“I’m supposed to be guarding you,” Frank said again, patiently. “Not thinking about what you might or might not do. My father would roast me alive if I let you get away.”
“I would work much better if I weren’t so thirsty, Frank. Get me a beer. I’m not going anywhere. Trust me.” Andy smiled slyly. “Don’t you think I’m a trustworthy person, Frank?”
“If you do go anywhere, and I don’t get roasted alive because you do, I’ll personally hunt you down and roast you myself,” Frank said. “I swear that by the Colonel’s bones, Andy.”
He went down the hall. When he returned, about a minute and a half later, Andy was bent over the computer screen again.
“Well, I escaped,” Andy said. “Then I thought of a new approach I wanted to try, and I decided to come back. Give me the goddamned beer.”
“Andy—” Frank said, handing the bottle over.
“Yes?”
“Look, there’s something I’ve been intending to tell you. I want to apologize for all that shotgun stuff, the day you arrived. It wasn’t very pretty. But I knew what my father and Steve would say if they found out you had been here and I had let you go away again. I couldn’t take the chance that you would.”
“Forget it, Frank. Don’t you think I understand why you pushed that gun in my face? I’m not holding any grudge.”
“I’d like to believe that.”
“You might just as well, then.”
“Just why did you come back here?” Frank asked him.
“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer. Part of it was just a wild impulse, I guess. But also—well—look, Frank, I’ll kill you if you say anything about this to anybody else. But there was something else going on in my mind too. I did some shitty things while I was wandering around the country. And when I headed north out of Los Angeles I found myself thinking that maybe I just ought to stop off here and make myself of some use to my family, if I could, instead of acting like a selfish asshole all of the time. Something like that.”
“You almost turned right around and left again, though. Before you were even inside the gate.”
Andy grinned. “It isn’t easy for me not to act like a selfish asshole. Don’t you know that about me, Frank?”
Eleven at night. No moon, no clouds, plenty of stars. Frank was off duty now; Martin had taken over the job of guarding Andy. Frank stood outside the communications center, looking up into the darkness, thinking about too many things at once.
His father. This mission, and whether it would achieve anything. Andy, about whom so many terrible things had been said, suddenly becoming so repentant, sweating away in there to find the secret that would let them overthrow the Entities. And how wonderful everything would be if by some miracle they did overthrow the Entities and regain their freedom.
He closed his eyes for a moment; and when he opened them again, the blazing stars arrayed in that great arch above him seemed to engulf him, to draw him up into their midst.
Cindy knew all their names. She had taught them to him long ago, and he still remembered a great many of them. That was Orion up there, an easy one to find because of the three stars of his belt. Mintak, Alnillam, Alnitak, they were. Strange names. Who had first called them that, and why? The one in the right shoulder, that was Betelgeuse. And there, there in the warrior-god’s left knee, that was Rigel.
Frank wondered which star the Entities had come from. We’ll probably never know, he thought. Were there different kinds of Entities living on the different stars? Might there be a world of Entities greater than our Entities somewhere, beings that would conquer ours someday, and devour their civilization, and set free their slaves? Oh, how he hoped that would happen! He loathed the Entities for what they had done to the world. He despised them. He envied Rasheed for being the one who had been chosen to kill Entity Prime, a task he had desperately wanted for himself.
Stars are suns, he told himself. And suns have planets, and planets have people.
He wondered what kept the stars from felling out of the sky. Some of them did, he knew. He had seen it happen. Often on August nights they would go streaking across the sky, plummeting toward doom somewhere far away. But why did some fall, and not others? There was so much that he didn’t know. He would have to ask Andy some of these questions, one of these days.
Maybe the Entities’ star was one of those that had fallen. Was that why they went around to other stars and stole the worlds of those who lived there? Yes, Frank thought, that must be it. The Entities’ star has fallen. And so have the Entities, in a way: they have fallen on us. Looking up into the dark glittering beauty of the night sky, Frank felt a second fierce surge of hatred for the conquerors of Earth who had come out of that sky to steal Earth from its rightful owners.
