The Alien Years

  He liked also to talk with Khalid about God. Allah, is what Khalid called Him, but Khalid said that it made little difference what name one used for God, so long as one accepted the truth of His wisdom and perfection and omnipotence. No one had ever said much to Frank about God while he was growing up, nor could he find much evidence for His existence as he contemplated the bloody saga that was human history. But Khalid believed unquestioningly in Him. “It is a matter of faith,” Khalid said softly. “Without Him, there is no meaning in the world. How could the world exist, if He had not fashioned it? He is the Lord of the Universe. And He is our protector: the Compassionate, the Merciful. To Him alone do we turn for help.”

  “If God is our compassionate and merciful protector,” said Frank, “why did He send the Entities to us? And, for that matter, why did He create sickness and death and war and all other evil things?”

  Khalid smiled. “I asked these same questions when I was a small boy. You must understand that God’s ways are not for us to question. He is beyond our comprehension. But those who are rightly guided by God, they shall surely triumph. As is revealed on the very first page of this book.” And he held out to Frank his old, worn copy of the Koran, the one that he had carried around from place to place all his life.

  The problem of the existence of God continued to mystify Frank. Again and again he went to Khalid for instruction; and again and again he came away unconvinced, and yet still fascinated. He wanted the world to have pattern and meaning; and he could see that for Khalid it did; and yet he could not help wishing that God had given the world some tangible evidence of His presence, revealing Himself not just to specially chosen prophets who had lived long ago in far-off lands, but in modern times, day in and day out, everywhere and to everyone. God remained invisible, though. “God’s ways are not for us to question,” Khalid would say. “He is beyond our comprehension.” The ways of the Entities were also, apparently, not for us to question; they were as mysterious in their aloofness as was God, and just as incomprehensible. But the Entities had been visible from the first. Why would God not show Himself to His people even for a moment?

  When he went to visit with Khalid, Frank usually would stop also at the nearby cemetery to pass a quick moment at the graves of his father and mother, and at Cindy’s grave; and sometimes at those of others who had died in the bombing attack, Steve and Peggy and Leslyn and James and the rest, and even the graves of people of the olden days whom he had never known, the Colonel and the Colonel’s son Anse and Andy’s grandfather Doug. It gave him a sense of the long past, of the continuity of human life across time, to walk among the resting-places of all these people and contemplate the lives they had led and the things they had sought to achieve.

  But this day he never quite got as far as the graveyard, because he was only a few paces along the path when he heard Andy calling to him in an oddly hoarse voice from the porch of the communications center. “Frank! Frank! Get in here, on the double!”

  “What is it?” Frank asked. He took in at a glance Andy’s flushed face, his staring eyes. Andy looked badly shaken: stunned, almost dazed. “Something wrong?”

  Andy shook his head. His lips were moving, but nothing coherent seemed to be coming out. Frank ran to him. The Entities, Andy seemed to be saying. The Entities. The Entities. He sounded so strange: thick-tongued, almost inaudible. Drunk, maybe?

  “What about them?” Frank asked. “Is a party of Entities heading toward the ranch right now? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No. No. Nothing like that.” And then, with an effort:

  “They’re leaving, Frank!”

  “Leaving?” Frank blinked. The unexpected word hit him with enormous force. What are you talking about, Andy? “Leaving where?”

  “Leaving the Earth. Packing up, clearing out!” Andy’s eyes looked wild. “Some are gone already. The rest will be going soon.”

  Strange, incomprehensible words. They fell upon Frank like an avalanche. But they had no meaning at first, any more than an avalanche would, only impact. They were mere noises without relevance to anything Frank could understand.

  The Entities are leaving the Earth. Leaving, packing, clearing out.

  What? What? What? Gradually Frank decoded what Andy had said, extracting actual concepts from it, but even so he had trouble getting his mind fully around it. Leaving? The Entities? Andy was speaking craziness. He must be in some delusional state. All the same, Frank felt a dizzying wave of astonishment and bewilderment engulf him. Almost without thinking he looked up, staring into the sky, as though he might find it full of Entity starships this very minute, dwindling and vanishing against the blueness. But all he saw was the great arching dome of the heavens and a few fluffy clouds off to the east.

  Then Andy seized his wrist, tugging at him, drawing him into the communications center. Pointing at the screen of the nearest computer, he said, “I’m pulling it in from everywhere—New York, London, Europe, a bunch of places. Including Los Angeles. It’s been happening all morning. They’re packing up, getting aboard their ships, moving on out. In some areas they’re completely gone already. You can walk right into their compounds, nothing to stop you. Nobody’s there.”

  “Let me see.”

  Frank peered at the screen. Words sprawled across it. Andy touched a button; the words moved along, other words took their place. The words, like Andy’s spoken ones of a few moments before, were reluctant to yield any meaning to him. Frank conjured significance out of them slowly, with a great effort. Leaving…leaving…leaving. It was so unexpected, and so strange. So damned confusing.

  “Look here,” Andy said. He did something to his computer. The words disappeared and a picture blossomed on the screen.

  “This is London,” he said.

  An Entity starship standing in a field, a park, some broad flat expanse of greenery. Half a dozen colossal Entities solemnly parading toward it in single file, stepping aboard a platform, riding up toward the hatch that opened for them in the starship’s side. The hatch closing. The ship rising on a column of flame.

  “You see?” Andy cried. “The same thing, all over the world. They’re tired of being here. They’re bored with Earth. They’re going home, Frank!”

  So it seemed. Frank began to laugh.

  “Yes. Pretty fucking funny, isn’t it?” Andy said.

  “Very funny, yes. A riot.” The laughter was coming from Frank in unstoppable gales. He fought to pull himself together. “We sit up on this mountainside for fifty years trying to figure out ways of making them go away, and nothing works, and finally we decide that we’re simply never going to succeed. We give the whole thing up. And then a couple of years later they go away anyhow, just like that. Why? Why?” He wasn’t laughing any more. “For God’s sake, Andy, why? What sense does any of it make?”

  “Sense? You should know better than to expect anything that the Entities do to make sense to us. The Entities do what the Entities do, and we’re not meant to know why. And never will know, I guess.—Hey, you know something, Frank, you look like you’re almost about to cry!”

  “I do?”

  “You ought to see your face right now.”

  “I don’t think I want to.” Frank turned away from Andy’s computers and wandered around the room, bewildered, confounded.

  The possibility that all this might actually be happening was starting to sink in. And, as it did, he felt a sensation as of the ground liquefying beneath him, of the whole mountain atop which he stood turning plastic and insubstantial and beginning slowly to flow down itself toward the sea.

  The Entities are leaving? Leaving? Leaving?

  Then he should be dancing with glee. But no, no; he was lost in perplexity instead. His eyes stung with anger. And suddenly he understood why.

  It maddened him that they might be gone from the world before he had found a way of driving them out. He realized in amazement that the sudden departure of the Entities, if indeed they had departed, would create a yawning v
acancy in his soul. His hatred for their presence on Earth was a huge part of him; and if they were gone, without his ever having had a chance to express that hatred properly, it would leave a mighty absence where that presence had been.

  Andy came up behind him.

  “Frank? What’s going on, Frank?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I feel so goddamned peculiar all of a sudden. It’s like—well, we had this big high holy purpose here, you know. Which was to get rid of the Entities. But we couldn’t bring it off, and then it happened anyway, without our even lifting a finger, and here we all are. Here. We. Are.”

  “So? I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  Frank groped for the right words. “What I’m saying is that I feel—I don’t know, some kind of letdown, I guess. A kind of hollowness. It’s like you push and push against a door all your life, and the door won’t budge, and then you stop pushing and walk away, and then—Surprise! Surprise!—the door opens by itself. It bewilders you, you know what I mean? It unsettles you.”

