The Alien Years

NINE YEARS FROM NOW

It was the greatest catastrophe in human history, beyond any question, because in one moment the world’s entire technological capability had been pushed back three and a half centuries. Somehow the Entities had flipped a gigantic switch and turned everything off, everything, at some fundamental level.

In 1845 that would have been a serious matter but not, perhaps, catastrophic, and it would have been even less of a problem in 1635 or 1425, and it certainly wouldn’t have mattered much in 1215. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century it was a stupendous calamity. When the electricity stopped, all of modern civilization stopped, and there were no backup systems—candles and windmills, could they really he considered backup systems?—to get things going again. This was more than a mere power failure; it was an immense paradigm shift. It wasn’t just the huge generating stations that had failed; nothing at all electrical would work, right down to battery-operated flashlights. Nobody had ever drawn up a plan for what to do if electricity went away on a worldwide and apparently permanent basis.

No one could begin to figure out how the Entities had done it, and that was almost as frightening as the thing itself. Had they changed the behavior of electrons? Had they altered the lattice structure of terrestrial matter so that conductivity was no longer a reality? Or, perhaps, achieved some modification of the dielectric constant itself?

However they had managed it, it had happened. Electromagnetic waves no longer traveled anywhere controllable or useful, and electricity as a going concept was apparently extinct all over Earth. Zap, zap, zap! and the whole electrical revolution, incomprehensibly, was undone in a flash, the entire immense technological pyramid that had been built atop the little friction generator that old Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg had constructed in 1650 and the Leyden jar that Pieter van Musschenbroek concocted to store the energy the Guericke friction machine created, and Alessandro Volta’s silver-and-zinc batteries, and Humphry Davy’s arc lights and Michael Faraday’s dynamos and the life’s work of Thomas Alva Edison and all the rest.

Goodbye, then—for how long, nobody knew—to telephones and computers and radio and television, to alarm clocks and burglar alarms, to doorbells, garage-door openers, and radar, to oscilloscopes and electron microscopes, to cardiac pacemakers, to electric toothbrushes, to amplifiers of any and every sort, to vacuum tubes and microprocessors. Bicycles were still all right, and rowboats, and graphite pencils. So were handguns and rifles. But anything that required electrical energy in order to function was now inoperative. What became known as the Great Silence had fallen.

The electrons simply would not flow, that was the problem. The electrical functions of biological organisms were unaffected, but everything else was kaput.

Any sort of circuitry through which a voltage might pass now had become as non-conductive as mud. Voltages themselves, wattages, amperages, sine waves, bands and bandwidths, signal-to-noise ratios, and, for that matter, both signals and noise, et cetera ad infinitum, became non-concepts.

Drawbridges and canal locks remained frozen in whatever position they might have been in at the time when the current stopped. Planes unlucky enough to be aloft then, suddenly bereft of all navigational aid and the functioning of their most trivial internal mechanisms, crashed. So did some millions of automobiles that were in transit when the roads went dark, the traffic-control computers went dead, and their own internal guidance systems failed. Cars not in transit at the moment of the death of electricity now were incapable of being started, except for the ancient crank-starting models, and there weren’t very many of those still operating. The various computer nets were snuffed in an instant, of course. All commercial records that had not already been printed out became inaccessible. As did the world’s currency reserves, safely sealed behind electronic security gates that now became very secure indeed. But currency reserves, those represented by such inert things as bars of gold as well as those represented by such lively though abstract things as digital entries coursing from mainframe to mainframe among the world’s central banks, were pretty meaningless all of a sudden.

Most things were. The world as we had known it had ended.

The apparent precipitating factor of the blackout was that someone, somewhere, had in a moment of foolish exasperation lobbed a couple of bombs at one of the alien ships. No one knew who had done it—the French, the Iraqis, the Russians?—and nobody was claiming responsibility; and in the confusions of the moment there was no reliable way of finding out, though there were plenty of rumors, of course. Perhaps they had been nuclear bombs; perhaps they were only archaic firecrackers. There was no way for anyone to know that, either, because very shortly after the attack all the military detection systems that would have been capable of picking up a sudden release of radiation became just as non-functional as all the rest of the world’s dismantled technology.

Whatever kind of attack had been made on the Entities, it was an altogether futile one. It did no damage, naturally. The Entity spaceships were, as everyone would swiftly discover, surrounded by force-fields that made it impossible for anyone to approach them without permission or to damage them in attacks from a distance.

What the attack did succeed in doing was to annoy the Entities. It was annoying in the way that a mosquito’s humming can be annoying, and so they retaliated with what could have been the alien equivalent of a slap that one might aim at the mosquito’s general vicinity on one’s arm. Or, as the anthropologist Joshua Leonards had put it at the Pentagon, the attempted destruction of an Entity vessel had been the opening statement in a kind of conversation, to which the Entities had replied in a very much louder voice.

The first power shutdown, the two-minute one, may simply have represented a tune-up of the equipment. The second one that followed a few hours later was the real thing. The Great Silence. The end of the world that had been, and the beginning of a nightmare time of murderous anarchy and terror and utter despair.

After a couple of hellish weeks in the cold and the dark, the power began returning. Sporadically. Selectively. Bewilderingly. Some things like automotive engines and deep-freeze units and water-purification plants began to work again; other things like television sets and tape recorders and radar screens didn’t, though electric lights and gas-station pumps did.

The general effect was to bring mankind back from a medieval level of existence to something like that of about 1937, but with strange and seemingly random exceptions. Who could explain it? There was no rhyme, no reason. Why telephones, but not modems? Why compact-disc players, but not pocket calculators? And when modems eventually did come back, they didn’t always work quite the way they had worked before.

But by then explanations didn’t really matter. The basic point had been made, anyway: the world had been conquered, good and proper, just like that, by an unknown enemy for unknown reasons, no explanations given: not a word, in fact, said at all. The invaders had not bothered with a declaration of war, nor had any battles been fought, and there had been no peace negotiations, and no articles of surrender had been signed; but nevertheless the thing had been accomplished, in a single night, quite definitively accomplished. Resistance would be punished; and serious resistance would be punished seriously.

Who, in any case, was going to resist? The government? The armed forces? How? With what? Overnight, all governments and armed forces had been rendered obsolescent, if not downright obsolete. Attempts to hold things together, to proceed with existing forms and procedures, were swept away in whirlwinds of chaos. Governmental structures began to corrode and sag like buildings that had gone without maintenance for centuries; but this was a corrosion that happened within days. Whole governmental sectors simply vanished. Others maintained a ghostly presence and pretended they still were functioning, but no one paid very much attention to them. The social contract that had sustained them had been repealed.

Many people simply accepted what had happened to the world, and tried to understand it as well as they could, which was not very well, and went about their business as well as they could, which also was not very well. Others—a great many—simply went berserk.

The police and the courts could not cope with the new anarchy; indeed, the whole law-enforcement structure fairly swiftly dissolved as though it had been dipped in acid, and vanished. Only by common consent, one could see now, had any of it been sustained in the first place. The mandate of the law had been withdrawn. Authority itself had been decapitated in a single stroke. Armies and police forces began to melt away. No formal orders for disbanding were given—quite the contrary—but, as their members went on unofficial leave by ones and twos and threes like water molecules boiling off, preferring to protect themselves and their own families rather than to serve the general good, such organizations simply ceased to exist.

And so the law was dead. Personal conscience was the only governor left. What had been neighborhoods turned into independent kingdoms, their borders guarded by quick-on-the-trigger vigilantes. Theft, looting, robbery, violent crime of all sorts: these things, never far below the surface in the turn-of-the-century world, now became epidemic.

In the first three weeks after the invasion—the Conquest—hundreds of thousands of people died by the hands of their fellow citizens in the United States alone. It was the war of everyone against everyone, days of frenzy and blood. In Western Europe, matters were not quite as bad; in Russia and many third world countries, worse.

This was the time that became known as the Troubles. After the first few wild weeks, things became a little more calm, once electricity began to return, and then calmer still. But they never went back to the pre-Conquest norm.

And from time to time over the months that followed the Entities would turn the power off again, all over the world, sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes for three or four days at a stretch. Just to remind people that they could do it. Just to warn them not to get too cozy, because another dose of chaos could hit at any time. Just to let them know who was boss here now, forever and a day, world without end.

People attempted to re-create some semblance of their former lives, nevertheless. But the old structures, having fallen apart so completely at the first shove, were maddeningly difficult to rebuild.

The global banking system had been shattered by the death of the computers. The stock exchanges, which had closed “temporarily” at the time of the alien landing, did not reopen, and all the abstract store of wealth that was represented by ownership of shares and funds vanished into some incomprehensible limbo. That was devastating. Everybody became a pauper overnight, and only the shrewdest and toughest and meanest knew what to do about it. National currencies ceased to find acceptance, and were largely replaced by improvised regional ones, or corporate scrip, or units of precious metals, or barter. The whole economy, such as it now was, was built on improvisations of that sort. Credit-card use was unthinkable now. Personal checks were no more acceptable than they had been in the Neolithic.

A surprising number of businesses remained going concerns, but their modes of doing business had to be radically reinvented. Computer communication resumed, but it, too, was a pallid and eerily transmogrified version of its former self, full of gaps and unpredictabilities. A sort of postal service continued, but only a sort. Private security forces emerged to fill the void left by the evaporation of the public ones.

Some unofficial underground resistance movements sprang up, too, almost immediately, but they wisely stayed very far underground, and in the first two years did no actual resisting. There were other groups that simply wanted to talk with the Entities, but the Entities did not appear to be interested in talking, though they did, as it soon turned out, have ways of communicating in their own fashion with those with whom they chose to communicate.

A dreamlike new reality had settled upon the world. The texture of life now, for nearly everyone, was like the way life is the morning after some great local catastrophe, an earthquake, a flood, a huge fire, a hurricane. Everything has changed in a flash. You look around for familiar landmarks—a bridge, a row of buildings, the front porch of your house—to see if they’re still there. And usually they are; but some degree of solidity seems to have been subtracted from them in the night. Everything is now conditional. Everything is now impermanent. That was the way it was now, all over the world.

After a time, people began to shuffle through their newly dysfunctional lives as though things had always been this way, though they knew in their hearts that that was not so. The only really functional entities in the world now were the Entities. Civilization, as the term had been understood in the early twenty-first century, had just about fallen apart. Some new form would surely evolve, sooner or later. But when? And what?

Anse was the first of the Carmichael tribe to arrive at the Colonel’s ranch for the Christmas-week family gathering, the third such gathering of the clan since the Conquest.

That was a pretty time of year, California Christmas. The hills all up and down the coast were green from recent rains. The air was soft and sweet, that lovely Southern California December warmth pervading everything, even though there was the usual incongruous fringe of snow right at the highest crest of the mountains back of town. The birds were caroling away, here in the late afternoon as Anse approached his father’s place. There was bright festive bloom in every garden, masses of purple or red bougainvillea, the red flower-spikes of aloes, the joyous scarlet splash of woody-branched poinsettias taller than a tall man. A steady flow of traffic could be seen heading up from the beach as Anse swung inland off the main highway and went looking for the road that led upward toward the ranch. It must have been a good day for some merry pre-Christmas surfing.

Merry Christmas, yes, merry, merry, merry, merry! God bless us every one!

The cooler air of higher altitude came through the open car window as Anse made his way along the narrow mountain road, which took vehicles up and behind the ranch a little way before curving down again and delivering them to the entrance. He honked three times as he started down the final approach. Peggy, the woman who served as his father’s secretary these days, came out to open the ranch gate for him.

She gave him a grin and a cheery hello. She was always cheery, Peggy was. Small fine-boned brunette, quite ornamental. The wild thought came to Anse that the old man must be sleeping with her. Anything could be true, here in these grim latter days. “Oh, the Colonel will be so happy to see you!” she cried, peering in, flashing her ever-ready smile at Anse’s wife Carole and at the three weary kids in the back of the car. “He’s been pacing around on the porch all day, restless as a cat, waiting for someone to show up.”

“My sister Rosalie’s not here yet, then? What about my cousins?”

“None of them, not yet. Not your brother, either.—Your brother will be coming, won’t he?”

“He said he would, yes,” Anse replied, no vast amount of conviction in his tone.

“Oh, terrific! Terrific! The Colonel’s so eager to see him after all this time.—How was your drive?”

“Wonderful,” Anse said, a little more sourly than was really proper. But Peggy didn’t seem to notice his tone.

Getting here was a grueling all-day business for him now. He had had to set out before sunrise from his home in Costa Mesa, well down the coast in Orange County, if he wanted to get to Santa Barbara before the early dark of this midwinter day. Once upon a time he had needed no more than about three hours, door to door. But the roads weren’t what they had been back then. Very little was.

In the old days Anse would have taken the San Diego Freeway north to Highway 101 and zipped right on up to the ranch. But the San Diego was a mess from Long Beach to Carson because it had never been repaved after the Troubles, and you didn’t want to go inland to take the Golden State Freeway, the other main northbound artery, because the Golden State ran straight through bandido territory and there were vigilante roadblocks everywhere, and so the only thing to do was to creep along surface streets from town to town, avoiding the more dangerous ones, and picking up a stretch of usable freeway wherever you could. You went zigzagging on and on through places like Garden Grove and Artesia and Compton and in the fullness of time you found yourself getting back to Highway 405 in Culver City, which was one of the safer parts of central Los Angeles.

From there it was a reasonably decent straight run north to the San Fernando Valley and you could, with only a couple of minor detours, get yourself on Highway 118 somewhere near Granada Hills, and that took you clear on out to the coast, eventually, via Saticoy and Ventura. Anse didn’t like driving 118 because it brought him uncomfortably close to the burned-out area where his Uncle Mike had died on the day of the big fires. Mike had been practically like an older brother to him. But taking that route was the most efficient way to do things, now that the Entities had shut off Highway 101 between Agoura and Thousand Oaks. Simply shut it off, northbound and southbound, big concrete-block wall right across all eight lanes at each end of the requisitioned zone.

They were building some sort of facility for themselves in there, it seemed. Using human labor. Slave labor. The way it went, Anse had heard, was that the gang boss, who was human but who had had the Touch and the Push applied to him, which left him considerably altered, came to your house with half a dozen armed men and said, “Come. Work.” And you went with them, and you worked. Or else they shot you. If you didn’t like the work and were nimble on your feet, you ran away when you got the chance and went underground. Those were the only choices, so it seemed. But once you had the Touch, once you got the Push, you had no choices left at all.

The Touch. The Push.

Oh, brave new world! And a merry Christmas to all.

It had been a difficult drive for Anse, hands clenching on the wheel, eyes fixed rigidly on the trash-strewn road, hour after hour. You didn’t want to hit anything that might hurt the tires; new tires were impossible to get and your old ones could take only so much fixing. You didn’t want to damage the car in any way at any time, for the same reason. Anse’s car was an ’03 Honda Acura, in decent enough shape but beginning to get a little tired around the edges. He had been thinking of trading it in for something bigger, just when the Invasion happened. But that was before everything changed.