One day we’ll rise up and kill them all.
It felt very good to think that, even though he had trouble making himself believe it ever would happen.
He glanced toward the communications center, and wondered how Andy was coming along in there. Then Frank looked up at the stars one last time; and then he went off to get some sleep.
Andy worked through the night, which was the way he preferred to do things, and put the last pieces of the puzzle together at the very moment when the sun was coming up. It was the time of the changing of his guard, too, James’s shift ending and Martin’s beginning.
Or perhaps it was the other way around, Martin going off duty and James arriving. Andy had never been very good at telling them apart. Frank stood out from the others to some degree—there was an extra spark of intelligence or intuition somewhere in him, Andy thought—but the rest of Anson’s kids all seemed interchangeable, like a bunch of androids. It was mostly that they all looked alike, poured from the same mold: that awesome Carmichael mold that never seemed to relinquish its grip on the family protoplasm. Glossy blond hair, chilly blue eyes, smooth even features, long legs, flat bellies—the entire crowd of them here at the ranch had been like that, boys and girls alike, decade after decade. Martin and James and Frank and Maggie and Cheryl in this generation; La-La, Jane, Ansonia, that whole bunch, too, just the same; Anson and Tony before them, and Heather and Leslyn, Cassandra and Julie and Mark, Jill and Charlie and Mike; and, even farther back, the Colonel’s three children, Ron and Anse and Rosalie. And the near-mythical Colonel himself. Generation after generation, going back to the primordial Carmichael at the beginning of time. Outsiders might come in, Peggy, Eloise, Carole, Raven, but the genes of most of them were gobbled up, never to be seen again. Only the Gannett input, the genes for brown eyes and too much weight and brown hair that went thin early, had somehow persevered. And, of course, so had Khalid’s, in spades; Khalid’s huge brood only too plainly bore the mark of Khalid. But Khalid was truly an outsider, so thoroughly non-Carmichael that his genetic heritage had succeeded in dominating even that of the indomitable Colonel.
Andy knew that he was being unfair: they must really be very different inside, Martin and James and Maggie and all the rest of the tribe, actual separate persons with individual identities. No doubt they would be indignant at being clumped together like this. So let them be indignant, and to hell with them. Andy had always felt overwhelmed by them all, outnumbered, outblonded. As his father also had been, Andy was sure. And probably his grandfather, also, Doug, whom he only faintly remembered.
“Tell your father I’ve finished the job and I’ve got the stuff he wants,” Andy said to Martin, or perhaps it was James, as the young man went off duty. “The whole business, every parameter lined up just right. No question of it. If he’ll come over here, I’ll lay it all out for him.”
“Yes,” said James, or perhaps it was Martin, with absolutely no inflection in his voice. He showed hardly any more comprehension of what Andy had just told him than if Andy had said to him that he had discovered a method for transforming latitude into longitude. And off he went to bear the news to Anson.
“Good morning, Andy,” the newly arrived brother
said, settling in for his shift.
“Morning, Martin.”
“I’m James.”
“Ah. Yes. James.” Andy acknowledged the correction with a nod and turned his attention back to the screen.
The yellow lines cutting across the pink field, the splashes of blue, the burning scarlet circle. It was all there, yes. He felt no particular sensation of triumph: a little of the opposite emotion, perhaps. After days and days of rummaging through the foul sewer that was the Borgmann archive, and then a gradual direct thrust through the area of essential Entity-relationship files, and now this sustained ten-hour burst of drilling down into the core of the matter, he had laid bare everything that Anson had asked him to find. Anson now could go out and strike the blow that would win his war against the Entities, and hoorah for Anson. What Andy was thinking in the moment of glorious attainment, mainly, was that now they would let him have his life back.
“I hear you’ve got some great news for us,” said a voice from the door.
Frank stood there, beaming like the newly risen sun.