  “I suppose it would, yes. I can see that.”

  But Frank saw that Andy didn’t see it at all. And then his thoughts raced off in the other direction entirely. None of this could actually be occurring. It was idiotic to believe that any such thing as a voluntary Entity withdrawal was going on.

  He nodded toward the screen. “Look, what if what we see here isn’t real?”

  Andy gave him a vexed look. “Of course it’s real. How can it not be real?”

  “You of all people shouldn’t need to ask that. It could be some kind of hacker hoax, couldn’t it? You know more about these things than I do. Couldn’t it be that somebody has worked up all these pictures, these bulletins, and sent them out over the Net, and that there isn’t a shred of truth to any of them? That would be possible, wouldn’t it?”

  “Possible, yes. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening.” Andy smiled. “If you want, though, we could check it out at first hand, you know.”

  “I don’t understand. How?”

  “Get in a car. Drive down to Los Angeles right now.”

  They made the journey in just two and a half hours, which was an hour less than usual. The roads were deserted. The LACON checkpoints were unmanned.

  The route Frank had chosen brought them into the city via the Pacific Coast Highway, which took them along the western rim of the wall and delivered them to the Santa Monica gate. As he made his inland turn toward the wall he saw that the gate was wide open, and that there were no LACON functionaries anywhere in sight. He drove on through, into downtown Santa Monica.

  “You see?” Andy asked. “You believe, now?”

  Frank answered with a curt nod. He believed, yes. The unthinkable, altogether inexplicable thing seemed really to be true. But he was finding all of this harder to digest than he could ever have expected. It was as though some great inner wall cut him off from the joy he should be feeling over the bewildering departure of the Entities. What he felt instead of happiness was something closer to despair, a profound inner confusion. That was the last thing he would have expected to feel on a day like this.

  It’s that sudden sense of absence, he thought. He saw that clearly now. The central purpose of his life had been stripped from him in the course of a single day, had been yanked away lightheartedly, almost flippantly, by the ever-mystifying beings from the stars, and it might not be easy for him to find a way to cope with that.

  Frank parked the car a few blocks inside the wall, just at the edge of the old Third Street Promenade. There had been a huge shopping mall there once, but the shops had been abandoned long ago and boarded up. Santa Monica was a silent city. Here and there, little scatterings of people could be seen moving slowly about in a dazed, blank-faced way, as though they had been drugged, or were walking in their sleep, lost in trances. No one was looking at anyone else. No one was saying anything. They were like ghosts.

  “I thought a wild celebration would be going on,” Frank said puzzledly. “People dancing in the streets.”

  Andy shook his head. “No. Wrong, Frank. You don’t understand what they’re like, these people. You haven’t lived among them the way I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look over there.”

  On the street facing the abandoned mall stood an old gray-walled high-rise building that bore the LACON insignia over its entrance. A small crowd had gathered in front of it: another group of silent, stunned people, standing side by side in five or six ragged lines, gazing upward at the building. A solitary LACON man stared back at them from a high window. He was pale, dead-eyed, frozen-faced.

  Andy gestured toward the building. “There’s your celebration,” he said.

  “I don’t get it. What’s he looking at them like that for? Is he afraid that they’re going to come upstairs and lynch him?”

  “Maybe they will, later on. It wouldn’t take much to trigger it. But right now they just want him to give them the Entities back. And the look on his face is his way of saying that he can’t.”

  “They want to have them back?”

  “They miss them, Frank. They love them. Don’t you get it?”

  Frank swung around to face him. He felt his face growing hot.

  “Please don’t joke around with me, Andy. Not now.”

  “I’m not joking. Put your mind to it, man. The Entities have been here since before either of us were born. Long before. They gave one little nudge and civilization simply fell apart, governments, armies, everything. And after they killed off something like half the population of the world to show that they meant business, they put a new system together in which they made all the rules and everybody did whatever they told them to do. No more private ownership of anything, no more individual initiative, just keep your head down and work at whatever job the Entities may give you and live wherever the Entities want you to live and it’ll all be nice and sweet, no war, no poverty, nobody going hungry or sleeping in the streets.”

