The Alien Years (28 page)

Khalid listened. What Richie was saying made sense. Khalid understood about not wanting to fight against gods. He understood also how it was possible to hate someone and yet go on unprotestingly living with him.

“Is it all right, letting them see us like this?” he asked. “Aissha says that sometimes when they see you, they reach out from their chests with the tongues that they have there and snatch you up, and they take you inside their buildings and do horrible things to you there.”

Richie laughed harshly. “It’s been known to happen. But they won’t touch Richie Burke, lad, and they won’t touch the son of Richie Burke at Richie Burke’s side. I guarantee you that. We’re absolutely safe.”

Khalid did not ask why that should be. He hoped it was true, that was all.

Two days afterward, while he was coming back from the market with a packet of lamb for dinner, he was set upon by two boys and a girl, all of them about his age or a year or two older, whom he knew only in the vaguest way. They formed themselves into a loose ring just beyond his reach and began to chant in a high-pitched, nasal way: “
Quisling, quisling, your father is a quisling!”

“What’s that you call him?”

“Quisling.”

“He is not.”

“He is! He is!
Quisling, quisling, your father is a quisling!”

Khalid had no idea what a quisling was. But no one was going to call his father names. Much as he hated Richie, he knew he could not allow that. It was something Richie had taught him:
Defend yourself against scorn, boy, at all times.
He meant against those who might be rude to Khalid because he was part Pakistani; but Khalid had experienced very little of that. Was a quisling someone who was English but had had a child with a Pakistani woman? Perhaps that was it. Why would these children care, though? Why would anyone?

“Quisling, quisling— “

Khalid threw down his package and lunged at the closest boy, who darted away. He caught the girl by the arm, but he would not hit a girl, and so he simply shoved her into the other boy, who went spinning up against the side of the market building. Khalid pounced on him there, holding him close to the wall with one hand and furiously hitting him with the other.

His two companions seemed unwilling to intervene. But they went on chanting, from a safe distance, more nasally than ever.

“Quis-ling, quis-ling, your fa-ther is a quis-ling!”

“Stop that!” Khalid cried. “You have no right!” He punctuated his words with blows. The boy he was holding was bleeding, now, his nose, the side of his mouth. He looked terrified.

“Quis-ling, quis-ling— “

They would not stop, and neither would Khalid. But then he felt a hand seizing him by the back of his neck, a big adult hand, and he was yanked backward and thrust against the market wall himself. A vast meaty man, a navvy, from the looks of him, loomed over Khalid. “What do you think you’re doing, you dirty Paki garbage? You’ll kill the boy!”

“He said my father was a quisling!”

“Well, then, he probably is. Get on with you, now, boy! Get on with you!”

He gave Khalid one last hard shove, and spat and walked away. Khalid looked sullenly around for his three tormentors, but they had run off already. They had taken the packet of lamb with them, too.

That night, while Aissha was improvising something for dinner out of yesterday’s rice and some elderly chicken, Khalid asked her what a quisling was. She spun around on him as though he had cursed Allah to her ears. Her face all ablaze with a ferocity he had not seen in it before, she said, “Never use that word in this house, Khalid. Never! Never!” And that was all the explanation she would give. Khalid had to learn, on his own, what a quisling was; and when he did, which was soon thereafter, he understood why his father had been unafraid, that day at Stonehenge when they stood outside that curtain of light and looked upon the Entities who were strolling among the giant stones. And also why those three children had mocked him in the street.
You just have to fashion your accommodation with them, that’s all there is.
Yes. Yes. Yes. To fashion your accommodation.

The Colonel sat on the ranch-house porch, rocking, rocking, rocking. Afternoon shadows were gathering. The day was growing a little cool. He realized that he might have been dozing again. Paul’s young daughter seemed to have wandered off, but the other child, little Anson, was still with him, gazing solemnly at him as though wondering how anybody who looked so old could continue to find the strength to breathe.

