The Armageddon Blues | Page 5

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'Arsennette, consists of freeways.
(The twentieth century saw the birth of the thermonuclear explosive and the freeway. Jalian could almost forgive one for the other.
(Almost.)
Dateline 712 A.T.F.
One step, and then two, and Jalian stood for a frozen timeless moment 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 man-made 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 more 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.
Run and run and run....
The freeway stretched before her; a road of possibilities.
Georges Mordreaux is an interesting man. Aside from the fact that entropy tends to decrease in his vicinity, there are eight of him.
Yes, eight. Not all on the same timeline, of course.
(It is a shame, but Georges will not admit to any of the eight having been present during the explosion of a thermonuclear weapon. He may be lying, of course; humans are notorious liars. Evidence suggests that he may be engaging in this common human pastime. For reasons too lengthy to go into here, asking any of his other seven directly would be…difficult.)
(Georges Mordreaux, of the base timeline that led to divergence 1962, did once meet Einstein. This is not the same as being present when a thermonuclear weapon is exploded, but it is the closest that Georges is willing to admit to. The author, commenting in a negative fashion on this subject, has been blessed with the response, "Ah, well." There are times when the author agrees with Georges that he is in some ways a very shallow fellow.
(All eight of him.)
Dateline 712 A.T.F.
Jalian ran automatically. Her body pushed itself without conscious attention. She was thinking about the end of the Big Road, and what she would find there. It would, she thought, be a strange place indeed ... something with bright, bright colors, and loud noises. Very loud.
Jalian liked loud noises.
With a shock more immense than anything she had every felt before in her young life, Jalian focused on an object some ways ahead of her. There was something on the Big Road. Her legs stumbled, then stopped. She stood there in the middle of the old freeway, her chest heaving, her short brown tunic splotchy with sweat, looking at the building that had grown up on her freeway.
She stood in the sun, quiet and motionless but for her breathing, for two minutes that stretched into three. Once she drew her knife from its sheath; then, looking back to the large building, she shook her head against the silliness and put it back with an impatient movement. Jalian, even at the age of six, knew the uses of a knife.
The action broke her paralysis, and Jalian found a strange, powerful fury growing in her. Here, in her holy place, on her Big Road, someone had grown a building.
The six-year old Jalian d'Arsennette, even through the worst anger that she had ever experienced in her life, knew there was nothing she could do about the building on her Big Road. She backed away from the building a