Daniel Keys Moran - Armegeddon Blues

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 362.17KB 139 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Color-- -1- -2- -3- -4- -5- -6- -7- -8- -9-

Text Size-- 10-- 11-- 12-- 13-- 14-- 15-- 16-- 17-- 18-- 19-- 20-- 21-- 22-- 23-- 24

Armageddon Blues

Daniel Keys Moran

Contents

All the Time in the World

DATELINE 2052 Gregorian.

DATELINE 1917 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 711 A.B.C. (AFTER THE BIG CRUNCH).

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.

DATELINE 1968 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 1969 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 1968 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.

DATELINE 1 968 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 718 A.B.C.

DATELlNE 1968 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 719 A.B.C.

DATELINE 1969 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 724 A.B.C.

DATELINE RETROGRADE: 721 A.B.C. TO 1962 GREGORIAN INCLUSIVE.

DATELINE BASE DIVERGENCE: 1962 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 724 A.B.C.

DATELINE 1969 GREGORIAN.

DATELINE 1969 GREGORIAN: FACTOR OF EIGHT DIVERGENCE.

As Time Goes By

DATELINE 1973 GREGORIAN: FEBRUARY.

DATELINE 1976 GREGORIAN: JUNE.

The Armageddon Blues

Introduction, To Turn The Tide November 8, 1961.

DATELINE 2007 GREGORIAN: JANUARY.

DATELINE 1981 GREGORIAN; MAY.

DATELINE 1985 GREGORIAN: DECEMBER.

DATELINE 1986 GREGORIAN: FEBRUARY

DATELINE 1988 GREGORIAN. JUNE. Irwindale, California.

DATELINE 1999 GREGORIAN: APRIL.

DATELINE 1993 GREGORIAN: APRIL.

DATELINE 1994 GREGORIAN: MARCH.

DATELINE 1996 GREGORIAN: AUGUST.

DATELINE 2007 GREGORIAN: MARCH.

DATELINE 1996 GREGORIAN: NOVEMBER.

DATELINE 2001 GREGORIAN; AUGUST.

DATELINE 2002 GREGORIAN. MARCH.

DATELINE 2002 GREGORIAN: AUGUST.

DATELINE 2003 GREGORIAN: MARCH.

DATELINE 2007 GREGORIAN: JANUARY.

DATELINE 2007

DATELINE ARMAGEDDON, JULY 17, 2007, GREGORIAN.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE ARMAGEDDON BLUES

Daniel Keys Moran

A TALE OF THE GREAT WHEEL OF EXISTENCE

The Armageddon Blues should probably be dedicated to George Scithers, a very nice man whom I have

never met, for reasons too numerous for me to list. But George has at least two books that I know of

dedicated to him already, so he's going to have to settle for a mention here; mondo thanks, George.

The Armageddon Blues is dedicated, with love, to Kari Lynn Moran, my sister, for couch and

hamburgers during hard times.

Acknowledgments

For their various contributions:

The quotations of President John F. Kennedy, as they appear herein, are taken from To Turn the Tide, a

collection of the speeches from the first year of his tragically short Presidency; as edited by John W.

Gardner.

A very useful research source was Lane's Guide to Strategic Weapons Systems. This is a fascinating

work for its weapons ads alone. Other important reading can be found in G. Harry Stine's Space Power,

and Ben Bova's The High Road.

I am monstrously indebted to Gregory McDonald, John Dos Passos, and Robert A. Heinlein, for

teaching me how to build this; to Tom Robbins, for showing me how to paint it, and to Hunter

Thompson, for explaining that sometimes it's okay to burn the bitch down—and for other reasons.

Thanks, Uncle Hunter.

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

The story went around during the glum diplomatic dog days in the late '30s. The 13-year-old son asks his

father, a retired senior diplomat: "Daddy, what was your role in the world war?" Lord Cecil looked up

from his newspaper: "I tried to prevent the bloody thing."

