The Alien Years Read online

  Anson started to ask another question, and cut himself off. Steve’s speech frequently was laced with cryptic references out of the world culture that had vanished, that world of books and plays and music, of history and literature, which Steve had been just old enough to experience, to some degree, before it disappeared; but Anson reminded himself that he probably did not need to find out just now what the Holy Grail was.

  Steve said, “As you know, I devoted this night past to yet one more goddamn heroic eight-hour attempt to link up all the data we’ve been able to compile about every major nexus of Entity intelligence, create an overlay, get some kind of confirmation of the theory that we’ve been playing with, for God only knows how long, that Prime is situated in downtown Los Angeles. Well, I failed. Again. But in the course of failing I think I stumbled over something peculiar in the data conduit linking Prague, Vienna, and Budapest that might just have Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s personal paw prints on it. Might. It’s a locked door and I don’t know what’s behind it and I don’t know how to pick the lock, either. But it’s the first hopeful thing I’ve come upon in five years.”

  “If you can’t pick the lock, who can?”

  “Andy can,” Steve said. “He’s very likely the only hacker in the world who could do it. He’s the best there is, even if I say so myself. That’s not paternal pride speaking, Anson. God knows I’m not very proud of Andy. But he can do magic with a data chain. It’s just the truth.”

  “Okay. Let’s get him on it, then!”

  “Sure,” said Steve. “I sent your boy Frank out just now to find Andy and bring him to me. Frank reports that Andy left the ranch at four in the morning and took off for parts unknown. Frank got this bit of information from Eloise’s girl La-La, who saw him go, and who unbeknownst to the rest of us has apparently been indulging in some kind of romance with Andy for the past six months and who, incidentally, revealed to your son Frank this morning that she’s pregnant, presumably by Andy. She thinks that’s why he took off. She also doesn’t think he plans to come back. He took his two favorite computers with him and apparently spent all of last evening downloading all his files into them.”

  “The little son of a bitch,” Anson said. “Begging your pardon, Steve. Well, we’ve just got to find him and haul his sneaky ass back here, then.”

  “Find Andy?” Steve guffawed. “Nobody’s going to find Andy unless he feels like being found. It would be easier to find Entity Prime. Now can I go to sleep, Anson?”

  We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project.

  That was what he had told Steve, a little to his own surprise, for he had not quite articulated the situation that way before, even to himself. But yes, yes, indeed, Anson thought. A crisis. A time to make bold decisions and act on them. He realized now that he had been thinking of the situation that way for several weeks. But he was beginning to suspect that the whole dire thing was taking place within the arena of his own mind.

  It had been building up in him for years. He knew that, now. That sense of himself as Anson the Entity-Killer, the man who finally would drive the alien bastards from the planet, the shining hero who would give Earth back to itself. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t thought it was his destiny to be the one who brought the task to culmination.

  But three times now in these recent weeks something very strange had come over him: a dizzying intensification of that ambition, a frantic passion for it, a wild hunger to get on with the job, strike now, strike hard. A passion that possessed him beyond all reasoning—that became, for the five or ten minutes that it held him in its grip, utterly uncontrollable. At such times he could feel the pressure beating against his skull, hammering against it from within as though there were some creature in there trying to get out.

  It was a little scary. Passionate impatience is not the hallmark of a great military commander.

  Perhaps, he thought, I should have a little talk with my father.

  Ron, who was nearly seventy and not in the best of health, had inherited the Colonel’s old bedroom, as was fitting for the patriarch of the family. Anson found him there now, sitting up in bed amidst a pile of ancient books and magazines, yellowing rarities from the Colonel’s crumbling library of twentieth-century reading matter. He looked poorly, pale and peaked.

  Cassandra was with him: the Carmichael community doctor, Cassandra was, self-trained out of the Colonel’s books and such medical texts as Paul or Doug or Steve had been able to extricate from the remnants of the pre-Conquest computer net. She did her best, and sometimes seemed like a miracle-worker; but it always was a sobering thing to find the busy Cassandra in a sick person’s room, because it usually meant that the patient had taken a turn for the worse. That was how it had been six months before, when Anson’s wife Raven, having gone through one pregnancy too many, had died, exhausted, from some very minor infection a few weeks after giving birth to their eighth child. Cassandra had done her best then, too. Had even seemed hopeful, for a time. But Anson had realized from the outset that nothing could save the worn-out Raven. He had pretty much the same feeling here.

  “Your father is a man of iron,” she said at once, almost defiantly, before Anson could say anything at all. “He’ll be up and around and chopping down trees with a single blow of the axe by this time tomorrow. I guarantee it.”

  “Don’t believe her, boy,” Ron said, winking. “I’m a goner, and that’s the truth. You can tell Khalid to get started carving the stone. And tell him to make it a damned good one, too. ‘Ronald Jeffrey Carmichael,’ and remember that you spell ‘Jeffrey’ with just seven letters, J-E-F-F-R-E-Y, born the twelfth of April, 1971, died the sixteenth of—”

  “Today’s the fourteenth already, Dad. You should have given him a little more notice.” Turning to Cassandra, Anson said, “Am I interrupting something important? Or can you excuse us for a little while?”

  She smiled pleasantly and went from the room.

  “How sick are you, really?” Anson asked bluntly, when Cassandra was gone.

  “I feel pretty shitty. But I don’t think I’m actually dying just yet, although I wish Cassie had some clearer idea of what’s really going on in my midsection.—Is there some problem, Anson?”

  “I’m itching to make a move on Prime. That’s the problem.”

  “You mean you’ve succeeded in discovering Prime’s hiding-place at last? Then why is that a problem? Go in there and get him!”

  “We haven’t discovered it. We don’t know any more than we did five years ago. The Los Angeles theory is still top of the list, but it’s still only a theory. The problem is that I don’t want to wait any longer. My patience has just about run itself out.”

  “And Tony? Is he getting impatient too? All in a sweat to make a strike in the dark, is he? Willing to go in there without knowing exactly where he’s supposed to go?”

  “He’ll do whatever I tell him to do. Khalid’s got him all charged up. He’s like a bomb waiting to go off.”

  “Like a bomb,” Ron said. “Waiting to go off. Ah. Ah.” He seemed almost amused. There was a curiously skeptical expression on his face, a smile that was not entirely a smile.

  Anson said nothing, simply met Ron’s gaze stare for stare and waited. It was an awkward moment. There was a streak of playfulness, of quicksilver unpredictability, in his father that he had never been able to deal with.

  Then Ron said gravely, “Let me get this straight. We’ve been planning this attack for years and years, training our assassin with an eye to sending him in as soon as we’ve pinned down the precise location of Prime, and now we have the assassin ready but we still don’t have the location, and you want to send him in anyway? Today? Tomorrow? Isn’t this a little premature, boy? Do we even know for sure that Prime actually exists, let alone where he is?”

  Like scalpel thrusts, they were. The hotheaded young leader’s idiocy neatly laid bare, just as Anson had feared and expected and even hoped it would be. He felt his cheeks flaming. It became
all that he could manage to keep his eyes on Ron’s. He felt his headache beginning to get going.

  Lamely he said, “The pressure’s been rising inside me for weeks, Dad. Longer, maybe. I get the feeling that I’m letting the whole world down by holding Tony back this long. And then my head starts pounding. It’s pounding now.”

  “Take an aspirin, then. Take two. We’ve still got plenty on hand.”

  Anson recoiled as though he had been struck.

  But Ron didn’t seem to notice. He was wearing that strange smile again. “Listen, Anson, the Entities have been here for forty years. We’ve all been holding ourselves back, all this time. Except for the suicidally addlebrained laser strike that brought the Great Plague down on us before you were born, and Khalid’s uniquely successful and perhaps unduplicatable one-man attack, we haven’t lifted a finger against them in all that time. Your grandfather grew old and died, miserable because the world had been enslaved by these aliens but only too well aware that it would be dumb to try any hostile action before we understood what we were doing. Your Uncle Anse sat stewing on this very mountain decade after decade, drinking himself silly for the same reason. I’ve held things together pretty well, I suppose, but I’m not going to last forever either, and don’t you think I’d like to see the Entities on the run before I check out? So we’ve all had our little lesson in patience to learn. You’re what, thirty-five years old?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Thirty-four. By that age you should have learned how to keep yourself from flying off the handle.”

  “I don’t think I am flying off the handle. But what I’m afraid of is that Tony’s training will lose its edge if we hold him back much longer. We’ve been winding him up for this project for the past seven years. He could be getting overtrained by now.”

  “Fine. So first thing tomorrow you’ll send him into L.A. with a gun on each hip and a belt full of grenades around his waist, and he’ll walk up to the first Entity he sees and say, ‘Pardon me, sir, can you give me Prime’s address?’ Is that how you imagine it? If you don’t know where your target is, where do you throw your bomb?”

  “I’ve thought of all these things.”

  “And you still want to send him? Tony’s your brother. It isn’t as though you’ve got lots of others. Are you really ready to have him get killed?”

  “He’s a Carmichael, Dad. He’s understood the risks from the beginning.”

  Ron made a groaning sound. “A Carmichael! A Carmichael! My God, Anson, do I have to listen to that bullshit right to the end of my days? What does being a Carmichael mean, anyway? Disapproving of your own children’s behavior, like the Colonel, and cutting them out of your life for years at a time? Twisting yourself inside out for the sake of an ideal and obliterating yourself with drink so you can go on living with yourself, the way Anse did? Or winding up like the Colonel’s brother Mike, maybe, the one who got himself into such a bind over his notions of proper behavior that he went and found himself a hero’s death the day the Entities landed? Is it your notion that Tony’s supposed to go waltzing to his certain death on a crazy mission simply because he had the bad luck to be born into a family of fanatic disciplinarians and hyper-achievers?”

  Anson peered at him, horrified. These were words he had never expected to hear, and they came crashing into him with stunning impact. Ron was red-faced and trembling, practically apoplectic. But after a moment he became a little calmer.

  He said, once more smiling in that bemused way, “Well, well, well, listen to the old guy rant and rave! All that sound and fury.—Look here, Anson, I know you want to be the general who launches the victorious counteroffensive against the dread invaders. We all wanted that, and maybe you’ll actually be the one. But don’t waste Tony so soon, all right? Can’t you hang on at least until you’ve got some decent idea of where Prime may be? Aren’t Steve and Andy still trying to work out some kind of precise pinpointing?”

  “Steve has been doing just that, yes. With occasional help from Andy, whenever Andy can be bothered. They’re pretty sure that L.A.’s the place where Prime is stashed away, probably downtown, but they can’t get it any more precise than that. And now Steve tells me, though, that he’s hit a wall. He thinks Andy’s the only hacker good enough to get beyond the blockage. But Andy’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Skipped out in the night, last night. Something about getting La-La pregnant and not wanting to stay around.”

  “No! The miserable little bastard!”

  “We’ll try to find him and bring him back. But we don’t even know where to begin looking for him.”

  “Well, figure it out. Catch him and yank him home and sit him down in the communications room until he tells you exactly where Prime is, which part of town, what building. And then send in Tony. Not before, not until you know the location right down to the street address. Okay?”

  Anson rubbed his right temple. Was the pounding subsiding a little in there? Perhaps. A little, anyway. A little.

  He said, “You think sending him now is really crazy, then?”

  “I sure do, boy.”

  “That’s what I needed you to tell me.”

  Khalid said, pointing toward the hawk that came riding up over the crest of the mountain on the wind from the sea, “You see the bird, there? Kill it.”

  Unhesitatingly Tony raised his rifle, sighting and aiming and pulling the trigger all in one smooth unhurried continuous process. The hawk, black against the blue shield of the sky, exploded into a flurry of scattering feathers and began to plummet toward the bare stony meadow in which they stood.

  Tony was perfect, Khalid thought. He was a magnificent machine. A machine of Khalid’s own creation, flawless, the finest thing he had ever shaped. A superbly crafted mechanism.

  “Very nice shot. Now you, Rasheed.”

  The slender boy with amber-toned skin at Khalid’s side lifted his gun and shot without seeming even to aim. The bullet caught the falling hawk squarely in the chest and knocked it spinning off on a new trajectory that sent it over to their left, down into the dark impenetrable tangle of chaparral that ran just below the summit.

  Khalid gave the boy an approving smile. He was fourteen now, already shoulder-high to his long-legged father, a superb marksman. Khalid often took him along on these back-country training sessions with Tony. He loved the sight of him, his wiry athletic form, his luminous intelligent green eyes, his corona of coppery hair. Rasheed too was perfect, in a different way from Tony. His perfection was not that of a machine but of a person. It was wonderful to have made a boy like Rasheed. Rasheed was the boy Khalid might have been, if only things had gone otherwise for him when he was young. Rasheed was Khalid’s second chance at life.

  To Tony, Khalid said, “And what do you feel, killing the bird?”

  “It was a good shot. I’m pleased when I shoot that well.”

  “And the bird? What do you think about the bird?”

  “Why should I think about the bird? The bird was nothing to me.”

  It was just before dawn when Andy reached Los Angeles. The first thing he did, after letting himself through the wall at the Santa Monica gate with the LACON credentials that he had whipped up for himself the week before, was to jack himself into a public-access terminal that he located at Wilshire and Fifth. He needed to update his map of the city. He might be staying here quite some time, several months at the very least, and Andy knew that the information about this place that was already in his files was almost certainly out of date. They kept changing the street patterns around all the time, he had heard, closing off some streets that had been perfectly good transit arteries for a hundred years, opening new ones where there had never been any before. But everything seemed pretty much as he remembered it.

  He hit the access code for Sammo Borracho’s e-mail slot and said, “It’s Megabyte, good buddy. I’m down here to stay, and planning to set up in business. Be so kind as to patch me on to Mary Canary, okay?”

 
This was Andy’s fourth visit to Los Angeles. The first time, about seven years back, he had sneaked down here with Tony and Charlie’s son Nick, using Charlie’s little car, which Andy had made available to them by emulating the code for the car’s ignition software. Tony and Nick, who were both around nineteen then, had wanted to go to the city to find girls, which were of lesser interest to Andy then, he being not quite thirteen. But neither Tony nor Nick was worth a damn as a hacker, and the deal was that they had to take Andy along with them in return for his liberating the car for them.

  Girls, Andy discovered on that trip, were more interesting than he had suspected. Los Angeles was full of them—it was a gigantic city, bigger than Andy had ever imagined, easily two or three hundred thousand people living there, maybe even more—and Tony and Nick were both the kind of big, good-looking guys who latched on to girls very quickly. The ones they found, in a part of Los Angeles that was called Van Nuys, were sixteen years old and named Kandi and Darleen. Kandi had red hair and Darleen’s was dyed a sort of green. They seemed very stupid, even dumber than the ones at the ranch. Nick and Tony didn’t seem bothered by that, though, and when Andy gave the matter a little thought, he couldn’t find any reason why they should be, considering what it was that they had come here for.

  “You want one too, don’t you?” Tony asked Andy, grinning broadly. This was back in the era when Tony still seemed like a human being to Andy, a few months before Khalid had started teaching him Khalid’s crazy philosophy, which so far as Andy was concerned had transformed Tony into an android, pretty much. “Darlene’s got a kid sister. She’ll show you a thing or two, if you like.”