The Alien Years

FORTY YEARS FROM NOW

It was eleven years after Khalid and Cindy had come to the ranch, and ten since he had married Jill, when he finally revealed to anyone what it was that he had done to warrant being put into detention by the Entities.

Eleven years.

And thirty-three since the Conquest; and the ranch still floated above the suffering world like an island in mid-air, sacrosanct. Somewhere out there were the impregnable compounds of the Entities—within which the conquering creatures from another world went about the unfathomable activities requisite to an occupation of the conquered planet, an occupation that now had lasted a full third of a century without letup or explanation; and, somewhere out there, labor gangs working under conditions amounting to slavery were building huge walls around all of Earth’s major cities, and doing, at the behest of human taskmasters who took their orders from the aliens, all manner of other things whose purpose no one could comprehend. And somewhere out there, too, there were prison camps in which thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had broken some mystifying and inexplicable regulation that had been decreed by Earth’s starborn monarchs were capriciously and randomly detained.

Here, meanwhile, were the Carmichaels up above the world. It was rare for any of them to leave their mountain home any longer. The ranch’s confines were much less confining, now; the Carmichael domain had spread outward and to some degree downward into the depopulated hillsides all about them. They spent their days raising tomatoes and corn and sheep and pigs and squadrons of new Carmichael babies. The making of babies was, in fact, a primary occupation there. The place swarmed with them, one generation tumbling fast upon its predecessor. And also, like some machine that has been set blindly into motion without any means of halting, going through the unending motions of running a Resistance that consisted mainly of sending strings of resolute and inspiring e-mail to other groups of Resisters all over the world. The Entities, inscrutable as ever, must surely must have known what was going on up there, but they stayed their hand.

The Carmichaels lived in such utter isolation that when some stranger, some spy, broke into their walled domain a few years after Khalid’s arrival there, it was an altogether astounding event, an unprecedented foray of reality into their charmed sphere. Charlie found him quickly and killed him and all was as it had been, once again. And the world went on, for the unconquered Carmichaels on their mountainside and for the conquered hosts below.

Eleven years. For Khalid they went by in a moment.

By then, the Carmichaels had just about forgotten the whole subject of Khalid’s detention. Khalid lived among them like a Martian among humans, he and the almost equally Martian Jill, in an isolated cabin of their own that he and Mike and Anson had constructed for them beyond the vegetable garden, and there Khalid spent his days fashioning sculptures large and small out of stone or clay or pieces of wood, and drew sketches, and taught himself how to grind pigments into paint and how to paint with them; and he and Jill raised their tribe of eerily beautiful children there, and no one, not even Khalid, ever thought much about Khalid’s mysterious past. The past was not a place Khalid cared to visit. It held no fond memories. He preferred to live one moment at a time, looking neither forward nor back.

The pasts of other people impinged on him all the time, though, because it was just a short way from his cabin to the ranch’s graveyard, off in a gravelly little rock-walled natural enclosure, a sort of box canyon, just to the left of the vegetable patch. Khalid went there often to sit among the dead people and look outward, thinking about nothing at all.

The view from the graveyard was ideal for that purpose. The little box canyon opened at its downslope end into a larger side canyon on the mountain’s western face, canted not toward the city of Santa Barbara but toward the next mountain in the series that ran parallel to the coastline. So you could sit there with your back against the steep mountain face and look right out into blue sky and wheeling hawks, with little else in your line of sight except the distant gray-brown bulk of the next mountain over, the one that bordered the ranch on the west.

Gravestones sprouted like toadstools all around him here, but that was all right. The dead were no more frightening to Khalid than the living. And in any case he had known very few of these people.

The biggest and most elaborate of the stones belonged to the grave of Colonel Anson Carmichael III, 1943-2027. There always were fresh flowers on that grave, every day of the year. Khalid understood that the Colonel had been the patriarch of this community. He had died a day or two after Khalid’s arrival here. Khalid had never laid eyes on him.

Nor on Captain Anson Carmichael IV, 1964-2024. They loved that name Anson here. The settlement was full of them.

Ron Carmichael’s oldest son was an Anson; so was Steve Gannett’s boy, though everyone called him “Andy.” And Khalid thought there might be others. There were so many children that it was hard to keep track. At Jill’s insistence Khalid had even given the name to one of his own sons: Rasheed Anson Burke, he was. This one in the grave before him had been known as “Anse": the oldest son of the illustrious Colonel, dead before his own father. A sad story, evidently, but no one had ever told Khalid the details of it. Jill, although she had been Anse’s daughter, never talked of him.

Jill’s mother was buried next to her husband: Carole Martinson Carmichael, 1969-2034. Khalid remembered her as a thin, pallid, downcast woman, a worn and ragged version of her beautiful daughter. She had never had much to say. Khalid had carved the headstone himself, with two winged angels on it within an elaborate wreath. Jill had requested that. Just back of the graves of Anse and Carole was the grave of someone named Helena Carmichael Boyce, 1979–2021—Khalid had no idea who she had been—and, not far from hers, the resting place of Jill’s first husband, the mysterious Theodore Quarles, 1975-2023, called “Ted.”

All Khalid knew about Theodore Quarles was that he had been many years older than Jill, that they had lived together as man and wife for about a year, that he had been killed in a rockslide during a stormy winter. He was another one of whom Jill never spoke; but that too was all right. Khalid had no interest in knowing any more about Theodore Quarles than he already did, which was the mere fact of his existence.

Then there were the graves of various children of the family who had died young in this little mountainside village that had no doctor. Five, six, seven headstones, small ones all in a row. These usually had flowers on them too. But there were never any flowers on the next grave over, that of the nameless intruder, perhaps a quisling spy, whom Charlie had killed six or seven years back after discovering him prowling around in the computer shack. Ron had insisted that he be given a proper burial, though there was a hot argument about it, Charlie and Ron going at it for hour after hour until young Anson managed to calm them down. That grave had only a crude marker on it. It was up against the side wall of the little canyon and no one ever went near it.

Also toward that side of the cemetery there were two gravestones that Khalid had erected himself, a couple of years ago. He hadn’t asked anyone’s permission, had just gone ahead and done it. Why not? He lived here too. He was entitled.

One of them marked Aissha’s grave. Of course, Khalid had no definite knowledge that she was dead. But he had no particular reason to think she was alive, either, and he wanted her to be commemorated here somehow. She was the only person in the universe who had ever meant anything to him. So he carved a fine stone for her, with intricate patterns of interwoven scrollwork all along it. Everything abstract: no graven images for devout Aissha. And wrote in bold letters right in the middle, AISSHA KHAN. With a few lines from the Koran below, lines in English, because Khalid had forgotten most of the little Arabic that Iskander Mustafa Ali had managed to teach him: Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe. You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help. No dates. He knew no dates to put there.

The other gravestone that Khalid put up had simpler ornamentation and a shorter inscription:

Leaving the last names off. He loathed his own; and even if Yasmeena had been married to Richie Burke, which Khalid doubted, he didn’t want that name on her stone. He could have called her “Yasmeena Khan.” But it seemed wrong for mother and son to have different last names, so he left both off. And also no dates. Khalid knew when she had died, because it was the day of his own birth, but he wasn’t sure how old she had been then. Young, that was all he knew. What did such things matter, anyway? The only thing that mattered was that she was remembered.

Jill, watching him carve Yasmeena’s stone, said, “And will you make one for your father, too?”

“No. Not for him.”

He was visiting the graves of Aissha and Yasmeena on a bright day in the middle one of those long, endless-seeming sun-drenched summers that came to the ranch in February or March of every year and stayed until November or December, when Jill unexpectedly appeared at the downslope side of the burying-ground, where the entrance was. One of the children was with her, the girl Khalifa, who was five.

“You’re praying,” Jill said. “I interrupted you.”

“No. I’m all done.”

Every Friday Khalid came here and spoke some words from the Koran over the two graves, words that he had tried to resurrect from his memories of his long-ago lessons in Salisbury with Iskander Mustafa Ali. On the day when the first and second blasts of the Trumpet are heard, Khalid would say, all hearts shall be filled with terror, and all eyes shall stare with awe. And then he would say: When the sky is torn asunder, when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together, when the graves are thrown about, then each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do. And then: On that day some will have beaming faces, smiling and joyful, for they will live in Paradise. And on that day the faces of others will be veiled with darkness and covered with dust. He could remember no more than that, and he knew that he had jumbled these lines together from different sections; but they were the best he could manage, and he believed that Allah would accept them from him, even though you were not supposed to alter a single word of the scripture, because this was the best he could do and Allah did not demand from you more than was possible.

Jill was barefoot and wore only a strip of blue fabric around her waist and another over her breasts. Khalifa wore nothing at all. Cloth was getting hard to come by, these days, and clothing wore out all too quickly; and in warm weather the small children went naked and most of the younger adult Carmichaels wore very little. Jill, at forty, still thought of herself as a younger Carmichael, and, even though she had borne five children and showed the signs or that, her long, slender frame had the look of youth about it yet.

“What is it?” Khalid asked. It had to be something unusual to bring her here while he was at his prayers. Above all else he and Jill respected each other’s privacy.

“Khalifa says she saw an Entity.”

Well, that was certainly something unusual, Khalid thought. He glanced at the child. She didn’t seem particularly upset. Quite calm, in fact.

“An Entity, eh? And where did this happen?”

“By the wading pond, she says. The Entity got into the pond with her and splashed around. It played with her and talked with her a long time. Then it took her in its arms and went with her on a trip into the sky and brought her back.”

“You believe that this happened?” Khalid asked.

Jill shrugged. “Not necessarily. But how would I know whether it happened or not? I thought you should know. What if they’re beginning to snoop around here?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

Jill was like that: she made no judgments, she drew no conclusions. She drifted through life like a Spook, rarely touching the ground. Sometimes she and Khalid went for days at a time without speaking to each other, though all was peaceful between them, and they would turn to each other in bed every night during such times as naturally and passionately as they always did. In eleven years together Khalid had never attempted to penetrate her inner thoughts, nor she his. They respected each other’s privacy, yes. Two of a kind, they were.

He knelt beside the little girl and said gently, “You saw an Entity, eh?”

“Yes. It took me flying into space.”

Khalifa was the most beautiful of his five striking children: angelic, even. She combined in herself the best of Jill’s fair-skinned fair-haired beauty and his own more exotic hybrid traits. Her limbs were long, already arguing for extraordinary height; her hair was shimmering golden fleece, with an underglow of bronze; her eyes were his gem-like blue-green; her pellucid skin had some subtle trace of his tawniness to it, a subcutaneous ruddy gleam like that of burnished copper.

He said, “What did it look like, this Entity?”

“It was a little like a lion,” she said, “and a little like a camel. It had shining wings and a long snaky tail. It was pink all over and very tall.”

“How tall?”

“As tall as you are. Maybe even a little taller.”

Her eyes were wide and solemn and sincere. But this had to be a fable. There were no Entities that looked like that. Unless some new kind had recently arrived on Earth, of course.

“Were you afraid?” Khalid asked.

“A little. It was sort of scary, I suppose. But it said it wouldn’t hurt me if I kept quiet. It just wanted to play with me, it said.”

“Play?”

“We played splashing games, and we danced around in the pond. It asked me my name and the names of my mommy and my daddy, and a lot of other things that I don’t remember. Then it took me flying. We went up to the moon and back. I saw the castles and rivers on the moon. It said that it would come back on my birthday and take me flying again.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon, and Mars, and lots of other places.”

Khalid nodded. For a moment or two he studied Khalifa’s angelic countenance, marveling at the teeming fantasies behind that small smooth forehead. Then he said: “How do you know anything about lions and camels?”

The briefest hesitation. “Andy told me about them.”

Andy. Now it made sense. Her twelve-year-old cousin Andy, Steve and Lisa’s son, was a gushing fountain of uncontrolled imagination. Too clever for his own good, that boy, forever making his magic with computers, bringing forth all sorts of unheard-of trickery. And something diabolical in his eyes, even back when he was only a baby.

“Andy told you?” Khalid said.

“He showed me pictures of them on the screen of his machine. And told me stories about them. Andy tells me lots of stories.”

“Ah,” Khalid said. He shot a glance at Jill. “Does Andy tell you stories about Entities too?” he asked the girl.

“Sometimes.”

“Did he tell you this one?”

“Oh, no. This one really happened!”

“To you, or to Andy?”

“To me! To me!” Indignantly. She gave him a petulant, even angry look, as though annoyed that he would doubt her. But then, abruptly, things changed. An expression of uncertainty, or perhaps fear, appeared on the child’s face. Her lower lip trembled. She was on the edge of tears.—"I wasn’t supposed to tell you. I shouldn’t have. The only one I told was Mommy, and she told you. But the Entity told me not to say anything to anybody about what had happened, or it would kill me. It isn’t going to kill me, is it, Khalid?”

He smiled. “No, child. That won’t happen.”

“I’m scared.” The tears were showing, now.

“No. No. Nothing’s going to kill you. Listen to me, Khalifa: if this so-called Entity or any other kind of creature comes back here and bothers you again, you tell me about it right away and I’ll kill it. I’ve already killed one Entity in my life and I can do it again. So there isn’t a thing for you to be afraid of.”

“Would you kill an Entity?” she asked.

“If it tried to bother you, yes,” said Khalid. “In a flash, I would.” He pulled her to him, lifted her, hugged her, set her gently down. Patted her on her bare little rump, told her once more not to worry about the Entity, sent her on her way.

To Jill he said, “That boy Andy is all mischief. I need to talk to him about not filling the girl’s head with nonsense.”

She was looking at him strangely.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

“Andy’s not the only one filling her head with nonsense, I think. Why did you tell her that thing about your killing an Entity once?”

“That wasn’t nonsense. It’s true.”

“Come on, Khalid.”

“What do you think I did that got me into Entity detention? You remember, I was an escaped detainee when I came here?” Jill was looking at him as though he had begun to speak in an unknown language. But, Khalid thought, it was time he had told her of this. More than time. He went on, “An Entity was shot dead once on a country road in England, years and years ago. I’m the one that shot it. But they had no way of knowing that, so everybody in my part of England was rounded up and killed, or put into the camps. The only one I ever told was Cindy. I’m not sure that she believed me.” Jill was still staring. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you believe that I could have done something like that?”

She was very slow to answer.

“Yes,” she said, eventually. “Yes, I think you could.”

He found Andy exactly where he expected to find him, on a bench outside the computer shack, tinkering with one of his portable computers. The boy, like his father, like his grandfather, seemed to eat and breathe and live computers, and probably wrote programs while he was sleeping, too.

“Andy?”

“Just a minute, Khalid.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Just a minute\”

Calmly Khalid reached down and pushed a button on Andy’s computer. The screen went dark. The boy gave him a fiery look and leaped to his feet, fists balled. He was big for his age, very well developed, but Khalid stood poised, ready to deal with any attack. Not that he would hit Andy—that would be too much like Richie, hitting a twelve-year-old boy—but he would restrain him, if he had to, until the boy’s fit of temper had passed.

Andy got control of himself quickly enough, though. Sourly he said, “You shouldn’t have done that, Khalid. You might have spoiled what I was writing.”

“When an adult tells you to pay attention, you pay attention,” Khalid said. “That is the rule here. You will not ignore me when I tell you I wish to speak with you. What were you doing? Eavesdropping on the secret conversations of the Entities?”

Andy’s fury dropped away. Smirking cheekily, he said, “You wish.”

The boy was naked. That bothered Khalid. Andy might be only twelve, but his body was already that of a man; he should cover himself. Khalid disliked the idea that this naked man-child should have been playing with his naked little daughter, telling her fantastic fables.

He said, “I hear from Khalifa that you make up very interesting stories about new kinds of Entities. In particular one that looks something like a lion and something like a camel.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“This is true, then?”

“Sure. I show the kids all sorts of graphics.”

“Show me,” said Khalid.

Andy turned the computer back on. Instantly four lines of bright lettering edged with flames blazed forth on the screen:

He hit a key, and another one, and another one, and a vivid picture began to take form on the screen. A mythical beast of some sort, it seemed. A camel’s long comic face, a lion’s ferocious claws, an eagle’s splendid wings. A long curling serpentine tale. Andy filled in the details quickly, until the image on the screen seemed almost three-dimensional. Ready to jump out of the computer and dance around before them. It turned its head from side to side, it grinned at them, it leered, it glowered, it showed a set of gleaming fangs that no camel had ever possessed.

How had the boy done that? Khalid knew almost nothing about computers. It seemed like magic to Khalid, black magic. The work of a jinni: one of the evil ones. The work of a demon.

“What is this creature?” Khalid asked.

“A griffin. I found it in a mythology text. I put the camel’s head on myself, just for fun.”

“And told Khalifa that it was an Entity?”

“Uh-uh. That was strictly her idea. I was just showing her graphics. Did she tell you I called it an Entity?”

“She said she saw an Entity, that it visited her and played with her and took her on a flight to the moon. And plenty of other crazy stuff. But she also said you’d been showing her lots of things like this on your computer.”

“And if I have?” Andy asked. “What’s the problem, Khalid?”

“She’s just a little girl. She hasn’t yet learned how to sort out reality from fantasy. Don’t mix her up, Andy.”

“I’m not supposed to tell her stories, you’re saying?”

“Don’t mix up her head, is what I’m saying.—And put some clothes on. You’re too old to be running around with everything you have showing.”

Quickly Khalid walked away. It troubled him to be giving angry orders to young people. It brought buried memories of ancient ugliness back to life.

But this boy, Andy—someone needed to impose some discipline on him. Khalid knew that he was not the one; but someone should. He was too wild, too defiant. You could see the rebelliousness growing in him from week to week. He was good with computers, yes: wonderful with computers, miraculous. But Khalid saw the wildness in him, and was puzzled that no one else did. Even now, Andy did mainly as he pleased; what would he be like later on? The first Carmichael quisling? The family’s first borgmann?

Close to a year went by before the story Khalid had told Jill had any repercussions whatever. That he had ever said a word to her about having killed that Entity was something that had all but passed from his mind.

He was carving a statue of Jill out of a slab of red manzanita wood, the latest in a series of such statues that he had made over the years. Little gatherings of them stood arrayed around the cabin in groups of three and four, congregations of Jills. Jill standing and Jill kneeling and Jill running, caught in mid-stride with her long hair flowing out behind her, and Jill stretched out with her elbow on the ground and her head resting on her fist; Jill with a baby in the crook of each arm; Jill asleep. She was nude in all of them. And she looked exactly alike in every one, always the youthful Jill of Khalid’s first days at the ranch, with the smooth unlined face and the flat belly and the high taut breasts. Even though he had her pose for each new statue, he depicted her only as she had been, not as she now was.

She had noticed that, after a time, and had remarked on it. “That is how I will always see you,” he explained. She went on posing for him nevertheless, though even he knew that there was really no need, not if all he was doing was carving statues of the Jill within his mind.

She was posing for him on a mild, humid spring morning when Tony came to him, Ron Carmichael’s younger son, a big, brawny, easygoing boy in his late teens with a lion’s mane of golden hair down to his shoulders. He gave only the most perfunctory of glances to the naked Jill, who stood with her arms outstretched and her head turned to the sky as if she were about to take wing. Everyone who passed by Khalid’s cabin was accustomed to seeing Jill posing.

Khalid glanced up. Tony said, “My brother would like to talk with you. He’s in the chart room.”

“Yes. Right away,” Khalid said, and set about the task of putting his chisels back in their chest.

The chart room was a big, airy room in the main house, the largest in the series of rooms in the wing that stretched off to the left of the dining room. The Colonel, long ago, had bedecked its mahogany-paneled walls with an extensive collection of military maps and charts from the time of the Vietnam War, framed topographic plans of battlefields and city maps and harbor charts, out of which bizarre unfamiliar names that must once have been terribly important came leaping, boldly underlined in red: Haiphong, Cam Ranh, Phan Rang, Pleiku, Khe Sanh, la Drang, Bin Dinh, Hue. The room had a fine strategic feel to it and at some time late in the Colonel’s life Ron Carmichael had made it the central planning headquarters for the Resistance. A direct telephone line that Steve and Lisa Gannett had wired up connected it with the communications center out back.

There was a pack of Carmichaels in the chart room when Khalid entered. They were sitting side by side behind the big curving leather-topped desk in the middle of the floor, like an assembly of judges, and they were all looking at him with peculiar intensity, the way they might look at some mythological monster that had wandered into the room.

Three of them were Carmichaels, anyway: Mike, the more pleasant of Jill’s two brothers, and Mike’s cousins Leslyn and Anson, two of Ron’s children. Steve Gannett was there also: some kind of Carmichael, Khalid knew, but not as Carmichael as the others, too plump, too bald, wrong color eyes. Khalid did not always bother to keep his sense of the relationships among all these people straight in his head. Fate had decreed that he should live among them, even marry one and have children by her; but none of that meant that he would ever feel like a true member of the family.

Anson was at the center of the group. Khalid understood that in recent months Anson had come to be in charge of things, now that his father Ron was beginning to grow old. Not quite thirty yet, was Anson, younger than Mike and Charlie and their sister Jill, younger considerably than Steve. But he was plainly the boss now, the Carmichael of Carmichaels, the one who had the strength to command, the one who always took opportunity into his hands. Anson was a tall wide-faced man with very pale skin and a great thick swoop of coarse yellow hair that fell down low across his forehead. And, of course, those rock-drill eyes that all these Carmichaels inevitably were born with. He had always struck Khalid as being very tightly wound—too tightly wound, perhaps, and perhaps also brittle at the core, so that it would not take very much to make him snap in half.

Anson said, “Jill told me something extremely strange about you last night, Khalid. I was up practically all night thinking about it.”

“Yes?” Khalid said, noncommittal as ever.

“What she said was that you had told her, some time back, that the thing you had been sent into detention for was the killing of that Entity who was assassinated on a highway in England fifteen or twenty years ago.”

“Yes,” Khalid said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I did it. I am the one.”

Anson’s penetrating eyes rested unblinkingly on him. But Khalid was not afraid of anyone’s eyes.

“And never said a word about it to anyone?” Anson said.

“Cindy knows. I told her years ago, when I first knew her, before we ever came to this place.”

“Yes. I asked her last night, and she confirms that you made that claim to her, while the two of you were driving down from Nevada. She wasn’t sure then whether to take you seriously. She still isn’t.”

“I was serious,” Khalid said. “I was the one who did it.”

“But never saw fit to mention it here. Why was that?”

“Why should I have talked about it? It was not a matter that ever came up in ordinary conversation. It is something I did one night a long time ago, when I was still a child, for reasons that were of concern to me on that night alone, and it is not important to me now.”

“Did it ever occur to you, Khalid,” Mike Carmichael said, “that it might be important to us?”

Khalid shrugged.

Anson said, “What made you come out with it to Jill, after all this time, then?”

“What I said is something that I said to my daughter Khalifa, not to Jill. Khalifa imagined that an Entity of a strange sort had come here to the ranch and played with her, and then made threats to her if she said anything about what had happened—this is something that your son Andy put into her mind,” Khalid said, looking coolly at Steve—"and when I heard this tale I told the child to have no fear, that I would protect her as a father should, that I had killed an Entity once and I would do it again, if need be. Then Jill asked me if I had really done such a thing. And so I told her the story.”

Leslyn Carmichael, a young slender woman who looked to Khalid disturbingly like the Jill of ten years before, said, “The Entities are capable of reading minds and defending themselves against attacks before the attack can even be made. That’s why nobody’s ever been able to kill one, except for that one incident in England all those years ago. How is it that you were able to do what no one else can manage to do, Khalid?”

“When the Entity came along the road in its wagon, there was nothing in my mind to cause it alarm. I felt no hatred for it, I felt no enmity. I allowed none of those things into my mind. Entities are very beautiful to me, and I love beautiful things. I was feeling my love for that one, for its beauty, even as I picked up the rifle and shot it. If it had looked into my mind as it approached, all it would have seen was my love.”

“You can do that?” Anson said. “You can turn off everything in your mind that you don’t want to be there?”

“I could then. Perhaps I still can.”

“Is that how you avoided being blamed for the killing afterward?” Leslyn asked. “You blanked all knowledge of the murder from your mind, so the Entity interrogators couldn’t detect it in there?”

“There were no Entity interrogators. They simply gave the order for everyone in our town to be gathered together and punished, as if we all were guilty. Human troops under Entity orders gathered us together. My mind would not have been open to them.”

There was some silence then, as all these Carmichaels contemplated what Khalid had said. He watched them, seeing in their faces that they were weighing his words, testing them for plausibility.

Believe me or don ^yt believe me, as you wish. It makes no difference to me.

But it seemed as if they did believe him.

“Come over here, Khalid,” Anson said, indicating the leather-topped desk. “I want to show you something.”

The desk had papers spread out all over it. They were computer printouts, full of jagged lines, diagrams, graphs. Khalid looked down at them without comprehension, without interest.

Anson said, “We’ve been collecting these reports for five or six years, now. What they are is an analysis of the movements of high-caste Entity personnel between cities, as well as we’ve been able to track them. These dotted lines here, these are transit vectors, the patterns of movement. They represent elite Entity figures, traveling from place to place. Look. Here. Here. Here. This cluster here.” He pointed to groups of lines and dots.

