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

Ralesh.

Jalian turned, her long brown hair swirling out behind her, and vanished into the trees. She left no trail.

None.

Consider a time traveler.

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, but some still 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 quite lovely, true, but they also detected abnormal radiation levels
quite capably, as a sort of staccato flashing in their peripheral vision. After the Big Crunch, this became a
survival mechanism.)

JalianтАЩs 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.B.C.
 Jalian pushed herself, moving through the light woods 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.