The Armageddon Blues | Page 9

Georges Mordreaux
walked the freeways of the world together, for a while.
Let us note, here, the two Precepts of Semi-Divinity:
(1) Mind Thine Own Business.
(2) Don't Worry About It.
The alien gods came to Earth in the early part of the twenty-eighth
century, as measured from the death of a man who was nailed to a tree
for telling people that it was all right to love each other.
Their landing craft dropped out of a clear blue summer sky, and set
down on a strip of what appeared, to them, to be a sort of primitive
road. They sought for the civilization that would produce such a road,
and found nothing.

They were not surprised, these alien gods. They had seen other
deathworlds; they recognized the signs. If they were surprised in any
degree, it was only by the obvious recency of the cataclysm; the
previous owners of this world had destroyed themselves less than a
cycled running cycle ago.
The alien gods--the Corvichi spacetime gypsies--set down to work. The
Ship that was their world was in trouble. Biosphere degradation,
resource depletion, failing machinery; they had traveled a long, long
way around the Great Wheel of Existence, had braved the Chained One
and Chaos itself, and much of their equipment was designed 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