The Alien Years

by Robert Silverberg

  “Not just the roads. Everywhere. A huge wall clear around the whole city.”

  “You aren’t serious!”

  “No? You want to see?”

  He had not been any closer to Los Angeles than this park itself since the day, ten years before, that his father and mother had thrown in their lot with the old Colonel at the mountaintop ranch. There was no occasion ever to go there. These days you needed to get an entry permit from LACON, the administrative body that ran the city on behalf of the Entities, for one thing. Besides, the place was said to have become a huge teeming slum, ugly and dangerous; and such contact as was necessary to maintain with Resistance operatives there could be and was maintained via on-line means, safe enough so long as proper coding precautions were observed.

  But a wall around all of Los Angeles, if the Entities were really constructing such a thing: that was news, that was something that they needed to know about back at the ranch. The existing limitations on entry and departure were purely bureaucratic ones, a matter of documents and electronic checkpoints. An actual tangible wall would be a surprising new development in the ongoing tightening of Entity control of human life. He wondered why no word of it had reached them from Andy Jackman or one of the other Resistance agents within the city.

  “Show me,” Steve said.

  Lisa drove. It was a slow, difficult business. They had to take all mountain roads, because of the long-standing blockage on Highway 101 and some new problem on the Pacific Coast Highway just before Malibu, a rock slide during a recent rainy spell that had never been cleared away. She was forced to turn inland at Mulholland Highway, and then to wiggle interminably onward along one narrow pot-holed road after another, going through sparsely inhabited high country that was rapidly reverting to a primitive state, until at last they emerged onto Highway 101 beyond the Agoura end of the zone where it had been walled off. Steve wondered why the Entities were bothering to have Los Angeles itself surrounded by a wall, when it was this difficult to access already.

  “The new wall cuts in at Topanga Canyon Boulevard,” Lisa said, but that name meant nothing to him. They were traveling eastward through steep, hilly countryside along a wide freeway in a relatively good state of repair. There was practically no traffic. He could see that this once had been a heavily populated region. The crumbling ruins of sprawling shopping malls and large residential subdivisions were still apparent everywhere, on both sides of the road.

  Just before an exit that was marked Calabasas Parkway Lisa braked suddenly, startling him.

  “Oops: sorry. Checkpoint up ahead. I almost forgot.”

  “Checkpoint?”

  “Nothing to worry about. I’ve got the password.”

  A ramshackle array of wooden sawhorses blocked the freeway before them. A couple of LACON Highway Patrol officers were sitting by the side of the road. As Lisa drew up, one of them wandered out and held a scanner out toward her. She rolled her window down and pressed her implant against its sensor plate. A green light flashed, and the patrolman waved them onward, through the zigzagging assemblage of sawhorses and back onto the open freeway. A routine affair.

  “Now,” Lisa said, some minutes later. “Look there.”

  She pointed ahead. And he saw the new wall, rising beyond and below them, where the subsidiary highway labeled Topanga Canyon Boulevard ran at right angles to their freeway.

  It was made of square concrete blocks, like the pair that cut a big section out of Highway 101 behind them from Thousand Oaks to Agoura. But this wall didn’t simply close off the hundred-foot width of the freeway, as the other ones did. It was a great long dinosaur of a thing that stretched as far as the eye could see, up and down the land. It came curving down out of the region to the northeast, which was or at least once had been a densely occupied suburb, and not only crossed the highway but continued on south of it, disappearing in a gently bending arc that appeared to head on down to the coast.

  The wall looked to be about a dozen feet high, Steve thought, judging its height by the size of the men in the work crews bustling about it. It wasn’t as easy to guess how thick it was, but it appeared to be seriously substantial, even deeper than it was high: an astoundingly massive barrier, far thicker than any imaginable wall would need to be.

