The Alien Years

  “Well, it shouldn’t have been,” said Anse, in a tone that was almost without expression. “It just wasn’t in me to do any better. It really wasn’t. No matter what he expected of me. I tried, but—well, you know how it’s been with me, bro—”

  “Of course I know,” said Ron vaguely, and returned the squeeze; and Anse gave him a blurrily affectionate look and went limping off toward the front of the house.

  “That was very touching,” Peggy said. “He loves you very much.”

  “I suppose he does. He’s drunk, Peg.”

  “Even so. He meant what he said.”

  Ron glowered at her. “Yes. Yes. But I loathe it when people tell me how much I’ve changed, how glad they are that I’m not the mean selfish son of a bitch I used to be. I loathe it. I haven’t changed. You know what I mean? I’m simply doing things in this region of my life that I hadn’t felt like making time for before. Like moving to the ranch. Like marrying a woman like you, like settling down and raising a family. Like agreeing with my father instead of automatically opposing him all the time. Like assuming certain responsibilities that extend beyond my own skin. But I’m still living within that skin, Peg. My behavior may have changed, but I haven’t. I’ve always made the sort of choices that make sense to me—they’re just different sorts of choices now, that’s all. And it makes me mad as hell when people, especially my own brother, patronize me by telling me that it’s wonderful that I’m not as shitty as I once was. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

  It was a long speech. Peggy was staring at him in what looked like dismay.

  “Am I running off at the mouth?” he asked.

  “Well—”

  “Hey, forget it,” he said, reaching out and stroking her cheek. “I’m very worried about my father, is all. And about Anse, for that matter. How fragile they’re both getting. How much Anse drinks. Both of them getting ready to die.”

  “No,” said Peggy. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. Wouldn’t surprise me if Anse goes first, either.” Ron shook his head. “Poor old Anse. Always trying to turn himself into the Colonel, and never able to. And burning himself out trying. Because nobody possibly could be the Colonel except the Colonel. Anse didn’t have the Colonel’s intelligence or dedication or discipline, but he forced himself to pretend that he did. At least I had the good sense not even to try.”

  “Is Anse really that sick?”

  “Sick? I don’t know if he’s sick, no. But he’s done for, Peg. All these years trying to run a Resistance, trying to find some way to beat the Entities because the Colonel thinks we should, although there isn’t any way and Anse has had to live in perpetual simmering rage inside because he’s been trying to accomplish the impossible. His whole life has gone by, trying to accomplish things he wasn’t meant to do, things that maybe couldn’t even have been done. Burned him out.” Ron shrugged. “I wonder if I’ll get like that when my turn comes: shrunken, frail, defeated-looking? No. No, I won’t, will I? I’m a different kind. Nothing in common but the blue eyes.”

  Was that really true? he wondered.

  There was noise, suddenly, down the hall, a clattering, some whoops. Mike and Charlie appeared, Anse’s boys, taller now than their father, taller even than him. Seventeen years old. Blue Carmichael eyes, light-hued Carmichael hair. They had a girl with them: the one from Monterey, it must be. Looked to be a year or two older than they were.

  “Hey, Uncle Ron! Aunt Peg! Want you to meet Eloise!”

  That was Charlie, the one with the unmarked face. The brothers had had a terrible fight when they were about nine, and Mike had come out of it with that angry red scar down his cheek. Ron had often thought it was very considerate of Charlie to have marked his brother like that. They were, otherwise, the most identical twins he had ever seen, altogether alike in movement, stance, voice, patterns of thought.

  Eloise was dark-haired, pretty, vivacious: sharp cheekbones, tiny nose, full lips, lively eyes. Leggy below and full on top. Very nice indeed. Ancient lustful reflexes stirred for an instant in Ron. She is only a child, he told himself sternly. And to her, you are simply some uninteresting old man.

  “Eloise Mitchell—our uncle, Ronald Carmichael—Peggy, our aunt—”

  “Pleased,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling. Impressive, yes. “It’s so beautiful here! I’ve never been this far south before. I love this part of the coast. I never want to go home!”

