The Alien Years

TWENTY-TWO YEARS FROM NOW

These years, the years of alien rule, had been good years for Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. When he was sixteen, living out his dark and lonely adolescent days, he had wanted prestige, power, fame. He was twenty-nine now, and he had them all.

Prestige, certainly.

He knew more about the Entities’ communications systems, and probably about the Entities themselves, than anyone else on Earth. That was a widely known fact. Everyone in Prague knew it; perhaps everyone on the planet. He was the master communicator, the conduit through whom the Entities spoke to the people of the world. He was the Maharajah of Data. He was Borgmann the borgmann.

There was prestige in that, certainly. You had to respect someone who had achieved what he had achieved, however you might feel about the morality of the achievement.

And power. He had that too, in excelsis.

From his glistening office on the top floor of the majestic riverfront building that had once been Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts, he could connect with the Entity net at fifty different points around the world: he, and only he, knew the way in, knew how to insert himself in their data banks, how to swim through the surging currents of those rivers of alien computation. Anyone in the world who wanted to make contact with the Entities for whatever reason, to file a petition, to enroll in their service, to request information from them, had to go through his office, his interface. The Borgmann interface: he had slapped his own name right on it for all to see.

Power, yes. He was, in a way, the master of life and death, here. What he understood, and hardly anyone else did, was that the Entities paid essentially no attention to all those petitions and requests and even the offers of service. They were above all that, mysteriously drifting through levels far beyond human ken. It was he who dealt with most of these people’s urgent requests, passing them along to the Entities for decisions that probably would never be made, or, often, interposing his own decisions on the assumption that the decrees he issued were approximately what the Entities would have chosen to do if only they had deigned to pay attention to any of the applications. He who proposed and disposed, he who assigned, transferred, rearranged, reorganized. Whole population sectors were uprooted and moved about on his say-so. Huge public-works projects came into being because he believed that the Entities desired them to exist. Was that not power? Supreme power? Was he not the Entities’ viceroy on Earth?

And fame—

Ah. A touchy matter, that. There was fame and then there was fame. Certainly the inventor of the Borgmann interface was world-famous. But Karl-Heinrich knew quite well that his fame was not entirely a positive thing. He was aware that his name had become a common noun, now, in the popular speech of every land: borgmann.

And what it meant, that word, was “traitor.” What it meant, that word, was “Judas.”

Well, he could do nothing about that. He was what he was; he had done what he had done. He had no regrets. He had meant no harm. It had all been an intellectual game for him, opening the interface between human computational systems and those of the aliens. A test of his abilities, which he had triumphantly passed. If he had not done it, someone else would have. And if he had never even been born, the world would have been no better off than it now was. Borgmann or no Borgmann, the Entities still would be here; still would rule, in their unfathomable, almost random way; still would be arranging and rearranging the conquered world in whatever ways they found amusing. He had merely facilitated things a little.

And here he was in this magnificent office paneled with the rarest of exotic woods brought in at infinite expense from the rain forests of South America, up here on top of this wonderful old French Renaissance Revival building, sitting here with a billion koruna worth of state-of-the-art computer hardware of his own design all around him, and the museum’s own spectacular collection of glassware and ceramics and silver serving dishes and nineteenth-century furniture still in place behind him in the surrounding hallways.

Karl-Heinrich rarely bothered to look at those things, indeed knew very little about most of them, but they were there for his amusement whenever he felt like strolling amongst them. He had had some of the paintings brought down from the National Gallery on Hradcany hill too, a Holbein and a Cranach and that sexy Suicide of Lucretia by Vouet; and his lavish Art Nouveau penthouse apartment a few blocks away was equally satisfactorily decorated with the national art, Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso, Braque. Why not? No one was allowed to go to the museum any more anyway, because it was on the castle grounds, where the Entity command compound was; and did they actually expect him to live in an apartment with bare walls?

Transferring the paintings had been a matter of a few simple keystrokes. Transferring some woman he fancied to his bed was just as easy. A work requisition had to be put through; that was all. The work involved service in the office of Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. You got the order, and you went, no questions asked, though you were only too well aware of what the “service” entailed. Because the alternative would surely be a lot worse: transfer to a work camp in Antarctica, transfer to sewer-sweeping duty in Novosibirsk, transfer to a latrine-cleaning job at a medical clinic in the middle of Africa. Or, if not you, then something equally terrible for your aged mother, your beloved babe, your husband, your cat.

Karl-Heinrich had not forgotten those evenings, ten years ago, eleven, twelve, when he had wandered disconsolate through the dark streets of Prague, gazing with insatiable longing at the girls he saw walking just ahead of him, or the ones sitting with their beaus in brightly lit cafes, or those standing before their mirrors in third-floor apartments. All of them as inaccessible to him as the inhabitants of alien worlds, those girls were. Then.

Well, he had access to them now. A long procession of them had marched through his bedroom in his years as Borgmann the borgmann. Starting with the girls he had lusted after in school, those of them that had survived the Great Plague: Jarmila and Magda, Eva, Jana, Jaroslava and Ludmila, the other Eva with the flat face and the wonderful bosom, and Osvalda, Vera, Ivana, Maria. Zuzana of the fiery hair. Bozena of the fiery temper. Milada. Jirina. Milena. He had had a long list to work his way through. Glorious Stepanka, alas, had died; he requisitioned her sister Katrina instead. And then Anna, Sophia, Theresa, Josefa. The other Milada, the tall one; the other Ludmila, the short one. And both Martinas. Some came with hatred in their eyes, some came in sullen indifference, some saw his bed as their gateway to special privilege. But they all came. What choice did they have?

Oh, yes, and Barbro Ekelund, too. One of the very first, even before Jarmila and Magda and Eva and the rest. The Swedish girl, the one for whom he had invented the myth of being able to tap into the Entity computers, the spontaneous boast that had been the beginning of all this for him. Barbro of the long slender limbs, the unexpectedly full breasts, the golden hair, the sea-green eyes.

“Why am I here?” she had asked, the first time he requisitioned her.

“Because I love you.”

“You don’t even know me. We’ve never met.”

“Oh, we have, we have. It was in August last year, in the Stare Mesto. You forgot.”

“August. The Stare Mesto.” A blank look.

“And then again at Christmastime. In the street. I wanted to buy you a coffee, but you were too busy.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember.”

“No. You don’t remember. But I do. Please, now, your clothes. Take them off.”

“What?”

“Please. Right now.” He was seventeen, then. Still new at this. Had had only four women up till that point, counting the first, and he had had to pay for that one, and she had been very stupid and smelled of garlic.

“Let me leave here,” she had said. “I don’t want to undress for you.”

“Ah, no, you will have to,” he said. “Look.” And he went to his computer, and from it came an official labor-requisition form, Barbro Ekelund of Dusni Street, Prague, assigned to hospital orderly duty, the Center for Communicable Diseases, Bucharest, Romania, effective three days hence. It seemed quite authentic. It was quite authentic.

“Am I supposed to believe that this is real?” she asked.

“You should. When you get home today, you’ll find that your residence permit has been revoked and your ticket for Bucharest is waiting for you at the station.”

“No. No.”

“Strip, then, please,” he said. “I love you. I want you.”

So she yielded, because she knew now that she had to. Their lovemaking was chilly and far from wonderful, but he had expected nothing much better. Afterward he revoked her transfer order; and, because he was still new at this then and had some residual human feelings of guilt still in his system, he wrote new orders for her that allowed her a year’s entry privileges at the swimming facilities in Modrany, and a season pass for two to the opera house, and extra food coupons for her and her family. She offered him the most rudimentary of thanks for these things, and did not take the trouble of concealing from him the shudder that ran through her as she was dressing to leave.

He had her come back five or six more times. But it was never any good between them, and by then Karl-Heinrich had found others with whom it was good, or who at least were able to make him think so; and so he left her in peace after that. At least he had had her, though. That was why he had given himself over to the Entities in the first place, so that he might have Barbro Ekelund; and Karl-Heinrich Borgmann was the sort of person who followed through on his intentions.

Now it was a dozen years later, an August day again, sunny, warm—sweltering, even; and on his screen was the information that a certain Barbro Ekelund was downstairs, desiring to see him, a matter of personal importance that would be of great interest to him.

