The Alien Years Read online

  “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 tardy, “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 Alike, 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 thou
ght 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 Alike 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 for 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?”