The Armageddon Blues

by The Armageddon Blues (new ed) (mobi)

  One gloved hand moved into hers. Jalian looked away from him, and turned unseeing eyes out to the wild rows of the garden. "I look at the moon," she said quietly, "at night. It is not the moon of my childhood. There is a scar, three hundred kilometers long, that I can see with my naked eyes."

  Georges squeezed her hand.

  "And every day," she said, "every day, I work to prevent Armageddon.

  "And every day more of Silver-Eyes dies in my mind."

  They sat together, listening to the wind in the leaves of the orange and apple trees. "You know," said Georges, many minutes later, "sometimes I feel very old."

  Jalian bowed her head slightly.

  "But I cannot die." Georges held her hand without speaking; there was nothing left for either of them to say.

  She left just before noon. Georges walked her to the edge of the trees. They parted company in silence, without good-byes. In his mind he followed her back to the campground, watched her getting into the car.

  She drove away; he pulled his awareness back into himself as the car receded. He turned and walked back to the cabin.

  He picked up the box by the cabin door with some curiosity; he'd forgotten to ask Jalian what sort of insects they were. He'd asked her to get bees of some sort, but he would be satisfied if she'd gotten any sort of pollinating insect. There were some things that, with all the best intentions, Jalian had never fully grasped the importance of--Georges thought she still did not know that honey came from bees. Honey making had been a lost art in her culture.

  The box was strangely warm; Georges put an ear to it and listened. No buzzing; there certainly were no bees within. There was a vague crackling sound. Intrigued, he took the box out to the porch, and tore off the brown paper that it was wrapped in. Heat flashed against his face. The box was getting genuinely hot.

  Georges lifted the lid off of the box.

  The explosion blasted him back off of the porch. He stood, dazed. The insects were swarming up out of the box, into the air. Flashes of vague warmth lit against his cheeks. Understanding broke in on him.

  Georges ran up the steps, charged through the door of the cabin, and slammed it shut. Another explosion rattled the door.

  He stood there, his mind completely blank, for several seconds.

  There was another booming explosion outside the door.

  Georges Mordreaux chuckled slowly. He sank down and sat on the rug before the doorway, and the chuckles became laughter. He sat with his back to the door, laughing so hard that his whole body shook, laughing as he had not laughed in more years than he could remember.

  Outside, the fireflies continued to blow themselves to bits.

  "Where nature makes natural allies of us all, we can demonstrate that beneficial relationships are possible even with those with whom we must deeply disagree, and this must someday be the basis of world peace and world law."

  --John F. Kennedy, State of the Union Address, January 29, 1961

  Dateline 1993 Gregorian: April.

  Rome, Italy.

  Ilya Navikara paused, just inside the entrance to the small bistro on the outskirts of Rome. The entrance let directly onto the dining room, a cozy area with perhaps twenty tables, dimly lit by red hanging lamps. The tablecloths where white and orange, the chairs made of real wood. It was not crowded, even at lunchtime on a Friday.

  His target was seated, alone, at a table at the far wall. Her back was to the wall. Warning flags went up in the back of Ilya's mind; the lamp over her table was dead. Still, she seemed so--delicate.

  His thoughts turned grim. This woman trained Michael Walks-Far, who came closer to killing you than anyone, ever. Closer even than the One in the forest.

  This woman killed Karien.

  Ilya brushed off the maitre d', and approached the table, smiling. "Miss d'Arsennette?" His English was accentless. "May I join you?"

  Jalian looked him over for a moment. If she recognized him, it did not show. She nodded. To the maitre d', hovering in the background, she said, "I would like some more peanut butter cookies. And more chocolate milk." The man nodded quickly and vanished back into the kitchen. Ilya seated himself. He could not see either of the room's entrances.

  Jalian ate a cookie, looking at Ilya appreciatively. He was rather good looking. Not as pretty as Michael, but more handsome than, say, Georges, even when he'd had his eyes. He was dressed in a conservative business suit. "Would you like a peanut butter cookie?" she asked. "They're out of chocolate chip."

