Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“I thought a wild celebration would be going on,” Frank said puzzledly. “People dancing in the streets.”

Andy shook his head. “No. Wrong, Frank. You don’t understand what they’re like, these people. You haven’t lived among them the way I did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look over there.”

On the street facing the abandoned mall stood an old gray-walled high-rise building that bore the LACON insignia over its entrance. A small crowd had gathered in front of it: another group of silent, stunned people, standing side by side in five or six ragged lines, gazing upward at the building. A solitary LACON man stared back at them from a high window. He was pale, dead-eyed, frozen-faced.

Andy gestured toward the building. “There’s your celebration,” he said.

“I don’t get it. What’s he looking at them like that for? Is he afraid that they’re going to come upstairs and lynch him?”

“Maybe they will, later on. It wouldn’t take much to trigger it. But right now they just want him to give them the Entities back. And the look on his face is his way of saying that he can’t.”

“They want to have them back’?”

“They miss them, Frank. They love them. Don’t you get it?”

Frank swung around to face him. He felt his face growing hot. “Please don’t joke around with me, Andy. Not now.”

“I’m not joking. Put your mind to it, man. The Entities have been here since before either of us were born. Long before. They gave one little nudge and civilization simply fell apart, governments, armies, everything. And after they killed off something like half the population of the world to show that they meant business, they put a new system together in which they made all the rules and everybody did whatever they told them to do. No more private ownership of anything, no more individual initiative, just keep your head down and work at whatever job the Entities may give you and live wherever the Entities want you to live and it’ll all be nice and sweet, no war, no poverty, nobody going hungry or sleeping in the streets.”

“I know all this,” Frank said, irked a little by Andy’s tone.

“But do you understand that in time most people came to prefer the new system to the old one? They adored it, Frank. Only a few isolated crackpots like the ones at a certain ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara thought there might be anything wrong with it. For some reason the Entities chose to leave those crackpots alone, but just about everybody else who didn’t love the system wound up in prison somewhere, or getting dead very fast. And now, poof, the Entities are gone and there’s no system any more. All these people feel abandoned. They don’t know how to deal with things on their own, and there’s no one to tell them. Do you see, Frank? Do you see?”

He nodded, his face reddening.

Yes, Andy. Yes. He saw. Of course he saw. And felt very foolish for having needed to have it all spelled out for him. He supposed he was just being slow-witted today, amidst the general startlement of this day’s bewildering events.

“You know,” Frank said, “Cindy made pretty much the same point to me, the day the ranch was bombed. How there were all these millions of people in the world who found life much easier just doing what the Entities told them to do.” He chuckled. “It was like, the gods were here and then just like that they went home, and now nobody can figure out what it all means. As Khalid likes to say, the ways of Allah are beyond our comprehension.”

Now it was Andy’s turn to look baffled. “Gods? What the fuck are you talking about, Frank?”

“That was something else Cindy said to me, once. That the Entities were like gods who had come down among us from heaven. The Colonel believed that too, she said. We never understood a damned thing about them. They were too far beyond us. Nobody ever figured out why they came here or what they wanted from us. They simply came, that’s all. Saw. Conquered. Rearranged the whole goddamned world to suit themselves. And when they had accomplished whatever it was that they had wanted to accomplish, they went away, without even telling us why they were going. So the gods were here, and then they went home, and now we’re left in the dark without them. That’s it, isn’t it, Andy? What do you do, when the gods go home?”

Andy was looking at him strangely. “And was that what they were for you, too, Frank? Gods?”

“For me? No. Devils, is what they were, for me. Devils. I hated them.” He walked away from Andy and began to move forward through the lines of numbed, dazed-looking people standing in front of the LACON building. No one paid any attention to him.

He passed among them, peering into their faces, their empty eyes. They were like sleepwalkers. It was frightening to look at them. But he understood their fear. He felt some of it himself. That confusion, that despair, that had come over him when he first heard that the Entities were leaving: it stemmed from the same uncertainty as theirs. What, Frank wondered, was going to happen in the world now that the Entity episode was over?

Episode. That was what it had been, he knew. The invasion, the conquest, the years of alien rule—just a single episode, if a very strange one, in humanity’s long history. Fifty-some years, out of thousands. The alien years, is what they would be called. And, thinking about it that way, giving it that name, episode, Frank felt himself at last beginning to come out of the fog of bewilderment that had engulfed him these few hours past since Andy first had told him of the Entities’ withdrawal.

The alien years had changed things very greatly, yes. Such episodes always did. But this wasn’t the first time that some great calamity had transformed the world. It had happened again and again. The Assyrians would come, or the Mongol hordes, or the Nazis, or the Black Death, or alien beings from the stars—whatever—and afterward nothing would be the same again.

But still, Frank thought, come what may, the basic things always continued: breakfast, lunch, love, sex, sunshine, rain, fear, hope, ambition, dreams, gratification, disappointment, victory, defeat, youth, age, birth, death. The Entities had arrived and they had wiped the world clean of everything fixed and stable, God only knew why; and then they went away, he thought, God knows why; and we are still here, and now we must start over, just as inevitably as spring starts everything over once winter is done with us. Now we must start over. God knows why, yes, and we don’t. He would have to talk to Khalid about that when he returned to the ranch.

“Frank?”

Andy had come up behind him. Frank glanced at him over his shoulder, but said nothing.

“Are you all right, Frank?”

“Of course I’m all right.”

“Walking away from me like that. Wandering around among these people. Something’s bothering you in a big way. You miss the Entities as much as they do, is that it?”

“I said I hated them. I said they were devils. But yes, yes, I do miss them, in a way. Because now I know that I won’t ever get a chance to kill any of them.”

Turning, Frank faced Andy squarely. “You know,” he said, “when you told me they were gone, it made me furious. After my father died, I had wanted so bad to be the one who drove them away. Even though I knew we probably weren’t capable of doing it. But now, coming right out of the blue, I lose even the possibility of my doing it.”

“Like father, like son, eh?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Frank asked.

“Right. Anson was so goddamned eager to go down in history as the man who got us out from under the Entities. And it broke him in half, wanting that. Broke him right in half. Is that what you want to happen to you?”