The Alien Years

TWENTY-NINE YEARS FROM NOW

Khalid was at work in the cluttered corner of the dormitory that he used as his studio, carving a statuette from a bar of soap, when Litvak came in and said, “Start packing, guys. We’re all being transported again.”

Litvak was the communications-net man in the group, the one with the implant jack who knew how to rig the house telephone to pick information off the Entity net. He was the dormitory’s borgmann, in a manner of speaking: a borgmann in reverse who spied on the Entities rather than working for them, a compact diminutive Israeli with an oddly triangular head, very broad through the forehead and tapering downward to a sharp little pointed chin.

It was an interesting head. Khalid had sculpted portraits of him several times.

Khalid didn’t look up. He was fashioning a miniature figure of Parvati, the Hindu goddess: high tapering headdress, exaggerated breasts, benign expression of utter tranquillity. Lately he had been carving the entire Hindu pantheon, after Litvak had pulled photos of them out of some forgotten archive of the old Net. Krishna, Shiva, Ganesha, Vishnu, Brahma: the whole lot of them. Aissha probably wouldn’t have approved of his making statuettes of Hindu gods and goddesses—for that matter, a good Muslim should not be making graven images at all—but it was seven years since he had last seen Aissha. Aissha was ancient history to him, like Krishna and Shiva and Vishnu, or Richie Burke. Khalid was a grown man now and he did as he pleased.

From across the room the Bulgarian, Dimiter, said, “Are we going to be split up, do you think?”

“What do you suppose, dummy?” Litvak asked tartly. “You think they find us so charming as a group that they’re going to keep us together for the rest of eternity?”

There were eight of them in this sector of the transportee dormitory, five men, three women, tossed together higgledy-piggledy by the random-scoop arrangements that the Entities seemed to favor. They had been together fourteen months, now, which was the longest period Khalid had stayed with any group of transportees. The dormitory, the whole prison camp, was located somewhere along the Turkish coast—“just north of Bodrum,” Litvak had said, though where Bodrum was, or for that matter Turkey itself, was something not very clear to Khalid. It was a pretty place, anyhow, warm sunny weather most of the year, dry brown hills running down to the coastal plain, a beautiful blue ocean, a scattering of islands just offshore. Before this place he had been in central Spain for eleven months, and in Austria for seven or eight, and in Norway for close to a year, and before that—well, he no longer remembered where he had been before that. The Entities liked to keep their prisoners on the move.

It was a long while since he had been housed with anyone from the vicinity of Salisbury. Not that that mattered greatly to him, since there was no one in Salisbury for whom he had cared in any special way except Aissha and old Iskander Mustafa Ali, and he had no idea where Aissha might be and Iskander Mustafa Ali surely was dead by this time. In the beginning, in the camp at Portsmouth, most of his fellow prisoners had been people from Salisbury or one of the neighboring towns, but by now, after five or six (or was it seven?) changes of detention center, he no longer lived with anyone from England at all. Apparently there were many people throughout the world, not just his own English neighbors, who had displeased the Entities in some manner and now were subjected to this constant rotation from one prison camp to another.

In Khalid’s group there was, aside from Litvak and Dimiter, a Canadian woman named Francine Webster, and a man from Poland named Krzysztof, and a perpetually sulky Irish girl, Carlotta, and Genevieve from the south of France, and a small, dark-skinned man from somewhere in North Africa whose name Khalid had never managed to catch, though he had not tried very hard. They all got along reasonably well together. The North African man spoke only French and Arabic; everybody else in the group spoke English, some better than others, and Genevieve translated for the North African whenever it was necessary. Khalid had little interest in getting to know his roommates, since they were almost certainly temporary. He found jittery little Litvak amusing, and the hearty, good-humored Krzysztof was pleasant company, and he liked the warm, motherly Francine Webster. The others didn’t matter. On several occasions he had slept with Francine Webster and also with Genevieve, because there was no privacy in the dormitory nor much remaining sense of individual boundaries, and nearly everybody in the group slept in a casual way with nearly everybody else now and then, and Khalid had discovered, during the years of his imprisoned adolescence, that he was not without sexual drive. But the sexual part of things had made little impact on him either, other than pure physical release.

He went on with his sculpting, and offered no comments about the impending transfer, and three days later, just as Litvak had predicted, they were all ordered to report to Room 107 of the detention center’s administration sector. In Room 107, which was a large hall entirely unfurnished except for an empty bookcase and a three-legged chair, they were left by themselves to stand for close to an hour before someone came in, asked them their names, and, referring to a sheet of brown paper in his hand, brusquely said, “You, you, and you, Room 103. You and you, Room 106. You, you, you, Room 109. And make it snappy.”

Khalid, Krzysztof, and the North African were the ones who were sent to room 109. They went there quickly. No time was spent on offering farewells to the other five, for they all knew that they now were disappearing from each other’s lives forever.

Room 109, which was mysteriously distant from Room 107, was much smaller than 107 but just about as sparsely furnished. A picture-frame that held no picture hung on the left-hand wall; on the floor against the wall opposite it stood a large green ceramic flower-vase with no flowers in it; there was a bare desk in front of the far wall, facing the door. Seated behind the desk was a petite round-faced woman who looked to be about sixty. Her dark eyes, which seemed to be set very far apart, had an odd glittery gleam, and her hair, which had probably once been jet black, was dramatically streaked with jagged zones of white, like flashes of lightning cutting across the night.

Glancing at a paper she was holding, she said, looking at the Pole, “Are you Kr—Kyz—Kzyz—Kryz—” She could not get her tongue around the letters of his name. But she seemed amused rather than irritated.

“Krzysztof,” he said. “Krzysztof Michalski.”

“Michalski, yes. And that first name again?”

“Krzysztof.”

“Ah. Christoph. I get it now. All right: Christoph Michalski. Polish name, right?” She grinned. “A lot easier to say it than to read it.” Khalid was surprised at how chatty she was. Most of these quisling bureaucrats were chilly and abrupt. But she had what sounded to him like an American accent. Perhaps her being American had something to do with that. “And which one of you is Khalid Haleem Burke?” the woman asked.

“I am.”

She gave him a long slow look, frowning a little. Khalid stared right back.

“And then you,” she said, turning now toward the North African, “must be—ah—Mulay ben Dlimi.”

“Oui.”

“What kind of name is that, Mulay ben Dlimi?”

“Oui,” the North African said again.

“He doesn’t understand English,” said Khalid. “He’s from North Africa.”

The woman nodded. “A real international group. All right, Christoph, Khalid, Mulay. I think you know the deal. You’re going to be transported again, day after tomorrow. Or possibly even tomorrow, if the paperwork gets done in time. Pack your stuff and be ready to leave your quarters as soon as you’re called.”

“Can you tell us,” Krzysztov said, “Where we’re going to be sent this time?”

She smiled. “The good old U.S. of A., this time. Las Vegas, Nevada. Do any of you know how to play blackjack?”

The transport plane once had been a commercial airliner, long, long ago, in the days when the citizens of the countries of Earth still moved about freely from one place to another on journeys of business or pleasure and there were such things called airlines to carry them. Khalid had not known that era at first hand, but he had heard tales of it. This plane, whose painted hull was faded and even rusted in places, still bore an inscription identifying it as belonging to British Airways. For Khalid, stepping aboard it was in a little way like returning to England. He was not sure how he felt about that.

But the airplane wasn’t England. It was only a long metal tube with blotchy gray walls and scars on the floor to mark the places where the seats had been ripped out. Bare mattresses had replaced the seats. There was no place to sit; one could only walk about or lie down. Long bars had been soldered to the walls above the windows, something to grab if the flight turned turbulent. Threadbare curtains divided the passenger compartment into several subcompartments.

For Khalid there was nothing new about any of this. All the planes that had carried him from one detention camp to another had been much like this one. This one seemed bigger, that was all. But that was because they were going to the United States, a lengthy journey that must require a larger plane. He had only the vaguest idea where the United States might be, but he knew that it was very far from where they were now.

The small woman who had met with them in Room 109 was aboard the plane, supervising the departure arrangements. Khalid assumed that she would leave once everybody who was being transported had been checked off the master list, but, no, she stayed on the plane after the checkoff was complete and the doors were closed. That was unusual. The detention-center officials did not normally accompany the transported prisoners to their destinations. But perhaps she wasn’t actually staying. He watched her disappear through the curtain that separated Khalid’s sector of the plane from the zone up front where the official personnel were, and wondered if there might be some other door up there through which she might leave before the plane took off. In a curious way he hoped there wasn’t. He liked her. She was an amusing woman, lively and irreverent, not at all like any of the other quisling officials with whom he had come in contact in his seven years of internment.

Khalid was pleased to see, not long after the plane had taken off, that she was still on board. She emerged from the front compartment, walking carefully in the steeply climbing plane, and halted when she reached the mattress where Khalid and the North African man were sitting.

“May I join you?” she asked.

“You need to ask permission, do you?” said Khalid.

“A little politeness never hurts.”

He shrugged. She spiraled down next to him, lowering herself to the floor in a quick, graceful way that belied her age, and folded herself up opposite him on the mattress with her legs crossed neatly, ankles to knees.

“You’re Khalid, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Cindy. You’re very pretty, Khalid, do you know that? I love the tawny color of your skin. Like a lion’s, it is. And that crop of dense bushy hair.” When he offered no reply, she said, “You’re an artist, I understand.”

“I make things, yes.”

“I made things once, too. And I was also pretty, once, for that matter.”

She smiled and winked at him, rendering Khalid somehow a co-conspirator in the agreement that she had once been pretty. It hadn’t occurred to him before this that she might have been an attractive woman once upon a time, but now, taking a close look at her, he saw that it was quite possible that she had been: a small and energetic person, trimly built, with delicate features and those bright, bright eyes. Her smile was still very appealing. And the wink. He liked that wink. She was definitely unlike any quisling he had ever encountered. With his artist’s eye he edited out the grooves and wrinkles that her sixty years had carved in her face, restored the darkness and glossiness of her hair, gave her skin the freshness of youth. Yes, he thought. No doubt quite pretty thirty or forty years ago.

“What are you, Khalid?” she said. “Some sort of Indian? At least in part.”

“Pakistani. My mother was.”

“And your father?”

“English. A white man. I never knew him. He was a quisling, people told me.”

“I’m a quisling.”

“Lots of people are quislings,” Khalid said. “It makes no difference to me.”

“Well,” she said. And said nothing further for a while, simply sat there cross-legged, her eyes looking into his as though she were studying him. Khalid looked back amiably. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. Let her stare, if she wanted to.

Then she said, “Are you angry about something?”

“Angry? Me? What is there to be angry about? I never get angry at all.”

“On the contrary. I think you’re angry all the time.”

“You are certainly free to think that.”

“You seem very calm,” she said. “That’s one of the things that makes you so interesting, how cool you are, how you just shrug within yourself at everything that happens to you and around you.

It’s the first thing anyone would notice about you. But that kind of calmness can sometimes be a mask for seething anger. You could have a volcano inside you that you don’t want to allow to erupt, and so you keep a lid on it a hundred percent of the time. A hundred twenty percent of the time. What do you think of that theory, Khalid?”

“Aissha, who raised me like a mother because my mother died when I was born, taught me to accept the will of Allah in whatever form it might manifest itself. Which I have done.”

“A very wise philosophy. Islam: the word itself means ‘absolute submission,’ right? Surrendering yourself to God. I’ve studied these things, you know.—Who was Aissha?”

“My mother’s mother. Her stepmother, really. She was like a mother to me. A very good woman.”

“Undoubtedly she was. And I think you’re a very, very angry man.”

“You are certainly free to think that,” said Khalid again.

Half an hour later, as Khalid sat by the window peering incuriously out at the vast island-dotted blue sea that stretched before him, she came back again and once more asked if she might sit down with him. Such politeness on the part of administrators puzzled him, but he beckoned her with an open palm to do as she pleased. She slipped with wonderful ease again into the cross-legged position.

With a nod toward Mulay ben Dlimi, who sat with his back against the wall of the plane, eyes veiled as though he were in a trance, she said, “Does he really not understand English?”

“He never appeared to. We had a woman in our group who spoke to him in French. He didn’t ever say a word to any of the rest of us.”

“Sometimes people understand a language but still don’t want to speak it.”

“I suppose that’s so,” said Khalid.

She inclined her torso toward the North African and said, “Do you know any English at all?”

He glanced blankly at her, then off into space again.

“Not even a word?” she asked. Still no response.

Smiling pleasantly, she said, in a polite conversational tone, “Your mother was a whore in the marketplace, Mulay ben Dlimi. Your father fucked camels. You yourself are the grandson of a pig.”

Mulay ben Dlimi shook his head mildly. He went on staring into space.

“You really don’t understand me even a bit, do you?” said Cindy. “Or else you’ve got yourself under even tighter control than Khalid, here. Well, God bless you, Mulay ben Dlimi. I guess it’s safe for me to say anything I want in front of you.” She turned back to Khalid. “Well, now. Let’s get down to business. Would you ever do anything that’s against the law?”

“What law do you mean? What law is there in this world?”

“Other than Allah’s, you mean?”

“Other than that, yes. What law is there?” he asked again.

In a low voice she said, leaning close to his ear, “Listen carefully to me. I’m tired of working for them, Khalid. I’ve been their loyal handmaiden for twenty-odd years and that’s about enough. When they first arrived I thought it was a miraculous thing that they had come to Earth, and it could have been, but it didn’t work out right. They didn’t share any of their greatness with us. They simply used us, and never even told us what they were using us for. Also they promised to show me their world, you know. But they didn’t deliver. They were going to take me there as an ambassador from Earth: I’m sure that’s what they were telling me with their minds. They didn’t, though. They lied to me, or else I was imagining everything and I was lying to myself. Well, either way, to hell with them, Khalid. I don’t want to be their quisling any more.”

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“What do you know about the geography of the United States?”

“Nothing whatever. It is a very big country very far away, that’s all I know.”

“Nevada,” she said, “which is the place where we’re heading, is a dry empty useless place where nobody in his right mind would want to live. But it’s right next door to California, and California is where I come from. I want to go home, Khalid.”

“Yes. I suppose you do. How does this concern me?”

“I come from the city of Los Angeles. You’ve heard of Los Angeles? Good.—It’s about three hundred miles, I would guess, from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Los Angeles. Most of the way, it’s pretty bleak country. A desert, actually. One woman traveling alone, those three hundred miles, might run into problems. Even a tough old dame like me. You see where this might concern you?”

“No. I am in permanent detention.”

“A situation that could be reversed by a simple receding of your registration. I could do that for you, just as I arranged to put myself aboard this plane. We could leave the detention compound together and no one would say a word. And you would accompany me to Los Angeles.”

“I see. And then I would be free, once I was in Los Angeles?”

“Free as a bird, Khalid.”

“Yes. But in detention they give me a place to sleep and food to eat. In Los Angeles, a place where I know no one, where I will understand nothing—”

“It’s beautiful there. Warm all year round, and flowers blooming everywhere. The people are friendly. And I’d help you. I’d see that things went well for you there.—Look, we won’t be getting to the States for a couple of days. Think about it, Khalid, between now and then.”

He thought about it. They flew from Turkey to Italy, stopping there to refuel, in Rome, and they refueled again in Paris, and then they stopped in Iceland, and after that came a long dreamlike time of flying over a land of ice and snow, until they landed again somewhere in Canada. These were only names to Khalid. Los Angeles was only a name, too. He rotated all these names in his mind, and from time to time he slept, and once in a while he pondered the quisling woman Cindy’s offer.

