The Armageddon Blues | Page 4

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, that somehow still is 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 lovely, true, but they also detected abnormal radiation levels quite capably, as a sort of staccato flashing in their peripheral vision. After the Fire, 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.T.F.
Jalian pushed herself, moving through the light woods silently 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 Fire. 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 ascended 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 guard rail. 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 only be 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 from the Girls' House with her on routine patrol of Silver-Eyes