Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“I’m six months pregnant and I’m not going to run anywhere,” said Cassandra tartly. “And I’m in the kiddie house with Irene and Andy and La-La and Jane and Cheryl. And Sabrina, too. Besides, I don’t have a gun. You find somebody else to go, you hear?”

Charlie was muttering something angry-sounding when Cassandra put down the receiver. Not my problem, she thought. The ranch was crawling with small kids and right this moment it was her job to look after them. Let Charlie find someone else to trot up to the gate: Jill, or Lisa, or Mark. Anybody. Or do it himself.

Some minutes went by. There was more honking.

Then she saw her young cousin Anson go jogging by, carrying the shotgun that was always carried by anyone who went to meet unexpected callers at the gate. His face was set in that clenched, rigid way that it always took on when one of the older men gave him a job to do. Anson was a terribly responsible kind of kid. Rain or shine, you could always get him to jump to it.

Well, problem solved, Cassandra thought, and went back to changing little Andy’s diaper.

“Yes?” Anson said, peeping through the bars of the gate at the strangers. The shotgun dangled casually from his hand, but he could bring it up into position in an instant. He was sixteen, tall and strapping, ready for anything.

These people didn’t seem very threatening, though. A thin, tired-faced little woman about his mother’s age, or even a few years older; and an unusual-looking man in his twenties, very tall and slender, with huge blue-green eyes and darkish skin and an enormous mop of shining curly hair that was not quite red, not quite brown.

The woman said, “My name is Cindy Carmichael. I was Mike Carmichael’s wife, long long ago. This is Khalid, who’s been traveling with me. We have no place to stay and we wonder if you can take us in.”

“Mike Carmichael’s wife,” Anson said, frowning. That was confusing. Mike Carmichael was his cousin’s name; but Cassandra was Mike’s wife, and in any case this woman was old enough to be Mike’s grandmother. She had to be talking about some other Mike Carmichael, in some other era.

She seemed to understand the problem. “Colonel Carmichael’s brother, he was. He’s dead now.—You’re a Carmichael yourself, aren’t you? I can tell by the eyes. And the way you stand. What’s your name?”

“Anson, ma’am.” And added: “Carmichael, yes.”

“That was the Colonel’s name, Anson. And he had a son by that name too. Anse, they called him. Are you Anse’s boy?”

“No, ma’am. Ron’s.”

“Are you, now? Ron’s boy. So he’s a family man these days. I suppose a lot of things have changed.—Let me think: that would make you Anson the Fifth, right? Just like in a royal dynasty.”

“The Fifth, yes, ma’am.”

“Well, hello, Anson the Fifth. I’m Cindy the First. Can we come in, please? We’ve been traveling a long way.”

“You wait here,” Anson said. “I’ll go and see.”

He jogged down to the main house. Charlie, Steve, and Paul were there, sitting at a table in the chart room with a sheaf of printouts spread out in front of them. “There’s a strange woman at the gate,” Anson told them. “And somebody foreign-looking with her, a man. She says she’s a Carmichael. Was married to a brother of the Colonel named Mike, once upon a time. I don’t know who the man is at all. She seems to know a lot about the family.—Did the Colonel ever have a brother named Mike?”

“Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “Before my time, if he did.” Steve merely shrugged. But Paul said, “How old is she? Older than I am, would you say?”

“I’d say so. Older even than Uncle Ron, maybe. About Aunt Rosalie’s age, maybe.”

“She tell you her name?”

“Cindy, she said.”

Paul’s eyes grew very wide. “I’ll be damned.”

“So you surely will, cousin,” said Ron, entering the room just then. “What’s going on?”

“You aren’t going to believe this. But apparently the ambassador from outer space has returned, and she’s waiting at the gate. Cindy, I mean. Mike’s wife Cindy. How about that?”

So the whole place was a kind of Carmichael commune now, the Colonel’s entire family living together on the hilltop. Cindy hadn’t expected that. That was a whole lot of Carmichaels, counting in the kids, and all. She felt a little outnumbered.

It was amazing to see them all again, these people who for a few years had been her kinfolk, after a manner of speaking, so many years ago. Not that Cindy had ever been particularly close to any of them, back in her freewheeling old Los Angeles days. Taking their cue from the formidable old Colonel, they had never really allowed her into the family circle, except perhaps for Mike’s nephew Anse, who had treated her politely enough. To the others she was just Mike’s crazy hippie wife, who dressed funny and talked funny and thought funny, and they had made it pretty clear that they wanted very little, if anything, to do with her. Which had basically been okay with Cindy. They had their lives; she and Mike had had theirs.

But that was then and this was now, and Mike was long gone and the world had changed beyond anybody’s ability to imagine, and she had changed too, and so had they. And these people were the closest thing to family that she had left. She could not let them reject her now.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to be here, to be back among the Carmichaels again. Or to be among the Carmichaels for the first time, really. I never was much of a family person back in the old days, was I? But I’d like to be, now. I really would.”

They were gawking at her as though an Entity, or perhaps a Spook, had wandered somehow into their house on the mountainside and was standing in their midst.

Cindy looked right back at them. Her gaze traveled around the room. She summoned up what she could remember of them.

Ronnie. That one had to be Ronnie, there in the middle of the group. He seemed to be running things, now. That was odd, Ronnie being in charge. She remembered sly Ronnie as a wild man, a trickster, a plunger, an operator, always on the outside in family stuff. If anything he had been more of the black sheep of the family than she. But here he was, now, fifty years old, fifty-five, maybe, big and solid, grown very stocky with the years, his blond hair now almost white, and you could see immediately that he had changed inwardly too, in some fundamental way, that he had grown stronger, steadier, transformed himself colossally in these twenty-odd years. He had never looked serious, in the old days. Now he did.

Next to him was his sister, Rosalie. A nice-looking woman then, Cindy remembered, and she had aged very well indeed, tall, stately, controlled. She had to be around sixty but she seemed younger. Cindy recalled Mike telling her that Rosalie had been a big problem when she was a girl—drugs, a great deal of screwing around—but all that was far behind her now. She had married some fat nerdy guy, a computer man, and become a reformed character overnight. That must be him with her, Cindy thought: that big bald doughy-faced fellow. She didn’t remember his name.

And that one—the stringy-looking blond woman—she must be Anse’s wife. A suburban-mom type back then, somewhat high-strung. Cindy had found her to be of absolutely no interest. Another name forgotten.

The younger man—he was Paul, wasn’t he? Mike’s other brother’s son. Pleasant young fellow, science professor at some college south of L.A. Figured to be forty-five or so, now. Cindy recalled that he had had a sister. She didn’t seem to be here now.

As for the others, four of them were kids in their middle or late twenties, and the other, the teenager, was Ron’s kid, who had met them at the gate. The rest were probably Anse’s children, or Paul’s. They all looked more or less alike, except for one, clearly the oldest, who was heavyset and brown-eyed and balding already, with only the faintest traces of Carmichael about him. The son of Rosalie and her computer guy, Cindy supposed. There would be time to sort the others out later. The remaining person was a woman in her late forties who was standing just alongside Ron. The late-fortyish woman seemed vaguely familiar to Cindy but plainly was no Carmichael, not with those dark eyes and that smallish, fine-boned frame. Ronnie’s wife, most likely.