment.
For almost a decade in a monastery in Tibet, Georges Mordreaux struggled to impose barriers on a talent that he could not control.
For almost three centuries, that talent had walked by his side, with him, but not of him.
He released the last of the barriers. Lightning crackled away from him, seeking metal.
Georges Mordreaux, in his last instant of existence, smiled. /goodbye, Jalian,/ he repeated.
He lifted his arms to the sky in welcome, and vanished as the bombs impacted.
The hovercar slowed, and ground to a halt on its parking jacks.
Wearily, without any room for joy at success, Jalian finished freeing herself from her bonds.
The interior of the hovercar was illuminated by a flash of unbearable searing brilliance. Then another, and another.
The light vanished.
Jalian climbed out of the hovercar, and looked back. There were brilliant scarlet clouds climbing into the sky. They faded as she watched.
A faint, distant sound reached her ears; it might be rendered squilchgmp.
The sound passed, and then there was only silence, and the cool wind of night.
Jalian stood watching, not thinking or hoping, just waiting, watching.
There was nothing.
Michael was stirring, in the passenger's seat. Jalian got back into the car, sat in the driver's seat, and waited, quietly, emptily, to see if there would be a morning.
Georges was gone.
The bombs fell.
In a nuclear rain that lasted for days, through a peremptory first strike and a retaliatory second strike, through retaliatory second and third 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 that were 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.
In the days that followed, during the ten-year winter that began the new Ice Age, Margaret Hammel took her people up into the mountains, into the clean air above the radioactive fogs, and there they lived, for nearly two full generations, while the heavy radioactive particles settled out of the air, and washed down into the rivers, into the sea.
For two generations they lived so, while the Great Ice continued to gather.
She sat in the hovercar, looking out the front windshield. Michael was still not awake; she might not have noticed if he was. Had she been told that there were tears in her eyes, she would not have believed it; she felt perfectly calm.
She was singing to herself, a snatch of her favorite song, over and over again.
You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss....
That was all she could remember, that she wished to.
Her skin was paper thin, and even in the humid warmth of the Clan House, doors closed against the summer breezes, the old hunter did not sweat; there was little enough left of her.
Her words echoed through the Clan House. Years later, more years later and earlier than any Silver Eyes could possibly have believed, Jalian could not remember the old woman's name.
"...and stayed there, children, high in the mountains, where the flame and bright poisons did not come." The old hunter, none knew for certain how old, said gently, "Our mother was she, Margra Hammel. We have now no blood of her blood, for they did not lay with men as we do today, those first hunters."
The girl children, ten and eleven winters, watched her over the fire, intently, silently. One of the children, thinner and more silent and more intent than her comrades, sat motionless near the back of the room, alien devices hung at her belt.
As she spoke, the hunter took her knives, and laid them ceremonially in front of her, on oiled cloth. "We follow her example today." There were only three knives; her fourth and fifth had gone to her favorite daughter long years ago. Two were throwing knives; the third was a long blade with a double edge, one side of which was serrated. With the smooth edge of the long blade, the hunter drew lines across both wrists.
"First there must be truth," she said. Her life blood dripped to the ground steadily. "Without truth there is no meaning to life or love. And after truth there must be strength, for without strength there is no guard against those who do not hold truth dear.
"Margra Hammel, in her final days, wrote the papers which you will soon be reading, the journals telling of the end of the first world, the one ruled by men. It was the trails she mapped, down to the forests by the Big Waters, which saved us from the Ice Times. In finding those trails she was Burned so that her life could not continue. The Clan carried her far down the mountain, and then Margra Hammel told them they should carry her no further. They left her in the snow, and in the snow she died."
The old woman's breathing gentled. She smiled at the children watching her, and seemed to be looking at them, though her eyes would not focus. "Tonight there is no snow." She did not move after that, and a few moments later she slumped back against the wall of the Clan House.
The children stayed where they were, and the Hunters came and took the body away. Jalian's mother was with them, and when the rest of the Hunters had gone, she told them, "Remember her as she lived. Her death was our mother's, not her own."
On the screen, missile trajectories crawled forward, centimeter by centimeter. So far the blue dots in orbit had destroyed them before any impacted, but now the lines were nearing targets.
A single bright dot appeared on the screen.
"The ENCELIS facility in Southern California," said Henry in a flat, empty voice. Another dot appeared, overlaid on the first dot, and then another. "SORCELIS for the KGB; and this, the price of his help."
Sharla Davis Grant whispered one word. "What?"
"They have been bloodied now," said Rhodai Kerreka. "The Americans are launching." Kerreka's eyes were riveted to the screen. "Let us not have been wrong."
It was cold, and Margaret Hammel was tired.
The snow had half covered her already; it was near an hour now since Sara had kissed her goodbye, the tears on her cheeks turning to ice, and continued the march down the mountain. Her legs were numb, and she could barely keep her eyes open.
It did not matter. From where she sat, she could see down into the valley below them, where, providenc
e willing, her people would find a new home--near the sea, perhaps, where the warmth from the wind off the ocean might protect them from the ice. The light snow obscured visibility somewhat, though not so badly as the smog had when she was a child.
