The Alien Years Read online

  “You okay?”

  The grin became a weary smile. “Fine, yes. Real fine. A little concussion, is all. Not too serious. Slight dislocation of the brain, nothing more. But the whole communications system got wrecked. If you were wondering why I’ve been off the air, now you know.” Andy pointed to the crater on the path. “They didn’t miss by much. And the main house—”

  “I can see.”

  “We were leading a charmed life up here for a hell of a long time, boy. But I guess we tried one little trick too many. It all happened very fast, the raid. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, blam, blam, blam, and they were here and gone. Of course, they might come back and finish the job half an hour from now.”

  “You think?”

  “Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

  “Where are the others?” Frank asked, glancing around. “What about my father?”

  Andy hesitated just a moment too long. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Frank Anson was in the main house when the bomb hit it.—I’m very sorry, Frank. Very sorry.”

  A dull thudding sensation was all that Frank felt. The real shock, he suspected, was going to hit later.

  “My father was in there with him,” Andy added. “My mother, too.”

  “Oh, Andy. Andy.”

  “And also your father’s sister.” Andy stumbled over the name. “—Les—Leh—Lesl—” He was right at the edge of collapse, Frank realized.

  “Leslyn,” Frank supplied. “You ought to go inside and get off your feet, Andy.”

  “Yes. I really should, shouldn’t I?” But he stayed where he was, bracing himself against the frame of the door. His voice came to Frank as though from very far away: “Mike is okay. Cassandra, too. And La-La. Lorraine, I mean. Peggy was pretty badly hurt. She may not pull through. I’m not sure what happened to Julie. The whole ranch-hand compound got smashed. But Khalid’s place wasn’t even touched. It’s the infirmary for the survivors, right now. Alike and Khalid went into the main house and brought out anybody who was still alive, just before the roof fell in. Cassandra’s looking after them.”

  Frank made a vague sound of acknowledgment. Turning away from Andy for a moment, he stared across the way, toward the burning building. Through his numbed mind went the thought of the Colonel’s books, of the maps and charts in the chart room, of all that history of the vanished free human world going up in flames. He wondered why he should think about anything as irrelevant as that just now.

  “My brothers and sisters?” he asked.

  “Most of them okay, just shaken up. But one of your brothers died. I don’t know if it was Martin or James.” Andy gave him a sheepish look. “Sony about that, Frank: I never could keep them straight in my head.” In a mechanical way he went on, now that Frank had started him going again: “My sister Sabrina, she’s okay. Not Irene. As for Jane—Ansonia—”

  “All right,” Frank said. “I don’t need to hear the whole list now. You ought to get yourself over to Khalid’s house and lie down, Andy. You hear me? Go over there and lie down.”

  “Yeah,” Andy said. “That sounds like a good idea.” He went lurching away.

  Frank glanced up and off toward the left, where the road that came from town could be seen, snaking along the flank of the mountain. The other cars would be arriving soon—Cheryl, Mark, Charlie. Some splendid homecoming this would to be for them, too, after the excitement of the grand and glorious expedition to Los Angeles. Perhaps they already knew of the mission’s failure. But then, to learn of the raid on the house, to see the damage, to hear of the deaths—

  Rasheed was the only one who would ride with the blow, Frank suspected, out of the entire group that had gone to Los Angeles. The strangely superhuman Rasheed, who had been designed and constructed by his father, the equally strange Khalid, to handle any kind of jolt without batting an eye. That eerie detachment of his, the otherworldly calm that had allowed him to venture right into the den of Entity Prime and fasten a bomb to the wall: that would carry him through the shock of returning to the gutted ranch without any difficulty at all. Of course, Rasheed’s mother and father and brothers and sisters hadn’t been touched. And he might not have given a damn about the success or failure of the mission in the first place. Did Rasheed give a damn about anything? Probably not.

  And very likely that was the attitude they would all need to cultivate now: detachment, indifference, resignation. There was no hope left, was there? No remaining fantasies to cling to now.

  He walked slowly back toward the parking area.

  Cindy was still standing by his car, running her hands over its sleek flanks in a weird caressing way. It occurred to Frank that the frail old woman’s mind must be gone, that she had been driven insane by the noise and fury of the bombing raid; but she turned toward him as he approached, and he saw the unmistakable clear, cool look of sanity in her eyes.

  “He told you who the dead ones are?” she asked him.

  “Most of them, I guess. Steve, Lisa, Leslyn, and others, too. One of my brothers. And my father, too.”

  “Poor Anson, yes. Let me tell you something, though. It was just as well, I think, that he died when he did.”

  The casual brutality of the remark startled him. But Frank had seen on other occasions how merciless the very old could be.

  “Just as well? Why do you say that?”

  Cindy waved one claw-like hand at the scene of destruction. “He couldn’t have lived with himself after seeing this, Frank. His grandfather’s ranch in ruins. Half the family dead. And the Entities still running the world, despite everything. He was a very proud man, your father. All the Carmichaels are.” The hand swiveled around and came to rest across Frank’s forearm, grasping it tightly. Her eyes glittered up into his like those of a witch. “It was bad enough for him when Tony was killed. But Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day if he had survived this. Knowing that his second great plan for ridding the world of the Entities had been an even bigger failure than the first—that it had ended by bringing all this wreckage upon us. He’s a lot better off not being here now. A lot better off.”

