Armageddon Blues

by Daniel Keys Moran

  "Oh, Jesus," he said with amusement. "I wondered why the wall lasers were tracking me."

  He saw her hands move at the edge of the desk. "How do you know about the wall lasers?"

  Michael said mildly, "SORCELIS informed me of the parts requisition. I imagine you did the install yourself; your CIA training in microelectronics is quite impressive. As to knowing they were armed…" He shrugged. "You can hear the targeting motors if you have good hearing and keep your mouth shut long enough to use it."

  "SORCELIS," Sharla said suddenly, with a flat harshness that was shocking, "Record."

  The monitor next to Michael Walks-Far lit the room in a wash of blue. "System active," responded SORCELIS. "Recording."

  "I remember," whispered Sharla to the blue-lit figure before her, "that you once asked Jalian what Sunflower was. That was… when you and I and she were Sunflower. She answered that it was the code name of a project intended to protect America's antiballistic-missile satellites." Sharla tilted her head slightly to regard him. "She lied."

  "She… did not tell the entire truth," Michael agreed. The words scrolled across the monitor at his side: She did not tell the entire truth.

  "You are in contact with her," said Sharla, with wonder in her voice. She shook her head slowly, hands still at the edge of her desk. Michael watched her as the slow understanding came to her. Thought moved almost visibly across the surface of her face; she was no longer looking at him. "You…" She paused a moment, tracing the thought to its logical conclusion. "You control SORCELIS." Her eyes focused on him. "You had SORCELIS warn me. You engineered this conversation." Sharla Davis Grant was not angry; she was closer to fright, as she came to a cold, clear realization of her own mortality. They were trying to tell her something, something that the only friend she had in the world, Michael Walks-Far, could not or would not say aloud. Finally she faced him, and said at last, "Michael, why?"

  "Sunflower was where she wanted it to be. There were other things she needed to do." He regarded her steadily. "I thought she should have that option."

  Sharla's hands gripped the edge of the desk. "Michael, you're not an idiot. You don't quit something like this." In the soft, diffuse glows from the reading lamp and monitor, his face seemed softer, less sun-darkened and windburned. "But she has," he said simply.

  He thought her voice trembled; he was not sure. "Michael, tell me of this… conspiracy." He could read nothing in her expression; her face glowed with a cool, eerie blue cast.

  "In the year 2007, a nuclear war destroyed our planet."

  "What?"

  "In the year—"

  "I heard you the first time. What do you mean?"

  "I mean," said Michael Walks-Far, "that I, and Jalian of the Fires, and three computers and a score of Russians and Americans and Africans, are going to save the world."

  Sharla stared down at her desktop, not seeing it, not seeing the psychometric profiles that were all that was left atop it. She felt unreality wash over her. Had he actually said…

  "Michael, this is treason."

  "You call it by its correct name."

  "Michael…"

  He came up out of the chair like a snake striking. "Sharla, we are traveling a long road, with nothing but death at its end. World War Three is inevitable, it is inevitable now, unless we take steps to stop it, now."

  Sharla shook her head. "This is insane, Michael." She pointed at the terminal in the corner. "Michael, this is being recorded. I could kill you at this moment. They'd give me a fucking medal."

  "True. But," he said without heat, "posthumously. You would not live to see the morning."

  "This is not—" Sharla searched for a word, "rational behavior, Michael. Will you take on the CIA and the KGB and the FBI and the NSA and the GRU and DataWeb Security and every other facet of the governments of the two greatest powers this world has ever seen? At once?"

  "Choose."

  "Michael?"

  "You know me," said Michael. Sharla nodded tentatively "And you know Jalian," his voice rose, "and you know the idiots in charge of the CIA and the State Department. Choose."

  She was silent for a long while, staring at him wordlessly. He returned her gaze without flinching. Slowly the tension left her. "I have to think about this, Michael." She let go of the edge of her desk; her hands were sore. She became aware of how damp her palms were. "It's late. I'm going home for the night. SORCELIS, File Record." Moving like an old woman, with an exhaustion she was only now beginning to feel, Sharla bent and picked up her briefcase from the side of the desk. She moved by him without even glancing at him. She stopped before the exit; her voice was shaky. "Would you like to spend the night?"

