Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

She said, as she completed her survey, “And the Colonel? What about him? Could he still be alive?”

“Could be and is,” Ronnie said. “Almost eighty-five and very feeble, and I don’t think he’ll be with us much longer. He’s going to be damned surprised to see you.”

“And not very pleased, I bet. I’m sure you know he never thought very highly of me. Perhaps for good reasons.”

“He’ll be glad to see you now. You’re his closest link with his brother Mike, you know. He spends most of his time in the past these days. Of course, he doesn’t have much future.”

Cindy nodded. “And there’s somebody else missing. Your brother Anse.”

“Dead,” Ronnie said. “Four years back.”

“I’m so sorry. He was a fine man.”

“He was, yes. But he had a lot of trouble with drinking, his later years. Anse wanted so much to be as strong and good as the Colonel, you know, but he never quite managed it. Nobody could have. But Anse just wouldn’t forgive himself for being human.”

Was there anyone else from the old days that she should ask about? Cindy didn’t think so. She glanced toward Khalid, wondering what he was making out of all this. But Khalid appeared utterly placid. As though his brain had gone off on a voyage to Mars.

The late-fortyish woman standing near Ronnie said cheerily, “I guess you don’t recognize me, do you, Cindy? But of course we were only together for a very few hours.”

“We were? When was that? I’m sorry.”

“On the Entity spaceship, after the Porter Ranch landing. We were in the same group of prisoners.” A warm smile. “Margaret Gabrielson. Peggy. I came here to work for the Colonel, and later I married Ron. No reason why you would remember me.”

No. There wasn’t. Cindy didn’t.

“You were very distinctive. I’ve never forgotten: the beads, the sandals, the big earrings. They let most of us go that afternoon, but you volunteered to stay with the aliens. You said they were going to take you to their planet.”

“That’s what I thought. But they never did,” Cindy said. “I worked for them all those years, doing whatever they wanted me to do, running detainee centers for them, transporting prisoners around, waiting for them to make good on their promise. But it didn’t happen. After a while I began to wonder if they had ever promised it. By now I’ve decided that it was all my own delusion.”

“You’re a quisling, then?” Ronnie asked. “Are you aware that this is a major center of the Resistance?”

“Was a quisling,” she said. “Not any longer. I was working at a detention center on the Turkish coast when I realized I had wasted twenty years playing footsie with the Entities for nothing. They hadn’t come here to turn our world into a paradise, which is what I used to believe. They had come here to enslave us. So I wanted out; I wanted to go home. I arranged for a pardoner I know in Germany to have me shipped out to the States, escorting a batch of prisoners to Nevada, and he rewrote my personnel code to say that I had been killed in an auto accident between Vegas and Barstow while driving this young man to his next detention camp. That’s why he’s here. The pardoner rewrote his code too. We’re permanent vanishees, now. When we got to L.A., I discovered that there’s a wall around the place. No way for us to get in, because we don’t officially exist any more.”

“So then you had the notion of coming here.”

“Yes. What else could I do? But if you don’t want me, just say so, and I’ll take off. My name is Carmichael, though. I was a member of this family once, your uncle’s wife. I loved him very much and he loved me. And I’m not about to interfere with any of your Resistance activities. If anything, I can help with them. I can tell you a lot of stuff about the Entities that you may not know.”

Ronnie was eyeing her reflectively.

“Let’s go talk to the Colonel,” he said.

Khalid watched her go from the room, followed by most of the others. Only a few of the younger ones remained with him: two men who were obviously twin brothers, though one had a long red scar on his face, and the tense, earnest, boyish-looking one, plainly related to the twins, who had met them at the gate with the shotgun in his hand. And also a girl who looked like a female version of the two brothers, tall and lean and blond, with those icy blue eyes that almost everyone around here seemed to have. The rest of her seemed icy too: she was as cool and remote as the sky. But very beautiful.

The brother with the scar said, to the other one, “We’d better move along, Charlie. We’re supposed to be fixing the main irrigation pump.”

“Right.” To the boy with the shotgun Charlie said, “Can you manage things here on your own, Anson?”

“Don’t worry about me. I know what to do.”

“If he does anything peculiar, you let him have it right in the gut, you hear me, Anson?”

“Go on, Charlie,” Anson said stiffly, gesturing toward the door with the shotgun. “Go fix the goddamned pump. I told you, I know what to do.”

The twins went out. Khalid stood patiently where he had been standing all along, calm as ever, letting time flow past him. The tall blond girl was looking at him intently. There was a detachment in her curiosity, a kind of aloof scientific fascination. She was studying him as though he were some new kind of life-form. Khalid found that oddly appealing. He sensed that she and he might be similar in certain interesting ways, behind their wholly different exteriors.

She let a moment or two go by. Then she said to the boy, “You run along now, Anson. Let me have the gun.”

Anson seemed startled. He is so very earnest, Khalid thought. Takes himself very seriously. “I can’t do that, Jill!”

“Sure you can. You think I don’t know how to use a shotgun? I was shooting rabbits on this mountain while you were still shitting in your diapers. Give it here. Run along.”

“Hey, I don’t know if—”

“Go, now,” she said, taking the gun from him and pointing with her thumb toward the door. She had not raised her voice at all throughout the entire interchange; but Anson, looking bewildered and cowed, went shuffling from the room as though she had struck him in the face with a whip.

“Hello,” the girl said to Khalid. Only the two of them were left in the room, now.

“Hello.”

Her eyes were fixed steadily on him. Almost without blinking. The thought came to him suddenly that he would like to see her without her clothes. He wanted to know whether the triangle at her loins was as golden as the hair on her head. He found himself imagining what it would be like to run his hand up her long, smooth thighs.

“I’m Jill,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Khalid.”

“Khalid. What kind of name is that?”

“An Islamic name. I was named for my uncle. I was born in England, but my mother was of Pakistani descent.”

“Pakistani, eh? And what may that be?”

“Pakistanis are people who come from Pakistan. That’s a country near India.”

“Ah-hah. India. I know about India. Elephants and tigers and rubies. I read a book about India once.” She waggled the gun around in a careless, easy way. “You have interesting eyes, Khalid.”

“Thank you.”

“Do all Pakistanis look like you?”

“My father was English,” he said. “He was very tall, and so am I. Pakistanis aren’t usually this tall. And they have darker skin than I have, and brown eyes. I hated him.”

“Because he had the wrong color eyes?”

“His eyes did not matter to me.”

Hers were staring right into his. Those blue, blue eyes.

She said, “You were in Entity detention, that woman said. What did you do to get yourself detained?”