“A boy?” she asked, very faintly.
“A boy, yes.”
In the blur of her dimming vision she thought she saw something small and pinkish-brown, smeared with scarlet, resting in her stepmother’s hands. Thought she could hear him crying, even.
“Do you want to hold him?”
“No. No.” Yasmeena understood clearly that she was going. The last of her strength had left her.
“He is strong and beautiful,” said Aissha. “A splendid boy.”
“Then I am very happy.” Yasmeena fought for one last fragment of energy. “His name—is—Khalid. Khalid Haleem Burke.”
“Burke?”
“Yes. Khalid Haleem Burke.”
“Is that the father, Yasmeena? Burke?”
“Burke. Richie Burke.” With her final sliver of strength she spelled the name.
“Tell me where he lives, this Richie Burke. I will get him. This is shameful, giving birth by yourself, alone in the dark, in this awful room! Why did you never say anything? Why did you hide it from me? I would have helped. I would—”
But Yasmeena Khan was already dead. The first shaft of morning light now came through the grimy window of the upstairs storeroom. Christmas Day had begun.
Eight miles away, at Stonehenge, the Entities had finished their night’s work. Three of the towering alien creatures had supervised while a human work crew, using handheld pistol-like devices that emitted a bright violet glow, had uprooted every single one of the ancient stone slabs of the celebrated megalithic monument on windswept Salisbury Plain as though they were so many jackstraws. And had rearranged them so that what had been the outer circle of immense sandstone blocks now had become two parallel rows running from north to south; the lesser inner ring of blue slabs had been moved about to form an equilateral triangle; and the sixteen-foot-long block of sandstone at the center of the formation that people called the Altar Stone had been raised to an upright position at the center.
A crowd of perhaps two thousand people from the adjacent towns had watched through the night from a judicious distance as this inexplicable project was being carried out. Some were infuriated; some were saddened; some were indifferent; some were fascinated. Many had theories about what was going on, and one theory was as good as another, no better, no worse.
As for Khalid Haleem Burke, born on Christmas Day amidst his mother’s pain and shame and his family’s grief, he was not going to be the new Savior of mankind, however neat a coincidence that might have been. But he would live, though his mother had not, and in the fullness of time he would do his little part, strike his little blow, against the awesome beings who had with such contemptuous ease taken possession of the world into which he had been born.
On the first day of the new year, at half past four in the morning Prague time, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann achieved his first successful contact with the communications network of the Entities.
He didn’t expect it to be easy, and it wasn’t. But he wasn’t expecting to fail, and he didn’t.
—Hello, there, he said.
A good deal of information about the aliens’ data-processing systems had already been accumulated, bit by bit, by this hacker and that one, here and there around the world. And, despite the deficiencies in the old global Net that had been caused by the Entities’ interference with the steady flow of electrical power on Planet Earth at the time of the Great Silence, most of this information had already been disseminated quite extensively by way of the reconstituted post-Conquest hacker network.
Karl-Heinrich was part of that network. Operating under the cognomen of Bad Texas Vampire Lords, he had built up associations with such European and even American centers of information as Interstellar Stalin, Pirates of the Starways, Killer Crackers from Hell, Mars Incorporated, Dead Inside, and Ninth Dimension Bandits. From them, and others like them, he had picked up whatever shards of data about the Entities’ computational modes that he could find, everything incomplete, a scintilla here and a particle there, a morsel here and a scrap there.
A lot of it was wrong. Much of it was excessively hypothetical. Some of it was entirely the invention of its disseminators. But—here and there, in the two years and two months since the Conquest—certain gifted hackers had managed to learn a few things, little nuggets of fact, that actually seemed to make sense.
They had done it by interviewing anyone who had had a chance to observe the doings of the Entities at close range and seen Entity computers in action. That meant dredging through the recollections of anyone who had been taken aboard the Entity starships, for one thing. Some of these abductees were hackers themselves, who had paid very close attention. There even were hackers who had managed to infiltrate human slave-labor gangs and take part in the incomprehensible reconstruction schemes of which the Entities were so fond. There was much that could be learned from that nasty experience.
And so they had garnered a few clues about the way the invaders sorted and processed and transmitted information; and they had put it all out there on the Net for their fellow hackers to see and ponder. And out of that assortment of crumbs, dribblets, rags, tags, tatters, and wild guesses, methodically filtering out the parts that were incompatible with the rest, Karl-Heinrich had eventually put together his own internally consistent picture of how the Entity computers might operate and how they could be hacked.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann of Prague, the Czech Republic.
The Bad Texas Vampire Lords, or, rather, the solitary and peculiar boy that lurked behind that particular nom-de-Net, did not rush to share these insights with the other subversive organizations of the hacker world. It might have been useful to the cause of humanity if he had, because it would have advanced everybody’s knowledge of the situation and, very likely, led to even greater understanding. But Karl-Heinrich had never been good at sharing things. There had never been much of a way for him to learn how to do it. He was the only child of remote, austere, forbidding parents. He had never had a close friend, except via the Net, and those were always long-distance friendships, anonymous, carefully controlled. His love life, thus far, had not progressed beyond electronic voyeurism. He was an island unto himself.
