The Alien Years Read online

  “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 recoding 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 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 suc
h 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 se
en 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. Avery 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.