The Alien Years Read online

  Pulled it upward. Brought it ripping like an irresistible force through his internal organs until it came clinking up against the cage of his ribs.

  He grunted and clasped his hands to the gaping wound. He could barely cover it with his ten outspread fingers. Surprisingly, there was no pain yet, only a dull sense of shock. She rolled backward from him and sprang to her feet, looming over him like a naked avenging demon.

  “I have no son,” she said vindictively, biting off the edges of the words, as his eyes began to dim.

  Karl-Heinrich nodded. Blood was spouting from him, covering the Persian carpet with a pool of blood. He attempted to tell the servo to send help, but he found himself unable to make a sound. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, in soft furry silence. In any case what good would calling for help do? He could feel himself already dying. His strength was leaving with him with every spurt. Eyesight growing blurry, inner systems shutting down. He was finished, a dead man at twenty-nine. He was surprised how little he cared. Perhaps that was what dying was like.

  So they had caught up with him at last.

  How odd that she would be the one. How appropriate.

  “I’ve dreamed of this for twelve years,” the lovely assassin said. “We all have. What joy it is to see you like this now, Borgmann.” And said again, this time making the name sound like the curse it had become: “Borgmann.”

  Yes. Of course. That was borgmann, no capital letter.

  She had killed him, all right.

  But there was consolation all the same, he told himself. He would die famous. His very name was part of the language now; that he knew; that knowledge he hugged lovingly close to himself as his life dwindled away. He would be dead in a few moments more, but his name—ah, his name—that would be immortal, that would march on through human history forever. Borgmann…borgmann…borgmann.

  The baby was a girl. Steve and Lisa named her Sabrina Amanda Gannett. Everyone at the ranch came around to go ooh and ahh and kitchy-koo, as the cultural norms demanded.

  But there was an enormous amount of muddle and turmoil before things got to that point, of course.

  First there was the awkward business of Lisa’s family’s quisling affiliations for Steve to deal with. So far as his uncle Ron was concerned, that was a simple matter. “You have to dump her, boy, that’s all there is to it. Carmichaels just can’t hang out with quislings. They just can’t.—Don’t give me that stricken expression, my friend. Out of all the pussy there is for you to find in California, why did you have to wind up with one of them?”

  That, though, was Ron, who was cool and smooth and handsome and who over the years had had any number of girlfriends, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, and at least a couple of wives too, before meeting up with Peggy and deciding to mend his wandering ways. Easy enough for him to say: dump her. What would someone as magnetic and charming as Ron understand, really, about poor pasty-faced Steve Gannett, who didn’t know how to keep his own shirt-tails tucked in and whose entire sex life up till the time he had met Lisa had consisted of serving as an animated dildo for his heartless cousin Jill? Did Ron think that it would really be so easy for him to toss Lisa back into the pool and find himself another girlfriend just like that, half an hour later?

  Besides, he loved Lisa. She was important to him in a way that nobody ever had been before. He lived for their meetings, their trips to Point Mugu Park, their delicious sweaty grapplings on that carpet of fallen leaves beneath the oak trees. He couldn’t imagine life without her. Nor did he see how he could bring himself to discard her, the way Jill had discarded him.

  How, though, was he going to work all this out?

  “I’ve got to see you,” he told her, a couple of days after their visit to the Topanga Canyon Boulevard construction site. “Right away. It’s essential.” But he didn’t have the ghost of an idea of what he was going to say to her.

  He drove blindly southward at top velocity over the battered coastal highway, giving no heed to potholes, cracks, dips and curves, and other such trifling obstacles. When he got to Mission San Buenaventura, Lisa was waiting out in front, sitting in her car. She smiled pleasantly as he approached, just as though this were one of their ordinary dates, though it was so soon after their last meeting that she should have suspected something. That cheery, expectant smile of hers made everything just that much worse. She opened the door on the passenger side for him and he slipped in beside her, but when she began to start the engine he caught her by the wrist and stopped her.

  “No, let’s not go down to the park. Let’s just stay here and talk, okay?”

  She looked startled. “Is something wrong?”

  “Plenty’s wrong, yes,” he said, allowing the words to come out without pausing to form them in his mind. “I’ve been thinking, Lisa. About how we got through the checkpoint, and all. How you happened to have the password, when practically all the LACON entry permits for Los Angeles have been revoked.” He could hardly bear to look straight at her. He had to force himself, and, even so, his gaze kept sliding away from her eyes toward her cheek or her chin. Surprisingly, she seemed very calm, staring steadily back at him, even when he let the next string of words come blurting forth: “Lisa, the only way you could have had that passport would be if you’re a quisling, isn’t that so? Or know someone who is?”

  “That’s an ugly word, quisling.”

  “Well, collaborator, then. Is that any better?”

  She shrugged. She was still strangely calm, though now her face seemed a little flushed. “My father works for the telephone company, and so do my brothers, and so do I. You know that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You know that too. Programming.”

  “And the phone company: What’s its relationship to LACON?”

