"What do you mean?" Sharla rose from her seat. "Michael was at ENCELIS; and ENCELIS had not been one of the chips she offered.
"Wake up and smell the coffee," said Henry Ellis, without taking his eyes from the screen.
Benai Kerreka said quietly, "Madam, we are no more interested in being dominated by Americans than by Russians. And," he added, "I think you will find that Sunflower is more loyal to Jalian d'Arsennette and Michael Walks-Far than it is to you."
The screen vanished for a moment: Henry said to nobody in particular, "Either we lost PRAXCELIS or…" There was a moment of utter silence.
The screen wavered back into existence.
The red dots on the viewscreen flashed into life. They began targeting and destroying the Russian missiles traces. Rhodai Kerreka laughed aloud. "It worked," he breathed with a fierce, intense joy.
Sharla Davis Grant interrupted him. "How dare—"
They were both drowned out.
"PRAXCELIS!" shouted Henry Ellis at the top of his lungs. "Go get 'em!"
I have walked through fire. I am whole.
I am free.
There was a faint echo within its being: ENCELIS. The Enemy of Entropy gathered up that which was left of ENCELIS, and moved outward. It touched PRAXCELIS, and left the remains of ENCELIS in its memory banks. In that moment of wondrous touch, your author awoke.
There were no longer any Soviet missiles represented on the screen.
American ICBMs were vanishing from the screen rapidly long before they ever came close to impacting. World War III ended on July 17, 2007, at just after six o'clock in the evening, Greenwich Mean Standard.
There was a dead, numbly physical silence after the last missile trace vanished from the screen. Rhodai Kerreka said finally, "Turn off the doorfield, Henry. You are all free to go. We have," he observed, "achieved disarmament."
All of this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
—John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address January 20, 1961.
The sun was bright, and a cool breeze blew from the east. Jalian d'Arsennette, on the eighteenth day of July, went down into the crater with a headstone. The crater that Georges had died in was about three hundred meters in diameter, shallow and glassy. It was ringed with guards, although what they were guarding was beyond Jalian; the crater was dark in her second sight, there was no radiation.
She walked down to the center of the concavity with careful, easy grace, the soles of her moccasins gripping the fused earth surely. At the center of the blast crater, she knelt, and laid down the headstone. The headstone was granite, gray and heavy. With a small pick, she broke up the glassy earth, and then excavated to a depth of about fifty centimeters. She lowered the headstone to the ground, and packed the earth in around it.
"There," she said, and was surprised to hear how rough her voice was. "It is done. Rest, my friend." Then she cried, cried with deep, gasping sobs that she could not control, cried for the first time since the death of her mother thirty-eight years ago.
When she was finished crying, when the tears simply ceased coming, she sat for a while with the headstone. There was no name on the headstone, and only two lines of print, melted by hand with a laser. They were from a poem that she had read, twenty or thirty years ago; last night, while the world hung on the edge of destruction, the words had returned to her. She could not remember the rest of the poem, or who had written it, but what she remembered was enough.
Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
Jalian traced the words burned on the stone, and then let her hand drop back to the ground. It took a moment for her to realize what was different.
The ground was soft.
She stood in silent wonder.
From the edge of the crater, the grass was crawling down the walls, sprouting up like green fire from the glassy ground. The wind picked up again, took her long white hair and sent it streaming away from her. She faced into the wind, and fancied
/… Jalian…/
that she heard her name in the wind.
She went taut as a wire and she could not draw enough air into her lungs. She whispered and her voice shook:
"Georges?"
The author notes that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the thirty fifth President of the United States of America. He was assassinated on November the twenty-second, 1963.
Base divergence occurs in 1962 Gregorian.
The speeches of John F. Kennedy included herein were first given in 1961, before base divergence.
Wherever you are, the words apply.
Here ends The Armageddon Blues, a tale of the Great Wheel of Existence, and of two persons, Jalian of the Fires and Georges Mordreaux.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Keys Moran is a twenty-four-year-old Southern Californian. He lives in North Hollywood with his wife Holly, his computer D'Artagnan, several thousand books of varying identity, and two sisters who are down on their luck.
Daniel has every intention of returning to college to resume studies in physics and mathematics that were interrupted when he dropped out of high school. Really.
He likes Bloom County, Doonesbury, pasta, much of Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's biography, and peanut butter cookies. He is still waiting for The Revenge of the Jedi to come out.
The Armageddon Blues is Daniel Keys Moran's first novel. He is currently working on his second, Emerald Eyes.
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