Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

She had, somehow, arranged to get the use of a car to take them to Los Angeles. “You are being transferred now from the Las Vegas detention center to one in Barstow, California,” she explained. “I have been assigned to deliver you to Barstow. It’s all been quite legally recorded in the archives. A friend in Leipzig who knows his way around the Entity computer net set it all up for me.”

The car looked ancient. It probably was: pre-Conquest, even. Its sides were dented and its silvery paint had flaked away in a hundred places, showing red rusty patches beneath, and it leaned badly on the left side, drooping so visibly that Khalid wondered whether the rim of the frame would strike the ground when the car moved.

“Can you drive?” Cindy asked, as they loaded their meager luggage into the car.

“No.”

“Of course you can’t. Where would you have learned to drive? How old were you, anyway, when they put you in detention?”

“Not quite thirteen.”

“And that was how long ago? Eight years? Ten?”

“Seven. I’ll be twenty-one on December 25th.”

“A Christmas baby. How nice. Everybody singing to celebrate your birthday. ‘Si-lent night, ho-o-ly night—’”

“Yes, very nice,” he said bitterly. “My birthdays were all extremely happy ones. We would gather around our Christmas tree, my mother and father and my brothers and sisters and I, and we would sing the Christmas songs, and we would give each other wonderful presents.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. There were some happy times.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “You told me on the plane that your mother died in childbirth and you never knew your father, and you were raised by your grandmother.”

“Yes. And I also told you then that I was Muslim.”

She laughed. “You were just trying to see if I was paying attention.”

“No,” he said. “I was just saying what came into my mind.”

“What an odd duck you are, Khalid!”

“Duck?”

“Never mind. An expression.” She unlocked the car’s doors and signaled for him to get in. He entered on the left-hand side, as he always had when he went out driving with Richie, and was surprised to find himself confronted by the steering wheel. It had been on the other side in Richie’s car: he was sure of that.

“American cars are different,” Cindy said. “At least you’ve been in a car before, I see. Even if you don’t know how to drive one.”

“I would go driving sometimes in my father’s car. On Sundays he would take me to places like Stonehenge.”

She looked at him sharply. “You never knew your father, you said.”

“I lied.”

“Oh. Oh. Oh. You play a lot of head games, don’t you, Khalid?”

“There was one thing I said that was true. I hated him.”

“For being a quisling? You said that he was. Was that part true?”

“He was one, but that was of no importance to me. I hated him because he treated Aissha badly. And, sometimes, me. He was probably bad to my mother, too. What does any of this matter now, though? The past is far away.”

“But not forgotten, I see.” She put the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine sputtered, coughed, caught, failed, sputtered again and this time came to life. Noisily the car moved forward through the detention compound. Cindy flashed her identification at the gate, the guard waved, and off they went.

They were out in the desert almost immediately.

For a time neither of them said anything. Khalid was too appalled by the hideous landscape all around him to speak; and Cindy, who was so small she could barely see over the top of the steering wheel, was concentrating intently on her driving. The surface of the road was a bad one, cratered and cracked in a million places, and the car, venerable ruin that it was, unceasingly groaned and grumbled, jouncing and jiggling them in merciless fashion and occasionally emitting ominous knocking noises as though getting ready to explode. He looked over at her and saw her sitting with her shoulders tensely hunched, biting down on her lower lip, gripping the wheel with all her strength as though to keep the car from skittering off into the sandy wasteland beyond the pavement’s edge.

“The speed limit on this freeway used to be seventy miles an hour. In kilometers that’s—what, a hundred ten? A hundred twenty?

Something like that. And we all used to drive it at eighty or eighty-five—miles an hour, I mean—when I was a kid. Of course you’d have’to be crazy to do that now. Assuming this car was capable of it, which it isn’t. It’s probably older than you are. It’s the kind that people had to use until just a few years before the Conquest, the sort you have to operate manually, because it doesn’t have a computer brain and won’t understand spoken commands. An antique. And definitely coming to the end of its days, too. But we’ll make it to L.A., one way or another. On foot, if we have to.”

“If you are supposed to be delivering me to a place called Barstow,” Khalid said, “how can we continue on to Los Angeles? Won’t they wonder about us when we don’t show up at this Barstow?”

“No reason why they should. We’re going to die in an auto accident tomorrow, before we ever get to Barstow.”

“Excuse me?”

“The accident’s already programmed into the computer. My pal in Leipzig fed it in. A crackerjack pardoner, he is. Do you know what a pardoner is, Khalid?”

“No.”

“Pardoners are very clever hackers. They’re something like borgmanns, except they do their hacking on our behalf instead of the Entities’. They cut into the Entity net and make revisions in the records. If you’ve been transferred someplace you don’t want to go, for example, it’s possible to get a pardoner to undo the transfer. For a price, of course. What has been programmed in here by my pardoner friend is that Agent C. Carmichael, transporting Detainee K. Burke, met with an unfortunate freeway accident on the 18th of this month, which is to say, tomorrow, ten miles north of Barstow while driving south on Interstate 15. She lost control of her manually operated vehicle and crashed into a roadside barrier. The car was totally demolished and she and the passenger were killed. Their bodies were cremated by local authorities.”

“She met with this accident tomorrow, you say?”

“When tomorrow comes up on the computer net, the accident will come up with it. So I use the past tense. It’s already in there, waiting to activate itself. Agent C. Carmichael will be removed from the system. So will Detainee K. Burke. We will vanish as though we never existed. Since the car will also no longer exist, any official scanner that happens to pick up its license plate as we continue on will most likely assume that the reading is erroneous. Once we’re in L.A., I’ll arrange to obtain a new license for the car, just to be on the safe side.—Are you getting hungry yet?”

“Yes.”

“So am I. Let’s do something about it.”

They stopped at a woebegone highway cafe in the middle of nowhere, where the heat outside the car closed around them like a great fist. She bought a dinner of sorts for them both simply by showing her I.D. card. It was terrible food, some sort of cardboardy and tasteless grilled meat on a bun and a cold bubbling drink, but Khalid was used to terrible food of all sorts by this time.

Onward, again, through the sandy emptiness. There was very little traffic. None at all going in the direction they were traveling; perhaps one car every half hour going the other way. Whenever they passed someone, Cindy kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the road ahead, and Khalid noticed that the drivers of the other cars never looked toward them, either.

The road was climbing, and good-sized mountains were visible all around them now, bigger than he had ever seen before. But the landscape was still as ugly as ever, rocky and sandy, not much vegetation and most of that stunted and gnarled. At one point Cindy said, as they went flashing past a sign by the edge of the road, “We’re in California now, Khalid. Or what used to be California when this country still had such things as separate states. When there were still such things as countries.” He imagined palm trees and soft breezes. Not so. Everything was just as ugly here as it had been on the Nevada side of the line.