There weren’t any more new cars, period. There was a big Honda factory somewhere in Ohio that had survived the wild period of lunacy that had followed the Conquest and supposedly was still turning out replacement parts that came up to specs, only they weren’t shipping anything west, apparently because they didn’t trust the west coast currency that had begun to circulate in place of federal money. The Honda facilities in California, those that hadn’t been wrecked in the Troubles, were being run on a hit-or-miss basis by the people that had been managing them the day the Entities came, who had seized them a few days after contact was lost with the parent company in Japan. But they didn’t seem to be a very competent bunch of managers, and you couldn’t count on the quality of what their factories turned out, assuming you could get the part you needed in the first place, which wasn’t often easy.

Repair, not replacement, was the order of the day; and if you had the bad luck to total your car somehow, you had essentially totaled your life, and you might as well just sign up with one of the Entity work gangs, for whom transportation, at least, was never any problem. They gave you the Touch; they gave you the Push; and then you went wherever they said, and did whatever they wanted you to do, and that was that.

Anse pulled the car into the gravel-topped lot just north of the big main building and staggered out, stiff, cross-eyed with fatigue. He had driven the whole way himself. Carole still was willing to drive within about a ten-mile radius from their home, but she was spooked nowadays about freeway driving, or driving in any sort of unfamiliar neighborhood, and he did all of that now. It was something that they never even discussed.

The Colonel was waiting for them on the back porch of the ranch house. “Look, guys, there’s Grandpa,” Anse said. “Give him a big hello.” But the kids were already out of the car and running toward him. The Colonel scooped them up like puppies, first the twins in one big swoop, then Jill afterward.

“He looks good,” Carole said. “Stands as straight as ever, still has that sparkle in his eyes—”

Anse shook his head. “Very tired, is how he looks to me. And old. A lot older than he looked at Eastertime. His hair is thinning, finally. His face looks gray.”

“He’s—what, sixty-eight, seventy?”

“Only sixty-four,” Anse said. But Carole was right: the Colonel was aging fast. His trim, erect look had always been deceptive. The true weight of his years had been thundering down upon him ever since the first day of the Troubles. That time when darkness had fallen across the world, panic had been widespread, the bonds of civil behavior had for a time been loosed as though they had never existed, had been the ultimate nightmare for the Colonel, Anse knew: the instantaneous collapse of all discipline and morality, the shedding of all civility. The world had come back a long way from the ghastly early days just after the Conquest, and so had the Colonel. But neither of them was anything like what it had been before, and probably never would be again. The changes showed on the Colonel’s face, as they did everywhere else.

Anse went crunching across the gravel and let his father gather him into his arms. He was an inch taller than the Colonel, and thirty or forty pounds heavier, but it was the older man who was in charge of the embrace, the Colonel enfolding Anse first and Anse hugging back. That was the deal. The Colonel was in charge, always. Always.

“You look a little weary, Dad,” Anse said. “Everything all right?”

“Everything’s all right, yes. As right as can be, considering.” Even his voice had lost a little of the old ring. “I’ve been negotiating with the Entities, and that’s tiresome stuff.” Anse lifted one eyebrow. “Negotiating?”

“Trying to. Tell you later, Anse.—By God, it’s good to see you, boy! But you look a little peaked yourself. It must have been a nasty drive.” He punched Anse in the arm, sharply, a hard shot, knuckle against meat. Anse punched back, just as sincerely. That was also something that they always did.

They had had some difficult times, Anse and the Colonel. There was a spread of just twenty-one years in their ages, which for a time, when the Colonel was in his vigorous forties and fifties and Anse was in his twenties and thirties, made the Colonel seem more like Anse’s older brother than his father. They were just enough like each other to have done a goodly amount of butting of heads whenever they came to some area where neither was capable of backing off, and just different enough so that there was plenty of headbutting also when they reached an area of total disagreement.

Anse’s leaving the Army so young had been one of those bad times. Anse’s spell of heavy drinking, fifteen years back, had been another. As for Anse’s occasional adventures with women other than Carole since his marriage, the Colonel surely knew nothing about those, or he would in all likelihood have killed him. But they loved each other anyway. There was no doubt about that on either side.

Together Anse and his father pulled the suitcases out of the Honda and the Colonel, stubbornly carrying the heaviest one, showed them to their rooms. The ranch house was a huge rambling affair, wings stretching off this way and that, and Anse and Carole always were put up in the best of the guest suites, which had a big bedroom for them and an adjoining smaller one that long-legged golden-haired Jill, who was nine, could share with her four-year-old twin brothers Mike and Charlie. There was also a nice sittingroom with a view of the sea. Anse was the firstborn son, after all. This was a family that went by the rules.

The Colonel, taking his leave of them, clapped Anse on the shoulder. “Welcome back, boy.”

“It’s good to be back.”

And it was. The ranch was a big, warm, comforting place, nestling securely here on its lofty hillside between the steep mountain wall and the beautiful Pacific, far from the congestion and turmoil and outright daily deadly peril that was most of Southern California. The old stone walls, the slate floors, the sturdy unpretentious furniture, the funny frilly curtains, the innumerable high-ceilinged rooms: how could anyone ever believe, living up here in craggy solitude high above the pretty red rooftops of Santa Barbara, that invincible alien monsters stalked the world at this very moment, randomly choosing human beings to do their bidding as they gradually rearranged the landscape of the world to suit their own incomprehensible needs?

Jill put herself in charge of getting the boys scrubbed up for dinner. She loved playing mommy, and that lifted a big burden from Carole. As Anse unpacked, Carole turned to him and said, “Do you mind if I shower first? I feel so creaky and edgy, after that long drive. And filthy, too.”

Anse felt none too fresh himself, and he had done all the work that day. But he told her to go ahead. The dark signs of strain were evident in her. Her lips were clamped tight, her arms were close against her body, her left hand was balled into a fist.

Carole was still a couple of years short of forty, but she didn’t have much stamina these days. She needed to be coddled, and Anse coddled her. Carrying the twins had taken a lot out of her; and then, two years later, the Conquest, the Troubles—those uncertain terrifying weeks of living without gas or electricity, without television or telephone, boiling all your water and trying to keep clean with sponge baths and cooking your scrappy meals over a Sterno-powered stove and taking turns sitting up all night with the shotgun, in case one of the looting parties that were roaming Orange County just then had decided that it was about time for them to investigate your nice tidy suburban neighborhood—those few weeks had wrecked her altogether. Carole had never been designed for frontier life. Even now she was still only partly recovered from that terrible time.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she undressed. One of his little covert pleasures: after eleven years he still loved the mere sight of her body, still youthful, almost girlish—the smooth supple legs, the small high breasts, the cascade of shining golden hair and that tight, springy little triangle, golden also, at the base of her belly. The familiar body, no surprises there but still exciting, still beloved, and yet so often betrayed. What had impelled him to step out on her again and again with those other, lesser women was something that Anse had never been able to understand. Nor had he ever really stopped feeling the pull from time to time.

A defect in the family genes, he supposed. A breakdown of the iron Carmichael virtue. The blood running thin at last, after all those generations of rugged God-fearing super-patriotic righteous-living American folks.

Not that Anse thought for a moment that his father was any kind of saint, neither he nor any of that long line of upright Carmichaels preceding him into the misty past. But he could not imagine the Colonel ever cheating on his wife, or even wanting to. Or flanging up some plausible excuse to get himself out of a dangerous or unpleasant assignment. Or putting a joint to his lips and taking a deep drag to while away some dreary night in Saigon. Or in any other way deviating from the proper path as he understood it. Anse couldn’t really even see the old man tiptoeing into the bedroom of that cute young Peggy of his to grab himself a little late-life fun.

Well, maybe the part about smoking a joint, yes. Considering that it had been the 1970s then, and Vietnam. But not any of the rest of it. The Colonel was a man of discipline, first and foremost. He must have been that way right from the cradle. Whereas Anse’s own life had been a constant struggle between the things he wanted to do and the things he knew he ought to do, and though by and large he did not consider himself to be a disgrace to the family’s staunch traditions, he knew that he had fallen from the true and righteous path many times more than he should, and most likely would again. In all probability his father knew it too, though not the full extent of his sins, oh, no, not nearly.

For Anse the mitigating factor in all this self-flagellation was that he was hardly the only member of the family who was something less than perfect. In the Colonel’s generation there had been Mike, Anse’s brooding, irascible uncle, dutifully putting in his time in the military for a little while, and just as dutifully doing the volunteer-firefighter thing that ultimately had killed him, but otherwise living such a strange reclusive irregular life, and eventually marrying that weird loopy jewelry-making Los Angeles woman whom the Colonel had loathed so much. And Anse’s own siblings had the taint too: Rosalie, for instance, whose adolescence, Anse knew, had been one long secret circus of frantic promiscuity that would have sent the old man into apoplexy if he had the slightest inkling of it, though she had long since cleaned up her act. Or brother Ronnie—Oh, God, yes, brother Ronnie—

“We’re all invited to the ranch for the holidays,” Anse had said to brother Ronnie two weeks before, in the deepest Southland where all three of the Colonel’s children had their homes. “Rosalie and Doug, and Paul and Helena, and Carole and me and the kids,” Anse said. “And you.”

Ronnie was the southernmost sibling of all, in La Jolla, just outside San Diego. Anse had driven all the way down there to deliver Ronnie’s invitation in person. Once upon a time La Jolla had been about an hour’s trip from Costa Mesa on the San Diego Freeway, but it wasn’t an easy trip any more, nor a safe one. His brother lived a lively bachelor life in a nice oceanfront condominium there, pink walls, thick carpets, sauna and spa, big picture windows, a million-dollar place purchased with the profits from some shady pre-Conquest venture Anse had never wanted to know anything about. The less Anse knew about his younger brother’s daily existence, the better: that had long been his policy.

Some houses on the landward side of Ronnie’s street were heaps of blackened rubble, destroyed in the Troubles and never rebuilt, but Ronnie’s own place looked fine. That was the way Ronnie’s luck worked.

“Me?” Ronald Carmichael had cried, throwing up his hands in that smarmy mock-astonished way of his. The color deepened on his already ruddy face. He was a big-boned fair-haired man who looked as if he might easily run to fat before long, though in fact his body was muscular and solid. “You’ve got to be joking. I haven’t exchanged a word with him in five years!”

“You’re invited, though. He’s your father and he says come for Christmas, and this year he put a little extra spin on it. I don’t know why, but he made it sound urgent. You can’t say no.”

“Sure I can. He made it perfectly clear to me way back then that he didn’t want anything whatever to do with me, and I’ve made my peace with that. We’ve been getting along very nicely without each other and I don’t see any reason to change that now.”

“Well, I do. This year, apparently, something special is up. He said you were on the guest list this year, and this year, pal, you’re going to be there. I’m simply not going to let you throw your own father’s Christmas invitation back in his face.”

But there hadn’t been any invitation, had there? Not directly from the Colonel to Ron, no. The old man had asked Arise to do the dirty work for him, and Ronnie took quick, easy advantage of that fact: “Look, Anse, let him speak to me himself, if he wants me there so badly.”

“That’s asking a lot of him, Ronnie. He can’t unbend that far, not yet, not after all that’s happened between you. But he wants you to come, that I know. It’s his way of making peace. I think you ought to come. I want you to come.”

“What the hell does he want me there for? Why do you? Obviously he still despises me. You know that he thinks I’m nothing more than a con man.”

“Well? Aren’t you?”

“Very funny, Anse.”

“This year he’ll stay off your case. I promise you that.”

“I bet he will. Look, Anse, you know goddamned well that if I show up, there’ll just be another fight. It’ll spoil Christmas for everyone.”

“Ronnie—”

“No.”

“Yes,” Anse said sharply, looking straight into his brother’s tricky, hooded, intensely blue Carmichael eyes and doing his patented imitation of the Colonel’s crispest I-take-no-prisoners tone of voice. “I’m notifying him of your acceptance. You be there, that’s all.”

“Hey, now, Anse—”

“Done and done, kiddo, and that’s that. One way or another, get your ass up to Santa Barbara by the afternoon of December 23.”

It sounded good as he said it, plenty of the old military zing in his tone. And Ron had shrugged and smiled in that charming, ingratiating way of his, and nodded and told him that he would give it real careful thought. Which was, of course, Ronnie’s usual way of saying no. Anse had no more expectation that Ron was going to make an appearance at the ranch than he did that the Entities were going to pack up and go back home tomorrow as a Christmas present to the beleaguered peoples of Earth. He knew what his brother was like. An alien in their midst, was Ronnie. Nothing Carmichael about him except those goddamn blue eyes.

Well, the Colonel wanted him at the ranch for Christmas, God only knew why, and so Anse had obediently delivered the invitation. But privately he hoped Ronnie would stay home. Or get himself snatched up by a roving band of Entities, as occasionally happened to people, and spend the holiday aboard one of their ships, telling them sweet stories of the babe in the manger. There was no need for Ronnie to be there spoiling the holiday for the rest of them, was there, really? The black sheep, long strayed from the fold. The rotten apple. The bad seed.

Anse heard the sound of a car door slamming outside.

Carole heard it too. “I think someone else just got here,” she called from the bathroom. She appeared in the doorway, all pink and gold, toweling herself dry. “You don’t think it’s your brother, do you?”

Could it be? The troubled shadowy sibling, reunited with his family at last? But no: looking out into the gathering darkness toward the parking area, Anse saw a woman getting out of the car, followed by a big, ungainly man and a plump preadolescent boy.

“No,” he said. “It’s just Rosalie and Doug, with Steve.”

Then, no more than ten minutes later, he saw another set of headlights glowing on the mountain road below the ranch. His cousins Paul and Helena, probably, who were supposed to be driving up together from Newport Beach. Paul had lost his wife in the Troubles, Helena her husband. They had gravitated toward each other, brother and sister forming a solid little unit in this time of tragic loss for each. But no again: by the last fading gleam of daylight Anse was able to tell that this was a trim little sports car, not the great hulking ancient van that Paul would be driving. This was his brother’s car. “My God,” Anse gasped. “I think it actually is Ron!”

In the beautiful city of Prague, which had been the capital of the Czech Republic until that day two years and two months ago when such things as capitals and republics had ceased to be of any real significance on Earth, and which now was the site of the central communications nexus for the Entities who occupied the mainland of Europe, the weather on this night, a few days before Christmas, was highly non-Californian, though it was pleasant enough for midwinter Prague. The temperature had been hovering just above the freezing mark all day and now, at nightfall, was beginning to slip below zero Celsius. It had snowed yesterday, though not really heavily, and much of the city was mantled now in a thin coating of white; but tonight the air was clear and still, just the slightest whisper of breeze rising off the river that ran through the heart of the old town but otherwise all was calm.

Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, sixteen years old, the son of a German electrical engineer who had been living in Prague since the mid-19905, moved quickly through the gathering darkness, light on his feet like the predatory cat he conceived himself to be, stalking his prey. He was, in truth, something other than cat-like: short and thick-waisted, actually, flat face with jutting cheekbones, heavy wrists and ankles, dark hair and swarthy complexion, everything about him rather more Slavic than Teutonic in appearance. But in his mind he was a cat on the prowl, just now. His prey was the Swedish girl, Barbro Ekelund, the University professor’s daughter, with whom he had been secretly, desperately, deliriously in love for the past four months, since the time they had met and briefly talked at the chopshop in Parizska Street, near the old Jewish quarter.

He trailed her now, staying twenty meters behind her and keeping his eyes fixed rigidly on her jeans-clad buttocks. This was the day he would at long last approach her again, speak to her, invite her to spend some time with him. His Christmas present to himself. A girl of his own, finally. The beginning of the new beginning of his life.

In his mind’s eye he imagined her to be walking naked down the street. He could see with incandescent clarity those two smooth, fleshy white cheeks flaring startlingly out of her narrow waist. He could see everything. The slim pale back rising up and up above her rump, the thin dark line of her spine plainly visible. The delicate bones of her shoulder blades. The long thin arms. The wonderfully attenuated legs, so slender that they didn’t meet and touch at the thighs the way the legs of Czech girls always did, but left a zone of open air from her knees all the way up to her loins.

He could spin her around to face him, too, if he wanted to, rotating her through a hundred-eighty-degree movement as easily as he could rotate an image on his computer screen with two quick keystrokes. He turned her now. Now he could see those ripe, round, pink-tipped breasts of hers, so incongruously full and heavy on her lean elongated form, and the long deep indentation of her navel framed to right and left by her jutting hipbones, and the sliver of a birthmark beside it, and the dense, mysterious pubic jungle below, unexpectedly dark for all her Nordic fairness. He imagined her standing there stark naked on the snowy street, grinning at him, waving to him, excitedly calling his name.

Karl-Heinrich had never actually beheld the nakedness of Barbro Ekelund, nor that of any other girl. Not with his own eyes, at any rate. But he had, through much trial and error, managed to attach a tiny spy-eye to a thin catheter-like metal tube and slide it upward from the basement of her apartment building along the building’s main data conduit into her very own bedroom. Karl-Heinrich was very good at managing such things. The spy-eye caught, now and then, delicious fugitive glimpses of Barbro Ekelund rising naked from her bed, moving about her room, doing her morning exercises, rummaging through her wardrobe for the clothes she meant to wear that day. It relayed those glimpses to the antenna atop the main post office that captured them for Karl-Heinrich’s private data box, from which he could retrieve them with a single mouse-click.

Over the past two months Karl-Heinrich had assembled and enhanced and in various ways edited his collection of Barbro shots so that, by now, he possessed an elegant little video of her as seen from every angle, turning, reaching, stretching, unwittingly displaying herself to him with utter candor. He never tired of watching it.

But watching, of course, was nowhere near as good as touching. Caressing. Experiencing.

If only, if only, if only—.

He walked faster, and then faster still. She was heading, Karl-Heinrich suspected, for that little coffee shop that she liked down toward the lower end of the square, just beyond the old Europa Hotel. He wanted to catch up with her before she entered it, so that she would enter it with him, instead of going immediately to some table filled with her friends.

“Barbro!” he called. His voice was husky with tension, little more than a hoarse ragged whisper. He had to force it out. It was always a formidable effort for him, making any sort of overture to a girl. Girls were more alien to him than the Entities themselves.

But she turned. Stared. Frowned, obviously puzzled.

“Karl-Heinrich,” he announced, coming up alongside her, compelling himself now to affect what he hoped was a jaunty, debonair ease. “You remember. From the chopshop in the Stare Mesto. Borgmann, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. I showed you how to jack the data wand to your implant.” He was speaking in English, as nearly everyone in Prague under twenty-five usually did.

“The chopshop?—” she said, sounding very doubtful. “Stare Mesto?”

He grinned up at her hopefully. She was two centimeters taller than he was. He felt so stocky, so bestial, so coarse and thick-set, next to her willowy radiant long-legged beauty. “It was in August. We had a long talk.” That was not strictly true. They had spoken for about three minutes. “The psychology of the Entities as Kafka might have understood it, and everything. You had some fascinating things to say. I’m so glad to have run into you again. I’ve been looking all over for you.” The words were tumbling out of him, an unstoppable cascade. “I wonder if I could buy you a coffee. I want to tell you about some wonderful new computer work that I’ve been doing.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling almost shyly, plainly still mystified. “I’m afraid I don’t recall—look, I’ve got to go, I’m meeting some friends from the University here—”

Push onward, he ordered himself sternly.

He moistened his lips. “What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line!” He was astounded to hear himself say a thing like that, so fantastic, so untrue. But he waved his arm in a vague way in the direction of the river, and of the great looming medieval bulk of Hradcany Castle high on its hill beyond it, where the Entities had made their headquarters in the lofty halls of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. “Isn’t that extraordinary? The first direct entry into their system. I’m dying to tell someone all about it, and it would make me very happy if you—if we—you and I—if we could—” He was babbling now, and knew it.

Her sea-green eyes were dishearteningly remote. “I’m terribly sorry. My friends are waiting inside.”

Not only taller than he, but a year or two older. And as beautiful and unattainable as the rings of Saturn.

He wanted to say, Look, I know everything about your body, I know the shape of your breasts and the size of your nipples and I know that your hair down below is dark instead of blonde and that you’ve got a little brown birthmark on the left side of your belly, and I think you’re absolutely beautiful and if you will only let me undress you and touch you a little I will worship you forever like a goddess.

But Karl-Heinrich said none of that, said nothing at all, just stood mute where he was, looking longingly at her as though she were a goddess in actual fact, Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, and she gave him another sad little perplexed smile and turned from him and went into the coffee shop, leaving him alone and crimson-cheeked and gaping like a fish in the street.

He felt shock and anger, although no real surprise, at the rejection. He felt great sadness. But also, he realized, a touch of relief. She was too beautiful for him: a cold pale fire that would consume him if he came too near. He would only have behaved like a fool if she had gone inside with him, anyway. In his reckless hungry overeagerness, he knew, he would have ruined things almost immediately.

Beautiful girls were so frightening. But necessary. Necessary. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Why, though, did it always end like this for him?

A swirling gust of snowy wind came roaring down the square at him and sent him shivering off toward the north, lost in a daze of bitter self-pity. Aimlessly, planlessly, he went wandering up along Melantrichova and into the maze of ancient little cobblestoned streets leading to the river. In ten minutes he was at the Charles Bridge, peering across at the somber mass of Hradcany Castle dominating the other bank.

They didn’t floodlight the castle any more, now that the Entities were here. But you could still make it out, the great heavy blackness of it on the hill, blotting out the stars of the western sky.

The whole castle area was sealed off now, not just the cathedral but the museums, the courtyards, the old royal palace, the gardens, and all the rest that had made the place so attractive to tourists. Not that there were any tourists coming to Prague these days, of course. Karl-Heinrich’s mind summoned the image of the gigantic aliens, the Entities, moving around within the cathedral as they went about their unfathomable tasks. He thought with some astonishment of the boast that had so unexpectedly sprung from his lips. What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line! Of course there was no truth to it. But could it be done? he wondered. Could it? Could it?

I’ll show her, he thought wildly. Yes.

Go up to the castle. Break in somehow. Connect with their computers. There has to be a way. It’s only a sequence of electrical impulses; even they need to use something like that, ultimately, in any sort of computational device. It will be an interesting experiment: an intellectual challenge. I am a failure with women but I have a very fine mind that needs constantly to be kept in play so that its edge will remain keen. I must forever improve my own range of mental ability through constant striving toward excellence.

And so. Connect with them. And not just connect! Open a line of communication with them. Offer to teach them things about our computers that they can’t possibly know and want to learn. Be useful to them. Somebody has to be. They are here to stay; they are our masters now.

Be useful to them, that’s the thing to do.

Earn their respect and admiration. I can be very helpful, that I know. Get them to trust me, to like me, to become dependent on me, to offer me nice rewards for my further cooperation.

And then—

Make them give her to me as a slave.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Anse said, “You won’t fuck around with him, will you, Ronnie? Promise me that. You won’t do a single goddamn thing to ruin the old man’s Christmas.”

“Cross my heart,” Ron said. “Last thing I would want, anything that would hurt him. It’s all up to him. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t start in. If he goes easy on me, I won’t have any quarrel with him. But remember, this was your idea, my coming up here.” Wearing only a bath towel around his waist, he moved briskly about the room, fastidiously unpacking, arranging his things just so, his shirts, his socks, his belts, his trousers. Ron was a very tidy man, Anse thought. Even a little prissy.

“His idea,” Anse said.

“Same thing. You be of one blood, you and he.”

“And so are you. Keep it in mind, is all I ask, all right?” They were four years apart in age, and they had never liked each other very much, though the animosity between them was nothing at all compared with that between Ronnie and his father. While they were growing up Anse had rarely been amused by Ronnie’s habit of borrowing things from him without troubling to ask—sneakers, joints, girlfriends, cars, liquor, et cetera et cetera et cetera—but he hadn’t regarded Ronnie’s lighthearted unprincipled ways with the same sort of lofty condemnation that the Colonel had. “You’re his son and he loves you, whatever has gone on between you over the years, and this is Christmas and the whole family is together, and I don’t want you to make trouble.”

Ronnie glanced back over his meaty shoulder. “Enough already, Anse. I told you I’d be good. What do you say, bro? Can we let it go at that?” He selected a shirt from the dozen or more that he had brought with him, unfolded it and tweaked the fabric thoughtfully between two fingers, shook his head, selected another from the stack, unbuttoned it with maddening precision and began to put it on.—“You have any idea why he wants us all here, Anse? Other than it being Christmas?”

“Isn’t Christmas enough?”

“When you came down to see me in La Jolla you told me that you thought something special was up, that it was important for me to come. Urgent, even, you said.”

“Right. But I don’t have a clue.”

“Could it be that he’s sick? Something really serious?”

Anse shook his head. “I don’t think so. He looks pretty healthy to me. A little run-down, that’s all. Working too hard. He’s supposed to be retired, but in fact he’s become involved in some way in the government, you know. What passes for a government now. They pulled him out of retirement after the Conquest, or he pulled himself out. He keeps a lid on the details, but he told me he recently led a delegation to the Entities in an attempt to open negotiations with them.”

Ronnie’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? Tell me more.”

“That’s all I know.”

“Fascinating. Fascinating.” Ronnie tossed his towel aside, slipped on a pair of undershorts, set about the process of selecting the perfect slacks for the evening. He rejected one pair, two, three, and was studying a fourth quizzically, tugging at one tip and then the.other of his drooping blond mustache, when Anse, beginning now to lose the very small quantity of patience that he had for his brother, said, “Do you think you can move it along a little, Ron? It’s practically seven. The before-dinner drinks are called for seven sharp and he’s expecting us in the rec room right now. You remember how he is about punctuality, I hope.”

Ronnie laughed softly. “I really bug you, don’t I, Anse?”

“Anybody who needs to spend fifteen minutes picking out a shirt and a pair of pants for an informal family dinner would bug me.”

“It’s been five years since he and I last saw each other. I want to look good for him.”

“Right. Right.”

“Tell me something else,” Ronnie said, choosing trousers at last and stepping into them. “Who’s the woman who showed me to my room? Peggy, she said her name was.”

There was something in his brother’s eyes suddenly, a glint, that Anse didn’t like.

“His secretary. Woman from Los Angeles, but he met her in Washington when he went back there for a meeting at the Pentagon right after the Invasion. She was actually taken captive by the Entities the first day, in the shopping-mall thing, the way Cindy was, and she was in Washington to tell the chiefs of staff what she had seen. She ran into Cindy while she was aboard the alien ship, incidentally.”

“Small world.”

“Very small. Peggy says she thought Cindy was pretty nutty.”

“No argument there. And Peggy and the Colonel—?”

“Colonel needed someone to help him with the ranch, and he liked her and she didn’t seem to have any entanglements in L.A., so he asked her to come up here. That’s about all I know about her.”

“Quite an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”

Anse let his eyes glide shut for a moment, and breathed slowly in and out.

“Don’t mess with her, Ron.”

“For Christ’s sake, Anse! I simply made an innocent comment!”

“The last innocent comment you made was ‘Goo goo goo,’ and you were seven months old.”

“Anse—”

“You know what I’m telling you. Leave her alone.”

An incredulous look came into Ronnie’s eyes. “Are you saying that she and the Colonel—that he—that they—”

“I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it very much.”

“If there’s nothing between them, then, and I happen to be here by myself this weekend and she happens to be an unattached single woman—”

“She’s important to the Colonel. She keeps this place running and I suspect that she keeps him running. I know what you do to women’s heads, and I don’t want you doing anything to hers.”

“Fuck you, Anse.” Very calmly, almost amiably.

“And you, bro. Will you be kind enough to put your shoes on, now, so that we can go up front and have drinks with our one and only father?”

For the past hour the locus of the tension had gone sliding downward in the Colonel’s body from his head to his chest to his midsection, and now it was all gathered around his lower abdomen like a band of white-hot iron. In all his years in Vietnam he had never felt such profound uneasiness, verging on fear, as he did while waiting now for his reunion with his last-born child.

But in a war, he thought, you really only need to worry about whether your enemy will kill you or not, and with enough intelligence and enough luck you can manage to keep that from happening. Here, though, the enemy was himself, and the problem was self-control. He had to hold himself in check no matter what, refrain from lashing out at the son who had been such a grievous disappointment to him. This was the family Christmas. He dared not ruin it, and ruining it was what he feared. The Colonel had never particularly been afraid of dying, or of anything else, very much, but he was afraid now that at his first glimpse of Ronnie he would unload all the stored-up anger that was in his heart, and everything would be spoiled.

Nothing like that occurred. Anse came into the room with Ronnie half a step behind him; and the Colonel, who was standing at the sideboard with Rosalie on one side of him and Peggy on the other, felt his heart melting in an instant at the sight at long last, here in his own house, of his big, blocky, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked second son. The problem became not one of holding his anger in check but of holding back his tears.

It would be all right, the Colonel thought in giddy relief. Blood was still thicker than water, even now.

“Ronnie—Ronnie, boy—”

“Hey, Dad, you’re looking good! After all this time.”

“And you. Put on a little weight, haven’t you? But you were always the chunky one of the family. Plus you’re not a boy any more, after all.”

