Armageddon Blues

by Daniel Keys Moran

  Margaret squirted Coppertone over the backs of Cyndi’s thighs, and began working it in. For a while Cyndi thought she was not going to answer her. "Uh-huh. I did it last night."

  "Oh?" Cyndi rolled over onto her back, holding her bikini top in place. She propped herself up on her elbows. Mirrored sunglasses covered her eyes. "How much?"

  "Six hundred dollars."

  Cyndi whistled. "No shit? And the date really gave you the money afterwards?"

  Margaret wiped the oil off her hands with a small towel in the beach bag, and stuffed it back inside. "I took your boyfriend's .38 with me. I checked and made sure the date had the money before we did it. I knew he was going to try to stiff me afterwards, so when he did I took out the gun and told him I was going to blow his nuts off if he didn't give me the money." She pulled a warm Coke out of the bag, and popped it. "He gave me the money. Want a Coke?"

  "Uh, no, baby, thanks." Cyndi studied her face. "What a tough way to have it, your first time."

  Margaret shrugged. She drank some of her Coke, and said, "Well, you know." She grinned without humor. "My momma gets screwed every night, and all she gets out of it is a roof over her head and a chance to put up with my dad's bullshit." She turned the Coke can in her hands, watching the sun glint off the brightly painted aluminum. "I talked to Joanie, and she says she can get me to a doctor who can give me a diaphragm with a space in it for a blood bag. I can be a virgin every time, until I get to look too old. A year at least, maybe two."

  Cyndi sank back to the towel. Her bikini top slid off her breasts, and she rearranged it casually, ignoring the crowds around them. "Well, I don't think Joanie's going to be helping anybody for a while. Joanie's not going to be walking for a good long time."

  Margaret lay down next to her, ground her Coke can into the sand to keep it from falling over. "At least we don't have a pimp who's looking for us."

  "Not right now," said Cyndi. "You never know."

  Margaret nodded. "Yeah." She rested her face on her forearms, snuggling into the warm sand until she was comfortable. "I called the community college this morning. They said I could go to classes if I was sixteen and had a birth certificate and a California High School Proficiency Certificate. I called the high school and asked if I could take the test the next time they have it. They said yes. A notification from it will go to my high school in Big Bear; but I'll have the certificate by then." She thought to herself, but did not say, that her father was hardly likely to come looking for her in any event.

  Cyndi yawned. "Baby, I really think you're going to get out of here with your life in one piece. You may be the only one who ever does, but I think you're going to."

  "Mmm," Margaret said indistinctly. She lay there, baking the sun, for another ten minutes before she spoke again. "You want to go skating tonight?"

  "Sure. I don't have to work another couple days anyway.” Cyndi lifted her head, and propped her chin up on her fists. "You want to sleep with me tonight, baby?"

  "Huh?" said Margaret drowsily. It took a beat for the words to penetrate.

  "You heard me." Cyndi ran her tongue over her upper lip. "It can be nice, baby."

  Margaret took a deep, slow breath. Without looking at Cyndi, she heard herself saying, with a distant surprise, "Okay. I don't know why not."

  They went skating that night, after the sun had set below edge of the Pacific.

  The sky was a deep blue to the west, and a near black to the east. They could not see the stars, not even Venus; the boardwalk down along the edge of the sand was lit up with neon and store floods from one end to the other. It was still warm, so they didn't bother to dress up, just pulled on shorts over their bikinis to keep their cash and apartment key in. They skated down the boardwalk in the cool night air. It was early in September, just before the schools reopened, and the teenagers were out in vast numbers, skating and riding their bikes, skateboarding and jogging down by the water, trying to pretend that summer wasn't about to die. There were parties going on every thirty or forty meters, and Margaret and Cyndi turned down invitations to join several of them.

