Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

The other gravestone that Khalid put up had simpler ornamentation and a shorter inscription:

YASMEENA MOTHER OF KHALID

Leaving the last names off. He loathed his own; and even if Yasmeena had been married to Richie Burke, which Khalid doubted, he didn’t want that name on her stone. He could have called her “Yasmeena Khan.” But it seemed wrong for mother and son to have different last names, so he left both off. And also no dates. Khalid knew when she had died, because it was the day of his own birth, but he wasn’t sure how old she had been then. Young, that was all he knew. What did such things matter, anyway? The only thing that mattered was that she was remembered.

Jill, watching him carve Yasmeena’s stone, said, “And will you make one for your father, too?”

“No. Not for him.”

He was visiting the graves of Aissha and Yasmeena on a bright day in the middle one of those long, endless-seeming sun-drenched summers that came to the ranch in February or March of every year and stayed until November or December, when Jill unexpectedly appeared at the downslope side of the burying-ground, where the entrance was. One of the children was with her, the girl Khalifa, who was five.

“You’re praying,” Jill said. “I interrupted you.”

“No. I’m all done.”

Every Friday Khalid came here and spoke some words from the Koran over the two graves, words that he had tried to resurrect from his memories of his long-ago lessons in Salisbury with Iskander Mustafa Ali. On the day when the first and second blasts of the Trumpet are heard, Khalid would say, all hearts shall be filled with terror, and all eyes shall stare with awe. And then he would say: When the sky is torn asunder, when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together, when the graves are thrown about, then each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do. And then: On that day some will have beaming faces, smiling and joyful, for they will live in Paradise. And on that day the faces of others will be veiled with darkness and covered with dust. He could remember no more than that, and he knew that he had jumbled these lines together from different sections; but they were the best he could manage, and he believed that Allah would accept them from him, even though you were not supposed to alter a single word of the scripture, because this was the best he could do and Allah did not demand from you more than was possible.

Jill was barefoot and wore only a strip of blue fabric around her waist and another over her breasts. Khalifa wore nothing at all. Cloth was getting hard to come by, these days, and clothing wore out all too quickly; and in warm weather the small children went naked and most of the younger adult Carmichaels wore very little. Jill, at forty, still thought of herself as a younger Carmichael, and, even though she had borne five children and showed the signs or that, her long, slender frame had the look of youth about it yet.

“What is it?” Khalid asked. It had to be something unusual to bring her here while he was at his prayers. Above all else he and Jill respected each other’s privacy.

“Khalifa says she saw an Entity.”

Well, that was certainly something unusual, Khalid thought. He glanced at the child. She didn’t seem particularly upset. Quite calm, in fact.

“An Entity, eh? And where did this happen?”

“By the wading pond, she says. The Entity got into the pond with her and splashed around. It played with her and talked with her a long time. Then it took her in its arms and went with her on a trip into the sky and brought her back.”

“You believe that this happened?” Khalid asked.

Jill shrugged. “Not necessarily. But how would I know whether it happened or not? I thought you should know. What if they’re beginning to snoop around here?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

Jill was like that: she made no judgments, she drew no conclusions. She drifted through life like a Spook, rarely touching the ground. Sometimes she and Khalid went for days at a time without speaking to each other, though all was peaceful between them, and they would turn to each other in bed every night during such times as naturally and passionately as they always did. In eleven years together Khalid had never attempted to penetrate her inner thoughts, nor she his. They respected each other’s privacy, yes. Two of a kind, they were.

He knelt beside the little girl and said gently, “You saw an Entity, eh?”

“Yes. It took me flying into space.”

Khalifa was the most beautiful of his five striking children: angelic, even. She combined in herself the best of Jill’s fair-skinned fair-haired beauty and his own more exotic hybrid traits. Her limbs were long, already arguing for extraordinary height; her hair was shimmering golden fleece, with an underglow of bronze; her eyes were his gem-like blue-green; her pellucid skin had some subtle trace of his tawniness to it, a subcutaneous ruddy gleam like that of burnished copper.

He said, “What did it look like, this Entity?”

“It was a little like a lion,” she said, “and a little like a camel. It had shining wings and a long snaky tail. It was pink all over and very tall.”

“How tall?”

“As tall as you are. Maybe even a little taller.”

Her eyes were wide and solemn and sincere. But this had to be a fable. There were no Entities that looked like that. Unless some new kind had recently arrived on Earth, of course.

“Were you afraid?” Khalid asked.

“A little. It was sort of scary, I suppose. But it said it wouldn’t hurt me if I kept quiet. It just wanted to play with me, it said.”

“Play?”

“We played splashing games, and we danced around in the pond. It asked me my name and the names of my mommy and my daddy, and a lot of other things that I don’t remember. Then it took me flying. We went up to the moon and back. I saw the castles and rivers on the moon. It said that it would come back on my birthday and take me flying again.”

“To the moon?”

“To the moon, and Mars, and lots of other places.”

Khalid nodded. For a moment or two he studied Khalifa’s angelic countenance, marveling at the teeming fantasies behind that small smooth forehead. Then he said: “How do you know anything about lions and camels?”

The briefest hesitation. “Andy told me about them.”

Andy. Now it made sense. Her twelve-year-old cousin Andy, Steve and Lisa’s son, was a gushing fountain of uncontrolled imagination. Too clever for his own good, that boy, forever making his magic with computers, bringing forth all sorts of unheard-of trickery. And something diabolical in his eyes, even back when he was only a baby.

“Andy told you?” Khalid said.

“He showed me pictures of them on the screen of his machine. And told me stories about them. Andy tells me lots of stories.”

“Ah,” Khalid said. He shot a glance at Jill. “Does Andy tell you stories about Entities too?” he asked the girl.

“Sometimes.”

“Did he tell you this one?”

“Oh, no. This one really happened!”

“To you, or to Andy?”

“To me! To me!” Indignantly. She gave him a petulant, even angry look, as though annoyed that he would doubt her. But then, abruptly, things changed. An expression of uncertainty, or perhaps fear, appeared on the child’s face. Her lower lip trembled. She was on the edge of tears.—"I wasn’t supposed to tell you. I shouldn’t have. The only one I told was Mommy, and she told you. But the Entity told me not to say anything to anybody about what had happened, or it would kill me. It isn’t going to kill me, is it, Khalid?”

He smiled. “No, child. That won’t happen.”

“I’m scared.” The tears were showing, now.

“No. No. Nothing’s going to kill you. Listen to me, Khalifa: if this so-called Entity or any other kind of creature comes back here and bothers you again, you tell me about it right away and I’ll kill it. I’ve already killed one Entity in my life and I can do it again. So there isn’t a thing for you to be afraid of.”