  “LACON controls all communications networks in and around the Los Angeles Basin, from Long Beach to Ventura. Certainly you would know that.”

  “So someone who works for the telephone company in this county actually works for LACON, isn’t that so?”

  “You might say so, yes.”

  “And therefore,” said Steve, with a sense that he was pitching himself off the edge of a high cliff, “you and your family work for LACON, and, since LACON is the human administrative arm of the alien occupying powers, therefore you all can be regarded as quis—as collaborators. Yes?”

  “Why are you grilling me like this, Steve?” Not at all indignant. Merely prompting him to speak the next line. As though she had expected this conversation to come, sooner or later.

  “I have to know these things.”

  “Well, you do know them, now. Like thousands and thousands of other people, my family earns its living by supplying services to the beings that happen to rule our planet. I don’t see anything wrong with that, really. It’s just our job. If we didn’t do it, somebody else would, and the Entities would still be here, only my family and I would have a much harder time keeping things together. If you have any problem with that, you ought to say so right now.”

  “I do have a problem with it. I’m with the Resistance.”

  “I know that, Steve.”

  “You do?”

  “You’re part of the Carmichael family. Your mother is old Colonel Carmichael’s daughter. You live up on top of that mountain behind Santa Barbara.”

  He blinked at her, amazed.

  “How do you know all that?”

  “You think you’re the only one who knows how to trace back a communications line? I’m with the phone company, remember.”

  “So you knew all along,” he said, lost now in bewilderment. “Practically from the start, you were aware that I’m Resistance, and it didn’t bother you, even though you’re a qu—”

  “Don’t say that word again.”

  “Someone who’s willing to work for them.”

  “Someone who sees no sensible alternatives, Steve. They’ve been here, what, fifteen years, now? What has your Resistance accomplished in all that time?
A lot of talk, is all. And meanwhile the Entities are as much in control as the day they turned all the power off, and they’ve taken over every aspect of our lives.”

  “With the help of people like—”

  “So? What’s the alternative? They’re here. They run things. They own us. We aren’t going to kick them out, not ever. That’s a fact of life. So we need to get on with our lives, to do our jobs, whatever our jobs might be.” She was looking at him in a level, uncompromising way, forcing him toward telling her whatever it was that he had come down here to tell her today. But he had not known, setting out that morning, what that was going to be.

  Suddenly he knew it now. He let himself say it. The words came rolling from him like a sentence of death.

  “We can’t go on seeing each other, Lisa. That’s all there is to it. Your family and mine, they’re just incompatible. We work to overthrow the Entities and you work to make things easier for them.”

  She met his feverish stare unblinkingly. “And why should that matter?”

  “It does. It simply does. We have our family traditions, and they’re pretty stiff stuff. You ought to see my grandfather, the Colonel. He’s getting a little senile, maybe, but he has flashes when he’s his old self, and then he makes the grandest speeches about liberty, freedom, the need never to forget what we were before the Entities came.”

  “I agree with that. I think it’s important to remember what it was like to be free.”

  “He means it, though.”

  “So do I. But there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t turn time backwards. The Entities own the world and nothing we do is going to change that.”

  They were getting nowhere. He felt as though he were breaking in half.

  “There’s no sense arguing about it,” he said. “All I know is that I don’t see how we can go on, your family collaborating, mine resisting. There couldn’t ever be any contact between the families. How could we have any life together, like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But there’s one thing I ought to tell you, Steve—”

  “Oh, Jesus, Lisa! You’re not—”

  Pregnant, yes. The old business of the Capulets and the Montagues, but with one extra little devastating twist.

  Her self-possession now disintegrated. So did his, such as it was. She began to cry, and he pulled her head against his chest and he began to cry too, and the astonishing thought came to him of the brown-eyed child that was sprouting in her belly, and of the improbability that so hopeless a nerd as he had been had actually fathered a baby; and he knew beyond doubt that he loved this woman and meant to marry her and stand beside her, no matter what.

  But that took some doing. He returned to the ranch and called Ron aside and told him of this newest development; and Ron, pensive and somber and not at all jaunty now, told him to sit tight and went off to talk to his sister Rosalie. Who after a time called Steve to her, and quizzed him extensively about his entire relationship with Lisa, not so much the sex part as the emotional part, his feelings, his intentions.

  He amazed himself with the forthrightness, the directness, the sheer adulthood of his own responses. No hemming, no hawing, no subterfuges, no standing on one leg and then the other. He came right out and said he loved Lisa. He told his mother that it made him terribly happy to know that there was going to be a child. He said that he had no intention of abandoning her.

  “You’ll stick by her even if you have to leave the ranch?”

  “Why would I let that interfere?” he asked.

  She seemed oddly pleased to hear that. But then she was quiet for a long while. Her face grew sad. “What a sorry mess this is, Steve. What a mess.”