“Thirty-nine next month. One year away from miserable antiquity. Oh, Dad—Dad—it’s been such a goddamn long time—” Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, a big messy embrace, Ronnie slapping his hands lustily against the Colonel’s back and the Colonel heartily squeezing Ronnie’s ribs, and then they were apart again and the Colonel was fixing drinks, the stiff double Scotch that he knew Ronnie preferred and sherry for Anse, who never drank anything stronger nowadays; and Ronnie was going around the room hugging people, his sister Rosalie first, then Carole, then his moody cousin Helena and her even-tempered brother Paul, and then a big hello for Rosalie’s clunky husband Doug Gannett and their overweight blotchy-faced kid Steve, and a whoop and a holler for Anse’s kids, sweeping them up into the air all three together, the twins and Jill—

Oh, he was slick, Ronnie was, thought the Colonel. A real charmer. And cut the thought off before it ramified, because he knew it would lead him nowhere good.

Ronnie was introducing himself to Peggy Gabrielson, now. Peggy looked a little flustered, perhaps because of the way magnetic Ronnie was laying on the beguiling introductory charisma, or maybe because she knew that Ronnie was the family pariah, a shady unscrupulous character with whom the Colonel had had nothing to do for many years, but who now for some reason was being taken back into the tribe.

Loudly the Colonel said, when the highballs had been handed around, “You may be wondering why I’ve called you all here tonight. And in fact I have a very full agenda for the next few days, which calls for a great quantity of eating and drinking, and also some discussion of Highly Serious Matters.” He made sure they heard the capital letters. “The drinking is scheduled to occur—” He paused dramatically and shot back his cuff to reveal his wrist-watch. “—at precisely 1900 hours. Which is in fact, right now.

With dinner to follow, and the Highly Serious Discussion tomorrow or the day after.” He hoisted his glass. “So: Merry Christmas, all of you! Everyone that I love in the whole poor old battered world, standing right here in front of me. How wonderful that is. How absolutely wonderful.—I’m not getting too mushy in my old age, am I?”

They agreed that he was well within his rights to get too mushy tonight. But what they did not yet know and he did was that most of the mushiness—not all, but most—was little more than a tactical maneuver. As was the reconciliation with Ronnie. The Colonel had things up his sleeve.

He went around the room clockwise, giving a little time to each in turn, and Ronnie went around the other way, and eventually they were face-to-face again, father and son. The Colonel saw Arise watching protectively from a distance, as though considering the merits of joining them as a buffer; but the Colonel shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Arise backed off.

In a quiet voice the Colonel said to Ronnie, “I’m tremendously glad you came here tonight, son. I mean that.”

“I’m glad too. I know we’ve had our problems, Dad—”

“Put them away. I have. With the world in the mess it’s in, we don’t have the luxury of carrying on feuds with our own flesh and blood. You made certain choices about your life that weren’t the choices I would have wanted you to make. All right. There are new choices to make, now. The Entities have changed everything, do you know what I mean? They’ve changed the future and they’ve damned well blotted out the past.”

“We’ll find a way of getting them off our backs sooner or later, won’t we, Dad?”

“Will we? I wonder.”

“Is that a hint of defeatism that I hear in your voice?”

“Call it realism, maybe.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing Colonel Anson Carmichael III saying any such thing.”

“Strictly speaking,” said the Colonel, smiling obliquely, “I’m a general now. In the California Army of Liberation, which hardly anybody knows about, and which I’m not going to discuss with you right now. But I still think of myself as a colonel, and you might as well too.”

“I hear that you went face-to-face with the Entities in their own lair. So to speak. They don’t actually have faces, do they? But you went right in there, you looked them in the eye, you gave them what-for. Isn’t that true, Dad?”

Actually seems curious about it, the Colonel observed. Actually appears to be interested. That in itself is pretty unusual, for Ronnie.

“More or less true,” he said. “Rather less than more.”

“Tell me about it?”

“I’d just as soon not, not right now. It wasn’t pleasant. I want tonight, this whole week, to be nothing but pleasant. Oh, Ronnie, Ronnie, you scamp, you miserable rogue—oh, how happy I am to see you here—”

It had not been pleasant at all, the Colonel’s meeting with the aliens. But it had been necessary, and, after a fashion, instructive.

The mystifying ease of the collapse of all human institutions almost immediately upon the arrival of the Entities was the thing that the Colonel had never been able to comprehend, let alone accept. All those governmental bodies, all those laws and constitutions, all those tightly structured military organizations with their elaborate codes of duty and performance: they had turned out, after thousands of years of civilization, to be just so many houses of cards. One quick gust of wind from outer space and they had all blown away overnight. And the little ad-hoc groups that had replaced them were nothing more than local aggregations of thugs on the one hand and hotheaded vigilantes on the other. That wasn’t government. That was anarchy’s second cousin.

Why? Why? Goddamn it, why’?

Some of it had to do with the dramatic breakdown of electronic communication, on which the world had become so dependent, and on the chaos that that had caused. What had taken three hundred years to happen to the Roman Empire was bound to happen a lot faster in a world that lived and died by data transmission. But that wasn’t a sufficient explanation.

There hadn’t been any overt onslaught, nor even any threat of it.

The Entities, after all, had not gone riding out daily among mankind like the warriors of Sennacherib or the hordes of Genghis Khan. For the most part they had remained, right from the beginning, immured within their own invulnerable starships, issuing no statements, making no demands. They went about their own inscrutable tasks in there and emerged only now and then, just a few at a time, to stroll casually around like so many mildly curious tourists.

Or, to put it more accurately, like haughty new landlords making their first inspection of properties that had recently come into their possession. Tourists would have been asking questions, buying souvenirs, flagging down taxi drivers. But the Entities asked no questions and hired no cabs and, though they did seem to have some interest in souvenirs, simply walked off with whatever they liked wherever they found it, no transaction having taken place, not even a semblance of by-your-leave being offered.

And the world stood helpless before them. Everything that was solid about human civilization had shattered by virtue of their mere presence here on Earth, as though the Entities radiated some high-pitched inaudible tone that had the capacity to shiver all human social structures into instant ruin like so much fragile glass.

What was the secret of their power? The Colonel yearned to know; for until you begin to understand your enemy, you have not a grasshopper’s chance of defeating him, and it was the Colonel’s hope above all else to see the world free again before the end of his days. That was something he could not help wanting, folly though the notion probably was. It was in his bones; it was in his genes.

And so when an opportunity presented itself for him to go right into the lair of the enemy and look him in the glittering yellow eye, he seized the chance unhesitatingly.

No one was quite able to say by what channels the invitation had come forth from them. The Entities did not speak to human beings in any of the languages of Earth; essentially, they did not speak at all. But somehow, somehow, their wishes were communicated. And they communicated a wish now to have two or three intelligent, perceptive Earthlings come aboard their Southern California flagship for a meeting of the minds.

The informal group that called itself the California Army of Liberation, to which the Colonel belonged, had repeatedly petitioned the Entities based in Los Angeles to allow just such a delegation of human negotiators to come aboard their ship and discuss the meaning and purpose of their visit to Earth. These petitions met with total lack of response. The Entities paid no attention at all. It was as if the ants were trying to negotiate with the farmer who had turned his hose on their anthill. It was as if the sheep were attempting to negotiate with the shearer, the pigs and cattle with the slaughterer. The other side seemed not to notice that any request whatever had been made.

But then, unexpectedly, they did seem to notice. It was all very roundabout and indirect. It started with the exercise of the telepathic means of compulsion that had become known as the Push against the bearers of a similar petition that had been presented to the Entities of London; it had been a fairly complex kind of Push, one that seemed to be pulling, after a fashion, as well as repelling. In Resistance circles, an analysis was undertaken aimed at comprehending just what it was the Entities might have been attempting to accomplish by Pushing the London people in the way that they had; and a belief began to emerge that the invaders had been letting it be known that they would indeed entertain such a delegation, a maximum of three human persons. In California, though, not in London.

That could all be a total misinterpretation of the facts, of course. The whole theory was guesswork. Nothing explicit had been said. It was a matter of actions and reactions, of powerful but inarticulate forces operating in a certain way that could be construed as meaning such-and-such, and had been so construed. But in years gone by astronomers had discovered entire hitherto-unsuspected planets of the solar system by studying cosmic actions and reactions of that sort; the California people decided that it was worth gambling on the hope that their interpretation of the London maneuvers was correct, and going forward on that basis with a delegation.

And so. The Liberation Army chose Joshua Leonards, for his anthropological wisdom. Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, for general savvy and scientific insight. Plus Colonel Anson Carmichael III (U.S. Army, Ret.) for any number of reasons. And there on a mild autumn morning the Colonel stood with the other two in front of the sleek gray bulk of the Entity vessel that had begun the whole shebang by making that fiery landing in the San Fernando Valley two years before—Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy once more, the only remaining residue in the Colonel’s life, aside from Peggy Gabrielson, of that grandiose, ambitious, utterly futile What-Shall-We-Do-About-It meeting at the Pentagon the day after the invasion.

“Is it a trap?” Joshua Leonards asked. “I heard this morning that they let five people on board a ship in Budapest last month. They never came out again.”

“Are you saying you want to back out?” Peter Carlyle-Macavoy asked, looking down almost distastefully at the stocky anthropologist from his great height.

“If they don’t let us out, we can study them from within while they study us,” said Leonards. “That’s fine with me.”

“And you, Colonel?”

The Colonel grinned. “I’d surely hate to spend the rest of my life aboard that ship. But I’d hate it worse to spend the rest of my life knowing that I could have gone in there but I said no.”

There was always the curious possibility, he thought, that he might wind up being shipped off to the Entities’ home world the way his former sister-in-law Cindy supposedly had been. That would be strange, all right, finishing his days in a P.O.W. camp on some weird alien world, undergoing perpetual telepathic interrogation by fifteen-foot-tall squids. Well, he would take the risk.

The big hatch in the side of the immense shining starship opened and the covering slid some twenty feet downward along an invisible track to become a platform on which all three of them could stand. Leonards was the first to mount it, then Carlyle-Macavoy, then the Colonel. The moment the last of the three men had come aboard, the platform silently ascended until it reached the level of the dark opening in the ship’s side. Dazzling brightness came splashing out at them from within. “Here we go,” Leonards said. “The three musketeers.”

The Colonel’s mind in that initial moment of entry was full of the questions he hoped to ask. All of them were variations on Where have you come from and why are you here and what do you plan to do with us? but they were couched in an assortment of marginally more indirect conceptualizations. Such as: Were the Entities representatives of a galactic confederation of worlds? If so, would the entry of Earth into that confederation be possible, either now or at some time in the future? And was there any immediate intention of working toward more constructive human-Entity communication? And did they understand that their presence here, their interference with human institutions and the functioning of human economic life, had caused great distress to the inhabitants of a peaceful and by its own lights civilized world? And so on and so on, questions that once upon a time he would never in a million years have imagined himself ever asking, or ever needing to ask.

But the Colonel did not, of course, get to ask any of them, so far as he could tell.

Upon entering a kind of vestibule of the alien ship he was swallowed up in a world of bewildering light, out of which a pair of mountainous alien figures came swimming gracefully toward him amidst veils of even greater brightness. They moved in an air of glory. Long flickers of cold flame rose up about them.

When he could see them clearly, which they permitted him to do after some indeterminate period of time, he was startled to discover that they were beautiful. Awesome and immense, yes. Frightening, perhaps. But in the subtle opalescent shimmer of their glossy translucent integuments and the graceful eddying of their movements and the mellow liquid gaze of their great eyes there lay a potent and ineffable beauty—a delicacy of form, even—that surprised him with its benign impact.

You could disappear into the shining yellow seas of those eyes. You could vanish into the pulsing radiant luminosity of their powerful intelligences, which surrounded them like whirling capes of light, an aura that partook of something close to the divine. You were overwhelmed by that. You were amazed. You were humbled. You were suffused with a sensation that hovered bewilderingly midway between terror and love.

Kings of the universe, they were, lords of creation. And the new masters of Earth.

“Well,” the Colonel wanted to say, “here we are. We’re very happy to have been given the opportunity to—”

But he did not say that, or anything else. Nor did Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy say anything. Nor did either of the aliens, at least not as we understand the meaning of the verb to say.

The meeting that took place in that vestibule of the starship was defined, mostly, by what did not happen.

The three human delegates were not asked their names, nor given any chance to offer them. The two Entities who had come forth to interview them likewise proffered no introductions. There was no pleasant little speech of welcome by the hosts nor expression of gratitude for the invitation by the delegates. Cocktails and canapes were not served. Ceremonial gifts were not exchanged. The visitors were not taken on a tour of the ship.

No questions were asked, no answers given.

Not a word, in fact, was spoken by either side in any language either human or alien.

What did happen was that the Colonel and his two companions stood side by side in awe and wonder and utter stunned silence before the two extraterrestrial titans for a long moment, an infinitely prolonged moment, during which nothing in particular seemed to be happening. And then, gradually, each of the three humans found himself dwindling away within, experiencing in the most excruciating fashion an utter diminution and devaluation of the sense of self-worth that he had painstakingly constructed during the course of a lifetime of hard work, study, and outstanding accomplishment. The Colonel felt dwarfed, and not just in the physical sense, by these eerie giants. The Colonel felt deflated and impaired—shriveled, almost. Reduced in every way.

It was like becoming a small child again, confronted by stern, vast, incomprehensible, omnipotent, and distinctly unloving parents. The Colonel felt utterly and completely disempowered. He was nothing. He was nobody.

This was the experience that had already become known to its recipients as the Touch. It was caused by the silent and non-verbal penetration of a human mind in some telepathic way by the mind of an Entity.

Had the Entities, the Colonel wondered afterward, really intended any such humiliation of their human guests? Perhaps that had been the whole purpose of the meeting: a reinforcement of the fact of their superiority. On the other hand, they had established that fact pretty damned thoroughly already. Why bother to make the point again in this fashion? When you’ve conquered a world overnight without lifting a tentacle in anger, you have no real need to rub it in. More likely the depressing effect of the meeting had merely been an inevitable thing: they are what they are, we are what we are, and when we stand before them we must unavoidably feel this way as an incidental by-product of the disparity in general puissance and all-around effectuality between one species and the other. And so, he concluded, they probably hadn’t meant them to come away from the meeting feeling quite as crappy as they did.

But understanding that did not make him feel much better, of course.

The Touch, the Colonel had already been informed, was usually followed by the Push. Which was the exertion of mental pressure by the infiltrating Entity against the infiltrated human mind, for the purpose of achieving something beneficial to the general welfare of the Entities.

That was what befell them next. The delegates from the California Army of Liberation now were subjected to the Push.

The Colonel felt something—he could not say what, but he felt it, felt himself somehow nudged, no, taken hold of and gently but firmly shoved, he knew not where—and then it was over. Over and gone and already becoming a non-event. But in the moment of that sensation the meeting, such as it had been, had reached its consummation. The Colonel saw that plainly. It was clear, from that point on, that they had already had whatever there was going to be, that the whole content of the meeting would be the Touch followed by the Push. A meeting of minds, indeed, in the most literal sense, but not a very satisfying one for the human delegates. No discussions of any sort. No exchange of statements, no discussion of aims and intents, most certainly no negotiations of any kind. The session was ended, though so far as the Colonel was concerned it had never really begun.

Another lengthy gray span of time without perceptible event went by in an unquantifiable way, one more timeless kind of period in which nothing in particular took place, an absence of incident or even awareness; and then he and Leonards and Macavoy found themselves standing outside the ship again, reeling like drunkards but gradually getting themselves under control.

For some while none of them spoke. Did not want to; perhaps could not.

“Well!” Leonards said, finally, or perhaps it was Carlyle-Macavoy who said it first. The monosyllable came out sounding profound. “And so now we know,” said Carlyle-Macavoy, and Leonards said the same thing half an instant later, just as profoundly. “Now we know, all right,” said the Colonel.

He found himself oddly unable to make eye contact with them; and they too were looking anywhere but straight at him. But then they all came together in a rush like the fellow survivors that they were; they wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders, burly little Leonards in the middle and the two taller men close against him; and in a lurching, staggering way, not without laughter, they went blundering like some deranged six-legged creature across the barren brown field to the car that was waiting for them beyond the boundary of the Entities’ compound.

And that was that. The Colonel was glad to have escaped with his sanity and independence of mind intact, if indeed he had. And it had been a valuable meeting, in its fashion. He saw now even more clearly than before that the Entities could do as they pleased with us; that they had powers so supreme that it was impossible even to describe them, let alone to comprehend them, and certainly not to do battle against them. That would be pure madness, the Colonel thought, doing battle against such creatures as these.

And yet it was not in him to accept that idea. He still carried within himself, embedded in his awareness of the hopelessness of resistance, a congenital unwillingness to accede to the eternal slavery of mankind. Despite everything he had just experienced, he intended to fight on and on, in whatever fashion he could, against these invaders. Those were not compatible concepts, his awareness of the enemy’s utter supremacy and his desire to defeat them anyway. The Colonel found himself skewered by that irresolvable incompatibility. And knew that he must remain so skewered until the end of his days, forever denying within himself that thing which he knew beyond all doubt could not be denied.

Ronnie and Peggy stood side by side by the edge of the flagstone patio, facing outward, looking into the wooded canyon that led down to the city of Santa Barbara. It was just before midnight, a bright moonlit night. Dinner was long over and the others had gone to sleep, and he and she, the last ones left, had simply walked outside together without the need for either of them to make the formal suggestion. She stood now very close to him, almost but not quite touching him. The top of her head was barely armpit-high against him.

The air was clear and eerily mild, even for a Southern California December, as though the silvery moonlight were bathing the landscape in mysterious warmth. The red rooftops of the little city far below were glowing purple-black in the darkness. A soft wind blew from the sea, perhaps portending rain in a day or two.

For a time neither of them spoke. It was very pleasant, he thought, just standing here next to this small, lithe, pretty woman in the peace and quiet of the gentle winter night.

If he said anything, he knew, he would find himself automatically dropping into the kind of games, seductive, manipulative, that he invariably played when he encountered an attractive new woman. He wanted not to do that with her, though he was not sure why. So he remained silent. So did she. She seemed to be expecting him to make some sort of move, but he did not, and that appeared to puzzle her. It puzzled him, too. But he let the silence continue.

Then she said, as though unable to allow it to last another moment, reaching for something and coming up with the most obvious gambit, “What they tell me is that you’re, like, the naughty boy of the family.”

Ronnie laughed. “I have been, I suppose. At least by my father’s standards. I never thought of myself as a particularly bad guy, just an opportunist, I guess. And some of the business deals I got myself involved with were, well, not altogether nice deals. The way the Colonel saw it, there was a certain element of chicanery about them. To me they were just deals. But the true issue, the basic thing for him, is that I never went into the military, which for the Colonel is an unpardonable sin for a member of our family. Though he seems to have pardoned me.”

“He loves you,” Peggy said. “He can’t understand where you went wrong.”

“Well, neither can I. But not for the same reason. By my lights I was just doing what made sense to me. Not every idea I had was a good one. But that doesn’t make me a villain, does it? Of course Hitler could have said the same thing.—Hey, tell me about yourself, okay?”

“What’s to tell?” But she told a little anyway: growing up on the outskirts of Los Angeles, family, high school, her first couple of jobs. Nothing unusual; nothing intimate. No mention of her sojourn aboard the Entities’ starship.

She was perky, cheerful, straightforward, very likable, nothing tricky about her. Ronnie understood now why the Colonel had asked her to come to live with him and help him run the ranch. But ordinarily Ronnie’s own tastes ran to women of a more baroque sort. He was surprised how attractive he found her. He began to see that he was getting snared more deeply than he had bargained for. Something was happening to him, here, something strange, even inexplicable. Well, so be it. A lot of inexplicable things were loose in the world these days.

“Ever been married?” he asked.

“No. Never occurred to me. What about you?”

“Only twice so far. Both youthful mistakes.”

“Everybody makes mistakes.”

“I think I’ve already had my full quota, though.”

“What does that mean?” she said. “Like, no more marriages?”

“No more inappropriate ones.”

She didn’t respond to that. After a while she said, “It’s a pretty night, isn’t it?”

It certainly was. Big bright moon, glittering stars, soft balmy air. Crickets singing somewhere. The scent of gardenia blossoms aloft. The nearness of her, the sense of her trim little body within easy reach, of the powerful pull that it was exerting on him.

Where was the source of that pull, which seemed out of all proportion to her actual qualities? Did it lie in the fact that she was a planet in orbit around the sun that was his father, and by laying hold of her he would attach himself more firmly to the Colonel, which was something that apparently was important to him now? He didn’t know. He refused even to seek an answer. That had been the root of Ronnie’s success all through life, the refusal to look closely into that which he knew he was better off not understanding.

“We can’t do white Christmases here in Southern California,” he said, after a short while, “but we sure can do nice ones of the sort that we do.”

“I’ve never seen snow, do you know that? Except in the movies.”

“I have. I lived in Michigan for two years, my first marriage. Snow’s a very pretty thing. You get tired of it when you live with it day after day, but it’s nice to look at, especially when it’s coming down. Everybody should see it once or twice in their lifetime. Maybe the Entities will arrange for it to start snowing in California as their next trick.”

“Do you seriously think so?” she asked.

“Actually, no. But you never can tell what they’ll do, can you?”

And just at that moment a cold hard point of brilliant blue-white light blossomed suddenly in the sky, to the left of the moon. It was so intense that it seemed to be vibrating.

“Look,” Ronnie said quickly. “The Star of Bethlehem, making a return appearance by popular demand.”

But Peggy wasn’t amused. What she was was scared. She caught her breath with a little hissing intake and pressed herself up against his ribs, and without hesitating he slipped his arm around her and gathered her in.

The point now elongated, becoming a long streaking comet-like smear of brightness that went arcing across the sky from south to north, a blurry white blare, and was gone.

“An Entity ship,” he said. “They’re traveling around somewhere, delivering their Christmas presents a couple of days early.”

“Don’t make jokes about them.”

“I can’t help joking about things like the Entities. I’d go out of my mind if I had to take them as seriously as they deserve.”

“I know what you mean. I still can’t believe it really happened, you know? That they dropped down out of the sky one day, these big hideous monstrous beings, and just took over the whole world. It doesn’t seem possible. It’s all like something you would read about in a comic book. Or a bad dream.”

Very cautiously Ronnie said, “I understand that you were actually a captive on one of their ships.”

“For a little while, yes. That was really like a dream. The whole time I was there I was like, ‘This isn’t really happening to me, this isn’t really happening to me.’ But it was. It was the strangest thing I could ever have imagined.—I met a relative of yours while I was up there, did you know that?”

“Cindy, yes. My uncle’s wife. A little on the eccentric side.”

“She sure was. What a weird woman! Went right up to the aliens, and she was like, ‘Hi, I’m Cindy, I want to welcome you to our planet.’ Just like they were long-lost friends.”

“To her they probably seemed that way.”

“I thought she was outrageous. A lunatic, too.”

“I never cared for her very much myself,” said Ronnie. “Not that I knew her very well, or wanted to. And my father—he absolutely loathed her. So the invasion hasn’t been such a bad thing for him, has it? In one stroke he gets rid of his sister-in-law Cindy and is reconciled with his rogue son Ronnie.”

Peggy seemed to think about that for a moment.

“Are you really such a rogue, then?” she asked.

He grinned. “Through and through, top to bottom. But I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am, like some people have red hair and freckles.”

A second point of light appeared, elongated, streaked across the sky to the north.

She shivered against him.

“Where are they going? What are they doing?”

“Nobody knows. Nobody knows the first goddamned thing about them.”

“I hate it that they’re here. I’d give everything to have them go back where they came from.”

“Me too,” he said. She was still shivering. He pivoted ninety degrees and bent from the hips until his face was opposite hers, and kissed her in a tentative way, and then, as she began to respond, uncertainly at first and then with enthusiasm, got less tentative about it, a good deal less tentative. Quite a good deal less.

And now it was Christmas Eve, and they had had their festive dinner just as though everything was right in the world, plenty of turkey for all and the proper trimmings and any number of bottles from the Colonel’s stock of quite decent Napa Valley wines. And then, when a glossy after-dinner glow had come over everybody, the Colonel stood up and announced, “All right, now. It’s time to get down to brass tacks, folks.”

Anse, who had been expecting this moment since his arrival but in the past thirty-six hours had not managed to garner a single clue about what was coming, sat up tensely, wholly sober even though he had allowed himself an extra glass or two of wine. The others appeared less attentive. Carole, sitting opposite Anse, had a glazed look of satiation. His brother-in-law Doug Gannett, untidy and uncouth as always, seemed actually to be asleep. Rosalie might have been dozing too. Anse’s unhappy cousin Helena seemed several million miles away, as usual. Her brother Paul, ever vigilant for her, was watching her warily. Anse noticed disapprovingly that Ronnie, wide-awake but looking even more than usually flushed from all the wine he had had, was nuzzling up against Peggy Gabrielson, who did not appear to mind.

The Colonel said, launching right into things in a crisp, overly fluent way that suggested that these were well-rehearsed words, “I think you all know that I’ve moved quite some distance out of retirement since the beginning of the invasion crisis. I’m active in Southern California liberation-front circles and I’m in touch, as much as it’s possible to be, with sectors of the former national government that still are operating in various eastern states. Contact is very iffy, you know. But news does reach me from time to time about what’s going on back there. For example, to cite the most spectacular example: within the past five weeks New York City has been completely shut down and sealed off.”

“Shut—down—and—sealed—off?” Anse said. “You mean, some kind of travel interdiction?”

“A very total one. The George Washington Bridge—that’s the one across the Hudson River—has been severed at the Manhattan end. The bridges within the city have been blocked in one way and another also. The subway system is kaput. The various tunnels from New Jersey have been plugged. There are walls across the highways at the northern end of the city. Et cetera. The airports, of course, haven’t been functioning for quite some time. The overall effect is to isolate the place completely from the rest of the country.”

“What about the people who live there?” Ronnie asked. “New York City isn’t a great farming area. What are they going to be eating from now on? Each other?”

“So far as I’m aware,” the Colonel said, “pretty much the whole population of New York is now living in the surrounding states. They were given three days’ notice to evacuate, and apparently most of them did.”

Anse whistled. “Jesus! The mother of all traffic jams!”

“Exactly. A few hundred thousand people were either physically incapable of leaving or simply didn’t believe the Entities were serious, and they’re still in there, where I suppose they’ll gradually starve. The rest, seven million suddenly homeless people, are living in refugee camps in New Jersey and Connecticut, or as squatters wherever they find vacant housing, or in tents, or however they can. You can imagine the scene back there.” The Colonel paused to let them imagine it; and then, just in case they weren’t up to the job, added, “Utter chaos, of course. More or less an instant reversion to barbarism and savagery.”

Doug Gannett, who, as it turned out, had not been asleep, said now, “It’s true. I got the story from a hacker in Cleveland. People are killing each other right and left to find food and shelter. Plus it’s twenty degrees back there now and snowing every third day and thousands are freezing to death in the woods. But there’s nothing we can do about any of this stuff, can we? It’s not our problem. So frankly I don’t understand why you’re bringing it up right here and now, Colonel Carmichael, all this depressing stuff right after such a nice fine meal,” Doug finished, his voice turning puzzled and morose and a little truculent.

The Colonel’s lip-corners crinkled ever so minutely, the gesture that Anse knew was the outward sign of scathing disapproval verging on disgust, within. The old man had never been good at disguising the disdain and even contempt he felt for his daughter’s husband, a slovenly and shambling man who was said to be a crackerjack computer programmer, but who in no other way had demonstrated any kind of worthiness in the Colonel’s eyes. In thirteen years Doug had not figured out anything better to call his father-in-law than “Colonel Carmichael,” either.

The Colonel said, “What if they were to do the same thing to Los Angeles? Give everybody from Santa Monica east to Pasadena and from Mulholland Drive south to Palos Verdes and Long Beach a couple of days to clear out, let’s say, and then interdict all the freeways and cut the place off totally from the surrounding counties.”

There were gasps of shock. There were cries of incredulity.

“Do you have any information that this is about to take place, Dad?” Ronnie asked.

“As a matter of fact, no. Or I would have brought the whole thing up a long time ago. But there’s no reason why it can’t happen—next month, next week, tomorrow. They’ve already made a start on it, you know. I doubt that I need to remind you that Highway 101’s been shut down near Thousand Oaks for the past six months, north and south, concrete walls right across it both ways. Suppose they decided to do that everywhere else. Just consider what it would be like: a tremendous chaotic migration of refugees, everybody looking out for himself and to hell with the consequences. A million people go west to Malibu and Topanga, and a million more cross into Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks, and all the rest of them head for Orange County. Into Costa Mesa, Anse and Carole. Into Newport Beach, Rosalie, Doug. Huntington Beach. Even all the way down to La Jolla, Ronnie. What will it be like? You haven’t forgotten the Troubles, have you? This will be ten times worse.”

Anse said, “What are you trying to tell us, Dad?”

“That I see a New York-style catastrophe shaping up for Los Angeles, and I want all of you to move up here to the ranch before it happens.”

Anse had never before seen them all look so nonplussed. There were slack jaws all over the room, wide eyes, bewildered faces, astonished murmurs.

The Colonel overrode it all. His voice was as firm and strong as Anse had ever heard it.

“Listen to me. We have plenty of space here, and there are outbuildings that can easily be converted to additional residential units. We have our own well. With a little sweat we can make ourselves self-sufficient so far as food goes: we can grow any crop except the really tropical ones, and there’s no reason why all this good land has to be given over to almonds and walnuts. Also our position up here on the side of the mountain is a good strategic one, easily fortified and defended. We—”

“Hold it, Dad. Please.”

“Just a minute, Anse. I’m not done.”

