The Alien Years

  Jill was barefoot and wore only a strip of blue fabric around her waist and another over her breasts. Khalifa wore nothing at all. Cloth was getting hard to come by, these days, and clothing wore out all too quickly; and in warm weather the small children went naked and most of the younger adult Carmichaels wore very little. Jill, at forty, still thought of herself as a younger Carmichael, and, even though she had borne five children and showed the signs of that, her long, slender frame had the look of youth about it yet.

  “What is it?” Khalid asked. It had to be something unusual to bring her here while he was at his prayers. Above all else he and Jill respected each other’s privacy.

  “Khalifa says she saw an Entity.”

  Well, that was certainly something unusual, Khalid thought. He glanced at the child. She didn’t seem particularly upset. Quite calm, in fact.

  “An Entity, eh? And where did this happen?”

  “By the wading pond, she says. The Entity got into the pond with her and splashed around. It played with her and talked with her a long time. Then it took her in its arms and went with her on a trip into the sky and brought her back.”

  “You believe that this happened?” Khalid asked.

  Jill shrugged. “Not necessarily. But how would I know whether it happened or not? I thought you should know. What if they’re beginning to snoop around here?”

  “Yes. I suppose.”

  Jill was like that: she made no judgments, she drew no conclusions. She drifted through life like a Spook, rarely touching the ground. Sometimes she and Khalid went for days at a time without speaking to each other, though all was peaceful between them, and they would turn to each other in bed every night during such times as naturally and passionately as they always did. In eleven years together Khalid had never attempted to penetrate her inner thoughts, nor she his. They respected each other’s privacy, yes. Two of a kind, they were.

  He knelt beside the little girl and said gently, “You saw an Entity, eh?”

  “Yes. It took me flying into space.”

  Khalifa was the most beautiful of his five striking children: angelic, even. She combined in herself the best of Jill’s fair-skinned fair-haired beauty and his own more exotic hybrid traits. Her limbs were long, already arguing for extraordinary height; her hair was shimmering golden fleece, with an underglow of bronze; her eyes were his gemlike blue-green; her pellucid skin had some subtle trace of his tawniness to it, a subcutaneous ruddy gleam like that of burnished copper.

  He said, “What did it look like, this Entity?”

  “It was a little like a lion,” she said, “and a little like a camel. It had shining wings and a long snaky tail. It was pink all over and very tall.”

  “How tall?”

  “As tall as you are. Maybe even a little taller.”

  Her eyes were wide and solemn and sincere. But this had to be a fable. There were no Entities that looked like that. Unless some new kind had recently arrived on Earth, of course.

  “Were you afraid?” Khalid asked.

  “A little. It was sort of scary, I suppose. But it said it wouldn’t hurt me if I kept quiet. It just wanted to play with me, it said.”

  “Play?”

  “We played splashing games, and we danced around in the pond. It asked me my name and the names of my mommy and my daddy, and a lot of other things that I don’t remember. Then it took me flying. We went up to the moon and back. I saw the castles and rivers on the moon. It said that it would come back on my birthday and take me flying again.”

  “To the moon?”

  “To the moon, and Mars, and lots of other places.”

  Khalid nodded. For a moment or two he studied Khalifa’s angelic countenance, marveling at the teeming fantasies behind that small smooth forehead. Then he said: “How do you know anything about lions and camels?”

  The briefest hesitation. “Andy told me about them.”

  Andy. Now it made sense. Her twelve-year-old cousin Andy, Steve and Lisa’s son, was a gushing fountain of uncontrolled imagination. Too clever for his own good, that boy, forever making his magic with computers, bringing forth all sorts of unheard-of trickery. And something diabolical in his eyes, even back when he was only a baby.

  “Andy told you?” Khalid said.

  “He showed me pictures of them on the screen of his machine. And told me stories about them. Andy tells me lots of stories.”

  “Ah,” Khalid said. He shot a glance at Jill. “Does Andy tell you stories about Entities too?” he asked the girl.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did he tell you this one?”

  “Oh, no. This one really happened!”

  “To you, or to Andy?”

  “To me! To me!” Indignantly. She gave him a petulant, even angry look, as though annoyed that he would doubt her. But then, abruptly, things changed. An expression of uncertainty, or perhaps fear, appeared on the child’s face. Her lower lip trembled. She was on the edge of tears.—“I wasn’t supposed to tell you. I shouldn’t have. The only one I told was Mommy, and she told you. But the Entity told me not to say anything to anybody about what had happened, or it would kill me. It isn’t going to kill me, is it, Khalid?”

  He smiled. “No, child. That won’t happen.”

  “I’m scared.” The tears were showing, now.

  “No. No. Nothing’s going to kill you. Listen to me, Khalifa: if this so-called Entity or any other kind of creature comes back here and bothers you again, you tell me about it right away and I’ll kill it. I’ve already killed one Entity in my life and I can do it again. So there isn’t a thing for you to be afraid of.”

  “Would you kill an Entity?” she asked.

  “If it tried to bother you, yes,” said Khalid. “In a flash, I would.” He pulled her to him, lifted her, hugged her, set her gently down. Patted her on her bare little rump, told her once more not to worry about the Entity, sent her on her way.

  To Jill he said, “That boy Andy is all mischief. I need to talk to him about not filling the girl’s head with nonsense.”

  She was looking at him strangely.

  “Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

  “Andy’s not the only one filling her head with nonsense, I think. Why did you tell her that thing about your killing an Entity once?”

  “That wasn’t nonsense. It’s true.”

  “Come on, Khalid.”

  “What do you think I did that got me into Entity detention? You remember, I was an escaped detainee when I came here?” Jill was looking at him as though he had begun to speak in an unknown language. But, Khalid thought, it was time he had told her of this. More than time. He went on, “An Entity was shot dead once on a country road in England, years and years ago. I’m the one that shot it. But they had no way of knowing that, so everybody in my part of England was rounded up and killed, or put into the camps. The only one I ever told was Cindy. I’m not sure that she believed me.” Jill was still staring. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you believe that I could have done something like that?”

  She was very slow to answer.

  “Yes,” she said, eventually. “Yes, I think you could.”

  He found Andy exactly where he expected to find him, on a bench outside the computer shack, tinkering with one of his portable computers. The boy, like his father, like his grandfather, seemed to eat and breathe and live computers, and probably wrote programs while he was sleeping, too.

  “Andy?”

  “Just a minute, Khalid.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Just a minute!”

  Calmly Khalid reached down and pushed a button on Andy’s computer. The screen went dark. The boy gave him a fiery look and leaped to his feet, fists balled. He was big for his age, very well developed, but Khalid stood poised, ready to deal with any attack. Not that he would hit Andy—that would be too much like Richie, hitting a twelve-year-old boy—but he would restrain him, if he had to, until the boy’s fit of temper had passed.
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  Andy got control of himself quickly enough, though. Sourly he said, “You shouldn’t have done that, Khalid. You might have spoiled what I was writing.”

  “When an adult tells you to pay attention, you pay attention,” Khalid said. “That is the rule here. You will not ignore me when I tell you I wish to speak with you. What were you doing? Eavesdropping on the secret conversations of the Entities?”

  Andy’s fury dropped away. Smirking cheekily, he said, “You wish.”

  The boy was naked. That bothered Khalid. Andy might be only twelve, but his body was already that of a man; he should cover himself. Khalid disliked the idea that this naked man-child should have been playing with his naked little daughter, telling her fantastic fables.

  He said, “I hear from Khalifa that you make up very interesting stories about new kinds of Entities. In particular one that looks something like a Hon and something like a camel.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “This is true, then?”

  “Sure. I show the kids all sorts of graphics.”

  “Show me,” said Khalid.

  Andy turned the computer back on. Instantly four lines of bright lettering edged with flames blazed forth on the screen:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY OF

  ANSON CARMICHAEL GANNETT.

  KEEP YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF!

  THIS MEANS YOU!!!!

  He hit a key, and another one, and another one, and a vivid picture began to take form on the screen. A mythical beast of some sort, it seemed. A camel’s long comic face, a lion’s ferocious claws, an eagle’s splendid wings. A long curling serpentine tale. Andy filled in the details quickly, until the image on the screen seemed almost three-dimensional. Ready to jump out of the computer and dance around before them. It turned its head from side to side, it grinned at them, it leered, it glowered, it showed a set of gleaming fangs that no camel had ever possessed.

  How had the boy done that? Khalid knew almost nothing about computers. It seemed like magic to Khalid, black magic. The work of a jinni: one of the evil ones. The work of a demon.

  “What is this creature?” Khalid asked.

  “A griffin. I found it in a mythology text. I put the camel’s head on myself, just for fun.”

  “And told Khalifa that it was an Entity?”

  “Uh-uh. That was strictly her idea. I was just showing her graphics. Did she tell you I called it an Entity?”

  “She said she saw an Entity, that it visited her and played with her and took her on a flight to the moon. And plenty of other crazy stuff. But she also said you’d been showing her lots of things like this on your computer.”

  “And if I have?” Andy asked. “What’s the problem, Khalid?”

  “She’s just a little girl. She hasn’t yet learned how to sort out reality from fantasy. Don’t mix her up, Andy.”

  “I’m not supposed to tell her stories, you’re saying?”

  “Don’t mix up her head, is what I’m saying.—And put some clothes on. You’re too old to be running around with everything you have showing.”

  Quickly Khalid walked away. It troubled him to be giving angry orders to young people. It brought buried memories of ancient ugliness back to life.

  But this boy, Andy—someone needed to impose some discipline on him. Khalid knew that he was not the one; but someone should. He was too wild, too defiant. You could see the rebelliousness growing in him from week to week. He was good with computers, yes: wonderful with computers, miraculous. But Khalid saw the wildness in him, and was puzzled that no one else did. Even now, Andy did mainly as he pleased; what would he be like later on? The first Carmichael quisling? The family’s first borgmann?

  Close to a year went by before the story Khalid had told Jill had any repercussions whatever. That he had ever said a word to her about having killed that Entity was something that had all but passed from his mind.