“Yes,” Khalid said, meaning nothing at all.

“We’ve noticed, over the years, certain patterns within the patterns, a flow of Entities in and out of specific places, sometimes gathering in relatively great numbers in such places. Los Angeles is one of those places. London is another. Istanbul, Turkey, is a third.”

Anson glanced toward him in that taut way of his, as though expecting some reaction. Khalid said nothing.

“It’s become evident, or so we think,” Anson went on, “that these three cities are the main command centers of the Entities, their capitals on Earth, and that Los Angeles is probably the capital of capitals for them. You may be aware that the wall around Los Angeles is higher and thicker than the wall around any other city. There may be some significance in that.—Well, Khalid, we jump now to our big hypothesis. Not only is Los Angeles very likely the main city, but it may contain a supreme figure, the commander-in-chief of all the Entities. What we have begun to call Entity Prime.”

Another wary glance at Khalid. Again Khalid offered no reaction. What was there for him to say?

Anson went on, “We think—we guess, we suspect, we believe—that all the Entities might be linked in some telepathic way to Entity Prime, and that they make regular pilgrimages to the site where Prime is located for some reason that we don’t understand, but which may have to do with their own biological processes, or their mental processes. A communion of some sort, maybe. As though they renew themselves somehow by going to see Prime. And that is Los Angeles, although there’s certain secondary evidence that it could be London or Istanbul instead.”

“You know this?” said Khalid doubtfully.

“Just a hypothesis,” said Leslyn. “But maybe a pretty good one.”

Khalid nodded. He wondered why they were bothering him with these matters.

“Like the queen bee who rules the hive,” said Alike.

“Ah,” said Khalid. “The queen bee.”

Anson said, “Not necessarily female, of course. Not necessarily anything. But suppose, now, that we were able to locate Prime—track him down, find him wherever they’ve got him hidden away in Los Angeles, or maybe in London or Istanbul. If we did that, and could get an assassin in to kill him, what effect would that have on the rest of the Entities, do you think?”

At last Khalid could provide something worthwhile. “When I killed the one in Salisbury,” he said, “the one next to him in the wagon went into convulsions. I thought for a moment I might have shot that one too, though I didn’t. So their minds may be linked just as you say.”

“You see? You see?” cried Anson triumphantly. “We start to get confirmation! Why the hell didn’t you tell us this stuff, Khalid? You shoot one and the other one on the wagon has convulsions! I’ll bet they all did, all around the world, right on up to Prime!”

“We need to check on this,” Steve said. “Find out, from as many sources we can, whether anyone observed unusual behavior among the Entities at the time of the Salisbury killing.”

Anson nodded. “Right. And if there was some kind of general worldwide Entity freakout as a result of the death of one relatively unimportant member of their species—then if we could somehow manage to find and kill Prime—well, Khalid, do you see where we’re heading?”

Khalid looked down at the maze of papers spread out all over the leather-topped desk.

“Of course. That you want to kill Prime.”

“More specifically, that we want you to kill Prime!”

“Me?” He laughed. “Oh, no, Anson.”

“No?”

“No. That is not a thing I would want to do. Oh, no, Anson. No.”

That seemed to stun them. It knocked the wind right out of them. Anson’s pale face turned bright red with anger, and Mike said something under his breath to Leslyn, and Steve muttered something to Leslyn also.

Then Leslyn, who was sitting just at Khalid’s elbow, looked up at him and said, “Why wouldn’t you? You’re the one person qualified to do it.”

“But I have no reason to do it. Killing Prime, if there is such a thing as Prime, is nothing to me.”

“Are you afraid?” Mike asked.

“Not at all. I would probably die in the attempt, and I would not want that to happen, because I have small children whom I love, and I want them to have a father. But I am not afraid, no. What I am is indifferent.”

“To what?”

“To the project of killing Entities. It is true that I killed that Entity when I was a boy, but I did it for special reasons that were of importance only to myself. Those reasons have been satisfied. Killing Entities is your project, not mine.”

“Don’t you want to see them driven from the world?” Steve Gannett asked him.