  "I think… not tonight."

  She nodded without particular forcefulness. "This war you speak of, in 2007… how can you say such a thing with such certainty?"

  Michael almost did not answer her. "Jalian…" His heart was beating far faster than it should have. "Jalian d'Arsennette is from the future."

  Sharla Davis Grant did not nod again. "Shit. I knew you were going to say something like that." She left without looking back.

  "SORCELIS," said Michael Walks-Far. "Access Jalian. Password Camelot."

  The terminal in the far corner lit.

  Jalian looked at him out of the screen. There were lines in the skin around her eyes. There was a single gray hair in the brown eyebrow over her right eye. Her voice was unchanged in these three years; even now the sound of it was enough to stir the awareness of desire in him. "She guessed."

  Michael inclined his head slightly. "She did; as you and SORCELIS predicted."

  "How did she take it?"

  "I don't know." He looked up to the cameras over the screen. "She's going home. So she said." Probably nobody alive but Jalian would have heard the traces of anguish in his voice. "If she does not go home…"

  "If she attempts to go elsewhere?" The silver eyes did not waver. "I will kill her, of course." Jalian hesitated. "Is there news of Georges?"

  Michael's voice was barely audible. "Nothing. He is harder to find than you are. Last sighting remains Chinese border, mid-1993."

  Jalian looked off-camera. "Thank you, Michael. Tell Henry Ellis that I will be in contact with him shortly… I must leave. The lights just came on over the garage."

  Michael Walks-Far went to the west window and watched the small compact hovercar leave the garage on the south side of the complex. Out of the darkness, a kilometer or more away, a hushchopper descended like a bird of prey.

  His eyesight was very good, nearly as good as Jalian's; but it was probably his imagination that gave him a flash of white from the inside of the hushchopper. When he closed his eyes, he could feel, as she had taught him all those years ago…

  /hunting/

  Sharla, he sent to her, go home. Go straight home. Please.

  It was 1996, and there were eleven years left until Armageddon.

  The author wishes to note that the following is verifiable data, unlike the contextual data assembled from reports and memory tapes taken from human beings who are highly subjective, poor observers, and dishonest.

  Program scrolling forward:

  DATAWEB NEWS, HEADLINES, 1997-2000.

  1997

  PLAGUE IN CHINA: USSR DENIES IT GENENGINEERED.

  "We're Here to Stay!!" Announces Lunar Astronaut.

  SOVIET UNION ANNOUNCES FURTHER HARDENING OF SILOS

  …when asked about his decision to ban hovercars in city limits, the mayor declined to comment…

  Senate Approves Appropriation For THOR! DATAWEB SECURITY NABS "WEBSLINGER."

  1998

  DATAWEB NEWS BREAKS FIFTY PERCENT SERVICE MARK!

  Armageddon Blues Band Begins Record-Breaking Tour.

  …"I Don't Remember You" number one song on charts for fourteenth consecutive week…

  PAN-AFRICA INCORPORATES; RACE RIOTS STILL FLARING

  …experts say much of South Africa and most of the central regions will be included in the ne
wly incorporated African Empire…

  CHINA SENDS TROOPS TO HONG KONG!

  1999

  SOVIET SUBS DISCOVERED OFF WEST COAST

  World Population Passes Six And A Half Billion!

  CHINA NUKES TAIWAN!! PRESIDENT BROWN DISAPPROVES

  …Chinese, French, and Brazilian representatives announced today that they would boycott the proposed US-USSR Disarmament Conference…

  2000

  FRENCH SCIENTIST ANNOUNCES SUCCESSFUL HUMAN CLONE

  …Doctor Demberrie said in response to questioning that the process was still highly experimental…

  Supreme Soviet Members Executed! Treason Speculated.