  Ilya accepted. "Thank you. May I speak freely?"

  "If you wish," Jalian said indifferently. She grinned with sudden fierceness. "There is nobody here to stop a person from speaking her thoughts freely."

  Bad sign. "I will put all of my cards on the table," said Ilya easily. "I am Ilya Navikara. You may have...."

  Jalian nodded. She held a thumb and forefinger slightly apart. "One of my people came that close with you."

  Ilya forged ahead. "I know as much about you as anyone is capable of knowing, having never met you before. Your name is Jalian d'Arsennette. Since 1971 you have worked with various offices and installations in the American intelligence community. In early 1976 you blackmailed the then-head of the Central Intelligence Agency and the American Secretary of Defense into creating a small, well-funded intelligence operation called Sunflower." Ilya paused. "The Solar Power Satellite was a good touch. It fooled us for most of a year."

  "Closer to two," said Jalian mildly.

  Ilya licked his lips. For the first time he seemed unsure. "Despite your rather remarkable appearance of youth, you are at the least in your late thirties....I hesitate to place an upper age limit."

  Jalian considered. "I am ... about fifty years old."

  Ilya exhaled slowly. "Then it is true. The woman who walked the freeways in the 1960's, in California; that was you. And the woman reported in 1969, when you tested that energy weapon in central California; that too was you."

  The waiter arrived with a tray of peanut butter cookies, and another glass of chocolate milk. He put them down before Jalian. In English, he asked stiffly, "Will that be all?"

  Jalian waved him away. "Yes, yes." When he was gone, Jalian separated the cookies into two piles, and shoved half the pile toward Ilya. "Actually," she said, "it was not a weapon. But you would not understand that."

  Ilya nodded thoughtfully. "It's an interesting thought, that it was not a weapon." He moved his lips in a graceful smile. "But it does not bear examination. There is a mirror-reflective scar of partially melted ground on the moon that is 1.3 meters wide and over three hundred kilometers in length. There is nothing but an energy weapon that could have done that--and a vastly powerful one. Still, let us not raise old arguments. Whatever the weapon was, you cannot control it, or you would have employed it--as threat, as weapon--by now." He made a cutting gesture. "I am getting sidetracked. I wish to ask you a question."

  Jalian nodded approvingly. "I see. You wish to join us, to defect?"

  Ilya Navikara said blankly, "To the contrary. I wish for you to join us."

  Half the world away, Georges Mordreaux was getting dressed. He pulled on a pair of old jeans, and a long-sleeved lumberjack's shirt. He shrugged into an old overcoat, and stamped into his walking boots. He added a pair of gloves and smoked black sunglasses, and picked up the walking stick next to the door. He read the note pinned to the table one last time, nodded with a vague feeling of unease, and left. He closed the door to the cabin behind him.

  It was approaching summer, and not as cold as it might have been. Occasional brilliant flashes in the night sky produced perceptible heat radiation. Navigating with the bouncing sonar images, he moved swiftly out into the grove of fruit trees, away from the swarm of booming, exploding fireflies.

  There was no moon that night, but he walked surely. His grip on the walking-stick was not very secure; it slipped from his hands twice in the ensuing kilometers. An old wolf was there, watching him, the second time he lost the walking stick, and it foll
owed him for several kilometers after that, the fur thickening and growing out over a spot into which some hunter had, long years past, pumped a load of buckshot.

  When Georges reached the road, the wolf left him. There was no traffic, so he started walking.

  South.

  Jalian looked at Ilya in amazement. "Work for you? Why?"

  Ilya said earnestly, "You are a talented woman with a great deal of useful information. The Soviet Union rewards individuals who make contributions. You are not an American to begin with. In truth, we do not know what nationality you are. You have a number of valuable secrets that we are willing to pay most handsomely for." He leaned forward. "The nature of the weapon used in 1969. The details of the treatment that keeps you young. The truth behind the spiriting away of Nigao Loos to your Midway space construction factory, and why you and he are the only two known instances of your anti-aging treatment in use." Ilya's voice took on a harsh cast; he whispered. "The truth of who you are, and of who the One in the forest is."

