The Alien Years

FORTY-SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW

Toward dawn, bleary-eyed and going foggy in the head after sitting in front of seven computer screens all night long, Steve Gannett decided he had had enough. He was going to be fifty next year, a little old for pulling all-nighters. He looked up at the blond-haired boy who had just entered the communications center with a breakfast tray for him and said, “Martin, have you seen my son Andy around yet this morning?”

“I’m Frank, sir.”

“Sorry. Frank.” All of Anson’s goddamned kids looked alike. This one’s voice, he realized, had already begun to break, which would put him at about thirteen, which would make him Frank.

Martin was only around eleven. Steve looked groggily into the tray and said again, “Well, tell me, Frank, is Andy up yet?”

“I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him.—My father sent me to ask you for a progress report.”

“Minimal, tell him.”

“Minimum?”

“Close. Minimal is what I said. It means ‘very little.’ It means ‘just about goddamn none,’ as a matter of fact. Tell him that I didn’t get anywhere worth speaking of, but I do see one possible new approach to the problem, and I’m going to ask Andy to explore it this morning. Tell him that. And then, Frank, go look for Andy and tell him to get himself over here lickety-split.”

“Lickety-split?”

“’Extremely quickly’ is what that phrase means.”

Jesus Christ, Steve thought. The language is rotting away before my very eyes.

Anson, looking out the chart room’s open window half an hour later, saw Steve go trudging like a weary bullock across the lawn toward the Gannett family compound, and called out to him: “Hey, cousin! Cousin! Got a minute to spare for me?”

Yawning, Steve said, “Just about that much, I guess.” There was very little enthusiasm in his voice.

He came trudging over and peered in through the window. A light early-season rain had begun to fall, but Steve was standing out there as though unable to perceive that that was happening.

Anson said, “No. Come on inside. This may take a minute and a half, maybe even two, and you’re going to get soaked if you stay out there.”

“I would really like to get some sleep, Anson.”

“Just give me a little of your time first, cousin,” Anson said, a little less affably this time, his tone verging on what his father described as the Colonel-voice. Anson, who had been sixteen when the Colonel died, had only the vaguest of recollections of his grandfather’s special tone of command. But apparently he had inherited it.

“So?” Steve said, when he had arrived in the chart room, letting droplets of water fall to the rug in front of Anson’s leather-topped desk.

“So Frank tells me you say you’ve found some new approach to the Prime problem. Can you tell me what it is?”

“It’s not a new approach, exactly. It’s the approach to a new approach. What it is is, I think I’ve hacked into the entrance to Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s private archives.”

“The Borgmann?”

“The very one. Our own special latter-day Judas himself.”

“He’s been dead for ages. You mean his archives still exist?”

“Listen, can we discuss this after I’ve had some sleep, Anson?”

“Just let me have a moment more. We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project and I need to keep myself on top of all the data. Tell me about this Borgmann thing insofar as it may impact the hunt for Prime. I assume that that’s the angle, right? Some link to Prime in the Borgmann files?”

Steve nodded. He looked about ready to fall down. Anson wondered charitably whether he might be pushing the man too hard. He expected top-flight performance from everyone, the way his father had, the way the old Colonel had before him. Carmichael-grade performance. But Steve Gannett was only half Carmichael, a bald, soft-bellied, bearish middle-aged man who had been up all night.

There were things Anson needed to know, though. Now.

Steve said, “Borgmann was assassinated twenty-five years back. In Prague, which is a city in the middle of Europe that has been the site of a major Entity headquarters just about from the beginning. We know that he was hooked right into the main Entity computer net for at least ten years prior to his death, doing so with the knowledge and permission of the Entities, but also perhaps in some illicit way too. That would be true to what we know about Borgmann, that he’d have been spying on the very people he was working for. We also know, from what we’ve heard from people who dealt with the actual Borgmann in the period between the Conquest and his murder, that he was the sort of person who never deleted a file, who squirreled every goddamned thing away in the most anal-retentive way you could imagine.”

“Anal-retentive?” Anson said.

“It means retentive, okay? Just a fancy way of saying it.”

Steve seemed to sway, and his eyes began to close for a moment. “Don’t interrupt me, okay? Okay?—What you need to know, Anson, is that we’ve always thought Borgmann’s archives are still there somewhere, maybe buried down deep in the Prague mainframe in a secret cache that he was able to conceal even from the Entities, and it’s widely believed that if they exist, they would be full of critical information about how the minds of the Entities work. Highly explosive stuff, so it’s thought. Just about every hacker in the world has been looking for Borgmann’s data practically since the day he died. The quest for the Holy Grail, so to speak. And with pretty much the same degree of success.”

Anson started to ask another question, and cut himself off. Steve’s speech frequently was laced with cryptic references out of the world culture that had vanished, that world of books and plays and music, of history and literature, which Steve had been just old enough to experience, to some degree, before it disappeared; but Anson reminded himself that he probably did not need to find out just now what the Holy Grail was.

Steve said, “As you know, I devoted this night past to yet one more goddamn heroic eight-hour attempt to link up all the data we’ve been able to compile about every major nexus of Entity intelligence, create an overlay, get some kind of confirmation of the theory that we’ve been playing with, for God only knows how long, that Prime is situated in downtown Los Angeles. Well, I failed. Again. But in the course of failing I think I stumbled over something peculiar in the data conduit linking Prague, Vienna, and Budapest that might just have Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s personal paw prints on it. Might. It’s a locked door and I don’t know what’s behind it and I don’t know how to pick the lock, either. But it’s the first hopeful thing I’ve come upon in five years.”

“If you can’t pick the lock, who can?”

“Andy can,” Steve said. “He’s very likely the only hacker in the world who could do it. He’s the best there is, even if I say so myself. That’s not paternal pride speaking, Anson. God knows I’m not very proud of Andy. But he can do magic with a data chain. It’s just the truth.”

“Okay. Let’s get him on it, then!”

“Sure,” said Steve. “I sent your boy Frank out just now to find Andy and bring him to me. Frank reports that Andy left the ranch at four in the morning and took off for parts unknown. Frank got this bit of information from Eloise’s girl La-La, who saw him go, and who unbeknownst to the rest of us has apparently been indulging in some kind of romance with Andy for the past six months and who, incidentally, revealed to your son Frank this morning that she’s pregnant, presumably by Andy. She thinks that’s why he took off. She also doesn’t think he plans to come back. He took his two favorite computers with him and apparently spent all of last evening downloading all his files into them.”

“The little son of a bitch,” Anson said. “Begging your pardon, Steve. Well, we’ve just got to find him and haul his sneaky ass back here, then.”

“Find Andy?” Steve guffawed. “Nobody’s going to find Andy unless he feels like being found. It would be easier to find Entity Prime. Now can I go to sleep, Anson?”

We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project.

That was what he had told Steve, a little to his own surprise, for he had not quite articulated the situation that way before, even to himself. But yes, yes, indeed, Anson thought. A crisis. A time to make bold decisions and act on them. He realized now that he had been thinking of the situation that way for several weeks. But he was beginning to suspect that the whole dire thing was taking place within the arena of his own mind.

It had been building up in him for years. He knew that, now. That sense of himself as Anson the Entity-Killer, the man who finally would drive the alien bastards from the planet, the shining hero who would give Earth back to itself. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t thought it was his destiny to be the one who brought the task to culmination.

But three times now in these recent weeks something very strange had come over him: a dizzying intensification of that ambition, a frantic passion for it, a wild hunger to get on with the job, strike now, strike hard. A passion that possessed him beyond all reasoning—that /became, for the five or ten minutes that it held him in its grip, utterly uncontrollable. At such times he could feel the pressure beating against his skull, hammering against it from within as though there were some creature in there trying to get out.

It was a little scary. Passionate impatience is not the hallmark of a great military commander.

Perhaps, he thought, I should have a little talk with my father.

Ron, who was nearly seventy and not in the best of health, had inherited the Colonel’s old bedroom, as was fitting for the patriarch of the family. Anson found him there now, sitting up in bed amidst a pile of ancient books and magazines, yellowing rarities from the Colonel’s crumbling library of twentieth-century reading matter. He looked poorly, pale and peaked.

Cassandra was with him: the Carmichael community doctor, Cassandra was, self-trained out of the Colonel’s books and such medical texts as Paul or Doug or Steve had been able to extricate from the remnants of the pre-Conquest computer net. She did her best, and sometimes seemed like a miracle-worker; but it always was a sobering thing to find the busy Cassandra in a sick person’s room, because it usually meant that the patient had taken a turn for the worse. That was how it had been six months before, when Anson’s wife Raven, having gone through one pregnancy too many, had died, exhausted, from some very minor infection a few weeks after giving birth to their eighth child. Cassandra had done her best then, too. Had even seemed hopeful, for a time. But Anson had realized from the outset that nothing could save the worn-out Raven. He had pretty much the same feeling here.

“Your father is a man of iron,” she said at once, almost defiantly, before Anson could say anything at all. “He’ll be up and around and chopping down trees with a single blow of the axe by this time tomorrow. I guarantee it.”

“Don’t believe her, boy,” Ron said, winking. “I’m a goner, and that’s the truth. You can tell Khalid to get started carving the stone. And tell him to make it a damned good one, too. ‘Ronald Jeffrey Carmichael,’ and remember that you spell ‘Jeffrey’ with just seven letters, J-E-F-F-R-E-Y, born die twelfth of April, 1971, died die sixteenth of—”

“Today’s the fourteenth already, Dad. You should have given him a little more notice.” Turning to Cassandra, Anson said, “Am I interrupting something important? Or can you excuse us for a little while?”

She smiled pleasantly and went from the room.

“How sick are you, really?” Anson asked bluntly, when Cassandra was gone.

“I feel pretty shitty. But I don’t think I’m actually dying just yet, although I wish Cassie had some clearer idea of what’s really going on in my midsection.—Is there some problem, Anson?”

“I’m itching to make a move on Prime. That’s the problem.”

“You mean you’ve succeeded in discovering Prime’s hiding-place at last? Then why is that a problem? Go in there and get him!”

“We haven’t discovered it. We don’t know any more than we did five years ago. The Los Angeles theory is still top of the list, but it’s still only a theory. The problem is that I don’t want to wait any longer. My patience has just about run itself out.”

“And Tony? Is he getting impatient too? All in a sweat to make a strike in the dark, is he? Willing to go in there without knowing exactly where he’s supposed to go?”

“He’ll do whatever I tell him to do. Khalid’s got him all charged up. He’s like a bomb waiting to go off.”

“Like a bomb,” Ron said. “Waiting to go off. Ah. Ah.” He seemed almost amused. There was a curiously skeptical expression on his face, a smile that was not entirely a smile.

Anson said nothing, simply met Ron’s gaze stare for stare and waited. It was an awkward moment. There was a streak of playfulness, of quicksilver unpredictability, in his father that he had never been able to deal with.

Then Ron said gravely, “Let me get this straight. We’ve been planning this attack for years and years, training our assassin with an eye to sending him in as soon as we’ve pinned down the precise location of Prime, and now we have the assassin ready but we still don’t have the location, and you want to send him in anyway? Today? Tomorrow? Isn’t this a little premature, boy? Do we even know for sure that Prime actually exists, let alone where he is?”

Like scalpel thrusts, they were. The hotheaded young leader’s idiocy neatly laid bare, just as Anson had feared and expected and even hoped it would be. He felt his cheeks flaming. It became all that he could manage to keep his eyes on Ron’s. He felt his headache beginning to get going.

Lamely he said, “The pressure’s been rising inside me for weeks, Dad. Longer, maybe. I get the feeling that I’m letting the whole world down by holding Tony back this long. And then my head starts pounding. It’s pounding now.”

“Take an aspirin, then. Take two. We’ve still got plenty on hand.”

Anson recoiled as though he had been struck.

But Ron didn’t seem to notice. He was wearing that strange smile again. “Listen, Anson, the Entities have been here for forty years. We’ve all been holding ourselves back, all this time. Except for the suicidally addlebrained laser strike that brought the Great Plague down on us before you were born, and Khalid’s uniquely successful and perhaps unduplicatable one-man attack, we haven’t lifted a finger against them in all that time. Your grandfather grew old and died, miserable because the world had been enslaved by these aliens but only too well aware that it would be dumb to try any hostile action before we understood what we were doing. Your Uncle Anse sat stewing on this very mountain decade after decade, drinking himself silly for the same reason. I’ve held things together pretty well, I suppose, but I’m not going to last forever either, and don’t you think I’d like to see the Entities on the run before I check out? So we’ve all had our little lesson in patience to learn. You’re what, thirty-five years old?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Thirty-four. By that age you should have learned how to keep yourself from flying off the handle.”

“I don’t think I am flying off the handle. But what I’m afraid of is that Tony’s training will lose its edge if we hold him back much longer. We’ve been winding him up for this project for the past seven years. He could be getting overtrained by now.”

“Fine. So first thing tomorrow you’ll send him into L.A. with a gun on each hip and a belt full of grenades around his waist, and he’ll walk up to the first Entity he sees and say, ‘Pardon me, sir, can you give me Prime’s address?’ Is that how you imagine it? If you don’t know where your target is, where do you throw your bomb?”

“I’ve thought of all these things.”