  She said, “It gets to the coast near Pacific Palisades, and runs right down the middle of the Pacific Coast Highway to somewhere around Redondo Beach. Then it turns inland, and goes on eastward past Long Beach, where it peters out. But I hear that they plan to extend it back northward along the route of the Long Beach Freeway until it reaches to around Pasadena, and then they’ll close the circuit. It’s really only just in the beginning stages, you know. Especially what you see here. There are places off to the north of here where it’s already two and three times as high as this section of it in front of us.”

  Steve whistled. “But what’s it all for? The Entities have us where they want us already, haven’t they? Why put in so much effort building a stupid enormous wall around Los Angeles?”

  “It isn’t their effort that’s being put in,” Lisa said, and laughed. “Anyway, who understands anything about what the Entities want? They don’t explain anything, you know. They just give a Push, and we do what we’re Pushed to do, and that’s all there is to it. You know that.”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  He sat there with her for a long while, numbed by the incomprehensible magnitude of the vast project that was under way before them. Hundreds of workers, swarming about the wall like so many ants, were hard at work lifting new blocks into place with mighty cranes, squaring them off, mortaring them. How high was the wall ultimately going to get? Twenty feet? Thirty? And forty or fifty feet deep? Why? Why?

  There wasn’t enough time for them to go to their secluded grove in the park that day, not if Steve hoped to get back to the ranch at any reasonable hour. But they made love anyway, in the car, twisted around crazily, Lisa’s legs splayed up over the backseat as they parked in a turnout along Mulholland—a frenzied, breathless, uncomfortable coupling, but it was unthinkable for him to go home without their having done it. He reached the ranch at ten that evening, rumpled, tired, a little depressed. He had never come back from a day with Lisa depressed before.

  As Steve put together a late dinner for himself, his uncle Ron appeared, winked, salaciously pumped his fisted arm back and forth, and said, “Hey, boy, that was a long day you put in, gone by dawn, back after dark. You do the old razzmatazz a couple of extra times today?”

  Steve reddened. “Come on, Ron. Let me be.” But he couldn’t help being amused and flattered. Secretly it pleased him that Ron would talk to him this way, one man to another, tacitly acknowledging the fact that his fat, nerdy little nephew Steve had made the transition into manhood.

  He had decided some time ago that the jaunty, somehow slightly disreputable Uncle Ron was his favorite member of the family. He had heard, of course, that Ron had been pretty wild when he was younger, involved in all sorts of dodgy and probably illicit financial deals and maneuvers back in the days before the Entities came. But there was no sign that he was involved in any of that stuff now, such of it as might still be possible to carry on.

  So far as Steve could see, Ron was the real center of the family: keen-witted and hardworking, a dedicated Resistance leader, probably the real king-pin of the whole operation. In theory Anse was in command now, by direct succession from the aging, increasingly feeble Colonel, who still held the official rank of chairman. But Anse drank. Ronnie worked. He was the one who was constantly in touch, thanks to the on-line skills of his brother-in-law Doug and his cousin Paul and his nephew Steve, with Resistance people all around the world, coordinating their findings, keeping everything moving along, as well as anyone could, toward the distant ultimate goal of human liberation. And he was good company, too, Steve thought. So different from the brooding Anse and his own glum, humorless father Doug.

  Steve said, grinning up from his soup, “Did you know they’re building
a wall all the way around Los Angeles?”

  “Been some rumors about that, yes.”

  “They’re true. I saw it. Lisa took me there. Through the mountains to the far side of the Highway 101 blockade, and then down the highway to where they’re doing the construction work. The new wall crosses 101 at a place called Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It’s a real monster. You can’t believe the size of it, Ron, the height, the width, the way it goes on and on and on.”

  Ron’s chilly blue eyes were studying him shrewdly.

  “There’s a LACON checkpoint, isn’t there, between Agoura and Calabasas? How were you able to get through it, fella?”

  “You know about that?” Steve asked. “Then you even know about the wall, don’t you? And not just from rumors.”

  Ron shrugged. “We try to keep on top of things. We have people out there moving around all the time.—How did you get through the Calabasas checkpoint, Steve?”

  “Lisa had the password software. She put her implant right to the highway patrolman’s scanner, and—”

  “She what?” His whole face tightened up. A vein popped into sudden prominence on his forehead.