  Jalian sat quietly, looking at Ilya. Her hair was a dull white beneath the dead overhead lamp. Highlights played in it from the functioning lamps over other tables. She looked no more than twenty years old; in a sudden, chill moment Ilya believed, truly, for the first time, that the woman facing him was indeed all of the things that legend said of her. For a full minute and more, Jalian sat and looked at him. Before thirty seconds were up he was beginning to fidget.

  She smiled, slowly. She

  /Michael./

  The mindtouch was faltering, unsure. /Jalian. one in a car parked down the street. he's sitting on the passenger's side./

  /take him./

  ... agreement. /it's done./

  reached for a peanut butter cookie. Ilya seemed nervous. He was fumbling with the napkin in front of him. He would not meet her eyes. Jalian was thinking to herself, All too easy, when a shock of adrenaline ran through her system like a knife.

  Naturally, not too casually or with too much show, Ilya took the napkin he was fiddling with, opened it and put it on his lap. Jalian knew instantly that she had underestimated him.

  His right hand came back up from under the table. His left hand did not.

  That was foolish, Jalian thought clearly. Nothing showed on her face. She munched a peanut butter cookie in apparent reflection. "I suppose," she said, "there is no reason I cannot come to work for you." She held a beat, and his left hand moved slightly as though he were adjusting his napkin still. "I have terms, however. You must build some more freeways."

  Ilya had become very calm. He was going to kill her; he had made up his mind, when.... "Freeways?"

  "And your food is terrible. I went to Russia back in '85"

  "And killed Karien Karchovsky," said Ilya softly.

  "You can't buy decent cookies anywhere. You could open some cookie factories." Jalian held a thoughtful pose. Her silver eyes focused on the distance. "And you could stop trying to sabotage American anti-ballistic missile satellites--oh," she said in tones of mild surprise, tipping over her chocolate milk. The liquid ran across the table top and dripped into Ilya's lap. His eyes flickered downward.

  With the fingertips of her right hand Jalian picked up the edge of the table and brought it smashing up against Ilya. The Russian kicked back and fell away from the table, rolling backward across the floor. A metallic something glinted in his hands, and Jalian moved a step to the left and filled the air with steel.

  The gun went off once. The bullet struck Jalian high up on the right shoulder. It spun her around; the bullet punched cleanly through. Without changing expression, she moved her fourth knife from her right hand to her left, and approached Ilya. He was lying flat on his back. Two of her thrown knives had found targets, in his chest and solar plexus. The third was hanging in the wall across the room, and Jalian found room to be glad that nobody important had seen her miss the throw.

  Ilya was still alive. Jalian nudged the gun out of his outstretched hand, and knelt next to him. "Too slow, Ilya." Blood was flowing down her shirt, front and back, a seeping scarlet stain that was very red against the white of the shirt.

  Ilya tried to say something, but his voice only rattled in his throat. He tried again, and made it. "Always wondered ... if you were ... real...." He said something else, in Russian, and died.

  Jalian stood slowly. A rush of dizziness took her, and her eyesight faded into a pattern of swirling red dots. She heard the kitchen doors swinging open, and the voice of the restaurant manager in loud, wild Italian.

  She made her way to the door. It was a long way to the door, longer than she remembered. Vaguely, she heard someone asking her, in English, where are you going?

  "I am going to save the world," she told them all. She realized, after a fuzzy moment, that she was speaking in silverspeech, and so she repeated it in English. It was important that they understand. "I am going to save the world."

  She succeeded in opening the door before her knees buckled. She found herself sitting in the open doorway, and she could hear the faint drip, drip, drip of her blood on the floor tiles. The warm Italian sun touched her cheek, and that was the last thing she remembered for a long time.

  In high summer, storm lightning crashed down into the tinder dry moss and pine needles of the forests of Saskatchewan.

  Before the fire stopped, 1600 square kilometers of the forest had burned.

  Near the end of the year 1993, a man struggled along a narrow trail, high in the Himalayan mountains. Somewhere up here was a lamasery that Herman Hesse had spoken highly of. "Somewhere up here" was turning out to be a lot of territory.