“And you still want to send him? Tony’s your brother. It isn’t as though you’ve got lots of others. Are you really ready to have him get killed?”

“He’s a Carmichael, Dad. He’s understood the risks from the beginning.”

Ron made a groaning sound. “A Carmichael! A Carmichael! My God, Anson, do I have to listen to that bullshit right to the end of my days? What does being a Carmichael mean, anyway? Disapproving of your own children’s behavior, like the Colonel, and cutting them out of your life for years at a time? Twisting yourself inside out for the sake of an ideal and obliterating yourself with drink so you can go on living with yourself, the way Anse did? Or winding up like the Colonel’s brother Mike, maybe, the one who got himself into such a bind over his notions of proper behavior that he went and found himself a hero’s death the day the Entities landed? Is it your notion that Tony’s supposed to go waltzing to his certain death on a crazy mission simply because he had the bad luck to be born into a family of fanatic disciplinarians and hyper-achievers?”

Anson peered at him, horrified. These were words he had never expected to hear, and they came crashing into him with stunning impact. Ron was red-faced and trembling, practically apoplectic. But after a moment he became a little calmer.

He said, once more smiling in that bemused way, “Well, well, well, listen to the old guy rant and rave! All that sound and fury.—Look here, Anson, I know you want to be the general who launches the victorious counteroffensive against the dread invaders. We all wanted that, and maybe you’ll actually be the one. But don’t waste Tony so soon, all right? Can’t you hang on at least until you’ve got some decent idea of where Prime may be? Aren’t Steve and Andy still trying to work out some kind of precise pinpointing?”

“Steve has been doing just that, yes. With occasional help from Andy, whenever Andy can be bothered. They’re pretty sure that L.A.’s the place where Prime is stashed away, probably downtown, but they can’t get it any more precise than that. And now Steve tells me, though, that he’s hit a wall. He thinks Andy’s the only hacker good enough to get beyond the blockage. But Andy’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Skipped out in the night, last night. Something about getting La-La pregnant and not wanting to stay around.”

“No! The miserable little bastard!”

“We’ll try to find him and bring him back. But we don’t even know where to begin looking for him.”

“Well, figure it out. Catch him and yank him home and sit him down in the communications room until he tells you exactly where Prime is, which part of town, what building. And then send in Tony. Not before, not until you know the location right down to the street address. Okay?”

Anson rubbed his right temple. Was the pounding subsiding a little in there? Perhaps. A little, anyway. A little.

He said, “You think sending him now is really crazy, then?”

“I sure do, boy.”

“That’s what I needed you to tell me.”

Khalid said, pointing toward the hawk that came riding up over the crest of the mountain on the wind from the sea, “You see the bird, there? Kill it.”

Unhesitatingly Tony raised his rifle, sighting and aiming and pulling the trigger all in one smooth unhurried continuous process. The hawk, black against the blue shield of the sky, exploded into a flurry of scattering feathers and began to plummet toward the bare stony meadow in which they stood.

Tony was perfect, Khalid thought. He was a magnificent machine. A machine of Khalid’s own creation, flawless, the finest thing he had ever shaped. A superbly crafted mechanism.

“Very nice shot. Now you, Rasheed.”

The slender boy with amber-toned skin at Khalid’s side lifted his gun and shot without seeming even to aim. The bullet caught the falling hawk squarely in the chest and knocked it spinning off on a new trajectory that sent it over to their left, down into the dark impenetrable tangle of chaparral that ran just below the summit.

Khalid gave the boy an approving smile. He was fourteen now, already shoulder-high to his long-legged father, a superb marksman. Khalid often took him along on these back-country training sessions with Tony. He loved the sight of him, his wiry athletic form, his luminous intelligent green eyes, his corona of coppery hair. Rasheed too was perfect, in a different way from Tony. His perfection was not that of a machine but of a person. It was wonderful to have made a boy like Rasheed. Rasheed was the boy Khalid might have been, if only things had gone otherwise for him when he was young. Rasheed was Khalid’s second chance at life.

To Tony, Khalid said, “And what do you feel, killing the bird?”

“It was a good shot. I’m pleased when I shoot that well.”

“And the bird? What do you think about the bird?”

“Why should I think about the bird? The bird was nothing to me.”

It was just before dawn when Andy reached Los Angeles. The first thing he did, after letting himself through the wall at the Santa Monica gate with the LACON credentials that he had whipped up for himself the week before, was to jack himself into a public-access terminal that he located at Wilshire and Fifth. He needed to update his map of the city. He might be staving here quite some time, several months at the very least, and Andy knew that the information about this place that was already in his files was almost certainly out of date. They kept changing the street patterns around all the time, he had heard, closing off some streets that had been perfectly good transit arteries for a hundred years, opening new ones where there had never been any before. But everything seemed pretty much as he remembered it.

He hit the access code for Sammo Borracho’s e-mail slot and said, “It’s Megabyte, good buddy. I’m down here to stay, and planning to set up in business. Be so kind as to patch me on to Mary Canary, okay?”

This was Andy’s fourth visit to Los Angeles. The first time, about seven years back, he had sneaked down here with Tony and Charlie’s son Nick, using Charlie’s little car, which Andy had made available to them by emulating the code for the car’s ignition software. Tony and Nick, who were both around nineteen then, had wanted to go to the city to find girls, which were of lesser interest to Andy then, he being not quite thirteen. But neither Tony nor Nick was worth a damn as a hacker, and the deal was that they had to take Andy along with them in return for his liberating the car for them.

Girls, Andy discovered on that trip, were more interesting than he had suspected. Los Angeles was full of them—it was a gigantic city, bigger than Andy had ever imagined, easily two or three hundred thousand people living there, maybe even more—and Tony and Nick were both the kind of big, good-looking guys who latched on to girls very quickly. The ones they found, in a part of Los Angeles that was called Van Nuys, were sixteen years old and named Kandi and Darleen. Kandi had red hair and Darleen’s was dyed a sort of green. They seemed very stupid, even dumber than the ones at the ranch. Nick and Tony didn’t seem bothered by that, though, and when Andy gave the matter a little thought, he couldn’t find any reason why they should be, considering what it was that they had come here for.

“You want one too, don’t you?” Tony asked Andy, grinning broadly. This was back in the era when Tony still seemed like a human being to Andy, a few months before before Khalid had started teaching him Khalid’s crazy philosophy, which so far as Andy was concerned had transformed Tony into an android, pretty much. “Darlene’s got a kid sister. She’ll show you a thing or two, if you like.”

“Sure,” said Andy, after only a fraction of a moment’s hesitation.