It occurred to him that it might all be a trick of some kind, a trap, but then he asked himself what purpose they would have in snaring him, when he was already their prisoner and they could do anything they wished with him anyway. Then, later, he found himself wondering whether he should ask her if they could take Krzysztof with them too, because Krzysztof was a cheerful, good-hearted man, and Khalid was fond of him, as much as he was capable of being of fond of anyone, and, besides, the sturdy Krzysztof might be a useful person to have with them on the journey across that desert. And, wondering that, he realized that he had somehow managed to make his decision without noticing that he had.

“I can’t take him, no,” Cindy said. “I can’t risk getting two of you free. If you won’t come, I’ll ask him. But it can only be one or the other of you.”

“Well, then,” Khalid said. “So be it.”

He regretted leaving Krzysztof behind: as much as he was capable of regretting anything, at any rate. But that was how it had to be, was it not? And so that was how it would be.

Nevada was the ugliest place he had ever seen or even imagined, a nightmare land so different from green and pleasant England that he could almost believe he was on some other planet. It seemed as though no rain had fallen here for five hundred years. Turkey had been hot and dry, too, but in Turkey there were farms everywhere, and the ocean nearby, and trees on the hills. Here there seemed to be only sand and rocks and dust, and occasional gnarly shrubs, and dark twisted little mountains farther back that had no vegetation on them at all. And the heat came down out of the sky like a metal weight, pressing down, pressing, pressing, pressing.

The city where their long plane journey had ended, Las Vegas, was ugly too, but at least its ugliness was of a kind that amused the eye, no two buildings alike, one resembling an Egyptian pyramid and one a Roman palace and others like structures out of strange dreams or fantasies, and everything of such colossal size. Khalid would have preferred to remain longer in Las Vegas, to make a few sketches of those peculiar buildings that would fix them more firmly in his memory. But he and Cindy were out of Las Vegas almost as soon as they arrived, heading off together into the grim, terrible desert that surrounded it.

She had, somehow, arranged to get the use of a car to take them to Los Angeles. “You are being transferred now from the Las Vegas detention center to one in Barstow, California,” she explained. “I have been assigned to deliver you to Barstow. It’s all been quite legally recorded in the archives. A friend in Leipzig who knows his way around the Entity computer net set it all up for me.”

The car looked ancient. It probably was: pre-Conquest, even. Its sides were dented and its silvery paint had flaked away in a hundred places, showing red rusty patches beneath, and it leaned badly on the left side, drooping so visibly that Khalid wondered whether the rim of the frame would strike the ground when the car moved.

“Can you drive?” Cindy asked, as they loaded their meager luggage into the car.

“No.”

“Of course you can’t. Where would you have learned to drive? How old were you, anyway, when they put you in detention?”

“Not quite thirteen.”

“And that was how long ago? Eight years? Ten?”

“Seven. I’ll be twenty-one on December 25th.”

“A Christmas baby. How nice. Everybody singing to celebrate your birthday. ‘Si-lent night, ho-o-ly night—’”

“Yes, very nice,” he said bitterly. “My birthdays were all extremely happy ones. We would gather around our Christmas tree, my mother and father and my brothers and sisters and I, and we would sing the Christmas songs, and we would give each other wonderful presents.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. There were some happy times.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “You told me on the plane that your mother died in childbirth and you never knew your father, and you were raised by your grandmother.”

“Yes. And I also told you then that I was Muslim.”

She laughed. “You were just trying to see if I was paying attention.”

“No,” he said. “I was just saying what came into my mind.”

“What an odd duck you are, Khalid!”

“Duck?”

“Never mind. An expression.” She unlocked the car’s doors and signaled for him to get in. He entered on the left-hand side, as he always had when he went out driving with Richie, and was surprised to find himself confronted by the steering wheel. It had been on the other side in Richie’s car: he was sure of that.

“American cars are different,” Cindy said. “At least you’ve been in a car before, I see. Even if you don’t know how to drive one.”

“I would go driving sometimes in my father’s car. On Sundays he would take me to places like Stonehenge.”

She looked at him sharply. “You never knew your father, you said.”

“I lied.”

“Oh. Oh. Oh. You play a lot of head games, don’t you, Khalid?”

“There was one thing I said that was true. I hated him.”

“For being a quisling? You said that he was. Was that part true?”

“He was one, but that was of no importance to me. I hated him because he treated Aissha badly. And, sometimes, me. He was probably bad to my mother, too. What does any of this matter now, though? The past is far away.”

“But not forgotten, I see.” She put the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine sputtered, coughed, caught, failed, sputtered again and this time came to life. Noisily the car moved forward through the detention compound. Cindy flashed her identification at the gate, the guard waved, and off they went.

They were out in the desert almost immediately.

For a time neither of them said anything. Khalid was too appalled by the hideous landscape all around him to speak; and Cindy, who was so small she could barely see over the top of the steering wheel, was concentrating intently on her driving. The surface of the road was a bad one, cratered and cracked in a million places, and the car, venerable ruin that it was, unceasingly groaned and grumbled, jouncing and jiggling them in merciless fashion and occasionally emitting ominous knocking noises as though getting ready to explode. He looked over at her and saw her sitting with her shoulders tensely hunched, biting down on her lower lip, gripping the wheel with all her strength as though to keep the car from skittering off into the sandy wasteland beyond the pavement’s edge.

“The speed limit on this freeway used to be seventy miles an hour. In kilometers that’s—what, a hundred ten? A hundred twenty?

Something like that. And we all used to drive it at eighty or eighty-five—miles an hour, I mean—when I was a kid. Of course you’d have’to be crazy to do that now. Assuming this car was capable of it, which it isn’t. It’s probably older than you are. It’s the kind that people had to use until just a few years before the Conquest, the sort you have to operate manually, because it doesn’t have a computer brain and won’t understand spoken commands. An antique. And definitely coming to the end of its days, too. But we’ll make it to L.A., one way or another. On foot, if we have to.”

“If you are supposed to be delivering me to a place called Barstow,” Khalid said, “how can we continue on to Los Angeles? Won’t they wonder about us when we don’t show up at this Barstow?”

“No reason why they should. We’re going to die in an auto accident tomorrow, before we ever get to Barstow.”

“Excuse me?”

“The accident’s already programmed into the computer. My pal in Leipzig fed it in. A crackerjack pardoner, he is. Do you know what a pardoner is, Khalid?”

“No.”

“Pardoners are very clever hackers. They’re something like borgmanns, except they do their hacking on our behalf instead of the Entities’. They cut into the Entity net and make revisions in the records. If you’ve been transferred someplace you don’t want to go, for example, it’s possible to get a pardoner to undo the transfer. For a price, of course. What has been programmed in here by my pardoner friend is that Agent C. Carmichael, transporting Detainee K. Burke, met with an unfortunate freeway accident on the 18th of this month, which is to say, tomorrow, ten miles north of Barstow while driving south on Interstate 15. She lost control of her manually operated vehicle and crashed into a roadside barrier. The car was totally demolished and she and the passenger were killed. Their bodies were cremated by local authorities.”

“She met with this accident tomorrow, you say?”

“When tomorrow comes up on the computer net, the accident will come up with it. So I use the past tense. It’s already in there, waiting to activate itself. Agent C. Carmichael will be removed from the system. So will Detainee K. Burke. We will vanish as though we never existed. Since the car will also no longer exist, any official scanner that happens to pick up its license plate as we continue on will most likely assume that the reading is erroneous. Once we’re in L.A., I’ll arrange to obtain a new license for the car, just to be on the safe side.—Are you getting hungry yet?”

“Yes.”

“So am I. Let’s do something about it.”

They stopped at a woebegone highway cafe in the middle of nowhere, where the heat outside the car closed around them like a great fist. She bought a dinner of sorts for them both simply by showing her I.D. card. It was terrible food, some sort of cardboardy and tasteless grilled meat on a bun and a cold bubbling drink, but Khalid was used to terrible food of all sorts by this time.