  “Gave the password with her implant. Jesus, Ron, you look absolutely appalled!”

  “She lives in Ventura, your girlfriend, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “All existing entry permits to Los Angeles for Ventura County people and beyond were revoked by LACON a couple of months ago. Except for those people living in the outer counties who work for the Entities and might have reason to commute into the city, and members of their families.”

  “Except for—people who work for—”

  “My God,” Ron said. Steve felt those eyes of his cutting into him in a way that was almost impossible to bear. “You know what kind of a girlfriend you’ve got, boy? You’ve got yourself a quisling. And she’s a computer nut too, right? A real borgmann, I bet. From a whole family of quislings and borgmanns. Oh, kiddo, kiddo, kiddo, what have you done? What have you done?”

  It was after the time that Richie beat Aissha so severely, and then did worse than that—violated her, raped her—that Khalid definitely decided that he was going to kill an Entity.

  Not Richie. An Entity.

  It was a turning point in Khalid’s relationship with his father, and indeed in Khalid’s whole life, and in the life of any number of other citizens of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, that time when Richie hurt Aissha so. Richie had been treating Aissha badly all along, of course. He treated everyone badly. He had moved into her house and had taken possession of it as though it were his own. He regarded her as a servant, there purely to do his bidding, and woe betide her if she failed to meet his expectations. She cooked; she cleaned the house; Khalid understood now that sometimes, at his whim, Richie would make her come into his bedroom to amuse him or his friend Syd or both of them together. And there was never a word of complaint out of her. She did as he wished; she showed no sign of anger or even resentment; she had given herself over entirely to the will of Allah. Khalid, who had found no convincing evidence of Allah’s existence, had not. But he had learned the art of accepting the unacceptable from Aissha. He knew better than to try to change what was unchangeable. So he lived with his hatred of Richie, and that was merely a fact of daily existence, like the fact that rain did not fall upward.

  Now, though, Richie had gone too far.

  Coming home plainly drunk, red-faced, enraged over something, muttering to himself. Greeting Aissha with a growling curse, Khalid with a stinging slap. No apparent reason for either. Demanding his dinner early. Getting it, not liking what he got. Aissha offering mild explanations of why beef had not been available today. Richie shouting that beef bloody well should have been available to the household of Richie Burke.

  So far, just normal Richie behavior when Richie was having a bad day. Even sweeping the serving-bowl of curried mutton off the table, sending it shattering, thick oily brown sauce splattering everywhere, fell within the normal Richie range.

  But then, Aissha saying softly, despondently, looking down at what had been her prettiest remaining sari now spotted in twenty places, “You have stained my clothing.” And Richie going over the top. Erupting. Berserk. Wrath out of all measure to the offense, if offense there had been.

  Leaping at her, bellowing, shaking her, slapping her. Punching her, even. In the face. In the chest. Seizing the sari at her midriff, ripping it away, tearing it in shreds, crumpling them and hurling them at her. Aissha backing away from him, trembling, eyes bright with fear, dabbing at the blood that seeped from her cut lower lip with one hand, spreading the other one out to cover herself at the thighs.

  Khalid staring, not knowing what to do, horrified, furious.

  Richie yelling. “I’ll stain you, I will! I’ll give you a sodding stain!” Grabbing her by the wrist, pulling away what remained of her clothing, stripping her all but naked right there in the dining room. Khalid covering his face. His own grandmother, forty years old, decent, respectable, naked before him: how could he look? And yet how could he tolerate what was happening? Richie dragging her out of the room, now, toward his bedroom, not troubling even to close the door. Hurling her down on his bed, falling on top of her. Grunting like a pig, a pig, a pig, a pig.

  I must not permit this.

  Khalid’s breast surged with hatred: a cold hatred, almost dispassionate. The man was inhuman, a jinni. Some jinn were harmless, some were evil; but Richie was surely of the evil kind, a demon.

  His father. An evil jinni.

  But what did that make him? What? What? What? What?