  Better off? Could that be true? Frank needed to think about that.

  He disengaged his arm and took a few steps away from her, toward the jumble of blackened granite and flagstone that was the smoldering house, and dug the toe of his boot into the heaps of charred wood scattered along the path.

  The bitter smell of burning things stung his nostrils. Cindy’s harsh words sounded and resounded in his ears, a doleful clamor that would not cease.

  Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day—a thousand deaths—a thousand deaths—

  His great plan a failure—

  A failure—

  A failure—

  Failure—failure—failure—failure—

  After a few moments it seemed to Frank that he could almost agree with her about Anson. He could never have withstood the immensity of the fiasco, the totality of it. It would have wrecked him. Not that that made his death any easier to accept, though. Or any of the rest of this. It was hard to take, all of it. It stripped all meaning from everything Frank had ever believed in. They had made their big move, and it had failed, and that was that. The game was over and they had lost. Wasn’t that the truth? And now what? Frank wondered.

  Now, he supposed, nothing at all. No more great plans. No grand new schemes for throwing off the Entity yoke with a single dramatic thrust. They were finished with such projects now.

  A strange dark thought, that was. For generations now his whole family had channeled its energies into the dream of undoing the Conquest. His whole life had been directed toward that goal, ever since he was old enough to understand that the Earth once had been free and then had been enslaved by beings from the stars: that he was a Carmichael, and the defining trait of Carmichaels was that they yearned to rid the world of its alien masters. Now he had to turn his back on all that. That was sad. But, he asked himself, standing there at the edge of the rubble that had been the ran
ch, what other attitude was possible, now that this had happened? What point was there in continuing to pretend that a way might yet be found to drive the Entities away?

  His great plan—

  A failure—a failure—a failure—

  A thousand deaths a day. A thousand deaths a day. Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Cindy said.

  He managed a feeble smile. “You really want to know?”

  She didn’t even bother to answer. She simply repeated the question with her unrelenting eyes. He knew better than to refuse again. “That it’s all over with, now that the mission’s failed,” he said. “That I guess we’re done with dreaming up grand projects for the liberation, now. That we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that the Entities are going to own the world forever.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, astounding him for the second time in the past two minutes. “No. Wrong, Frank. Don’t you dare think any such thing.”

  “Why shouldn’t I, then?”

  “Your father’s not even in his grave yet, but he’d be turning in it already if he was. And Ron, and Anse, and the Colonel, in theirs. Listen to you! ‘We just have to resign ourselves.’”

  The sharpness of her mockery, the vehemence of it, caught Frank off guard. Color came to his cheeks. He struggled to make sense of this. “I don’t mean to sound like a quitter, Cindy. But what can we do? You just said yourself that my father’s plan had failed. Doesn’t that end it for us? Is it realistic to go on thinking we can defeat them, somehow? Was it ever?”

  “Pay attention to me,” she said. She impaled him with a stark, unanswerable glare from which there could be no flinching. “You’re right that we’ve just proved that we can’t defeat them. But completely wrong to say that because we can’t beat them we should give up all hope of being free.”

  “I don’t underst—”

  She went right on. “Frank, I know better than anyone alive how far beyond us the Entities are in every way. I’m eighty-five years old. I was right on the scene, the day the Entities came. I spent weeks aboard one of their starships. I stood right before them, no farther from them than you are from me, and I felt the power of their minds. They’re like gods, Frank. I knew that from the moment they came. We can hurt them—we just demonstrated that—but we can’t seriously damage them and we certainly can’t overthrow them.”

  “Right. And therefore it seems to me that it’s useless to put any energy into the false hope of—”

  “Pay attention to me, is what I said. I was with the Colonel just before he died. You never knew him, did you?—No, I didn’t think so. He was a great man, Frank, and a very wise one. He understood the power of the Entities. He liked to compare them to gods, too. That was the very term he used, and he was right. But then he said that we had to keep on dreaming of a day when they’d no longer be here, nevertheless. Keeping the idea of resistance alive despite everything, is what he said. Remembering what it was like to have lived in a free world.”

  “How can we remember something we never knew? The Colonel remembered it, yes. You remember. But the Entities have been here almost fifty years. They were already here before my father was born. There are two whole generations of people in the world who never—”

  Again the glare. His voice died away.

  “Sure,” Cindy said scornfully. “I understand that. Out there are millions of people, billions, who don’t know what it ever was like to live in a world where it was possible to make free choices. They don’t mind having the Entities here. Maybe they’re even happy about it, most of them. Life is easier for them, maybe, than it would have been fifty years ago. They don’t have to think. They don’t have to shape themselves into anything. They just do what the Entity computers and the quisling bosses tell them to do. But this is Carmichael territory, up here, what’s left of it. We think differently. And what we think is, the Entities have turned us into nothing, but we can be something again, someday. Somehow. Provided we don’t allow ourselves to forget what we once were. A time will come, I don’t know how or when, when we can get out from under the Entities and fix things so that we can live as free people again. And we have to keep that idea alive until it does. Do you follow me, Frank?”