  “I know all this,” Frank said, irked a little by Andy’s tone.

  “But do you understand that in time most people came to prefer the new system to the old one? They adored it, Frank. Only a few isolated crackpots like the ones at a certain ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara thought there might be anything wrong with it. For some reason the Entities chose to leave those crackpots alone, but just about everybody else who didn’t love the system wound up in prison somewhere, or getting dead very fast. And now, poof, the Entities are gone and there’s no system any more. All these people feel abandoned. They don’t know how to deal with things on their own, and there’s no one to tell them. Do you see, Frank? Do you see?”

  He nodded, his face reddening.

  Yes, Andy. Yes. He saw. Of course he saw. And felt very foolish for having needed to have it all spelled out for him. He supposed he was just being slow-witted today, amidst the general startlement of this day’s bewildering events.

  “You know,” Frank said, “Cindy made pretty much the same point to me, the day the ranch was bombed. How there were all these millions of people in the world who found life much easier just doing what the Entities told them to do.” He chuckled. “It was like, the gods were here and then just like that they went home, and now nobody can figure out what it all means. As Khalid likes to say, the ways of Allah are beyond our comprehension.”

  Now it was Andy’s turn to look baffled. “Gods? What the fuck are you talking about, Frank?”

  “That was something else Cindy said to me, once. That the Entities were like gods who had come down among us from heaven. The Colonel believed that too, she said. We never understood a damned thing about them. They were too far beyond us. Nobody ever figured out why they came here or what they wanted from us. They simply came, that’s all. Saw. Conquered. Rearranged the whole goddamned world to suit themselves. And when they had accomplished whatever it was that they had wanted to accomplish, they went away, without even telling us why they were going. So the gods were he
re, and then they went home, and now we’re left in the dark without them. That’s it, isn’t it, Andy? What do you do, when the gods go home?”

  Andy was looking at him strangely. “And was that what they were for you, too, Frank? Gods?”

  “For me? No. Devils, is what they were, for me. Devils. I hated them.” He walked away from Andy and began to move forward through the lines of numbed, dazed-looking people standing in front of the LACON building. No one paid any attention to him.

  He passed among them, peering into their faces, their empty eyes. They were like sleepwalkers. It was frightening to look at them. But he understood their fear. He felt some of it himself. That confusion, that despair, that had come over him when he first heard that the Entities were leaving: it stemmed from the same uncertainty as theirs. What, Frank wondered, was going to happen in the world now that the Entity episode was over?

  Episode. That was what it had been, he knew. The invasion, the conquest, the years of alien rule—just a single episode, if a very strange one, in humanity’s long history. Fifty-some years, out of thousands. The alien years, is what they would be called. And, thinking about it that way, giving it that name, episode, Frank felt himself at last beginning to come out of the fog of bewilderment that had engulfed him these few hours past since Andy first had told him of the Entities’ withdrawal.

  The alien years had changed things very greatly, yes. Such episodes always did. But this wasn’t the first time that some great calamity had transformed the world. It had happened again and again. The Assyrians would come, or the Mongol hordes, or the Nazis, or the Black Death, or alien beings from the stars—whatever—and afterward nothing would be the same again.

  But still, Frank thought, come what may, the basic things always continued: breakfast, lunch, love, sex, sunshine, rain, fear, hope, ambition, dreams, gratification, disappointment, victory, defeat, youth, age, birth, death. The Entities had arrived and they had wiped the world clean of everything fixed and stable, God only knew why; and then they went away, he thought, God knows why; and we are still here, and now we must start over, just as inevitably as spring starts everything over once winter is done with us. Now we must start over. God knows why, yes, and we don’t. He would have to talk to Khalid about that when he returned to the ranch.