  “She isn’t going to,” Charlie said. And Mike winked and laughed.

  Then they were off, running down the hall, heading for the sunlight and warmth outside the old stone house.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ron said. “Do you think they are sharing her?”

  “That isn’t any of your business,” Peggy told him. “The younger generation does as it pleases. Just as we did.”

  “The younger generation, yes. And we’re the stuffy old geezers now. There’s the world’s future rising up before our eyes. Charlie. Mike. Eloise.”

  “And our Anson and Leslyn and Heather and Tony. Cassandra and Julie and Mark. And now Steve’s baby soon too.”

  “The future, crowding in on the present all the time. While the past makes ready to clear out. Been like that for a long while, hasn’t it, Peg? And not going to change now, I guess.”

  5

  TWENTY-NINE YEARS FROM NOW

  Khalid was at work in the cluttered corner of the dormitory that he used as his studio, carving a statuette from a bar of soap, when Litvak came in and said, “Start packing, guys. We’re all being transported again.”

  Litvak was the communications-net man in the group, the one with the implant jack who knew how to rig the house telephone to pick information off the Entity net. He was the dormitory’s borgmann, in a manner of speaking: a borgmann in reverse who spied on the Entities rather than working for them, a compact diminutive Israeli with an oddly triangular head, very broad through the forehead and tapering downward to a sharp little pointed chin. It was an interesting head. Khalid had sculpted portraits of him several times.

  Khalid didn’t look up. He was fashioning a miniature figure of Parvati, the Hindu goddess: high tapering headdress, exaggerated breasts, benign expression of utter tranquility. Lately he had been carving the entire Hindu pantheon, after Litvak had pulled photos of them out of some forgotten archive of the old Net. Krishna, Shiva, Ganesha, Vishnu, Brahma: the whole lot of them. Aissha probably wouldn’t have approved of his making statuettes of Hindu gods and goddesses—for that matter, a good Muslim should not be making graven images at all—but it was seven years since he had last seen Aissha. Aissha was ancient history to him, like Krishna and Shiva and Vishnu, or Richie Burke. Khalid was a grown man now and he did as he pleased.

  From across the room the Bulgarian, Dimiter, said, “Are we going to be split up, do you think?”

  “What do you suppose, dummy?” Litvak asked tartly. “You think they find us so charming as a group that they’re going to keep us together for the rest of eternity?”

  There were eight of them in this sector of the transportee dormitory, five men, three women, tossed together higgledy-piggledy by the random-scoop arrangements that the Entities seemed to favor. They had been together fourteen months, now, which was the longest period Khalid had stayed with any group of transportees. The dormitory, the whole prison camp, was located somewhere along the Turkish coast—“just north of Bodrum,” Litvak had said, though where Bodrum was, or for that matter Turkey itself, was something not very clear to Khalid. It was a pretty place, anyhow, warm sunny weather most of the year, dry brown hills running down to the coastal plain, a beautiful blue ocean, a scattering of islands just offshore. Before this place he had been in central Spain for eleven months, and in Austria for seven or eight, and in Norway for close to a year, and before that—well, he no longer remembered where he had been before that. The Entities liked to keep their prisoners on the move.

  It was a long while since he had been housed with anyone from the vicinity o
f Salisbury. Not that that mattered greatly to him, since there was no one in Salisbury for whom he had cared in any special way except Aissha and old Iskander Mustafa Ali, and he had no idea where Aissha might be and Iskander Mustafa Ali surely was dead by this time. In the beginning, in the camp at Portsmouth, most of his fellow prisoners had been people from Salisbury or one of the neighboring towns, but by now, after five or six (or was it seven?) changes of detention center, he no longer lived with anyone from England at all. Apparently there were many people throughout the world, not just his own English neighbors, who had displeased the Entities in some manner and now were subjected to this constant rotation from one prison camp to another.