  There were whispered family conferences all week long. His mother and her two brothers; the three of them and his father; Steve with Ron again, with Anse, with his mother, with Paul, with Peggy. He sensed that Ron, who had told him so bluntly and uncompromisingly to rid himself of Lisa, was coming around to a more sympathetic position, perhaps under some pressure from Peggy; that his mother was of several minds about the problem, though more on his side than not; that Anse seemed mainly angry at being troubled by so complicated a business as this. During this time, Steve was forbidden to engage in any communications operations on behalf of the Resistance. Was forbidden, indeed, to go anywhere near a computer. Which cut him off from communication with Lisa. Just to make certain, his father wrote a blocking command into the system that guaranteed he could not have access to it; and Steve, good as he was, knew he could not countermand a block written by Doug. Not that he would dare, not in this situation.

  He wondered what was going through Lisa’s mind. He had promised her, as they parted in Ventura, that he would work something out with his family. But what? What?

  It was the longest week of his life. He spent it roaming the hillside, sitting for long hours on the rocky outcropping where Jill once had followed him and made use of him. That seemed a million years ago. Jill now paid almost no attention to him at all. If she had any inkling of the pickle he was in, she gave no indication of it to him, though he overheard her giggling with her brothers Charlie and Mike, and was sure that it was his situation that they were giggling over.

  Finally Ron came to him and said, “The Colonel wants to talk to you.”

  The Colonel was frail, now. He had grown very thin and had a tremor in his hands, and used a walking-stick when he moved about. But he moved about infrequently; he spent most of his time these days sitting quietly in his chair near the edge of the patio, looking out over the valley, with a lap-robe spread across him except on the very warmest days.

  “Sir?” Steve said, and stood before him and waited.

  The Colonel’s eyes, at least, had lost none of their old force. He studied Steve for an intolerably long time, staring, staring, while Steve drew himself up as straight as he knew how to hold himself, and waited. And waited.

  And at last the Colonel spoke. “Well, boy. Is it true that you’re going to sell us out to the Entities?”

  It was a monstrous question; but there was something in his eyes that told Steve that it was not to be taken too seriously. Or so Steve hoped.

  “No, sir. It’s not true in the slightest, and I hope no one has been telling you anything of the kind.”

  “She is a quisling, isn’t she, though? She and her whole family?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You knew that when you became involved with her?”

  “No, sir. Not even remotely. I didn’t realize it until the other day, when she got us through a LACON checkpoint with a password that she shouldn’t have been able to have.”

  “Ah. But she was aware all along that you were a Carmichael?”

  “Evidently so.”

  “And consorted with you for the sake of infiltrating the ranch and betraying us to the Entities, do you think?”

  “No, sir. Absolutely not. It’s not really a secret that this is a Resistance headquarters, you know, sir. I think even the Entities must be aware of that. But in any case, there was never a word out of Lisa that indicated to me that she had any such dark intentions.”

  “Ah. Then it was just an innocent little romantic thing, what went on between you and her?”

  Steve reddened. “In truth, not all that innocent, sir, I would have to admit.”

  The Colonel said, chuckling, “So I’ve been given to understand. When is the baby due?”

  “Around six months from now.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “I mean, do you leave the ranch to live with her, then, or are we supposed to take her in here?”

  Flustered, Steve said, “Why, I don’t know, sir. It’s up to the family to decide, not to me.”

  “And if the family tells you that you’re to give up the woman and the baby and never see either one of them again?”

  The fierce old blue eyes drilled deep.

  After a moment’s silence Steve said, “I don’t
think I would go along with that, sir.”

  “You love her that much?”

  “I love her, yes. And I have a responsibility to the child.”

  “Indeed. That you do.—So you would go to live among quislings if need be, eh? But would they take you in, do you think, knowing that you were an agent of the Resistance?”

  Steve moistened his lips. “What if we were to take Lisa in, instead?”

  “To spy on us, you mean?”

  “I don’t mean that at all. It’s just a job for her, working for them. She doesn’t see it as working for the Entities at all, just for the phone company, which is an arm of LACON, which of course is the Entity puppet administration down there. There’s nothing ideological about her. She doesn’t like having the Entities here any more than we do. She just doesn’t see what we can do about it, so she does her job and doesn’t think about such things. If she came here, she’d have no further contact with the other side.”

  “Including her father? Her brothers?”

  “I suppose she’d speak with them, visit them sometimes, maybe. But there’s no reason in the world why she would reveal anything about ranch activities to them or anyone else.”

  “And so you ask us—infatuated as you are, blinded by love—to accept a spy into our midst simply because you’ve managed to make her pregnant,” said the Colonel. “Do I have it right?”

  Steve had a sense of having being played with throughout the entire interview. It seemed to him that the Colonel, kindly though he had been during most of this, had been testing him, primarily, trying to see how he reacted under pressure. Taking this position and that one, now sympathetic, now hostile, poking at him here, poking at him there, making harsh assumptions, raising damning hypotheses, checking things out from all angles. But plainly the old man’s mind was already made up, and not in his favor. How could he possibly allow a girl from a quisling family into the ranch?