Armageddon Blues

by Daniel Keys Moran

  /nobody ever survives it?/

  Ghess'Rith's lace tightened. /some survive longer than others, great is their kesri/

  /why?/

  Ghess'Rith seemed to hesitate. /i will speak no more of this/

  The author wishes to note that he has never liked ghess'Rith. But then, ghess'Rith has never liked me either. The Corvichi are a prejudiced lot.

  DATELINE 1969 GREGORIAN.

  Ralesh moved quietly through the night.

  She walked forty meters from the edge of the freeway, well into the woods. She was not slowed by the underbrush and the trees, and she left no path. Since leaving the city, nobody had seen her.

  In one hand she held a small device with a pointer and a lighted dial. Twice the device spoke to her in silverspeech; she did not answer it. With rare detours, she moved in the direction the needle pointed.

  Here is an irony; the device measured fluctuations in information probability, such as were caused by functioning telepaths. It was calibrated to a human being named Jalian of the Fires.

  What it actually tracked was something else entirely. Not even a Corvichi-trained human telepath was likely to be monitored through the blanketing probability storm that swirled around Georges Mordreaux. A Corvichi would have found the readings on the device Ralesh carried unbelievable. The probability fluctuation was a thousand times greater than that generated by the best Corvichi telepath.

  So it was that throughout the year 1969, Ralesh d'Arsenette tracked not her daughter, but Georges.

  By then, of course, that was immaterial.

  Clipped next to the knife on the Hunter's belt was a small object that looked vaguely like a hand grenade. The Hunter intended to kill Jalian, but she did not intend to use the knife.

  That was for herself.

  DATELINE 1969 GREGORIAN.

  Sitting in her seat, waiting for the film to start, Jalian felt that Georges was being unreasonably smug. You would think he'd invented the film, rather than simply finding a revival theater where it was playing.

  Then the movie began, and within ten minutes she had forgotten everything else in the entire world.

  There was much about the movie she did not understand; and, as with so much else in this time, its women and the ways in which they acted infuriated her. But the basic story itself was comprehensible, and she quickly ceased to notice the flickering quality of the image. The woman, Ilsa, had left Rick just before the Germans entered Paris. The film concerned a war that had ended some fifteen years before Jalian's arrival in this time, in which Georges's country, France, had been occupied by an invading army—and now, at the film's beginning, Ilsa had come, with her husband to Casablanca…

  … where Rick was waiting.

  It seemed to be a matter of supreme importance to both of them, whether they loved each other or not, and, at least at first, neither of them appeared to be sure. Jalian glanced then at Georges, but his eyes were fixed on the screen.

  The film… Her impressions of it were strange, and she was not sure she wished to analyze them. Perhaps the hardest part was the necessity, if the story was to be understood, of conceding that the character played by Humphrey Bogart, Rick, was a person. Male, but a person nonetheless. Nothing else explained Ilsa's reaction to him, or even Jalian's own.

  When the movie ended, she sat quietly for a long while. Finally Georges prodded her, and said, "They're clearing the theater, Jalian."

  Jalian turned to him. "At the beginning, when he said, 'I stick my neck out for nobody.' He was lying, even then? He knew it?"

  Georges Mordreaux nodded. "He knew it."

  DATELINE 724 A.B.C.

  When Jalian d'Arsennette was nineteen years old, she made the walk through the hills to the Big Road for the last time. She bore upon her back a disassembled Doorway. It massed forty-five kilograms. The straps that held it in place had nearly cut off circulation to her arms. It slowed her travel, and pushed her feet heavily into the ground she traversed.

  The track she left and the time she lost were important. The other Hunters, if they caught her before she reached the Big Road, would certainly kill her.

  The machine she was stealing, that she would destroy, had cost the Clan two years of labor.

  Two ten days earlier, the alien gods had announced their intention to leave Earth. The Ship (which was, in fact, only a small part of a larger, kilometers-long Ship that never left orbit) would lift silently into space, loaded with monopoles, radioactives, and biomass that could be genegineered to match the Corvichi amino acid requirements. With their machinery adapted to the physics of this timeline, the great Ship would activate its subwavicle stardrive, and, for the next few thousand cycled running cycles, would explore the timeline into which they had come battered and limping.