Onward, again, through the sandy emptiness. There was very little traffic. None at all going in the direction they were traveling; perhaps one car every half hour going the other way. Whenever they passed someone, Cindy kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the road ahead, and Khalid noticed that the drivers of the other cars never looked toward them, either.

The road was climbing, and good-sized mountains were visible all around them now, bigger than he had ever seen before. But the landscape was still as ugly as ever, rocky and sandy, not much vegetation and most of that stunted and gnarled. At one point Cindy said, as they went flashing past a sign by the edge of the road, “We’re in California now, Khalid. Or what used to be California when this country still had such things as separate states. When there were still such things as countries.” He imagined palm trees and soft breezes. Not so. Everything was just as ugly here as it had been on the Nevada side of the line.

“Getting dark,” Cindy announced, an hour later. “The driving’s going to get tougher. These old crates are a lot of work to operate on a bad road. So I’m going to pull off and rest for a little while before we try to go further. You’re sure you don’t know how to drive?”

“Would you like me to try?” “Maybe not, I think. Just stay awake, keep watch, let me know if you see anything strange.”

She left the freeway at the next exit and brought the car to a halt just off the road. Pushing her seat back until it was practically horizontal, she reclined against it, closed her eyes, and seemed to fall asleep almost at once.

Khalid watched her for a while. There was a look of great peace on her face.

She was, he thought, an unusual woman, very much in control of herself at all times, self-assured, confident. A very capable person. Possessing much inner serenity, of that he was certain. Inner serenity was something Khalid admired very much. He had worked very hard to attain it himself, and he had, he believed, succeeded; surely he would never have been able to kill that Entity without it.

Or did he have it? What had she said, on the plane? I think you’re angry all the time. A seething volcano inside him, she said, with a tight lid clamped down on it to keep it from erupting. Was that true? He didn’t know. He always felt calm; but perhaps, somewhere deep down inside, he was really raging with red-hot fury, killing Richie Burke a hundred times a day, killing all those who had made his life such a misery ever since the moment when he had understood that his mother was gone and his father was a monster and the world was under the control of bizarre, bewildering creatures who ruled, so it seemed, purely by whim and savage caprice.

Perhaps so. He didn’t choose to look within and see.

But he was sure that there were no hidden volcanoes in this woman Cindy. She seemed to take life as it came, easily, day by day; very likely always had. Khalid wanted to know more about her, who she was, what her existence had been like before the Entities came, why she had become a quisling, all of that. But probably he would never ask. He was not used to asking people such things about themselves.

He left the car, walked around a little, glanced up at the moon and stars as night settled in. It was very quiet here, and with the coming of darkness the day’s blistering warmth was fleeing into the thin desert air. Already it had become quite cool. There were scrabbling sounds somewhere nearby: animals, he supposed. Lions? Tigers? Did they have such things in California? This was a wild land, fierce and harsh. It made England seem very placid. He sat on the ground beside the car and watched shooting stars go streaking across the black dome overhead.

“Khalid?” Cindy called, after a time. “You out there? What are you doing?”

“Just looking at the sky,” he said.

She had rested enough, she told him. He got back in, and they drove onward. Sometime during the night they came to the exit for Barstow.

“We died ten miles back,” she said. “It was all over so fast we never knew what was happening.”

A little before dawn, as they were descending a long gentle curve in a hilly part of the route, Khalid saw the turquoise lights of an Entity transport convoy far below, making its way uphill toward them. Cindy did not appear to notice.

“Entities,” he said, after a moment.

“Where?”

“That light down there.”

“Where? Where? Oh. Shit! Sharp eyes you have.—Who would expect them to be driving around in a place like this in the middle of the night? But of course, why wouldn’t they?” She swerved the car roughly to the left and brought it to a screeching halt on the outer margin of the freeway.

He frowned at her. “What are you doing?”

“Come on. Get out and let’s run for it. We’ve got to hide in that ravine until they go past.”

“Why is that?”

“Come on,” she said. She was anything but serene now. “We’re supposed to be dead! If they detect us, and decide to check out our I.D.—”

“They will pay no attention to us, I think.”

“How do you know? Oh, Jesus, Jesus, you idiot\” She could not wait any longer. She made a furious snorting sound and leaped from the car, plunging off straightaway into the steep brushy drop alongside the highway. Khalid remained where he was. He watched her dwindle into the darkness until the angle of the ravine hid her from his sight; and then he leaned back against the head-rest of his seat and waited for the Entity transport to approach.

He wondered whether they would notice him, sitting here in a parked car by the side of a dark road in an empty landscape, and whether they would care. Could they reach into his mind and see that he was Khalid Haleem Burke, who had died in an accident some hours earlier on this road, on the other side of the city called Barstow? Would they know anything about the supposed accident without consulting their computer net? Why would they bother? Why would they care?

Perhaps, he thought, they would look into his mind as they went past and discover that he was the person who had killed a member of their species seven years ago on the highway between Salisbury and Stonehenge. In that case he had made a mistake, very likely, by remaining here, staying within range of their telepathy, instead of running off into the underbrush with Cindy.

The image blossomed in his mind of that night long ago on the road to Stonehenge, the beautiful angelic creature standing in the transport wagon, the gun, the crosshairs, the head perfectly targeted. Squeezing the trigger, seeing the angel’s head burst apart, the bright fountain of flame, the radiant fragments flying outward, the greenish-red cloud of alien blood swiftly expanding into the air. The other Entity going into that frantic convulsion as its companion’s spirit went whirling out into the darkness. He was as good as dead, Khalid knew, if the Entities detected that image as they passed by.

He pushed it aside. He emptied his mind entirely. He sealed it off from intruders with iron bands.

I am no one at all. I am not here.

Glimmers of turquoise light now ascended heavenward right in front of him. The transport had almost reached the top of the hill.

Khalid waited for it in utter tranquillity.

He was not there. There was no one at all in the car.

Three aliens rode in the transport: one of the big ones who were the Entities, and two of the lesser kind, the Spooks. Khalid ignored the Spooks and fixed his eyes in wonder on the Entity, enraptured as always by its magical gleaming beauty. His soul went out to it in love and admiration. If they had stopped and asked him to give them the world, he would have given it to them. But of course they already owned it.

He wondered why, as he watched the convoy go by, he had never become a quisling, if he admired the Entities so much. But the answer came just as quickly. He had no desire to serve them, only to worship their beauty. It was an aesthetic thing. A sunrise was beautiful too, or a snowcapped mountain, or a lake that reflected the red glow of the end of day. But one did not enroll in the service of a mountain or a lake or a sunrise simply because one thought it was beautiful.

He let the time slide along: five minutes, ten. Then he left the car and called down to Cindy, in the ravine, “They’re gone, now. You can come back.”

A faint, distant reply came to him: “Are you sure?”

“I sat here and watched them go by.”

It was a while before she reappeared. At last she came scrambling up out of the brush, out of breath and looking very rumpled and flustered and flushed. Collapsing down next to him in the car, she said, between deep gulps of air, “They—didn’t bother—you—at all?”

“No. Went right by, paid no attention. I told you that they wouldn’t. I wasn’t there.”

“It was crazy to take the chance.”

“Maybe I’m crazy,” Khalid said cheerfully, as she started the car and pulled back out onto the freeway.

“I don’t think you are,” she said, after a moment. “Why did you do it?”

“To be able to look at them,” he told her, in absolute sincerity. “They are so beautiful, Cindy. They are like magical creatures to me. Jinn. Angels.”

She swiveled around in her seat and gave him a long strange look. “You really are something unusual, Khalid.”

He made no answer to that. What could he say?

After another lengthy silent stretch she said, “I lost my cool back there, I guess. There wasn’t any real reason why they’d have stopped to interrogate us, was there?”

“No.”

“But I was afraid. A quisling and a detainee out driving together on an empty road late at night, well beyond the city that I was supposed to be taking you to, and both our I.D.s already invalidated on the master net because we’ve been reported as dead—we’d have been in a mess. I panicked.”