“They can keep the world forever, so far as I am concerned,” replied Khalid evenly. “Who rules the world is not my concern. From what I understand, there was never much happiness in it even before the Entities came, at least not for my family. Those people are all dead, now, the family I had in England. I never knew them anyway, except for one. But now I have children of my own. I find happiness in them. For the first time in my life, I have tasted happiness. The thing that I want is to stay here and raise my children. Not to go into a city I do not know and try to kill some strange being that means nothing to me. Perhaps I would return alive from that, more likely not. But why should I take the risk? What is there for me to gain?”

“Khalid—” Anson said.

“Was I not sufficiently clear? I tried to express myself very clearly indeed.”

Stymied. Khalid seemed as alien to them as the Entities themselves.

They sent him from the room. He went back to his cabin, opened his tool chest, asked Jill to resume her pose. Of what had taken place in the chart room he said nothing at all. His children fluttered around him, Khalifa, Rasheed, Yasmeena, Aissha, Haleem, naked, lovely. Khalid’s heart swelled with joy at the sight of them. Allah was good; Allah had brought him to this mountain, had given him the strange and beautiful Jill, had caused these children of his to be born to her. After much suffering his life had begun at last to blossom. Why should he surrender it for these people’s foolish project?

“Get me Tony,” Anson said, when Khalid was gone.

His conversation with his brother was brief. Tony had never been a deep thinker, nor was he a man of many words. He was eight years younger than Anson and had always held him in the deepest reverence. Loved him; feared him; looked up to him. Would do anything for him. Even this, Anson hoped.

He explained to Tony what was at stake, and what would be needed to bring it off.

“I’m going to give it a try,” Anson said. “It’s my responsibility.”

“Is that how you see it? Well, then.”

“That’s how I see it, yes. But the first one who goes down there may not bring it off. If I don’t succeed in killing Prime, will you agree to be the next one to take a whack at the job?”

“Sure,” Tony replied immediately. He seemed hardly even to give the matter any consideration. The difficulties, the risk. No frowns furrowed Tony’s broad, amiable, clear-eyed face. “Why not? Whatever you say, Anson. You’re the boss.”

“It won’t be that simple. It could involve months of special training. Years, maybe.”

“You’re the boss,” Tony said.

A little while later, as Khalid was finishing his morning’s work, Anson came to him. He looked even more tightly wound than usual, lips clamped tightly, eyebrows furrowed. They stood together outside the building, amidst the carved array of naked wooden Jills, and Anson said, “You told us just now that you were indifferent to the whole idea of killing Entities. That you were indifferent to it, apparently, even as you went about killing one.”

“Yes. This is so.”

“Do you think you could instruct somebody in that kind of indifference, Khalid? That way you have of wiping your mind clean of anything that might arouse an Entity’s defenses?”

“I could try, I suppose. I think it would not work. You have to be born to it, I think.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps it could be taught.”

“Perhaps,” said Khalid.

“Could you try to teach me?”

That startled Khalid, that Anson would want to propose himself for what surely would be a suicide mission. Khalid could almost understand that sort of dedication to a task: in the abstract, at least. But Anson was the father of a large family, as Khalid was. Six, seven children already, Anson had, and still young himself, a few years younger even than Khalid. Year after year children came out of Raven, the plump little broad-hipped wife whom Anson had found for himself over in the ranch-hand compound, with unvarying regularity. You could always tell when spring had arrived, because Raven was having her annual baby. Did Anson not want the joy of watching those children grow up? Was it worth losing all that for the sake of a foolhardy attempt to kill some monstrous being from another world?

This was a pointless discussion, though. “You would never learn it,” Khalid said. “You have the wrong kind of mind. You could never be indifferent to anything.”

“Try me anyway.”

“I will not. It would be a waste of your time and mine.”

“What a stubborn bastard you are, Khalid!”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose I am that.”

He waited for Anson to go away. But Anson remained right there, looking at him, frowning, chewing on his lower lip, visibly calculating things. A moment or two went by; and then he said, “Well, then, Khalid, what about my brother Tony? He’s told me that he’d be willing.”

“Tony,” Khalid repeated. The big stupid one, yes. He was a different story, that one. “I suppose I could try it, with Tony,” Khalid said. “It probably would not work even for him, because I think it is a thing that you must learn from childhood, and even if he did learn, and he went to destroy the Entity, I think he would perish in the attempt. I think they would see through him no matter how well he is trained, and they would kill him. Which is something for you to consider. But I could try to teach him, yes. If that is what you want.”