—William F. Buckley Editorial February 19, 1985

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 Coldtimes, 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 campfires. 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's 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's eyes were open, and motioned to the soldier holding Georges's 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 trench wall. "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 two hundred and five years old.

Perhaps he was a bit shallow, at that.

One of the definitions of the word "entropy" 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 Big Crunch 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, overextended roads, observed the goings-on, and later,

when the barbarians and other mutants came howling out of the radioactive ruins 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.B.C. (AFTER THE BIG CRUNCH).

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 straightline 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.

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.

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 Big Crunch and the Fire Times.)

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 brownclothed, 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 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 Cermeal, 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.

Consider a time traveler.

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, but some still 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 quite lovely, true, but they also detected abnormal radiation levels quite

capably, as a sort of staccato flashing in their peripheral vision. After the Big Crunch, 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.B.C.

Jalian pushed herself, moving through the light woods 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 Big Crunch. 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 usually ascended to the Big Road.

It was a desolate area at the edge of the concrete, where a plant that resembled ivy had survived the

radiation long enough to breach the Big Road's protective guardrail. Dirt and dust, working their ways

into the body of the dead ivy mutant, had formed a small, natural incline that Jalian was able to scramble

up and make her way onto the concrete of the Big Road itself. She paused at the edge of the Big Road,

her feet still on dirt but only a step away from the concrete.

This would be only the second time that Jalian had set foot on the Big Road.

The first time, one of the Hunters—Jalian could not remember who it had been, except that it was not an

Elder Hunter because she did not wear the white tunic of an Elder Hunter—had taken a group of children

from the Girls' House with her on routine patrol of Silver-Eyes borders. The patrol had made camp at the

edge of the hills, while the four- and five- and six-year-olds scrambled over the Big Road. Later, one of

the younger women in the patrol told the children about the land of gods and demons at its end.

Then she had tried to run away, and been caught by Ralesh.

This time, Jalian had a third-day start. They would not catch her.

They would not.

The twentieth century, as viewed by Jalian d'Arsenette, consists of freeways.

(The twentieth century saw the birth of the thermoexplosive and the freeway. Jalian could almost forgive

one for the other.)

(Almost.)

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.

One step, and then two, and Jalian stood for a frozen timemoment on the concrete of the Big Road itself.

Then the paralysis broke, and, shivering slightly, Jalian walked to the center of the road, where the melted

ruin of a lane divider stood a lonely vigil.

The freeway ran away from her, straight and true and clean, protected as though by the gods. (The

winds, here, were too sporadic to erode much. Plants, which in other places grew up through the asphalt

and crumbled the manmade structures, here stood no chance against the radioactive Burn. The freeway

itself, cambered from the center, was regularly cleaned of the dirt that built up on its surface by the

summer rains.)

At the age of six, to Jalian d'Arsennette, it made sense that the Big Road was protected by the gods. (Or

the demons, perhaps, although Jalian did not like to think about that.)

For how long Jalian simply stood on the Big Road, the sun burning down on her, her eyes seeking into

the distance for the end of the Big Road, she never knew. She came back from infinity, slowly, with the

thoughts in her mind: Mountains beside me, desert behind me. Forest and hills and sun, and the Big

Road far ahead…

That moment, her thin body touched with the ecstasy of a dimly perceived greater reality, Jalian

remembered for the rest of her life.

The moment ended and she ran.

Jalian had not made it to the end of the Big Road when she was five because she had squandered her

lead time. This time she would not make that mistake.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Color---1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9-TextSize--10--11--12--13--14--15--16--17--18--19--20--21--22--23--24ArmageddonBluesByDanielKeysMoranContentsAlltheTimeintheWorldDATELINE2052Gregorian.DATELINE1917GREGORIAN.DATELINE711A.B.C.(AFTERTHEBIGCRUNCH).DATELINE712A.B.C.DATELINE712A.B.C.DATELINE712A.B.C.DATEL...

展开>> 收起<<

Daniel Keys Moran - Armegeddon Blues.pdf

共139页,预览28页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Daniel Keys Moran - Armegeddon Blues

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: