The Alien Years

  He saw a domed building that looked like a beehive, but of white marble: a shrine, a temple, a sanctuary. A sanctuary, yes. Prime lay within it. Prime was a great bloated pallid slug-like thing, thirty feet long, encased in mechanisms that supplied it with nutrients.

  And now Anson saw a human figure approaching that dome: an enigmatic figure, slender, calm, faceless. It might almost be an android. Andy Gannett, sitting before his terminal with a diabolical look in his eyes, was guiding it by remote control, furiously feeding it data that he had pulled out of the sealed archive of Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. The faceless assassin stood before the door of the sanctuary, now, and Andy gave it mysterious digital commands that it transmitted to the sanctuary’s gatekeeper, and instantly the door slid open, revealing another beyond and another, and another, until at last the faceless killer stood within the sacred hiding-place of Prime itself—

  Raising a weapon. Calmly firing. Prime bathed in blue flame. Sizzling, charring, blackening.

  And in that same moment the Entities everywhere on Earth magically shriveling, withering, dying—the sun rising the next day on a world set free—

  Anson looked back toward Steve, who was leaning against the wall of the house, watching Anson in an oddly placid way. Anson managed a pale smile and said, “You know, don’t you, that I haven’t given much of a shit about the whole Resistance thing since Tony died? That I’ve just been going through the motions?”

  “Yes. I know that, Anson.”

  “This might change things, though. If you could only find your damn renegade mutant genius son, finally. And if you can make him crack open the Borgmann archive. And if the Borgmann stuff should give us some clue to the nature and whereabouts of Prime. And if we can then insert a properly programmed killer who—”

  “I’d say that’s a hell of a lot of ifs.”

  “It is, isn’t it, cousin? Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. What do you say? Let’s wrap up the Resistance once and for all, acknowledge that the world is going to belong to the Entities until the end of time, shut down the entire underground network that you and Doug and Paul spent the last thirty years putting together, and just go on peacefully sitting on our asses up here, living our quiet little lives the way we’ve been living them all along. What do you say, Steve? Shall we give up the tired old pretense of a Resistance at last?”

  “Is that what you want, Anson?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Neither do I. Let me see what I can do about finding Andy.”

  Where they took him, wrapped and trussed as he was, was LACON headquarters on Figueroa Street, the ninety-story tower of black marble that was the home of the puppet city government. They sat him against the wall in a cavernous, brightly lit hallway and left him there for what seemed like a day and a half, though he supposed it was really no more than an hour or so. Andy didn’t give a damn. He was numb. They could have put him in a cesspool and he wouldn’t have cared. He wasn’t physically damaged—his automatic internal circuit check was still running and it came up green—but the humiliation was so intense that he felt crashed. He felt destroyed. The only thing he wanted to know now was the name of the hacker who had done it to him.

  He had heard a lot about the Figueroa Street building. It had ceilings about twenty feet high everywhere, so that there would be room for Entities to move around. Voices reverberated in those vast open spaces like echoes in a cavern. As he sat there he could feel inchoate streams of blurred sounds going lalloping back and forth all around him, above, below, fore, aft. He wanted to hide from them. His brain felt raw. He had never taken such a pounding in his life.

  Now and then a couple of mammoth Entities would come rumbling through the hall, tiptoeing on their tentacles in that weirdly dainty mincing way of theirs. With them came a little entourage of humans, bustling along on every side of them like tiny courtiers hovering around members of some exalted nobility. Nobody paid any attention to Andy. He was just a piece of furniture lying there against the wall.

  Then some LACON people returned, different ones from before.

  “Is this the pardoner, over here?” someone asked.

  “That one, yeah.”

  “She wants to see him now.”

  “You think we should fix him up a little first?”

  “She said now.”

  A hand at Andy’s shoulder, rocking him gently. Lifting him. Hands working busily, undoing the wrappings that bound his legs together, but leaving his arms still strapped up. They let him take a couple of wobbly steps. He glared at them as he worked to get the kinks out of his thigh muscles.

  “All right, fellow. Come along now: it’s interview time. And remember, don’t make any trouble or you’ll get hurt.”

  He let them shuffle him down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office that had a ceiling high enough to provide an Entity with all the room it could possibly want. He didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk down at the far end, about a mile away from him. In that colossal room, it looked like a toy desk. She looked like a toy woman. The LACONs pushed him into a chair near the door and left him alone with her. Trussed up like that, he didn’t pose much of a risk.

  “Are you John Doe?” she asked.

  “Do you think I am?”

  “That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”

  “I give lots of names as I travel around. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”

  “Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”

  “You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”

  “Please,” she said. “This’ll be easier if you cooperate. The accusations against you include illegal entry, illegal seizure of a vehicle, and illegal interfacing activity—specifically, selling pardons. Do you have a statement?”

  “No.”

  “You deny that you’re a pardoner?”

  “I don’t deny, I don’t affirm. What’s the goddamned use?”

  She rose and came out from behind the desk and very slowly walked toward him, pausing when she was about fifteen feet away. Andy stared sullenly at his shoes.

  “Look up at me,” she said.

  “That would be a whole lot of effort.”

  “Look up,” she said. There was a sharp edge to her voice. “Whether you’re a pardoner or not isn’t the issue. We know you’re a pardoner. I know you’re a pardoner.” And she called him by a name he hadn’t used in a very long time. “You’re Mickey Megabyte, aren’t you?”

  Now he looked at her.

  Stared. Had trouble believing he was seeing what he saw. Felt a rush of memories come flooding up out of long ago.

  The fluffy red hair was styled differently, now, clinging more tightly to her head. The five years had added a little flesh to her body here and there and some lines in her face. But she hadn’t really changed all that much.

  What was her name? Vanessa? Clarissa? Melissa?

  Tessa. That was it. Tessa.

  “Tessa?” he said hoarsely. “Is that who you are?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s who I am.”

  Andy felt his jaw sagging stupidly. This promised to be even worse than what the hacker had done to him. But there was no way to run from it.

  “You worked for LACON even then, yes. I remember.”

  “That pardon you sold me wasn’t any good, Mickey. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, someone who was important to me, but when I tried to get through the wall they stopped me just like that, and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then Bill and I would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat. Instead he went without me. I never saw him again. And it cost me three years’ worth of promotions. I was lucky that that was all.
”

  “I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” Andy said.

  “Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”

  Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. It wasn’t easy for him to look into them.

  “You still feel like killing me?” Andy asked. “Are you planning to have me executed?”

  “No and no, Mickey. That isn’t your name either, is it?”

  “Not really.”

  “I can’t tell you how astounded I was, when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe, new in town and working the Pershing Square area. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. That’s what they reassigned me to, after my hearing: dealing with pardoners. Isn’t that cute, Mickey? Poetic justice. When they first assigned me to this job I used to wonder if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, no, not a chance, he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they pulled in this John Doe, and I went past you in the hall and saw your face.”

  There was no hiding from the vindictive gleam in those gray eyes.

  This called for desperate measures.

  “Listen to me, Tessa,” Andy said, letting a little of that useful hoarseness come back into his voice. “Do you think you could manage to believe that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s God’s own truth.”

  “Right. My heart goes out to you. I’m sure it’s been years of unending agony for you.”

  “I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted, Tessa. You’re the one I’ve, regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”

  She considered that. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him even for a fraction of a second, but he could see that she was considering it.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked, after a bit.

  “I stiff people because I don’t want to seem too perfect,” he told her. “You have to stiff the customers once in a while or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous. You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. One out of every five, approximately. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work,”

  “You deliberately cheated me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought that it must have been deliberate. You seemed so cool, so professional. So perfect, except for that dumb try at making a pass at me, and when you did that I just thought, oh, well, men, what can you expect? I was sure the pardon would be valid. I couldn’t see how it would miss. And then I got to the wall and they grabbed me. And then I thought, that bastard purposely sold me out. He was too good just to have flubbed it up by accident.” Her tone was calm but the anger was all too evident in her eyes. “Couldn’t you have stiffed the next one, Mickey? Why did it have to be me?”

  He looked at her for a long time, calculating things.

  Then he took a deep breath and said, putting all he had into it, “Because I had fallen for you in a big way.”

  “Bullshit, Mickey. Bullshit. You didn’t even know me. I was just some stranger who walked in off the street to hire you.”

  “That’s just it. It happened just like that.” He felt an inspired improvisation coming on, and went with it. “There I was full of all kinds of crazy instant lunatic fantasies about you, all of a sudden ready to turn my nice orderly life upside down for you, write exit passes for both of us, take us on a trip around the world, the whole works. But all you could see was somebody you had hired to do a job. I didn’t know about the guy from San Diego. All I knew was that I saw you and you were gorgeous and I wanted you. I fell in love with you right then and there.”

  “Yeah. Fell in love. That’s very touching.”

  So far, not so good. But you can do this, he thought. Just let it come rolling out and see where it goes.

  He said, “You don’t think that’s love, Tessa? Well, call it something else, then, whatever you want. It was something that I had never let myself feel before. It isn’t smart to get too involved, I always thought, it ties you down, the risks are too big. And then I saw you and I talked to you a little and right away I thought something could be happening between us and things started to change inside me, and I thought, Yeah, yeah, go with it this time, let it happen, this may make everything different And you stood there not seeing it, not even beginning to notice, just jabbering on endlessly about how important the pardon was for you. Cold as ice, you were. That hurt me. It hurt me terribly, Tessa. So I stiffed you. And afterwards I thought, Jesus, I ruined that wonderful girl’s life and it was just because I got myself into a snit, and that was a fucking petty thing to have done. I’ve been sorry ever since. You don’t have to believe that. I didn’t know about San Diego. That makes it even worse for me.”

  She had not said anything all this time. Her implacable stony stillness began to get to him. To puncture it Andy said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: who was he?”

  “He wasn’t anybody,” she said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “He isn’t a who. He’s a what. An it. An android, a mobile anti-pardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Santa Monica. Something new that we have going around town looking for people like you.”

  “Oh,” Andy said, stunned, as if she had kicked him. “Oh.”

  “The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”

  “It gave me one too. Turned my brain half to mush.”

  “There was no way you could have beaten it. You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned ace of a hacker, you know that? Yes, of course you do. Of course.”

  “Why do you work for them?” Andy asked.

  She shrugged. “Everybody works for them, one way or another. Except people like you, I guess. Why shouldn’t we? It’s their world, isn’t it?”

  “It didn’t used to be.”

  “A lot of things didn’t used to be. What does that matter now? And it’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for TTD.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for TTD?”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”

  “To whom?”

  “The network always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive, even from the outside. You’ll work for us.”

  “You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” Andy said, astonished.

  “It beats TTD.”

  She couldn’t possibly be serious, he thought. This was some game she was playing with him. They would be fools to trust him in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to give him any kind of access to their net.

  “Well?” she said, when he remained silent. “Is it a deal, Mickey?”

  He was silent a little while longer. She was serious, he realized. Handing him the keys to the kingdom. Well, well, well. They must have their reasons, he supposed. He’d be the fool, if he said no.

  He said, “I’ll do it, yes. On one condition.”

  She whistled. “You really have balls, don’t you?”

  “Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. Okay?”

  “You aren’t in any position to lay down conditions, you know.”

  “Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t mak
e me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”

  She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”

  “Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”

  “You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”

  “Let me find that out.”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” Andy said.

  It surprised him tremendously that she would go along with it. But she did. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and got off some orders, and pretty soon they brought in the android he had encountered in the park, or maybe another one that had the same bland face, the same general nondescript gray appearance. It looked him over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.

  Someone came in and took the security lock off Andy’s wrists and fastened his ankles together with it, and left again. Tessa gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to him and they made contact. And Andy jumped right in.

  He was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but he knew what he needed to do and he knew he had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a terminal, it was just a unit—and go for what lay behind it. He would offer no implant-to-implant access this time. No little one-on-one courtesies at all. Quickly he bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. Moving intuitively and instantaneously, because he knew that he was finished if he stopped to spell things out for himself, he leaped right over it while the android was still setting up its combinations, piercing its borgmann interface and diving underneath it before the android could do anything to stop him. That took him instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level, which was a machine of unthinkably enormous capacity, and as he arrived he gave the monster a hearty handshake.

  There was a real thrill in that.

  For the first time Andy understood, truly understood, what old Borgmann had achieved by building the interface that linked human biochips to Entity mainframes. All that power, all those zillions of megabytes squatting there, and he was plugged right into it. He felt like a mouse hitchhiking on the back of an elephant, but that was all right. He might be only a mouse but that mouse was getting a tremendous ride. Quickly he found the android’s data chain and tied a bow-knot in it to keep it from coming after him. Then, hanging on tight, he let himself go soaring along on the hurricane winds of that colossal machine for the sheer fun of the ride.