“I was expecting your father,” Andy said.
“He’s still asleep. He’s been feeling poorly lately, you know. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Andy decided not to stand on ceremony. If they didn’t feel like sending Anson over, well, he would explain things to Frank, and so be it. During the search Frank had appeared to understand more of what he was doing than Anson, anyway.
“Here,” Andy said, “this is where they keep Prime.” He indicated the scarlet circle. “Downtown Los Angeles, in the strip between the Santa Ana Freeway and the dry bed of the old Los Angeles River. That’s just a couple of miles south and east of the place where my father thought he was being kept at the time of the Tony episode. I tracked down an ancient city gazetteer that says the neighborhood is a warehouse district, but of course that was back in the twentieth century, and things may have changed a lot. The Entities’ own digital code for Prime translates out to Oneness, so our name for him was pretty damned close.”
Frank’s grin grew broader. “That’s terrific. What kind of security arrangements do they have for him?”
“A ring of three gates. They work just like the gates in the city walls, with biochip-driven gatekeepers.” Andy sent two clicks along the line that connected him to the computer and a batch of code jumped out into a window on the auxiliary screen. “These are access protocols, which I’ve derived from stuff that Borgmann had collected and stashed away in Prague. They were operative when Prime was being kept in the castle there, and I think they’ll still be good. From what I can tell, they don’t seem to have changed any of the numbers after the move to L.A. The protocols will take your man through the gates one by one, pretty much as far as he wants to go, and his mission ought to seem perfectly legitimate to the security screens.”
“What about the centrality of Prime to the Entity neural framework?” Frank asked. “Do you see any sign of a communal linkage?”
Those were fancy words. Andy gave him a quick look tinged with new respect. “I can only offer you an informed guess about that,” Andy said.
“Okay.”
“In Borgmann’s time, all the lines of communication, everywhere around the world, ran to Prime’s nest in Prague. I’m talking about computer access. There’s a similar heavy convergence on the Los Angeles nest today. Which is a good argument for the centrality of Prime to their computer system, but it doesn’t prove anything about the supposed telepathic linkage between Prime and the other Entities that Anson believes exists, and which I gather is critical to the whole assassination plan. On the other hand, if there’s no such telepathic linkage I think there would have to be a great many more strands of on-line communication than I’ve been able to find. And that leads me to think that a portion, perhaps the greater portion, of the communication between Prime and the lesser Entities must be carried out by some form of telepathy. Which, of course, we aren’t capable of detecting.”
“This is all a guess, you say.”
“All a guess, yes.”
“Show me Prime’s nest again.”
Andy brought the scarlet circle onto the screen once more, standing out brightly against the gray backdrop of a Los Angeles street map.
“We’ll blow him halfway to the moon,” said Frank.
Rasheed had no implant, and Khalid didn’t want him to have one installed. Implants, Khalid said firmly, were devices of Satan. Since Andy saw no way to carry out the Prime mission other than by moving Rasheed through the Entity security fines by remote-control on-line impulse, this created a certain problem, which required weeks of negotiation to resolve. In the end Khalid backed off, after Anson convinced him that the only way to bring Rasheed back alive from the venture was to guide him via an implant. Without an implant it became a suicide mission or no mission at all, and, faced with that choice, Khalid opted to let the Devil’s gadget be inserted into his eldest son’s forearm, with the proviso that the dread thing be taken out again once the mission had been carried out. But by the time all that was agreed on, it was June.
Now the implant had to be put in, which was done by the man from San Francisco who had built the one for Tony. Rasheed’s was of similar but improved design, with all the tracer features that its predecessor had had, but a wider and more versatile range of audio signals by which the remote operator—Andy, that would be—could guide Rasheed through his tasks by wireless modem, or, if need be, by direct vocal instruction. Another three months went by while the implant was constructed and installed and Rasheed went through the necessary period of healing and training.