  In Khalid’s group there was, aside from Litvak and Dimiter, a Canadian woman named Francine Webster, and a man from Poland named Krzysztof, and a perpetually sulky Irish girl, Carlotta, and Genevieve from the south of France, and a small, dark-skinned man from somewhere in North Africa whose name Khalid had never managed to catch, though he had not tried very hard. They all got along reasonably well together. The North African man spoke only French and Arabic; everybody else in the group spoke English, some better than others, and Genevieve translated for the North African whenever it was necessary. Khalid had little interest in getting to know his roommates, since they were almost certainly temporary. He found jittery little Litvak amusing, and the hearty, good-humored Krzysztof was pleasant company, and he liked the warm, motherly Francine Webster. The others didn’t matter. On several occasions he had slept with Francine Webster and also with Genevieve, because there was no privacy in the dormitory nor much remaining sense of individual boundaries, and nearly everybody in the group slept in a casual way with nearly everybody else now and then, and Khalid had discovered, during the years of his imprisoned adolescence, that he was not without sexual drive. But the sexual part of things had made little impact on him either, other than pure physical release.

  He went on with his sculpting, and offered no comments about the impending transfer, and three days later, just as Litvak had predicted, they were all ordered to report to Room 107 of the detention center’s administration sector. In Room 107, which was a large hall entirely unfurnished except for an empty bookcase and a three-legged chair, they were left by themselves to stand for close to an hour before someone came in, asked them their names, and, referring to a sheet of brown paper in his hand, brusquely said, “You, you, and you, Room 103. You and you, Room 106. You, you, you, Room 109. And make it snappy.”

  Khalid, Krzysztof, and the North African were the ones who were sent to room 109. They went there quickly. No time was spent on offering farewells to the other five, for they all knew that they now were disappearing from each other’s lives forever.

  Room 109, which was mysteriously distant from Room 107, was much smaller than 107 but just about as sparsely furnished. A picture-frame that held no picture hung on the left-hand wall; on the floor against the wall opposite it stood a large green ceramic flower-vase with no flowers in it; there was a bare desk in front of the far wall, facing the door. Seated behind the desk was a petite round-faced woman who looked to be about sixty. Her dark eyes, which seemed to be set very far apart, had an odd glittery gleam, and her hair, which had probably once been jet black, was dramatically streaked with jagged zones of white, like flashes of lightning cutting across the night.

  Glancing at a paper she was holding, she said, looking at the Pole, “Are you Kr—Kyz—Kzyz—Kryz—” She could not get her tongue around the letters of his name. But she seemed amused rather than irritated.

  “Krzysztof,” he said. “Krzysztof Michalski.”

  “Michalski, yes. And that first name again?”

  “Krzysztof.”

  “Ah. Christoph. I get it now. All right: Christoph Michalski. Polish name, right?” She grinned. “A lot easier to say it than to read it.” Khalid was surprised at how chatty she was. Most of these quisling bureaucrats were chilly and abrupt. But she had what sounded to him like an American accent. Perhaps her being American had something to do with that. “And which one of you is Khalid Haleem Burke?” the woman asked.

  “I am.”

  She gave him a long slow look, frowning a little. Khalid stared right back.

  “And then you,” she said, turning now toward the North African, “must be—ah—Mulay ben Dlimi.”

  “Oui.”

  “What kind of name is that, Mulay ben Dlimi?”

  “Oui,” the North African said again.

  “He doesn’t understand English,” said Khalid. “He’s from North Africa.”

  The woman nodded. “A real international group. All right, Christoph, Khalid, Mulay. I think you know the deal. You’re going to be transported again, day after tomorrow. Or possibly even tomorrow, if the paperwork gets done in time. Pack your stuff and be ready to leave your quarters as soon as you’re called.”

  “Can you tell us,” Krzysztof said, “Where we’re going to be sent this time?”

  She smiled. “The good old U.S. of A., this time. Las Vegas, Nevada. Do any of you know how to play blackjack?”

