Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“No. Went right by, paid no attention. I told you that they wouldn’t. I wasn’t there.”

“It was crazy to take the chance.”

“Maybe I’m crazy,” Khalid said cheerfully, as she started the car and pulled back out onto the freeway.

“I don’t think you are,” she said, after a moment. “Why did you do it?”

“To be able to look at them,” he told her, in absolute sincerity. “They are so beautiful, Cindy. They are like magical creatures to me. Jinn. Angels.”

She swiveled around in her seat and gave him a long strange look. “You really are something unusual, Khalid.”

He made no answer to that. What could he say?

After another lengthy silent stretch she said, “I lost my cool back there, I guess. There wasn’t any real reason why they’d have stopped to interrogate us, was there?”

“No.”

“But I was afraid. A quisling and a detainee out driving together on an empty road late at night, well beyond the city that I was supposed to be taking you to, and both our I.D.s already invalidated on the master net because we’ve been reported as dead—we’d have been in a mess. I panicked.”

A little way farther onward she said, breaking the next silence into which they had slipped, “Exactly what was it that you did, Khalid, to get yourself interned in the first place?”

He hesitated not at all. “I killed an Entity.”

“You what?”

“In England, outside Salisbury. The one that was shot along the side of a road. I did it, with a special kind of gun that I took from my father. They collected everyone in the five towns closest to the place of the killing and executed some of us and sent the rest of us into the prison camps.”

She laughed, in a way that told him she hadn’t for a moment believed him. “What a wild sense of humor you have, Khalid.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I have no sense of humor whatever.”

Now morning had come and they were out of the desert and among a scattering of towns—a few cities, even, a little later on—and there was some traffic on the road. “That’s San Bernardino,” she said. “Redlands is that place over down there. We’re about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, I’d say.”

He saw palm trees now, huge and strange against the brightening sky. Other plants and trees that he could not identify, spiky, odd. Low buildings with roofs of red tiles. Cindy drove with exaggerated precision, so much so that the cars behind her honked their horns at her to get her to move along. To Khalid she said, “Got to be very careful not to get into any accidents here. If a highway patrolman wanted to see my identification, we’d be cooked.”

They came to a place where they switched from one freeway to another. “This is called the San Bernardino Freeway,” Cindy explained. “It takes us westward, through Ontario, Covina, towns like that, toward the San Gabriel Valley and on into Los Angeles itself. The one we were on goes down through Riverside toward San Diego.”

“Ah,” he said knowingly, as though these names meant something to him.

“It’s over twenty years since I was last in L.A. God knows how much it’s changed in all that time. But what I figure on doing is driving straight out to the coast. Siegfried gave me the name of a friend of his, too, who lives in Malibu. I’ll try to track him down and maybe he can plug me into the local communications channels. I had a lot of friends out in that part of town once, Santa Monica, Venice, Topanga. Some of them must still be alive and living in the vicinity. Siegfried’s buddy can help me find them. And get me a new license plate, too, and new I.D. for us both.”

“Siegfried?”

“My hacker friend from Leipzig.”

“The pardoner.”

“Yes. The pardoner.”

“Ah,” said Khalid.

The freeway was huge here, so many lanes wide that he could scarcely believe it. The traffic, though heavier than he had seen anywhere else, was swallowed up in its vastness. But Cindy assured him that in the old days this freeway had been busy all day and all night, thousands of cars choking it all the time. In the old days, that was.

A little way farther on they came to an immense yellow sign stretching across all the lanes, high overhead, that said, FREEWAY ENDS IN FIVE MILES.

“Huh?” Cindy said. “We’re only in Rosemead! Nowhere near Los Angeles yet. Are they telling me I’m going to have to do all the rest of it on surface streets? How the hell am I supposed to find my way through all these little towns on surface streets?”

“What are surface streets?” Khalid asked, but she had already pulled off the freeway and into a dilapidated service station just at the exit. It looked deserted; but then a stubbly-faced man in stained overalls appeared from behind the pumps. Jumping from the car, Cindy trotted over to him. A long conference ensued, with much pointing and waving of arms. When she returned to the car she had a stunned, disbelieving look on her face.

“There’s a wall,” she told Khalid, in a tone of awe. “A great humongous wall, all around Los Angeles!”

“Is that something new?”

“New? Damned right it’s new! He says it’s sky-high and runs clear around the whole place, with gates every five or six miles. Nobody gets in or out of the city without giving a password to the gatekeeper. Nobody.”

“You have your official identification number,” Khalid said.

“I’ve been dead since late last night, remember? I give the gatekeeper my number and we’ll both be in detention five minutes later.”

“What about your pardoner friend’s friend? Can’t he get you a new identification pass?”

“He’s in there, on the other side of the wall,” Cindy said. “I’ve got to be able to get to him before he can do anything for me. There’s no way I can reach him from out here.”

“You could hook into the computer net and reach him that way,” Khalid suggested.

“With what?” She held forth her arms, wrists turned upward. “I don’t have an implant. Never bothered with them. Do you? No, of course you don’t. What am I supposed to do, send him a postcard?” She pressed her fingertips against her eyes. “Let me think a minute. Shit. Shit! A wall around the entire city. Who the hell could have imagined that’?”

In silence Khalid watched her think.

“One possibility,” she said eventually. “A long shot. Santa Barbara.”

“Yes?” he said, if only to encourage her.

“That’s a little city a couple of hours north of L.A. They can’t have run the goddamned wall that far up. I used to have a relative up there, my husband’s older brother. Retired army colonel, he was. Had a big ranch on a mountain above the town. I was there a couple of times long ago. He never cared for me very much, the Colonel. I wasn’t his kind of person, I suppose. Still, I don’t think he’d turn me away.”

Her husband. She had said nothing about a husband until this moment.

“The Colonel! Haven’t thought of him in a million years,” Cindy said. “He’d be—I don’t know—eighty, ninety years old by now. But he’d still be there. I’d bet on it. Man was made out of leather and steel; I can’t imagine him ever dying. If he did, well, one of his children or grandchildren probably would be living there. Somebody would be, anyway, some member of the family. They might take us in. It’s worth a try. I don’t know what else to do.”

“What about your husband?” Khalid asked. “Where is he?”

“Dead, I think. I heard once that he died the day the Entities arrived. Cracked up his plane while on firefighting duty, something like that. A sweet man, he was. Sweet Mike. I really loved him.” She laughed. “Not that I can even remember exactly what he looked like, now. Except his eyes. Blue eyes that saw right into you. The Colonel had eyes like that, too. So did his kids. They all did. The whole tribe.—Well, what do you say, my friend? Shall we try for Santa Barbara?”