The door to the cabin was open. Jalian could see, in the dark, the infrared radiation from Georges, sitting on the porch with his back to her. Her feelings concerning this man were something that she had not sought to explain to herself in many years. It was close to seventeen years now since Georges had lost his eyesight.
In seventeen years, neither of them had spoken of love. From the porch, Georges Mordreaux's voice drifted back to her. "Will you come sit with me?"
Jalian glanced to her left. Nigao Loos was huddled on the bed, lying curled in a tight ball against the cold. She hesitated a moment, shrugged, and drew the blanket up to cover him. She went out to Georges.
Georges moved over slightly on the porch, motioned to her to sit where he had been. Jalian settled down next to him. Georges was silent for a moment. His glove-covered hands were folded one over the other in his lap. "What have you been doing?"
Jalian pulled her jacket more tightly closed. It was cold out, though not as cold as a winter night of her childhood. The weather was different in this time, before the Fires changed everything. The areas that got as hot as the Selvren valley of her childhood never got as cold; those that got as cold never came close to getting as hot. "Many things," she answered Georges. Her breath plumed white into the night air, under the stars and half moon. "I killed a man in the USSR. It was an accident." She shivered. "I have never killed a person before, even a male, accidentally."
"How many have you killed, now?"
Jalian said distantly, "it would be more trouble than it is worth to count."
Georges sighed. "Ah, well… it solves nothing, you know."
She shook her head. "I do not know. I have no love for these Americans, Georges. They are arrogant beyond words. But… but they are better than their alternatives. The Russians, the Chinese—they are horrors, Georges." She started to say something else, stopped. "I have not been to China. I have only studied it. It is better perhaps than Russia, because it is less efficient. I have been to Russia. I would not wish such a home on Real Indians."
"I know… I visited them in the mid-1930s." He shook his head. "They have not changed, I think. Only grown more practiced in their inhumanity."
Jalian said in a small voice, "I do not say I like it, Georges. I take no pleasure in killing." She smiled, a hesitant ghost smile in the night. "Neither do I avoid it when necessary; and I make my own decisions. I work with the Americans, not for them. I see no better course. There are too many persons alive in this time. I can do nothing alone."
Georges grew very still. Beside him, Jalian looked at him for the first time. "Georges? Your thoughts?" Georges's voice stumbled slightly getting the words out. "I think… it seems to me that there must always be alternatives."
Jalian said curiously, "You are not specific." Georges shook his head decisively. "It is not a specific thought. Only…" He moved one crippled hand in a dismissive motion. "It is not important. But think: those in control of the atomic weapons, they are not the American people, nor the Russian people, nor the Chinese or Indian or French or English people. It is not the politicians who control the weapons. It is," said Georges, "the soldiers who control the weapons."
Jalian said without inflection, "That is true."
Georges chuckled warmly. "Jalian, if I say something you find silly…"
"Obvious," said Jalian with a straight face. "Perhaps it was a bit obvious."
Georges smiled. "Ah, well. Tell me more of what you have done."
Jalian leaned against him, let her eyes close. She did not comment when his arm pulled her closer. She was drowsy, she had not slept in two days aside from the last few hours, and he was a warmth that protected her from the slight breeze from the south. "It is not so much," she said sleepily. "I have seen some movies, read many books, and killed a man by accident. I tried to learn math again, to translate Corvichi physics into human physics. I cannot do it… there is almost nothing I find in common between the systems. I have taught myself to regress my memory back to when ghess'Rith was teaching me, but even with all the memories I possessed as a child, I cannot solve the equations that suggest themselves concerning what we are attempting." She rested quietly against Georges. "We can change time, certainly," she said very softly. "We already have. We can stop Armageddon from happening, perhaps. I simply do not know. None of the cycles complete themselves.
She said nothing more after that, and in a while Georges came to be aware that she was asleep. He sat upright on the porch, with Jalian in his arms. He reached into her mind once, and withdrew like a man who had touched a live wire.
In her dream, she was being held by ghess'Rith.
For over an hour, he sat with her. He made a mental note to ask her whether she'd brought him any new seeds, and to ask her to remember to bring him some birds, next time she came. Or bees, perhaps, for honey.
His position did not tire him. He did not grow tired in conventional sense of the word; he dreamed, but rarely slept. Sometimes, though, sometimes it seemed to him that the world and all that were in it were only insubstantial ghosts that affected him in the most minor of ways, and then his ennui grew so great that it was almost unendurable.
Only recently had it occurred to him that he was vastly old.
Georges shivered, and chased the thoughts away. Jalian stirred in his arms, and he held her more tightly.
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 had grown 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's microcomputer—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 on 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, most strange; 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 rearview 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 EIlis's 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 graveled 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 and hair was short and neat.
His name was llya 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 Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1961-1963. Lyndon B. John, 1963-1968. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1969-1976. Edward M. Kennedy, 1977-1984. Ronald W. Reagan, 1985-1988. Scott L. McCarthy, 1989-1992. Edmund G Baldwin, Jr., 1993-2000. Ernest Warren, 2001-2004. James Malacar, 2005-2007.
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 antimatter, and obviously it is not. The cosmic-ray satellites have indicated that quite clearly. On the other hand, we have managed to produce antimatter 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…
—Nigao Loos and Henry Ellis.
"The Observability of Chronons in Nature." In Scientific American February 1988: p. 14.
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 com…"
"I know that."
"… and then the Russkies orbited a satellite that shoots down incoming American ICBMs," 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, created on 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 unit 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 any such initiative."
"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—"
ENCEL9S 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 Javis 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, "Welto 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 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 ENCELlS was simply unable to assign functions. After considerable processing, ENCELIS tentatively assigned the sounds "our world is ending" to the data type FIGURE OF SPEECH. FIGURE OF SPEECH was itself a tentatively assigned data type that ENCELIS had l
oosely grouped among word patterns. Other word patterns that ENCELIS had identified, ranging in probability from Identified to Evaluating, included CLONE, EXAGGERATION, LIE, and EXCLAMATION.
ENCELIS was still uncertain whether verbalization, the data type SPEECH, should be classified as an action that the data type HUMAN 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, roiled 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."
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