The Alien Years Read online

  “What I said is something that I said to my daughter Khalifa, not to Jill. Khalifa imagined that an Entity of a strange sort had come here to the ranch and played with her, and then made threats to her if she said anything about what had happened—this is something that your son Andy put into her mind,” Khalid said, looking coolly at Steve—“and when I heard this tale I told the child to have no fear, that I would protect her as a father should, that I had killed an Entity once and I would do it again, if need be. Then Jill asked me if I had really done such a thing. And so I told her the story.”

  Leslyn Carmichael, a young slender woman who looked to Khalid disturbingly like the Jill of ten years before, said, “The Entities are capable of reading minds and defending themselves against attacks before the attack can even be made. That’s why nobody’s ever been able to kill one, except for that one incident in England all those years ago. How is it that you were able to do what no one else can manage to do, Khalid?”

  “When the Entity came along the road in its wagon, there was nothing in my mind to cause it alarm. I felt no hatred for it, I felt no enmity. I allowed none of those things into my mind. Entities are very beautiful to me, and I love beautiful things. I was feeling my love for that one, for its beauty, even as I picked up the rifle and shot it. If it had looked into my mind as it approached, all it would have seen was my love.”

  “You can do that?” Anson said. “You can turn off everything in your mind that you don’t want to be there?”

  “I could then. Perhaps I still can.”

  “Is that how you avoided being blamed for the killing afterward?” Leslyn asked. “You blanked all knowledge of the murder from your mind, so the Entity interrogators couldn’t detect it in there?”

  “There were no Entity interrogators. They simply gave the order for everyone in our town to be gathered together and punished, as if we all were guilty. Human troops under Entity orders gathered us together. My mind would not have been open to them.”

  There was some silence then, as all these Carmichaels contemplated what Khalid had said. He watched them, seeing in their faces that they were weighing his words, testing them for plausibility.

  Believe me or don’t believe me, as you wish. It makes no difference to me.

  But it seemed as if they did believe him.

  “Come over here, Khalid,” Anson said, indicating the leather-topped desk. “I want to show you something.”

  The desk had papers spread out all over it. They were computer printouts, fall of jagged lines, diagrams, graphs. Khalid looked down at them without comprehension, without interest.

  Anson said, “We’ve been collecting these reports for five or six years, now. What they are is an analysis of the movements of high-caste Entity personnel between cities, as well as we’ve been able to track them. These dotted lines here, these are transit vectors, the patterns of movement. They represent elite Entity figures, traveling from place to place. Look. Here. Here. Here. This cluster here.” He pointed to groups of lines and dots.

  “Yes,” Khalid said, meaning nothing at all.

  “We’ve noticed, over the years, certain patterns within the patterns, a flow of Entities in and out of specific places, sometimes gathering in relatively great numbers in such places. Los Angeles is one of those places. London is another. Istanbul, Turkey, is a third.”

  Anson glanced toward him in that taut way of his, as though expecting some reaction. Khalid said nothing.

  “It’s become evident, or so we think,” Anson went on, “that these three cities are the main command centers of the Entities, their capitals on Earth, and that Los Angeles is probably the capital of capitals for them. You may be aware that the wall around Los Angeles is higher and thicker than the wall around any other city. There may be some significance in that.—Well, Khalid, we jump now to our big hypothesis. Not only is Los Angeles very likely the main city, but it may contain a supreme figure, the commander-in-chief of all the Entities. What we have begun to call Entity Prime.”

  Another wary glance at Khalid. Again Khalid offered no reaction. What was there for him to say?

  Anson went on, “We think—we guess, we suspect, we believe—that all the Entities might be linked in some telepathic way to Entity Prime, and that they make regular pilgrimages to the site where Prime is located for some reason that we don’t understand, but which may have to do with their own biological processes, or their mental processes. A communion of some sort, maybe. As though they renew themselves somehow by going to see Prime. And that is Los Angeles, although there’s certain secondary evidence that it could be London or Istanbul instead.”

  “You know this?” said Khalid doubtfully.