Darleen’s sister’s name was Delayne. He told her he was fifteen. Delayne seemed exactly like Darleen, except that she was two years younger and about twice as stupid. She had a room of her own, a mattress on the floor, girl-clutter everywhere, photographs of long-ago movie stars tacked up all over the wall.

Andy didn’t care how dumb she was. It wasn’t her mind that he was interested in communing with. He winked and gave her what he hoped was a torrid look.

“Oh, you want to play?” she asked, batting her eyes at him. “Well, come here, then.”

Within the past year Andy had accessed a dozen pre-Conquest porno videos that he had found cached in somebody’s Net library in Sacramento, and so he had an approximate idea of how to go about things, but it turned out to be a little more complicated than it seemed on video. Still, he thought that he had conducted himself creditably. And apparently he had. “You were okay, for your first time,” Delayne told him afterward. “Truly truly, I tell you. Not bad at all.” He hadn’t fooled her in the least, but she hadn’t let that be a problem. Which lifted her considerably in his estimation. Perhaps, he decided, she wasn’t quite as stupid as he thought.

He made his second trip to L.A. a year and a half later, when he had grown bored with trying out the things Delayne had shown him on various cousins at the ranch. Jane and Ansonia and Cheryl were willing to play, but La-La wasn’t, and La-La, who was two years older than Andy was, was the only one who held much appeal for him, because she was smart and tough, because she had the same kind of sharp edge on her that her father Charlie did. Since La-La didn’t seem to want to be cooperative, and fooling around with Jane and Ansonia and Cheryl was a little like molesting the sheep, Andy went off to try to find Delayne.

This time he went alone, borrowing his father’s car, which was a much newer model than Charlie’s, the voice-actuated kind. “Los Angeles,” Andy said, in a deep, authoritative tone, and it took him to Los Angeles. Like a magic carpet, practically. He found Darleen, but not Delayne, because Delayne had been caught in some infraction and reassigned to a labor gang working out of Ukiah, which was somewhere far upstate. Darleen, though, was willing enough to spend a day or two playing with him. Apparently she was as bored with her regular life as Andy was with his, and he was like a Christmas treat for her.

She took him around the city, giving him a good taste of its immensity. The place was made up, Andy realized, of a whole string of little cities pasted together into one gigantic one. And as he heard their names—Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Studio City, West Hollywood—he began to put together in his mind a more tangible sen$e of the physical location of some of the hackers with whom he had dealt with by e-mail over the past few years.

They knew him as Megabyte Monster, alias Mickey Megabyte. He knew them as Teddy Spaghetti of Sherman Oaks, Nicko Nihil of Van Nuys, Green Hornet of Santa Monica, Sammo Borracho of Culver City, Ding-Dong 666 of West L.A. While driving around with Darleen, Andy jacked in at a series of widely separated access points and let them know he was in the vicinity. “Down here for a couple of days visiting a girl I know,” he told them. And waited to see what they had to say. Not much, is what they had to say. No immediate invitations to come around for face-to-face, eye-to-eye. You had to be careful, though, making eye-to-eye with other hackers whom you knew only electronically. They might not be quite the people you thought they were. Some could be stooges for LACON, or even for the Entities, happy to turn you in for the sake of getting patted on the head. Some could be predators. Some could be bozos.

But Andy felt them out, and they felt him out, and the time came when he decided it was safe to meet Sammo Borracho of Culver City, as a first move. Sammo Borracho’s on-line persona was quick and clever, and nevertheless he was always ready to acknowledge Andy’s superiority as a data-thrower. “You know how to get to Culver City?” Andy asked Darleen.

“All the way down there?” She wrinkled her nose. “What for?”

“Somebody there I need to talk to, face-face. But I can find it myself, if you don’t want to bother showing me how to—”

“No, I’ll go. It’s just straight down Sepulveda, anyway, miles and miles and miles. We can do a little of it on the freeway, but the road’s a wreck south of the Santa Monica interchange.”

The trip took more than an hour, through an assortment of neighborhoods, some of them burned out. Sammo Borracho had always come on like a big fat drunken Mexican in his e-mail, but in person he was small, pale, wiry, a little twitchy, with an implant jack in each arm and lines of little purple tattoos across his cheeks. Not drunken, not Mexican, and no more than a couple of years older than Andy. Andy and Darleen met him, as arranged, at a swivelball parlor in the shadow of the ruined San Diego Freeway. From the way he kept staring at Darleen, Andy figured that he hadn’t been laid in at least three years. Or ever.

“I thought you’d be older,” Sammo Borracho told him.

“I thought you’d be, too.”

He told Sammo Borracho he was nineteen, winking at Darleen to keep quiet, because she thought he was only seventeen. He was, in fact, fourteen and a half. Sammo Borracho said he was twenty-three. Andy figured that was at least a six-year upgrading. “You live in San Francisco, right?” Sammo Borracho asked him.

“Right.”

“Never been there. I hear it’s freezing cold all the time.”

“It’s not so bad,” said Andy, who had never been there either. “But I’m getting tired of it.”

“Thinking of moving down here, are you?”

“Another year, year or two, maybe.”

“Let me know,” Sammo Borracho said. “I’ve got connections. Couple of pardoners I know. Been doing a little pardoning work myself, and I could probably get some for you, if you were interested.”

“I could be,” Andy said.

“Pardoners?” said Darleen, eyes going wide. “You know some pardoners?”

“Why?” said Sammo Borracho. “You need a deal?”

Andy and Darleen and Sammo Borracho spent the night together at Sammo Borracho’s place at the eastern edge of Culver City. That was something new, for Andy. And, in its way, pretty interesting.

“Whenever you come down to stay,” Sammo Borracho told him in the morning, “you just let me know, guy. I’ll set things up the way you want. Just say the word.”

The third trip was two years after that, when word reached Andy that new interface upgrades had been invented that would fit his kind of implant jack, upgrades that had double the biofiltering capacity of the old-fashioned sort. That caught his attention. It wasn’t often that some new technological improvement came along, any more, and you wanted to keep as much bio-originated crud out of your implant as you could. The manufacture of mobile androids had been the last big breakthrough, five years back, and that had been worked out in quisling laboratories under Entity auspices. The new interface was good old freelance human ingenuity at work.

It turned out that there were only two places where Andy could have the upgrade installed: in the old Silicon Valley that was just south of San Francisco, or Los Angeles. He remembered what Sammo Borracho had said about the weather in San Francisco. Andy didn’t like cold weather at all; and it was time, perhaps, to check in with Darleen once again. He swiped his father’s car without much difficulty and went to Los Angeles.

Darleen wasn’t living in the Valley any more. Andy tracked her down, after some quick work with access codes that let him look into the LACON residential-permit files, in Culver City, living with Sammo Borracho. Delayne had been pardoned out of the Ukiah labor camp and she was living there too. Sammo Borracho seemed to be one very happy hacker indeed.

