The Alien Years

by Robert Silverberg

  Not long after the Tessa event, Andy decided that it was time to begin raking off a little of his fees from the top. Mary Canary and his gang didn’t need quite that much out of him, he figured. A little here, a little there: it could mount up very nicely.

  Soon, though, he began to see signs that they might be tapping in on him, checking on his figures. Did they suspect something, or was this just a routine check? He didn’t know. He wrote a cute little cancel that would keep them in the dark. But also he decided that he had had enough of Los Angeles for the time being. He didn’t love the place much. It was time to move along, maybe. Phoenix? New Orleans? Acapulco?

  Someplace warm, at any rate. Andy had never liked cold weather.

  At the ranch, Anson waited for a sign that the explosion in Los Angeles had had some effect on things.

  What kind of reprisal would there be—arrests, plagues, disruptions of electrical service?—and when would it come? The Entities were certainly going to send mankind a message, now, to the effect that it was unacceptable to set off bombs in the middle of a major Entity administrative district.

  There did not seem to have been any reprisal.

  Anson waited for it for weeks. Waited. Waited.

  But nothing happened. The world went on as before. Tony did not reappear, nor could he be traced via the Net; but that was no surprise. And otherwise everything was as it had been.

  Thinking about Tony was almost unbearable for him. Sickening waves of guilt came sweeping through him, dizzying him, giving him attacks of the staggers, whenever he allowed himself to dwell on his brother’s probable fate.

  Anson couldn’t understand how it had been possible for him to act on so little information—or how he could so coolly have let his brother go to his death. “I should have gone myself,” he said over and over. “I should never have let him take the risk.”

  “The Entities wouldn’t have allowed you to get within ten miles of Prime,” Steve told him. “You’d have been broadcasting your intentions every step of the way.”

  And Khalid said, “You were not someone who could have done it, Anson. Tony was the one to go. Not you. Never you.”

  Gradually Anson came to admit the truth of that, though not before his brooding had reached such a pitch of despondency that Steve and Mike and Cassandra had seriously discussed the desirability of keeping him on suicide watch. Things never came to that; but the dark cloud that had settled on Anson did not seem ever to lift, either.

  The great puzzle now was why had there been no response to the bombing. What were the Entities up to? Anson had no answer to that.

  It was almost as if they were mocking him, refusing to strike back. Saying to him, We know what you were trying to do, but we don’t give a damn. We have nothing to fear from insects like you. We are too far above you even to be angry. We are everything and you are nothing.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was nothing at all like that. The thing about aliens, Anson reminded himself, is that they are alien. Whatever we think we understand about them is wrong. We will never understand them. Never. Never. Never.

  Never.

  8

  FIFTY-TWO YEARS FROM NOW

  “Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” Andy said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

  He didn’t generally expect software to be suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—he could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff, Andy thought.

  He stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

  “Name, please,” the gatekeeper said, what could have been a century later, in its kludgy robotic gatekeeper voice.

  “John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x.”

  He extended his wrist. A moment for implant check. Tick tick tick tick. Then came confirmation. Once more Andy had bamboozled a keeper. The gate opened. He walked into Los Angeles.

  As easy as Beta Pi.

  He had forgotten how truly vast the wall that encircled Los Angeles was. Every city had its wall, but this one was something special: a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty feet thick, easily. Its gates were more like tunnels. The total mass of it was awesome. The expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle—must have been phenomenal, he thought. Considering that the wall ran completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it was at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep. That was something to think about, a wall that size. So much sweat, so much toil. Not his own personal sweat and toil, of course, but still—still—

  What were they for, all these walls?

  To remind us, Andy told himself, that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build them, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that.

  Just within the wall Andy caught sight of a few Entities walking around right out in the street, preoccupied as usual with their own mystifying business and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were high-caste ones, the boss critters, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. Andy gave them plenty of room. They had a way sometimes, he knew, of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they studied him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. Old Cindy, back at the ranch, had told tales of being snatched up that way right at the beginning of the Conquest.

  Andy didn’t think he would care for that. You didn’t get hurt, apparently, but it wasn’t dignified to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles.

  His first project after entering the city was to find himself a car. He had driven in from Arizona that morning in quite a decent late-model Buick that he had picked up in Tucson, plenty of power and style, but by now he expected that there were alerts out for it everywhere and it didn’t seem wise to try to bring it through the wall. So, with great regret, he had left it parked out there and gone in on foot.

  On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall he came upon a late-model Toshiba El Dorado that looked pretty good to him. He matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to his personal metabolic cues. The previous owner, he thought, must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.

  “Pershing Square,” he told the car.

  It had nice capacity, maybe 90 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. Andy figured he’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three quick pardons to keep his edge sharp, get himself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. Stay in L.A. a week or so, no more than that. Then head out to Hawaii, maybe. Or down to South America. Meanwhile, L.A. wasn’t such a bad place to be, this time of year. It was the middle of winter, yes, but the Los Angeles winter was a joke; that golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons. Andy was glad to be back in the big town at last, at least for a little while, after five years roving the boondocks.

  A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange, traffic suddenly began to back up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock: no way of knowing until he was there. Andy told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.

  Slipping through roadblocks could have its scary aspects and even under favorable conditions called for a lot of hard work. He preferred not to deal with them. He knew that he probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you didn’t have to?

  After some zigging and zagging, heading basically in the general
direction of the downtown towers, he asked the car where he was.