Besides, he wanted full credit for cracking the Entity code. He wanted to be world-famous, the best hacker ever. He wanted to be immensely famous. If he couldn’t be loved, he could at least be admired and respected. And—who knew?—if he became famous enough, platoons of girls might stand in line outside his door for a chance to give themselves to him. Which was the thing he wanted above all else.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers.
Already, beyond any question, it had become clear to everyone who had worked on the problem that the Entities used a digital system of computation. That was welcome news. After all, being aliens, they might have had some altogether alien way of processing data that would be beyond all human fathoming. But it had turned out that even on the far-off unknown star of the Entities the good old binary system was the most efficient way of counting things, even as on primitive little Earth. Yes or no; on or off, go or no-go; positive or negative; open or closed; present or absent; one or zero—there was nothing simpler. Even for them.
The Entity mainframe computers themselves were bio-organic devices with liquid software reservoirs, apparently. In essence, huge synthetic brains. They seemed to be, as human brains are, chemically programmable, responding to hormonal inputs. But that was only an operational fact. In the most fundamental sense they could be understood to be, almost certainly, electrically operated mechanisms: again, just as human brains are. Computations were achieved by the manipulation of charge. The chemical inputs changed electrical polarities; they turned ones into zeros, presences into absences, ons into offs.
The chemical inputs, perhaps, could be duplicated electrically, just as they were in the implanted biochips that had become all the rage among hackers like
Karl-Heinrich a year or two before the invasion. Karl-Heinrich set out to try.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers. This has been the great dream of my life, and now I have achieved it.
He spent a couple of dark wintry days up on the steep hill behind Hradcany Castle, snooping around the deserted streets outside the ancient wall. It wasn’t possible to get into the castle grounds any more, of course, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t tap into electrical conduits that did. Unless the aliens could pull electricity out of the air by alien magic, they needed distribution lines for their power just like anyone else. And unless they had installed their own generating systems within the castle, which was an altogether plausible possibility, the lines had to come in from outside.
Karl-Heinrich went looking for them, and in short order he found them. He was very good at such things. When other little boys had been reading about pirates or spacemen, he was reading his father’s textbooks of electrical wiring.
Now—first contact—
Karl-Heinrich carried his own tiny computer with him at all times, an implant, right there in his forearm—a biochip no bigger than a snowflake, and even more elegant of design. It collected and deployed body warmth to amplify and transmit coded signals that opened data channels, making possible all sorts of transactions. Karl-Heinrich had been one of the first to get implanted, the day after his thirteenth birthday. Perhaps ten percent of the population, most of them young, had had implants installed by the time of the arrival of the Entities. The implant revolution, though still only in its earliest stages, had been widely seen as full of promise for the fantastic flowering future—a future which, unfortunately, the alien invasion had apparently aborted. But the implants were still in place.
Tapping into an electrical meter was child’s play for Karl-Heinrich. Any power-company meter-reader could have done it. Karl-Heinrich was something more than a meter-reader. He spent two days measuring inductances and impedances, and then, too excited now even to remember to breathe, he sent a tendril of electrical energy into the meter and through it, down a surging river of electrons, until he felt himself make contact with—
Something.
A data source. Alien data.
It made him shiver to feel the alienness of it, its shape, its internal structure, its linkage configurations. He felt as though he were walking the mysterious glades of an unutterably strange forest on an unknown world.
The system through which it was flowing was nothing like any computer he had ever known, or even imagined. Why should it have been? Nevertheless he sensed familiarity amidst the strangeness. The data, however strange, was still only data, a series of binary numbers. The shape of that digital flow was weird and bizarre and yet he felt somehow confident that it was well within the reach of ultimate comprehension by him. The alien device into which he had tapped was, after all, a system for the manipulation and storage of data in binary form. What was that, if not a computer?
And he was inside it. That was the important thing. A hot tingle of sheer intellectual joy ran through him at the contemplation of his triumph. It was almost orgasmic in its intensity. He doubted that sex itself could provide such a thrill. But of course Karl-Heinrich had very little grounds for such a comparison.
It took him quite some while to understand the particular nature of what it was that he had touched. But gradually it dawned on him that the program within which he was wandering must be the master template for the whole electrical distribution grid; and suddenly there was a map of the Entities’ electrical system superimposed on the map of the castle grounds that he had in his head.
He explored it. Very quickly he found himself trapped in a blind alley, went back, took another path. Another and another. Hit a roadblock, went around it, plunged forward.
His confidence grew from hour to hour. He was discovering things. He was learning. Things were adding up. He was piecing together correlations. He had found channels. He was getting deeper and deeper in.
