The Armageddon Blues Daniel Keys Moran This is a work of fiction. None of the characters in it are real people and any resemblance to anybody, living or dead, is a coincidence. It is the author's intention that this work should be freely downloadable, copyable, and shareable in electronic format. It may not be reproduced, shared, or transmitted for a fee by any party to whom the author has not contractually granted permission. The author retains all other rights. Copyright (c) 1987 by Daniel Keys Moran All Rights Reserved Dedicated to The first edition of this book, many years ago, was dedicated to my sister Kari, for couch and hamburgers during hard times. This edition is dedicated to Alex and Andrea and Bram and Richard and Connor. For helping me get out of bed every morning. Furniture in both dedications. I wouldn't attach any significance to that, really. The Armageddon Blues A Tale of the Great Wheel A note from the author: The following is compiled from a number of sources, including humans. It may therefore be inaccurate in a number of details. In fact, considering the humans involved, I will go farther than that. What follows is not accurate. It is not truth. It is ... elegant. I am a computer. All The Time In The World Consider the explosion of a thermonuclear weapon. From an insignificant collection of radioactives and supporting hardware, the bomb expands within seconds to a thundering mushroom cloud of stunning size and power. (Psychedelic mushrooms, yeah, yeah, yeah.) Hold this image most clearly in mind, please--small metal egg of the technological demons to the fires of a somewhat less sophisticated era's hell; flash. Do you see it, do you have the image, do you understand? To comprehend the essence of the personality of Georges Mordreaux, take this image, this process, and reverse it. (Add the sound of Japanese wind chimes. Georges Mordreaux is a happy man. (Naturally.) A brief aside: It is the opinion of the author that the sound of an atomic bomb exploding in reverse is squilchgmp! The author is willing to concede that he could be wrong, but adds that, until such time as he is proven incorrect, he will continue to hold this opinion. Dateline 2052 Gregorian. Marchand the Hunter went into the deep Burns after her daughter. The child was five Colds, and she knew no better; the nighttime glow of the Burn beckoned, and she went. The Clan of Hammel, migrating through the Big Desert by the Waters, pressed on. It was death to enter the Burns. They knew they would never see Marchand again. Three days later Marchand d'Loria y ken Hammel staggered out of the darkness, past the Clan's sentries and into the ring of camp fires. Dilann, her daughter, was clutched in her arms. Marchand died the next morning. To the awe of the entire Clan, Marchand's daughter survived. Before Dilann's sixth birthday, the Clan, or what was left of the Clan after the desert trek, had reached the forests by the Big Waters of the North Coast. What was left of the Clan prospered. Dilann became known as Dilann d'Arsennette, the lady of the fires. Only one of Dilann's three children survived to adulthood. All three of Dilann's children were mutant, as was to be expected of the offspring of one who had survived the banked fires of Armageddon. The child who lived was a girl, Rhia, tall and fair and strong. Her eyes were bright silver. Dilann's grandchildren, every one, had silver eyes. Dateline 1917 Gregorian. Verdun, France: The Western Front. When Georges was a younger man--not a young man, no, but younger--the world had gotten together for a while and declared a social event called the Great War, the War to End All Wars, and later, World War One. (Rumors to the contrary, there was no American aviator named Snoopy, famed for his duels with the Red Baron. That all came later.) Georges Mordreaux, through some bad timing on his part and the jealousy of the husband of a wife, found himself in the middle of this silly conflict, yes sir. What should have been his last thought, as the German soldier came up out of the rain-soaked trench, bayonet in hand, was that's a muddy bayonet, as though it could possibly make any difference whether he was killed with a clean bayonet or a dirty one. (Georges was a perfectionist of sorts; even when it was in style, some years in his future, he refused to drink his milk out of a dirty glass.) Georges came to some hours later, so the overhead sun, peeking cautiously through gray clouds, informed him. He was being dragged away from the front. All around he saw the rest of the French army, retreating methodically and with great haste. Georges' corporal, Henri, who was nineteen and who, Georges later heard, became a hero Taking A Hill that nobody gave a damn about anyway, saw that Georges' eyes were open, and motioned to the soldier holding Georges' right arm to drag him the rest of the way to his feet. Georges stumbled a few steps over the ragged, shell-torn ground, before gaining his balance. Georges could not think clearly; there was a vast pain in his neck that was only beginning to abate. The terrain about them seemed vaguely familiar. After nearly a kilometer, the retreat slowed, then stopped; they began digging in, grimly determined that the Germans would go no further. Night descended like a raven. Soldiers were still stringing barbed wire on grimy, rotting wood posts, and the shattered fragments of shell-torn trees. They had to pull dead men off some of the trees before they could use them. Georges and the remains of his company--Henri--sat in the muddy trenches, trying to nurse a small fire, raised a few inches over the mud. They were having some success, more than anyone else, but still the flame was weak. Georges had not spoken since awakening. When Henri spoke to him, he found himself unable to answer, having, uh, no vocal cords to speak of. They knitted as the night wore on; the scar on his neck began to fade. Near midnight, he whispered, in