“Please. Let me say something, first.” Anse didn’t wait for permission. “Are you seriously asking us to abandon our houses, our jobs, our lives—”

“What jobs? What lives?” There was a sudden whipcrack tone in the Colonel’s voice. “Since the Troubles you’ve all been improvising, every bit of the time. There isn’t one of you, is there, who’s still got the same job they had the day before the Entities came. Or goes about any other part of their daily life in remotely the same way. So it isn’t as if you’re clinging to well-loved established routines. And what about your houses? Those nice pretty suburban houses of yours, Anse, Rosalie, Paul, Helena? With the whole population of central Los Angeles flooding down your way to look for a place to sleep, and everybody angry because their neighborhood got sealed off and yours didn’t, what’s going to become of your cute little towns? No. No. What’s just ahead for us is going to be infinitely worse than anything that occurred during the Troubles. It’s going to be like a Richter Nine earthquake, I warn you. I want you here, where you’ll be safe, when that happens.”

Helena, who had been widowed at twenty-two in the fury of the Troubles, and who had not even begun in the intervening two years to come to terms with her loss, now started to sob. Rosalie and Doug were staring at each other in consternation. Their pudgy son Steve seemed stunned; he looked as though he wanted to crawl under the table. The only ones in the room who appeared completely calm were Peggy Gabrielson, who surely had known in advance that this was what the Colonel had in mind, and Ronnie, whose face was a bland, noncommittal poker-player’s mask.

Anse looked toward his wife. Panic was visible in her eyes. Leaning across to him, Carole whispered, “He’s gone completely around the bend, hasn’t he? You’ve got to do something, Anse. Get him to calm down.”

“I’m afraid he is calm,” Anse said. “That’s the problem.”

Paul Carmichael, with one comforting arm across his sister’s shoulders, said, levelheaded as always, “I don’t have any doubt, Uncle Anson, that we’ll be better off up here if the same thing takes place in Los Angeles that you say was done in New York. But just how likely a possibility is that? The Entities could shut down New York just by cutting half a dozen transportation arteries. Closing off Los Angeles would be a lot more complicated.”

The Colonel nodded. He moistened his lips thoughtfully.

“It would be, yes. But they could do it if they wanted to. I don’t know whether they do: nobody does. Let me tell you, though, one further thing that may affect your decision. Or at least I’ll partly tell you.”

That was too cryptic. There were frowns all over the room.

The Colonel said, “As I told you, I’ve been more active in the Resistance than I’ve let you know, and thus I happen to be privy to a great deal of information that circulates in Resistance circles. I don’t intend to share any classified details with you, obviously. But what I can tell you is that certain factions within the Resistance are considering making a very serious attempt at a military strike against an Entity compound right after the new year. It’s a rash and stupid and very dangerous idea and I hope to God that it never comes to pass. But if it does, it will certainly fail, and then the Entities will beyond any doubt retaliate severely, and may the Lord help us all, then. Chaos beyond belief will be the result and you, wherever you may be at the time, will wish that you had taken me up on my offer to move up here. That’s all I’m going to say. The rest is up to you.”

He looked around the room, steely-eyed, fierce, almost defiant, every inch the commanding officer.

“Well?”

The Colonel was looking straight at Anse. The oldest, the favorite. But Anse did not know what to say. Were things really going to be as apocalyptic as this? He respected the old man’s concern for them. But even now, after all that had taken place, he could not bring himself to believe that the roof was going to fall in on Los Angeles like that. And he felt a powerful inner opposition to the idea of giving up whatever was left of the life he had made for himself down there in Orange County, uprooting the whole family on the Colonel’s mere say-so and holing up like hermits on this mountainside. Settling in here with his father and his slippery rascal of a brother and all the rest of them. Fort Carmichael, they could call it.

He sat silent, stymied, stuck.

Then came a cheerful voice from the corner:

“I’m with you, Dad. This is the only place to be. I’ll go home right after Christmas and pack up my stuff and get myself back here before the first of the year.”

Ronnie.

Uttering words that fell on the astounded Anse like thunderbolts. This is the only place to be.

Even the Colonel seemed momentarily dumbfounded to realize that Ronnie, of all people, had been the first one to agree. He, of all people, scurrying back ahead of the others to the parental nest. But he made a quick recovery.

“Good. Good. That’s wonderful, Ronnie. What about the rest of you, now? Doug, Paul, you guys are both computer experts. I don’t know beans about computers, and I need to. We get a little on-line communication with other places here, but it isn’t nearly enough. If you were living here, you could click right into the Resistance net and do some very necessary programming for us. Rosalie, you’re with a money broker of some sort now, is that right? In the next stage of the breakdown of society you could probably help us figure out how to cope with the changes that will be coming. And you, Anse—”

Anse’s head was swimming. He still could not bring himself to accede. Across the way from him, Carole, reading his mind without the slightest difficulty, was saying silently, lips exaggeratedly pursed, No. No. No. No.

“Anse?” the Colonel said again.

“I think I could use a little fresh air,” Anse said.

He went outside before his father had any chance to respond to that.

It was cooler tonight than last night, but still on the mild side. There was rain coming soon:” he could feel it. Anse stood looking down at little Santa Barbara and imagined that it was the gigantic city of Los Angeles, and imagined that city in flames, its freeways impenetrably blocked, vast armies of refugees on the march, heading toward his very street. Swarms of gleeful Entities floating along behind them, herding them along.

He wondered also what was behind Ronnie’s quick acquiescence. Buttering the old man up, gliding cunningly toward the foremost place in his heart after the long estrangement? Why? What for?

Maybe Peggy Gabrielson had had something to do with it. Anse was pretty sure that Ronnie and Peggy had spent last night together. Did the Colonel know that? The body language was obvious enough. Except, perhaps, to the Colonel. The Colonel would not have been pleased. The Colonel took a very Victorian view of such goings-on. And he was so protective of Peggy. He would surely intervene.

Well, Colonel or no, Ronnie almost certainly was up to something with Peggy, and was even willing to move to the ranch to keep it going. For one wild moment Anse found himself arguing that he would have to move here too, to protect his father against Ronnie’s schemes, whatever they might be. Because Ronnie was totally amoral. Ronnie was capable of anything.

Anse had been troubled by his younger brother’s amorality since he was old enough to understand Ronnie’s nature. That was what he was, Anse thought—not immoral, as the Colonel took him to be, but amoral. Someone who does as he pleases without ever pausing a millisecond to consider issues of right and wrong, of guilt or shame. You had to be very cautious when you were dealing with somebody like that.

But also Anse was, and always had been, intimidated by Ronnie’s volatile intelligence. Ronnie’s mind moved faster and took him into stranger places than Anse could ever enter.

Anse knew that he himself was a fundamentally ordinary, decent man, flawed, weaker than he would like to be, occasionally guilty of acts of which he disapproved. Ronnie never disapproved of anything having to do with Ronnie. That was frightening. He was demonic; diabolical, even. Capable of almost anything. To prosaic diligent imperfect Anse, who loved his wife and yet was often unfaithful to her, who obeyed his iron-souled father in all things and yet had not troubled himself to have the expected distinguished military career, Ronnie—who had not bothered with any sort of military career, nor offered the slightest explanation for bypassing one—was terrifying to Anse, a superior being, forever outflanking him with maneuvers he could not comprehend.

Ronnie was always a step ahead, acting out of motives that Anse could not fathom. His two quick marriages and lightning-fast divorces, no visible reasons for either. His equally swift and puzzling shifts from one sort of lucrative borderline-legal business operation to another. Or, for that matter, the time once when they were both still little boys and Ronnie had justified some terrible act of hostile mischief by explaining that it made him angry that Anse, and not he, had been given the sacred privilege of carrying the family name, Anson Carmichael IV, and that he, Ronald Jeffrey Carmichael, was going to get even with Anse for that a million times over during all the days of their lives.

And now here was Ronnie improbably jumping at the Colonel’s unexpected offer, instantly agreeing to move up here and dwell forever after at the right hand of their father while the rest of Southern California went to hell around them. What did Ronnie know? What did he see in the days ahead that was invisible to Anse?

Anse thought of his children in the midst of civil strife. A replay of the Troubles, only really bad this time. Gunfire in the street, fires raging on the northern horizon, black smoke filling the sky, maddened hordes of people converging on Costa Mesa, his very district: hundreds of thousands of people from Torrance and Carson and Long Beach and Gardena and Inglewood and Culver City and Redondo Beach and all those million other little places that made up the giant amoebic thing that was Los Angeles, people who had been driven from their own homes by Entity edict and now proposed to take shelter in his. And there were Jill and Mike and Charlie peeking hesitantly out from behind him on the porch, mystified, frightened, their faces gone completely bloodless, asking plaintively, “Daddy, Daddy, why are there so many people on our street, what do they want, why do they look so unhappy?” While Carole, from within the house, called to him again and again, a strangled terrified moan, “Anse—Anse—Anse—Anse—”

It would never happen. Never. Never never never. It was just the old man’s wild apocalyptic fantasy. Probably he was having Vietnam flashbacks again.

Even so, Anse was surprised to find that he had somehow decided to move to the ranch after all, in the time it took him to walk back from the edge of the patio to the door of the house. And he discovered, too, once he was inside, that all the others had come to the same decision also.

Christmas morning, very early. The Colonel lay dreaming. More often than not, what he dreamed of was that happy time right after the war, reunited with his family at last, his children around him and his wife in his bed every night in that pretty little rented house in that cheery Maryland suburb. He was dreaming of that time now. Halcyon days, at least when seen in the warm pink glow of a dream. The Johns Hopkins days, getting his doctorate, working toward it in the library all day, then coming home to robust little Anse, who was always ten or eleven in the dreams, and Rosalie, a pretty little girl in smudged jeans, and Ron, no more than two and already with that rapscallion gleam in his eye. And best of all Irene, still healthy, young, just turned thirty and delicious to look at, strong sturdy thighs, high taut breasts, long dazzling spill of golden hair. She was coming toward him now, smiling, radiant, wearing nothing but a filmy little amethyst-colored negligee—

But, as ever, he remained on the edge of wakefulness even while asleep, the ancient inescapable discipline of his profession. The soft bleebling of the telephone by the bedside sounded, the private line, and by the second ring Irene and her negligee were gone and the phone was in his hand.

“Carmichael.”

“General Carmichael, it’s Sam Bacon.” The former Senate Majority Leader, with the fine tennis-player legs. Now one of the ranking civilian officials of the California Army of Liberation. “I’m sorry to be awakening you so early on Christmas day, but—”

“There’s probably a good reason, Senator.”

“I’m afraid there is. Word has just come through from Denver. They’re going to do the laser thing after all.”

“The stupid fucking sons of bitches,” said the Colonel.

“Ah—yes. Yes, definitely,” said Bacon. He seemed a little taken aback at the sound of such colorful language, coming from the Colonel. That was not the Colonel’s custom. “They’ve seen Joshua Leonards’s report, and Peter’s comments too, and the response is that they’re going to go ahead with it anyway. They’ve got an anthropologist of their own—no, a sociologist—who says that if only for symbolic reasons we need to begin some sort of counter-offensive against the Entities, in fact it’s long overdue, and now that we have the actual capacity to do so—”

“Symbolic lunacy,” the Colonel said.

“We all second that, sir.”

“When will it happen?”

“They’re being very cagey. But we’ve also intercepted and decoded a Net message from the Colorado center to their adjuncts in Montana that seems pretty clearly to indicate that the strike will occur on January 1 or 2. That is, approximately seven days from now.”

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“We’ve already notified the President, and he’s sending a countermanding order through to Denver.”

“The President,” said the Colonel, making that sound like an obscenity also. “Why don’t they notify God, too? And the Pope. And Professor Einstein. Denver isn’t going to pay any attention to countermanding orders that come out of Washington. Washington’s ancient history. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say that to you, Senator. What we need to do is get somebody into Denver ourselves and disable that damned laser trigger ourselves before they can use it.”

“I concur. And so do Joshua and Peter. But we have some serious opposition right within our own group.”

“On the grounds that an act of sabotage aimed against our beloved liberation-front comrades in Denver is treason against humanity in general, is that it?”

“Not exactly, General Carmichael. The opposition comes on straight military grounds, I’m afraid. General Brackenridge. General Comstock. They believe that the Denver laser strike is a good and proper thing to attempt at this present time.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” the Colonel said. “So I’m outvoted, Sam?”

“I’m sorry to say that you are, sir.”

The Colonel’s heart sank. He had been afraid of this.

Brackenridge had been something fairly high up in the Marines before the Conquest. Comstock was a Navy man. Even a Navy man could be a general in the California Army of Liberation. They were both much younger than the Colonel; they had never had any combat experience whatsoever, not even a minor police action in some third-world boondock. Desk men, both of them. But they had two votes to his one in the military arm of the executive committee.

The Colonel had suspected they would take the position that they now had taken. And had fought with them about it.

Let me remind you, he had said, of a remarkably ugly bit of military history. The Second World War, Czechoslovakia: the Czech underground managed to murder the local Nazi commander, a particularly monstrous character named Reinhard Heydrich. Whereupon the Nazis rounded up every single inhabitant of the village -where it had happened, a place called Lidice, executed all the men, sent the women and children to concentration camps, where they died too. Don’t you think the same thing is likely to happen, only at least twenty thousand times worse, if we lay a finger on one of these precious E-Ts?

They had heard him out; he had given it whatever eloquence he could muster; it had not mattered.

“When was this vote held?” he asked.

“Twenty minutes ago. I thought it was best to let you know right away.”

The Colonel yearned to slide back into his dream. Once more, 17 Brewster Drive; the young Irene in her amethyst-colored negligee; the hard pink tips of the beautiful breasts that ultimately would kill her showing distinctly against the filmy fabric of the garment. But none of that was available just now.

What was available, sitting up there high above the Earth in geosynchronous orbit, was a three-year-old laser-armed military satellite that the Entities had curiously failed to notice when they had neutralized the other human orbital weapons, or had not understood, or simply were not afraid of. It had the capacity to shoot a beam of very potent energy indeed at any point on Earth that happened to pass beneath it. It had been intended, in those long-ago idyllic pre-Entity days of three years ago, as the United States’ all-purpose global policeman, equipped with the high-tech equivalent of a very long billy-club: the ability to cut a nifty scorch-line warning across the territory of any petty country whose tinhorn despot of a ruler might suffer from a sudden attack of delusions of grandeur.

The problem was that the software that activated the satellite’s deadly laser beam had been lost during the Troubles, and so the thing was simply sitting up there, idle, useless, pointlessly going around and around and around.

There was a new and even bigger problem now, which was that the Colorado counterpart of the California Army of Liberation had discovered a backup copy of the activator program and was proudly planning to launch a laser strike against the Denver headquarters of the Entities.

The Colonel knew what the consequences of that were going to be. And dreaded them.

To Former Senate Majority Leader Sam Bacon he said simply, “So there’s no way, diplomatic or otherwise, of preventing them from launching the strike?”

“It doesn’t seem so, General.”

Lidice, he thought. Lidice all over again.

“Oh, the damned fools,” said the Colonel quietly. “The hotheaded suicidal idiots!”

Across the world in England, Christmas Day had long since arrived.