  MILLENNIAL RIOTS KILL MILLIONS

  …McCartney said, in the interview, that Lennon was consistently misinterpreting his work…

  From DataWeb News, April 13, 2001: Interview with Rhodai Kerreka, author of the cult classic A Theory of Rational Ethics.

  Q. You were elected to the provisory Disarmament Council by a landslide. What are your plans for the next year?

  Kerreka. Essentially, to keep channels of communications open between the Americans and the Soviets. The American delegate, Henry Ellis, is an old friend. I'd like to establish close relations with the Soviet delegate, Anatoly Dibrikin.

  Q. It seems strange, Sen Kerreka—as strange as referring to you by a title that you invented—listening to your plans, to reflect on how little of what the Council plans to do directly concerns disarmament.

  A. My views are on record. Disarmament talks have been going on for forty years, since the days of Kennedy the First. In that time there is no record of a single weapon being destroyed or withdrawn from deployment except for reasons of obsolescence. The UN has only the power given to it by its members; at this point that's not much. While the Disarmament Council enjoys high visibility at the moment, you must realize that none of what we decide is binding.

  Q. You've stated on a number of occasions that unless some of the basic parameters of the current political situation are changed, you consider nuclear war inevitable.

  A. There are too many people on this small planet, and more coming at a rate of half a million a day… we are on a long downhill slide, and I am not optimistic.

  DATELINE 2001 GREGORIAN; AUGUST.

  Georges was out for his morning walk across the roof of the world.

  It was the only time of day that he left the small set of rooms that the lamas had given him. His control was still shaky; he could rarely hold down the talent for more than an hour at a time. He treasured that hour, spent it for the most part walking; usually just a short distance down the road from the lamasery. He nearly always stopped before he reached the village, unless he had risen very early indeed and the sun was not yet up.

  Despite the spring that was approaching in that half of the world, the morning air, high on the mountain, was still well below freezing; even during summer it rarely broke sixty degrees Fahrenheit. He had grown a beard, and frost settled in it as he walked blindly down the road. He wore only a brown robe, and with the suppression of the talent that he enforced upon himself, the cold struck him like a razor. He had not yet learned to ignore the cold.

  He walked carefully down the dirt road, barefooted, humming "I Want to Hold Your Hand," to himself; it was a new song one of the lamas had taught him, and he found to his surprise that he rather liked it.

  It had been disconcerting at first, the way the edge of the road trailed off into an echo of nothingness—except in the two places where prayer wheels were set up for the use of travelers—but Georges had been taking this morning walk now for more than two years; he was used to it. His walking stick tapped from side to side, as though his hearing were no better than that of a normally blind man. The villagers saw him only rarely, and the simple fact that he was a white man was enough to cause rumors that had brought the local Chinese constable, or equivalent thereof, up to the monastery twice already. Fortunately the man spoke no English, or French, and Georges pretended to speak neither Mandarin nor the local, Burmese-related dialect; the constable had gone away frustrated both times. But let the villagers report to him that the blind white man walked like a sighted man, without a cane, and he would be back with other police—communist Chinese police—who would not find the authority of the head lama particularly impressive. It would not matter to them, as it did to the local police, that the Mahayana Buddhists had been here since the early 1800s. If they were notified of a white man living among them in the safety of the monastery, well, the monastery would no longer be particularly safe.

  So it was that he walked down the path with his walking stick swinging from side to side.

  Nearly a kilometer and a half down the crude road, near the point where he usually turned back, he heard a sound.

  A child, crying.

  The sun was close to rising. Georges considered briefly, muttered to himself, "Ah, well," and continued down the slope toward the sound. The crying ceased as he approached the area where the road widened out into a clearing where the village boys often herded yaks. Georges stood silently, then moved toward the edge of the clearing, where it dropped off into a series of small ledges that were too steep to be of use even for pasturing. There was nobody there, but he could still hear…

  Sighing, Georges set down his staff, knelt, and inched his head out over the edge of the bluff. All sound ceased, except for quick, frightened breathing. Georges pulled his head back over the edge of the cutoff.