A little way farther onward she said, breaking the next silence into which they had slipped, “Exactly what was it that you did, Khalid, to get yourself interned in the first place?”

He hesitated not at all. “I killed an Entity.”

“You what?”

“In England, outside Salisbury. The one that was shot along the side of a road. I did it, with a special kind of gun that I took from my father. They collected everyone in the five towns closest to the place of the killing and executed some of us and sent the rest of us into the prison camps.”

She laughed, in a way that told him she hadn’t for a moment believed him. “What a wild sense of humor you have, Khalid.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I have no sense of humor whatever.”

Now morning had come and they were out of the desert and among a scattering of towns—a few cities, even, a little later on—and there was some traffic on the road. “That’s San Bernardino,” she said. “Redlands is that place over down there. We’re about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, I’d say.”

He saw palm trees now, huge and strange against the brightening sky. Other plants and trees that he could not identify, spiky, odd. Low buildings with roofs of red tiles. Cindy drove with exaggerated precision, so much so that the cars behind her honked their horns at her to get her to move along. To Khalid she said, “Got to be very careful not to get into any accidents here. If a highway patrolman wanted to see my identification, we’d be cooked.”

They came to a place where they switched from one freeway to another. “This is called the San Bernardino Freeway,” Cindy explained. “It takes us westward, through Ontario, Covina, towns like that, toward the San Gabriel Valley and on into Los Angeles itself. The one we were on goes down through Riverside toward San Diego.”

“Ah,” he said knowingly, as though these names meant something to him.

“It’s over twenty years since I was last in L.A. God knows how much it’s changed in all that time. But what I figure on doing is driving straight out to the coast. Siegfried gave me the name of a friend of his, too, who lives in Malibu. I’ll try to track him down and maybe he can plug me into the local communications channels. I had a lot of friends out in that part of town once, Santa Monica, Venice, Topanga. Some of them must still be alive and living in the vicinity. Siegfried’s buddy can help me find them. And get me a new license plate, too, and new I.D. for us both.”

“Siegfried?”

“My hacker friend from Leipzig.”

“The pardoner.”

“Yes. The pardoner.”

“Ah,” said Khalid.

The freeway was huge here, so many lanes wide that he could scarcely believe it. The traffic, though heavier than he had seen anywhere else, was swallowed up in its vastness. But Cindy assured him that in the old days this freeway had been busy all day and all night, thousands of cars choking it all the time. In the old days, that was.

A little way farther on they came to an immense yellow sign stretching across all the lanes, high overhead, that said, FREEWAY ENDS IN FIVE MILES.

“Huh?” Cindy said. “We’re only in Rosemead! Nowhere near Los Angeles yet. Are they telling me I’m going to have to do all the rest of it on surface streets? How the hell am I supposed to find my way through all these little towns on surface streets?”

“What are surface streets?” Khalid asked, but she had already pulled off the freeway and into a dilapidated service station just at the exit. It looked deserted; but then a stubbly-faced man in stained overalls appeared from behind the pumps. Jumping from the car, Cindy trotted over to him. A long conference ensued, with much pointing and waving of arms. When she returned to the car she had a stunned, disbelieving look on her face.

“There’s a wall,” she told Khalid, in a tone of awe. “A great humongous wall, all around Los Angeles!”

“Is that something new?”

“New? Damned right it’s new! He says it’s sky-high and runs clear around the whole place, with gates every five or six miles. Nobody gets in or out of the city without giving a password to the gatekeeper. Nobody.”

“You have your official identification number,” Khalid said.

“I’ve been dead since late last night, remember? I give the gatekeeper my number and we’ll both be in detention five minutes later.”

“What about your pardoner friend’s friend? Can’t he get you a new identification pass?”

“He’s in there, on the other side of the wall,” Cindy said. “I’ve got to be able to get to him before he can do anything for me. There’s no way I can reach him from out here.”

“You could hook into the computer net and reach him that way,” Khalid suggested.

“With what?” She held forth her arms, wrists turned upward. “I don’t have an implant. Never bothered with them. Do you? No, of course you don’t. What am I supposed to do, send him a postcard?” She pressed her fingertips against her eyes. “Let me think a minute. Shit. Shit! A wall around the entire city. Who the hell could have imagined that’?”

In silence Khalid watched her think.

“One possibility,” she said eventually. “A long shot. Santa Barbara.”

“Yes?” he said, if only to encourage her.

“That’s a little city a couple of hours north of L.A. They can’t have run the goddamned wall that far up. I used to have a relative up there, my husband’s older brother. Retired army colonel, he was. Had a big ranch on a mountain above the town. I was there a couple of times long ago. He never cared for me very much, the Colonel. I wasn’t his kind of person, I suppose. Still, I don’t think he’d turn me away.”

Her husband. She had said nothing about a husband until this moment.

“The Colonel! Haven’t thought of him in a million years,” Cindy said. “He’d be—I don’t know—eighty, ninety years old by now. But he’d still be there. I’d bet on it. Man was made out of leather and steel; I can’t imagine him ever dying. If he did, well, one of his children or grandchildren probably would be living there. Somebody would be, anyway, some member of the family. They might take us in. It’s worth a try. I don’t know what else to do.”

“What about your husband?” Khalid asked. “Where is he?”

“Dead, I think. I heard once that he died the day the Entities arrived. Cracked up his plane while on firefighting duty, something like that. A sweet man, he was. Sweet Mike. I really loved him.” She laughed. “Not that I can even remember exactly what he looked like, now. Except his eyes. Blue eyes that saw right into you. The Colonel had eyes like that, too. So did his kids. They all did. The whole tribe.—Well, what do you say, my friend? Shall we try for Santa Barbara?”

She returned to the freeway and continued along it, past more signs warning that it was ending, until in another few minutes the wall came into view before them.

“Joseph Mary Jesus,” Cindy said. “Will you look at that thing?” It was impressive, all right. It was a solid gray mass of big concrete blocks extending off to the left and right as far as Khalid could see, rising about as high as Salisbury Cathedral. The wall was pierced, where the freeway ran into it, by an arched gateway, deep and dark. A long line of cars was strung out in front of it. They were passing within very slowly, one by one. Occasionally an eastbound car would emerge from the other lane of the gate and drive off onto the freeway.

Cindy turned off the freeway to a city street, a wide boulevard lined by shabby little shops that looked mostly to be out of business, and began following the line of the wall northward. It seemed impossible for her to get over her astonishment at its height and bulk. She kept muttering to herself, shaking her head, now and then whistling in wonderment as some particularly lofty section of it appeared before them. There were places where the pattern of the streets forced them a few blocks away from the wall, but it was always visible off to their left, rearing up high over the two- and three-story buildings that seemed to be all there were in this district, and she returned to its proximity whenever she could.

She said very little to him. The struggle to find her way through these unfamiliar neighborhoods seemed to be exhausting her.

“This is incredible,” she said, toward mid-morning, as they churned on and on through a series of towns all packed very close together, some of them much more attractive than others. “The immensity of it. The amount of labor that must have been poured into it. What sheep we’ve become! Build a wall all the way around Los Angeles, they tell us—they don’t even say it, they just give you a little Push—and right away you get ten thousand men out there building them a wall. Raise food for us! And we do. Put enormous incomprehensible machines together for us. Yes. Yes. They’ve domesticated us. A whole planet of sheep, is what we are now. A planet of slaves. And the damnedest thing is that we don’t lift a finger to undo it all.—Did you really kill that Entity?”

“Do you think that I did?”

“I think you might have, yes. Whoever did it, though, it’s the only time anyone ever succeeded at it.” She leaned forward, squinting at a faded highway sign, pockmarked as though someone had used it for target practice. “I remember the day it happened. For five minutes the Entities all went crazy. Jumping around like they’d been given a high-voltage jolt. Then they calmed down. Some wild day, that was. I was at the Vienna center, then. Like a circus, that day. And then we found out what had happened, that somebody had actually knocked one of them off, back in England. It hit me very hard, personally, when I heard that. I was, like, totally shocked. A terrible, terrible crime, I thought. I was still in love with them, then.”