A child had been born at Bethlehem on this day some two thousand years before, and two thousand years later children continued to be born at Christmastime all around the world, though the coincidence could be an awkward one for mother and child, who must contend with the risks inherent in the general overcrowding and understaffing of hospitals at that time of year. But prevailing hospital conditions were not an issue for the mother of the child of uncertain parentage and dim prospects who was about to come into the world in unhappy and disagreeable circumstances in an unheated upstairs storeroom of a modest Pakistani restaurant grandly named Khan’s Mogul Palace in Salisbury, England, very early in the morning of this third Christmas since the advent of the Entities.

Salisbury is a pleasant little city that lies to the south and west of London and is the principal town of the county of Wiltshire. It is noted particularly for its relatively unspoiled medieval charm, for its graceful and imposing thirteenth-century cathedral, and for the presence, eight miles away, of the celebrated prehistoric megalithic monument known as Stonehenge. Stonehenge, in the darkness before the dawn of that Christmas Day, was undergoing one of the most remarkable events in its long history, and, despite the earliness (or lateness) of the hour, a goodly number of Salisbury’s inhabitants had turned out to witness the spectacular goings-on.

But not Haleem Khan, the owner of Khan’s Mogul Palace, nor his wife Aissha, both of them asleep in their beds, for neither of them had any interest in the pagan monument that was Stonehenge, let alone the strange thing that was happening to it now. And certainly not Haleem’s daughter Yasmeena Khan, who was seventeen years old and cold and frightened, and who was lying half naked on the bare floor of the upstairs storeroom of her father’s restaurant, hidden between a huge sack of raw lentils and an even larger sack of flour, writhing in terrible pain as shame and illicit motherhood came sweeping down on her like the avenging sword of angry Allah.

She had sinned. She knew that. Her father, her plump, reticent, overworked, mortally weary, and in fact already dying father, had several times in the past year warned her of sin and its consequences, speaking with as much force as she had ever seen him muster; and yet she had chosen to take the risk. Just three times, three different boys, only one time each, all three of them English and white.

Andy.

Eddie.

Richie.

Names that blazed like bonfires in the neural pathways of her soul.

Her mother—not really her mother; her true mother had died when Yasmeena was three; this was Aissha, her father’s second wife, the robust and stolid woman who had raised her, had held the family and the restaurant together all these years—had given her warnings too, but they had been couched in entirely different terms. “You are a woman now, and a woman must allow herself some pleasure in life,” Aissha had told her. “But you must be careful.” Not a word about sin, just taking care not to get into trouble.

Well, Yasmeena had been careful, or thought she had, but evidently not careful enough. Therefore she had failed Aissha. And failed her sad, quiet father too, because she had certainly sinned despite all his warnings to remain virtuous, and Allah now would punish her for that. Was punishing her already. Punishing her terribly.

She had been very late discovering she was pregnant. She had not expected to be. Yasmeena wanted to believe that she was still too young for bearing babies, because her breasts were so small and her hips were so narrow, almost like a boy’s. And each of the three times she had done It with a boy—impulsively, furtively, half reluctantly, once in a musty cellar and once in a ruined omnibus and once right here in this very storeroom—she had taken precautions afterward, diligently swallowing the pills she had secretly bought from the smirking Hindu woman at the shop in Winchester, two tiny green pills in the morning and the big yellow one at night, five days in a row.

The pills were so nauseating that they had to work. But they hadn’t. She should never have trusted pills provided by a Hindu, Yasmeena would tell herself a thousand times over; but by then it was too late.

The first sign had come only about three months before. Her breasts suddenly began to fill out. That had pleased her, at first. She had always been so scrawny; but now it seemed that her body was developing at last. Boys liked breasts. You could see their eyes quickly flicking down to check out your chest, though they seemed to think you didn’t notice it when they did. All three of her lovers had put their hands into her blouse to feel hers, such as they were; and at least one—Eddie, the second—had actually been disappointed at what he found there. He had said so, just like that: “Is that all?”

But now her breasts were growing fuller and heavier every week, and they started to ache a little, and the dark nipples began to stand out oddly from the smooth little circles in which they were set, and her bleeding had not come, either. So Yasmeena began to feel fear; and when her bleeding still did not come, she feared even more. But her bleeding had never come on time. Once last year she had been two months late, and she an absolute pure virgin then.

Still, there were the breasts; and then her hips seemed to be getting wider. Yasmeena said nothing, went about her business, chatted pleasantly with the customers, who liked her because she was slender and pretty and polite, and pretended all was well. Again and again at night her hand would slide down her flat boyish belly, anxiously searching for hidden life lurking beneath the taut skin. She felt nothing.

But something was there, all right, and by early November it was making the faintest of bulges, only a tiny knot pushing upward below her navel, but a little bigger every day. She began wearing her blouses untucked, to hide the new fullness of her breasts and the burgeoning rondure of her belly. She opened the seams of her trousers and punched two new holes in her belt. It became harder for her to do her work, to carry the heavy trays all evening long and to put in the hours afterward washing the dishes, but she forced herself to be strong. There was no one else to do the job. Her father took the orders and Aissha did the cooking and Yasmeena served the food and cleaned up after the restaurant closed. Her brother Khalid was gone, killed defending Aissha from a mob of white men during the riots that broke out after the Entities came, and her sister Leila was too small, only five, no use in the restaurant.

No one at home commented on the new way she was dressing. Perhaps they thought it was the current fashion.

Her father scarcely glanced at anyone these days; preoccupied with his failing restaurant and his failing health, he went about bowed over, coughing all the time, praying endlessly under his breath. He was forty years old and looked sixty. Khan’s Mogul Palace was nearly empty, night after night, even on the weekends. People did not travel any more, now that the Entities were here. No foreigners came from distant parts of the world to spend the night at Salisbury before going on to see Stonehenge, these days.

As for her stepmother, Yasmeena imagined that she saw her giving her sidewise looks now and again, and worried over that. But Aissha said nothing. So there was probably no suspicion. Aissha was not the sort to keep silent, if she suspected something.

The Christmas season drew near. Now Yasmeena’s swollen legs were as heavy as dead logs and her breasts were hard as boulders and she felt sick all the time. It was not going to be long, now. She could no longer hide from the truth. But she had no plan. If Khalid were here, he would know what to do. Khalid was gone, though. She would simply have to let things happen and trust that Allah, when He was through punishing her, would forgive her and be merciful.

Christmas Eve, there were four tables of customers. That was a surprise, to be so busy on a night when most English people had dinner at home. Midway through the evening Yasmeena thought she would fall down in the middle of the room and send her tray, laden with chicken biriani and mutton vindaloo and boti kebabs and schooners of lager, spewing across the floor. She steadied herself then; but an hour later she did fall, or, rather, sag to her knees, in the hallway between the kitchen and the garbage bin where no one could see her. She crouched there, dizzy, sweating, gasping, nauseated, feeling her bowels quaking and strange spasms running down the front of her body and into her thighs; and after a time she rose and continued on with her tray toward the bin.

It will be this very night, she thought.

And for the thousandth time that week she ran through the little calculation in her mind: December 24 minus nine months is March 24, therefore it is Richie Burke, the father. At least he was the one who gave me pleasure also.

Andy, he had been the first. Yasmeena couldn’t remember his last name. Pale and freckled and very thin, with a beguiling smile, and on a summer night just after her sixteenth birthday when the restaurant was closed because her father was in hospital for a few days with the beginning of his trouble, he invited her dancing and treated her to a couple of pints of brown ale and then, late in the evening, told her of a special party at a friend’s house that he was invited to, only there turned out to be no party, just a stale-smelling cellar room and an old couch, and his hands roaming the front of her blouse and then going between her legs and her trousers coming off and then, quick, quick!, the long hard narrow reddened thing emerging from him and sliding into her, done and done and done in just a couple of moments, a gasp from him and a shudder and his head buried against her cheek and that was that. She had thought it was supposed to hurt, the first time, but she had felt almost nothing at all, neither pain nor anything that might have been delight. The next time Yasmeena saw him in the street he grinned and turned crimson and winked at her, but said nothing to her, and they had never exchanged a word since.

Then Eddie Glossop, in the autumn, the one who had found her breasts insufficient and told her so. Big broad-shouldered Eddie, who worked for the meat merchant and who had an air of great worldliness about him. He was old, almost twenty-five. She went with him because she knew there was supposed to be pleasure in it and she had not had it from Andy. But there was none from Eddie either, just a lot of huffing and puffing as he lay sprawled on top of her in the aisle of that burned-out omnibus by the side of the road that went toward Shaftesbury. He was much bigger down there than Andy, and it hurt when he went in, and she was glad that this had not been her first time. But she wished she had not done it at all.

And then Richie Burke, in this very storeroom on an oddly warm night in March, with everyone asleep in the family apartments downstairs at the back of the restaurant. She tiptoeing up the stairs, and Richie clambering up the drainpipe and through the window, tall, lithe, graceful Richie who played the guitar so well and sang and told everyone that someday he was going to be a general in the war against the Entities and wipe them from the face of the Earth. A wonderful lover, Richie. She kept her blouse on because Eddie had made her uneasy about her breasts. Richie caressed her and stroked her for what seemed like hours, though she was terrified that they would be discovered and wanted him to get on with it; and when he entered her, it was like an oiled shaft of smooth metal gliding into her, moving so easily, easily, easily, one gentle thrust after another, on and on and on until marvelous palpitations began to happen inside her and then she erupted with pleasure, moaning so loudly that Richie had to put his hand over her mouth to keep her from waking everyone up.

That was the time the baby had been made. There could be no doubt of that. All the next day she dreamed of marrying Richie and spending the rest of the nights of her life in his arms. But at the end of that week Richie disappeared from Salisbury—some said he had gone off to join a secret underground army that was going to launch guerrilla warfare against the Entities—and no one had heard from him again.

Andy. Eddie. Richie.

And here she was on the floor of the storeroom again, with her trousers off and the shiny swollen hump of her belly sending messages of agony and shame through her body. Her only covering was a threadbare blanket that reeked of spilled cooking oil. Her water had burst about midnight. That was when she had crept up the stairs to wait in terror for the great disaster of her life to finish happening. The contractions were coming closer and closer together, like little earthquakes within her. Now the time had to be two, three, maybe four in the morning. How long would it be? Another hour? Six? Twelve?

Relent and call Aissha to help her?

No. No. She didn’t dare.

Earlier in the night voices had drifted up from the streets to her. The sound of footsteps. That was strange, shouting and running in the street, this late. The Christmas revelry didn’t usually go on through the night like this. It was hard to understand what they were saying; but then out of the confusion there came, with sudden clarity:

“The aliens! Pulling down Stonehenge, taking it apart!”

“Get your wagon, Charlie, we’ll go and see!”

Pulling down Stonehenge. Strange. Strange. Why would they do that? Yasmeena wondered. But the pain was becoming too great for her to be able to give much thought to Stonehenge just now, or to the Entities who had somehow overthrown the invincible white men in the twinkling of an eye and now ruled the world, or to anything else except what was happening within her, the flames dancing through her brain, the ripplings of her belly, the implacable downward movement of—of—

Something.

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” she murmured timidly. “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet.”

And again: “Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe.”

And again.

And again.

The pain was terrible. She was splitting wide open.

“Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael!” That something had begun to move in a spiral through her now, like a corkscrew driving a hot track in her flesh. “Mohammed! Mohammed! Mohammed! There is no god but Allah!” The words burst from her with no timidity at all, now. Let Mohammed and Allah save her, if they really existed. What good were they, if they would not save her, she so innocent and ignorant, her life barely begun? And then, as a spear of fire gutted her and her pelvic bones seemed to crack apart, she let loose a torrent of other names, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Mary, and even the forbidden Hindu names, Shiva, Krishna, Shakti, Kali, anyone at all who would help her through this, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone—

She screamed three times, short, sharp, piercing screams.

She felt a terrible inner wrenching and the baby came spurting out of her with astonishing swiftness, and a gushing Ganges of blood followed it, a red river that would not stop flowing. Yasmeena knew at once that she was going to die. Something wrong had happened. Everything would come out of her insides and she would die.

Already, just moments after the birth, an eerie new calmness was enfolding her. She had no energy left now for further screaming, or even to look after the baby. It was somewhere down between her spread thighs, that was all she knew. She lay back, drowning in a rising pool of blood and sweat. She raised her arms toward the ceiling and brought them down again to clutch her throbbing breasts, stiff now with milk. She called now upon no more holy names. She hardly remembered her own.

She sobbed quietly. She trembled. She tried not to move, because that would surely make the bleeding even worse.

An hour went by, or a week, or a year.

Then an anguished voice high above her in the dark:

“What? Yasmeena? Oh, my god, my god, my god! Your father will perish!”

Aissha, it was. Bending to her, engulfing her. The strong arm raising her head, lifting it against the warm motherly bosom.

“Can you hear me, Yasmeena? Oh, Yasmeena! My god, my god!” And then an ululation of grief rising from her stepmother’s throat like some hot volcanic geyser bursting from the ground. “Yasmeena! Yasmeena!”

“The baby?” Yasmeena said, in the tiniest of voices.

“Yes! Here! Here! Can you see?”

Yasmeena saw nothing but a red haze.

“A boy?” she asked, very faintly.

“A boy, yes.”

In the blur of her dimming vision she thought she saw something small and pinkish-brown, smeared with scarlet, resting in her stepmother’s hands. Thought she could hear him crying, even.

“Do you want to hold him?”

“No. No.” Yasmeena understood clearly that she was going. The last of her strength had left her.

“He is strong and beautiful,” said Aissha. “A splendid boy.”

“Then I am very happy.” Yasmeena fought for one last fragment of energy. “His name—is—Khalid. Khalid Haleem Burke.”

“Burke?”

“Yes. Khalid Haleem Burke.”

“Is that the father, Yasmeena? Burke?”

“Burke. Richie Burke.” With her final sliver of strength she spelled the name.

“Tell me where he lives, this Richie Burke. I will get him. This is shameful, giving birth by yourself, alone in the dark, in this awful room! Why did you never say anything? Why did you hide it from me? I would have helped. I would—”

But Yasmeena Khan was already dead. The first shaft of morning light now came through the grimy window of the upstairs storeroom. Christmas Day had begun.

Eight miles away, at Stonehenge, the Entities had finished their night’s work. Three of the towering alien creatures had supervised while a human work crew, using handheld pistol-like devices that emitted a bright violet glow, had uprooted every single one of the ancient stone slabs of the celebrated megalithic monument on windswept Salisbury Plain as though they were so many jackstraws. And had rearranged them so that what had been the outer circle of immense sandstone blocks now had become two parallel rows running from north to south; the lesser inner ring of blue slabs had been moved about to form an equilateral triangle; and the sixteen-foot-long block of sandstone at the center of the formation that people called the Altar Stone had been raised to an upright position at the center.

A crowd of perhaps two thousand people from the adjacent towns had watched through the night from a judicious distance as this inexplicable project was being carried out. Some were infuriated; some were saddened; some were indifferent; some were fascinated. Many had theories about what was going on, and one theory was as good as another, no better, no worse.

