Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

Khalid glanced up. Tony said, “My brother would like to talk with you. He’s in the chart room.”

“Yes. Right away,” Khalid said, and set about the task of putting his chisels back in their chest.

The chart room was a big, airy room in the main house, the largest in the series of rooms in the wing that stretched off to the left of the dining room. The Colonel, long ago, had bedecked its mahogany-paneled walls with an extensive collection of military maps and charts from the time of the Vietnam War, framed topographic plans of battlefields and city maps and harbor charts, out of which bizarre unfamiliar names that must once have been terribly important came leaping, boldly underlined in red: Haiphong, Cam Ranh, Phan Rang, Pleiku, Khe Sanh, la Drang, Bin Dinh, Hue. The room had a fine strategic feel to it and at some time late in the Colonel’s life Ron Carmichael had made it the central planning headquarters for the Resistance. A direct telephone line that Steve and Lisa Gannett had wired up connected it with the communications center out back.

There was a pack of Carmichaels in the chart room when Khalid entered. They were sitting side by side behind the big curving leather-topped desk in the middle of the floor, like an assembly of judges, and they were all looking at him with peculiar intensity, the way they might look at some mythological monster that had wandered into the room.

Three of them were Carmichaels, anyway: Mike, the more pleasant of Jill’s two brothers, and Mike’s cousins Leslyn and Anson, two of Ron’s children. Steve Gannett was there also: some kind of Carmichael, Khalid knew, but not as Carmichael as the others, too plump, too bald, wrong color eyes. Khalid did not always bother to keep his sense of the relationships among all these people straight in his head. Fate had decreed that he should live among them, even marry one and have children by her; but none of that meant that he would ever feel like a true member of the family.

Anson was at the center of the group. Khalid understood that in recent months Anson had come to be in charge of things, now that his father Ron was beginning to grow old. Not quite thirty yet, was Anson, younger than Mike and Charlie and their sister Jill, younger considerably than Steve. But he was plainly the boss now, the Carmichael of Carmichaels, the one who had the strength to command, the one who always took opportunity into his hands. Anson was a tall wide-faced man with very pale skin and a great thick swoop of coarse yellow hair that fell down low across his forehead. And, of course, those rock-drill eyes that all these Carmichaels inevitably were born with. He had always struck Khalid as being very tightly wound—too tightly wound, perhaps, and perhaps also brittle at the core, so that it would not take very much to make him snap in half.

Anson said, “Jill told me something extremely strange about you last night, Khalid. I was up practically all night thinking about it.”

“Yes?” Khalid said, noncommittal as ever.

“What she said was that you had told her, some time back, that the thing you had been sent into detention for was the killing of that Entity who was assassinated on a highway in England fifteen or twenty years ago.”

“Yes,” Khalid said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I did it. I am the one.”

Anson’s penetrating eyes rested unblinkingly on him. But Khalid was not afraid of anyone’s eyes.

“And never said a word about it to anyone?” Anson said.

“Cindy knows. I told her years ago, when I first knew her, before we ever came to this place.”

“Yes. I asked her last night, and she confirms that you made that claim to her, while the two of you were driving down from Nevada. She wasn’t sure then whether to take you seriously. She still isn’t.”

“I was serious,” Khalid said. “I was the one who did it.”

“But never saw fit to mention it here. Why was that?”

“Why should I have talked about it? It was not a matter that ever came up in ordinary conversation. It is something I did one night a long time ago, when I was still a child, for reasons that were of concern to me on that night alone, and it is not important to me now.”

“Did it ever occur to you, Khalid,” Mike Carmichael said, “that it might be important to us?”

Khalid shrugged.

Anson said, “What made you come out with it to Jill, after all this time, then?”

“What I said is something that I said to my daughter Khalifa, not to Jill. Khalifa imagined that an Entity of a strange sort had come here to the ranch and played with her, and then made threats to her if she said anything about what had happened—this is something that your son Andy put into her mind,” Khalid said, looking coolly at Steve—"and when I heard this tale I told the child to have no fear, that I would protect her as a father should, that I had killed an Entity once and I would do it again, if need be. Then Jill asked me if I had really done such a thing. And so I told her the story.”

Leslyn Carmichael, a young slender woman who looked to Khalid disturbingly like the Jill of ten years before, said, “The Entities are capable of reading minds and defending themselves against attacks before the attack can even be made. That’s why nobody’s ever been able to kill one, except for that one incident in England all those years ago. How is it that you were able to do what no one else can manage to do, Khalid?”

“When the Entity came along the road in its wagon, there was nothing in my mind to cause it alarm. I felt no hatred for it, I felt no enmity. I allowed none of those things into my mind. Entities are very beautiful to me, and I love beautiful things. I was feeling my love for that one, for its beauty, even as I picked up the rifle and shot it. If it had looked into my mind as it approached, all it would have seen was my love.”

“You can do that?” Anson said. “You can turn off everything in your mind that you don’t want to be there?”

“I could then. Perhaps I still can.”

“Is that how you avoided being blamed for the killing afterward?” Leslyn asked. “You blanked all knowledge of the murder from your mind, so the Entity interrogators couldn’t detect it in there?”

“There were no Entity interrogators. They simply gave the order for everyone in our town to be gathered together and punished, as if we all were guilty. Human troops under Entity orders gathered us together. My mind would not have been open to them.”

There was some silence then, as all these Carmichaels contemplated what Khalid had said. He watched them, seeing in their faces that they were weighing his words, testing them for plausibility.

Believe me or don yt believe me, as you wish. It makes no difference to me.

But it seemed as if they did believe him.

“Come over here, Khalid,” Anson said, indicating the leather-topped desk. “I want to show you something.”

The desk had papers spread out all over it. They were computer printouts, full of jagged lines, diagrams, graphs. Khalid looked down at them without comprehension, without interest.

Anson said, “We’ve been collecting these reports for five or six years, now. What they are is an analysis of the movements of high-caste Entity personnel between cities, as well as we’ve been able to track them. These dotted lines here, these are transit vectors, the patterns of movement. They represent elite Entity figures, traveling from place to place. Look. Here. Here. Here. This cluster here.” He pointed to groups of lines and dots.

“Yes,” Khalid said, meaning nothing at all.

“We’ve noticed, over the years, certain patterns within the patterns, a flow of Entities in and out of specific places, sometimes gathering in relatively great numbers in such places. Los Angeles is one of those places. London is another. Istanbul, Turkey, is a third.”