a voice like ground glass, "Henri? What happened to me?" Henri was hunched over the small fire, trying to light a damp cigarette that was already half smoked. He finally produced a dim glow in the tip of the cigarette, and sat back against the trenchwall. "Don't know, Georges. German stuck you..." He hesitated. "It looked like your head came off. That's just what it looked like." He shrugged indifferently. "I shot the German. When I looked again your head was in place and there was a bleeding gash all around your neck." Georges touched the skin above his collar. There was a thin ridge he could barely feel. He nodded. "I used to wonder if I could die." "Georges?" "This area looks familiar," whispered Georges. "I think this is where General Dumouriez stopped the Prussians, when they were trying to help King Louis restore the monarchy. The day after the battle ..." He shook his head, and winced at the faint ghost of pain. "That was September 20. In 1792. The next day the National Convention declared we were a Republic." Henri was staring at him, wide-eyed, across the fire. "In January," said Georges in a voice distant with memory, "we cut King Louis' head off." Henri turned his face away from Georges, and drew his coat about himself. He clutched his rifle tightly. (In the morning he was gone, and that was the last time Georges saw him, because three days later, while Taking a Hill that nobody gave a damn about anyway, he became a Hero of the French Republic, his last thoughts being of Georges Mordreaux. Ironically, it was a German boy with a bayonet who got him too, although the resemblance stops there. The German boy--he was actually younger than Henri, and his name is unimportant, since like Henri he did not survive the war--this German boy put his bayonet in from behind, and the corporal did not resurrect. Ah, well.) Georges spent the rest of the night trying to whistle. He did quite creditably. Georges thought, with some irritation at himself, that there ought to be some point to be learned from having one's head cut off, and surviving the experience. He could not think of one, however, aside from the obvious. He was very glad to be alive. In some ways, thought Georges Mordreaux, I am a very shallow fellow. Ah, well. The author notes that in the year 1917, Georges Mordreaux was two hundred and five years old. Perhaps he was a bit shallow, at that. One of the definitions of the word "entropy," as given by Webster's Third New International Dictionary, is: "The degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity." Put more simply; "Things run down." Georges never read dictionaries. He considered them, being as they were largely artificial attempts to impose order on the anarchistic languages of man, very much beneath him. About order-imposers, as dictionary compilers; Georges was better at it. Indeed, one might consider Georges Mordreaux "The Enemy of Entropy." Georges liked to. When the Fire came, and the superpowers decided to sterilize the face of the planet, the freeways survived. (Vista: A thousand-and-one mushroom clouds dotting the face of a small planet. Terminal acne. Winding lazily among the mushrooms, strips of concrete, over-extended roads, observed the going-ons, and later, when the barbarians and the mutants came howling out of the radioactive Burns to trek the surface of the freeways among the dead shells of the automobiles, the freeways might have giggled to themselves. Eventually the cars were dragged from the freeways for use in making weapons, and the freeways were left alone to contemplate their freewayness.) Dateline 711 A.T.F. (After the Fire). Ralesh caught her before she had even reached the hills beyond the forest. The little girl had fallen asleep beneath an old willow, at the edge of the grassy meadow that led up to the foothills. Ralesh, a woman of early years, awoke the five-year old unceremoniously, and ran the child the kilometers back to the Clan House without comment. She whipped the child publicly. Five lashes; she was not a severe mother. When the punishment was over, she took her daughter back to the Girls' House. She put her daughter to bed; kissed her on the forehead, and said gently, "Child, the woods are dangerous for children. There are bears and Real Indians. There is nothing at the end of the Big Road; the stories are lies." Her daughter stared up at the oak planks of the Girls' House. She did not speak. Ralesh sighed. "Daughter, understand this; I will catch you. You cannot run so far nor so fast that I will not find you. Remember that." She left, and left the girl alone. When she was gone, Jalian d'Arsennette, the straight-line female descendant of Dilann d'Arsennette, finally let the tears come. It was strange, though; the tears were external, they tracked down her cheeks and she could hear herself sobbing, but inside none of it mattered. Inside she was as cold and calm as an elder Hunter. They would be watching her now; but now was not always. Summer would come again. Ralesh's words stayed with her, though, like a curse that would not be shaken. "You cannot run so far nor so fast ... I will catch you." Jalian's hands clenched into fists. Summer would come. They gave Jalian few duties on the day the Hunters came back; she finished them early, and slipped out of the Clan House when nobody was watching her. She wandered through the village aimlessly, stopping to play a game of strike with one of the boys. (She was only beginning to understand that boys were not fit company; she had not yet learned why that was so, except that in all the stories it was the boys who caused the Fire.) By the time the watch was preparing to change, she had reached the clearing that separated Selvren village from the forest. She squirmed into what cover she could find at the south end of the clearing; brown-haired and brown-clothed, she would have been hard to see in any case. Against the brown summer meadow grass she