The Alien Years Read online

  He got past the porno levels, an endless time later.

  He thought for a while that he never would. But then, abruptly, he found himself among files that had an entirely new inventorying system, an archive buried within the archive, and knew, after a few minutes of poking around, that he had hit the jackpot.

  It was awesome, how thoroughly Borgmann had infiltrated himself into the Entities’ mysterious data systems, starting absolutely from scratch. How much he had perceived, and achieved, and squirreled away under lock and key right there in one of the main machines of the Entities’ own computational network, there to rest undisturbed until Andy Gannett came chopping his way in to find it. He had been a creep, old Borgmann had been, but he also must have been a supreme master of data-handling to have penetrated this deeply into an alien code system and learned how to deal with it. In the midst of his distaste for the man Andy could not help feeling a certain degree of reverence for the great master he had been.

  There was plenty here that would be useful to the Resistance. The record of all of Borgmann’s one-on-one dealings with the occupying administration of Central Europe. His interfacing lines, the ones that had enabled him to communicate with the high Entity offices. His lists of useful channels to use when relaying data to them. His classified set of Entity decrees and promulgations. Best of all, here was his digital dictionary, Borgmann language lined up against Entity language, the whole set of code equivalencies—the key to full translation, perhaps, of the secret Entity communications system.

  Andy didn’t stop to make any sort of detailed investigation of this material. His job now was just to collect it and make it accessible for later study. Working quickly, he lassoed great gobs of it, anything that seemed even halfway relevant, copied it file by file and kicked it on through his parallel data chains, Moscow to Bombay to Istanbul, Jakarta to Johannesburg to London, letting the chains snarl and overlap and become corrupted beyond anybody’s comprehension, human or Entity, while at the same time coding them to reconstruct themselves in some mysterious midpoint zone where he could find them and bring them up again right here at the ranch. Which he did. One by one, everything useful that he could find, neatly carried around Borgmann’s nasty little lock into an open file so that it would not be necessary for anyone ever again to go through all that Andy had gone through this night.

  He looked up at last from his screen.

  His father, red-eyed and bleary-faced, still sat beside him, watching him in undisguised astonishment. Frank leaned yawning against the wall. Anson had fallen asleep on the couch near the door. Andy heard the patter of rainfall outside. There was a gray light in the sky.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Half past six in the morning. You haven’t stopped going for a moment, Andy.”

  “No. I guess I haven’t, have I?” He rose, stretched, yawned, pressed his knuckles against his eyeballs. He felt creaky, tired, hungry, empty. “I think I’d like to pee, now, okay? And then maybe somebody could bring me a cup of coffee.”

  “Right.” Steve gestured to Frank, who got up immediately and left. As Andy, still yawning, started to amble toward the washroom, Steve said, making no attempt at concealing his eagerness to know, “Well, boy, any luck? What did you find in there?”

  “Everything,” Andy said.

  So it had worked out after all, their long shot. The unfindable Andy had returned to the ranch and entered the unenterable archive for them, and now they had confirmation of the unconfirmable Prime hypothesis. Looking in wonder and jubilation through the synopsis that Steve had prepared for him from Andy’s early analysis of his preliminary tour of the Borgmann file, Anson felt the burdens dropping away from him, that leaden weight of grief and regret and self-denunciation. All of that had turned him into an old man for the past five years, but now he was miraculously rejuvenated, full of energy and dreams, ready once more to rush forth and rescue the world from its conquerors. Or so it seemed to him just now. He hoped the feeling would last.

  He paged through the glossy, neatly printed sheets for three or four minutes, while the others watched without speaking. Then he looked up and said, “How soon can we get moving on this, do you think? Do we have enough information to move against Prime yet?”

  With him in the chart room were Steve Gannett, and Steve’s wife Lisa, and Paul’s oldest son Mark and Mark’s sister Julie, and Charlie Carmichael with his wife Eloise. The inner circle, pretty much, of the family now, everyone but Cindy, the ancient and ageless, the matriarch of the clan, who was somewhere else just then. But it was Steve to whom Anson looked for most of his answers now.

  And the answer that Steve gave him was not the one he wanted to hear.

  “Actually,” Steve said, “we’ve still got quite a bit of work ahead of us first, Anson.”

  “Oh?”

  “The honcho Entity that Borgmann was dealing with—and we can assume, I think, that that really was the one we call Prime—was based in Prague, in a big castle that they have there up on a hill. As you already know, I think, we believe that the Prague headquarters was de-emphasized quite some time ago, and that Prime was moved to Los Angeles. But we need to confirm that, which I intend to have Andy do for us as soon as he’s worked out the access path. Once we’ve pinned down the location of Prime, we can start thinking of ways to take him out.”

  “What if Andy should decide to vanish again?” Anson asked. “Will you be able to come up with the necessary data yourself, Steve?”

  “He won’t vanish.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “I think he genuinely wants to be part of this, Anson. He knows how essential he is to the project. He won’t let us down.”

  “All the same, I’d like to keep your son under twenty-four-hour-a-day guard. To insure that he sticks around until he’s finished massaging the Borgmann data. Is that very offensive to you, Steve?”