The conversation was making Khalid uncomfortable. “Are we near Los Angeles yet?” he asked.

“This is all Los Angeles, more or less. These were independent towns, but everything was really Los Angeles except they called themselves separate towns. The actual official Los Angeles is all on the far side of the wall, though. Maybe twenty miles away.”

You could tell when you were leaving one little city and entering another, because the street lamps were different and so were the houses, one city having splendid mansions and the very next one very small half-ruined ones. But there was a certain sameness to everything, beneath it all: the huge glossy-leaved trees, the lush gardens that even the smallest and poorest houses had, the low buildings and the bright eye of the sun blasting down onto everything. There were mountains just up ahead, stupendous ones, looking right down onto all these little towns. They had snow on their summits, though it was as warm as a summer day down here.

Cindy called off all the names of the cities to him as they passed through them, as if giving him a geography lesson. “Pasadena,” she said. “Glendale. Burbank. That’s Los Angeles down there, to our left.”

They had turned, now, and were heading west, toward the sun, driving on a freeway again. The wall was quite distant from them along this part of the route, though later on they came near it again, and, later still, they were forced off the freeway into another region of what she called surface streets. The terrain here was flat and monotonous and the streets were long and straight.

“We’re very close to the place where the Entities made their first landing,” Cindy told him. “I hurried right to the spot, that morning. I had to see them. I was in love with the whole idea that the space people had come. I gave myself to them. Offered my services: the very first quisling, I guess. Not that I saw myself as a traitor, you understand, just an ambassador, a bridge between the species. But they let me down. They just shuffled me around from one job to another all those years while I waited for them to put me aboard a ship going to their home world. And finally I realized that they never would.—Look, Khalid, you can just about manage to see the wall again in that valley to our left, all the way down there, curving off toward the Pacific. But we’re outside it now. We should have clear sailing all the way to Santa Barbara.”

And they did. But when they got there, late in the day, they found the town practically deserted, whole neighborhoods abandoned, block after block of handsome stucco-walled tiled buildings that had fallen into ruin. “I can’t believe this,” she said, over and over. “This beautiful little city. Everybody must have just walked away from it! Or been taken away.” Pointing toward the lofty mountains rising behind the oceanfront plain on which the city stood, she said, “Use those sharp eyes of yours. Can you see any houses up there?”

“Some, yes.”

“Signs that they’re inhabited?”

“My eyes aren’t that sharp,” he said.

But Santa Barbara wasn’t wholly desolate. After driving around for a time Cindy found three short, swarthy-looking men standing together on a street corner in what must once have been the main commercial sector. She rolled down her car window and spoke to them in a language Khalid did not understand; one of them answered her, very briefly, and she spoke again, at great length this time, and they smiled and conferred with one another, and then the one who had answered before began to gesture toward the mountains and to indicate with movements of his hands and wrists a series of twisting, turning roads that would take her up there.

“What language was that?” Khalid asked, when they were moving again.

“Spanish.”

“Is that the language they speak in California?”

“In this part,” she said. “Now, at any rate. He says the ranch is still there, that we just keep going up and up and up and eventually we’ll come to the gate. He also said they wouldn’t let us in. But maybe he’s wrong.”

It was Cassandra, on duty in the children’s compound, who was the one that heard the distant honking: three long honks, then a short one, then three more. She picked up the phone and called down to the ranch house. A voice that was either her husband’s or her husband’s twin brother answered. Cassandra was better at telling Mike’s and Charlie’s voices apart than anyone, but even she had trouble sometimes.

“Mike?” she said, guessing.

“No, Charlie. What’s up?”

“Someone at the gate. We expecting anybody?”

She could hear Charlie asking someone, perhaps Ron. Then he said, “No, nobody that we know of. Why don’t you run up there and take a look, and call me back? You’re closer to the gate than anybody else, where you are.”

“I’m six months pregnant and I’m not going to run anywhere,” said Cassandra tartly. “And I’m in the kiddie house with Irene and Andy and La-La and Jane and Cheryl. And Sabrina, too. Besides, I don’t have a gun. You find somebody else to go, you hear?”

Charlie was muttering something angry-sounding when Cassandra put down the receiver. Not my problem, she thought. The ranch was crawling with small kids and right this moment it was her job to look after them. Let Charlie find someone else to trot up to the gate: Jill, or Lisa, or Mark. Anybody. Or do it himself.

Some minutes went by. There was more honking.

Then she saw her young cousin Anson go jogging by, carrying the shotgun that was always carried by anyone who went to meet unexpected callers at the gate. His face was set in that clenched, rigid way that it always took on when one of the older men gave him a job to do. Anson was a terribly responsible kind of kid. Rain or shine, you could always get him to jump to it.

Well, problem solved, Cassandra thought, and went back to changing little Andy’s diaper.

“Yes?” Anson said, peeping through the bars of the gate at the strangers. The shotgun dangled casually from his hand, but he could bring it up into position in an instant. He was sixteen, tall and strapping, ready for anything.

These people didn’t seem very threatening, though. A thin, tired-faced little woman about his mother’s age, or even a few years older; and an unusual-looking man in his twenties, very tall and slender, with huge blue-green eyes and darkish skin and an enormous mop of shining curly hair that was not quite red, not quite brown.

The woman said, “My name is Cindy Carmichael. I was Mike Carmichael’s wife, long long ago. This is Khalid, who’s been traveling with me. We have no place to stay and we wonder if you can take us in.”

“Mike Carmichael’s wife,” Anson said, frowning. That was confusing. Mike Carmichael was his cousin’s name; but Cassandra was Mike’s wife, and in any case this woman was old enough to be Mike’s grandmother. She had to be talking about some other Mike Carmichael, in some other era.

She seemed to understand the problem. “Colonel Carmichael’s brother, he was. He’s dead now.—You’re a Carmichael yourself, aren’t you? I can tell by the eyes. And the way you stand. What’s your name?”

“Anson, ma’am.” And added: “Carmichael, yes.”

“That was the Colonel’s name, Anson. And he had a son by that name too. Anse, they called him. Are you Anse’s boy?”

“No, ma’am. Ron’s.”

“Are you, now? Ron’s boy. So he’s a family man these days. I suppose a lot of things have changed.—Let me think: that would make you Anson the Fifth, right? Just like in a royal dynasty.”

“The Fifth, yes, ma’am.”

“Well, hello, Anson the Fifth. I’m Cindy the First. Can we come in, please? We’ve been traveling a long way.”

“You wait here,” Anson said. “I’ll go and see.”

He jogged down to the main house. Charlie, Steve, and Paul were there, sitting at a table in the chart room with a sheaf of printouts spread out in front of them. “There’s a strange woman at the gate,” Anson told them. “And somebody foreign-looking with her, a man. She says she’s a Carmichael. Was married to a brother of the Colonel named Mike, once upon a time. I don’t know who the man is at all. She seems to know a lot about the family.—Did the Colonel ever have a brother named Mike?”

“Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “Before my time, if he did.” Steve merely shrugged. But Paul said, “How old is she? Older than I am, would you say?”

“I’d say so. Older even than Uncle Ron, maybe. About Aunt Rosalie’s age, maybe.”

“She tell you her name?”

“Cindy, she said.”

Paul’s eyes grew very wide. “I’ll be damned.”

“So you surely will, cousin,” said Ron, entering the room just then. “What’s going on?”

“You aren’t going to believe this. But apparently the ambassador from outer space has returned, and she’s waiting at the gate. Cindy, I mean. Mike’s wife Cindy. How about that?”

So the whole place was a kind of Carmichael commune now, the Colonel’s entire family living together on the hilltop. Cindy hadn’t expected that. That was a whole lot of Carmichaels, counting in the kids, and all. She felt a little outnumbered.