You owe me one, pal, Andy thought.

“You finally moving south, then?” Sammo Borracho asked him, looking just a bit uneasy about that possibility, as though he might be thinking that Andy intended to reclaim one or both of the girls.

“Not yet, man. I’m just here on a holiday. Thought I’d get me one of the new bio interfaces, too. You know an installer?”

“Sure,” Sammo Borracho said, not taking any trouble at all to hide his relief that that was all that Andy wanted.

Andy got his interface upgrade put in in downtown L.A. Sammo Borracho’s installer was a little hunchbacked guy with a soft, crooning voice and eagle eyes, who did the whole thing freehand, no calipers, no microscope. Sammo Borracho let Andy borrow Delayne for a couple of nights, too. When that started to get old he went back to the ranch.

“Any time you want to come down here and set yourself up writing pardons, man, just let me know,” said Sammo Borracho, as usual, as Andy was getting ready to leave.

And now he was in the big city once more and ready to set up shop. He was done with ranch life. Ultimately La-La had come across, sure. Had come across big time, in fact, six months of wild nights, plenty of fun. Too much fun, because she was knocked up, now, and talking about marrying him and having lots of kids. Which was not exactly Andy’s idea of what the next few years ought to hold for Andy. Goodbye, La-La. Goodbye, Rancho Carmichael. Andy’s on his way into the big bad world.

Sammo Borracho had moved to Venice, which was a town right along the ocean, narrow streets and weird old houses, just down the road from Santa Monica. He had put a little meat on his bones and had had his dumb tattoos removed and all in all he looked sleek and prosperous and happy. His house was a nice place just a couple of blocks from the water, lots of sunlight and breezes and three rooms full of impressive-looking hardware, and he had a nice red-haired live-in playmate named Linda, too, long and lean as a whippet. Sammo Borracho didn’t say a word about Darleen or Delayne, and Andy didn’t ask. Darleen and Delayne were history, apparently. Sammo Borracho was on his way in the world too, it seemed.

“You’ll need your own territory,” Sammo Borracho told him. “Somewhere out east of La Brea, I imagine. We’ve already got enough pardoners working the West Side. As you know, the territorial allotments are done by Mary Canary. I’ll hook you along to Mary and she’ll take care of things.”

Mary Canary, Andy soon discovered, was as female as Sammo Borracho was Mexican. Andy had a brief on-line discussion with “her” and they arranged to meet in Beverly Hills at the place where Santa Monica Boulevard crossed Wilshire, and when he got there he found a dark-haired greasy-skinned man of about forty, nearly as wide as he was tall, waiting there for him with a blue Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap on his head, turned back to front. The turned-around Dodger cap was the identification signal Andy had been told to look for.

“I know who you are,” said Mary Canary right away. His voice was deep and full of gravel, a tough voice, a movie-gangster voice. I just want you to realize that. If you mess around, you’ll be shipped back to your family’s cozy little hideaway in Santa Barbara in several pieces.”

“I’m from San Francisco, not Santa Barbara,” Andy said.

“Sure you, are. San Francisco: I accept that. Only I’d like you to understand that I’m aware it isn’t true. Now let’s get down to business.”

There was a formally organized guild of pardoners, it seemed, and Mary Canary was one of the guildmasters. Andy, having been vouched for by Sammo Borracho and being also widely known by reputation to various other Los Angeles guild members, was welcome to join. His territory, Mary Canary told him, would be bounded by Beverly Boulevard on the north and Olympic Boulevard on the south, and would run from Crenshaw Boulevard in the west to Normandie Avenue in the east. That sounded like a sizable chunk of turf, although Andy suspected that it was somewhat less than the most lucrative area around.

Within his territory he was free to solicit as much pardoning work as he dared. The guild would give him all the basic know-how he would need to perform basic pardoning operations, and the rest was up to him. In return, he would pay the guild a commission of thirty percent of his first year’s gross earnings, and fifteen percent each year thereafter. In perpetuity, said Mary Canary.

“Don’t try to finagle,” Mary Canary warned him. “I know how good you are, believe me. But our guys aren’t such dopes themselves, and the one thing we don’t tolerate is a hacker trying to subvert revenues. Play it straight, pay what’s due, is what I most strenuously advise.”

And gave Andy a long, slow look that very explicitly said, We are quite aware of your hacking skills, Mr. Andy Gannett, and therefore we will be keeping our eyes on you. So you just better not mess around.

Andy didn’t intend to mess around. Not right away, anyway.

On a cold, windy day three weeks after Andy’s departure for Los Angeles, one of those bleak mid-winter days when the ranch was being buffeted by a wild storm that had burst howling out of Alaska and gone rampaging right down the entire west coast looking for Mexico, Cassandra walked without knocking, an hour before dawn, into the austere, monastic little bedroom where Anson Carmichael had spent his nights since Raven’s death. “You’d better come now,” she told him. “Your father’s going fast.”

Anson was awake instantly. A surge of surprise ran through him, and some anger. Accusingly he said, “You told me that he’d be okay!”

“Well, I was wrong.”

They hurried down the hallways. The wind outside was heading toward gale force and hail was scrabbling against the windows.

Ron was sitting up in bed and seemed still to be conscious, but Anson could see right away that something had changed just in the past twelve hours. It was as if his father’s facial muscles were relinquishing their grasp. His face looked strangely smooth and soft, now, as though the lines that time had carved in it had vanished in the night. His eyes had an oddly unfocused look; and he was smiling, as always, but the smile appeared to be sliding downward on the left side of his mouth. His hands were resting languidly on the bedcovers on either side of him in an eerie way: he could almost be posing for his own funerary monument. Anson could not push aside the distinct feeling that he was looking upon someone who was poised between worlds.

“Anson?” Ron said faintly.

“Here I am, Dad.”

His own voice sounded inappropriately calm to him. But what am I supposed to do? Anson wondered. Wail and shriek? Rend my hair? Rip my clothing?

Something that might have been a chuckle came from his father. “Funny thing,” Ron said, very softly. Anson had to strain to hear him. “I was such a baddie that I thought I’d live forever. I was really, really bad. It’s the good who are supposed to die young.”

“You aren’t dying, Dad!”

“Sure I am. I’m dead up to the knees already, and it’s moving north very goddamned fast. Much to my surprise, but what can you do? When your time comes, it comes. Let’s not pretend otherwise, boy.” A pause. “Listen to me, Anson. It’s all yours, now. You’re the man: the Carmichael of the hour. Of the era. The new Colonel, you are. And you’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off, won t you?” Again a pause. A frown, of sorts. He was entering some new place. “Because—the Entities—the Entities—look, I tried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—"Anson’s eyes went wide. Ron had never called him “Anse.” Who was he talking to?