The delight was intense. He had never known such pleasure.
He copied a swatch of data from an Entity computer, downloaded it into his own, and was pleased to see that he was capable of manipulating it by adding or subtracting electrical charge. He had no way of knowing what changes he was making, because the underlying data was incomprehensible to him. But it was a good start. He was able to access the information; he was even able to process it; all that was missing was some way of understanding it.
He realized that even at this primitive stage of his penetration of the system he should be able to send the Entities messages that they would be able to understand, if they had bothered to learn any of the languages of Earth. And he suspected that he could even eventually learn to reprogram their data through this line of access, if only he could figure out their computer language. But that was something to deal with later on.
He went onward, inward, wondering whether he might be sounding any alarms within the system as he went. He didn’t think so. They would have stopped him by now, if they knew that he was boring inward like this. Unless, of course, they were amused by what he was doing, watching him, applauding his progress.
Before long his head was aching miserably, but his heart had begun to swell with a gathering sense of triumph.
Karl-Heinrich was certain now that the center of everything, the main computational node, was, as was already generally suspected, inside the cathedral. He had located something major down at the far end, in the Imperial Chapel, and something almost as big in the Chapel of St. Sigismund. But these, he suspected, were subsidiary trunks. There was a huge floor-to-ceiling screen full of pulsing fights in front of the Wenceslas Chapel that was a raging circus of energy, in and out, in and out. He realized, after probing it for four or five hours, that it had to be the master interface of the whole set-up, the traffic manager for everything else on the premises.
He jacked in, via the power line, and let oceans of incomprehensible data surge through him.
The alien information came at him in a gigantic flood, too voluminous even to try to copy and download. He did not dare to attempt to process it and certainly had no way of decoding it. All it was was a stream of ones and zeros, but he had no key to help him translate the binary digits into anything meaningful. He would need some gigantic mainframe, like the one that the University once had had, even to begin making an attempt at that. The world’s mainframes were down for good, though. The Entities had blown them all out in the moment of the Great Silence and they had stayed that way. The present-day version of the Net worked by virtue of a jerry-built string of patched-together servers that was barely capable of handling ordinary traffic, let alone of processing anything as intricate as what Karl-Heinrich had stumbled upon.
But he had made contact. That was the key thing. He was on the inside.
And now, now, now, the big decision stared him in the face. Simply continue to spy in secrecy on the Entity computer as a skulking loner, soaking up all this interesting gibberish, tinkering with it on the sly purely for fun, making a nice gratifying private hobby out of it? Or should he link up with Interstellar Stalin, Ninth Dimension Bandits, and the rest of the hackers who were working at the problem of entering the Entity network, and show them what he had managed to achieve, so that they could build on his achievement and carry the process on to the next level?
The first alternative would bring him nothing but the pleasures of solitary vice. Karl-Heinrich already knew how limited those were. The second would give him a momentary flicker of fame in the hacker underground; but then others would seize what he had done and run onward with it and he would be forgotten.
But there was a third choice, and it was the one he had favored all along.
All the hacker talk of mastering Entity computer code and using the knowledge somehow to overthrow them was mere childish stupidity. Nobody was going to overthrow the Entities. They were too powerfu
l. The world was theirs, and that was that.
Accept that, then. Work with it. Offer them your services. They need an interface between themselves and humanity for the more efficient carrying-out of their purposes. Very well. Here’s an opportunity for you, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. You have everything to gain and nothing but your misery to lose.
Their signals were incomprehensible to him, but his would not be to them, and contact had been made. Very well. Do something with it.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers. This has been the great dream of my life, and now I have achieved it.
—I think I can be of great help to you. And I know that you can be of great help to me.
About seventeen hours later, on the other side of the world, someone in the Denver command headquarters of the Colorado Freedom Front keyed three handshake commands into a ten-year-old desktop computer, waited for a response from space, received it within thirty seconds, and keyed in four further commands. This time they were the signals that would activate the laser cannon in orbit 22,000 miles overhead.
These commands required acknowledgment, which came, and repetition, which was given.
From the military satellite overhead there now instantly descended a crackling bolt of energy in the form of an intensely focused beam of light, which homed in on the compound in which the Denver Entity forces had set up their operations, and for the next ninety seconds bathed its central building in flame. What effect this action had on the Entities within the building was not possible to determine, and, indeed, was destined never to be known.
But evidently it caused them some distress, for there were two immediate retaliatory consequences, both of them quite harsh.
The first was that electrical power began going off all over the Earth almost at once. In the initial few days the outages were spotty and irregular, but then a total planetwide interdiction took hold. The power stayed off for the next thirty-nine days, an outage more severe and disruptive than the so-called Great Silence of two years previously. With all electronic communication knocked out, it became impossible, among other things, for the members of the Colorado Freedom Front to carry out the additional laser strikes that had been planned to follow the opening salvo in the so-called War of Liberation.
The Alien Years Page 17