  “It’s certainly going to be offensive to Andy.”

  “Andy has let us down before. I don’t want to take any further risks of losing him. I suppose I might as well tell you: I’ve asked Frank and a couple of my other boys to take turns guarding him while he’s here at the ranch.”

  “Well,” Steve said, letting some displeasure show. “Whatever you want, Anson. Especially since you seem already to have done it. My opinion about the need for treating him like a prisoner is on record.”

  “Lisa?” Anson said. “He’s your son. How do you feel about this?”

  “I think you should watch him like a hawk until you get what you need from him.”

  “There you are,” said Anson triumphantly. “Watch him like a hawk! Which Frank will do. Which he is doing right at this very moment, as a matter of fact. Martin and James are going to take turns with him, eight hours per day each. That much is settled, all right?—Steve, how soon are you likely to have anything hard concerning Prime’s location?”

  “I’ll have it when I have it, okay? We’re making it our highest priority.”

  “Easy. Easy. I just wanted an estimate.”

  “Well,” Steve said, seeming almost to be pouting, “I can’t give you one. And I don’t think putting Andy under round-the-clock guard is going to improve his motivation for helping us, either. But let that pass. Maybe he’ll be willing to cooperate anyway. I certainly want to think so. Once we do get you your information, incidentally, what method do you have in mind for taking Prime out?”

  “We’ll do it the way we did before. Only better, this time, I hope.—Hello, Cindy,” Anson said, as she came into the room. She moved serenely across it with the stately grace of the frail old woman that she was, eyes bright as ever, head held alertly forward, and took a seat next to Mark. “We’re talking about the assault on Prime,” Anson told her. “I’ve just explained to Steve that I intend to carry it out pretty much the same way as the first time, sending someone in to plant a bomb right against the side of Prime’s house. Or even inside it, if we can. This time Andy should be able to provide us with
the precise location of Prime, and also the right computer passwords to get our man through Entity security.”

  Mark said, “Do you have anyone in mind for the job yet, Anson?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. My son Frank.”

  That was something Anson hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Frank, until this moment. The uproar was instant and vehement. They all were talking at once right away, yelling, gesticulating. In the midst of the sudden chaos Anson saw Cindy, sitting bolt upright, as rigid and gaunt and grim-faced as the mummy of some ancient Pharaoh, staring at him with a look of such wholehearted truculent violence in her intense and glittering eyes that it struck him with an almost tangible force.

  “No,” she said, a deep icy contralto that sliced through the din like a scimitar. “Not Frank. Don’t even think of sending Frank, Anson.”

  The room fell silent, and stayed that way until Anson could find his voice.

  “You see some problem with that, Cindy?” he asked, finally.

  “Five years ago you sent your only brother down there to die. Now you want to send your son? Don’t tell me that you have three more in reserve, either. No, Anson, no, we aren’t going to let you risk Frank’s life on this thing.”

  Anson pressed his lips into a thin, tight line.

  “Frank won’t be at risk. We know what mistakes we made the last time. We aren’t going to repeat them.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “We’re going to take every precaution. Don’t you think I’ll do everything in my power to see to it that Frank gets safely through the mission? But this is a war, Cindy. Risk is inevitable. So is sacrifice.”

  But she was inexorable. “Tony was your sacrifice. You aren’t required to make a second one. What kind of crazy demonstration of macho toughness is this, anyway? Do you think we don’t know what you’ve already given, and how much it cost you? Frank’s the hope of the future, Anson. He’s the next generation of leadership here. You know that: everyone does. He mustn’t be wasted. Even if there’s only one chance in ten that he wouldn’t come back, that’s too much of a chance.—Besides, there’s someone else at the ranch who’s far better fitted for the job than Frank is.”

  “Who’s that?” Anson demanded harshly. “You? Me? Or do you mean Andy, maybe?”

  “Talk to Khalid,” Cindy said. “He’s got someone who can do this job just fine.”

  Anson was mystified. “Who? Tell me. Who?”

  “Talk to Khalid,” she said.

  “I would want certain safeguards for him,” Khalid said. “He is my eldest son. His life is sacred to me.”

  He stood before them straight as a soldier on patrol, as cool and self-possessed as though he and not Anson were in charge of this meeting. Only in the moment of entering the chart room had Khalid betrayed a touch of uneasiness, seeing so many family members gathered there, like a court in session with Anson as the high judge; but that had very quickly passed and his normal aura of preternatural calm had reasserted itself.

  Khalid was an unfamiliar figure here. He was never present at any of the chart room meetings; he had amply let it be known years ago that the Resistance was no concern of his. Indeed he very rarely had been in the main house at all in recent years. Khalid spent most of his time in and about his little cabin on the far side of the vegetable patch, with the equally reclusive Jill and their multitude of strange, lovely-looking children. There he carved his little statuettes and the occasional larger work, and raised crops for his family, and sat in the wonderful California sunlight reading and rereading the Word of God. Sometimes he went roving along the back reaches of the mountain, hunting the wild animals that had come to flourish there in these days of diminished human population, the deer and boars and such. His son Rasheed occasionally went with him; more usually he went alone. He lived a private, inward life, needing very little beyond the company of his wife and children, and often content to hold himself apart even from them.