“The Entities—”

Yet another pause. A very long one.

“I’m listening, Dad.”

That smile. Those eyes.

That pause that did not end.

“Dad?”

“He isn’t going to say anything else, Anson,” Cassandra told him quietly.

I ttried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—

Khalid carved a magnificent stone almost overnight. Anson made sure that he spelled Jeffrey correctly. They all stood together in the cemetery—it was still raining, the day of his burial—and Rosalie said a few words about her brother, and Paul spoke, and Peggy, and then Anson, who got as far as saying, “He was a lot better man than he thought he was,” and bit his lip and picked up the shovel.

A fog of grief hung over Anson for days. The subtraction of Ron from his life left him in a weirdly free-floating state, unchecked as he was, now, by Ron’s constant presence, his wisdom, his graceful witty spirit, his poise and balance. The loss was tremendous and irrevocable.

But then, though the sense of mourning did not recede, a new feeling began to take hold of him, a strange sense of liberation. It was as if he had been imprisoned all these years, encased within Ron’s complex, lively, mercurial self. He—sober-sided, earnest, even plodding—had never felt himself to be the fiery Ron’s equal in any way. But now Ron was gone. Anson no longer needed to fear the disapproval of that active, unpredictable mind. He could do anything he wanted, now.

Anything. And what he wanted was to drive the Entities from the world.

The words of his dying father echoed in his mind:

—The Entities—the Entities—

—You’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off—you’ll be the one—

—The one—the one—

Anson played with those words, moved them this way and that, stood them upside down and rightside up again. The one. The one. Both Ron and the Colonel, he thought—and Anse too, in a way—had lived all those years waiting, suspended in maddening inaction, dreaming of a world without the Entities but unwilling, for one reason or another, to give the order for the launching of a counterattack. But now he was in command. The Carmichael of the era, Ron had said. Was he to live a life of waiting too? To go through the slow cycle of the years up here on this mountain, looking forever toward the perfect time to strike? There would never be a perfect time. They must simply choose a time, be it perfect or not, and at long last begin to lash back at the conquerors.

There was no one to hold him back, any more. That was a little frightening, but, yes, it was liberating, too. Ron’s death seemed to him to be a signal to act.

He found himself wondering if this was some kind of manic overreaction to his father’s death.

No, Anson decided. No. It was simply that the time had come to make the big move.

The pounding in his head was starting again. That terrible pressure, the furious knuckles knocking from within. This is the time, it seemed to be saying. This is the time. This is the time.

If not now, when?

When?

Anson waited two weeks after the funeral.

On a bright, crisp morning he came striding into the chart room. “All right,” he said, looking about the room at Steve and Charlie and Paul and Peggy and Mike. “I think that the right moment to get things started has arrived. I’m sending Tony down to L.A. to take out Prime.

Nobody said a word against it. Nobody dared. This was Anson’s party all the way. He had that look in his eye, the look that came over him when something started throbbing inside his head, that unanswerable something that told him to get on with the job of saving the world.

Down there in Los Angeles, Andy was in business in a big way, or at least semi-big. Mickey Megabyte, ace pardoner. It beat sitting around the ranch listening to the sheep go baa.

He found a little apartment right in the middle of his district, just south of Wilshire, and for the first two days sat there wondering how people who needed a pardoner’s services were going to know how to find him. But they knew. It wasn’t necessary for him to beat the bushes for jobs. In his first week he did four pardoning deals, splicing himself neatly and expertly into the system to reverse a driver’s-license cancellation for a man who lived on Country Club Drive, to cancel a mystifying denial of a marriage permit for a couple from Koreatown, to arrange a visit to relatives in New Mexico for someone who had arbitrarily been refused exit passage from Los Angeles—the Entities were getting tighter and tighter about letting people move about from place to place, God only knew why, but who ever had any answers to questions about Entity policies?—and to maneuver a promotion and a raise for a LACON highway patrolman who was raising two families at opposite ends of the city.

That last one was pushing things a little, doing a hack for a LACON man, but the fellow came to Andy with valid documentation from Mary Canary saying it was safe to take on the job, and Andy risked it. It worked out. So did the others. Everybody paid promptly and Andy obediently flipped his commissions over to the guild right away and all was well.

So: the pardoning career of Mickey Megabyte had begun. Easy money for not very much work. He would begin to yearn for something more challenging after a while, he knew. But Andy didn’t expect to spend his life at this, after all. It was his plan to pile up bank accounts for himself all around the continent and then write himself an exit ticket that would let him get out of L.A. and see a little of the world.

After the fourth pardon came a surprise, though. Someone from Mary Canary’s staff dropped around and said to him, “You like to do things a little too well, don’t you, kid?”

“What?”

“Didn’t anybody tell you? You can’t make every fucking pardon you write a perfect one. You do that all the time, you’re bound to attract the attention of the Entities, and that’s not something you really want to do, is it? Or anything that we would want you to do.”

Andy didn’t get it. “I’m supposed to write bad pardons some of the time, is that what you’re saying? Pardons that don’t go through?”

“Right. Some of them, anyway. I know, I know, it’s a professional thing with you. You have a rep to maintain and you want to look good. But don’t look too good, you know what I mean? For your own sake. And also it makes everybody else look bad, because nobody else does perfect work. Once word gets around town about you, customers will start coming in here from other districts, and you can see the problem with that. So flub a few, Mickey. Stiff a client, now and then, okay? For your own sake. Okay? Okay?”

That was hard, being expected to do less than perfect work. It went against his nature to do an incompetent hack. But he’d have to write a couple of stiffs before long, he supposed, just to keep the guild guys happy.

At the beginning of the second week a woman came to him who wanted a transfer to San Diego. Nice-looking woman, twenty-eight, maybe thirty years old, job in the LACON judiciary wing, had some reason for wanting to change towns but couldn’t swing the transfer arrangements. Tessa, her name was. Fluffy red hair, full red lips, pleasant smile, good figure. Nice. He had always had a thing for older women.

Andy was uneasy about having so many LACON people coming to him for pardons. But this one had the right letter of recommendation too.

He started setting up the hack for her.

Then he said, thinking about the fluffy red hair, the good figure, the week and a half he had just spent sleeping alone in this strange new town, “You know, Tessa, I’ve got an idea. Suppose I write a transfer for both of us, for Florida, or maybe Mexico. Mexico would be nice, wouldn’t it? Cuernavaca, Acapulco, somewhere down there in the sun.” A sudden wild impulse. But what the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained. “We could have a nice little holiday together, okay? And when we came back you’d go to San Diego, or wherever you wanted, and—”

Andy could see her reaction right away, and it wasn’t a good one.