  It was bad. The child below him was small, perhaps less than a meter tall, probably no more than eight or nine years old. He was wearing only the usual long-sleeve, high collar robe; sitting on the ledge over a meter beneath Georges, with the frozen-dead body of an animal, a dog most likely, clutched in his arms.

  Georges crawled back so that his head hung over the edge. He called, in what he knew was heavily accented Mandarin, "Child?"

  There was a wait before the child answered, uncertainly, in equally accented Chinese. "Who are you?"

  It was, Georges thought, the voice of a boy, although at that age it was hard to be sure. "Can you stand up?"

  "I don't think so… who are you?"

  "My name is Gorja," said Georges patiently. "I live at the monastery."

  "You don't have any eyes."

  "No," agreed Georges. "But I can hear you. Better than you think. Do you want to come back up?"

  "Yes." The boy sounded ready to cry again. "My legs don't move any more."

  "Oh." Frostbite, then. Worse and worse. "Can you move your arms at all?"

  The boy did start crying then. "But I'll have to let go of Go'an."

  Go'an? Ah, the dog. "Go'an is dead, child. The fall won't hurt him."

  "He's not dead," the child screamed. "They all said he was, and Father just… just threw him over the edge." He started crying again, a child whose heart had been broken, with great shaking sobs that Georges feared would send him over the side of the thin ledge.

  "Child, he's cold. I can hear the stiffness of him from here."

  The boy stopped sobbing after a while. "He's cold," he agreed. He sounded surprised.

  "Reach for my hand." Georges reached out as far as he could; the boy was still ten or twenty centimeters away.

  "Go'an would fall."

  "Reach for my hand."

  The boy sat silently for a moment. Then, moving as though it pained him, with a whimper that even Georges barely heard, he loosened his hold on the dog. The dog stuck, frozen to his skin, for just a moment; then it fell, forty meters to the ravine below. It shattered when it struck. The boy did not seem to notice; he reached up, making small high-pitched keening sounds with the movement, and clasped the weak, numb fingers of one hand around Georges' wrist.

  Georges clamped his crippled hand around the boy's wrist. He made no effort to pull the child up. In his current state he would drop the child. There was no question in his mind.

  He let go of the controls; shed the chains he had fought to put in place.
>
  Himself blasted into life, eightfold. He heaved, and the child came up off the ledge like a feather. Georges' grip failed almost immediately, but already the boy was halfway over the edge of the bluff. Georges threw his arms around the child, and worked his way back from the cutoff.

  His back fetched up against one of the small trees that grew close to the edge; he leaned back against it. The boy was still wrapped in his arms. He was not tired, he was not cold. Electric fire danced over his skin; his hearing grew sharper and clearer. The Enemy of Entropy burst into being within him like a solid white spike of glowing steel, and he was alive again, alive…

  The boy was stirring in his arms. Georges whistled in ultrasonic, and listened to the echoes from the boy's legs and hands. The frostbite was fading rapidly. Georges released the boy. The boy scrambled out of his lap, ran a few steps, and stopped. He looked back at Georges. Georges said nothing.

  The boy took a step back toward Georges. He said, sounding as if he were ready to bolt, "Thank you. My name is Kai. My father is going to be angry that I left to come look for Go'an. If he had to come look for me he would be even madder."

  Georges nodded. "You should probably go home. It's still quite cold for you to be out without an overshirt." Kai nodded. "Thank you," he whispered again. He bit his lip. "Did Go'an… I thought he broke when he hit the ground."

  Georges started to deny it, and changed his mind. "Yes, he did. Kai, Go'an was already dead when you let go of him."

  Kai looked around the clearing. "The plants are growing," he said in amazement. He looked back to where Georges sat. "It's you," he said. "How are you doing this?"

  Georges stood. He listened carefully for the echo of his staff, found it, and picked it up. The villagers would be up this way any time now. "Kai, listen to me. I want you to understand. Go'an died because he was sick, or else old. Your father didn't throw him over the edge because he hated Go'an, or because he hated you. Go'an was already gone."