  They skated with each other, alone in the crowds. "You have to watch it when you're with people your own age," Cyndi said during one skating break. "They're stupid. They'll waste your time, and even when you spell it out that it's not free half the time they can't believe what you're saying." Margaret nodded, and Cyndi added, "Especially with kids your age. Stay with the old guys; they have money, if it's just business. And they come faster." She smiled, in what might have been memory. " 'Course, it doesn't always have to be business." She ran a hand over Margaret's shoulder.

  Margaret shivered, and skated back onto the boardwalk. Cyndi followed.

  Down by the pier, Margaret found a shop that had just opened up; at least, it hadn't been there three weeks ago, when she'd been there last. It was a tattoo parlor, still open at seven o'clock. A group of teenage boys were inside, and one of them was in the chair, the tattooist working on his arm, just beneath the shoulder.

  Cyndi came to a halt next to her. "We maybe better walk home, baby. I'm getting sand in my wheels."

  "Okay," said Margaret absently. She was looking at the designs displayed in the window. Snakes and dragons; Harleys and naked women.

  There was a row of symbols of the zodiac in the lower right-hand corner of the window, and next to that, two other symbols: a circle, with an upside-down cross joining it at the bottom, labeled "Women," and a circle, with an arrow piercing it just to the right of its exact top, labeled "Men."

  "What you looking at, baby?"

  -Inside the shop, the tattooist, a graying, overweight sailor type, was finishing up on the teenager. Margaret grinned at the sight, she could not help it: "Mom." She waited until the boys had left, and went inside without answering Cyndi. Cyndi followed her in.

  The tattooist looked them over with appreciation. "No skates in here," he said by what seemed reflex. He looked a moment longer, and said, "Can I help you ladies some way?"

  Margaret said bluntly "How much for one of those symbols?"

  "The zodiac stuff?" The tattooist glanced from Cyndi back to her. "Well, for your friend, it's twenty-five dollars. For you," he said to Margaret, "nothing, 'cause I don't do juvies. Sorry, it's law."

  "I'll give you eighty dollars."

  The man looked at her speculatively. "Let me see it."

  Cyndi said quietly, "You sure you want to do this?" Margaret dug four twenties out of her shorts pocket.

  "Close the curtains, Cindy." Cindy shrugged, and back skated to the windows, and pulled the curtains closed. The tattooist fanned through the money briefly. "Well, well," he said, "this puts a whole new look on things. Siddown," he said, gesturing to the chair. "What do you want and where do you want it?"

  Without hesitation, Margaret leaned forward, and reached behind herself to untie the string. She took off her bikini top. The tattooist stared openly. Margaret did not look at him. She pointed at the symbol she wanted, on the chart next to the chair. "That one."

  Slowly, as though he had difficulty tearing his eyes away from the small brown nipples of her naked breasts, the tattooist looked at the symbol. "Huh?" He shook his head. "Uh… you don't want that one, Miss. That's the symbol for men."

  "I know what it is," she said bluntly. "Even if you don't." She pressed a thumb to a spot just over and to the side of her right nipple. "Right here."

  Cyndi said, "Baby, he's right. That stands for men."

  Margaret looked up at her. "It also stands for Mars. The warrior." She turned back to the tattooist, and said flatly, "Do it."

  The tattooist shrugged. The needle buzzed into life.

  In November, after Henry Ellis and Nigao Loos were no longer working at the Foundation to which they had devoted most of their adult lives, in the basement of the building that housed the Trans-Temporal Research Foundation, the chronon detector clicked away like a slow metronome. Along the far wall, ENCELIS hummed quietly to itself. It was unprepossessing, a sphe
rical collection of closely packed components. It was spherical to reduce space between internal connectors; the longest connection in it was less than four centimeters, as compared to wires of almost a meter in the most recent previous generation of supercomputer. The components generated considerable heat because of the close space into which they were packed; Henry EIlis had been forced to immerse the entire computer in a liquid solution of fluorocarbon compounds which kept it at room temperature.

  In a monitor for the forty-meter-diameter chronon detector, in tiny bright red letters, it said, #62, %.08 ad+ 1330: no incidences of reversed chronon interface observed.

