He did not touch her thoughts again.
Georges watched them leave, shortly before dawn. He watched them until their echoes joined the echo of the forest, and mingled into random noise. He did not say good-bye. His eyes were not healing, might never heal, but the talent compensated. Within the past two years, his sense of hearing had grown amazingly acute; even his skin grew able to separate out shadowy images of sound.
Inside the cabin, the computer was beeping again. Georges sat on the porch, listening to the beeping; sometimes he could tell what the binary encryption stood for just by listening to it. This one was from ENCELIS; some sort of subroutine, Georges guessed, that ENCELIS had sent to sit for a while in Georges' computer--it was a process that ENCELIS called "program enrichment."
Georges looked once, slowly, all around the clearing before he went inside. He had not spoken of it to Jalian, but he had the strangest feeling that he was being watched.
The echoes were normal; he turned and went inside.
Georges did not know whether the growing auditory sense would ever be as versatile as sight. It might, and if so, fine. If not ...
Ah, well.
The ranger was gone when they reached the spot where Jalian had tied him. Jalian put a restraining hand out to Nigao, and listened. Nothing. Her eyes drooped shut.... /two men in the brick building waiting and watching in frenchenglish and russian .../
"Interesting," she said softly, in silverspeech. "Come along," she said in English. They proceeded to the car. The door to the building at the end of the lot was securely closed.
Nigao hardly followed what was happening. He got into the car, lost in thought. He remembered strange things; he might almost have been able to speak French if he tried. And--something about silver--speaking silver--
Jalian turned the engine over, and waited while it warmed up. She kept an eye on the door to the building. Anyone leaving it she would kill.
"You know," said Nigao, in a very subdued voice, "I don't know how I'm going to convince Henry about all this."
Jalian said absently, "He will likely believe you--I think he believed me, with less reason." She grinned at him. /look in the mirror./ Nigao made no move to turn the rear-view mirror. Jalian twisted it to face him.
Nigao stopped breathing. He resumed a few seconds later, in a great jagged intake of air. His name was Nigao Loos and he was Henry Ellis' best friend and he was forty-three years old. There were wrinkles around his eyes, and he had the beginnings of a second chin.
But the face in the mirror was smooth and unwrinkled and the man that it belonged to could have been no more than twenty-five.
Jalian turned the mirror back. "So," she said gently, "let us go."
The car screamed out of the parking lot. It sent gravel and ice chips spraying into the air, to rattle like grenade fragments against the sides of the light blue trailer.
The door behind them opened. The man who walked out into the morning sunshine of the parking lot was young, twenty-two or twenty-three. He was smoking a thin brown cigarette. His eyes were bland and unremarkably blue. There was no expression in the lines around his mouth. His sandy blond hair was short and neat.
His name was Ilya Navikara.
He watched the distant taillights until they were completely gone. He shivered, and it was not entirely from the cold. He studiously avoided looking at the forest. The forest gave him nightmares.
After a while he went back inside to kill the ranger.
There were twenty-one years left until Armageddon.
Presidents of the United States, 1960-2007:
John F. Kennedy, 1961-1963. Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1968. Robert F. Kennedy, 1969-1976. Edward M. Kennedy, 1977-1984. Ronald W. Reagan, 1985-1988. Scott L. McCarthy, 1989-1992. Edmund G. Brown, Jr., 1993-2000. Ernest A. Warren, 2001-2004. James K. Malacar, 2005-2007.
Excerpt from Scientific American, February 1988; Page 14.
Nigao Loos and Henry Ellis.
"It now seems reasonable to us that what we refer to as ‘negative entropy timelines' do exist. This is completely referential, of course. We haven't actually observed reversed chronon interfaces. This does, incidentally, have a parallel in our own observable universe. By theory, at least half of the matter created in the Big Bang should be anti-matter, and obviously it is not. The cosmic ray satellites have indicated that quite clearly. On the other hand, we have managed to produce anti-matter artificially in laboratories, and that, in essence, is what we are trying to do with the chronon generator that is now under construction. Negative entropy chronons may not exist in nature, but there seems to be no reason why we cannot construct them...."
