Armageddon Rag

by George R. R. Martin

  She looked over at him and noted the serious look on his face. “Radical?” she said. “Shit, no. I is a revolutionary, massa, and the last lil’ hippie chick in the whole wide world.”

  Sandy grinned despite himself. “At least you have a sense of humor,” he said. “I never trusted revolutionaries who had no sense of humor.”

  “Fuck, man, these days you got to have a sense of humor. Any day now I expect to see Timothy Leary doing American Express commercials. ‘I didn’t need a credit card on the trips I used to take, but now, on the lecture circuit, my face won’t even get me a sugar cube. That’s why I carry this.’ Hell, if you don’t laugh, you have to cry.”

  “Tell me about Edan Morse,” Sandy said to her.

  Her big dark eyes flicked over at him again and held his gaze, amused and confident. “You did taw a puddy tat, you did,” she said wryly.

  Sandy frowned. “You saw my card?”

  “Sure. I’m Edan’s left hand. Gort is his right. Cute little card. Edan was less amused, however. He likes to think those days are gone and forgotten.”

  “Aren’t you taking a chance admitting all this?” Sandy asked. “Sylvester is a wanted fugitive. Suppose I went to the cops and fingered your boss.”

  “Well,” said Ananda, “in the first place you won’t. I’ve read enough of your writing to get a pretty good idea of what you’re like. I trust you. But even if I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter. Sure, Edan gets nervous when he’s linked to Sylvester or Von Doom or the Alfies. You’d get nervous, too. But it isn’t as though nobody suspects. The underground was always full of rumors. And I don’t have to tell you how thoroughly most of the radical groups had been penetrated, which means the feds heard those rumors, too. You want to call the FBI and tell ’em about Sylvester? Just tell Edan, and he’ll let you use his phone. You can’t prove it. The thing of it is, what you know and I know and they know won’t cut no ice unless there’s proof. Edan was always careful. You want to know about Edan? That’s the first thing. He’s careful. He’s had to be.”

  “Yeah?” Sandy said. “And what else is he?”

  “Committed,” said Ananda. “He’s a great man, Sandy. Really he is. You’ll see. If we’d had a few more like Edan Morse, the revolution would have come off when it should have, and this would be a better world today.”

  “How come the Alfies kicked this great, committed man out on his ass then?” Sandy asked, hoping to jar something loose.

  “That’s a distorted version of what really went down. It was Edan who washed his hands of the Alfies. They were squabbling and incompetent and fatally compromised. Fuck, I’d say about half of them were undercover cops. You know the kind—the ones who come to all the meetings and push for more and more violence so they have lots of terrorist atrocities to play up in the press. Edan had had enough of that, so he just flushed them away.”

  “Are you saying the infamous Sylvester turned nonviolent?”

  “Edan never had any use for meaningless violence,” Ananda replied.

  “Interesting,” Sandy said, “but it doesn’t square with the other stories I’ve heard. The way I hear it, Morse got weird. Spiritual.”

  “That’s not so far off,” Ananda said calmly. “Edan has vision. Power.”

  Sandy felt very uncomfortable. “Oh, great.”

  “You sound skeptical. Fine. I was the same way at first. Who could believe all this freaky occult shit, right? Well I do, now. I’ve seen things. Experienced things. I don’t pretend to understand it all, but I believe.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her large dark eyes, and the tip of her tongue flickered across her lower lip again in a gesture both nervous and strangely erotic. “You ever seen a ghost, Sandy?” she asked.

  A month ago he would have laughed at the question. But that was before his strange night in Chicago. He hesitated. “I—I’m not sure. Maybe. I think it was just a dream.”

  “The world is full of forces we don’t understand,” Ananda said cheerily. “You can deny them all you want, but that won’t make them any less real. That was part of what the whole counterculture thing was about, right? Shucking off the middle-class mindset, all the preconceptions we got from Mommy and Daddy and Reverend Jones, so we could see the world like it really was. Only the preconceptions were too strong for most. But not for Edan. He’s broken through.”

  “To what?” Sandy asked.