  Khalid found himself going into the room after them, against all prohibitions, despite all risks. Seeing Richie plunked between Aissha’s legs, his shirt pulled up, his trousers pulled down, his bare buttocks pumping in the air. And Aissha staring upward past Richie’s shoulder at the frozen Khalid in the doorway, her face a rigid mask of horror and shame: gesturing to him, a repeated brushing movement of her hand through the air, telling him to go away, to get out of the room, not to watch, not to intervene in any way.

  He ran from the house and crouched cowering amid the rubble in the rear yard, the old stewpots and broken jugs and his own collection of Arch’s empty whiskey bottles. When he returned, an hour later, Richie was in his room, chopping malevolently at the strings of his guitar, singing tunelessly in a low, boozy voice. Aissha was dressed again, moving about in a slow, downcast way, cleaning up the mess in the dining room. Sobbing softly. Saying nothing, not even looking at Khalid as he entered. A sticking-plaster on her lip. Her cheeks looked puffy and bruised. There seemed to be a wall around her. She was sealed away inside herself, sealed from all the world, even from him.

  “I will kill him,” Khalid said quietly to her.

  “No. That you will not do.” Her voice was deep and remote, a voice from the bottom of the sea.

  Aissha gave him a little to eat, a cold chapati and some of yesterday’s rice, and sent him to his room. He lay awake for hours, listening to the sounds of the house, Richie’s endless drunken droning song, Aissha’s barely audible sobs. In the morning nobody said anything about anything.

  Khalid understood that it was impossible for him to kill his own father, however much he hated him. But Richie had to be punished for what he had done. And so, to punish him, Khalid was going to kill an Entity.

  The Entities were a different matter. They were fair game.

  For some time now, on his better days, Richie had been taking Khalid along with him as he drove through the countryside, doing his quisling tasks, gathering information that the Entities wanted to know and turning it over to them by some process that Khalid could not even begin to understand, and by this time Khalid had seen Entities on so many different occasions that he had grown quite accustomed to being in their presence.

  And had no fear of them. To most people, apparently, Entities were scary things, ghastly alien monsters, evil, strange; but to Khalid they still were, as they always ha
d been, creatures of enormous beauty. Beautiful the way a god would be beautiful. How could you be frightened by anything so beautiful? How could you be frightened of a god?

  They didn’t ever appear to notice him at all. Richie would go up to one of them and stand before it, and some kind of transaction would take place. While that was going on, Khalid simply stood to one side, looking at the Entity, studying it, lost in admiration of its beauty. Richie offered no explanations of these meetings and Khalid never asked.

  The Entities grew more beautiful in his eyes every time he saw one. They were beautiful beyond belief. He could almost have worshipped them. It seemed to him that Richie felt the same way about them: that he was caught in their spell, that he would gladly fall down before them and bow his forehead to the ground.

  And so.

  I will kill one of them, Khalid thought.

  Because they are so beautiful. Because my father, who works for them, must love them almost as much as he loves himself, and I will kill the thing he loves. He says he hates them, but I think it is not so: I think he loves them, and that is why he works for them. Or else he loves them and hates them both. He may feel the same way about himself. But I see the light that comes into his eyes when he looks upon them.

  So I will kill one, yes. Because by killing one of them I will be killing some part of him. And maybe there will be some other value in my doing it, besides.

  4

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS FROM NOW

  These years, the years of alien rule, had been good years for Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. When he was sixteen, living out his dark and lonely adolescent days, he had wanted prestige, power, fame. He was twenty-nine now, and he had them all.

  Prestige, certainly.

  He knew more about the Entities’ communications systems, and probably about the Entities themselves, than anyone else on Earth. That was a widely known fact. Everyone in Prague knew it; perhaps everyone on the planet. He was the master communicator, the conduit through whom the Entities spoke to the people of the world. He was the Maharajah of Data. He was Borgmann the borgmann. There was prestige in that, certainly. You had to respect someone who had achieved what he had achieved, however you might feel about the morality of the achievement.