  He was carving a statue of Jill out of a slab of red manzanita wood, the latest in a series of such statues that he had made over the years. Little gatherings of them stood arrayed around the cabin in groups of three and four, congregations of Jills. Jill standing and Jill kneeling and Jill running, caught in mid-stride with her long hair flowing out behind her, and Jill stretched out with her elbow on the ground and her head resting on her fist; Jill with a baby in the crook of each arm; Jill asleep. She was nude in all of them. And she looked exactly alike in every one, always the youthful Jill of Khalid’s first days at the ranch, with the smooth unlined face and the flat belly and the high taut breasts. Even though he had her pose for each new statue, he depicted her only as she had been, not as she now was.

  She had noticed that, after a time, and had remarked on it. “That is how I will always see you,” he explained. She went on posing for him nevertheless, though even he knew that there was really no need, not if all he was doing was carving statues of the Jill within his mind.

  She was posing for him on a mild, humid spring morning when Tony came to him, Ron Carmichael’s younger son, a big, brawny, easygoing boy in his late teens with a lion’s mane of golden hair down to his shoulders. He gave only the most perfunctory of glances to the naked Jill, who stood with her arms outstretched and her head turned to the sky as if she were about to take wing. Everyone who passed by Khalid’s cabin was accustomed to seeing Jill posing.

  Khalid glanced up. Tony said, “My brother would like to talk with you. He’s in the chart room.”

  “Yes. Right away,” Khalid said, and set about the task of putting his chisels back in their chest.

  The chart room was a big, airy room in the main house, the largest in the series of rooms in the wing that stretched off to the left of the dining room. The Colonel, long ago, had bedecked its mahogany-paneled walls with an extensive collection of military maps and charts from the time of the Vietnam War, framed topographic plans of battlefields and city maps and harbor charts, out of which bizarre unfamiliar names that must once have been terribly important came leaping, boldly underlined in red: Haiphong, Gam Ranh, Phan Rang, Pleiku, Khe Sanh, Ia Drang, Bin Dinh, Hue. The room had a fine strategic feel to it and at some time late in the Colonel’s life Ron Carmichael had made it the central planning headquarters for the Resistance. A direct telephone line that Steve and Lisa Gannett had wired up connected it with the communications center out back.

  There was a pack of Carmichaels in the chart room when Khalid entered. They were sitting side by side behind the big curving leather-topped desk in the middle of the floor, like an assembly of judges, and they were all looking at him with peculiar intensity, the way they might look at some mythological monster that had wandered into the room.

  Three of them were Carmichaels, anyway: Mike, the more pleasant of Jill’s two brothers, and Mike’s cousins Leslyn and Anson, two of Ron’s children. Steve Gannett was there also: some kind of Carmichael, Khalid knew, but not as Carmichael as the others, too plump, too bald, wrong color eyes. Khalid did not always bother to keep his sense of the relationships among all these people straight in his head. Fate had decreed that he should live among them, even marry one and have children by her; but none of that meant that he would ever feel like a true member of the family.

  Anson was at the center of the group. Khalid understood that in recent months Anson had come to be in charge of things, now that his father Ron was beginning to grow old. Not quite thirty yet, was Anson, younger than Mike and Charlie and their sister Jill, younger considerably than Steve. But he was plainly the boss now, the Carmichael of Carmichaels, the one who had the strength to command, the one who always took opportunity into his hands. Anson was a tall wide-faced man with very pale skin and a great thick swoop of coarse yellow hair that fell down low across his forehead. And, of course, those rock-drill eyes that all these Carmichaels inevitably were born with. He had always struck Khalid as being very tightly wound—too tightly wound, perhaps, and perhaps also brittle at the core, so that it would not take very much to make him snap in half.

  An
son said, “Jill told me something extremely strange about you last night, Khalid. I was up practically all night thinking about it.”

  “Yes?” Khalid said, noncommittal as ever.

  “What she said was that you had told her, some time back, that the thing you had been sent into detention for was the killing of that Entity who was assassinated on a highway in England fifteen or twenty years ago.”

  “Yes,” Khalid said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I did it. I am the one.”

  Anson’s penetrating eyes rested unblinkingly on him. But Khalid was not afraid of anyone’s eyes.

  “And never said a word about it to anyone?” Anson said.

  “Cindy knows. I told her years ago, when I first knew her, before we ever came to this place.”

  “Yes. I asked her last night, and she confirms that you made that claim to her, while the two of you were driving down from Nevada. She wasn’t sure then whether to take you seriously. She still isn’t.”

  “I was serious,” Khalid said. “I was the one who did it.”

  “But never saw fit to mention it here. Why was that?”

  “Why should I have talked about it? It was not a matter that ever came up in ordinary conversation. It is something I did one night a long time ago, when I was still a child, for reasons that were of concern to me on that night alone, and it is not important to me now.”

  “Did it ever occur to you, Khalid,” Mike Carmichael said, “that it might be important to us?”

  Khalid shrugged.

  Anson said, “What made you come out with it to Jill, after all this time, then?”