Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“Would you kill an Entity?” she asked.

“If it tried to bother you, yes,” said Khalid. “In a flash, I would.” He pulled her to him, lifted her, hugged her, set her gently down. Patted her on her bare little rump, told her once more not to worry about the Entity, sent her on her way.

To Jill he said, “That boy Andy is all mischief. I need to talk to him about not filling the girl’s head with nonsense.”

She was looking at him strangely.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

“Andy’s not the only one filling her head with nonsense, I think. Why did you tell her that thing about your killing an Entity once?”

“That wasn’t nonsense. It’s true.”

“Come on, Khalid.”

“What do you think I did that got me into Entity detention? You remember, I was an escaped detainee when I came here?” Jill was looking at him as though he had begun to speak in an unknown language. But, Khalid thought, it was time he had told her of this. More than time. He went on, “An Entity was shot dead once on a country road in England, years and years ago. I’m the one that shot it. But they had no way of knowing that, so everybody in my part of England was rounded up and killed, or put into the camps. The only one I ever told was Cindy. I’m not sure that she believed me.” Jill was still staring. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you believe that I could have done something like that?”

She was very slow to answer.

“Yes,” she said, eventually. “Yes, I think you could.”

He found Andy exactly where he expected to find him, on a bench outside the computer shack, tinkering with one of his portable computers. The boy, like his father, like his grandfather, seemed to eat and breathe and live computers, and probably wrote programs while he was sleeping, too.

“Andy?”

“Just a minute, Khalid.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Just a minute\”

Calmly Khalid reached down and pushed a button on Andy’s computer. The screen went dark. The boy gave him a fiery look and leaped to his feet, fists balled. He was big for his age, very well developed, but Khalid stood poised, ready to deal with any attack. Not that he would hit Andy—that would be too much like Richie, hitting a twelve-year-old boy—but he would restrain him, if he had to, until the boy’s fit of temper had passed.

Andy got control of himself quickly enough, though. Sourly he said, “You shouldn’t have done that, Khalid. You might have spoiled what I was writing.”

“When an adult tells you to pay attention, you pay attention,” Khalid said. “That is the rule here. You will not ignore me when I tell you I wish to speak with you. What were you doing? Eavesdropping on the secret conversations of the Entities?”

Andy’s fury dropped away. Smirking cheekily, he said, “You wish.”

The boy was naked. That bothered Khalid. Andy might be only twelve, but his body was already that of a man; he should cover himself. Khalid disliked the idea that this naked man-child should have been playing with his naked little daughter, telling her fantastic fables.

He said, “I hear from Khalifa that you make up very interesting stories about new kinds of Entities. In particular one that looks something like a lion and something like a camel.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“This is true, then?”

“Sure. I show the kids all sorts of graphics.”

“Show me,” said Khalid.

Andy turned the computer back on. Instantly four lines of bright lettering edged with flames blazed forth on the screen:

PRIVATE PROPERTY OF ANSON CARMICHAEL GANNETT.

KEEP YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF! THIS MEANS YOU!!!

He hit a key, and another one, and another one, and a vivid picture began to take form on the screen. A mythical beast of some sort, it seemed. A camel’s long comic face, a lion’s ferocious claws, an eagle’s splendid wings. A long curling serpentine tale. Andy filled in the details quickly, until the image on the screen seemed almost three-dimensional. Ready to jump out of the computer and dance around before them. It turned its head from side to side, it grinned at them, it leered, it glowered, it showed a set of gleaming fangs that no camel had ever possessed.

How had the boy done that? Khalid knew almost nothing about computers. It seemed like magic to Khalid, black magic. The work of a jinni: one of the evil ones. The work of a demon.

“What is this creature?” Khalid asked.

“A griffin. I found it in a mythology text. I put the camel’s head on myself, just for fun.”

“And told Khalifa that it was an Entity?”

“Uh-uh. That was strictly her idea. I was just showing her graphics. Did she tell you I called it an Entity?”

“She said she saw an Entity, that it visited her and played with her and took her on a flight to the moon. And plenty of other crazy stuff. But she also said you’d been showing her lots of things like this on your computer.”

“And if I have?” Andy asked. “What’s the problem, Khalid?”

“She’s just a little girl. She hasn’t yet learned how to sort out reality from fantasy. Don’t mix her up, Andy.”

“I’m not supposed to tell her stories, you’re saying?”

“Don’t mix up her head, is what I’m saying.—And put some clothes on. You’re too old to be running around with everything you have showing.”

Quickly Khalid walked away. It troubled him to be giving angry orders to young people. It brought buried memories of ancient ugliness back to life.

But this boy, Andy—someone needed to impose some discipline on him. Khalid knew that he was not the one; but someone should. He was too wild, too defiant. You could see the rebelliousness growing in him from week to week. He was good with computers, yes: wonderful with computers, miraculous. But Khalid saw the wildness in him, and was puzzled that no one else did. Even now, Andy did mainly as he pleased; what would he be like later on? The first Carmichael quisling? The family’s first borgmann?

Close to a year went by before the story Khalid had told Jill had any repercussions whatever. That he had ever said a word to her about having killed that Entity was something that had all but passed from his mind.

He was carving a statue of Jill out of a slab of red manzanita wood, the latest in a series of such statues that he had made over the years. Little gatherings of them stood arrayed around the cabin in groups of three and four, congregations of Jills. Jill standing and Jill kneeling and Jill running, caught in mid-stride with her long hair flowing out behind her, and Jill stretched out with her elbow on the ground and her head resting on her fist; Jill with a baby in the crook of each arm; Jill asleep. She was nude in all of them. And she looked exactly alike in every one, always the youthful Jill of Khalid’s first days at the ranch, with the smooth unlined face and the flat belly and the high taut breasts. Even though he had her pose for each new statue, he depicted her only as she had been, not as she now was.

She had noticed that, after a time, and had remarked on it. “That is how I will always see you,” he explained. She went on posing for him nevertheless, though even he knew that there was really no need, not if all he was doing was carving statues of the Jill within his mind.

She was posing for him on a mild, humid spring morning when Tony came to him, Ron Carmichael’s younger son, a big, brawny, easygoing boy in his late teens with a lion’s mane of golden hair down to his shoulders. He gave only the most perfunctory of glances to the naked Jill, who stood with her arms outstretched and her head turned to the sky as if she were about to take wing. Everyone who passed by Khalid’s cabin was accustomed to seeing Jill posing.