Could it be? The very same one? It must. How many other Swedes could there be in Prague, after all? And with that very name.

Visitors here were unusual, except for those people whom Karl-Heinrich summoned to him, and he certainly had not summoned her. Their encounters of long ago had been too bleak, too chilly; he did not look back on them with sentimental fondness or longing. She was nothing more than a phantom out of his past, a wandering ghost. He leaned toward the mouthpiece of his servo and began to order her to be sent away, but cut himself off after half a syllable. Curiosity gnawed at him. Why not see her? For old times’ sake despite everything, a reunion with an artifact of his unhappy adolescence. There was nothing to be afraid of. Surely her resentment had died away, after all this time. And she was so close to having been the first woman he had ever possessed: the temptation to see what she looked like today overmastered him.

He told the servo to send her up, and activated the security spy-eyes mounted in his walls, just in case. No one, nothing, could get within his safety perimeter while the security field was on. It was a reasonable precaution for a man in his position to take.

She had changed, had changed a great deal.

Still slender and fair, yes, the golden hair, the sea-green eyes.

Still quite tall, of course, taller than he. But her radiant Nordic beauty had faded. Something was gone: the ski-slope freshness, the midnight-sun glow. Little lines at the corners of her eyes, along the sides of her mouth. The splendid shining hair somewhat dulled. Well, she was thirty, now, maybe thirty-one: still young, still quite attractive, actually, but these had been hard years for most people.

“Karl-Heinrich,” she said. Her voice was calm, neutral. She seemed actually to be smiling, though the smile was a distant one. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? You’ve done well for yourself.” She gestured broadly, taking in the paneled office, the river view, the array of computer equipment, the wealth of national artistic treasures all about him.

“And you?” he said, more or less automatically. “How have you been, Barbro?” His own tone sounded unfamiliar to him, oddly cozy. As though they were old friends, as though she were not merely some stranger whose body he had used five or six times, under compulsion, a dozen years before.

A little sigh. “Not as good as I would wish, to speak the truth,” she said. “Did you get my letter, Karl-Heinrich?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t recall.” He never read his mail, never. It was always full of angry screeds, execrations, denunciations, threats.

“It was a request for assistance. A special thing, something only you would really understand.”

His face turned bleak. He realized that he had made a terrible mistake, letting a petitioner get in here to see him in person. He had to get rid of her.

But she was already pulling documents out, unfolding papers in front of him. “I have a son,” she said. “Ten years old. You would admire him. He is wonderful with computers, the way you must have been when you were growing up. He knows everything about everything that has to do with them. Gustav, his name is. Look, I have his picture here. A handsome boy.”

He waved it away. “Listen, Barbro, I’m not in need of any proteges, if that’s what you came here to—”

“No. There is a terrible problem. He has been transferred to a work camp in Canada. The order came through last week. Somewhere far in the north, where it is cold all the time, a place where they cut trees down for paper mills. Tell me, Karl-Heinrich, why would they want to send a boy of not even eleven years to a logging camp? Not to work with the computers. It is a straight manual-labor requisition. He will die there. It is surely a mistake.”

“Errors do get made, yes. A lot of these things are purely random.” He saw where this was heading.

He was right.

“Save him,” she said. “I remember how you wrote out transfer orders for me, long ago. And then changed them. You can do anything. Save my boy, I beg you. I beg you. I’ll make it worth your while.”

She was looking at him in a stricken way, eyes fixed, every muscle of her face rigid.

In a low, crooning voice she said, “I will do anything for you, Karl-Heinrich. You wanted me as a lover, once. I held myself back from you, then, I would not allow myself to please you, but I will be your lover now. Your slave. I will kiss your feet. I will perform any act you ask of me. The most intimate things, whatever you desire. For as long as you want me, I am yours. Just save him, that I beg of you. You are the only one that can.”

She was wearing, on this humid summer day, a white blouse, a short blue skirt. As she spoke she was unbuttoning herself, tossing one garment after another to the floor. The pale heavy mounds of her breasts rose into view. They were glistening with perspiration. Her nostrils flared; her lips drew back in what apparently was meant as a hungry, seductive smile.

I will be your slave. How could she have known? His very fantasy, of so many years ago!

He was beginning to develop a headache. Save my boy. I beg you. I will be your slave.

Karl-Heinrich didn’t want Barbro Ekelund to be his slave, not any more. He didn’t want Barbro Ekelund at all. He had yearned for her long ago, yes, desperately, when he was sixteen, and he had her, for whatever that had been worth, and that was that; she was history, she was an archival fact in his memory, and nothing else. He was no longer sixteen. He had no desire for ongoing relationships. He wanted no sentimental reunions with figures out of his past. He was content simply to call women up by computer almost at random, new ones all the time; have them come to him, briefly serve him, disappear forever from his life.

All those troublesome human entanglements, those messy little snarls of dependency and whatnot, that any sort of true personal transaction involved: he had tried to avoid them all his life, had kept himself as far above the worldly fray as any Entity, and yet from time to time he seemed to find himself becoming ensnarled in them anyway, this one wanting a favor, that one offering some sort of quid pro quo as though he needed one, people pretending they were his friends, his lovers. He had no friends. There was no one he loved. There was, he knew, no one who loved him. That was satisfactory to him. There was nothing Karl-Heinrich Borgmann needed that he could not simply reach out and take.

Even so, he thought. Be merciful for once. This woman meant something to you for a little while, a long time ago. Give her what she wants, do what needs to be done to save her son, then tell her to put her clothes on and get out of here.

She was naked now. Wriggling provocatively before him, offering herself in a way that would have made him delirious with delight many years ago, but which seemed only absurd to him, now. And in another moment she would step within the security perimeter. “Watch out,” he said. “My desk area is guarded. If you get any closer, you’ll trip the barrier screen. It’ll knock you cold.”

Too late.

“Oh!” she cried, a little gasp. And flung up her arms, and went spinning backward.

She had touched the security field, it seemed—at least the fringe of it—and had had a jolt from it. She recoiled from it dramatically. Karl-Heinrich watched her stagger and lurch and crumple and go tumbling to the floor, landing with a hard thump in the middle of the room. There she pulled herself instantly into a little ball, facedown in a huddled sobbing heap, her forehead grinding into the ancient Persian carpet from the museum. This was the first time Karl-Heinrich had seen anyone encounter the field. Its effect was even more powerful than he had expected. To his dismay she seemed now to be going into hysterics, her whole body jerking convulsively, her breath coming in wild gulping gasps. That was annoying; annoying and yet somehow sad, too. That she should suffer so.

He wondered what to do. He stood over her, staring down at her twitching naked form, seeing her now as he had seen her in that illicit spy-eye view of all those years ago, the fleshy white buttocks, the slim pale back, the delicate tracery of her spine.

For all his earlier indifference, a surprising touch of desire arose in him now, even in the midst of her agony. Because of it, perhaps. Her vulnerability, her misery, her utter pitifulness; but also that smooth taut rump heaving there, the lovely slender legs coiling beneath her. He knelt beside her and let his hand rest lightly on her shoulder. Her skin was hot, as though she was feverish.

“Look, there’s really no problem,” he said gently. “I’ll get you your son back, Barbro. Don’t carry on like that. Don’t.”

Moans came from her. This was almost like a seizure. He knew that he should send for help.

She was trying to say something. He could not make out the words, and leaned closer still. Her long arms were splayed out wide, the left hand drumming in torment on the floor, the other one clutching at the air with quivering fingers. Then, suddenly, she was turning, rolling over to face him, jerking and twitching no longer, and there was a ceramic knife in that outstretched hand, arriving there as though by magic—pulled out of thin air? Out of her pile of discarded garments?—and, utterly calm and poised, she rose toward him in a single smooth movement and thrust the blade with extreme force, with astonishing strength, deep into his lower abdomen.

Pulled it upward. Brought it ripping like an irresistible force through his internal organs until it came clinking up against the cage of his ribs.

He grunted and clasped his hands to the gaping wound. He could barely cover it with his ten outspread fingers. Surprisingly, there was no pain yet, only a dull sense of shock. She rolled backward from him and sprang to her feet, looming over him like a naked avenging demon.

“I have no son,” she said vindictively, biting off the edges of the words, as his eyes began to dim.

Karl-Heinrich nodded. Blood was spouting from him, covering the Persian carpet with a pool of blood. He attempted to tell the servo to send help, but he found himself unable to make a sound. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, in soft furry silence. In any case what good would calling for help do? He could feel himself already dying. His strength was leaving with him with every spurt. Eyesight growing blurry, inner systems shutting down. He was finished, a dead man at twenty-nine. He was surprised how little he cared. Perhaps that was what dying was like. So they had caught up with him at last. How odd that she would be the one. How appropriate. “I’ve dreamed of this for twelve years,” the lovely assassin said. “We all have. What joy it is to see you like this now, Borgmann.” And said again, this time making the name sound like the curse it had become: “Borgmann.”

Yes. Of course. That was borgmann, no capital letter. She had killed him, all right.

But there was consolation all the same, he told himself. He would die famous. His very name was part of the language now; that he knew; that knowledge he hugged lovingly close to himself as his life dwindled away. He would be dead in a few moments more, but his name—ah, his name—that would be immortal, that would march on through human history forever. Borgmann… borgmann… borgmann.

The baby was a girl. Steve and Lisa named her Sabrina Amanda Gannett. Everyone at the ranch came around to go ooh and ahh and kitchy-koo, as the cultural norms demanded.

But there was an enormous amount of muddle and turmoil before things got to that point, of course.

First there was the awkward business of Lisa’s family’s quisling affiliations for Steve to deal with. So far as his uncle Ron was concerned, that was a simple matter. “You have to dump her, boy, that’s all there is to it. Carmichaels just can’t hang out with quislings. They just can’t.—Don’t give me that stricken expression, my friend. Out of all the pussy there is for you to find in California, why did you have to wind up with one of them?”

That, though, was Ron, who was cool and smooth and handsome and who over the years had had any number of girlfriends, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, and at least a couple of wives too, before meeting up with Peggy and deciding to mend his wandering ways. Easy enough for him to say: dump her. What would someone as magnetic and charming as Ron understand, really, about poor pasty-faced Steve Gannett, who didn’t know how to keep his own shirt-tails tucked in and whose entire sex life up till the time he had met Lisa had consisted of serving as an animated dildo for his heartless cousin Jill? Did Ron think that it would really be so easy for him to toss Lisa back into the pool and find himself another girlfriend just like that, half an hour later?

Besides, he loved Lisa. She was important to him in a way that nobody ever had been before. He lived for their meetings, their trips to Point Mugu Park, their delicious sweaty grapplings on that carpet of fallen leaves beneath the oak trees. He couldn’t imagine life without her. Nor did he see how he could bring himself to discard her, the way Jill had discarded him.

How, though, was he going to work all this out?

“I’ve got to see you,” he told her, a couple of days after their visit to the Topanga Canyon Boulevard construction site. “Right away. It’s essential.” But he didn’t have the ghost of an idea of what he was going to say to her.

He drove blindly southward at top velocity over the battered coastal highway, giving no heed to potholes, cracks, dips and curves, and other such trifling obstacles. When he got to Mission San Buenaventura, Lisa was waiting out in front, sitting in her car. She smiled pleasantly as he approached, just as though this were one of their ordinary dates, though it was so soon after their last meeting that she should have suspected something. That cheery, expectant smile of hers made everything just that much worse. She opened the door on the passenger side for him and he slipped in beside her, but when she began to start the engine he caught her by the wrist and stopped her.

“No, let’s not go down to the park. Let’s just stay here and talk, okay?”

She looked startled. “Is something wrong?”

“Plenty’s wrong, yes,” he said, allowing the words to come out without pausing to form them in his mind. “I’ve been thinking, Lisa. About how we got through the checkpoint, and all. How you happened to have the password, when practically all the LACON entry permits for Los Angeles have been revoked.” He could hardly bear to look straight at her. He had to force himself; and, even so, his gaze kept sliding away from her eyes toward her cheek or her chin. Surprisingly, she seemed very calm, staring steadily back at him, even when he let the next string of words come blurting forth: “Lisa, the only way you could have had that passport would be if you’re a quisling, isn’t that so? Or know someone who is?”

“That’s an ugly word, quisling.”

“Well, collaborator, then. Is that any better?”

She shrugged. She was still strangely calm, though now her face seemed a little flushed. “My father works for the telephone company, and so do my brothers, and so do I. You know that.”

“Doing what?”

“You know that too. Programming.”

“And the phone company: what’s its relationship to LACON?”

“LACON controls all communications networks in and around the Los Angeles Basin, from Long Beach to Ventura. Certainly you would know that.”

“So someone who works for the telephone company in this county actually works for LACON, isn’t that so?”

“You might say so, yes.”

“And therefore,” said Steve, with a sense that he was pitching himself off the edge of a high cliff, “you and your family work for LACON, and, since LACON is the human administrative arm of the alien occupying powers, therefore you all can be regarded as quis—as collaborators. Yes?”

“Why are you grilling me like this, Steve?” Not at all indignant. Merely prompting him to speak the next line. As though she had expected this conversation to come, sooner or later.

“I have to know these things.”

“Well, you do know them, now. Like thousands and thousands of other people, my family earns its living by supplying services to the beings that happen to rule our planet. I don’t see anything wrong with that, really. It’s just our job. If we didn’t do it, somebody else would, and the Entities would still be here, only my family and I would have a much harder time keeping things together. If you have any problem with that, you ought to say so right now.”

“I do have a problem with it. I’m with the Resistance.”

“I know that, Steve.”

“You do?”

“You’re part of the Carmichael family. Your mother is old Colonel Carmichael’s daughter. You live up on top of that mountain behind Santa Barbara.”

He blinked at her, amazed.

“How do you know all that?”

“You think you’re the only one who knows how to trace back a communications line? I’m with the phone company, remember.”

“So you knew all along,” he said, lost now in bewilderment. “Practically from the start, you were aware that I’m Resistance, and it didn’t bother you, even though you’re a qu—”

“Don’t say that word again.”

“Someone who’s willing to work for them.’”

“Someone who sees no sensible alternatives, Steve. They’ve been here, what, fifteen years, now? What has your Resistance accomplished in all that time? A lot of talk, is all. And meanwhile the Entities are as much in control as the day they turned all the power off, and they’ve taken over every aspect of our lives.”

“With the help of people like—”

“So? What’s the alternative? They’re here. They run things. They own us. We aren’t going to kick them out, not ever. That’s a fact of life. So we need to get on with our lives, to do our jobs, whatever our jobs might be.” She was looking at him in a level, uncompromising way, forcing him toward telling her whatever it was that he had come down here to tell her today. But he had not known, setting out that morning, what that was going to be.

Suddenly he knew it now. He let himself say it. The words came rolling from him like a sentence of death.

“We can’t go on seeing each other, Lisa. That’s all there is to it. Your family and mine, they’re just incompatible. We work to overthrow the Entities and you work to make things easier for them.”

She met his feverish stare unblinkingly. “And why should that matter?”

“It does. It simply does. We have our family traditions, and they’re pretty stiff stuff. You ought to see my grandfather, the Colonel. He’s getting a little senile, maybe, but he has flashes when he’s his old self, and then he makes the grandest speeches about liberty, freedom, the need never to forget what we were before the Entities came.”

“I agree with that. I think it’s important to remember what it was like to be free.”

“He means it, though.”

“So do I. But there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t turn time backwards. The Entities own the world and nothing we do is going to change that.”

They were getting nowhere. He felt as though he were breaking in half.

“There’s no sense arguing about it,” he said. “All I know is that I don’t see how we can go on, your family collaborating, mine resisting. There couldn’t ever be any contact between the families. How could we have any life together, like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But there’s one thing I ought to tell you, Steve—”

“Oh, Jesus, Lisa! You’re not—”

Pregnant, yes. The old business of the Capulets and the Montagues, but with one extra little devastating twist.

Her self-possession now disintegrated. So did his, such as it was. She began to cry, and he pulled her head against his chest and he began to cry too, and the astonishing thought came to him of the brown-eyed child that was sprouting in her belly, and of the improbability that so hopeless a nerd as he had been had actually fathered a baby; and he knew beyond doubt that he loved this woman and meant to marry her and stand beside her, no matter what.

