The Armageddon Blues | Page 4

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.
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, 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