  She was frail and unsteady and trembling. But her voice, deep and harsh and full, was as strong as an iron rod.

  Frank searched for a reply, but none that had any logic to it would come. Of course he wanted to maintain the traditions of his ancestors. Of course he felt the weight of all the Carmichaels he had never known, and those that he had, pressing on his soul, goading him to lead some wonderful crusade against the enemies of mankind. But he had just returned from such a crusade, and the ruins of his home lay smoldering all around him. What was important now was burying the dead and rebuilding the ranch, not thinking about the next futile crusade.

  So there was nothing he could say. He would not deny his heritage; but it seemed foolish to utter some noble vow binding him to make one more attempt at attaining the impossible.

  Abruptly Cindy’s expression softened. “All right,” she said. “Just think about what I’ve been saying. Think about it.”

  A horn sounded in the distance, three honks. Cheryl returning, or Mark, or Charlie.

  “You’d better go up there and meet them,” Cindy said. “You’re in charge, now, boy. Let them know what’s taken place here. Go on, will you? Hurry along. See who it is.” And as he started up the path to the gate he heard her voice trailing after him, a softer tone now: “Break it to them gently, Frank. If you can.”

  9

  FIFTY-FIVE YEARS FROM NOW

  It was the third spring after the bombing of the ranch before the scars of the raid really began to fade. The dead had been laid to rest and mourned, and things went on. New plantings now covered the bomb craters, and generous winter rains had nurtured the young shrubs and freshly seeded grass into healthy growth.

  The damaged buildings had been either repaired or demolished, and some new ones constructed. Removing the debris of the burned-out main house had been the biggest task, a two-year job; the place had been built to last through the ages, and dismantling it using simple hand tools was a monumental task for one small band of people. But finally that was done, too. They had managed to salvage the rear wing of the house, at least, the five rooms that were still intact, and had recycled sections of wall and flooring from the rest to construct a few rooms more. The communications center was back on its foundation also, and Andy had even succeeded in reopening on-line contact with people elsewhere in California and other parts of the country.

  It was a quiet existence. The crops thrived. The flocks flourished. Children grew toward maturity; couples came together; new children were born. Frank himself, almost twenty-two years old, was a father now. He had married Mark’s daughter Helena, and they had two so far, both named for his parents: Raven was the girl’s name, and Anson the boy’s—the newest Anson Carmichael in the long sequence. Some things would never change.

  The Colonel’s library was gone forever, but at Frank’s suggestion Andy succeeded in downloading books from libraries as far away as Washington and New York, and Frank spent much of his time reading, now. History was his great passion. He had not known much about the world that had existed before the Entities, but he spent endless hours now discovering it, Roman history, Greek, British, French, the whole human saga swimming about in his bedazzled mind, a horde of great names all mixed together, builders and destroyers both, Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Augustus, Hider, Stalin, Winston Churchill, Genghis Khan.

  He knew that California had once been a part of the country that had been known as the United States of America, and he pored over that country’s history, too, swallowing it whole, learning how it had been put together out of little states and then had nearly come apart and had been united again, supposedly for all time, and had grown to be the most powerful nation in the world. He heard for
the first time the names of its famous presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and the two great generals Grant and Eisenhower, who had become presidents also.

  The names and details quickly lost themselves in a chaotic welter. But the patterns remained discernible enough, how all through history countries and empires had been formed, had grown to greatness, had overreached themselves and crumbled and been replaced by new ones, while in each of those countries and empires people constantly struggled toward creating a civilization built on justice, on fairness, on open opportunity in life for all. The world had, perhaps, finally been on the verge of attaining those things just when the Entities arrived. Or so it seemed to him, anyway, half a conquered century later, knowing nothing but what he could find in the books that Andy plundered for him from the on-line archives of the conquered world.

  No one spoke of the Resistance now, or of assassinating Entities, or of anything much but the need to get the crops planted on time and to bring in a good harvest and to look after the livestock. Frank had not lost his hatred for the Entities who had stolen the world and killed his father. It was practically in his genes, that hatred. Nor had he forgotten the things Cindy had said to him the day he had returned from Los Angeles to find the ranch in ruins. That conversation—the last one he had ever had with Cindy, for she had died a few days later, peacefully, surrounded by people who loved her—was forever in the back of his mind, and now and again he took out the ideas she had expounded and looked at them for a while, and then put them away again. He could see the strength of them. He understood the worth of them. He would pass them dutifully along to his children. But he saw no practical way to give them any life.

  On an April day in the third year after the bombing, with the rainy season finished for the year and the air warm and fragrant, Frank set out across the ravine to Khalid’s compound, where Khalid and Jill and their many children lived apart from the others in an ever-expanding settlement.

  Frank went there often to visit with Khalid and sometimes with his gentle, elusive son Rasheed. He found it curiously comforting to spend time with them, savoring the peacefulness that was at the core of their souls, watching Khalid carve his lovely sculptures, abstract forms now rather than the portraits of earlier years.