The Armageddon Blues | Page 9

to operate on timelines whose physical law was vastly different from the one on which they now found themselves.
And so they set to work.
Three days after they set down, eighty of Clan Silver-Eyes' most blooded Hunters climbed onto the steelstone of the Big Road, and began the long, long run toward the ship.
Many of the women wore the white of Elder Hunter; they did not lag behind their younger comrades.
At their head was a woman named Ralesh, who would one day be Eldest Hunter.
Dateline 712 A.T.F.
In the Clan House, well past sunset, lights glowed and flickered. The flicker came from the central fire pit, where lopers and bluewings were roasting on a spit. The glow came from several strange, floating balls, about two hands across, that emitted an eerie blue radiance.
Sitting on the faded green tatami mats nearest the fire pit, the eight Eldest Hunters, including Morine, the Eldest Hunter, conferred with the alien gods.
For reasons of their own, the gods had insisted that Jalian be allowed to attend the meeting. Morine d'Arsennette y ken Selvren was at first inclined to say no; the child was willful and headstrong, and was not to be rewarded for her asinine behavior.
The alien gods insisted.
Jalian sat in a dark corner of the Clan House's central hall, separated from the alien gods by fire and the eight white forms. The alien gods spoke to the Elder Hunters through a machine that spoke understandable silverspeech, in the voice of the first ken Selvren that had addressed it. It was strange for Jalian, listening when the alien gods talked; the machine's voice was her mother's.
That they talked in her mother's voice was not the strangest thing about them. The things they talked about were not even the most interesting things about them, although they were interesting enough:
Of the eight Elder Hunters present, five, including Morine and Morine's daughter Ralesh, knew how to read and write. Sylva de Kelvin and her daughter Jenna knew the basic rudiments of chemistry and mathematics. Other Hunters, not present because of low status, knew the arts of medicine and construction. Though the wastefulness of the Men's World forced a simple lifestyle upon them, the Silver-Eyes, ken Selvren that was ken Hammel, had the capability, as the Real Indians and mutants did not, of reconstructing a technical civilization, given power and metal.
It was this that the alien gods were offering them; but first they had to explain what an alternate timeline was, and that took a long, long while.
Like everything else about them, their explanation was strange; but it was not the strangest thing.
What was strangest was the way they looked.
If it is true, as said, that it is only the first time a human looks at a thing that she truly sees it, then it is probable that Jalian saw the gods more clearly than any of the others in the House's central Hall. Even Jalian's mother, the youngest of the Elder Hunters present, looking at the gods, was able to put aside her preconceptions of what a creature should look like only to the point where she perceived a sort of very large, squarish bear, with tentacles and something like strings of lace hanging about its upper regions.
To Jalian, at the age of six when most things are new and strange, the alien god was a four-limbed, nearly cubical hunk of furred flesh; there was a double-jointed leg, as thick around as both of a normal person's legs put together, at each corner of the body. Atop the cube there rose a lattice of interweaving bars that looked like exposed black bone. Lace was strung about the lattice; in some spots tightly, in others more loosely. Their tentacles grew out of the base of the bone lattice; there were about twenty of them, and four of those twenty were thicker and longer than the rest. The tentacles were covered with a fine, purplish fur, that faded to show purple-black skin at the tips of the tentacles. While Jalian watched, the lace stretched and loosened, as the bones beneath them shifted positions slightly. Watching the lace, she had the sudden strange, intense sensation that she could read expression in them.
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Before the machine spoke to the Silver-Eyes, it was always preceded by a high-pitched whine that only a few of the Silver-Eyes could hear. They could not tell which of the gods was actually speaking at any one time. Jalian suspected that it was the small one nearest the machine, for no other reason than that it was the closest. There were four of the alien gods present; three of them stood still and motionless. The fourth, who was furthest away from Jalian, seemed restless. It ... he kept shifting his weight from one foot-pair to another, in a slow circle that