But that took some doing. He returned to the ranch and called Ron aside and told him of this newest development; and Ron, pensive and somber and not at all jaunty now, told him to sit tight and went off to talk to his sister Rosalie. Who after a time called Steve to her, and quizzed him extensively about his entire relationship with Lisa, not so much the sex part as the emotional part, his feelings, his intentions.

He amazed himself with the forthrightness, the directness, the sheer adulthood of his own responses. No hemming, no hawing, no subterfuges, no standing on one leg and then the other. He came right out and said he loved Lisa. He told his mother that it made him terribly happy to know that there was going to be a child. He said that he had no intention of abandoning her.

“You’ll stick by her even if you have to leave the ranch?”

“Why would I let that interfere?” he asked.

She seemed oddly pleased to hear that. But then she was quiet for a long while. Her face grew sad. “What a sorry mess this is, Steve. What a mess.”

There were whispered family conferences all week long. His mother and her two brothers; the three of them and his father; Steve with Ron again, with Anse, with his mother, with Paul, with Peggy. He sensed that Ron, who had told him so bluntly and uncompromisingly to rid himself of Lisa, was coming around to a more sympathetic position, perhaps under some pressure from Peggy; that his mother was of several minds about the problem, though more on his side than not; that Anse seemed mainly angry at being troubled by so complicated a business as this. During this time, Steve was forbidden to engage in any communications operations on behalf of the Resistance. Was forbidden, indeed, to go anywhere near a computer. Which cut him off from communication with Lisa. Just to make certain, his father wrote a blocking command into the system that guaranteed he could not have access to it; and Steve, good as he was, knew he could not countermand a block written by Doug. Not that he would dare, not in this situation.

He wondered what was going through Lisa’s mind. He had promised her, as they parted in Ventura, that he would work something out with his family. But what? What?

It was the longest week of his life. He spent it roaming the hillside, sitting for long hours on the rocky outcropping where Jill once had followed him and made use of him. That seemed a million years ago. Jill now paid almost no attention to him at all. If she had any inkling of the pickle he was in, she gave no indication of it to him though he overheard her giggling with her brothers Charlie and Mike, and was sure that it was his situation that they were giggling over.

Finally Ron came to him and said, “The Colonel wants to talk to you.”

The Colonel was frail, now. He had grown very thin and had a tremor in his hands, and used a walking-stick when he moved about. But he moved about infrequently; he spent most of his time these days sitting quietly in his chair near the edge of the patio, looking out over the valley, with a lap-robe spread across him except on the very warmest days.

“Sir?” Steve said, and stood before him and waited.

The Colonel’s eyes, at least, had lost none of their old force. He studied Steve for an intolerably long time, staring, staring, while Steve drew himself up as straight as he knew how to hold himself, and waited. And waited.

And at last the Colonel spoke. “Well, boy. Is it true that you’re going to sell us out to the Entities?”

It was a monstrous question; but there was something in his eyes that told Steve that it was not to be taken too seriously. Or so Steve hoped.

“No, sir. It’s not true in the slightest, and I hope no one has been telling you anything of the kind.”

“She is a quisling, isn’t she, though? She and her whole family?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You knew that when you became involved with her?”

“No, sir. Not even remotely. I didn’t realize it until the other day, when she got us through a LACON checkpoint with a password that she shouldn’t have been able to have.”

“Ah. But she was aware all along that you were a Carmichael?”

“Evidently so.”

“And consorted with you for the sake of infiltrating the ranch and betraying us to the Entities, do you think?”

“No, sir. Absolutely not. It’s not really a secret that this is a Resistance headquarters, you know, sir. I think even the Entities must be aware of that. But in any case, there was never a word out of Lisa that indicated to me that she had any such dark intentions.”

“Ah. Then it was just an innocent little romantic thing, what went on between you and her?”

Steve reddened. “In truth, not all that innocent, sir, I would have to admit.”

The Colonel said, chuckling, “So I’ve been given to understand. When is the baby due?”

“Around six months from now.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I mean, do you leave the ranch to live with her, then, or are we supposed to take her in here?”

Flustered, Steve said, “Why, I don’t know, sir. It’s up to the family to decide, not to me.”

“And if the family tells you that you’re to give up the woman and the baby and never see either one of them again?”

The fierce old blue eyes drilled deep.

After a moment’s silence Steve said, “I don’t think I would go along with that, sir.”

“You love her that much?”

“I love her, yes. And I have a responsibility to the child.”

“Indeed. That you do.—So you would go to live among quislings if need be, eh? But would they take you in, do you think, knowing that you were an agent of the Resistance?”

Steve moistened his lips. “What if we were to take Lisa in, instead?”

“To spy on us, you mean?”

“I don’t mean that at all. It’s just a job for her, working for them. She doesn’t see it as working for the Entities at all, just for the phone company, which is an arm of LACON, which of course is the Entity puppet administration down there. There’s nothing ideological about her. She doesn’t like having the Entities here any more than we do. She just doesn’t see what we can do about it, so she does her job and doesn’t think about such things. If she came here, she’d have no further contact with the other side.”

“Including her father? Her brothers?”

“I suppose she’d speak with them, visit them sometimes, maybe. But there’s no reason in the world why she would reveal anything about ranch activities to them or anyone else.”

“And so you ask us—infatuated as you are, blinded by love—to accept a spy into our midst simply because you’ve managed to make her pregnant,” said the Colonel. “Do I have it right?”

Steve had a sense of having being played with throughout the entire interview. It seemed to him that the Colonel, kindly though he had been during most of this, had been testing him, primarily, trying to see how he reacted under pressure. Taking this position and that one, now sympathetic, now hostile, poking at him here, poking at him there, making harsh assumptions, raising damning hypotheses, checking things out from all angles. But plainly the old man’s mind was already made up, and not in his favor. How could he possibly allow a girl from a quisling family into the ranch?

There was no point in being diplomatic any longer, Steve saw.

Taking a deep breath, he said, “No, sir, you don’t have it right. I may be infatuated, yes, but I think I know her pretty well, and I don’t see her as a danger to us in any way. I ask you to take her in because she’s going to bring the next member of this family into the world, and this is where she belongs, because I belong here, and I want my wife and child to be here with me. If they don’t belong here, I don’t either. And I’m prepared to leave the ranch forever if that’s what I have to do.”

The Colonel did not reply. His face was expressionless, unreadable. It was as though Steve had not spoken at all.

And the silence extended itself to an unendurable length. Steve wondered if he had gone too far, had offended the stern old warrior with his bluntness and dealt a fatal blow to his case. Then he started to wonder whether the old man had simply fallen asleep with his eyes open.

“Well, then,” the Colonel said, at last, his face coming to life, even something like a twinkle entering the stern chilly eyes. “If that’s how it is, do you mind if we have Ron meet with her and get some sort of reading on her before we make a final decision about her coming here?”

Steve gasped. “You’ll allow her into the ranch, then?”

“If Ron thinks that we should, yes. Yes, I will.”

“Oh, sir! Oh! Oh, sir, sir, sir—!”

“Easy, boy. Nothing’s been settled yet, you know.”

“But it’ll work out. I know that it will. Ron’s going to see right away what kind of a person she is. He’ll love her. You all will.—And I want to tell you here and now, Grandfather, that if the baby is a boy, we’re naming him for you. There’ll be one more Anson at the ranch: Anson Gannett, this one will be. Anson Carmichael Gannett. That’s a promise, Grandfather.”

The baby, though, was a girl. Sabrina Amanda Gannett, then, after Lisa’s mother and grandmother. The next one was a girl, too, two years later, and they named her Irene, for the Colonel’s long-dead wife, the grandmother whom Steve had never known. Anson Carmichael Gannett didn’t get himself born for another three years, coming into the world finally by a neat coincidence on the Colonel’s 83rd birthday, which occurred in the twenty-first year after the Conquest. “You’re going to be the greatest computer genius of all time,” Steve told the new baby, as he lay red-faced and gurgling, two hours old, in his weary mother’s arms. “And a shining hero of the Resistance, too.”

Those would turn out to be pretty accurate prophecies. But not quite in the ways that Steve was expecting.

Richie Burke said, “Look at this goddamned thing, will you, Ken? Isn’t it the goddamnedest fantastic piece of shit anyone ever imagined?”

They were in what had once been the main dining room of the old defunct restaurant. It was early afternoon. Aissha was elsewhere, Khalid had no idea where. His father was holding something that seemed like a rifle, or perhaps a highly streamlined shotgun, but it was like no rifle or shotgun he had ever seen. It was a long, slender tube of greenish-blue metal with a broad flaring muzzle and what might have been some type of gunsight mounted midway down the barrel and a curious sort of computerized trigger arrangement on the stock. A one-of-a-kind sort of thing, custom made, a home inventor’s pride and joy.

“Is it a weapon, would you say?”

“A weapon? A weapon? What the bloody hell do you think it is, boy? It’s a fucking Entity-killing gun! Which I confiscated this very day from a nest of conspirators over Warminster way. The whole batch of them are under lock and key this very minute, thank you very much, and I’ve brought Exhibit A home for safekeeping. Have a good look, lad. Ever seen anything so diabolical?”

Khalid realized that Richie was actually going to let him handle it. He took it with enormous care, letting it rest on both his outstretched palms. The barrel was cool and very smooth, the gun lighter than he had expected it to be.

“How does it work, then?”

“Pick it up. Sight along it. You know how it’s done. Just like an ordinary gunsight.”

Khalid put it to his shoulder, right there in the room. Aimed at the fireplace. Peered along the barrel.

A few inches of the fireplace were visible in the crosshairs, in the most minute detail. Keen magnification, wonderful optics. Touch the right stud, now, and the whole side of the house would be blown out, was that it? Khalid ran his hand along the butt.

“There’s a safety on it,” Richie said. “The little red button. There. That. Mind you don’t hit it by accident. What we have here, boy, is nothing less than a rocket-powered grenade gun. A bomb-throwing machine, virtually. You wouldn’t believe it, because it’s so skinny, but what it hurls is a very graceful little projectile that will explode with almost incredible force and cause an extraordinary amount of damage, altogether extraordinary. I know because I tried it. It was amazing, seeing what that thing could do.”

“Is it loaded now?”

“Oh, yes, yes, you bet your little brown rump it is! Loaded and ready! An absolutely diabolical Entity-killing machine, the product of months and months of loving work by a little band of desperados with marvelous mechanical skills. As stupid as they come, though, for all their skills.—Here, boy, let me have that thing before you set it off somehow.”

Khalid handed it over.

“Why stupid?” he asked. “It seems very well made.”

“I said they were skillful. This is a goddamned triumph of miniaturization, this little cannon. But what makes them think they could kill an Entity at all? Don’t they imagine anyone’s ever tried? Can’t be done, Ken, boy. Nobody ever has, nobody ever will.”

Unable to take his eyes from the gun, Khalid said obligingly, “And why is that, sir?”

“Because they’re bloody unkillable!”

“Even with something like this? Almost incredible force, you said, sir. An extraordinary amount of damage.”

“It would fucking well blow an Entity to smithereens, it would, if you could ever hit one with it. Ah, but the trick is to succeed in firing your shot, boy! Which cannot be done. Even as you’re taking your aim, they’re reading your bloody mind, that’s what they do. They know exactly what you’re up to, because they look into our minds the way we would look into a book. They pick up all your nasty little unfriendly thoughts about them. And then—bam!—they give you the bloody Push, and you’re done for, piff paff poof. We know of four cases, at least. Attempted Entity assassination. Trying to take a shot as an Entity went by. Found the bodies, the weapons, just so much trash by the roadside.” Richie ran his hands up and down the gun, fondling it almost lovingly. “—This gun here, it’s got an unusually great range, terrific sight, will fire upon the target from an enormous distance. Still wouldn’t work, I wager you. They can do their telepathy on you from three hundred yards away. Maybe five hundred. Who knows, maybe a thousand. Still, a damned good thing that we broke this ring up in time. Just in case they could have pulled it off somehow.”

“It would be bad if an Entity was killed, is that it?” Khalid asked.

Richie guffawed. “Bad? Bad? It would be a bloody catastrophe. You know what they did, the one time anybody managed to damage them in any way? No, how in hell would you know? It was right around the moment you were getting born. Some buggerly American idiots launched a laser attack from space on an Entity building. Maybe killed a few, maybe didn’t, but the Entities paid us back by letting loose a plague on us that wiped out damn near half the people in the world. Right here in Salisbury they were keeling over like flies. Had it myself. Thought I’d die. Damned well hoped I would, I felt so bad. Then I arose from my bed of pain and threw it off. But we don’t want to risk bringing down another plague, do we, now? Or any other sort of miserable punishment that they might choose to inflict. Because they certainly will inflict one. One thing that has been clear from the beginning is that our masters will take no shit from us, no, lad, not one solitary molecule of shit.”

He crossed the room and unfastened the door of the cabinet that had held Khan’s Mogul Palace’s meager stock of wine in the long-gone era when this building had been a licensed restaurant. Thrusting the weapon inside, Richie said, “This is where it’s going to spend the night. You will make no reference to its presence when Aissha gets back. I’m expecting Arch to come here tonight, and you will make no reference to it to him, either. It is a top secret item, do you hear me? I show it to you because I love you, boy, and because I want you to know that your father has saved the world this day from a terrible disaster, but I don’t want a shred of what I have shared with you just now to reach the ears of another human being. Or another inhuman being for that matter. Is that clear, boy? Is it?”

“I will not say a word,” said Khalid.

And said none. But thought quite a few.

All during the evening, as Arch and Richie made their methodical way through Arch’s latest bottle of rare pre-Conquest whiskey, salvaged from some vast horde found by the greatest of good luck in a Southampton storehouse, Khalid clutched to his own bosom the knowledge that there was, right there in that cabinet, a device that was capable of blowing the head off an Entity, if only one could manage to get within firing range without announcing one’s lethal intentions.

Was there a way of achieving that? Khalid had no idea.

But perhaps the range of this device was greater than the range of the Entities’ mind-reading capacities. Or perhaps not. Was it worth the gamble? Perhaps it was. Or perhaps not.

Aissha went to her room soon after dinner, once she and Khalid had cleared away the dinner dishes. She said little these days, kept mainly to herself, drifted through her life like a sleepwalker. Richie had not laid a violent hand on her again, since that savage evening several years back, but Khalid understood that she still harbored the pain of his humiliation of her, that in some ways she had never really recovered from what Richie had done to her that night. Nor had Khalid.

He hovered in the hall, listening to the sounds from his father’s room until he felt certain that Arch and Richie had succeeded in drinking themselves into their customary stupor. Ear to the door: silence. A faint snore or two, maybe.

He forced himself to wait another ten minutes. Still quiet in there. Delicately he pushed the door, already slightly ajar, another few inches open. Peered cautiously within.

Richie slumped head down at the table, clutching in one hand a glass that still had a little whiskey in it, cradling his guitar between his chest and knee with the other. Arch on the floor opposite him, head dangling to one side, eyes closed, limbs sprawled every which way. Snoring, both of them. Snoring. Snoring. Snoring.

Good. Let them sleep very soundly.

Khalid took the Entity-killing gun now from the cabinet. Caressed its satiny barrel. It was an elegant thing, this weapon. He admired its design. He had an artist’s eye for form and texture and color, did Khalid: some fugitive gene out of forgotten antiquity miraculously surfacing in him after a dormancy of centuries, the eye of a Gandharan sculptor, of a Rajput architect, a Gujerati miniaturist coming to the fore in him after passing through all those generations of the peasantry. Lately he had begun doing little sketches, making some carvings. Hiding everything away so that Richie would not find it. That was the sort of thing that might offend Richie, his taking up such piffling pastimes. Sports, drinking, driving around: those were proper amusements for a man.

On one of his good days last year Richie had brought a bicycle home for him: a startling gift, for bicycles were rarities nowadays, none having been available, let alone manufactured, in England in ages. Where Richie had obtained it, from whom, with what brutality, Khalid did not like to think. But he loved his bike. Rode long hours through the countryside on it, every chance he had. It was his freedom; it was his wings. He went outside now, carrying the grenade gun, and carefully strapped it to the bicycle’s basket.

He had waited nearly three years for this moment to make itself possible.