  “I’ll let him tell you,” she said. “Just keep an open mind. There are more things under heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in—”

  “Gotcha,” said Sandy, interrupting. They both laughed, for no apparent reason. Then there was a moment of awkward silence. Sandy sat there looking at her. He could feel a real sexual tension in the air. He tried to tell himself that Ananda was just a source, part of his story, but the attraction was undeniable. Much as he might try to look at the scenery, his eyes kept going back to her smooth bare midriff, her breasts pushing against the white halter, nipples clearly outlined, and her smile. He cleared his throat self-consciously, feeling like a high-schooler on his first date.

  Ananda broke the spell by asking him what he was working on. He told her about the novel he’d abandoned on page thirty-seven. She asked him about his travels, and he talked briefly about the friends he’d looked up, and made her laugh twice with a couple of his favorite anecdotes about Froggy. Then somehow he got onto the subject of his home life. Ananda frowned when he mentioned Sharon and sighed rather theatrically. “Oh, well,” she said. “Why is it the good ones are always taken, and the loose ones are always fascists?” She went on to tweak him about Sharon’s profession a little. “Real estate is such an oppressive sham. I mean, think of it. Owning the earth! Like owning the air. It’s crazy. Land should belong to everybody.” But she said it with such good-humored frankness that Sandy wasn’t bothered; nor did he feel any great urge to rush to Sharon’s defense.

  She had been talking about her own childhood in Los Angeles for a while when they finally came rolling up to Edan Morse’s beach house. It was a big, sprawling place, built on two levels, with a garage underneath it. Ananda picked a garage door opener off the dash, and the rough-sawn wooden door slid up and out of their way as they approached. Lights came on simultaneously. They all climbed out of the van and Gort stretched himself and grunted. Then they went upstairs. The house was clean, modern, tastefully furnished, yet somehow disturbing. It seemed very austere to Sandy. Everything spare and functional, but the paintings on the white walls, glimpsed quickly in passing, were vivid, surreal studies of twisted faces and figures bent in pain. But that wasn’t it. Something larger about the house felt wrong, somehow. Sandy put it down to a bad case of nerves.

  Edan Morse’s office looked out over the beach through a tinted plate-glass window. Out there the sun had just started to set. In front of the window stood a massive teak desk. It was the cleanest, neatest, most orderly desk Sandy had ever seen. In the middle of it was a blood-red blotter, precisely centered. There was also a gold pencil-and-pen set in a black marble stand, an antique silver dagger of unusual design, serpents coiling around the handle, an empty wooden IN basket, an empty wooden OUT basket, and a glass paperweight in the shape of a globe with a peaceful farm scene within. Shaking the paperweight would start a blizzard of fake snow, Sandy knew. His father had once had a paperweight just like that one. But there were no papers under Morse’s paperweight, or anywhere else on the big desk, except in the exact center of the blotter, where someone had placed Sandy’s purple calling card so squarely that the blotter seemed to frame it.

  Behind the desk was a leather swivel-rocker with a high back. Morse had it turned to look out over the waves and the setting sun, but he swung around when the door closed and looked up at Sandy.

  It was an uneasy moment. There were no other chairs in the room. Sandy was forced to stand in front of the desk. It reminded him of the times he’d been dragged before the principal in grade school. Gort and Ananda stood flanking him like the world’s oddest brace of p
atrol boys. Standing and looking down on Morse should have given him some kind of psychological advantage. It didn’t.

  Sandy had to admit it: there was something oddly impressive about Edan Morse. At first glance, Morse was so normal it made Sandy’s teeth hurt. Instead of the wild-eyed, Mansonesque, Rasputin-like character Sandy had imagined, he saw a slender, clean-shaven, smiling man in his middle thirties. Morse wore a white turtleneck and crisp new blue jeans. His light brown hair came to a small widow’s peak in the front. He had big brown eyes, a cleft in his chin, and dimples. The man who had helped found the American Liberation Front looked as though the only paramilitary group he could possibly be associated with was the Boy Scouts. For a fleeting, bizarre moment Sandy wondered whether Ray had just given him a shuck-and-jive to get rid of him.