Andy was impressed by the swiftness with which Rasheed learned how to interpret and act on the signals he received from his implant. Rasheed, who was twenty years old, slender and fragile-looking and taller even than his long-shanked father, had the shy, alert look of some delicate forest creature that was always ready to break into flight at the crackling of a twig. To Andy he was an enigma of the most profound sort, elusive and remote, indeed virtually unreachable. Rasheed could easily have been something that had descended from space with the Entities. He hardly ever spoke, except in answer to a direct question and not always even then; and when he did respond it was inevitably with a parsimonious syllable or two uttered just at the threshold of audibility, rarely anything more. The extraordinary grace and beauty of his appearance, verging on the angelic, contributed to the extraterrestrial aura that forever cloaked him: the great dark liquid eyes, the finely chiseled features, the luminous glinting of his skin, the swirling halo of glowing hair. He listened gravely to everything that Andy had to tell him, filing it all away in some retentive recess of his inscrutable soul and giving it back perfectly whenever Andy quizzed him on it. That was very impressive. Rasheed had the efficiency of a computer; and Andy understood computers very well. Yet Rasheed was more than just a mechanism, Andy sensed. There seemed to be a person inside there, an actual human being, shy, sensitive, perceptive, highly intelligent. One thing Andy understood above all else about computers was that they were not intelligent in the least.
At the end of November Andy pronounced him ready to go.
“In the beginning, you know, I thought that this was an absolutely crazy plan,” he said to Frank. Andy and Frank had become friends, of a sort, lately. Andy was no longer under round-the-clock guard; but Frank was with him much of the time, simply to keep him company. They had both become accustomed to that. “I didn’t see, from the moment when Anson and your father first explained it to me, how it could possibly have any chance of succeeding. Send your assassin into a den of telepathic aliens and expect that he’d go unnoticed? Lunacy, is what I thought. Rasheed’s mind will be broadcasting his lethal intentions at every step of the way, and the Entities will pick up on them before he ever gets within five miles of Prime. And as soon as they decide that this is something serious, not just some deranged joke, they’ll give him a Push—hell, man, they’ll fucking give him a Shove—and it’ll be goodbye,
Rasheed.”
But that, Andy went on, had been before his first meeting with Rasheed. He knew better now. His months with Rasheed had brought him to an awareness of Rasheed’s special skill, the great thing that Rasheed had learned from his equally mysterious father: the art of Not Being There. Rasheed was capable of disappearing totally behind the wall of his forehead. His training had taught him how to reduce his mind to an absolute blank. The Entities would find nothing to read if they turned their telepathy on Rasheed. It was Andy himself, far away, who would be the true assassin. Do this, do that, turn right, turn left. All of which Rasheed would do, without thinking about it. And even the Entities would have no means of picking up Andy’s remote-control computer commands with their telepathy.
Anson, who had kept out of the picture all summer long, now emerged from his seclusion to issue the final directives. “Four cars,” Anson said crisply, when all the relevant personnel had gathered in the chart room, “will be dispatched to Los Angeles at intervals of ten to fifteen minutes. The drivers are to be Frank, Mark, Charlie, and Cheryl. Rasheed will ride with Cheryl at the outset, but somewhere around Camarillo she will drop him off to be picked up by Mark, and Mark will hand him off to Frank in Northridge—”
He shot a glance toward Andy, who was sitting slouched at his keyboard, languidly bringing all this stuff up in three dimensions on the big chart-room screen as Anson laid it out.
“Are you getting all this, Andy?” he asked, using the hard, crisp tone that everyone at the ranch thought of as the Colonel-voice, though the Colonel himself might have been surprised to know that.
“I’m right with you, commander,” Andy said. “Just keep on rapping it forth.”
Anson glowered a little. He looked haggard and there were dark rings under his eyes. In his left hand he held a zigzaggy walking-stick that he had carved some time back from the glossy red wood of a manzanita branch, and he was tapping it steadily against his left boot, as though to keep his toes awake.