Nearly every night nowadays, Khalid knew, one could usually see Entities traveling about on the road between Salisbury and Stonehenge, one or two of them at a time, riding in those cars of theirs that floated a little way above the ground on cushions of air. Stonehenge was a major center of Entity activities nowadays and there were more and more of them in the vicinity all the time. Perhaps there would be one out there this night, he thought. It was worth the chance: he would not get a second opportunity with this captured gun that his father had brought home.

About halfway out to Stonehenge there was a place on the plain where he could have a good view of the road from a little copse several hundred yards away. Khalid had no illusion that hiding in the copse would protect him from the mind-searching capacities the Entities were said to have. If they could detect him at all, the fact that he was standing in the shadow of a leafy tree would not make the slightest difference. But it was a place to wait, on this bright moonlit night. It was a place where he could feel alone, unwatched.

He went to it. He waited there.

He listened to night-noises. An owl; the rustling of the breeze through the trees; some small nocturnal animal scrabbling in the underbrush.

He was utterly calm.

Khalid had studied calmness all his life, with his grandmother Aissha as his tutor. From his earliest days he had watched her stolid acceptance of poverty, of shame, of hunger, of loss, of all kinds of pain. He had seen her handling the intrusion of Richie Burke into her household and her life with philosophical detachment, with stoic patience. To her it was all the will of Allah, not to be questioned. Allah was less real to Khalid than He was to Aissha, but Khalid had drawn from her her infinite patience and tranquillity, at least, if not her faith in God. Perhaps he might find his way to God later on. At any rate, he had long ago learned from Aissha that yielding to anguish was useless, that inner peace was the only key to endurance, that everything must be done calmly, unemotionally, because the alternative was a life of unending chaos and suffering. And so he had come to understand from her that it was possible even to hate someone in a calm, unemotional way. And had contrived thus to live calmly, day by day, with the father whom he loathed.

For the Entities he felt no loathing at all. Far from it. He had never known a world without them, the vanished world where humans had been masters of their own destinies. The Entities, for him, were an innate aspect of life, simply there, as were hills and trees, the moon, or the owl who roved the night above him now, cruising for squirrels or rabbits. And they were very beautiful to behold, like the moon, like an owl moving silently overhead, like a massive chestnut tree.

He waited, and the hours passed, and in his calm way he began to realize that he might not get his chance tonight, for he knew he needed to be home and in his bed before Richie awakened and could find him and the weapon gone. Another hour, two at most, that was all he could risk out here.

Then he saw turquoise light on the highway, and knew that an Entity vehicle was approaching, coming from the direction of Salisbury. It pulled into view a moment later, carrying two of the creatures standing serenely upright, side by side, in their strange wagon that floated on a cushion of air.

Khalid beheld it in wonder and awe. And once again marveled, as ever, at the elegance of these Entities, their grace, their luminescent splendor.

How beautiful you are! Oh, yes. Yes.

They moved past him on their curious cart as though traveling on a river of light, and it seemed to him, dispassionately studying the one on the side closer to him, that what he beheld here was surely a jinni of the jinn: Allah’s creature, a thing made of smokeless fire, a separate creation. Which none-the-less must in the end stand before Allah in judgment, even as we.

How beautiful. How beautiful.

I love you.

He loved it, yes. For its crystalline beauty. A jinni? No, it was a higher sort of being than that; it was an angel. It was a being of pure light—of cool clear fire, without smoke. He was lost in rapt admiration of its angelic perfection.

Loving it, admiring it, even worshipping it, Khalid calmly lifted the grenade gun to his shoulder, calmly aimed, calmly stared through the gunsight. Saw the Entity, distant as it was, transfixed perfectly in the crosshairs. Calmly he released the safety, as Richie had inadvertently showed him how to do. Calmly put his finger to the firing stud.

His soul was filled all the while with love for the beautiful creature before him as—calmly, calmly, calmly—he pressed the stud. He heard a whooshing sound and felt the weapon kicking back against his shoulder with astonishing force, sending him thudding into a tree behind him and for a moment knocking the breath from him; and an instant later the left side of the beautiful creature’s head exploded into a cascading fountain of flame, a shower of radiant fragments. A greenish-red mist of what must be alien blood appeared and went spreading outward into the air.

The stricken Entity swayed and fell backward, dropping out of sight on the floor of the wagon.

In that same moment the second Entity, the one that was riding on the far side, underwent so tremendous a convulsion that Khalid wondered if he had managed to kill it, too, with that single shot. It stumbled forward, then back, and crashed against the railing of the wagon with such violence that Khalid imagined he could hear the thump. Its great tubular body writhed and shook, and seemed even to change color, the purple hue deepening almost to black for an instant and the orange spots becoming a fiery red. At so great a distance it was hard to be sure, but Khalid thought, also, that its leathery hide was rippling and puckering as if in a demonstration of almost unendurable pain.

It must be feeling the agony of its companion’s death, he realized. Watching the Entity lurch around blindly on the platform of the wagon in what had to be terrible pain, Khalid’s soul flooded with compassion for the creature, and sorrow, and love. It was unthinkable to fire again. He had never had any intention of killing more than one; but in any case he knew that he was no more capable of firing a shot at this stricken survivor now than he would be of firing at Aissha.

During all this time the wagon had been moving silently onward as though nothing had happened; and in a moment more it turned the bend in the road and was gone from Khalid’s sight, down the road that led toward Stonehenge.

He stood for a while watching the place where the vehicle had been when he had fired the fatal shot. There was nothing there now, no sign that anything had occurred. Had anything occurred? Khalid felt neither satisfaction nor grief nor fear nor, really, any emotion of any other sort. His mind was all but blank. He made a point of keeping it that way, knowing he was as good as dead if he relaxed his control even for a fraction of a second.

Strapping the gun to the bicycle basket again, he pedaled quietly back toward home. It was well past midnight; there was no one at all on the road. At the house, all was as it had been; Arch’s car parked in front, the front lights still on, Richie and Arch snoring away in Richie’s room.

Only now, safely home, did Khalid at last allow himself the luxury of letting the jubilant thought cross his mind, just for a moment, that had been flickering at the threshold of his consciousness for an hour:

Got you, Richie! Got you, you bastard!

He returned the grenade gun to the cabinet and went to bed, and was asleep almost instantly, and slept soundly until the first bird-song of dawn.

In the tremendous uproar that swept Salisbury the next day, with Entity vehicles everywhere and platoons of the glossy balloon-like aliens that everybody called Spooks going from house to house, it was Khalid himself who provided the key clue to the mystery of the assassination that had occurred in the night.

“You know, I think it might have been my father who did it,” he said almost casually, in town, outside the market, to a boy named Thomas whom he knew in a glancing sort of way. “He came home yesterday with a strange sort of big gun. Said it was for killing Entities with, and put it away in a cabinet in our front room.”

Thomas would not believe that Khalid’s father was capable of such a gigantic act of heroism as assassinating an Entity. No, no, no, Khalid argued eagerly, in a tone of utter and sublime disingenuousness: he did it, I know he did it, he’s always talked of wanting to kill one of them one of these days, and now he has.

He has?

Always his greatest dream, yes, indeed.

Well, then—

Yes. Khalid moved along. So did Thomas. Khalid took care to go nowhere near the house all that morning. The last person he wanted to see was Richie. But he was safe in that regard. By noon Thomas evidently had spread the tale of Khalid Burke’s wild boast about the town with great effectiveness, because word came traveling through the streets around that time that a detachment of Spooks had gone to Khalid’s house and had taken Richie Burke away.

“What about my grandmother?” Khalid asked. “She wasn’t arrested too, was she?”

“No, it was just him,” he was told. “Billy Cavendish saw them taking him, and he was all by himself. Yelling and screaming, he was, the whole time, like a man being hauled away to be hanged.”

Khalid never saw his father again.

During the course of the general reprisals that followed the killing, the entire population of Salisbury and five adjacent towns was rounded up and transported to walled detention camps near Portsmouth. A good many of the deportees were executed within the next few days, seemingly by random selection, no pattern being evident in the choosing of those who were put to death. At the beginning of the following week the survivors were sent on from Portsmouth to other places, some of them quite remote, in various parts of the world.

Khalid was not among those executed. He was merely sent very far away.

He felt no guilt over having survived the death-lottery while others around him were being slain for his murderous act. He had trained himself since childhood to feel very little indeed, even while aiming a rifle at one of Earth’s beautiful and magnificent masters. Besides, what affair was it of his, that some of these people were dying and he was allowed to live? Everyone died, some sooner, some later. Aissha would have said that what was happening was the will of Allah. Khalid more simply put it that the Entities did as they pleased, always, and knew that it was folly to ponder their motives.