  Then he noticed Morse’s jewelry, and the wholesome image cracked just a little. He wore a heavy pendant covered with astrological signs, and on his left hand was a huge silver ring with what appeared to be a dead black widow spider encased in lucite. And there was something in his eyes as well. Behind the soft brown surface warmth, something glittered briefly, and then it was gone. Sandy looked for it, and found no trace, and dropped his eyes, feeling confused. Maybe he was just seeing what he had expected to see: a fanatic. A journalist had to beware his preconceptions.

  Morse’s first words were innocuous enough, and they were addressed to Ananda, not Sandy. “How was your trip?” he asked.

  “No problems,” she replied. “Looks like it could be a nice evening. Not too chilly.”

  “Good,” Morse said. He snapped his fingers. “Where are my manners?” he said. “Gort, get Sandy a chair, will you? The big comfortable one from the games room should do nicely.”

  The giant left silently and returned in short order, carrying a huge overstuffed armchair as easily as Sandy might tote a folding bridge chair. He dumped it in the middle of the floor with a grunt. Sandy sat in it, crossed his legs, and faced Edan Morse. He had to look up now; Morse’s chair was higher than his was.

  They exchanged a few meaningless pleasantries, and then Morse dismissed both Gort and Ananda. When the door closed softly behind them, Morse’s smile grew taut, and they got down to business. “It was not necessary to leave this sort of message for me,” he said, picking up the silver dagger and using its point to tap lightly against Sandy’s card. “I would have seen you in any case. Rick Maggio phoned and told me about the story you’re working on. Hell, I would have contacted you if I’d had any idea how to find you. I want to talk about the Nazgûl, and my plans for them.”

  “Do you, now?” Sandy said. “How about Jamie Lynch? Do you want to talk about him?”

  Edan Morse leaned back in the rocker, toying with the knife in his hand and frowning. “Lynch? Why would I want to talk about that pig? I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Come off it, Morse! Or should I call you Sylvester? Or Maxwell? You know fucking well what I’m getting at. Where were you the night Jamie died?”

  Morse smiled thinly. “As a matter of fact, I was in Beverly Hills, at the home of an old family friend. A banker who was once close to my father. A rich, anal fascist, enormously respectable. The hour was late. I got him out of bed and stayed a long time, but he put up with it because he’s chairing a local charity drive and I was giving him a check for five thousand dollars. He despises me, but I’m certain he’ll remember my visit.”

  “So?” said Sandy. “So maybe you weren’t in Maine personally, but it was still your hand at work, long distance.”

  “There’s no possible way for you to prove that,” Morse said. He smiled his dimpled, Boy Scout smile.

  Sandy decided to shake him up a bit and see if the merit badges fell off. “Lynch was a very neat man. Organized. Filed all his correspondence. The cops found your letters, and carbons of his replies. They know you wanted the Nazgûl and he wouldn’t give ’em up. That’s motive. They have the letter where you arranged to send a representative to Lynch to talk things over, so they know why he admitted his killer. That’s opportunity. It’s all there.”

  “Then why am I sitting here, and not under arrest?” Morse said. “Come on. If these letters did exist, the killer would almost certainly have gone to Lynch’s filing cabinets and removed them, leaving a few earlier letters that were essentially harmless. By all accounts, the man who killed Lynch knew what he was doing. He wouldn’t leave anything obviously incriminating behind, would he?” Morse shook his head. “You’re wrong. But even if you were right about me, you couldn’t prove anything. Believe me. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to defend myself against ridiculous charges. I’ve been under suspicion for more shit than I can remember. I’ve been questioned and interrogated and hassled by whole battalions of pigs, I’ve been beaten up by establishment goons, I’ve been investigated by dozens of hot young reporters, and I’ve been forced to testify before two grand juries. No one has ever proved me guilty of any criminal act.” He leaned forward and pointed the knife at Sandy, as if for emphasis. “I’ll tell you this, though—I’m not sorry that somebody offed Lynch. Like I said, the man was a pig. Filth.”

  “Oh?” said Sandy. “Why was that?”