“Please,” she said, very cool and crisp, no pleasant smile at all, now. Glowering at him, in fact. “They told me you were a professional. Making passes at the customers isn’t very professional.”

“Sorry,” Andy said. “Maybe I got a little carried away.”

“San Diego is what I want, yes? And solo, if you don’t mind.”

“Right, Tessa. Right.”

She was still giving him that scowling look, as though he had unzipped himself in front of her, or worse. Suddenly he was angry. Perhaps he had let himself get carried away, yes. A little out of line, yes. But she didn’t have to look at him that way, did she? Did she? It was offensive, being scowled at like that, just because he had stepped a little out of line.

He was supposed to write a few pardons that didn’t work out, Mary Canary’s guy had told him. Screw up his code a little, once in a while, get things just a tiny bit wrong.

All right, he thought. Let this one be the first. What the hell. What the hell. He wrote her an exit permit for San Diego. And put just the littlest little bug in it, down near the end, that invalidated the whole thing top to bottom. It was a very little bug, not even an entire line of code. It would do the trick, though. Teach her a lesson, too. He didn’t like it when people glowered at him like that.

Mark, Paul Carmichael’s oldest son, drove Tony down to Los Angeles from the ranch, taking the back road eastward through Fillmore and Castaic to the place where it met the remnants of Interstate 5, and heading south from there. Steve Gannett had determined that the most likely location of Prime’s sanctuary was in the northeastern sector of the city, bounded by the Hollywood Freeway on the north, the Harbor Freeway on the west, the city wall on the east, and Vernon Boulevard on the south.

Within that zone, Steve said, the highest-probability location for the site itself was right in the heart of the old downtown business district. He had all sorts of figures, based on Entity transit vector observations, that proved to his own satisfaction, at least, that a certain building two blocks south of the old Civic Center was the place. Mark delivered him, therefore, to the East Valley gate of the wall, where Burbank met Glendale, which was as close as he could get to downtown. There Mark would wait, for days, if necessary, while Tony entered the city on foot and made his steady way toward the designated target area.

“Give me a ping,” Mark said, as Tony got out of the car.

Tony grinned and held up his arm. “Ping,” he said. “Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.”

“There you are,” Mark said. “Right on the screen where you belong.”

They had put an implant in Tony’s forearm, one that had a directional locator built into it. One of the best implant men in San Francisco had designed it and come down to the ranch to install it, and Lisa Gannett had programmed it to broadcast its signal right into the city telephone lines. Wherever Tony went, they would be able to follow him. Mark could trace him from the car; Steve or Lisa could track him from the ranch’s communications center.

“Well, now,” Mark said. “All set to get going, are you, then?”

“Ping,” said Tony again, and moved off in the direction of the wall.

Mark watched him go. Tony didn’t look back. He walked quickly and steadily toward the gate. When he reached it, he put his implant over the gatekeeper node and let it read the access code that Lisa had written for him.

The gate opened. Tony entered Los Angeles. It was a few minutes past midnight. His big moment was unfolding at last.

He was ready for it. More than ready: Tony was ripe.

He was carrying, in his backpack, a small explosive device powerful enough to take out half a dozen square blocks of the city. All he had to do now was find the building where Steve thought Prime might be hidden, affix the bomb to its side, walk quickly away, and send the signal to the ranch, the single blurt of apparently meaningless digital information that would tell them they could detonate at will.

Khalid had spent close to seven years training him for this, emptying out whatever had been inside Tony’s soul before and replacing it with a sense of serene dedication to unthinking action. And, so they all hoped, Tony was completely and properly programmed now. He would go about his tasks in Los Angeles the way a broom goes about sweeping away fallen leaves scattered along a walk, giving no more thought to what he had come here to do, or what the consequences of a successful mission might be, than the broom gives to the leaves or the walk.

“He’s inside the wall,” Mark said, over the car phone. “On his way.”

“He’s inside the wall,” Steve said at the ranch, pointing to the yellow dot of light on the screen, and to the red one. “That’s Mark, sitting in the car just outside the wall,” he said. “And that one’s Tony.”

“And now we wait, I guess,” said Anson. “But is his mind blank enough, I wonder? Can you just trot right in there and stick a bomb on a building without thinking at all about what you’re doing?”

Steve looked up from the screen. “I know what Khalid would say to that. Everything is in the hands of Allah, Khalid would say.”

“Everything is,” said Anson.

In the darkness of the city Tony plodded on, south and south and south, past looming silent freeways, past gigantic empty office buildings, dead and dark, that were left over from an era that now seemed prehistoric. The computer in his forearm made little soft noises. Steve was guiding him from Santa Barbara, following his progress on the screen and moving him from street to street like the machine he was. A sound like this meant to turn left. A sound like that, right. Eventually he might hear a tone that sounded like this this this, and then he was to take the little package from his backpack and stick it to the wall of the building that was just in front of him. After which he was supposed to move swiftly away from the site, going back in the direction from which he had just come.

The streets were practically deserted, here. Occasionally a car went by; occasionally, one of the floating wagons of the Entities, with a glowing figure or two standing upright in it. Tony glanced at them incuriously. Curiosity was a luxury he had long ago relinquished.

Turn left at this corner. Yes. Right at the next one. Yes. Straight ahead, now, ten blocks, until the mighty pillars of an elevated freeway blocked his way. Steve, far away, directed him with tiny sounds toward an underpass that went between the freeway’s elephantine legs, taking him beneath the roadbed and across to the far side. Onward. Onward. Onward.

Mark, in the car outside the wall, followed the pings coming from Tony’s implant as they converted themselves into splashes of light on the screen on his dashboard. Steve, at the ranch, monitored them also. Anson stood beside him, watching the screen.

“You know,” Anson said hoarsely, breaking a long silence about four in the morning, “this can’t possibly work.”

“What?” Steve said.

Startled, he glanced up from his equipment. Sweat was streaming down Anson’s face, giving him a glossy, waxen look. His eyes were bulging. Knotted-up muscles were writhing along his jawline. Altogether he looked very strange.

Anson said, “The problem is that the basic idea is wrong. I see that now. It’s complete madness to imagine that we could decapitate the entire Entity operation just by knocking off the top Entity. Steve, I’ve sent Tony down there to die for nothing.”

“Maybe you ought to get some rest. It doesn’t take two of us to do this.”

“Listen to me, Steve. This is all a huge mistake.”

“For Christ’s sake, Anson! Have you lost your mind? You’ve been behind the project from the start. It’s a hell of a time for you to be saving stuff like this. Anyway, Tony’s going to be all right.”

“Will he?”