It was amazing to see them all again, these people who for a few years had been her kinfolk, after a manner of speaking, so many years ago. Not that Cindy had ever been particularly close to any of them, back in her freewheeling old Los Angeles days. Taking their cue from the formidable old Colonel, they had never really allowed her into the family circle, except perhaps for Mike’s nephew Anse, who had treated her politely enough. To the others she was just Mike’s crazy hippie wife, who dressed funny and talked funny and thought funny, and they had made it pretty clear that they wanted very little, if anything, to do with her. Which had basically been okay with Cindy. They had their lives; she and Mike had had theirs.

But that was then and this was now, and Mike was long gone and the world had changed beyond anybody’s ability to imagine, and she had changed too, and so had they. And these people were the closest thing to family that she had left. She could not let them reject her now.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to be here, to be back among the Carmichaels again. Or to be among the Carmichaels for the first time, really. I never was much of a family person back in the old days, was I? But I’d like to be, now. I really would.”

They were gawking at her as though an Entity, or perhaps a Spook, had wandered somehow into their house on the mountainside and was standing in their midst.

Cindy looked right back at them. Her gaze traveled around the room. She summoned up what she could remember of them.

Ronnie. That one had to be Ronnie, there in the middle of the group. He seemed to be running things, now. That was odd, Ronnie being in charge. She remembered sly Ronnie as a wild man, a trickster, a plunger, an operator, always on the outside in family stuff. If anything he had been more of the black sheep of the family than she. But here he was, now, fifty years old, fifty-five, maybe, big and solid, grown very stocky with the years, his blond hair now almost white, and you could see immediately that he had changed inwardly too, in some fundamental way, that he had grown stronger, steadier, transformed himself colossally in these twenty-odd years. He had never looked serious, in the old days. Now he did.

Next to him was his sister, Rosalie. A nice-looking woman then, Cindy remembered, and she had aged very well indeed, tall, stately, controlled. She had to be around sixty but she seemed younger. Cindy recalled Mike telling her that Rosalie had been a big problem when she was a girl—drugs, a great deal of screwing around—but all that was far behind her now. She had married some fat nerdy guy, a computer man, and become a reformed character overnight. That must be him with her, Cindy thought: that big bald doughy-faced fellow. She didn’t remember his name.

And that one—the stringy-looking blond woman—she must be Anse’s wife. A suburban-mom type back then, somewhat high-strung. Cindy had found her to be of absolutely no interest. Another name forgotten.

The younger man—he was Paul, wasn’t he? Mike’s other brother’s son. Pleasant young fellow, science professor at some college south of L.A. Figured to be forty-five or so, now. Cindy recalled that he had had a sister. She didn’t seem to be here now.

As for the others, four of them were kids in their middle or late twenties, and the other, the teenager, was Ron’s kid, who had met them at the gate. The rest were probably Anse’s children, or Paul’s. They all looked more or less alike, except for one, clearly the oldest, who was heavyset and brown-eyed and balding already, with only the faintest traces of Carmichael about him. The son of Rosalie and her computer guy, Cindy supposed. There would be time to sort the others out later. The remaining person was a woman in her late forties who was standing just alongside Ron. The late-fortyish woman seemed vaguely familiar to Cindy but plainly was no Carmichael, not with those dark eyes and that smallish, fine-boned frame. Ronnie’s wife, most likely.

She said, as she completed her survey, “And the Colonel? What about him? Could he still be alive?”

“Could be and is,” Ronnie said. “Almost eighty-five and very feeble, and I don’t think he’ll be with us much longer. He’s going to be damned surprised to see you.”

“And not very pleased, I bet. I’m sure you know he never thought very highly of me. Perhaps for good reasons.”

“He’ll be glad to see you now. You’re his closest link with his brother Mike, you know. He spends most of his time in the past these days. Of course, he doesn’t have much future.”

Cindy nodded. “And there’s somebody else missing. Your brother Anse.”

“Dead,” Ronnie said. “Four years back.”

“I’m so sorry. He was a fine man.”

“He was, yes. But he had a lot of trouble with drinking, his later years. Anse wanted so much to be as strong and good as the Colonel, you know, but he never quite managed it. Nobody could have. But Anse just wouldn’t forgive himself for being human.”

Was there anyone else from the old days that she should ask about? Cindy didn’t think so. She glanced toward Khalid, wondering what he was making out of all this. But Khalid appeared utterly placid. As though his brain had gone off on a voyage to Mars.

The late-fortyish woman standing near Ronnie said cheerily, “I guess you don’t recognize me, do you, Cindy? But of course we were only together for a very few hours.”

“We were? When was that? I’m sorry.”

“On the Entity spaceship, after the Porter Ranch landing. We were in the same group of prisoners.” A warm smile. “Margaret Gabrielson. Peggy. I came here to work for the Colonel, and later I married Ron. No reason why you would remember me.”

No. There wasn’t. Cindy didn’t.

“You were very distinctive. I’ve never forgotten: the beads, the sandals, the big earrings. They let most of us go that afternoon, but you volunteered to stay with the aliens. You said they were going to take you to their planet.”

“That’s what I thought. But they never did,” Cindy said. “I worked for them all those years, doing whatever they wanted me to do, running detainee centers for them, transporting prisoners around, waiting for them to make good on their promise. But it didn’t happen. After a while I began to wonder if they had ever promised it. By now I’ve decided that it was all my own delusion.”

“You’re a quisling, then?” Ronnie asked. “Are you aware that this is a major center of the Resistance?”

“Was a quisling,” she said. “Not any longer. I was working at a detention center on the Turkish coast when I realized I had wasted twenty years playing footsie with the Entities for nothing. They hadn’t come here to turn our world into a paradise, which is what I used to believe. They had come here to enslave us. So I wanted out; I wanted to go home. I arranged for a pardoner I know in Germany to have me shipped out to the States, escorting a batch of prisoners to Nevada, and he rewrote my personnel code to say that I had been killed in an auto accident between Vegas and Barstow while driving this young man to his next detention camp. That’s why he’s here. The pardoner rewrote his code too. We’re permanent vanishees, now. When we got to L.A., I discovered that there’s a wall around the place. No way for us to get in, because we don’t officially exist any more.”

“So then you had the notion of coming here.”

“Yes. What else could I do? But if you don’t want me, just say so, and I’ll take off. My name is Carmichael, though. I was a member of this family once, your uncle’s wife. I loved him very much and he loved me. And I’m not about to interfere with any of your Resistance activities. If anything, I can help with them. I can tell you a lot of stuff about the Entities that you may not know.”

Ronnie was eyeing her reflectively.

“Let’s go talk to the Colonel,” he said.

Khalid watched her go from the room, followed by most of the others. Only a few of the younger ones remained with him: two men who were obviously twin brothers, though one had a long red scar on his face, and the tense, earnest, boyish-looking one, plainly related to the twins, who had met them at the gate with the shotgun in his hand. And also a girl who looked like a female version of the two brothers, tall and lean and blond, with those icy blue eyes that almost everyone around here seemed to have. The rest of her seemed icy too: she was as cool and remote as the sky. But very beautiful.

The brother with the scar said, to the other one, “We’d better move along, Charlie. We’re supposed to be fixing the main irrigation pump.”

“Right.” To the boy with the shotgun Charlie said, “Can you manage things here on your own, Anson?”

“Don’t worry about me. I know what to do.”

“If he does anything peculiar, you let him have it right in the gut, you hear me, Anson?”

“Go on, Charlie,” Anson said stiffly, gesturing toward the door with the shotgun. “Go fix the goddamned pump. I told you, I know what to do.”

The twins went out. Khalid stood patiently where he had been standing all along, calm as ever, letting time flow past him. The tall blond girl was looking at him intently. There was a detachment in her curiosity, a kind of aloof scientific fascination. She was studying him as though he were some new kind of life-form. Khalid found that oddly appealing. He sensed that she and he might be similar in certain interesting ways, behind their wholly different exteriors.

She let a moment or two go by. Then she said to the boy, “You run along now, Anson. Let me have the gun.”

