Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“Yes,” said James, or perhaps it was Martin, with absolutely no inflection in his voice. He showed hardly any more comprehension of what Andy had just told him than if Andy had said to him that he had discovered a method for transforming latitude into longitude. And off he went to bear the news to Anson.

“Good morning, Andy,” the newly arrived brother said, settling in for his shift.

“Morning, Martin.”

“I’m James.”

“Ah. Yes. James.” Andy acknowledged the correction with a nod and turned his attention back to the screen.

The yellow lines cutting across the pink field, the splashes of blue, the burning scarlet circle. It was all there, yes. He felt no particular sensation of triumph: a little of the opposite emotion, perhaps. After days and days of rummaging through the foul sewer that was the Borgmann archive, and then a gradual direct thrust through the area of essential Entity-relationship files, and now this sustained ten-hour burst of drilling down into the core of the matter, he had laid bare everything that Anson had asked him to find. Anson now could go out and strike the blow that would win his war against the Entities, and hoorah for Anson. What Andy was thinking in the moment of glorious attainment, mainly, was that now they would let him have his life back.

“I hear you’ve got some great news for us,” said a voice from the door.

Frank stood there, beaming like the newly risen sun.

“I was expecting your father,” Andy said.

“He’s still asleep. He’s been feeling poorly lately, you know. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Andy decided not to stand on ceremony. If they didn’t feel like sending Anson over, well, he would explain things to Frank, and so be it. During the search Frank had appeared to understand more of what he was doing than Anson, anyway.

“Here,” Andy said, “this is where they keep Prime.” He indicated the scarlet circle. “Downtown Los Angeles, in the strip between the Santa Ana Freeway and the dry bed of the old Los Angeles River. That’s just a couple of miles south and east of the place where my father thought he was being kept at the time of the Tony episode. I tracked down an ancient city gazetteer that says the neighborhood is a warehouse district, but of course that was back in the twentieth century, and things may have changed a lot. The Entities’ own digital code for Prime translates out to Oneness, so our name for him was pretty damned close.”

Frank’s grin grew broader. “That’s terrific. What kind of security arrangements do they have for him?”

“A ring of three gates. They work just like the gates in the city walls, with biochip-driven gatekeepers.” Andy sent two clicks along the line that connected him to the computer and a batch of code jumped out into a window on the auxiliary screen. “These are access protocols, which I’ve derived from stuff that Borgmann had collected and stashed away in Prague. They were operative when Prime was being kept in the castle there, and I think they’ll still be good. From what I can tell, they don’t seem to have changed any of the numbers after the move to L.A. The protocols will take your man through the gates one by one, pretty much as far as he wants to go, and his mission ought to seem perfectly legitimate to the security screens.”

“What about the centrality of Prime to the Entity neural framework?” Frank asked. “Do you see any sign of a communal linkage?”

Those were fancy words. Andy gave him a quick look tinged with new respect. “I can only offer you an informed guess about that,” Andy said.

“Okay.”

“In Borgmann’s time, all the lines of communication, everywhere around the world, ran to Prime’s nest in Prague. I’m talking about computer access. There’s a similar heavy convergence on the Los Angeles nest today. Which is a good argument for the centrality of Prime to their computer system, but it doesn’t prove anything about the supposed telepathic linkage between Prime and the other Entities that Anson believes exists, and which I gather is critical to the whole assassination plan. On the other hand, if there’s no such telepathic linkage I think there would have to be a great many more strands of on-line communication than I’ve been able to find. And that leads me to think that a portion, perhaps the greater portion, of the communication between Prime and the lesser Entities must be carried out by some form of telepathy. Which, of course, we aren’t capable of detecting.”

“This is all a guess, you say.”

“All a guess, yes.”

“Show me Prime’s nest again.”

Andy brought the scarlet circle onto the screen once more, standing out brightly against the gray backdrop of a Los Angeles street map.

“We’ll blow him halfway to the moon,” said Frank.

Rasheed had no implant, and Khalid didn’t want him to have one installed. Implants, Khalid said firmly, were devices of Satan. Since Andy saw no way to carry out the Prime mission other than by moving Rasheed through the Entity security lines by remote-control online impulse, this created a certain problem, which required weeks of negotiation to resolve. In the end Khalid backed off, after Anson convinced him that the only way to bring Rasheed back alive from the venture was to guide him via an implant. Without an implant it became a suicide mission or no mission at all, and, faced with that choice, Khalid opted to let the Devil’s gadget be inserted into his eldest son’s forearm, with the proviso that the dread thing be taken out again once the mission had been carried out. But by the time all that was agreed on, it was June.

Now the implant had to be put in, which was done by the man from San Francisco who had built the one for Tony. Rasheed’s was of similar but improved design, with all the tracer features that its predecessor had had, but a wider and more versatile range of audio signals by which the remote operator—Andy, that would be—could guide Rasheed through his tasks by wireless modem, or, if need be, by direct vocal instruction. Another three months went by while the implant was constructed and installed and Rasheed went through the necessary period of healing and training.

Andy was impressed by the swiftness with which Rasheed learned how to interpret and act on the signals he received from his implant. Rasheed, who was twenty years old, slender and fragile-looking and taller even than his long-shanked father, had the shy, alert look of some delicate forest creature that was always ready to break into flight at the crackling of a twig. To Andy he was an enigma of the most profound sort, elusive and remote, indeed virtually unreachable. Rasheed could easily have been something that had descended from space with the Entities. He hardly ever spoke, except in answer to a direct question and not always even then; and when he did respond it was inevitably with a parsimonious syllable or two uttered just at the threshold of audibility, rarely anything more. The extraordinary grace and beauty of his appearance, verging on the angelic, contributed to the extraterrestrial aura that forever cloaked him: the great dark liquid eyes, the finely chiseled features, the luminous glinting of his skin, the swirling halo of glowing hair. He listened gravely to everything that Andy had to tell him, filing it all away in some retentive recess of his inscrutable soul and giving it back perfectly whenever Andy quizzed him on it. That was very impressive. Rasheed had the efficiency of a computer; and Andy understood computers very well. Yet Rasheed was more than just a mechanism, Andy sensed. There seemed to be a person inside there, an actual human being, shy, sensitive, perceptive, highly intelligent. One thing Andy understood above all else about computers was that they were not intelligent in the least.