Aissha was not available to discuss these matters with. He was separated from her before reaching Portsmouth and Khalid never saw her again, either. From that day on it was necessary for him to make his way in the world on his own.

He was not quite thirteen years old.

Ron Carmichael said, trotting up toward the main house along the grassy path from the gray stone building that was the Resistance communications center, “Where’s my father? Has anyone seen the Colonel?” The dispatch from London was in his hand.

“On the patio,” Jill called to him. She was descending the same path, on her way down to the vegetable garden with a pail for tomatoes. “In his rocking chair, as usual.”

“No. I can see the patio from here. He’s not there.”

“Well, he was five minutes ago. It’s not my fault if he isn’t there now, is it? Man gets up and moves around sometimes, you know.”

He gave her a scowling look as they passed each other, and she stuck her tongue out at him. She was such a sour bitch, was his pretty niece. Of course, what she needed was a man, he knew. Getting on into her twenties and still sleeping alone, and even her dorky cousin Steve married now and about to be a father—it made no sense, Ron thought.

Time for Jill to find someone, yes. Ted Quarles had been asking about her just the other day, at the last meeting of the Resistance committee. Of course that was a little odd, Ted being at least twenty years her senior, maybe more. And Jill had never given him so much as a glance. But these were odd times.

The first person Ron encountered within the house was his older daughter, Leslyn. “Do you know where Grandpa is?” he asked her. “He’s not on the porch.”

“Mommy’s with him. In his room.”

“Is something wrong?”

But the little girl had already gone skipping away. Ron wasted no time calling her back. Hurrying through the maze of slate-floored corridors, he made his way to his father’s bedroom, at the back of the house with a grand view of the mountain wall above the ranch, and found him sitting up in bed, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe and a red muffler about his throat. He seemed pallid and weary and very old. Peggy was with him.

“What’s going on?” he asked her.

“He was feeling chilly, that’s all. I brought him inside.”

“Chilly? It’s a bright sunny morning out there! Practically like summer.”

“Not for me,” the Colonel said, smiling faintly. “For me it’s starting to be very, very late in autumn, Ronnie, going on winter very fast. But your lovely lady is taking good care of me. Giving me my medicine, and all.” He patted Peggy affectionately on the back of one hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. What I would have done without her, these many years.”

“Mike and Charlie have been all the way up to Monterey and back,” Peggy said, looking up from the bedside at Ron. “They found a whole new supply of the Colonel’s pills in a store up there. They brought a girl back with them, too, a very nice one. Eloise, her name is. You’ll be impressed.”

Ron blinked a couple of times. “A girl? What are they going to do, share her? Even if they are twins, I don’t see how they can seriously propose—”

Laughing, the Colonel said, “You’ve become stuffier than Anse, do you know that, Ronnie? ‘I don’t see how they can seriously propose—’ My God, boy, they aren’t marrying her! She’s just a houseguest! You sound like you’re fifty years old.”

“I am fifty,” Ron said. “Will be in another couple of months, anyway.” He paced restively around the room, clutching the Net message from London, wondering if he ought to bother his obviously ailing father with this startling news now. He decided after a moment that he should; that the Colonel would not have had it any other way.

And in any case the Colonel had already guessed.

“Is there news?” he asked, with a glance at the crumpled grayish sheet in Ron’s hand.

“Yes. Pretty amazing stuff, as a matter of fact. An Entity has been assassinated in the English town of Salisbury. Paul just picked up the story on a Net link.”

The Colonel, nestling back against his mound of pillows and giving Ron a slow, steady, unflustered look, said quietly, as though Ron had announced that word had just arrived via the Net of the second coming of Christ, “Just how reliable is this report, boy?”

“Very. Paul says, unimpeachable authority, London Resistance network, Martin Bartlett himself.”

“An Entity. Killed.” The Colonel considered that. “How?”

“A single shot on a lonely road, late at night. Hidden sniper, using some sort of homemade grenade-firing rifle.”

“The very plan that Faulkenburg and Cantelli and some of the others were so hot to put into being two or three years ago, and which we ultimately voted down because it was impossible to kill Entities that way anyhow, because of the telepathic screening field. Now someone has gone and done it, you tell me? How? How? We all agreed it couldn’t be done.”

“Well,” Ron said, “somebody found a way, somehow.”

The Colonel considered that for a time, too. He sat back, there among his framed diplomas and military memorabilia and innumerable photographs of his dead wife and his dead brothers and his sons and daughters and growing tribe of grandchildren, and he seemed to vanish into the labyrinth of his own thoughts and lose his way in there.

Then he said, “There’s really only one way that would work, isn’t there? Getting around the telepathy, I mean. The assassin would have to be like some sort of machine, practically—somebody with no more emotion and feeling than an android. Someone completely stolid and unexcitable. Someone who could wait there by the roadside holding that rifle and never for a moment let his mind dwell on the notion that he was going to strike a great blow for the liberation of mankind, or for that matter that he was about to murder an intelligent creature. Or any other sort of thought that might possibly attract the attention of the Entity who was going to be his victim.”

“A total moron,” Ronnie suggested. “Or an utter sociopath.”

“Well, yes. That might work, if you could teach a moron to use a rifle, or if you found a sociopath who didn’t get some kind of sick kick out of the anticipation of firing that shot. But there are other possibilities, you know.”

“Such as?”

“In Vietnam,” said the Colonel, “we ran across them all the time: absolutely impassive people who did the goddamnedest bloody things without batting an eye. An old woman who looked like your grandmother’s grandmother who would come up to you and placidly toss a bomb in your car. Or a sweet little six-year-old boy putting a knife into you in the marketplace. People who would kill or maim or mutilate you without pausing to think about what they were about to do and without feeling a gnat’s worth of animosity for you as they did it. Or remorse afterward. Half the time they blew themselves up right along with you, and the likelihood that that was going to happen didn’t faze them either. Perhaps it never even entered their minds. They just went ahead and did what they’d been told to do. An Entity mind-field might not be any defense against somebody like that.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine a mentality like that.”

“Not for me,” the Colonel said. “I saw just that kind of mentality in action at very close range indeed. Then I spent much of my academic career studying it. I even taught about it, remember? Way back in the Pleistocene? Professor of non-western psychology.”

He shook his head. “So they’ve actually killed one. Well, well, well.—What about reprisals, now?”

“They’ve cleaned out half a dozen towns in the vicinity, London says.”

“Cleaned them out? What does that mean?”

“Rounded up every person. Taken them away somewhere.”

“And killed them?”

“Not clear,” Ronnie said. “I doubt that anything nice is going to happen to them, though.”

The Colonel nodded. “That’s it, then? Purely local reprisal? No worldwide plagues, no major power shutoffs?”

“So far, no.”

“So far,” said the Colonel. “We can only pray.”

Ronnie approached his father’s bedside. “Well, at any rate, that’s the news. I thought you’d like to know, and now you do. Now you tell me: how are you feeling?”

“Old. Tired.”

“That’s all? Nothing in particular hurting you?”

“Old and tired, that’s all. So far. Of course, the Entities haven’t let any plagues loose yet, either, so far.”

He and Peggy went into the hallway. “Do you think he’s dying?” he asked her.

“He’s been dying for a long time, very very slowly. But I think he’s still got some distance to go. He’s tougher than you think he is, Ron.”

“Maybe so. But I hate to watch him crumbling like this. You have no idea what he was like when we were young, Peg. The way he stood, the way he walked, the way he held himself. Such an amazing man, absolutely fearless, absolutely honorable, always strong when you needed him to be strong. And always right. That was the astounding thing. I’d argue with him about something I had done, you know, trying to justify myself and feeling that I had made out a good case for myself, and he’d say three or four quiet words and I’d know that I had no case at all. Not that I would admit it, not then.—Christ, I’ll hate to lose him, Peggy!”

“He’s not going to die yet, Ron. I know that.”

“Who isn’t going to die?” said Anse, lumbering up out of one of the side corridors. He came to a halt alongside them, breathing hard, leaning on his cane. There was the faint sweet odor of whiskey about him, even now, well before noon. His bad leg had grown much more troublesome lately. “Him, you mean?” Anse asked, nodding toward the closed door of the Colonel’s bedroom.

“Who else?”

“He’ll live to be a hundred,” Anse said. “I’ll go before he does. Honestly, Ron.”

He probably would, Ron thought. Anse was fifty-six and appeared to be at least ten years older. His face was gray and bloated, his no longer intense eyes were lost in deep shadows, his shoulders now were rounded and slumped. All that was new. He didn’t seem as tall as he once had been. And he had lost some weight. Anse had always been a fine, sturdy man, not at all beefy—Ron was the beefy brother—but with plenty of muscle and flesh on him. Now he was visibly shrinking, sagging, diminishing. Some of it was the booze, Ron knew. Some of it was simply age. And some of it was, no doubt, that mysterious dark cloud of disappointment and discontent that had surrounded Anse for so long. The big brother who somehow had not gone on to become head of the family.

“Come off it, Anse,” Ron said, with as much sincerity as he could muster. “There’s nothing wrong with you that a new left leg wouldn’t fix.”

“Which I could probably have gotten,” Anse said, “but for the fucking Entities.—Hey, Paul says a story’s come in that they’ve actually succeeded in killing one, over in England. What are the chances that it’s true?”

“No reason to think it isn’t.”

“Is this the beginning, then? The counterattack?”

“I doubt that very much,” said Ron. “We don’t have a lot of details about how they managed it. But Dad’s got a theory that it would take a very special kind of assassin to bring it off—somebody with essentially no emotions at all, somebody who’s practically an android. It would be hard to put together a whole army of people like that.”

“We could train them.”

“We could, yes,” Ron said. “It would take quite a bit of time. Let me give it some thought, okay?”

“Was he happy about the killing?”

“He wondered about the reprisals, mostly. But yes, yes, he was happy about it. I suppose. He didn’t come right out and say that he was.”

“He wants them eradicated from the Earth once we’re properly ready to do the job,” said Anse. “That’s always been his goal underneath it all, even when they were saying that he had turned pacifist, even when they were hinting he had gone soft in the head. You know that. And now it’s the one thing keeping him alive—the hope that he’ll stick around long enough to see them completely wiped out.”

“Well, he isn’t going to. Nor you, nor me. But we can always hope. And you know, bro, he’s never been anything but a pacifist. He hates war. Always has. And his idea of preventing war is to constantly be prepared to fight one.—Ah, he’s some guy, isn’t he? They broke the mold when they made him, let me tell you. I hate to see him fading away like this. I hate it more than I can say.”

It was an oddly valedictory conversation, Ron thought. They were telling each other things, now, that both of them had known since they were children. But it was as though they needed to get these things said one more time before it was too late to say them at all.

Ron suspected he knew what was going to be said next—he could already see the moist gleam of emotion coming into Anse’s eyes, could already hear the heavy throbbing chords of the symphonic accompaniment—and, sure enough, out the words came, a moment later:

“What really gets to me is when you talk about how much you care for him, bro. You know, there were all those years when you and he weren’t speaking to each other, and I thought you really despised him. But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?” Now Anse will take my hand fervently between both of his. Yes, like that. “One more thing, bro. I want to tell you, if I haven’t already done so, how glad I am that in the course of time you did shape up the way that you have, how proud I am that you could be capable of changing so much, to make your peace with our dad and come here and be so much of a comfort to him. You worked out all right, in the long run. I confess I was surprised.”

“Thank you, I guess.”

“Especially when I—didn’t—work out so well.”

“That was a surprise too,” Ron said, having quickly decided that there was no point in offering any contradiction.

“Well, it shouldn’t have been,” said Anse, in a tone that was almost without expression. “It just wasn’t in me to do any better. It really wasn’t. No matter what he expected of me. I tried, but—well, you know how it’s been with me, bro—”

“Of course I know,” said Ron vaguely, and returned the squeeze; and Anse gave him a blurrily affectionate look and went limping off toward the front of the house. “That was very touching,” Peggy said. “He loves you very much.”

“I suppose he does. He’s drunk, Peg.”

“Even so. He meant what he said.”

Ron glowered at her. “Yes. Yes. But I loathe it when people tell me how much I’ve changed, how glad they are that I’m not the mean selfish son of a bitch I used to be. I loathe it. I haven’t changed. You know what I mean? I’m simply doing things in this region of my life that I hadn’t felt like making time for before. Like moving to the ranch. Like marrying a woman like you, like settling down and raising a family. Like agreeing with my father instead of automatically opposing him all the time. Like assuming certain responsibilities that extend beyond my own skin. But I’m still living within that skin, Peg. My behavior may have changed, but I haven’t. I’ve always made the sort of choices that make sense to me—they’re just different sorts of choices now, that’s all. And it makes me mad as hell when people, especially my own brother, patronize me by telling me that it’s wonderful that I’m not as shitty as I once was. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

It was a long speech. Peggy was staring at him in what looked like dismay.

“Am I running off at the mouth?” he asked.

“Well—”

“Hey, forget it,” he said, reaching out and stroking her cheek. “I’m very worried about my father, is all. And about Anse, for that matter. How fragile they’re both getting. How much Anse drinks. Both of them getting ready to die.”

“No,” said Peggy. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. Wouldn’t surprise me if Anse goes first, either.” Ron shook his head. “Poor old Anse. Always trying to turn himself into the Colonel, and never able to. And burning himself out trying. Because nobody possibly could be the Colonel except the Colonel. Anse didn’t have the Colonel’s intelligence or dedication or discipline, but he forced himself to pretend that he did. At least I had the good sense not even to try.”

“Is Anse really that sick?”

“Sick? I don’t know if he’s sick, no. But he’s done for, Peg. All these years trying to run a Resistance, trying to find some way to beat the Entities because the Colonel thinks we should, although there isn’t any way and Anse has had to live in perpetual simmering rage inside because he’s been trying to accomplish the impossible. His whole life has gone by, trying to accomplish things he wasn’t meant to do, things that maybe couldn’t even have been done. Burned him out.” Ron shrugged. “I wonder if I’ll get like that when my turn comes: shrunken, frail, defeated-looking? No. No, I won’t, will I? I’m a different kind. Nothing in common but the blue eyes.”

Was that really true? he wondered.

There was noise, suddenly, down the hall, a clattering, some whoops. Mike and Charlie appeared, Anse’s boys, taller now than their father, taller even than him. Seventeen years old. Blue Carmichael eyes, light-hued Carmichael hair. They had a girl with them: the one from Monterey, it must be. Looked to be a year or two older than they were.

“Hey, Uncle Ron! Aunt Peg! Want you to meet Eloise!”

That was Charlie, the one with the unmarked face. The brothers had had a terrible fight when they were about nine, and Mike had come out of it with that angry red scar down his cheek. Ron had often thought it was very considerate of Charlie to have marked his brother like that. They were, otherwise, the most identical twins he had ever seen, altogether alike in movement, stance, voice, patterns of thought.

Eloise was dark-haired, pretty, vivacious: sharp cheekbones, tiny nose, full lips, lively eyes. Leggy below and full on top. Very nice indeed. Ancient lustful reflexes stirred for an instant in Ron. She is only a child, he told himself sternly. And to her, you are simply some uninteresting old man.

“Eloise Mitchell—our uncle, Ronald Carmichael—Peggy, our aunt—”

“Pleased,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling. Impressive, yes. “It’s so beautiful here! I’ve never been this far south before. I love this part of the coast. I never want to go home!”

“She isn’t going to,” Charlie said. And Mike winked and laughed.

Then they were off, running down the hall, heading for the sunlight and warmth outside the old stone house.

“I’ll be damned,” Ron said. “Do you think they are sharing her?”

“That isn’t any of your business,” Peggy told him. “The younger generation does as it pleases. Just as we did.”

“The younger generation, yes. And we’re the stuffy old geezers now. There’s the world’s future rising up before our eyes. Charlie. Mike. Eloise.”

“And our Anson and Leslyn and Heather and Tony. Cassandra and Julie and Mark. And now Steve’s baby soon too.”

“The future, crowding in on the present all the time. While the past makes ready to clear out. Been like that for a long while, hasn’t it, Peg? And not going to change now, I guess.”