  “Just a hypothesis,” said Leslyn. “But maybe a pretty good one.”

  Khalid nodded. He wondered why they were bothering him with these matters.

  “Like the queen bee who rules the hive,” said Mike.

  “Ah,” said Khalid. “The queen bee.”

  Anson said, “Not necessarily female, of course. Not necessarily anything. But suppose, now, that we were able to locate Prime—track him down, find him wherever they’ve got him hidden away in Los Angeles, or maybe in London or Istanbul. If we did that, and could get an assassin in to kill him, what effect would that have on the rest of the Entities, do you think?”

  At last Khalid could provide something worthwhile. “When I killed the one in Salisbury,” he said, “the one next to him in the wagon went into convulsions. I thought for a moment I might have shot that one too, though I didn’t. So their minds may be linked just as you say.”

  “You see? You see?” cried Anson triumphantly. “We start to get confirmation! Why the hell didn’t you tell us this stuff, Khalid? You shoot one and the other one on the wagon has convulsions! I’ll bet they all did, all around the world, right on up to Prime!”

  “We need to check on this,” Steve said. “Find out, from as many sources we can, whether anyone observed unusual behavior among the Entities at the time of the Salisbury killing.”

  Anson nodded. “Right. And if there was some kind of general worldwide Entity freakout as a result of the death of one relatively unimportant member of their species—then if we could somehow manage to find and kill Prime—well, Khalid, do you see where we’re heading?”

  Khalid looked down at the maze of papers spread out all over the leather-topped desk.

  “Of course. That you want to kill Prime.”

  “More specifically, that we want you to kill Prime!”

  “Me?” He laughed. “Oh, no, Anson.”

  “No?”

  “No. That is not a thing I would want to do. Oh, no, Anson. No.”

  That seemed to stun them. It knocked the wind right out of them. Anson’s pale face turned bright red with anger, and Mike said something under his breath to Leslyn, and Steve muttered something to Leslyn also.

  Then Leslyn, who was sitting just at Khalid’s elbow, looked up at him and said, “Why wouldn’t you? You’re the one person qualified to do it.”

  “But I have no reason to do it. Killing Prime, if there is such a thing as Prime, is nothing to me.”

  “Are you afraid?” Mike asked.

  “Not at all. I would probably die in the attempt, and I would not want that to happen, because I have small children whom I love, and I want them to have a father. But I am not afraid, no. What I am is indifferent.”

  “To what?”

  “To the project of killing Entities. It is true that I killed that Entity when I was a boy, but I did it for special reasons that were of importance only to myself. Those reasons have been satisfied. Killing Entities is your project, not mine.”

  “Don’t you want to see them driven from the world?” Steve Gannett asked him.

  “They can keep the world forever, so far as I am concerned,” replied Khalid evenly. “Who rules the world is not my concern. From what I understand, there was never much happiness in it even before the Entities came, at least not for my famil
y. Those people are all dead, now, the family I had in England. I never knew them anyway, except for one. But now I have children of my own. I find happiness in them. For the first time in my life, I have tasted happiness. The thing that I want is to stay here and raise my children. Not to go into a city I do not know and try to kill some strange being that means nothing to me. Perhaps I would return alive from that, more likely not. But why should I take the risk? What is there for me to gain?”

  “Khalid—” Anson said.

  “Was I not sufficiently clear? I tried to express myself very clearly indeed.”

  Stymied. Khalid seemed as alien to them as the Entities themselves.

  They sent him from the room. He went back to his cabin, opened his tool chest, asked Jill to resume her pose. Of what had taken place in the chart room he said nothing at all. His children fluttered around him, Khalifa, Rasheed, Yasmeena, Aissha, Haleem, naked, lovely. Khalid’s heart swelled with joy at the sight of them. Allah was good; Allah had brought him to this mountain, had given him the strange and beautiful Jill, had caused these children of his to be born to her. After much suffering his life had begun at last to blossom. Why should he surrender it for these people’s foolish project?

  “Get me Tony,” Anson said, when Khalid was gone.