  The transport plane once had been a commercial airliner, long, long ago, in the days when the citizens of the countries of Earth still moved about freely from one place to another on journeys of business or pleasure and there were such things called airlines to carry them. Khalid had not known that era at first hand, but he had heard tales of it. This plane, whose painted hull was faded and even rusted in places, still bore an inscription identifying it as belonging to British Airways. For Khalid, stepping aboard it was in a little way like returning to England. He was not sure how he felt about that.

  But the airplane wasn’t England. It was only a long metal tube with blotchy gray walls and scars on the floor to mark the places where the seats had been ripped out. Bare mattresses had replaced the seats. There was no place to sit; one could only walk about or lie down. Long bars had been soldered to the walls above the windows, something to grab if the flight turned turbulent. Threadbare curtains divided the passenger compartment into several subcompartments.

  For Khalid there was nothing new about any of this. All the planes that had carried him from one detention camp to another had been much like this one. This one seemed bigger, that was all. But that was because they were going to the United States, a lengthy journey that must require a larger plane. He had only the vaguest idea where the United States might be, but he knew that it was very far from where they were now.

  The small woman who had met with them in Room 109 was aboard the plane, supervising the departure arrangements. Khalid assumed that she would leave once everybody who was being transported had been checked off the master list, but, no, she stayed on the plane after the check-off was complete and the doors were closed. That was unusual. The detention-center officials did not normally accompany the transported prisoners to their destinations. But perhaps she wasn’t actually staying. He watched her disappear through the curtain that separated Khalid’s sector of the plane from the zone up front where the official personnel were, and wondered if there might be some other door up there through which she might leave before the plane took off. In a curious way he hoped there wasn’t. He liked her. She was an amusing woman, lively and irreverent, not at all like any of the other quisling officials with whom he had come in contact in his seven years of internment.

  Khalid was pleased to see, not long after the plane had taken off, that she was still on board. She emerged from the front compartment, walking carefully in the steeply climbing plane, and halted when she reached the mattress where Khalid and the North African man were sitting.

  “May I join you?” she asked.

  “You need to ask permission, do you?” said Khalid.

  “A little politeness never hurts.”

  He shrugged. She spiraled down next to him, lowering herself to the floor in a quick, graceful way that belied her age, and folded herself up opposite him on the mattress with her legs crossed neatly, ankles to knees.

/>   “You’re Khalid, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Cindy. You’re very pretty, Khalid, do you know that? I love the tawny color of your skin. Like a lion’s, it is. And that crop of dense bushy hair.” When he offered no reply, she said, “You’re an artist, I understand.”

  “I make things, yes.”

  “I made things once, too. And I was also pretty, once, for that matter.”

  She smiled and winked at him, rendering Khalid somehow a co-conspirator in the agreement that she had once been pretty. It hadn’t occurred to him before this that she might have been an attractive woman once upon a time, but now, taking a close look at her, he saw that it was quite possible that she had been: a small and energetic person, trimly built, with delicate features and those bright, bright eyes. Her smile was still very appealing. And the wink. He liked that wink. She was definitely unlike any quisling he had ever encountered. With his artist’s eye he edited out the grooves and wrinkles that her sixty years had carved in her face, restored the darkness and glossiness of her hair, gave her skin the freshness of youth. Yes, he thought. No doubt quite pretty thirty or forty years ago.

  “What are you, Khalid?” she said. “Some sort of Indian? At least in part.”

  “Pakistani. My mother was.”

  “And your father?”

  “English. A white man. I never knew him. He was a quisling, people told me.”

  “I’m a quisling.”

  “Lots of people are quislings,” Khalid said. “It makes no difference to me.”

  “Well,” she said. And said nothing further for a while, simply sat there cross-legged, her eyes looking into his as though she were studying him. Khalid looked back amiably. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. Let her stare, if she wanted to.

  Then she said, “Are you angry about something?”

  “Angry? Me? What is there to be angry about? I never get angry at all.”

  “On the contrary. I think you’re angry all the time.”