  Night was drawing in about him, and gentle snows were falling, when he found the temple. The trail broadened out into a wide, snow-whitened courtyard. At one end of the courtyard rose the walls of the temple, and two massive iron gates.

  Raising his walking stick, the man rapped on the metal of the gate. There was no answer, and he rapped again, a dull clanging sound that seemed to echo away forever.

  With a deep, slow creaking, the gates began to swing aside. When the gap between them was grown to the point that it would let a man pass, he entered; and the gates swung shut behind him with ease, as though oiled.

  On December the twenty-fifth, 1993, Jalian d'Arsennette made her way through a grove of dead fruit trees. Their branches were burnt bare of leaves, and the garden in the clearing inside was blasted and burnt and frozen. The door to the cabin hung open, and snow had drifted in to cover the doorway and rug.

  On the table in the middle of the room, there was a knife, pinned to the charred table. A knife that Jalian had given Georges back in 1968, a knife that Ralesh had given to Jalian when she took the Woman's Brand.

  Just the knife, and the blackened wood; nothing else.

  It was Christmas Day, 1993, and there were less than fourteen years left until Armageddon.

  Dateline 1994 Gregorian: March.

  Laguna Beach, California.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  Jalian came awake all at once; up out of the nightmare.

  Beep. Beep. Bee ...

  She sat up in bed, and ran a thumb over the pressure point marked callercheck on the video terminal by the bedside. The beeping stopped, and rainbows washed briefly across her nude form, highlighting the scarred burn tissue of her Woman's Brand. Michael Walks-Far appeared in the screen. She pushed the stud for time and callaccept with her thumb and forefinger in one motion.

  10:23:15 PM. "Jalian?" Michael caught sight of the form in the bed next to her; she saw him struggling to keep the disapproval from his expression. "I have good news."

  "Yes?" Without haste, she pulled on the silk robe by the bedside.

  "We have another sighting."

  The words brought her head up, staring into the screen. "Where?"

  "Calm down," he said too gently. "It's not fresh. From December of last year; an airport in Vietnam. He was disembarking from a flight from Japan. There is a tentative sighting following this one, at the Chinese bord
er; we've not confirmed it yet."

  Jalian nodded. "Very well. Call me again when you have more."

  "I will." He seemed on the verge of adding something else; instead the screen fuzzed into polychrome static.

  Jalian sat at the edge of the bed, working on her breathing. Breathing deep, slow. She had been sweating in her sleep, although the night was cool, and the windows in her bedroom were open to the breeze off of the sea.

  The nightmare was the one she had been having for over a month now. She was nineteen years old, and the Corvichi were leaving; ghess'Rith was leaving her. Somehow ghess'Rith became Georges, and he was saying in v'chak, "I am not Ralesh and I am not ghess'Rith. I am myself, and I will never hurt you." The words should have been in silverspeech, but they were not; for some reason he spoke them in v'chak.

  She clasped her hands together, dug her nails into the flesh and concentrated on the pain until it burned away the subtler, less controllable anguish.

  The figure in the bed next to her stirred. She groped for Jalian, and her eyes opened when Jalian was not to be found. "Jalian?" she asked groggily. "What, did you get a phone call?"

  Jalian said simply, "Yes. Go back to sleep, child." She did not turn to look at her.

  The girl pulled Jalian's pillow close, and curled up around it. "What're you calling me child for...." She yawned hugely. "'M as old as you are anyhow...." She snuggled into the pillow, and was asleep again instantly.

  Jalian smiled. She could not help it. "No, you are not." She got out of bed and walked down the hallway of the house she was renting to the shower. She stood under the shower, first as hot as she could bear it, then as cold as the water would go.

  In the kitchen, hair still damp, she fried vegetables in a pan on the stove. There were doughnuts and chocolate milk in the refrigerator, but since Georges had disappeared her body would not allow her to eat foods with sugar. She still ate them sometimes by accident, and was astonished and angry when her body rejected them; she had not been ill in two and a half decades.