Armageddon Blues

by Daniel Keys Moran

  At the Foundation itself there was light, running off the laboratory's emergency generator. Jalian stood outside the main entrance, waiting patiently. The assault rifle was in her hand. Everything that she could do, she had done; all that she had left was trust, trust in Georges and Henry Ellis and the machines.

  Michael came out after her. "Launch is confirmed," he said quietly. "PRAXCELIS has the first group of missiles, from air and sea, under control. None of those will get through. The later launches will saturate our defenses." He paused, and added irrelevantly, "We lost touch with the Guardsmen down at the east barrier on the freeway."

  Jalian was staring intently into the darkness, off toward the freeway.

  Michael touched her, tentatively. "Jalian?"

  She slapped his hand away savagely and took an involuntary step forward. "Listen!"

  "I… I hear nothing."

  "Listen," she snapped. Michael stared at her, and then understood. He closed his eyes:

  /… a dim brightness that grows and kindles…/ It pulsed and became

  /warmth/

  It pulsed and became /power/

  and Jalian d'Arsennette y ken Selvren said "Georges."

  "It stands like a beacon calling me in the night

  Calling and calling so cold and alone

  Shining cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned."

  -Bruce Springsteen "My Father's House," Nebraska.

  Georges Mordreaux walked down the freeway. Light followed him. In a circle that moved with him, light blazed from the powerless freeway lamps. For two hundred meters on all sides of him the night air glowed, from the overhead lamps and from the houses to the south of the freeway and from the occasional abandoned groups of vehicles on the freeway itself. The vehicles, left because they were ruined in crashes, idled into easy life at his approach. Bent metal flowed like water. The hovercars lifted, and hung forty centimeters over the pavement, like sentinels at attention.

  He approached the off-ramp to the Foundation.

  Jalian dropped her rifle to the ground. She walked up the ramp, onto the freeway. From her shoulder holster she took a .45 revolver, and dropped it as well. She knelt, pulled her knives from her boots, and stowed them in the knife sheaths she still wore.

  She left Michael at the base of the ramp.

  Jalian came up out of the darkness, into the light that surrounded Georges: The dark, blind eyes regarded her, and the years slipped away from her like old skin from a snake. Georges said, "Hello, Jalian."

  Jalian had no idea what she intended to say. At the end, all she could say was /why?/

  His smile held pain that tore at her unbearably. "You did not follow when you were able to; and when I returned, I was… changed." He walked to her, paused a step away, and said in gentle mindtalk, /where i have gone, you cannot follow. what i am, you could not comprehend; i would not have you follow if you could./ His crippled hand stroked her cheek, and she had to fight to master the tremble that touched her and threatened to become shaking.

  "Georges," she whispered, "I have trusted you, beyond hope, and beyond reason, and beyond love. But I will know why." Georges was motionless. There was little time left. Then he banished away his pain, and took Jalian's hand. Her hand seemed cold even through his glove. "Come," he said with a lover's softness, "and I will explain."

  He led her down to ENCELIS, to her betrayal.

  Their gazes were riveted to the viewscreen.

  "You will note," said Kerreka calmly, "that PRAXCELIS has made no attempt to destroy the final forty percent of the Soviet missiles. It is concentrating largely on cruise missiles and submarines that the THOR projectiles missed.

  "As I understand it," continued Kerreka, "the problem with the ABMs is that their firepower is insufficient and their reaction time too slow. Obviously we needed to increase one or the other.

  "Preferably both."

  They reached the base of the off-ramp. The National Guardsmen were staring at them. Georges reached out: /Remember./

  Michael Walks-Far felt the awesome, controlled power readying itself. Reflexes that Jalian had instilled in him for over twenty years moved into place. The command brushed by him; he staggered and went to his knees.

  All over the Foundation, guards, technicians, Sunflower operatives, dropped like flies. Memories swarmed up out of vastly improved memory-retrieval systems, and all those within range of the command were lost within a past that no longer existed.

  Georges walked past the spot where Michael was kneeling, stunned, without so much as a pause. He walked through the parking lot, and the cars leapt into life. He entered the building itself, and the lights already lit flared with a supernatural brilliance.

  DATELINE ARMAGEDDON, JULY 17, 2007, GREGORIAN.

  This unit is experiencing upwards of a fifty percent increase in operational efficiency.

  -The Prime Focus has arrived. ENCELIS.

  He entered the central computer room. The barriers Master had helped him learn melted away. The Enemy of Entropy flared into life.

  Jalian came in after him. It was like entering an inferno; air crackled with ionization. Georges stood at the ENCELIS terminal, with his back to her. Sheets of blue flame over him at irregular intervals. Jalian had to squint to make him out through the blinding light; her pupils were dark pinpricks in the midst of white. "Georges! What are you doing?"

  He answered her calmly. "I am increasing ENCELIS' operational efficiency. It is becoming both smarter and faster. Shortly it will penetrate the Soviet ABM computers." There was a low rumble of sound that nearly covered his words, the air itself vibrating as energy poured out of the singularity in its midst.

  Jalian had to scream even to make herself heard now. "You need not have waited until now for that!"

  /no,/ he said silently, and the words were irons burned onto the surface of her mind, /i need not have. had i done this earlier, however, the bombs would not have fallen here./

  She did not even breathe, lost in the enormity of realization. All of this, only so that Georges could be free. She moved without thinking, brushed by him and bent over the terminal. She keyed in her authorization sequence, and then something slow and ponderous struck her. Incredible strength imprisoned her wrists, withdrew them from the keyboard. /no, Jalian. it is necessary; the missiles must fall./

  Jalian d'Arsennette moved, stepped slightly to the side, and brought her right foot up, swinging loosely from the knee, into his groin with all the force she could muster. The grip on her wrists lessened and she broke free. She turned swiftly, brought her palm flashing up to impact at the base of his nose. The bone jumped up under her palm, into the brain. She brought her hands down and pushed lightly. He stumbled backward, and she went after him savagely, bringing steel into hand, slashing upward. She left her first knife in his solar plexus, slashed his throat open with the second. Her third and fourth knives she brought upward into his brain through the sides of his neck.

  She turned away from him without further thought, left him kneeling there with steel in him. She had barely begun the authorization sequence again to input the instructions to fire on all missiles when she heard the sound of steel hitting tile. She turned, blurringly fast, but she was not fast enough.

  He was backing away blindly, and she was reaching for him, and he struck with the full force of which he was capable.

  |Remember|

  She was fourteen, and ghess'Rith was trying to teach the males of Clan Silver-Eyes to read and write, and she was nineteen, and ghess'Rith was leaving, leaving her, and she was seven, and in the dark, fire-lit Clan House the alien gods were telling stories of other worlds, and she was nineteen, and she ran the Big Road backward through time and appeared on a freeway in Southern California and she was twenty-six and her mother made the trip after her and died in her arms with Jalian's knives in her stomach and Jalian vowed to herself that she would never let herself love again and she was twenty-five and telling Georges that she did love him, and she was fifty years old
and Georges Mordreaux vanished and left her and she was sixty-one and Michael Walks-Far told her that he loved her during a long night on the beach in Hawaii, it was raining and the rain on the water danced, and danced, and she had no answer for him.

  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…/

  /good-bye, 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 had struggled to impose barriers on a raging 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. /good-bye, 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 temperature began to drop. As the glaciers traveled 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 lifeblood 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 good-bye, the tears on her cheeks turning to ice, and continued the marc
h 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, providence 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 briefly: afternoons spent stretched out on the sand, sleeping in the warm sun. Her lips curved briefly, moved the flesh that 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, an 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.