  His conversation with his brother was brief. Tony had never been a deep thinker, nor was he a man of many words. He was eight years younger than Anson and had always held him in the deepest reverence. Loved him; feared him; looked up to him. Would do anything for him. Even this, Anson hoped.

  He explained to Tony what was at stake, and what would be needed to bring it off.

  “I’m going to give it a try,” Anson said. “It’s my responsibility.”

  “Is that how you see it? Well, then.”

  “That’s how I see it, yes. But the first one who goes down there may not bring it off. If I don’t succeed in killing Prime, will you agree to be the next one to take a whack at the job?”

  “Sure,” Tony replied immediately. He seemed hardly even to give the matter any consideration. The difficulties, the risk. No frowns furrowed Tony’s broad, amiable, clear-eyed face. “Why not? Whatever you say, Anson. You’re the boss.”

  “It won’t be that simple. It could involve months of special training. Years, maybe.”

  “You’re the boss,” Tony said.

  A little while later, as Khalid was finishing his morning’s work, Anson came to him. He looked even more tightly wound than usual, lips clamped tightly, eyebrows furrowed. They stood together outside the building, amidst the carved array of naked wooden Jills, and Anson said, “You told us just now that you were indifferent to the whole idea of killing Entities. That you were indifferent to it, apparently, even as you went about killing one.”

  “Yes. This is so.”

  “Do you think you could instruct somebody in that kind of indifference, Khalid? That way you have of wiping your mind clean of anything that might arouse an Entity’s defenses?”

  “I could try, I suppose. I think it would not work. You have to be born to it, I think.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps it could be taught.”

  “Perhaps,” said Khalid.

  “Could you try to teach me?”

  That startled Khalid, that Anson would want to propose himself for what surely would be a suicide mission. Khalid could almost understand that sort of dedication to a task: in the abstract, at least. But Anson was the father of a large family, as Khalid was. Six, seven children already, Anson had, and still young himself, a few years younger even than Khalid. Year after year children came out of Raven, the plump little broad-hipped wife whom Anson had found for himself over in the ranch-hand compound, with unvarying regularity. You could always tell when spring had arrived, because Raven was having her annual baby. Did Anson not want the joy of watching those children grow up? Was it worth losing all that for the sake of a foolhardy attempt to kill some monstrous being from another world?

  This was a pointless discussion, though. “You would never learn it,” Khalid said. “You have the wrong kind of mind. You could never be indifferent to anything.”

  “Try me anyway.”

  “I will not. It would be a waste of your time and mine.”

  “What a stubborn bastard you are, Khalid!”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose I am that.”

  He waited for Anson to go away. But Anson remained right there, looking at him, frowning, chewing on his lower lip, visibly calculating things. A moment or two went by; and then he said, “Well, then, Khalid, what about my brother Tony? He’s told me that he’d be willing.”

  “Tony,” Khalid repeated. The big stupid one, yes. He was a different story, that one. “I suppose I could try it, with Tony,” Khalid said. “It probably would not work even for him, because I think it is a thing that you must learn from childhood, and even if he did learn, and he went to destroy the Entity, I think he would perish in the attempt. I think they would see through him no matter how well he is trained, and they would kill him. Which is something for you to consider. But I could try to teach him, yes. If that is what you want.”

  7

  FORTY-SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW

  Toward dawn, bleary-eyed and going foggy in the head after sitting in front of seven computer screens all night long, Steve Gannett decided he had had enough. He was going to be fifty next year, a little old for pulling all-nighters. He looked up at the blond-haired boy who had just entered the communications center with a breakfast tray for him and said, “Martin, have you seen my son Andy around yet this morning?”

  “I’m Frank, sir.”

  “Sorry. Frank.” All of Anson’s goddamned kids looked alike. This one’s voice, he realized, had already begun to break, which would put him at about thirteen, which would make him Frank. Martin was only around eleven. Steve looked groggily into the tray and said again, “Well, tell me, Frank, is Andy up yet?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him.—My father sent me to ask you for a progress report.”

  “Minimal, tell him.”

  “Minimum?”

  “Close. Minimal is what I said. It means Very little.’ It means ‘just about goddamn none,’ as a matter of fact. Tell him that I didn’t get anywhere worth speaking of, but I do see one possible new approach to the problem, and I’m going to ask Andy to explore it this morning. Tell him that. And then, Frank, go look for Andy and tell him to get himself over here lickety-split.”

  “Lickety-split?”

  “‘Extremely quickly’ is what that phrase means.”

  Jesus Christ, Steve thought. The language is rotting away before my very eyes.

  Anson, looking out the chart room’s open window half an hour later, saw Steve go trudging like a weary bullock across the lawn toward the Gannett family compound, and called out to him: “Hey, cousin! Cousin! Got a minute to spare for me?”

  Yawning, Steve said, “Just about that much, I guess.” There was very little enthusiasm in his voice.

  He came trudging over and peered in through the window. A light early-season rain had begun to fall, but Steve was standing out there as though unable to perceive that that was happening.

  Anson said, “No. Come on inside. This may take a minute and a half, maybe even two, and you’re going to get soaked if you stay out there.”

  “I would really like to get some sleep, Anson.”

  “Just give me a little of your time first, cousin,” Anson said, a little less affably this time, his tone verging on what his father described as the Colonel-voice. Anson, who had been sixteen when the Colonel died, had only the vaguest of recollections of his grandfather’s special tone of command. But apparently he had inherited it.

  “So?” Steve said, when he had arrived in the chart room, letting droplets of water fall to the rug in front of Anson’s leather-topped desk.

  “So Frank tells me you say you’ve found some new approach to the Prime problem. Can you tell me what it is?”

  “It�
��s not a new approach, exactly. It’s the approach to a new approach. What it is is, I think I’ve hacked into the entrance to Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s private archives.”

  “The Borgmann?”

  “The very one. Our own special latter-day Judas himself.”

  “He’s been dead for ages. You mean his archives still exist?”

  “Listen, can we discuss this after I’ve had some sleep, Anson?”

  “Just let me have a moment more. We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project and I need to keep myself on top of all the data. Tell me about this Borgmann thing insofar as it may impact the hunt for Prime. I assume that that’s the angle, right? Some link to Prime in the Borgmann files?”

  Steve nodded. He looked about ready to fall down. Anson wondered charitably whether he might be pushing the man too hard. He expected top-flight performance from everyone, the way his father had, the way the old Colonel had before him. Carmichael-grade performance. But Steve Gannett was only half Carmichael, a bald, soft-bellied, bearish middle-aged man who had been up all night.

  There were things Anson needed to know, though. Now.

  Steve said, “Borgmann was assassinated twenty-five years back. In Prague, which is a city in the middle of Europe that has been the site of a major Entity headquarters just about from the beginning. We know that he was hooked right into the main Entity computer net for at least ten years prior to his death, doing so with the knowledge and permission of the Entities, but also perhaps in some illicit way too. That would be true to what we know about Borgmann, that he’d have been spying on the very people he was working for. We also know, from what we’ve heard from people who dealt with the actual Borgmann in the period between the Conquest and his murder, that he was the sort of person who never deleted a file, who squirreled every goddamned thing away in the most anal-retentive way you could imagine.”

  “Anal-retentive?” Anson said.

  “It means retentive, okay? Just a fancy way of saying it.”

  Steve seemed to sway, and his eyes began to close for a moment. “Don’t interrupt me, okay? Okay?—What you need to know, Anson, is that we’ve always thought Borgmann’s archives are still there somewhere, maybe buried down deep in the Prague mainframe in a secret cache that he was able to conceal even from the Entities, and it’s widely believed that if they exist, they would be frill of critical information about how the minds of the Entities work. Highly explosive stuff, so it’s thought. Just about every hacker in the world has been looking for Borgmann’s data practically since the day he died. The quest for the Holy Grail, so to speak. And with pretty much the same degree of success.”