  “He was an exploiter, for starts. He had no talent himself. He had no creativity. He fed off the real creative spirits of our age. He leeched off the people’s music, turned it into some kind of shit-eating capitalist game. He was a pusher. I’ve got nothing against drugs, used for the right reasons. Drugs can be very liberating. But Lynch used them to control other human beings. If you saw the house he lived in, you have an idea how much wealth he bled from the people.”

  Sandy gave a snort of derision. “Hell,” he said. “You could have bought Lynch out of loose change, from what I hear.”

  Edan Morse shrugged. “So? I’m not proud of my wealth. My grandmother and great-grandfather accumulated most of it, immorally. But at least I’ve done my best to use it as a force for positive change. Jamie Lynch used his money only for himself. For power. That was all he cared about, ever. Power. Control. Money, sex, love, even the music he dealt in—they all meant power to him, and nothing else. He was a pig. A Nixon with long hair. He deserved to die. If I knew who killed him, I’d certainly never turn them in. It was an execution. People’s revolutionary justice.”

  “Jamie Lynch was a has-been rock promoter,” Sandy said. “How the hell does his death help the goddamned revolution?”

  “In ways you could not possibly understand,” Morse replied. “It has set forces in motion, forces that will now proceed to an inevitable, inexorable conclusion. Individuals and nations alike will be swept aside. The world will be remade in justice. We will have love and peace and freedom at last, a golden age, all the things we once dreamed of.” He smiled. “And you can have the inside story, Sandy. If you want it. What do you think?”

  “I think you watched too many cartoons as a kid,” Sandy said. “You’ve gone looney-tunes.”

  “You don’t think there can be a revolution, is that it?”

  “More or less,” Sandy said. “On this trip of mine, I’ve been looking up a lot of old college friends. One of them used to be positively rabid for revolution. Now he works in an ad agency. He’s an asshole, but he said it best. There was never going to be no revolution, he said.”

  Edan Morse looked straight at him. For a second, the strange glitter returned to the brown eyes, and Sandy tried to pin it down. Conviction? Fanaticism? What? “I will lay you odds,” Morse said, “that you did not always feel that way. Be honest with yourself. Forget what this asshole ad-man said, and look inside yourself, remember how it was. Woodstock. Kent State. Cambodia. How did you feel then?”

  Sandy started to answer and stopped with his mouth open. The denial would not come. Morse had him. He had believed; even practical work-within-the-system Clean-for-Gene Sandy Blair, skeptic, joker, even he had believed for a few magic moments.

  Edan Morse was watching Sandy’s face. “Do you know Julius Caesar?” he asked
. “Where Brutus says, There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries? For us, for the Movement, that was our floodtide: Cambodia and Kent State. That was the moment we had to seize. Ever since we have drifted in our own shallows and miseries. The revolution has become a dimly remembered joke, even to us. The dream has turned to ashes.” His voice was soft and sad and persuasive.

  “I know the play,” Sandy said. “I also know that it was that speech that led Brutus and Cassius to Philippi, and the end of their revolution.”

  “It’s just a play,” Morse said airily, dismissing Sandy’s objection with a casual wave of the serpent-encrusted dagger he held loosely in his hand.

  “Even if you’re right, what difference does it make?” Sandy said. “The floodtide has passed, by your own admission. The revolutionaries have bought tract homes and three-piece suits. They’ll never rise again.”

  “So true,” said Edan Morse. “That is, unless time can somehow be turned on itself, the tide made to come again.” He leaned forward intently. “Let me ask you a question. When did the Sixties end?”

  “The end of ’69,” Sandy said, “or the end of ’70, if you’re a purist, because there was no—”

  “Don’t give me that calendar shit,” Morse interrupted. “I’m talking about the spirit of an age, not when that stupid ball fell in Times Square. The Sixties began when Kennedy was assassinated and ’Nam got hot. So when they end, Sandy? When?”

  Sandy shrugged. “The day Nixon resigned, maybe. Or the day Saigon fell and the war ended.”

  “Wrong. Too late. Our tide had begun to ebb long before that. Our momentum, our unity, the sense of destiny, of inevitable triumph—we had lost them all, hardly noticing when they began to bleed away, yet feeling it all the same. I’ve studied it. I know the moment when it changed. I know!”