Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

Anson was awake instantly. A surge of surprise ran through him, and some anger. Accusingly he said, “You told me that he’d be okay!”

“Well, I was wrong.”

They hurried down the hallways. The wind outside was heading toward gale force and hail was scrabbling against the windows.

Ron was sitting up in bed and seemed still to be conscious, but Anson could see right away that something had changed just in the past twelve hours. It was as if his father’s facial muscles were relinquishing their grasp. His face looked strangely smooth and soft, now, as though the lines that time had carved in it had vanished in the night. His eyes had an oddly unfocused look; and he was smiling, as always, but the smile appeared to be sliding downward on the left side of his mouth. His hands were resting languidly on the bedcovers on either side of him in an eerie way: he could almost be posing for his own funerary monument. Anson could not push aside the distinct feeling that he was looking upon someone who was poised between worlds.

“Anson?” Ron said faintly.

“Here I am, Dad.”

His own voice sounded inappropriately calm to him. But what am I supposed to do? Anson wondered. Wail and shriek? Rend my hair? Rip my clothing?

Something that might have been a chuckle came from his father. “Funny thing,” Ron said, very softly. Anson had to strain to hear him. “I was such a baddie that I thought I’d live forever. I was really, really bad. It’s the good who are supposed to die young.”

“You aren’t dying, Dad!”

“Sure I am. I’m dead up to the knees already, and it’s moving north very goddamned fast. Much to my surprise, but what can you do? When your time comes, it comes. Let’s not pretend otherwise, boy.” A pause. “Listen to me, Anson. It’s all yours, now. You’re the man: the Carmichael of the hour. Of the era. The new Colonel, you are. And you’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off, won t you?” Again a pause. A frown, of sorts. He was entering some new place. “Because—the Entities—the Entities—look, I tried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—"Anson’s eyes went wide. Ron had never called him “Anse.” Who was he talking to?

“The Entities—”

Yet another pause. A very long one.

“I’m listening, Dad.”

That smile. Those eyes.

That pause that did not end.

“Dad?”

“He isn’t going to say anything else, Anson,” Cassandra told him quietly.

I ttried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—

Khalid carved a magnificent stone almost overnight. Anson made sure that he spelled Jeffrey correctly. They all stood together in the cemetery—it was still raining, the day of his burial—and Rosalie said a few words about her brother, and Paul spoke, and Peggy, and then Anson, who got as far as saying, “He was a lot better man than he thought he was,” and bit his lip and picked up the shovel.

A fog of grief hung over Anson for days. The subtraction of Ron from his life left him in a weirdly free-floating state, unchecked as he was, now, by Ron’s constant presence, his wisdom, his graceful witty spirit, his poise and balance. The loss was tremendous and irrevocable.

But then, though the sense of mourning did not recede, a new feeling began to take hold of him, a strange sense of liberation. It was as if he had been imprisoned all these years, encased within Ron’s complex, lively, mercurial self. He—sober-sided, earnest, even plodding—had never felt himself to be the fiery Ron’s equal in any way. But now Ron was gone. Anson no longer needed to fear the disapproval of that active, unpredictable mind. He could do anything he wanted, now.

Anything. And what he wanted was to drive the Entities from the world.

The words of his dying father echoed in his mind:

—The Entities—the Entities—

—You’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off—you’ll be the one—

—The one—the one—

Anson played with those words, moved them this way and that, stood them upside down and rightside up again. The one. The one. Both Ron and the Colonel, he thought—and Anse too, in a way—had lived all those years waiting, suspended in maddening inaction, dreaming of a world without the Entities but unwilling, for one reason or another, to give the order for the launching of a counterattack. But now he was in command. The Carmichael of the era, Ron had said. Was he to live a life of waiting too? To go through the slow cycle of the years up here on this mountain, looking forever toward the perfect time to strike? There would never be a perfect time. They must simply choose a time, be it perfect or not, and at long last begin to lash back at the conquerors.

There was no one to hold him back, any more. That was a little frightening, but, yes, it was liberating, too. Ron’s death seemed to him to be a signal to act.

He found himself wondering if this was some kind of manic overreaction to his father’s death.

No, Anson decided. No. It was simply that the time had come to make the big move.

The pounding in his head was starting again. That terrible pressure, the furious knuckles knocking from within. This is the time, it seemed to be saying. This is the time. This is the time.

If not now, when?

When?

Anson waited two weeks after the funeral.

On a bright, crisp morning he came striding into the chart room. “All right,” he said, looking about the room at Steve and Charlie and Paul and Peggy and Mike. “I think that the right moment to get things started has arrived. I’m sending Tony down to L.A. to take out Prime.

Nobody said a word against it. Nobody dared. This was Anson’s party all the way. He had that look in his eye, the look that came over him when something started throbbing inside his head, that unanswerable something that told him to get on with the job of saving the world.

Down there in Los Angeles, Andy was in business in a big way, or at least semi-big. Mickey Megabyte, ace pardoner. It beat sitting around the ranch listening to the sheep go baa.

He found a little apartment right in the middle of his district, just south of Wilshire, and for the first two days sat there wondering how people who needed a pardoner’s services were going to know how to find him. But they knew. It wasn’t necessary for him to beat the bushes for jobs. In his first week he did four pardoning deals, splicing himself neatly and expertly into the system to reverse a driver’s-license cancellation for a man who lived on Country Club Drive, to cancel a mystifying denial of a marriage permit for a couple from Koreatown, to arrange a visit to relatives in New Mexico for someone who had arbitrarily been refused exit passage from Los Angeles—the Entities were getting tighter and tighter about letting people move about from place to place, God only knew why, but who ever had any answers to questions about Entity policies?—and to maneuver a promotion and a raise for a LACON highway patrolman who was raising two families at opposite ends of the city.

That last one was pushing things a little, doing a hack for a LACON man, but the fellow came to Andy with valid documentation from Mary Canary saying it was safe to take on the job, and Andy risked it. It worked out. So did the others. Everybody paid promptly and Andy obediently flipped his commissions over to the guild right away and all was well.

So: the pardoning career of Mickey Megabyte had begun. Easy money for not very much work. He would begin to yearn for something more challenging after a while, he knew. But Andy didn’t expect to spend his life at this, after all. It was his plan to pile up bank accounts for himself all around the continent and then write himself an exit ticket that would let him get out of L.A. and see a little of the world.