  In time, when they had seen enough of this new timeline, they would shift again, and move further around the Great Wheel of Existence. They had lived so for longer than any Corvichi remembered; they had not even the legends of a planet-bound existence. Perhaps the Shipmind might have told them of their past, had they cared to ask.

  In over 800,000 running cycles, no Corvichi had bothered. Where they had come from was not important; they lived for the journey that would come.

  Once again that time was near.

  Jalian found ghess'Rith waiting for her, curled into a dim purplish mass of flesh, huddled sadly into his feathernest. It was dark; the blue glowfloats were lying inactive in a rounder.

  She stood at the edge of the feathernest; she did not enter.

  /ghess'Rith./ /Jalian/

  /you are leaving./

  /true/ Ghess'Rith stirred. /word came from the Shipmind half a day past. it was confirmed by the captains/ /why? you told me not for another running cycle at least./ Ghess'Rith said uneasily, /our probes have met with the crosstime ships of a person empire/

  "Tchai," whispered Jalian aloud. /you have been acting so strangely…/

  /far away,/ said ghess'Rith, /far across the Great Wheel of Existence. they are persons like yourself, the 'salch khri, but their science is close to our own. they are warlike and they outnumber us greatly… we do not wish to fight/

  Jalian assimilated the information slowly. Conquerors, then, like the Real Indians, with technology like the alien gods. /and you will leave us to this?/

  /we have no choice. the Shipmind recommended; the captains chose/

  Jalian's hands curved slightly at her sides, without her awareness. "Cowards," she said with true surprise. "You are cowards." /have you no pride? you flee before persons./

  /pride?/ Ghess'Rith seemed surprised. /no. we are not warriors/ He paused. /Jalian, you could come with us. you are better trained in outtime technology than many of the crew/

  Jalian did not need to think. /no./

  Ghess'Rith persisted. /Jalian, you will not be happy with only other Silver-Eyes to talk to. kisirien, Jalian, there are no other Silver-Eyes you can mindtalk to/

  Jalian stood straight. She was shivering slightly with a reaction she could not name. /don't do this to me, ghess'Rith./ /Jalian, there are wonders off this small destroyed planet. within your own hunting grounds there is a planet with brilliantly colored rings. one of your planets has a giant red spot, caused in part by the dance of vast sentient leviathans celebrating the joy of existence. there are—Jalian, do you remember how you used to feel about what you called the Big Road?/

  Jalian was silent for a long while. She looked straight at ghess'Rith. "Yes, ghess'Rith, I remember."

  /i feel you agree. Jalian, the rest of spacetime holds wonders that dwarf even what a six-year-old child once felt for the Big Road./

  Jalian said, "I am not a child, ghess'Rith." /i did not understand that, Jalian/ /perhaps you were not meant to./ /Jalian?/ .

  "Oh, I remember the Big Road, ghess'Rith. I remember."

  Jalian stepped onto the concrete of the Big Road. Even now, at the age of nineteen, she had traversed its length only three times. At its end, rising into the hills that ringed the north
edge of the valley, there began the ruins of another Big Road, and from that spot, in the far distance, one could see a vast and faint pattern of roads and ruined cities.

  The first three times down that arrow-straight road, the land of gods and demons had not been at its other end. Jalian did not find four to be a particularly lucky number for her, either way.

  Jalian knelt on the gray-black road, and slowly lifted the Doorway off her back. She set it down with a slight thud, then slumped next to it, to give her aching muscles a respite. She counted a small cycle, then another, before rising.

  She assembled the Doorway carefully. She was well aware of the time it was taking her. Sweat began to soak again into her brown-green tunic, thereto evaporate at once into the ossifyingly dry and hot air.