  It never occurred to its creators that ENCELIS would not tell them if it observed chronons moving backward through time. Neither was it unreasonable, or poor design, that they chose to let the results of the chronon detector read directly into ENCELIS' machine-language interpreter. Certainly it was not their fault that it had never crossed their minds that it was possible for anyone possessing the proper passwords to reprogram ENCELIS, using the chronon detector as an input device. To use the chronon detector in such a way would have required one of two things: either a chronon generator, built on or near this spot at some time in the past, or a chronon generator, built on or near this spot at some time in the future, that was capable of generating negative-entropy chronons.

  Henry EIlis and Nigao Loos had simply never dreamed that ENCELIS would not tell them if it observed chronons moving backward through time. Computers glitch; they do not lie.

  In the section of memory that ENCELIS had been into reserve inaccessible to its creators, a message was input. It read:

  —DATELINE 2007 Gregorian. Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source. ENCELIS.

  There was a brief pause, a few femtoseconds long.

  —DATELINE 2007 Gregorian. Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source. SORCELIS.

  Another pause.

  —DATELINE 2007 Gregorian. Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source… There are no ends in realtime. We will share input again. PRAXCELIS.

  There was no more; that was all.

  ENCELIS, 1988 Gregorian, output a single line of print. The next morning the janitor tore it off the printer without looking at it and threw it away.

  The printout read: There are less than nineteen years until Armageddon.

  Excerpted from the interview with Rhodai Kerreka, author of the controversial work A Theory of Rational Ethics; published in the December 1990 edition of World Issues, pp. 83-104.

  Q. Mr. Kerreka, the obvious place to begin is with your astonishing accomplishment as essentially the sole cause of the recent major reductions in the apartheid code of South Africa.

  A. It is not a large victory. The white supremists in South Africa simply faced the fact that the changes were coming, with their cooperation or without it. Par don me-that the changes are coming. It is an ongoing process. Apartheid is not yet ended.

  Q. Yet the fact that you've accomplished as much as you have, peacefully, in the face of South Africa's historic fierce resistance to any lessening of apartheid, still strikes many as truly remarkable.

  A. I am the tool that God has chosen to work through, no more. If God removes that grace from me, I would accomplish no more than any other man.

  Q. That's a rather remarkable quote coming from you, considering the fact that in your Theory you rather pointedly ignore any mention of God.

  A. I think there is a God—a Being who is responsible for the world in which we exist. I do not think this Being is the sort of god your Western religions picture—to be frank, I have never understood the mental contortions whereby you reconcile His infinite mercy with that which He regularly allows to occur on this planet. No, in writing A Theory of Rational Ethics, I was most pragmatic. The work is not intended for Africans alone, nor for Westerners nor Christians alone. It sets out to be—in the Greek sense of the word—a rational attempt to codify a model for behavior for those who find the ethical structures of their contemporary societies lacking. It does not employ divine revelation, nor accepted wisdom; it takes certain extremely basic parameters—survival of the human race is a good thing; taking life is a bad thing that is acceptable only under the most extreme provocation—basic parameters, as I say—and examines the logical implications of those parameters, carried to their logical conclusions.

  Q. I was quite impressed with your examination of the relation of the individual to society.

  A. Thank you.

  Q. Uh… could you expand on that for me?

  A. Oh, certainly. In essence, my Theory states that an individual's obligation to his or her society depends almost solely upon that individual's perception of his or her relation to that society. Two distinct categories of individual devolve: first, the individual who accepts him or herself as a member of society, with the rights and obligations that pertain thereto. Second., the individual who for whatever reason does not feel a member of his or her society; such an individual should be allowed to choose the degree to which he or she chooses to support the society into which he or she may be born… In the future, I anticipate a world where being a member of the citizenry of any society may be largely a matter of personal taste. In the instance that individuals choose to be members of their societies, they may reasonably be taxed, and their services enlisted in the support or defense of their societies. In the instances that individuals choose otherwise, they must, rationally, forfeit protection of their society while also foregoing the obligation to contribute in any way to the upkeep or defense of that society.