Anson seemed startled. He is so very earnest, Khalid thought. Takes himself very seriously. “I can’t do that, Jill!”

“Sure you can. You think I don’t know how to use a shotgun? I was shooting rabbits on this mountain while you were still shitting in your diapers. Give it here. Run along.”

“Hey, I don’t know if—”

“Go, now,” she said, taking the gun from him and pointing with her thumb toward the door. She had not raised her voice at all throughout the entire interchange; but Anson, looking bewildered and cowed, went shuffling from the room as though she had struck him in the face with a whip.

“Hello,” the girl said to Khalid. Only the two of them were left in the room, now.

“Hello.”

Her eyes were fixed steadily on him. Almost without blinking. The thought came to him suddenly that he would like to see her without her clothes. He wanted to know whether the triangle at her loins was as golden as the hair on her head. He found himself imagining what it would be like to run his hand up her long, smooth thighs.

“I’m Jill,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Khalid.”

“Khalid. What kind of name is that?”

“An Islamic name. I was named for my uncle. I was born in England, but my mother was of Pakistani descent.”

“Pakistani, eh? And what may that be?”

“Pakistanis are people who come from Pakistan. That’s a country near India.”

“Ah-hah. India. I know about India. Elephants and tigers and rubies. I read a book about India once.” She waggled the gun around in a careless, easy way. “You have interesting eyes, Khalid.”

“Thank you.”

“Do all Pakistanis look like you?”

“My father was English,” he said. “He was very tall, and so am I. Pakistanis aren’t usually this tall. And they have darker skin than I have, and brown eyes. I hated him.”

“Because he had the wrong color eyes?”

“His eyes did not matter to me.”

Hers were staring right into his. Those blue, blue eyes.

She said, “You were in Entity detention, that woman said. What did you do to get yourself detained?”

“I’ll tell you that some other time.”

“Not now?”

“Not now, no.”

She ran her hand along the barrel of the shotgun, stroking it lovingly, as though she just might be thinking of ordering him at gunpoint to tell him what the crime was that he had committed. He remembered how he had stroked the grenade gun, the night he had killed the Entity. But he doubted that she would shoot him; and he did not intend to tell her anything about that now, no matter what kind of threats she made. Later, maybe. Not now.

She said, “You’re very mysterious, aren’t you, Khalid. Who are you, I wonder?”

“No one in particular.”

“Neither am I,” she said.

The Colonel looked to be about two hundred years old, Cindy thought. There didn’t seem to be anything left of him but those outrageous eyes of his, blue as glaciers, sharp as lasers.

He was in bed, propped up on a bunch of pillows. He had a visible tremor of some kind, and his face was haggard and deathly pale, and from the look of his shoulders and chest he weighed about eighty pounds. His famous shock of silvery hair had thinned to mere wisps.

All around him, on both night-tables and on the wall, were dozens and dozens of family photographs, some two-dimensional and some in three, along with all manner of official-looking framed documents, military honors and such. Cindy spotted the photo of Mike at once. It leaped out instantly from everything else: Mike as she remembered him, a vigorous handsome man in his fifties, out in the New Mexico desert standing next to that little plane he had loved so much, the Cessna.

“Cindy,” the Colonel said, beckoning with a claw-like palsied hand. “Come here. Closer. Closer.” Faint and papery as it was, it was still unmistakably the voice of the Colonel. She could never have forgotten that voice. When the Colonel said something, however mildly, it was an order. “You really are Cindy, are you?”

“Really. Truly.”

“How amazing. I didn’t ever imagine that I’d see you again. You went to the aliens’ planet, did you?”

“No. That was just a pipe dream. They just kept me, all those years. Put me to work, moving me around from this compound to that, one administrative job and another. Eventually I decided to escape.”

“And come here?”

“Not at all. I had no way of knowing I’d find anyone here. I went to L.A. But I couldn’t get in, so I took a chance and went up here. This was my last resort.”

“You know that Mike is long dead, don’t you?”

“I know that, yes.”

“And Anse, too. You remember Anse? My older son?”

“Of course I remember him.”

“My turn’s next. I’ve already lived ten years too long, at the very least. Thirty, maybe. But it’s just about over for me, now. I broke my hip last week. You don’t recover from that, not at my age. I’ve had enough, anyway.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say anything like that.”

“You mean that I sound like a quitter? No. That’s not it. I’m not giving up, exactly. I’m just going away. There’s no preventing it, is there? We aren’t designed to live forever. We outlive our own time, we outlive our friends, if we’re really unlucky we outlive our children, and then we go. It’s all right.” He managed a sort of smile. “I’m glad you came here, Cindy.”

“You are? Really?”

“I never understood you, you know. And I guess you never understood me. But we’re family, all the same. My brother’s wife: how could I not love you? You can’t expect everybody around you to be just like yourself. Take Mike, for instance—”

He began to cough. Ronnie, who had been standing to one side in silence, stepped forward quickly, snatching up a glass of water from a nearby table and offering it to him. Quietly he said, “You may be overexerting yourself, Dad.”

“No. No. All I’m doing is making a little speech.” The Colonel drank deeply, let his eyes droop shut for a moment, opened them and turned them on Cindy again. “As I was saying: Mike. A martyr, I used to think, to all the cockeyed ideas that went running through American life since we went to war in Vietnam. The things he did. Quit the Air Force, ran off to L.A., married a hippie, went out to the desert a lot to hide himself away and meditate. I didn’t approve. But what business was it of mine? He was what he was. He was already himself when he was six years old, and what he was was something different from me.”

Another deep drink of water.

“Anse. Tried his best to be someone like me. Failed at it. Burned himself out and died young. Ronnie. Rosalie. Problems, problems, problems. If my own children are this crazy, I thought, what must the rest of the world be like? One big lunatic asylum, with me stranded in it. And that was before the Entities came, even. But I was wrong. I just wanted everybody to be as stiff and stern as me, because that’s how I thought people should be. Carmichaels, anyway. Warriors, dedicated to the cause of righteousness and decency.” A soft chuckle came from him. “Well, the Entities showed us a thing or two, didn’t they? The good, the bad, the indifferent—we all got conquered the same day, and lived unhappily ever after.”

“You never got conquered, Dad,” Ronnie said.

“Is that how it seems to you? Well, maybe. Maybe.” The old man had not released his grip on Cindy’s hand. He said, “You lived among the Entities all this time, you say? So you must know a thing or two about them. Do they have any flaws, do you think? An Achilles’ heel somewhere that will let us defeat them, ultimately?”

“I wouldn’t say I saw anything like that, no.”

“No. No. They’re perfect superbeings. They’re just like gods. Can that be so? I suppose it is. But I wanted to go on resisting, all the same. Keeping the idea of resistance alive, anyway. The memory of what it had been like to live in a free world. Maybe we never even did live in a free world, anyway. God knows I heard plenty of that stuff during the Vietnam time, how the evil multinational corporations actually were the ones who ran everything, or some little group of secret political masters, conspiracies, lies. That nothing was what it seemed to be on the surface. All our supposed democratic freedoms just illusions designed to keep people from understanding the truth. America really a totalitarian state like all the rest. I never believed any of that. But even so, even if I was naive all my life, I want to think it’s possible for the America that I used to think existed to exist again, regardless of whether it ever did the first time around. Are you following me? That it can all be reborn, that we can come out from under these slave-master Entities, that we can repair ourselves somehow and live as we were meant to live. Call it faith in the ultimate providence of God, I guess. Call it—” He paused and winked at her. “Some speech, eh, Cindy? The old man’s farewell address. I’ve just about run out of steam, though. Are you going to live here with us from now on?”

“I want to.”

“Good. Welcome home.” For once the fierce eyes softened a little. “I love you, Cindy. It’s taken me thirty years to get around to being able to say that, and I guess the world had to be conquered by aliens, first, and Mike to die, and a lot of other wild stuff to happen. But I love you. That’s all I want to say. I love you.”

“And I love you,” she said softly. “I always did. I just didn’t know it, I guess.”