The Alien Years Read online

“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.”

  6

  FORTY YEARS FROM NOW

  It was eleven years after Khalid and Cindy had come to the ranch, and ten since he had married Jill, when he finally revealed to anyone what it was that he had done to warrant being put into detention by the Entities.

  Eleven years.

  And thirty-three since the Conquest; and the ranch still floated above the suffering world like an island in mid-air, sacrosanct. Somewhere out there were the impregnable compounds of the Entities—within which the conquering creatures from another world went about the unfathomable activities requisite to an occupation of the conquered planet, an occupation that now had lasted a full third of a century without letup or explanation; and, somewhere out there, labor gangs working under conditions amounting to slavery were building huge walls around all of Earth’s major cities, and doing, at the behest of human taskmasters who took their orders from the aliens, all manner of other things whose purpose no one could comprehend. And somewhere out there, too, there were prison camps in which thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had broken some mystifying and inexplicable regulation that had been decreed by Earth’s star-born monarchs were capriciously and randomly detained.

  Here, meanwhile, were the Carmichaels up above the world. It was rare for any of them to leave their mountain home any longer. The ranch’s confines were much less confining, now; the Carmichael domain had spread outward and to some degree downward into the depopulated hillsides all about them. They spent their days raising tomatoes and corn and sheep and pigs and squadrons of new Carmichael babies. The making of babies was, in fact, a primary occupation there. The place swarmed with them, one generation tumbling fast upon its predecessor. And also, like some machine that has been set blindly into motion without any means of halting, going through the unending motions of running a Resistance that consisted mainly of sending strings of resolute and inspiring e-mail to other groups of Resisters all over the world. The Entities, inscrutable as ever, surely must have known what was going on up there, but they stayed their hand.

  The Carmichaels lived in such utter isolation that when some stranger, some spy, broke into their walled domain a few years after Khalid’s arrival there, it was an altogether astounding event, an unprecedented foray of reality into their charmed sphere. Charlie found him quickly and killed him and all was as it had been, once again. And the world went on, for the unconquered Carmichaels on their mountainside and for the conquered hosts below.

  Eleven years. For Khalid they went by in a moment.

  By then, the Carmichaels had just about forgotten the whole subject of Khalid’s detention. Khalid lived among them like a Martian among humans, he and the almost equally Martian Jill, in an isolated cabin of their own that he and Mike and Anson had constructed for them beyond the vegetable garden, and there Khalid spent his days fashioning sculptures large and small out of stone or clay or pieces of wood, and drew sketches, and taught himself how to grind pigments into paint and how to paint with them; and he and Jill raised their tribe of eerily beautiful children there, and no one, not even Khalid, ever thought much about Khalid’s mysterious past. The past was not a place Khalid cared to visit. It held no fond memories. He preferred to live one moment at a time, looking neither forward nor back.

  The pasts of other people impinged on him all the time, though, because it was just a short way from his cabin to the ranch’s graveyard, off in a gravly little rock-walled natural enclosure, a sort of box canyon, just to the left of the vegetable patch. Khalid went there often to sit among the dead people and look outward, thinking about nothing at all.

  The view from the graveyard was ideal for that purpose. The little box canyon opened at its downslope end into a larger side canyon on the mountain’s western face, canted not toward the city of Santa Barbara but toward the next mountain in the series that ran parallel to the coastline. So you could sit there with your back against the steep mountain face and look right out into blue sky and wheeling hawks, with little else in your line of sight except the distant gray-brown bulk of the next mountain over, the one that bordered the ranch on the west.

  Gravestones sprouted like toadstools all around him here, but that was all right. The dead were no more frightening to Khalid than the living. And in any case he had known very few of these people.

  The biggest and most elaborate of the stones belonged to the grave of Colonel Anson Carmichael III, 1943-2027. There always were fresh flowers on that grave, every day of the year. Khalid understood that the Colonel had been the patriarch of this community. He had died a day or two after Khalid’s arrival here. Khalid had never laid eyes on him.

  Nor on Captain Anson Carmichael IV, 1964-2024. They loved that name Anson here. The settlement was full of them. Ron Carmichael’s oldest son was an Anson; so was Steve Gannett’s boy, though everyone called him “Andy.” And Khalid thought there might be others. There were so many children that it was hard to keep track. At Jill’s insistence Khalid had even given the name to one of his own sons: Rasheed Anson Burke, he was. This one in the grave before him had been known as “Anse”: the oldest son of the illustrious Colonel, dead before his own father. A sad story, evidently, but no one had ever told Khalid the details of it. Jill, although she had been Anse’s daughter, never talked of him.