  The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. Right at the edge of downtown, looked like. He had the car drop him at Spring Street, a couple of blocks from Pershing Square. “Pick me up at 1830 hours,” Andy told it. “Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill.”

  It went away to park itself and he headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.

  It wasn’t Andy’s plan to check in with the Mary Canary syndicate. They wouldn’t welcome him very warmly, and in any case he was planning to be in town only a short while, too short for them to be able to track him down, so why split the fees with them? He’d be gone before they ever knew he was here.

  He didn’t need their help, anyway. It wasn’t hard for a good freelance pardoner to find buyers. You could see the need in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment at whatever it was that the mindless, indifferent Entity-controlled bureaucracy had done to them. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that told you right away that here was a customer, which meant somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. Andy was in business within fifteen minutes.

  The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. Surfing, once such a big thing along the coast, was pretty much extinct, Andy knew. The Entities hadn’t allowed it for ten, perhaps fifteen years—they had their plankton seines just offshore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients that seemed to be their main food, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up.

  But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the Earth’s rotation, it was easy to see what an athlete he had been. He sat down next to Andy and began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall-laborer, most likely. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.

  Andy got him talking, after a while. A surfer, yes. At least forty years old, and lost in the faraway and gone. He began sighing about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton, the old LACON training base. Sometimes the LACON guards would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his huge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week for the next ten years.”

  “Ten?” Andy said. “That’s a shitty deal.”

  “You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”

  “Some,” he said. “They buy their way out.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “It can be done, you know.”

  The surfer gave him a careful look. That was sensible, Andy thought. You never knew who might be a quisling. Collaborators and spies were everywhere. An amazing number of people loved working for the Entities.

  “It can?” the surfer asked.

  “All it takes is money,” Andy said.

  “And a pardoner.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One you can trust.”

  Andy shrugged. “There are pardoners and then there are pardoners. You’ve got to go on faith, man.”

  “Yeah,” the surfer said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, right out there on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that would have cost him?”

  “About twenty grand,” Andy said.

  “Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”

  “No guess.”

  “Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”

  “I’m not. Just visiting.”

  “That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”

  “I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”

  “Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”

  “And a seven-year labor exemption.”

  “I pulled ten,” he said.

  “I can’t get you off a ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? It would draw too much attention if I tried to nix you out of a ten-year term. But seven would work. You’d still owe them three when the exemption was up, but you could get so far from here in seven years that they’d lose you forever. You could goddamned swim to Australia in that much time. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there.”

  “You know a hell of a lot.”

  “My business to know,” Andy said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”

  “I’m worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?”

  “Just what I said. Through the wall, and seven years’ exemption.”

  “A bargain rate, hey?”

  “I take what I can get,” Andy said. “You have an implant?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. Give me your wrist. And don’t worry. This part is read-only.”

  He keyed the surfer’s data implant and patched his own in. The surfer had fifteen hundred in the bank and a collateral rating of sixteen thou, exactly as he claimed. They eyed each other very carefully now. This was a highly illegal transaction. The surfer had no way of knowing whether Andy was a quisling or not, but Andy couldn’t be sure of the surfer, either.

  “You can do it right here in the park?” the surfer asked.

  “You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you’re snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I’ll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It’s up to you to make your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits but I’m not a goddamned travel agent. Are we on?”

  The surfer put his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  It was fingertip stuff, straight circuit emulation, Andy’s standard hack. He picked up all his identification codes, carried them into Central, found the man’s records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. Andy wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Then he gave him a wall-transit pass, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. The guy didn’t think like a programmer and he didn’t look like a programmer, but the wall software wasn’t going to figure that out.

  With these moves Andy had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful who were free to go in and out of the walled cities as they wished. In return for these little favors he signed over the surfer’s entire life savings to various accounts of his, payable as arranged, part now, part later. The surfer wasn’t worth a nickel any more, but he was a free man. That wasn’t such a terrible trade-off, was it?

  And it was a valid pardon, too. Andy didn’t intend to write any stiffs while he was here. The guild might require its pardoners to write the occasional stiff, but he wasn’t working with the guild just now. And though Andy could understand the need to fudge up a pardon now and then if you were going to work the same territory for any prolonged period, he had never cared for the idea of doing it. It was offensive to his professional pride. He didn’t plan to be in town long enough, anyway, this time around, for anybody—the Entities, their human puppets, or, for tha
t matter, the guild itself—to be unduly disturbed by the skill with which he was practicing his trade.

  The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that Andy thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby blue business suit—her grandfather, perhaps—was dying to comfort her. Public crying was a good indicator, Andy knew, that someone was in bad Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” he said, and they were both so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.

  He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which of course wasn’t likely to happen: the assignments were pretty random, but they seemed rarely to be crazy, and what use would a ninety-pound girl be in hauling stone blocks around?

  The father-in-law, though, had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. That was bad news. And they had given her a TTD classification. Even worse.

  “The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see, right away, she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”

  “So you know what Area Five is, do you?” Andy said, surprised.

  “The medical experiment place. And this mark here, TTD. I know what that stands for too.”

  She began to moan again. Andy couldn’t really blame her. TTD meant Test To Destruction. So far as he understood the TTD program, it had to do with a need the Entities felt for finding out how much physical labor humans were really capable of doing. The only reliable way to discover that, apparently, was to put a sampling of the populace through tests that showed where the endurance limits lay.

  “I will die,” the woman wailed. “My babies! My babies!”