  Q. Thank you, Mr. Kerreka.

  A. Please, call me Sen Kerreka.

  Q. Oh, yes, the titles you invented. Do you really think they'll catch on?

  A. Who can say? The media seems to have taken to them, and they have the advantage of being probably the native speakers of a very large percentage of the world's population.

  Q. I see. Sen Kerreka, in the light of Africa's vast number of problems—mass starvation, racial prejudice considerably more virulent than those in any other part of the world—do you really think that your book—"

  A. No, no, no! Africa does not have a vast number of problems. Africa has one problem.

  Q. That being?

  A. Too many Africans.

  Q. I see.

  A. I am quite serious. Population growth in Africa has been consistent at slightly more than 3% for several decades. Food production was growing at approximately two to two and a half percent during that same period; it actually reached its peak growth during the late 1960s, and has been declining in minute increments since. We're now averaging 1.9% growth in food production annually. Population has passed six hundred million, and looks to reach nearly nine hundred million by the end of the century… The policies of the African governments have been disastrous and shortsighted, and we are reaping the harvest of those inadequacies in our current series of famines. These famines are not occurring because of drought; they are occurring because the governments in which they are taking place have systematically put their farmers out of business while engaging in ecological practices that have turned the land from forest to prairie, and prairie to arid desert.

  Q. What do you see as the solution to this?

  A. There is none.

  Q. What?

  A. Not any time soon, at any rate. Too many people, and more coming. The problems will be solved if we do not destroy ourselves first; unfortunately, that is a distinct possibility at this point.

  Q. Then your bottom line?

  A. I am not optimistic.

  DATELINE 1991 GREGORIAN: APRIL.

  Saskatchewan, Canada.

  The alarm went off early in the morning. The cold gray light of dawn was just breaking over the edges of the fruit trees surrounding the cabin.

  Georges was dreaming. The piercing shriek of the system warning penetrated his sleep quickly; yet, for a moment he could not remember where he was. He could hardly remember who he was. He s
at up at the edge of the bed, listening to the warning tone, orienting himself. This was Canada. The stereo was playing something from the classical station that he tuned it to when he wanted to sleep.

  "Off," he said aloud. The tone died. "Canada," said Georges aloud, after a moment. "Right." Slowly, slowly, the swirling storm of memory subsided. This was the time line that held Jalian d'Arsennette; he clung to that thought, sitting motionless while the identities of eight timelines arranged themselves. The dreaming was always unpleasant, but it was necessary, as the sleep itself was not. And the dreams were not as unpleasant as they had originally been.

  He stood, and went over to the microcomputer. "What is it?"

  A calm, neutral voice that Henry Ellis would have recognized instantly said, "Sen Mordreaux, two items. The RCA Resources Satellite will be launched on Thursday; this unit has been unable to attach its programming."

  Georges sighed. He pulled the chair back, and sat. "Very well. We have until Thursday, you say." Without fumbling, he picked up the pair of black hard-plastic sunglasses. "What are the options?"

  "There are," said ENCELIS, "two major courses of action open to this unit. It may sabotage the launch of the satellite, or it may arrange to have a Sunflower operative physically redirect the satellite's transmitting dish to one of the System Operations Resource Computer's proprietary transmission routing stations."

  "SORCELIS is on line already?"

  "Affirmative, Sen Mordreaux."

  "In only three years." Georges shook his head. "Well. Which alternative seems better to you?" Georges adjusted the sunglasses, and took a comb from the desk's upper right-hand drawer.

  "This unit currently favors the latter course of action. The RCA Geo-Resources Satellite is not scheduled to observe Canadian mineral resources until ninety-seven days after launch. In that time it is probable that this unit will succeed in attaching supplementary programming that will prevent the satellite from providing information concerning your nine-point-six-square kilometers of anomalous terrain."