“Look, here: he’s moving along very smoothly, past the Civic Center already, closing in on the building that I think is Prime’s, nicely going about his job, and there’s no sign of any intercept. If they knew he had a bomb on him this close to Prime, they’d have stopped him by now, wouldn’t they? Five more minutes and it’ll be done. And once we kill Prime, they’ll all go bonkers from the shock. You know that, Anson. Their minds are all hooked together.”

“Are you sure of that? What do we know, really? We don’t even know that Prime exists in the first place. If Prime isn’t in that building, it might not matter to them that Tony’s armed. And even if Prime does exist and is sitting right there, and even if they are all hooked together telepathically, how can we be sure what’ll happen if we kill him? Other than terrible reprisals, that is? We’re assuming that they’ll just lie down and weep, once Prime’s dead. What if they don’t?”

Steve ran his hand in anguish through what was left of his hair. The man seemed to be having a breakdown right before his eyes.

“Cut it out, Anson, will you? It’s very late in the game to be spouting crap like this.”

“But is it such crap? The way it looks to me, all of a sudden, is that in my godawful impatience to do something big, I’ve done something very, very dumb. Which my father and my grandfather before me had the common sense not to try.—Call him back, Steve.”

“Huh?”

“Get him out of there.”

“Jesus, he’s practically at the site now, Anson. Maybe half a block away, looks like. Maybe less than that.”

“I don’t care. Turn him around. That’s an order.”

Steve pointed to the screen. “He has turned around. You see those bleeps of light? He’s signaling that he’s already placed the explosive. Leaving the scene, heading for safe ground. So the thing’s done. In five minutes or so I can detonate. No sense not doing it, now that the bomb’s been planted.”

Anson was silent. He put his hands to the sides of his head and rubbed them.

“All right,” he said, though the words came from him with a reluctance that was only too obvious. “Go ahead and detonate, then.”

Tony heard the sound rising through the air behind him, an odd kind of hissing first, then a thud, then the first part of the boom, then the main part of it, very loud. Painfully loud, even. His ears tingled. A hot breeze went rushing past him. He walked quickly on. Something must have exploded, he thought. Yes. Something must have exploded. There has been an explosion back there. And now he had to return to the wall and go through the gate and find Mark and go home. Yes.

But there were figures, suddenly, standing in his way. Human figures, three, four, five of them, wearing gray LACON uniforms. They seemed to have sprung right from the pavement before him, as though they had been following him all this time, waiting for the moment for making themselves known.

“Sir?” one of them said, too politely. “May I see your identification, sir?”

“He’s off the screen,” Mark said, from the car outside the wall. “I don’t know what happened.”

“The bomb went off, didn’t it?” said Steve.

“It went off, all right. I could hear it from here.”

“He’s off my screen too. Could he have been caught up in the explosion?”

“Looked to me like he was well clear of the site when it blew,” Mark said.

“Me too. But where—”

“Hold it, Steve. Entity wagon going by just now. Three of them in it.”

“Behaving crazily? Signs of shock?”

“Absolutely normal,” Mark said. “I’d think I’d better begin getting myself out of here.”

Steve looked toward Anson. “You hear all that?”

“Yes.”

“Entity wagon going by. No sign of unusual behavior. I think the site we blew might not have been the right one.”

Anson nodded wearily. “And Tony?” he asked.

“Off the screen. Allah only knows.”

In the three days after Andy had written the self-canceling pardon for the woman with fluffy red hair, he wrote five legitimate ones for other people who were in various sorts of trouble. He figured that was about the right proportion to keep the guild happy, one stiff per every five or six legits.

He wondered what had befallen her when she showed up at the wall and presented her dandy little exit permit, the one he had written that granted her the right to change her residence to San Diego. The gatekeeper would disagree. And then? Off to a labor camp for trying to use a phony permit, most likely. What a pity, Tessa. But no pardoner ever offered guarantees. They all made that clear right up front. You hired a pardoner, you had to understand that there were certain risks, both for you and the pardoner. And it wasn’t as if the customers had any recourse, did they? You couldn’t hire somebody to do illegal work for you and then complain about the quality of the job. Pardoners didn’t give refunds to dissatisfied customers.

Poor Ms. Tessa, he thought. Poor, poor Tessa.

He put her out of his mind. Her problems were not his problem. She was just a job that hadn’t worked out.

Not long after the Tessa event, Andy decided that it was time to begin raking off a little of his fees from the top. Mary Canary and his gang didn’t need quite that much out of him, he figured. A little here, a little there: it could mount up very nicely.

Soon, though, he began to see signs that they might be tapping in on him, checking on his figures. Did they suspect something, or was this just a routine check? He didn’t know. He wrote a cute little cancel that would keep them in the dark. But also he decided that he had had enough of Los Angeles for the time being. He didn’t love the place much. It was time to move along, maybe. Phoenix? New Orleans? Acapulco?

Someplace warm, at any rate. Andy had never liked cold weather.

At the ranch, Anson waited for a sign that the explosion in Los Angeles had had some effect on things.

What kind of reprisal would there be—arrests, plagues, disruptions of electrical service?—and when would it come? The Entities were certainly going to send mankind a message, now, to the effect that it was unacceptable to set off bombs in the middle of a major Entity administrative district.

There did not seem to have been any reprisal.

Anson waited for it for weeks. Waited. Waited.

But nothing happened. The world went on as before. Tony did not reappear, nor could he be traced via the Net; but that was no surprise. And otherwise everything was as it had been.

Thinking about Tony was almost unbearable for him. Sickening waves of guilt came sweeping through him, dizzying him, giving him attacks of the staggers, whenever he allowed himself to dwell on his brother’s probable fate.

Anson couldn’t understand how it had been possible for him to act on so little information—or how he could so coolly have let his brother go to his death. “I should have gone myself,” he said over and over. “I should never have let him take the risk.”

“The Entities wouldn’t have allowed you to get within ten miles of Prime,” Steve told him. “You’d have been broadcasting your intentions every step of the way.”

And Khalid said, “You were not someone who could have done it, Anson. Tony was the one to go. Not you. Never you.”

Gradually Anson came to admit the truth of that, though not before his brooding had reached such a pitch of despondency that Steve and Mike and Cassandra had seriously discussed the desirability of keeping him on suicide watch. Things never came to that; but the dark cloud that had settled on Anson did not seem ever to lift, either.

The great puzzle now was why had there been no response to the bombing. What were the Entities up to? Anson had no answer to that.

It was almost as if they were mocking him, refusing to strike back. Saying to him, We know what you were trying to do, but we don’t give a damn. We have nothing to fear from insects like you. We are too for above you even to be angry. We are everything and you are nothing.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was nothing at all like that. The thing about aliens, Anson reminded himself, is that they are alien. Whatever we think we understand about them is wrong. We will never understand them. Never. Never. Never.

Never.