Then Ronnie appeared from within, and instantly the boy went running toward him. Ronnie swept him off his feet, tossed him high, caught him and tossed him again. The boy squealed with pleasure. The Colonel was pleased, too. He loved to watch Ronnie playing with his son. He loved the idea that Ronnie
had
a son at all, that he had married a fine woman like Peggy, that he had settled down. He had changed so much, had Ronnie, since the Conquest. Given up his bad old ways, become so responsible. The one good thing to come out of the whole dreary event, the Colonel thought.

Putting the boy down and turning toward him, now, Ronnie said, “Well, Dad, the meeting’s over, and you’ll be happy to hear how things turned out.”

“The meeting?”

“The Resistance Committee meeting, yes,” said Ronnie gently.

“Yes, of course. What other meeting would it have been? —You don’t think I’ve gone senile yet, do you, boy? No, don’t answer that. Tell me about the meeting.”

“We just finished taking the vote. It went your way.”

“The vote.” He tried to remember what they had been discussing in there.

His mind was like molasses. Currents of thoughts stirred slowly, sullenly, within it. There were days when he still recognized himself to be Colonel Anson Carmichael III, U.S.A., Ret. Anson Carmichael, Ph.D. Professor Anson Carmichael, the distinguished authority on southeast Asian linguistics and the thought processes of non-western cultures. This was not one of those days. There were other days, days like this one, when he was barely capable of making himself believe that he once had been an alert, forceful, intelligent man. Such days came more and more often now.

“The vote,” Ronnie said. “On the campaign of attrition, the proposed sniper program.”

“Of course. —They voted it down?” The Colonel remembered now. “I can’t believe it. What changed their minds?”

“Just as the discussion was getting toward the vote, and indeed it looked mighty like the vote would be in favor of a program of ambushing Entities wherever we caught one going around by itself, Doug came out with some new information that he’d been sitting on all afternoon, the way he sometimes likes to do. Stuff that he had pulled in from an on-line operation working out of Vancouver, which got it from those Seattle hackers just before the borgmanns spilled the beans on them.” Ronnie paused, giving him a doubtful look. “You’re following all this, aren’t you, Dad?”

“I’m with you. Go on. This Vancouver information—”

“Well, it looks to be pretty much impossible, trying any sort of sniper attacks on Entities. Apparently there have been sniper attempts already, at least three of them, one in the southern United States, one in France, one somewhere else that I forget. They flopped, all three. The snipers never even managed to get off a single shot. The Entities have some kind of mental power, a mind-field that surrounds them and scans for hostile thought-emanations, and when the field detects anybody nearby who might be planning to do anything nasty to them, they just reach out and give him the Push, extra hard, and the sniper falls over dead. It’s happened every time.”

“What’s the range of this mind-field?”

“Nobody knows. Wide enough to pick up the mental broadcasts of any sniper who might get within shooting range, evidently.”

“Mental telepathy too,” the Colonel said. He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head slowly. “They must have animals on their planet that are more evolved than we are. Pets, even. —So Doug dumped all this out into the Committee meeting, and that killed the attrition plan right then and there?”

“It was tabled. Between the mind-field thing and the whole reprisal issue, we decided that there was no sense in attempting anything against them right now. Everybody but Faulkenburg agreed, and sooner or later he came around too. Before we can launch any sort of hostile action, we need to gather more information, a lot more, about how their minds work. At present we know practically nothing. If there was some way we could neutralize that mind-field, for example—”

“Right,” the Colonel said. He chuckled. His own mind was as clear now as it had been in days. “The Santa Claus approach to coping with the problem, eh? Maybe he’ll bring us a mind-field neutralizer next Christmas. Or maybe he won’t. At any rate, I’m glad the vote went the way it did. I was worried, for a while. Everybody seemed in such a hurry to kill the Entities off, all of a sudden, and not a reason in the world for a rational person to think that it could be done. I thought we were done for. I thought you were all going to shoot us clear over the brink.”