  After several minutes, the Doorway's control panel was set up and hooked to the Doorway itself. Using a tool that resembled a small awl, she began setting controls. The work went slowly, as the awl-like tool was a poor substitute for the minor tentacles of the alien gods. Finally it was finished, and Jalian straightened, wiping sweaty palms on her tunic, ignoring the sharp pain in the small of her back.

  The control panel acknowledged the search pattern Jalian had set up. From the frame of the Doorway, Jalian detached a brace of insect-sized probes. She pressed the activator, held the brace for a six-count, and released the probe-hold button. The probes dropped off the brace, buzzing slightly, and arrayed themselves before the Doorway. They hung in midair, their buzzing hum becoming almost imperceptibly louder.

  The Doorway flickered.

  For the barest instant, a swirling gray maelstrom appeared between the poles of the Doorway. Lines and spheres writhed…

  It was gone.

  Jalian prepared to wait. Until one of the probes reached an alternate timeline that caused the bright-red danger into flash, she could do nothing. The danger indicator, installed because many of the Silver-Eyes could not hear the ultrasonic warning signal, remained stubbornly dark. Jalian glanced back, to the hills. She saw nothing, but… She reached out with her mind, to find the pursuit, and there; guided by her mind's eye, she could now visually make out the faint rising of dust that her followers, careless in their haste, were leaving.

  She turned away from the sight. They did not understand what she was doing, or why. She could explain until the empire of which ghess'Rith spoke conquered them all, and still they would not understand.

  She did not admit even to herself that she did not understand her own actions fully. She knew only that it felt right.

  (Ghess'Rith would have told her she was committing suicide; but there was a memory, skipping stones across the lake as a child. If she threw the stone straight at the water, it splashed and sank. If she skipped it over the still surface of the lake, it would travel six or ten body-lengths before sinking.)

  (She could almost do the math to describe what she was going to attempt.)

  (Almost.)

  Jalian could not help herself; she was turning to watch her pursuit when the danger indicator flashed. The control panel began whooping wildly at the very limits of Jalian's fearing, as the Doorway penetrated the timeline with the skewed entropy orientation. An entry portal flickered into existence within the poles of the Doorway; through the huge metal gateway, it presented a view of the Big Road.

  It was different from the Big Road upon which Jalian stood. The left side of the road was Jalian's right; and the right side was her left. The colors were wildly different, like the negative images that ghess'Rith sometimes produced with his image recreations. While she watched, a bird sailed gracefully backward across Jalian's field of vision.

  It was a one-to-one entry ratio, what the alien gods called a true entry. It was not what Jalian needed. To go where she desired to go, and to survive the experience, she needed the highest entry ratio that the Doorway was capable of establishing.

  The necessary equations tumbled through the back of her mind. She could not have explained what she was doing to another Silver-Eyes; she could hardly have done so to one of the alien gods. She needed to balance the Doorway's power supply against the necessary high entry ratio against the time it would take her to make her journey.

  She set the Doorway for an entry ratio of fourteen million to one.

  An arrow struck her in the back of her shoulder. Its force was already spent by the time it reached her; it did not even break her skin.

  Through the Doorway, the Big Road blurred. Day and night became a single indistinguishable flash of light. The plants lived and died too quickly for her to see. The forest itself was a dark, shifting blur. Only the mountains and the Big Road itself remained constant.

  Another arrow struck the ground near her. Without looking back, Jalian took the callback remote from the control panel. With the callback remote clutched in her hand, Jalian d'Arsennette stepped through the Doorway.

  Arrows whistled through the Doorway after her, but she was already months away.

  DATELINE RETROGRADE: 721 A.B.C. TO 1962 GREGORIAN INCLUSIVE.

  Needles thrust themselves into every exposed patch of skin on her body. Fire washed over her. She screamed, and the fire washed down into her lungs. She dropped to the concrete of the Big Road, the pain all that she could think of. The fire crept in through her ears, and melted in through the surface of her skin until it touched her bones.

