The Alien Years Read online

  “Sure,” said Andy, after only a fraction of a moment’s hesitation.

  Darleen’s sister’s name was Delayne. He told her he was fifteen. Delayne seemed exactly like Darleen, except that she was two years younger and about twice as stupid. She had a room of her own, a mattress on the floor, girl-clutter everywhere, photographs of long-ago movie stars tacked up all over the wall.

  Andy didn’t care how dumb she was. It wasn’t her mind that he was interested in communing with. He winked and gave her what he hoped was a torrid look.

  “Oh, you want to play?” she asked, batting her eyes at him. “Well, come here, then.”

  Within the past year Andy had accessed a dozen pre-Conquest porno videos that he had found cached in somebody’s Net library in Sacramento, and so he had an approximate idea of how to go about things, but it turned out to be a little more complicated than it seemed on video. Still, he thought that he had conducted himself creditably. And apparently he had. “You were okay, for your first time,” Delayne told him afterward. “Truly truly, I tell you. Not bad at all.” He hadn’t fooled her in the least, but she hadn’t let that be a problem. Which lifted her considerably in his estimation. Perhaps, he decided, she wasn’t quite as stupid as he thought.

  He made his second trip to L.A. a year and a half later, when he had grown bored with trying out the things Delayne had shown him on various cousins at the ranch. Jane and Ansonia and Cheryl were willing to play, but La-La wasn’t, and La-La, who was two years older than Andy was, was the only one who held much appeal for him, because she was smart and tough, because she had the same kind of sharp edge on her that her father Charlie did. Since La-La didn’t seem to want to be cooperative, and fooling around with Jane and Ansonia and Cheryl was a little like molesting the sheep, Andy went off to try to find Delayne.

  This time he went alone, borrowing his father’s car, which was a much newer model than Charlie’s, the voice-actuated kind. “Los Angeles,” Andy said, in a deep, authoritative tone, and it took him to Los Angeles. Like a magic carpet, practically. He found Darleen, but not Delayne, because Delayne had been caught in some infraction and reassigned to a labor gang working out of Ukiah, which was somewhere far upstate. Darleen, though, was willing enough to spend a day or two playing with him. Apparently she was as bored with her regular life as Andy was with his, and he was like a Christmas treat for her.

  She took him around the city, giving him a good taste of its immensity. The place was made up, Andy realized, of a whole string of little cities pasted together into one gigantic one. And as he heard their names—Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Studio City, West Hollywood—he began to put together in his mind a more tangible sense of the physical location of some of the hackers whom he had dealt with by e-mail over the past few years.

  They knew him as Megabyte Monster, alias Mickey Megabyte. He knew them as Teddy Spaghetti of Sherman Oaks, Nicko Nihil of Van Nuys, Green Hornet of Santa Monica, Sammo Borracho of Culver City, Ding-Dong 666 of West L.A. While driving around with Darleen, Andy jacked in at a series of widely separated access points and let them know he was in the vicinity. “Down here for a couple of days visiting a girl I know,” he told them. And waited to see what they had to say. Not much, is what they had to say. No immediate invitations to come around for face-to-face, eye-to-eye. You had to be careful, though, making eye-to-eye with other hackers whom you knew only electronically. They might not be quite the people you thought they were. Some could be stooges for LACON, or even for the Entities, happy to turn you in for the sake of getting patted on the head. Some could be predators. Some could be bozos.

  But Andy felt them out, and they felt him out, and the time came when he decided it was safe to meet Sammo Borracho of Culver City, as a first move. Sammo Borracho’s on-line persona was quick and clever, and nevertheless he was always ready to acknowledge Andy’s superiority as a data-thrower. “You know how to get to Culver City?” Andy asked Darleen.

  “All the way down there?” She wrinkled her nose. “What for?”

  “Somebody there I need to talk to, face-to-face. But I can find it myself, if you don’t want to bother showing me how to—”

  “No, I’ll go. It’s just straight down Sepulveda, anyway, miles and miles and miles. We can do a little of it on the freeway, but the road’s a wreck south of the Santa Monica interchange.”

  The trip took more than an hour, through an assortment of neighborhoods, some of them burned out. Sammo Borracho had always come on like a big fat drunken Mexican in his e-mail, but in person he was small, pale, wiry, a little twitchy, with an implant jack in each arm and lines of little purple tattoos across his cheeks. Not drunken, not Mexican, and no more than a couple of years older than Andy. Andy and Darleen met him, as arranged, at a swivel-ball parlor in the shadow of the ruined San Diego Freeway. From the way he kept staring at Darleen, Andy figured that he hadn’t been laid in at least three years. Or ever.

  “I thought you’d be older,” Sammo Borracho told him.

  “I thought you’d be, too.”

  He told Sammo Borracho he was nineteen, winking at Darleen to keep quiet, because she thought he was only seventeen. He was, in fact, fourteen and a half. Sammo Borracho said he was twenty-three. Andy figured that was at least a six-year upgrading. “You live in San Francisco, right?” Sammo Borracho asked him.

  “Right.”

  “Never been there. I hear it’s freezing cold all the time.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said Andy, who had never been there either. “But I’m getting tired of it.”

  “Thinking of moving down here, are you?”

  “Another year, year or two, maybe.”

  “Let me know,” Sammo Borracho said. “I’ve got connections. Couple of pardoners I know. Been doing a little pardoning work myself, and I could probably get some for you, if you were interested.”

  “I could be,” Andy said.

  “Pardoners?” said Darleen, eyes going wide. “You know some pardoners?”

  “Why?” said Sammo Borracho. “You need a deal?”

  Andy and Darleen and Sammo Borracho spent the night together at Sammo Borracho’s place at the eastern edge of Culver City. That was something new, for Andy. And, in its way, pretty interesting.

  “Whenever you come down to stay,” Sammo Borracho told him in the morning, “you just let me know, guy. I’ll set things up the way you want. Just say the word.”

  The third trip was two years after that, when word reached Andy that new interface upgrades had been invented that would fit his kind of implant jack, upgrades that had double the biofiltering capacity of the old-fashioned sort. That caught his attention. It wasn’t often that some new technological improvement came along, any more, and you wanted to keep as much bio-originated crud out of your implant as you could. The manufacture of mobile androids had been the last big breakthrough, five years back, and that had been worked out in quisling laboratories under Entity auspices. The new interface was good old freelance human ingenuity at work.

  It turned out that there were only two places where Andy could have the upgrade installed: in the old Silicon Valley that was just south of San Francisco, or Los Angeles. He remembered what Sammo Borracho had said about the weather in San Francisco. Andy didn’t like cold weather at all; and it was time, perhaps, to check in with Darleen once again. He swiped his father’s car without much difficulty and went to Los Angeles.

  Darleen wasn’t living in the Valley any more. Andy tracked her down, after some quick work with access codes that let him look into the LACON residential-permit files, in Culver City, living with Sammo Borracho. Delayne had been pardoned out of the Ukiah labor camp and she was living there too. Sammo Borracho seemed to be one very happy hacker indeed.

  You owe me one, pal, Andy thought.

  “You finally moving south, then?” Sammo Borracho asked him, looking just a bit uneasy about that possibility, as though he might be thinking that Andy intended to reclaim one or both of the girls.

 
; “Not yet, man. I’m just here on a holiday. Thought I’d get me one of the new bio interfaces, too. You know an installer?”

  “Sure,” Sammo Borracho said, not taking any trouble at all to hide his relief that that was all that Andy wanted.

  Andy got his interface upgrade put in in downtown L.A. Sammo Borracho’s installer was a little hunchbacked guy with a soft, crooning voice and eagle eyes, who did the whole thing freehand, no calipers, no microscope. Sammo Borracho let Andy borrow Delayne for a couple of nights, too. When that started to get old he went back to the ranch.

  “Any time you want to come down here and set yourself up writing pardons, man, just let me know,” said Sammo Borracho, as usual, as Andy was getting ready to leave.

  And now he was in the big city once more and ready to set up shop. He was done with ranch life. Ultimately La-La had come across, sure. Had come across big time, in fact, six months of wild nights, plenty of fun. Too much fun, because she was knocked up, now, and talking about marrying him and having lots of kids. Which was not exactly Andy’s idea of what the next few years ought to hold for Andy. Goodbye, La-La. Goodbye, Rancho Carmichael. Andy’s on his way into the big bad world.

  Sammo Borracho had moved to Venice, which was a town right along the ocean, narrow streets and weird old houses, just down the road from Santa Monica. He had put a little meat on his bones and had had his dumb tattoos removed and all in all he looked sleek and prosperous and happy. His house was a nice place just a couple of blocks from the water, lots of sunlight and breezes and three rooms full of impressive-looking hardware, and he had a nice red-haired live-in playmate named Linda, too, long and lean as a whippet. Sammo Borracho didn’t say a word about Darleen or Delayne, and Andy didn’t ask. Darleen and Delayne were history, apparently. Sammo Borracho was on his way in the world too, it seemed.

  “You’ll need your own territory,” Sammo Borracho told him. “Somewhere out east of La Brea, I imagine. We’ve already got enough pardoners working the West Side. As you know, the territorial allotments are done by Mary Canary. I’ll hook you along to Mary and she’ll take care of things.”

  Mary Canary, Andy soon discovered, was as female as Sammo Borracho was Mexican. Andy had a brief on-line discussion with “her” and they arranged to meet in Beverly Hills at the place where Santa Monica Boulevard crossed Wilshire, and when he got there he found a dark-haired greasy-skinned man of about forty, nearly as wide as he was tall, waiting there for him with a blue Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap on his head, turned back to front. The turned-around Dodger cap was the identification signal Andy had been told to look for.

  “I know who you are,” said Mary Canary right away. His voice was deep and full of gravel, a tough voice, a movie-gangster voice. “I just want you to realize that. If you mess around, you’ll be shipped back to your family’s cozy little hideaway in Santa Barbara in several pieces.”

  “I’m from San Francisco, not Santa Barbara,” Andy said.

  “Sure you are. San Francisco: I accept that. Only I’d like you to understand that I’m aware it isn’t true. Now let’s get down to business.”

  There was a formally organized guild of pardoners, it seemed, and Mary Canary was one of the guildmasters. Andy, having been vouched for by Sammo Borracho and being also widely known by reputation to various other Los Angeles guild members, was welcome to join. His territory, Mary Canary told him, would be bounded by Beverly Boulevard on the north and Olympic Boulevard on the south, and would run from Crenshaw Boulevard in the west to Normandie Avenue in the east. That sounded like a sizable chunk of turf, although Andy suspected that it was somewhat less than the most lucrative area around.

  Within his territory he was free to solicit as much pardoning work as he dared. The guild would give him all the basic know-how he would need to perform basic pardoning operations, and the rest was up to him. In return, he would pay the guild a commission of thirty percent of his first year’s gross earnings, and fifteen percent each year thereafter. In perpetuity, said Mary Canary.

  “Don’t try to finagle,” Mary Canary warned him. “I know how good you are, believe me. But our guys aren’t such dopes themselves, and the one thing we don’t tolerate is a hacker trying to subvert revenues. Play it straight, pay what’s due, is what I most strenuously advise.”

  And gave Andy a long, slow look that very explicitly said, We are quite aware of your hacking skills, Mr. Andy Gannett, and therefore we will be keeping our eyes on you. So you just better not mess around.

  Andy didn’t intend to mess around. Not right away, anyway.

  On a cold, windy day three weeks after Andy’s departure for Los Angeles, one of those bleak mid-winter days when the ranch was being buffeted by a wild storm that had burst howling out of Alaska and gone rampaging right down the entire west coast looking for Mexico, Cassandra walked without knocking, an hour before dawn, into the austere, monastic little bedroom where Anson Carmichael had spent his nights since Raven’s death. “You’d better come now,” she told him. “Your father’s going fast.”

  Anson was awake instantly. A surge of surprise ran through him, and some anger. Accusingly he said, “You told me that he’d be okay!”