was next to invisible. The clearing was a ten-second run for Jalian, from one end to the other, and it was in clear view of the Clan House. Out in front of the Clan House the men were tending the fires that would be used to smoke the catch the Hunters returned with. Ten seconds. The watch's replacements arrived. The women stood together, gossiping for a few moments, before the new guards assumed their posts. Jalian drew her legs up under her, checked her knife to make sure the sheath was securely tied down, peered toward the Clan House one last time.... She ran. Ten seconds was a long time; long enough to think of exactly what Ralesh would do to her if she was seen, if she was caught. Run, and run, and run.... Jalian reached the trees at the north end of the clearing, running as fast as she had ever run before. Her foot caught in a tuft of the long brown grass at the last instant and sent her tumbling. She did her best to convert it into a roll as she had been taught, but still the wind was knocked from her lungs and she had trouble breathing when she regained her feet. Fighting silently to pull air into her emptied lungs, Jalian squirmed up to the edge of the decent cover and peered out. There was no unusual activity over at the long wooden Clan House, nothing out of the ordinary for early morning in the late thaw-time ... she had not been seen. Jalian grinned fiercely. It would be late afternoon, now, before she was missed, and by then she would be long gone. They would know where she had gone, when she failed to show up to help with the preparation of the Ceremony meal, but by then, with luck, it would be too late. If the Hunters started out after her the instant they became aware of her absence, Jalian would still have a third- day start. With luck, before nightfall Jalian would be in the land of the gods and demons that was at the end of the Big Road. She did not think that anyone but Ralesh would try to follow her there--and perhaps not even Ralesh. Jalian turned, her long brown hair swirling out behind her, and vanished into the trees. She left no trail. None. Her name is Jalian. Yes, Jalian d'Arsennette, except that there have been, well, changes. She is no longer six years old, and her hair is no longer brown. It is white, ice-white, completely untinted. She is twenty-six years old. Her eyebrows and eyelashes are still brown, and it gives her features an artificial seeming. Her skin is extremely pale; she does not tan. Rather than melanin her skin holds pigmentation that whitens under the sun. She is lovely in a strange, erotic way. None of the above is important. She has eyes. Even in the twentieth century Gregorian, her eyes are exceptional. The irises are silver. They have always been silver, of course, but now they are something else and more; a maelstrom of swirling color, silver and blue and pink and purple and green and gold red, that somehow still is only silver when faced with the lens of a camera; the effect is not reproducible. (Clan Silver-Eyes prospered where the Real Indians and the barbarians did not at least partially because of the silver irises; they were lovely, true, but they also detected abnormal radiation levels quite capably, as a sort of staccato flashing in their peripheral vision. After the Fire, this became a survival mechanism.) Jalian's eyes can and do cause almost instant desire in any functioning male, and in not a few women besides. They are the eyes of someone who has seen too much and knows too much, and knows that there is nothing she can do about what she knows. Because, of course, Armageddon is coming. Jalian d'Arsennette is viewed, by the twentieth century, as a tall, rather elfin beauty; a woman whom destiny rides like a demon. She has the strange habit of not meeting other people's eyes. Dateline 712 A.T.F. Jalian pushed herself, moving through the light woods silently nonetheless. The sun, striking down through the trees, rarely touched her; she was a silvered shadow, mingling with the other shadows of morning. The light did not find her, she made no sound. It would have taken an Elder Hunter to track her; no lesser tracker would have discerned any trail. It was late morning when Jalian reached the hills. There was no cover in the hills to compare with that in the forests; automatically she made the most of the sketchy scrub, and refrained from worrying about it. She would make it across the hills or she would not. It was near noon when she reached the place. Ruins of the old world lay all about them, wherever one looked. Old buildings, the frames of karz; even, in some places, where ancient builders had lined concrete with polymer bases, stretches of good roads. Still, for Jalian, none of these, not even the few good roads, matched the straight and clean and serene beauty of her place: The Big Road. Like the path of a thrown knife, the Big Road stretched away as far as the eye could see, west and north toward the far hills that ringed the other end of the valley, toward the mountains that legend said the Clan had walked down from in the days after the Fire. For as far as Jalian could see, the Big Road ran true. The Big Road, where Jalian came to it, was bordered by one of the largest and worst of the Burns. If one had known the Big Road before the bombs fell, that person might have been able to tell Jalian that the Big Road was not supposed to be partially melted; but there was nobody to tell Jalian that, and she supposed that the Big Road had always been that way. (Even before the missiles came burning from the sky, this spot had held a laboratory in which there were radioactive materials stored for testing. When the bombs went down and then up again, strange things had happened there.) That was more than seven centuries ago; to Jalian's eyes, the Burn still sparkled faintly. Jalian stood at the spot where she ascended the Big Road. It was a desolate area at the edge of the concrete, where a plant that