"Daniel Keys Moran - Armageddon Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.


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 indeedтАж
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 BigRoad. 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 few steps, eyes still locked to it; then, reluctantly, turned and began the long run back to the
Clan House. She would be home nearly a twelfth-day before she would be needed for the Ceremony
meal, but that was of no account. When she told Ralesh what she had done, she would be badly
punished perhaps even ceremonially scarred; but Jalian's mother would do something about the tall, thin
building that had grown up on Jalian's Big Road.

Jalian d'Arsennette had no way of knowing that the "building" was a starship.

DATELINE 1968 GREGORIAN.
 Georges Mordreaux sat behind the wheel of a green '66 Camaro. He was traveling north on the Pacific
Coast Highway. Georges Mordreaux was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with cheerful nondescript
features, light blue eyes and light brown hair. He smiled a lot.

The Camaro ran smoothly, with the sort of leashed power that a jet pilot might have recognized, but
which was utterly out of place in a green 1966 model Camaro. (Or any other color Camaro.) Both the
passenger's and driver's windows were down, and wind was blasting through the car. The air conditioner
was on. So was the heater.

The machine ranтАж well, better than new was the term that came immediately to Georges' mind.
Georges did not think that the car would break the sound barrier, even if he pushed it. The car was too
aerodynamically inefficient. Georges had owned the car for two weeks now. He'd bought it from a
used-car dealer in New Jersey who swore that it had been driven by a retired couple who simply liked
Camaros. Georges had not put gasoline into the car once on the way west.

"Better than new" was probably the correct term. Georges whistled as he drove. He was not very good