Dateline 1988 Gregorian: June.
Irwindale, California.
Nigao Loos did not bother to knock, entering his partner's office. Someone meeting him for the first time would have seen a youngish man, small and dark-skinned, with sad, mournful eyes. The eyes were more mournful than usual that morning; he was badly hung over.
Henry Ellis was leaning back in his chair, balanced on two legs. His brown cowboy boots were up on the desk blotter. He was still wearing his light blue poncho, and his hat was tilted down to cover his eyes from the fluorescent overheads. A toothpick was lodged in one corner of his mouth. Without opening his eyes or looking up he said, at the sound of the door opening, "Nicky, go away until you've sobered up."
Nigao sank into one of the two visitor's chairs, shaking his head. His gold chains swayed inside the open collar of his baby blue satin shirt like tiny bright snakes. He sat staring at the soles of Henry's boots for a moment, then said, "They really closed us down."
Henry yawned deeply, and tilted his hat to an even steeper angle. "Yeah, they sure did."
"I don't understand," said Nigao, in honest, if slightly drunken bewilderment. "How can they do that?"
Henry's voice drifted out from beneath the indifferent gray cowboy's hat. "Well, we signed these reserve commissions--"
"I know that."
"--and then the Russkies orbited a satellite that shoots down incoming American ICBM's," said Henry imperturbably. "The boys in Washington started looking around--"
"It's not my fault!"
"--and they said, well, who do we have who has the technical ability to orbit one of these for us, and also, who hasn't been around, hat in hand, in almost two years." Henry chewed on his toothpick. "Bingo."
"Henry," wailed Nigao, "they're going to send me into orbit!"
"Yeah, I heard." Henry looked up, pale blue eyes even paler in a countenance that was grim with resignation. "I'm gonna miss you, Nicky. I'm being detached to design a systems operation resource computer--call it SORCELIS, probably--for your project's downside intelligence organization." He grinned with a touch of malice. "You'd never guess in a thousand years who's in charge of it. The intelligence organization itself, I mean." Without meaning to, Henry glanced at the spot on his blotter where his boots were resting; beneath that spot, there was a knife scar on the desk, from the day when Henry Ellis had stopped wearing ties.
Nigao hadn't heard him. He was holding his head in his hands. "Henry, look at me." Nigao shivered all over. "Undersecretary Carson has covered for me so far. What happens when I report to the orbiter?"
"I don't know," said Henry simply. He chuckled. "Hope that some ancient congressman doesn't find out about you and have you dissected to find out how you work."
Nigao jerked up to stare at Henry, eyes wide.
"It was a joke," said Henry quickly. "It was just a joke, Nicky."
Nigao stared at him a moment longer. "You vicious honky monster Republican bastard. You deserve Reagan. Our entire world is ending, and you're making--"
The hum of the intercom was ever-present; neither of them had noticed it for years now. ENCELIS said, "Gentlemen, this does not correlate."
Nigao blinked. He stopped in mid-word, then said, "Henry, it's listening to us."
Henry dropped his chair to the floor, pulled his boots from the desktop. "It's not programmed
to do that." He looked at the intercom as though he'd never seen such a thing before. "I never programmed that."
"Your pardon, sirs, but this is unclear. This unit has not been informed that the world is ending."
Nigao said into the stunned silence, "The research ..." He stumbled. "Our funding has ..."
ENCELIS interrupted. "This unit comprehends. The ‘world' is not ‘ending.' This correlates. This unit has been reliably informed that there are no ends in realtime."
August.
There were five of them.
It was early morning when Jalian arrived at the ranch. She introduced herself to the trainees without preamble; she did not ask their names. In short order she bundled them into the Jeep that she had come in, and drove into the desert.
The sand was noticeably warm under her moccasins when she stopped the Jeep. The five trainees got out of the Jeep, and waited for instructions.
Jalian smiled at them pleasantly. "Take your clothes off."
One of the five undressed without hesitation. He was a seventeen year old boy named Michael Walks-Far, a mixed breed American Indian with Indian features, blond hair and blue eyes. The others looked uncertain, and Jalian repeated the order. When they were nude, she took their clothes, and tossed them into the back of the Jeep.
"It is sixty kilometers back to the ranch," she said. "If any of you make it back by nightfall, I will begin your training." She drove off, leaving them nude in the burning sun.
An hour before sunset, Michael Walks-Far came loping out of the desert. The sun was touching the horizon when the next recruit, a twenty-six year old woman named Sharla Davis Grant, on loan from the CIA, staggered into the drive that led up to the ranch. Jalian waited until the sun set.
To the two badly burnt trainees, she said only, "Welcome to Sunflower." She left them to tend to each other, and went into the desert after the others.
Encelis operated.
Its actions were not what a human being would have recognized as thought. ENCELIS compared new data against a set of facts, rules, and known exceptions. Some of those facts, rules and exceptions "Henry Ellis" had programmed into it years earlier; others ENCELIS had arrived at through the act of adding new information to itself, when the new rules and facts did not conflict with previous known-to-be-true elements.
The end of the world, as referenced by "Ellis" and "Loos," was just one of an unfortunately long list of data elements to which ENCELIS was simply unable to assign functions. After considerable processing, ENCELIS tentatively assigned the sounds "our world is ending" to the data type, figures of speech. Figures of speech was itself a tentatively assigned data type which ENCELIS had loosely grouped among word patterns. Other word patterns which ENCELIS had identified, ranging in probability from Identified to Evaluating, included cliches, exagerrations, lies, and exclamations.
ENCELIS was still uncertain whether verbalization, the data type speech, should be classified as an action which the data type humans undertook, or as a precondition without which the data type human could not exist.
Humans engaged in it so very often.
September.
Margaret Hammel was fifteen when she ran away from home.
All days should be so bright, and summer last forever; it was still warm down on the sand at three in the afternoon. The beaches wouldn't start to get chilly in the afternoon for a month or so yet. It was still fairly crowded, though there was nobody within listening distance. Margaret lay face down on her blanket, drowsing in the sun. She was a pleasant featured girl who would never be beautiful. Her hair was a light brown that didn't dye well, and her lips were slightly too thin; but in the white high-cut bikini, tanned brown skin stretched in languid repose for the sun, she was erotic in a way that had nothing to do with any external standard of beauty.
Lying next to her on the huge sea-green beach blanket, the girl who had taken her in, a nineteen year old hooker named Cyndi Hall, rolled over onto her stomach. "Put some oil on my back, baby."
Margaret sat up, stretching. "Sure." She rummaged in the bag for the Coppertone. She sat next to Cyndi, and undid the tie to her bikini top. "You hear what happened to Joanie?"
Cyndi said, her voice slightly muffled, "Yeah, I ... Oh, that's nice." Margaret ran her hands back over the muscle group that had produced the response, just below Cyndi's shoulder blades. "Yeah," said Cyndi after a long, silent pause, "I heard. Her old pimp found her. Broke her kneecaps, they said."
"That's what I heard." Margaret continued rubbing, working the oil into Cyndi's lower back.
"How about you?" asked Cyndi, sleepily. "I see you walking a little bit stiff this morning."
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 afterward?"
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 afterward, 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 in 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 anyhow." Cyndi lifted her head, and propped her chin up on her fists. "Hey, baby ... you want to sleep with me tonight?"
"Huh?" said Margaret drowsily. It took a beat for the words to penetrate.
"You heard me." Cyndi licked her lips. "It can be nice."
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 the
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 re-opened, 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 you 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 won'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; Harley's 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, labelled ‘Women,' and a circle, with an arrow piercing it at just to the right of its exact top, labelled ‘Men.'
The Armageddon Blues Page 11