  Jill’s mother was buried next to her husband: Carole Martinson Carmichael, 1969-2034. Khalid remembered her as a thin, pallid, downcast woman, a worn and ragged version of her beautiful daughter. She had never had much to say. Khalid had carved the headstone himself, with two winged angels on it within an elaborate wreath. Jill had requested that. Just back of the graves of Anse and Carole was the grave of someone named Helena Carmichael Boyce, 1979-2021—Khalid had no idea who she had been—and, not far from hers, the resting place of Jill’s first husband, the mysterious Theodore Quarles, 1975-2023, called “Ted.”

  All Khalid knew about Theodore Quarles was that he had been many years older than Jill, that they had lived together as man and wife for about a year, that he had been killed in a rockslide during a stormy winter. He was another one of whom Jill never spoke; but that too was all right. Khalid had no interest in knowing any more about Theodore Quarles than he already did, which was the mere fact of his existence.

  Then there were the graves of various children of the family who had died young in this little mountainside village that had no doctor. Five, six, seven headstones, small ones all in a row. These usually had flowers on them too. But there were never any flowers on the next grave over, that of the nameless intruder, perhaps a quisling spy, whom Charlie had killed six or seven years back after discovering him prowling around in the computer shack. Ron had insisted that he be given a proper burial, though there was a hot argument about it, Charlie and Ron going at it for hour after hour until young Anson managed to calm them down. That grave had only a crude marker on it. It was up against the side wall of the little canyon and no one ever went near it.

  Also toward that side of the cemetery there were two gravestones that Khalid had erected himself, a couple of years ago. He hadn’t asked anyone’s permission, had just gone ahead and done it. Why not? He lived here too. He was entitled.

  One of them marked Aissha’s grave. Of course, Khalid had no definite knowledge that she was dead. But he had no particular reason to think she was alive, either, and he wanted her to be commemorated here somehow. She was the only person in the universe who had ever meant anything to him. So he carved a fine stone for her, with intricate patterns of interwoven scrollwork all along it. Everything abstract: no graven images for devout Aissha. And wrote in bold letters right in the middle, AISSHA KHAN. With a few lines from th
e Koran below, lines in English, because Khalid had forgotten most of the little Arabic that Iskander Mustafa Ali had managed to teach him: Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe. You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help. No dates. He knew no dates to put there.

  The other gravestone that Khalid put up had simpler ornamentation and a shorter inscription:

  YASMEENA

  MOTHER OF KHALID

  Leaving the last names off. He loathed his own; and even if Yasmeena had been married to Richie Burke, which Khalid doubted, he didn’t want that name on her stone. He could have called her “Yasmeena Khan.” But it seemed wrong for mother and son to have different last names, so he left both off. And also no dates. Khalid knew when she had died, because it was the day of his own birth, but he wasn’t sure how old she had been then. Young, that was all he knew. What did such things matter, anyway? The only thing that mattered was that she was remembered.

  Jill, watching him carve Yasmeena’s stone, said, “And will you make one for your father, too?”

  “No. Not for him.”

  He was visiting the graves of Aissha and Yasmeena on a bright day in the middle one of those long, endless-seeming sun-drenched summers that came to the ranch in February or March of every year and stayed until November or December, when Jill unexpectedly appeared at the down-slope side of the burying-ground, where the entrance was. One of the children was with her, the girl Khalifa, who was five.

  “You’re praying,” Jill said. “I interrupted you.”

  “No. I’m all done.”

  Every Friday Khalid came here and spoke some words from the Koran over the two graves, words that he had tried to resurrect from his memories of his long-ago lessons in Salisbury with Iskander Mustafa Ali. On the day when the first and second blasts of the Trumpet are heard, Khalid would say, all hearts shall be filled with terror, and all eyes shall stare with awe. And then he would say: When the sky is torn asunder, when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together, when the graves are thrown about, then each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do. And then: On that day some will have beaming faces, smiling and joyful, for they will live in Paradise. And on that day the faces of others will be veiled with darkness and covered with dust. He could remember no more than that, and he knew that he had jumbled these lines together from different sections; but they were the best he could manage, and he believed that Allah would accept them from him, even though you were not supposed to alter a single word of the scripture, because this was the best he could do and Allah did not demand from you more than was possible.