Late that night, as Ronnie was moving through the back wing of the building turning off the lights, he caught sight of Anse sitting by himself in one of the small rooms off the library. There was a bottle in front of him on a little table. There usually was a bottle somewhere close by Anse, these days. A damned shame, Ronnie thought, the way Anse had gone back on the stuff after breaking his leg. Anse had worked so hard for so many years to keep his boozing under control. And now. Look at him, Ronnie thought sadly. Look at him.

“Little nightcap, bro?” Anse called.

“Sure,” Ronnie said. Why the hell not? “What are we drinking?”

“Grappa.”

“Grappa,” Ronnie repeated, glancing away and wincing. “Well, sure, Anse. Sure.” It was a sort of Italian brandy, very harsh, not much to his taste, really. They had a case of it, one of the stranger things in the weird loot they had brought back from that deserted warehouse downtown. Anse would drink anything, though.

Anse poured. “Say when, bro.”

“When,” said Ronnie, quickly.

Solemnly he clinked glasses with his brother and took a shallow sip. If only to be sociable. He didn’t like to see Anse drinking alone. It was ironic, he thought, how the Colonel had always looked upon Anse as a pillar of stability and dependability and virtue, and on him as some kind of wild, disreputable high-living heathen, when in fact Anse was a deeply closeted drunk who had spent his whole adult life struggling desperately against his craving for the sauce and he, for all his high-life tastes and fast-lane companions, had never had the slightest problem with it.

Anse drained his glass and set it down. He picked up the half-empty bottle and stared at it a long while, as though the deepest secrets of the universe were inscribed on its label. When the silence started to drag a little Ronnie said, “Everything all right, bro?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“But it isn’t, is it?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything,” Ronnie said. “It’s been a long day. I don’t like to think after ten in the evening. Sometimes I call it quits even earlier than that. —What’s eating you now, Anse? The old man? He’ll be okay. Not what he once was, but which one of us is? We aren’t immortal, you know. But he brightened up plenty when I told him how the vote had turned out today.”

“Have some more?”

“Thanks, no. I’m still working on this.”

“Mind if I?”

Ronnie shrugged. Anse filled his glass practically to the brim.

“This fucking meeting,” Anse said in a low, somber tone, when he had put another goodly slug of the grappa away. “This whole fucking Resistance, Ronnie.”

“What about it?”

“What a sham! What a miserable idiotic sham! We hold these meetings, and all we’re doing is making empty gestures. Spinning our wheels, don’t you see? Appointing committees, making studies, cooking up grand plans, sending e-mail about those grand plans to people just as helpless as we are all around the world. That’s a Resistance? Are the Entities giving ground before our valiant onslaughts? Is the liberation of Earth practically within our grasp, do you think? Are we doing the slightest fucking thing, really, to achieve it? —There isn’t any Resistance, not really. We’re just pretending that there is.”

“As long as we go on pretending,” Ronnie said, “we keep the idea of being free alive. You’ve heard the Colonel say that a million times. Once we give up even the pretense, we’re slaves forever.”

“You really believe that shit, bro?”

Some grappa was needed before replying to that one. Ronnie tried to gulp the stuff without tasting it. “Yes,” he said, fixing his gaze squarely on Anse’s squinting bloodshot eyes. “Yes, bro, I really do. I don’t think it’s shit at all.”

Anse laughed. “You sound so amazingly sincere.”

“I
am
sincere, Anse.”

“Right. Right. You say that very sincerely, too. —You’re still a con man at heart, aren’t you, bro? Always were, always will be. And very good at it.”

“Watch it, Anse.”

“Am I saying anything other than the truth, bro? You can tell me that you believe the old man’s bullshit, sure, but don’t ask me to start believing yours, not this late in the game. —Here. Here. Have some more grappa. Do you some good. Oil up your sincerity glands a little more for the next sucker, right?”