  “Well, I was wrong.”

  They hurried down the hallways. The wind outside was heading toward gale force and hail was scrabbling against the windows.

  Ron was sitting up in bed and seemed still to be conscious, but Anson could see right away that something had changed just in the past twelve hours. It was as if his father’s facial muscles were relinquishing their grasp. His face looked strangely smooth and soft, now, as though the lines that time had carved in it had vanished in the night. His eyes had an oddly unfocused look; and he was smiling, as always, but the smile appeared to be sliding downward on the left side of his mouth. His hands were resting languidly on the bedcovers on either side of him in an eerie way: he could almost be posing for his own funerary monument. Anson could not push aside the distinct feeling that he was looking upon someone who was poised between worlds.

  “Anson?” Ron said faintly.

  “Here I am, Dad.”

  His own voice sounded inappropriately calm to him. But what am I supposed to do? Anson wondered. Wail and shriek? Rend my hair? Rip my clothing?

  Something that might have been a chuckle came from his father. “Funny thing,” Ron said, very softly. Anson had to strain to hear him. “I was such a baddie that I thought I’d live forever. I was really, really bad. It’s the good who are supposed to die young.”

  “You aren’t dying, Dad!”

  “Sure I am. I’m dead up to the knees already, and it’s moving north very goddamned fast. Much to my surprise, but what can you do? When your time comes, it comes. Let’s not pretend otherwise, boy.” A pause. “Listen to me, Anson. It’s all yours, now. You’re the man: the Carmichael of the hour. Of the era. The new Colonel, you are. And you’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off, won’t you?” Again a pause. A frown, of sorts. He was entering some new place. “Because—the Entities—the Entities—look, I tried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—”

  Anson’s eyes went wide. Ron had never called him “Anse.” Who was he talking to?

  “The Entities—”

  Yet another pause. A very long one.

  “I’m listening, Dad.”

  That smile. Those eyes.

  That pause that did not end.

  “Dad?”

  “He isn’t going to say anything else, Anson,” Cassandra told him quietly.

  I tried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—

  Khalid carved a magnificent stone almost overnight. Anson made sure that he spelled Jeffrey correctly. They all stood together in the cemetery—it was still raining, the day of his burial—and Rosalie said a few words about her brother, and Paul spoke, and Peggy, and then Anson, who got as far as saying, “He was a lot better man than he thought he was,” and bit his lip and picked up the shovel.

  A fog of grief hung over Anson for days. The sub
traction of Ron from his life left him in a weirdly free-floating state, unchecked as he was, now, by Ron’s constant presence, his wisdom, his graceful witty spirit, his poise and balance. The loss was tremendous and irrevocable.

  But then, though the sense of mourning did not recede, a new feeling began to take hold of him, a strange sense of liberation. It was as if he had been imprisoned all these years, encased within Ron’s complex, lively, mercurial self. He—sober-sided, earnest, even plodding—had never felt himself to be the fiery Ron’s equal in any way. But now Ron was gone. Anson no longer needed to fear the disapproval of that active, unpredictable mind. He could do anything he wanted, now.

  Anything. And what he wanted was to drive the Entities from the world.

  The words of his dying father echoed in his mind:

  —The Entities—the Entities—

  —You’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off—you’ll be the one—

  —The one—the one—

  Anson played with those words, moved them this way and that, stood them upside down and rightside up again. The one. The one. Both Ron and the Colonel, he thought—and Anse too, in a way—had lived all those years waiting, suspended in maddening inaction, dreaming of a world without the Entities but unwilling, for one reason or another, to give the order for the launching of a counterattack. But now he was in command. The Carmichael of the era, Ron had said. Was he to live a life of waiting too? To go through the slow cycle of the years up here on this mountain, looking forever toward the perfect time to strike? There would never be a perfect time. They must simply choose a time, be it perfect or not, and at long last begin to lash back at the conquerors.

  There was no one to hold him back, any more. That was a little frightening, but, yes, it was liberating, too. Ron’s death seemed to him to be a signal to act.