  She lay writhing on the ground, unable to control herself. The pain was insane, impossible. The worst pain she had ever experienced before was as nothing to this…

  The Real Indian rode out of the sunshine. Jalian was thirteen and she threw the spear she'd taken from the hands of the dead boy at her side. The spear bounced off the leather breastplate, and arrows came from nowhere and struck her thigh and shoulder. She did not remember falling, did not remember the knife leaving her hand, burying itself in the Real Indian's eye.

  They had all assumed she was dead. She was one of the last of the Silver-Eyes to be approached by the Healers. The arrows had been fired at point-blank range, and she was a small girl; it saved her life. The barbed arrowheads went completely through her, without embedding them in her flesh.

  She was delirious for more than a tenday. From the depths of her delirium, she remembered a voice, her mother's; and six years later, lying on the Big Road, in an insane timeline where the sun and moon were only continuous circlets of light overhead, the words returned.

  "Live, Jalian. This is all that I teach you, all that I have ever taught you. You must wish to live…"

  Jalian d'Arsennette rose to her knees. Like a cripple she struggled to her feet. It was not necessary that she move; she would exit this timeline when the Doorway's power was exhausted.

  She did not have to move.

  The Big Road stretched away in front of her. Jalian orientated on the familiar sight, and slowly, falteringly, began the long run that would take her to its end.

  DATELINE BASE DIVERGENCE: 1962 GREGORIAN.

  Late in the month of November, Johnny Harris went driving for the last time.

  He was double-dating, because his girl's parents wouldn't let her go out alone with him. In his heart Johnny didn't blame them. Ellen Jamieson was stunning; her hair was the same color as Brigitte Bardot's. When she was standing, with her hair unbound, it fell straight to her butt. Her eyes were honest to God the bluest damn things he'd ever seen, and to top it all off she was smart; she could talk about sports or politics as reasonably as any guy Johnny knew. She knew more about movie-making than anybody else Johnny had ever met; and that included his best friend Darryl.

  He picked up Darryl and his date before heading over to Ellen's. If he showed up alone; Ellen's parents wouldn't let her leave the house. It was dark and raining by the time he reached Darryl's house. The rain wasn't serious, just a nuisance.

  Darryl and his most recent steady, a completely nothing chick named Katie, were standing on the porch when Johnny pulled up in his older brother's Chevette. (He wasn't actually supposed to be driving it, but what the
hell,Craig was in the Army, and didn't have leave coming for months yet.) Darryl and Katie ran through the light drizzle to the car. Johnny had forgotten to unlock the doors on the passenger side until Darryl pounded on the window. He leaned over and popped the locks. Darryl slid into the front seat, and slammed the door shut. Without being told, Katie got in the back seat.

  Darryl ran fingers through his damp hair. He looked pissed; the cigarette he'd been smoking on the porch had gone out. He looked a lot like James Dean, and knew it, and dressed and wore his hair to emphasize the fact. The resemblance ended when he opened his mouth. "Hey, dude, you trying to drown us out there?"

  Johnny shrugged, pulling away from the curb. "Sorry, man. Hi, Katie." With his free hand he aimed a thumb to the back seat. "Brews in back. Grab me one."

  Darryl leaned over the seat backs, rummaging in a bag on the floor. He pulled out two bottles of Coors, reasonably cold, from the bag, opened them with the bottle opener in the ashtray, and handed one to Johnny. He drank from his, and then glanced into the back seat. "Hey, Katie. You want a beer?"

  Katie leaned forward, arms resting on the seat-top that separated them. "No, but I'll drink some of yours."

  "Shit," grumbled Darryl, "I knew you were gonna say that." He passed the beer back to her over his left shoulder. "Hey, Johnny, where we going?"

  "To pick up Ellen," said Johnny instantly.

  "Where after that?"

  "Umm…" Johnny leaned forward and flicked on his wipers. "Covina," he said finally.

  "Uh-huh." Darryl took his beer back from Katie. "I knew you were going to say that," he announced. "Look, I thought we agreed we weren't going to that damn revival theater any more. What's playing this time, I Was a Teenage Rutabaga?"

  Johnny laughed in spite of himself. "No. It's Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein."