She truly had come to Russia largely as a tourist. She checked with contacts she'd been given, but 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. "Karien… 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, you 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 terror 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 Cal; 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 a 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-Eleven, 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 on Earth 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.
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't 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 subzero 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 reverie 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.
Julian 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 eves 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 microcomputer 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 microcomputer. "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 indeed 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 up 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 that 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 that 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.
Armageddon Blues Page 10
