Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

Besides, he loved Lisa. She was important to him in a way that nobody ever had been before. He lived for their meetings, their trips to Point Mugu Park, their delicious sweaty grapplings on that carpet of fallen leaves beneath the oak trees. He couldn’t imagine life without her. Nor did he see how he could bring himself to discard her, the way Jill had discarded him.

How, though, was he going to work all this out?

“I’ve got to see you,” he told her, a couple of days after their visit to the Topanga Canyon Boulevard construction site. “Right away. It’s essential.” But he didn’t have the ghost of an idea of what he was going to say to her.

He drove blindly southward at top velocity over the battered coastal highway, giving no heed to potholes, cracks, dips and curves, and other such trifling obstacles. When he got to Mission San Buenaventura, Lisa was waiting out in front, sitting in her car. She smiled pleasantly as he approached, just as though this were one of their ordinary dates, though it was so soon after their last meeting that she should have suspected something. That cheery, expectant smile of hers made everything just that much worse. She opened the door on the passenger side for him and he slipped in beside her, but when she began to start the engine he caught her by the wrist and stopped her.

“No, let’s not go down to the park. Let’s just stay here and talk, okay?”

She looked startled. “Is something wrong?”

“Plenty’s wrong, yes,” he said, allowing the words to come out without pausing to form them in his mind. “I’ve been thinking, Lisa. About how we got through the checkpoint, and all. How you happened to have the password, when practically all the LACON entry permits for Los Angeles have been revoked.” He could hardly bear to look straight at her. He had to force himself; and, even so, his gaze kept sliding away from her eyes toward her cheek or her chin. Surprisingly, she seemed very calm, staring steadily back at him, even when he let the next string of words come blurting forth: “Lisa, the only way you could have had that passport would be if you’re a quisling, isn’t that so? Or know someone who is?”

“That’s an ugly word, quisling.”

“Well, collaborator, then. Is that any better?”

She shrugged. She was still strangely calm, though now her face seemed a little flushed. “My father works for the telephone company, and so do my brothers, and so do I. You know that.”

“Doing what?”

“You know that too. Programming.”

“And the phone company: what’s its relationship to LACON?”

“LACON controls all communications networks in and around the Los Angeles Basin, from Long Beach to Ventura. Certainly you would know that.”

“So someone who works for the telephone company in this county actually works for LACON, isn’t that so?”

“You might say so, yes.”

“And therefore,” said Steve, with a sense that he was pitching himself off the edge of a high cliff, “you and your family work for LACON, and, since LACON is the human administrative arm of the alien occupying powers, therefore you all can be regarded as quis—as collaborators. Yes?”

“Why are you grilling me like this, Steve?” Not at all indignant. Merely prompting him to speak the next line. As though she had expected this conversation to come, sooner or later.

“I have to know these things.”

“Well, you do know them, now. Like thousands and thousands of other people, my family earns its living by supplying services to the beings that happen to rule our planet. I don’t see anything wrong with that, really. It’s just our job. If we didn’t do it, somebody else would, and the Entities would still be here, only my family and I would have a much harder time keeping things together. If you have any problem with that, you ought to say so right now.”

“I do have a problem with it. I’m with the Resistance.”

“I know that, Steve.”

“You do?”

“You’re part of the Carmichael family. Your mother is old Colonel Carmichael’s daughter. You live up on top of that mountain behind Santa Barbara.”

He blinked at her, amazed.

“How do you know all that?”

“You think you’re the only one who knows how to trace back a communications line? I’m with the phone company, remember.”

“So you knew all along,” he said, lost now in bewilderment. “Practically from the start, you were aware that I’m Resistance, and it didn’t bother you, even though you’re a qu—”

“Don’t say that word again.”

“Someone who’s willing to work for them.’”

“Someone who sees no sensible alternatives, Steve. They’ve been here, what, fifteen years, now? What has your Resistance accomplished in all that time? A lot of talk, is all. And meanwhile the Entities are as much in control as the day they turned all the power off, and they’ve taken over every aspect of our lives.”

“With the help of people like—”

“So? What’s the alternative? They’re here. They run things. They own us. We aren’t going to kick them out, not ever. That’s a fact of life. So we need to get on with our lives, to do our jobs, whatever our jobs might be.” She was looking at him in a level, uncompromising way, forcing him toward telling her whatever it was that he had come down here to tell her today. But he had not known, setting out that morning, what that was going to be.

Suddenly he knew it now. He let himself say it. The words came rolling from him like a sentence of death.

“We can’t go on seeing each other, Lisa. That’s all there is to it. Your family and mine, they’re just incompatible. We work to overthrow the Entities and you work to make things easier for them.”

She met his feverish stare unblinkingly. “And why should that matter?”

“It does. It simply does. We have our family traditions, and they’re pretty stiff stuff. You ought to see my grandfather, the Colonel. He’s getting a little senile, maybe, but he has flashes when he’s his old self, and then he makes the grandest speeches about liberty, freedom, the need never to forget what we were before the Entities came.”

“I agree with that. I think it’s important to remember what it was like to be free.”

“He means it, though.”

“So do I. But there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t turn time backwards. The Entities own the world and nothing we do is going to change that.”

They were getting nowhere. He felt as though he were breaking in half.

“There’s no sense arguing about it,” he said. “All I know is that I don’t see how we can go on, your family collaborating, mine resisting. There couldn’t ever be any contact between the families. How could we have any life together, like that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But there’s one thing I ought to tell you, Steve—”

“Oh, Jesus, Lisa! You’re not—”

Pregnant, yes. The old business of the Capulets and the Montagues, but with one extra little devastating twist.

Her self-possession now disintegrated. So did his, such as it was. She began to cry, and he pulled her head against his chest and he began to cry too, and the astonishing thought came to him of the brown-eyed child that was sprouting in her belly, and of the improbability that so hopeless a nerd as he had been had actually fathered a baby; and he knew beyond doubt that he loved this woman and meant to marry her and stand beside her, no matter what.

But that took some doing. He returned to the ranch and called Ron aside and told him of this newest development; and Ron, pensive and somber and not at all jaunty now, told him to sit tight and went off to talk to his sister Rosalie. Who after a time called Steve to her, and quizzed him extensively about his entire relationship with Lisa, not so much the sex part as the emotional part, his feelings, his intentions.