Back | Next
Contents

Cover

Prologue

Hundreds of years after the nuclear destruction known as Big Bang Day, humankind had crawled out of the rubble sufficiently to revive a few traditions of the ancients. Among them: dictatorship.

Interspersed among the radiation fields of the land called Merqua grew a new myriad of cities and work camps under the servitude of a secretive ruler known as the Monitor. Rumors about the Monitor were many: that he was mutant—large and bull faced; that he was centuries old; that he hoarded certain technological secrets of the ancients for his own vile purposes. These particular whisperings, as it turned out, were true.

Such a civilization has its doubters and reprobates, of course. The Revolutionaries hunkered in their remote eastern outpost, buried under a mountain in the range once known as the Blue Ridge. From there they launched their largely ineffective assaults against the repressive regime of the Monitor. Ineffective, that is, until they struck an odd alliance with the rogue magic man named Pec-Pec.

Pec-Pec was many things to many people. To the dark-skinned outcasts called Rafers, he was a god. To the common people of the work camps, he was a master of cheap theatrics and a thief. Finally, to the Monitor in his remote canyon hideout, Pec-Pec meant death.

So it was that the marginally competent Revolutionaries learned the lesson that had been surprising their counterparts for millennia: It is one thing to overthrow a despot; it is quite another to create a satisfactory Government in his place.

Back | Next
Framed