Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

And thirty-three since the Conquest; and the ranch still floated above the suffering world like an island in mid-air, sacrosanct. Somewhere out there were the impregnable compounds of the Entities—within which the conquering creatures from another world went about the unfathomable activities requisite to an occupation of the conquered planet, an occupation that now had lasted a full third of a century without letup or explanation; and, somewhere out there, labor gangs working under conditions amounting to slavery were building huge walls around all of Earth’s major cities, and doing, at the behest of human taskmasters who took their orders from the aliens, all manner of other things whose purpose no one could comprehend. And somewhere out there, too, there were prison camps in which thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had broken some mystifying and inexplicable regulation that had been decreed by Earth’s starborn monarchs were capriciously and randomly detained.

Here, meanwhile, were the Carmichaels up above the world. It was rare for any of them to leave their mountain home any longer. The ranch’s confines were much less confining, now; the Carmichael domain had spread outward and to some degree downward into the depopulated hillsides all about them. They spent their days raising tomatoes and corn and sheep and pigs and squadrons of new Carmichael babies. The making of babies was, in fact, a primary occupation there. The place swarmed with them, one generation tumbling fast upon its predecessor. And also, like some machine that has been set blindly into motion without any means of halting, going through the unending motions of running a Resistance that consisted mainly of sending strings of resolute and inspiring e-mail to other groups of Resisters all over the world. The Entities, inscrutable as ever, must surely must have known what was going on up there, but they stayed their hand.

The Carmichaels lived in such utter isolation that when some stranger, some spy, broke into their walled domain a few years after Khalid’s arrival there, it was an altogether astounding event, an unprecedented foray of reality into their charmed sphere. Charlie found him quickly and killed him and all was as it had been, once again. And the world went on, for the unconquered Carmichaels on their mountainside and for the conquered hosts below.

Eleven years. For Khalid they went by in a moment.

By then, the Carmichaels had just about forgotten the whole subject of Khalid’s detention. Khalid lived among them like a Martian among humans, he and the almost equally Martian Jill, in an isolated cabin of their own that he and Mike and Anson had constructed for them beyond the vegetable garden, and there Khalid spent his days fashioning sculptures large and small out of stone or clay or pieces of wood, and drew sketches, and taught himself how to grind pigments into paint and how to paint with them; and he and Jill raised their tribe of eerily beautiful children there, and no one, not even Khalid, ever thought much about Khalid’s mysterious past. The past was not a place Khalid cared to visit. It held no fond memories. He preferred to live one moment at a time, looking neither forward nor back.

The pasts of other people impinged on him all the time, though, because it was just a short way from his cabin to the ranch’s graveyard, off in a gravelly little rock-walled natural enclosure, a sort of box canyon, just to the left of the vegetable patch. Khalid went there often to sit among the dead people and look outward, thinking about nothing at all.

The view from the graveyard was ideal for that purpose. The little box canyon opened at its downslope end into a larger side canyon on the mountain’s western face, canted not toward the city of Santa Barbara but toward the next mountain in the series that ran parallel to the coastline. So you could sit there with your back against the steep mountain face and look right out into blue sky and wheeling hawks, with little else in your line of sight except the distant gray-brown bulk of the next mountain over, the one that bordered the ranch on the west.

Gravestones sprouted like toadstools all around him here, but that was all right. The dead were no more frightening to Khalid than the living. And in any case he had known very few of these people.

The biggest and most elaborate of the stones belonged to the grave of Colonel Anson Carmichael III, 1943-2027. There always were fresh flowers on that grave, every day of the year. Khalid understood that the Colonel had been the patriarch of this community. He had died a day or two after Khalid’s arrival here. Khalid had never laid eyes on him.

Nor on Captain Anson Carmichael IV, 1964-2024. They loved that name Anson here. The settlement was full of them.

Ron Carmichael’s oldest son was an Anson; so was Steve Gannett’s boy, though everyone called him “Andy.” And Khalid thought there might be others. There were so many children that it was hard to keep track. At Jill’s insistence Khalid had even given the name to one of his own sons: Rasheed Anson Burke, he was. This one in the grave before him had been known as “Anse": the oldest son of the illustrious Colonel, dead before his own father. A sad story, evidently, but no one had ever told Khalid the details of it. Jill, although she had been Anse’s daughter, never talked of him.

Jill’s mother was buried next to her husband: Carole Martinson Carmichael, 1969-2034. Khalid remembered her as a thin, pallid, downcast woman, a worn and ragged version of her beautiful daughter. She had never had much to say. Khalid had carved the headstone himself, with two winged angels on it within an elaborate wreath. Jill had requested that. Just back of the graves of Anse and Carole was the grave of someone named Helena Carmichael Boyce, 1979–2021—Khalid had no idea who she had been—and, not far from hers, the resting place of Jill’s first husband, the mysterious Theodore Quarles, 1975-2023, called “Ted.”

All Khalid knew about Theodore Quarles was that he had been many years older than Jill, that they had lived together as man and wife for about a year, that he had been killed in a rockslide during a stormy winter. He was another one of whom Jill never spoke; but that too was all right. Khalid had no interest in knowing any more about Theodore Quarles than he already did, which was the mere fact of his existence.

Then there were the graves of various children of the family who had died young in this little mountainside village that had no doctor. Five, six, seven headstones, small ones all in a row. These usually had flowers on them too. But there were never any flowers on the next grave over, that of the nameless intruder, perhaps a quisling spy, whom Charlie had killed six or seven years back after discovering him prowling around in the computer shack. Ron had insisted that he be given a proper burial, though there was a hot argument about it, Charlie and Ron going at it for hour after hour until young Anson managed to calm them down. That grave had only a crude marker on it. It was up against the side wall of the little canyon and no one ever went near it.

Also toward that side of the cemetery there were two gravestones that Khalid had erected himself, a couple of years ago. He hadn’t asked anyone’s permission, had just gone ahead and done it. Why not? He lived here too. He was entitled.

One of them marked Aissha’s grave. Of course, Khalid had no definite knowledge that she was dead. But he had no particular reason to think she was alive, either, and he wanted her to be commemorated here somehow. She was the only person in the universe who had ever meant anything to him. So he carved a fine stone for her, with intricate patterns of interwoven scrollwork all along it. Everything abstract: no graven images for devout Aissha. And wrote in bold letters right in the middle, AISSHA KHAN. With a few lines from the Koran below, lines in English, because Khalid had forgotten most of the little Arabic that Iskander Mustafa Ali had managed to teach him: Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe. You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help. No dates. He knew no dates to put there.