As for Khalid Haleem Burke, born on Christmas Day amidst his mother’s pain and shame and his family’s grief, he was not going to be the new Savior of mankind, however neat a coincidence that might have been. But he would live, though his mother had not, and in the fullness of time he would do his little part, strike his little blow, against the awesome beings who had with such contemptuous ease taken possession of the world into which he had been born.

On the first day of the new year, at half past four in the morning Prague time, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann achieved his first successful contact with the communications network of the Entities.

He didn’t expect it to be easy, and it wasn’t. But he wasn’t expecting to fail, and he didn’t.

—Hello, there, he said.

A good deal of information about the aliens’ data-processing systems had already been accumulated, bit by bit, by this hacker and that one, here and there around the world. And, despite the deficiencies in the old global Net that had been caused by the Entities’ interference with the steady flow of electrical power on Planet Earth at the time of the Great Silence, most of this information had already been disseminated quite extensively by way of the reconstituted post-Conquest hacker network.

Karl-Heinrich was part of that network. Operating under the cognomen of Bad Texas Vampire Lords, he had built up associations with such European and even American centers of information as Interstellar Stalin, Pirates of the Starways, Killer Crackers from Hell, Mars Incorporated, Dead Inside, and Ninth Dimension Bandits. From them, and others like them, he had picked up whatever shards of data about the Entities’ computational modes that he could find, everything incomplete, a scintilla here and a particle there, a morsel here and a scrap there.

A lot of it was wrong. Much of it was excessively hypothetical. Some of it was entirely the invention of its disseminators. But—here and there, in the two years and two months since the Conquest—certain gifted hackers had managed to learn a few things, little nuggets of fact, that actually seemed to make sense.

They had done it by interviewing anyone who had had a chance to observe the doings of the Entities at close range and seen Entity computers in action. That meant dredging through the recollections of anyone who had been taken aboard the Entity starships, for one thing. Some of these abductees were hackers themselves, who had paid very close attention. There even were hackers who had managed to infiltrate human slave-labor gangs and take part in the incomprehensible reconstruction schemes of which the Entities were so fond. There was much that could be learned from that nasty experience.

And so they had garnered a few clues about the way the invaders sorted and processed and transmitted information; and they had put it all out there on the Net for their fellow hackers to see and ponder. And out of that assortment of crumbs, dribblets, rags, tags, tatters, and wild guesses, methodically filtering out the parts that were incompatible with the rest, Karl-Heinrich had eventually put together his own internally consistent picture of how the Entity computers might operate and how they could be hacked.

—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann of Prague, the Czech Republic.

The Bad Texas Vampire Lords, or, rather, the solitary and peculiar boy that lurked behind that particular nom-de-Net, did not rush to share these insights with the other subversive organizations of the hacker world. It might have been useful to the cause of humanity if he had, because it would have advanced everybody’s knowledge of the situation and, very likely, led to even greater understanding. But Karl-Heinrich had never been good at sharing things. There had never been much of a way for him to learn how to do it. He was the only child of remote, austere, forbidding parents. He had never had a close friend, except via the Net, and those were always longdistance friendships, anonymous, carefully controlled. His love life, thus far, had not progressed beyond electronic voyeurism. He was an island unto himself.

Besides, he wanted full credit for cracking the Entity code. He wanted to be world-famous, the best hacker ever. He wanted to be immensely famous. If he couldn’t be loved, he could at least be admired and respected. And—who knew?—if he became famous enough, platoons of girls might stand in line outside his door for a chance to give themselves to him. Which was the thing he wanted above all else.

—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers.

Already, beyond any question, it had become clear to everyone who had worked on the problem that the Entities used a digital system of computation. That was welcome news. After all, being aliens, they might have had some altogether alien way of processing data that would be beyond all human fathoming. But it had turned out that even on the far-off unknown star of the Entities the good old binary system was the most efficient way of counting things, even as on primitive little Earth. Yes or no; on or off; go or no-go; positive or negative; open or closed; present or absent; one or zero—there was nothing simpler. Even for them.

The Entity mainframe computers themselves were bio-organic devices with liquid software reservoirs, apparently. In essence, huge synthetic brains. They seemed to be, as human brains are, chemically programmable, responding to hormonal inputs. But that was only an operational fact. In the most fundamental sense they could be understood to be, almost certainly, electrically operated mechanisms: again, just as human brains are. Computations were achieved by the manipulation of charge. The chemical inputs changed electrical polarities; they turned ones into zeros, presences into absences, ons into offs.

The chemical inputs, perhaps, could be duplicated electrically, just as they were in the implanted biochips that had become all the rage among hackers like Karl-Heinrich a year or two before the invasion. Karl-Heinrich set out to try.

—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers. This has been the great dream of my life, and now I have achieved it.

He spent a couple of dark wintry days up on the steep hill behind Hradcany Castle, snooping around the deserted streets outside the ancient wall. It wasn’t possible to get into the castle grounds any more, of course, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t tap into electrical conduits that did. Unless the aliens could pull electricity out of the air by alien magic, they needed distribution lines for their power just like anyone else. And unless they had installed their own generating systems within the castle, which was an altogether plausible possibility, the lines had to come in from outside.

Karl-Heinrich went looking for them, and in short order he found them. He was very good at such things. When other little boys had been reading about pirates or spacemen, he was reading his father’s textbooks of electrical wiring.

Now—first contact—

Karl-Heinrich carried his own tiny computer with him at all times, an implant, right there in his forearm—a biochip no bigger than a snowflake, and even more elegant of design. It collected and deployed body warmth to amplify and transmit coded signals that opened data channels, making possible all sorts of transactions. Karl-Heinrich had been one of the first to get implanted, the day after his thirteenth birthday. Perhaps ten percent of the population, most of them young, had had implants installed by the time of the arrival of the Entities. The implant revolution, though still only in its earliest stages, had been widely seen as full of promise for the fantastic flowering future—a future which, unfortunately, the alien invasion had apparently aborted. But the implants were still in place.

Tapping into an electrical meter was child’s play for Karl-Heinrich. Any power-company meter-reader could have done it. Karl-Heinrich was something more than a meter-reader. He spent two days measuring inductances and impedances, and then, too excited now even to remember to breathe, he sent a tendril of electrical energy into the meter and through it, down a surging river of electrons, until he felt himself make contact with—

Something.

A data source. Alien data.

It made him shiver to feel the alienness of it, its shape, its internal structure, its linkage configurations. He felt as though he were walking the mysterious glades of an unutterably strange forest on an unknown world.

The system through which it was flowing was nothing like any computer he had ever known, or even imagined. Why should it have been? Nevertheless he sensed familiarity amidst the strangeness. The data, however strange, was still only data, a series of binary numbers. The shape of that digital flow was weird and bizarre and yet he felt somehow confident that it was well within the reach of ultimate comprehension by him. The alien device into which he had tapped was, after all, a system for the manipulation and storage of data in binary form. What was that, if not a computer?

And he was inside it. That was the important thing. A hot tingle of sheer intellectual joy ran through him at the contemplation of his triumph. It was almost orgasmic in its intensity. He doubted that sex itself could provide such a thrill. But of course Karl-Heinrich had very little grounds for such a comparison.

It took him quite some while to understand the particular nature of what it was that he had touched. But gradually it dawned on him that the program within which he was wandering must be the master template for the whole electrical distribution grid; and suddenly there was a map of the Entities’ electrical system superimposed on the map of the castle grounds that he had in his head.

He explored it. Very quickly he found himself trapped in a blind alley, went back, took another path. Another and another. Hit a roadblock, went around it, plunged forward.

His confidence grew from hour to hour. He was discovering things. He was learning. Things were adding up. He was piecing together correlations. He had found channels. He was getting deeper and deeper in.

The delight was intense. He had never known such pleasure.

He copied a swatch of data from an Entity computer, downloaded it into his own, and was pleased to see that he was capable of manipulating it by adding or subtracting electrical charge. He had no way of knowing what changes he was making, because the underlying data was incomprehensible to him. But it was a good start. He was able to access the information; he was even able to process it; all that was missing was some way of understanding it.

He realized that even at this primitive stage of his penetration of the system he should be able to send the Entities messages that they would be able to understand, if they had bothered to learn any of the languages of Earth. And he suspected that he could even eventually learn to reprogram their data through this line of access, if only he could figure out their computer language. But that was something to deal with later on.

He went onward, inward, wondering whether he might be sounding any alarms within the system as he went. He didn’t think so. They would have stopped him by now, if they knew that he was boring inward like this. Unless, of course, they were amused by what he was doing, watching him, applauding his progress.

Before long his head was aching miserably, but his heart had begun to swell with a gathering sense of triumph.

Karl-Heinrich was certain now that the center of everything, the main computational node, was, as was already generally suspected, inside the cathedral. He had located something major down at the far end, in the Imperial Chapel, and something almost as big in the Chapel of St. Sigismund. But these, he suspected, were subsidiary trunks. There was a huge floor-to-ceiling screen full of pulsing lights in front of the Wenceslas Chapel that was a raging circus of energy, in and out, in and out. He realized, after probing it for four or five hours, that it had to be the master interface of the whole setup, the traffic manager for everything else on the premises.

He jacked in, via the power line, and let oceans of incomprehensible data surge through him.

The alien information came at him in a gigantic flood, too voluminous even to try to copy and download. He did not dare to attempt to process it and certainly had no way of decoding it. All it was was a stream of ones and zeros, but he had no key to help him translate the binary digits into anything meaningful. He would need some gigantic mainframe, like the one that the University once had had, even to begin making an attempt at that. The world’s mainframes were down for good, though. The Entities had blown them all out in the moment of the Great Silence and they had stayed that way. The present-day version of the Net worked by virtue of a jerry-built string of patched-together servers that was barely capable of handling ordinary traffic, let alone of processing anything as intricate as what Karl-Heinrich had stumbled upon.

But he had made contact. That was the key thing. He was on the inside.

And now, now, now, the big decision stared him in the face. Simply continue to spy in secrecy on the Entity computer as a skulking loner, soaking up all this interesting gibberish, tinkering with it on the sly purely for fun, making a nice gratifying private hobby out of it? Or should he link up with Interstellar Stalin, Ninth Dimension Bandits, and the rest of the hackers who were working at the problem of entering the Entity network, and show them what he had managed to achieve, so that they could build on his achievement and carry the process on to the next level?

The first alternative would bring him nothing but the pleasures of solitary vice. Karl-Heinrich already knew how limited those were. The second would give him a momentary flicker of fame in the hacker underground; but then others would seize what he had done and run onward with it and he would be forgotten.

But there was a third choice, and it was the one he had favored all along.

All the hacker talk of mastering Entity computer code and using the knowledge somehow to overthrow them was mere childish stupidity. Nobody was going to overthrow the Entities. They were too powerful. The world was theirs, and that was that.

Accept that, then. Work with it. Offer them your services. They need an interface between themselves and humanity for the more efficient carrying-out of their purposes. Very well. Here’s an opportunity for you, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. You have everything to gain and nothing but your misery to lose.

Their signals were incomprehensible to him, but his would not be to them, and contact had been made. Very well. Do something with it.

—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface -with your computers. This has been the great dream of my life, and now I have achieved it.

—I think I can be of great help to you. And I know that you can be of great help to me.

About seventeen hours later, on the other side of the world, someone in the Denver command headquarters of the Colorado Freedom Front keyed three handshake commands into a ten-year-old desktop computer, waited for a response from space, received it within thirty seconds, and keyed in four further commands. This time they were the signals that would activate the laser cannon in orbit 22,000 miles overhead.

These commands required acknowledgment, which came, and repetition, which was given.

From the military satellite overhead there now instantly descended a crackling bolt of energy in the form of an intensely focused beam of light, which homed in on the compound in which the Denver Entity forces had set up their operations, and for the next ninety seconds bathed its central building in flame. What effect this action had on the Entities within the building was not possible to determine, and, indeed, was destined never to be known.

But evidently it caused them some distress, for there were two immediate retaliatory consequences, both of them quite harsh.

The first was that electrical power began going off all over the Earth almost at once. In the initial few days the outages were spotty and irregular, but then a total planetwide interdiction took hold. The power stayed off for the next thirty-nine days, an outage more severe and disruptive than the so-called Great Silence of two years previously. With all electronic communication knocked out, it became impossible, among other things, for the members of the Colorado Freedom Front to carry out the additional laser strikes that had been planned to follow the opening salvo in the so-called War of Liberation.

The second consequence of the laser attack was that sealed canisters stored in eleven of the world’s major cities sprang open within three hours of the Denver event, releasing microorganisms of an apparently synthetic nature that induced an infectious and highly contagious disease of a previously unknown kind across much of the planet. The symptoms were inordinately high fever followed by structural degradation of the larger veins and arteries followed by systemic breakdown and death. There was no known treatment. Quarantines seemed to have little value. Of those infected, about a third, who evidently had some sort of natural immunity, threw off the fever before reaching the stage of circulatory-system breakdown and recovered completely. The rest died within three or four days of onset.

It was Doug Gannett who brought the news to the Colonel, in the early days when limited e-mail communication still was possible. “Everybody’s dying out there,” he said. “I’m getting the same story from whoever’s been able to stay on-line. It’s a huge epidemic and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it.”

The Colonel, raging within, reacted outwardly only with a weary nod. “Well, we can try to hide from it,” he said. He called the ranch hands together and told the ones who lived on the premises that they would continue to be free to go down into Santa Barbara, as before, but that they would not be allowed to return if they did. As for the ones who lived in town, mainly in the Mexican neighborhood on the south side, he let them know that they could choose between remaining at the ranch or going back down to their homes and families, but that if they did leave the ranch there would be no coming back.

“The same, of course, goes for all of you,” he told the various assembled Carmichaels, giving each of them a long, slow look. “You go out there, you don’t get back in. No exceptions.”

“And how long does this rule stay in effect?” Ronnie asked.

“As long as it needs to,” said the Colonel.

The worldwide plague continued to rage until early July, bringing what had been left of the world’s economy to a total standstill. Then it vanished as suddenly as it had come, as though the beings who had loosed it upon the world had now concluded that it had done its job to sufficiently good effect.

The effects had been considerable. On the lofty, isolated hillside where Rancho Carmichael was situated, there had been no impact at all, except for the loss of the ranch hands who had opted to return to their families, and who, it was presumed, had perished with them. Down below, things went quite differently. When the damage finally could be reckoned up, it turned out that close to fifty percent of the world’s population had perished. The actual death rate varied, of course, from country to country, depending on local standards of sanitation and the availability of convalescent care; but none went unscathed, and some were virtually wiped out. Across the face of the world a new kind of Great Silence had fallen, the silence of depopulation. And though some three billion human beings had somehow managed to survive, very few of them had any further inclination to attempt or even consider hostile action against the alien conquerors of Earth.