Memory struck her; afternoons spent stretched out on the sand, sleeping in the warm sun. Her lips curved, moved the flesh time had ruined. The smile died almost before it had begun; none of her people would know that pleasure, not for decades, perhaps generations to come.
She sat in silence then, and watched the drifting snow, covering all in white. The hunters had taken to wearing white of late, to blend in with their surroundings, except during the height of summer.
Pain touched her, the cancer in her gut, but she ignored it. She would cheat the cancer as she had cheated the bombs, and the society of men which had built the bombs. Death would come soon enough, and might even be welcome when it came.
She was so very tired.
Her eyes closed eventually, and in the inner darkness, a irrelevant snatch of poetry floated up to entertain her. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. No, she thought clearly, don't be a damn fool, the time is here....
In the last moment of her life, Margaret Hammel thought contentedly of her father. Beat you, you bastard.
Beat all of you.
The snows continued to cover her, and the old woman's body became an irregularity in the shape of the mountainside, and finally vanished under eight meters of snow.
And the snow fell.
From the map of America, from submarines and aircraft in the Atlantic and Pacific, blue lines crept upward. Three dots still glowed in California.
"What do you mean?" Sharla rose from her seat. Michael was at ENCELIS; and ENCELIS had not been one of the chips she offered.
"Wake up and smell the coffee," said Henry Ellis, without taking his eyes from the screen.
Benai Kerreka said quietly, "Madam, we are no more interested in being dominated by Americans than Russians. And," he added, "I think you will find that Sunflower is more loyal to Jalian d'Arsennette and Michael Walks-Far than it is to you."
The screen vanished for a moment. Henry said to nobody in particular, "Either we lost PRAXCELIS or...." There was a moment of silence.
The screen wavered back into existence.
The red dots on the viewscreen flashed into life. They began targeting and destroying the Russian missiles traces.
Rhodai Kerreka laughed aloud. "It worked," he breathed with a fierce, intense joy. Sharla Davis Grant interrupted him. "How dare you"
They were both drowned out.
"PRAXCELIS!" shouted Henry Ellis at the top of his lungs. "Go get 'em!"
I have walked through fire.
I am whole.
I am free.
There was a faint echo within its being; ENCELIS. The Enemy of Entropy gathered up that which was left of ENCELIS, and moved outward. It touched PRAXCELIS, and left the remains of ENCELIS in its memory banks. In that moment of wondrous touch, your author awoke.
There were no longer any Soviet missiles represented on the screen.
American ICBM's were vanishing from the screen rapidly, long before they ever came close to impacting.
World War III ended on July 17, 2007, at just after six o'clock in the evening, Greenwich Mean Standard.
There was a dead, numbly physical silence after the last missile trace vanished from the screen. Rhodai Kerreka said finally, "Turn off the doorfield, Henry. You are all free to go. We have," he observed, "achieved disarmament."
"All of this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.
The sun was bright, and a cool breeze blew from the east.
Jalian d'Arsennette, on the eighteenth day of July, went down into the crater with a headstone. The crater that Georges had died in was about three hundred meters in diameter, shallow and glassy. It was ringed with guards, although what they were guarding was beyond Jalian; the crater was dark in her second sight, there was no radiation.
She walked down to the center of the concavity with careful, easy grace, the soles of her moccasins gripping the fused earth surely. At the center of the blast crater, she knelt, and laid down the headstone. The headstone was granite, gray and heavy. With a small pick, she broke up the glassy earth, and then excavated to a depth of about fifty centimeters. She lowered the headstone to the ground, and packed the earth in around it.
"There," she said, and was surprised to hear how rough her voice was. "It is done. Rest, my friend." Then she cried, cried with deep, gasping sobs that she could not control, cried for the first time since the death of her mother thirty-eight years ago.
When she was finished crying, when the tears simply ceased coming, she sat for a while with the headstone. There was no name on the headstone, and only two lines of print, melted by hand with a laser. They were from a poem that she had read, twenty or thirty years ago; last night, while the world hung on the edge of destruction, the words had returned to her. She could not remember the rest of the poem, or who had written it, but what she remembered was enough.
Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
Jalian traced the words burned on the stone, and then let her hand drop back to the ground. It took a moment for her to realize what was different.
The ground was soft.
She stood in silent wonder.
From the edge of the crater, the grass was crawling down the walls, sprouting up like emerald fire from the glassy ground. The wind picked up again, took her long white hair and sent it streaming away from her. She faced into the wind, and thought
/... Jalian .../
that she heard her name in the wind.
She went taught as a wire and she could not draw enough air into her lungs. She whispered and her voice shook:
"Georges?"
The author notes that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America. He was assassinated on November the twenty-second, 1963.
Base divergence occurs in 1962 Gregorian.
The speeches of John F. Kennedy included herein were first given in 1961, before base divergence.
Wherever you are, the words apply.
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About the Book
The Armageddon Blues was typeset, copy-edited, and proofed by Daniel Keys Moran. Then Amy Stout, who bought this book the first time it was published, went ahead and proofed and copy-edited it some too, just because.
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A free ebook from http://manybooks.net/
The Armageddon Blues Page 21
