Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

She returned to the freeway and continued along it, past more signs warning that it was ending, until in another few minutes the wall came into view before them.

“Joseph Mary Jesus,” Cindy said. “Will you look at that thing?” It was impressive, all right. It was a solid gray mass of big concrete blocks extending off to the left and right as far as Khalid could see, rising about as high as Salisbury Cathedral. The wall was pierced, where the freeway ran into it, by an arched gateway, deep and dark. A long line of cars was strung out in front of it. They were passing within very slowly, one by one. Occasionally an eastbound car would emerge from the other lane of the gate and drive off onto the freeway.

Cindy turned off the freeway to a city street, a wide boulevard lined by shabby little shops that looked mostly to be out of business, and began following the line of the wall northward. It seemed impossible for her to get over her astonishment at its height and bulk. She kept muttering to herself, shaking her head, now and then whistling in wonderment as some particularly lofty section of it appeared before them. There were places where the pattern of the streets forced them a few blocks away from the wall, but it was always visible off to their left, rearing up high over the two- and three-story buildings that seemed to be all there were in this district, and she returned to its proximity whenever she could.

She said very little to him. The struggle to find her way through these unfamiliar neighborhoods seemed to be exhausting her.

“This is incredible,” she said, toward mid-morning, as they churned on and on through a series of towns all packed very close together, some of them much more attractive than others. “The immensity of it. The amount of labor that must have been poured into it. What sheep we’ve become! Build a wall all the way around Los Angeles, they tell us—they don’t even say it, they just give you a little Push—and right away you get ten thousand men out there building them a wall. Raise food for us! And we do. Put enormous incomprehensible machines together for us. Yes. Yes. They’ve domesticated us. A whole planet of sheep, is what we are now. A planet of slaves. And the damnedest thing is that we don’t lift a finger to undo it all.—Did you really kill that Entity?”

“Do you think that I did?”

“I think you might have, yes. Whoever did it, though, it’s the only time anyone ever succeeded at it.” She leaned forward, squinting at a faded highway sign, pockmarked as though someone had used it for target practice. “I remember the day it happened. For five minutes the Entities all went crazy. Jumping around like they’d been given a high-voltage jolt. Then they calmed down. Some wild day, that was. I was at the Vienna center, then. Like a circus, that day. And then we found out what had happened, that somebody had actually knocked one of them off, back in England. It hit me very hard, personally, when I heard that. I was, like, totally shocked. A terrible, terrible crime, I thought. I was still in love with them, then.”

The conversation was making Khalid uncomfortable. “Are we near Los Angeles yet?” he asked.

“This is all Los Angeles, more or less. These were independent towns, but everything was really Los Angeles except they called themselves separate towns. The actual official Los Angeles is all on the far side of the wall, though. Maybe twenty miles away.”

You could tell when you were leaving one little city and entering another, because the street lamps were different and so were the houses, one city having splendid mansions and the very next one very small half-ruined ones. But there was a certain sameness to everything, beneath it all: the huge glossy-leaved trees, the lush gardens that even the smallest and poorest houses had, the low buildings and the bright eye of the sun blasting down onto everything. There were mountains just up ahead, stupendous ones, looking right down onto all these little towns. They had snow on their summits, though it was as warm as a summer day down here.

Cindy called off all the names of the cities to him as they passed through them, as if giving him a geography lesson. “Pasadena,” she said. “Glendale. Burbank. That’s Los Angeles down there, to our left.”

They had turned, now, and were heading west, toward the sun, driving on a freeway again. The wall was quite distant from them along this part of the route, though later on they came near it again, and, later still, they were forced off the freeway into another region of what she called surface streets. The terrain here was flat and monotonous and the streets were long and straight.

“We’re very close to the place where the Entities made their first landing,” Cindy told him. “I hurried right to the spot, that morning. I had to see them. I was in love with the whole idea that the space people had come. I gave myself to them. Offered my services: the very first quisling, I guess. Not that I saw myself as a traitor, you understand, just an ambassador, a bridge between the species. But they let me down. They just shuffled me around from one job to another all those years while I waited for them to put me aboard a ship going to their home world. And finally I realized that they never would.—Look, Khalid, you can just about manage to see the wall again in that valley to our left, all the way down there, curving off toward the Pacific. But we’re outside it now. We should have clear sailing all the way to Santa Barbara.”

And they did. But when they got there, late in the day, they found the town practically deserted, whole neighborhoods abandoned, block after block of handsome stucco-walled tiled buildings that had fallen into ruin. “I can’t believe this,” she said, over and over. “This beautiful little city. Everybody must have just walked away from it! Or been taken away.” Pointing toward the lofty mountains rising behind the oceanfront plain on which the city stood, she said, “Use those sharp eyes of yours. Can you see any houses up there?”

“Some, yes.”

“Signs that they’re inhabited?”

“My eyes aren’t that sharp,” he said.

But Santa Barbara wasn’t wholly desolate. After driving around for a time Cindy found three short, swarthy-looking men standing together on a street corner in what must once have been the main commercial sector. She rolled down her car window and spoke to them in a language Khalid did not understand; one of them answered her, very briefly, and she spoke again, at great length this time, and they smiled and conferred with one another, and then the one who had answered before began to gesture toward the mountains and to indicate with movements of his hands and wrists a series of twisting, turning roads that would take her up there.

“What language was that?” Khalid asked, when they were moving again.

“Spanish.”

“Is that the language they speak in California?”

“In this part,” she said. “Now, at any rate. He says the ranch is still there, that we just keep going up and up and up and eventually we’ll come to the gate. He also said they wouldn’t let us in. But maybe he’s wrong.”

It was Cassandra, on duty in the children’s compound, who was the one that heard the distant honking: three long honks, then a short one, then three more. She picked up the phone and called down to the ranch house. A voice that was either her husband’s or her husband’s twin brother answered. Cassandra was better at telling Mike’s and Charlie’s voices apart than anyone, but even she had trouble sometimes.

“Mike?” she said, guessing.

“No, Charlie. What’s up?”

“Someone at the gate. We expecting anybody?”

She could hear Charlie asking someone, perhaps Ron. Then he said, “No, nobody that we know of. Why don’t you run up there and take a look, and call me back? You’re closer to the gate than anybody else, where you are.”