  Anson said, “What safeguards do you mean, specifically?”

  “I mean I will not let you send him to his death. He must not perish the way Tony perished.”

  “Specifically, I said.”

  “Very well. He will not go on this mission unless you prepare the way fully for him. What I mean by that is that you must be altogether sure that you are sending him to the right place, and that when he gets there, the doors of it must be open to him. He must know the passwords that will admit him. I understand about these passwords. He must be able to walk into the place of Prime in complete safety.”

  “We have Andy working on extracting the location of Prime and the password protocols right this minute. We won’t be sending Rasheed until we have them, I assure you.”

  “Assurance is not enough. This is a sacred promise?”

  “A sacred promise, yes,” Anson said.

  “There is more,” said Khalid. “You will see to it that he comes safely back. There will be cars waiting, several cars, and care will be taken that confusion is created so that the police do not know which car he is in, and so he can be returned to the ranch.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You agree very quickly, Anson. But I must be convinced that you are sincere, or otherwise I will see to it that he does not go. I know how to make a tool, but I know how to blunt its edge, too.”

  “I lost my brother to this project,” Anson said. “I haven’t forgotten what that felt like. I don’t intend to lose your son.”

  “Very good. See to that, Anson.”

  Anson made no immediate reply. He wished there were some way that he could transmit telepathically to Khalid his absolute conviction that this time the dung would be done right, that Andy would find in Borgmann’s archive every scrap of information that they would need in order to send Rasheed to the true location of Prime and to open all the hidden doors for him, so that Rasheed could carry out the assassination and make good his escape. But there was no way for Anson to do that. He could only ask for Khalid’s help, and hope for the best.

  Khalid was watching him calmly.

  That cool gaze of Khalid was unnerving. He was so alien, was Khalid. That was how he had seemed to the sixteen-year-old Anson on that day, decades ago, when he had turned up here out of the blue, traveling with Cindy; and after all this time, he was alien still. Even though he had lived among them for so many years, had married into their family, had shared in the splendor and isolation of their mountaintop existence as though he were a born Carmichael himself. He still remained, Anson thought, something mysterious, something other. It wasn’t so much that he was of foreign birth, or that he had that strange, almost unearthly physical beauty, or that he worshipped a god named Allah and lived by the book of Mohammed, who had been a desert prince in some unimaginably alien land thousands of years ago. That was part of it, but only part. Those things couldn’t account for Khalid’s formidable inner discipline, that granite-hard calm of his, the lofty detachment of his spirit. No, no, the explanation of his mystery must lie somewhere in Khalid’s childhood, in the very shaping of him, born as he had been in the earliest and harshest years of the Conquest and raised in a town infested by Entities, under hardships and tensions whose nature Anson could scarcely begirt to guess at. It was those hardships and tensions that must have led to his becoming what he was. But Khalid never would speak of his early years.

  “There’s one thing I’d like to know,” Anson said. “If you have so little desire to place Rasheed at risk, why did you give him the same assassin training you gave Tony? I remember very clearly the time you told me that you didn’t give a damn about killing Prime, that the whole project was simply no concern of yours. So surely it wasn’t your intention to set up Rasheed as someone to be put into play if Tony failed.”

  “No. That was not my intention at all. I was training Tony to be your assassin. I was training Rasheed to be Rasheed. The training happened to be the same; the goals were different. Tony became a perfect machine. Rasheed became perfect too, but he is much more than a
machine. He is a work of art.”

  “Which you now are willing to place at our service for a very dangerous mission, knowing that we’re going to do everything we can to protect him, but there’s going to be some element of risk nevertheless. Why? We would never have known what Rasheed was, if you hadn’t happened to say to Cindy that you felt he could handle the job. What made you tell her that?”

  “Because I have found a life here among you,” said Khalid unhesitatingly. “I was no one, a man without a home, a family, an existence, even. All that had been stripped from me when I was a child. I was merely a prisoner; but Cindy found me, and brought me here, and everything changed for me after that. I owe you something back. I give you Rasheed; but I want you to use him wisely or else not at all. Those are the terms, Anson. You will protect him, or you will not have him.”

  “He’ll be protected,” Anson said. “We aren’t going to repeat the Tony event. I swear it, Khalid.”

  “Are you getting anywhere?” Frank asked, as Andy looked wearily up from the screen.

  “Depends how you define ‘anywhere.’ I’m discovering new things all the time. Some of them are actually useful.—Would you mind getting me another beer, Frank? And have one for yourself.”

  “Right.” Frank moved hesitantly toward the door.

  “Don’t worry,” Andy said. “I’m not going to jump through that window and run away the moment you leave the room.”

  “I know that. But I’m supposed to be guarding you, you know.”

  “You think I’m going to try to escape? When I’m this close to breaking through into the most secret Entity code?’”