The Alien Years (16 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling almost shyly, plainly still mystified. “I’m afraid I don’t recall—look, I’ve got to go, I’m meeting some friends from the University here—”

Push onward, he ordered himself sternly.

He moistened his lips. “What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line!” He was astounded to hear himself say a thing like that, so fantastic, so untrue. But he waved his arm in a vague way in the direction of the river, and of the great looming medieval bulk of Hradcany Castle high on its hill beyond it, where the Entities had made their headquarters in the lofty halls of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. “Isn’t that extraordinary? The first direct entry into their system. I’m dying to tell someone all about it, and it would make me very happy if you—if we—you and I—if we could—” He was babbling now, and knew it.

Her sea-green eyes were dishearteningly remote. “I’m terribly sorry. My friends are waiting inside.”

Not only taller than he, but a year or two older. And as beautiful and unattainable as the rings of Saturn.

He wanted to say, Look, I know everything about your body, I know the shape of your breasts and the size of your nipples and I know that your hair down below is dark instead of blonde and that you’ve got a little brown birthmark on the left side of your belly, and I think you’re absolutely beautiful and if you will only let me undress you and touch you a little I will worship you forever like a goddess.

But Karl-Heinrich said none of that, said nothing at all, just stood mute where he was, looking longingly at her as though she were a goddess in actual feet, Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, and she gave him another sad little perplexed smile and turned from him and went into the coffee shop, leaving him alone and crimson-cheeked and gaping like a fish in the street.

He felt shock and anger, although no real surprise, at the rejection. He felt great sadness. But also, he realized, a touch of relief. She was too beautiful for him: a cold pale fire that would consume him if he came too near. He would only have behaved like a fool if she had gone inside with him, anyway. In his reckless hungry overeagerness, he knew, he would have ruined things almost immediately.

Beautiful girls were so frightening. But necessary. Necessary. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Why, though, did it always end like this for him?

A swirling gust of snowy wind came roaring down the square at him and sent him shivering off toward the north, lost in a daze of bitter self-pity. Aimlessly, planlessly, he went wandering up along Melantrichova and into the maze of ancient little cobblestoned streets leading to the river. In ten minutes he was at the Charles Bridge, peering across at the somber mass of Hradcany Castle dominating the other bank.

They didn’t floodlight the castle any more, now that the Entities were here. But you could still make it out, the great heavy blackness of it on the hill, blotting out the stars of the western sky.

The whole castle area was sealed off now, not just the cathedral but the museums, the courtyards, the old royal palace, the gardens, and all the rest that had made the place so attractive to tourists. Not that there were any tourists coming to Prague these days, of course. Karl-Heinrich’s mind summoned the image of the gigantic aliens, the Entities, moving around within the cathedral as they went about their unfathomable tasks. He thought with some astonishment of the boast that had so unexpectedly sprung from his lips.
What I
’
ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line!
Of course there was no truth to it. But could it be done? he wondered. Could it? Could it?

I’ll show her, he thought wildly. Yes.

Go up to the castle. Break in somehow. Connect with their computers. There has to be a way. It’s only a sequence of electrical impulses; even they need to use something like that, ultimately, in any sort of computational device. It will be an interesting experiment: an intellectual challenge. I am a failure with women but I have a very fine mind that needs constantly to be kept in play so that its edge will remain keen. I must forever improve my own range of mental ability through constant striving toward excellence.

And so. Connect with them. And not just connect! Open a line of communication with them. Offer to teach them things about our computers that they can’t possibly know and want to learn. Be useful to them. Somebody has to be. They are here to stay; they are our masters now.

Be useful to them, that’s the thing to do.

Earn their respect and admiration. I can be very helpful, that I know. Get them to trust me, to like me, to become dependent on me, to offer me nice rewards for my further cooperation.

And then—

Make them give her to me as a slave.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Anse said, “You won’t fuck around with him, will you, Ronnie? Promise me that. You won’t do a single goddamn thing to ruin the old man’s Christmas.”

“Cross my heart,” Ron said. “Last thing I would want, anything that would hurt him. It’s all up to him. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t start in. If he goes easy on me, I won’t have any quarrel with him. But remember, this was your idea, my coming up here.” Wearing only a bath towel around his waist, he moved briskly about the room, fastidiously unpacking, arranging his things just so, his shirts, his socks, his belts, his trousers. Ron was a very tidy man, Anse thought. Even a little prissy.

“His
idea,” Anse said.

“Same thing. You be of one blood, you and he.”

“And so are you. Keep it in mind, is all I ask, all right?” They were four years apart in age, and they had never liked each other very much, though the animosity between them was nothing at all compared with that between Ronnie and his father. While they were growing up Anse had rarely been amused by Ronnie’s habit of borrowing things from him without troubling to ask—sneakers, joints, girlfriends, cars, liquor, et cetera et cetera et cetera—but he hadn’t regarded Ronnie’s lighthearted unprincipled ways with the same sort of lofty condemnation that the Colonel had. “You’re his son and he loves you, whatever has gone on between you over the years, and this is Christmas and the whole family is together, and I don’t want you to make trouble.”

Ronnie glanced back over his meaty shoulder. “Enough already, Anse. I told you I’d be good. What do you say, bro? Can we let it go at that?” He selected a shirt from the dozen or more that he had brought with him, unfolded it and tweaked the fabric thoughtfully between two fingers, shook his head, selected another from the stack, unbuttoned it with maddening precision and began to put it on. —”You have any idea why he wants us all here, Anse? Other than it being Christmas?”

“Isn’t Christmas enough?”

“When you came down to see me in La Jolla you told me that you thought something special was up, that it was important for me to come. Urgent, even, you said.”

“Right. But I don’t have a clue.”

“Could it be that he’s sick? Something really serious?”

Anse shook his head. “I don’t think so. He looks pretty healthy to me. A little run-down, that’s all. Working too hard. He’s supposed to be retired, but in fact he’s become involved in some way in the government, you know. What passes for a government now. They pulled him out of retirement after the Conquest, or he pulled himself out. He keeps a lid on the details, but he told me he recently led a delegation to the Entities in an attempt to open negotiations with them.”

Ronnie’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? Tell me more.”

“That’s all I know.”

“Fascinating. Fascinating.” Ronnie tossed his towel aside, slipped on a pair of undershorts, set about the process of selecting the perfect slacks for the evening. He rejected one pair, two, three, and was studying a fourth quizzically, tugging at one tip and then the other of his drooping blond mustache, when Anse, beginning now to lose the very small quantity of patience that he had for his brother, said, “Do you think you can move it along a little, Ron? It’s practically seven. The before-dinner drinks are called for seven sharp and he’s expecting us in the rec room right now. You remember how he is about punctuality, I hope.”

Ronnie laughed softly. “I really bug you, don’t I, Anse?”

“Anybody who needs to spend fifteen minutes picking out a shirt and a pair of pants for an informal family dinner would bug me.”

“It’s been five years since he and I last saw each other. I want to look good for him.”

“Right. Right.”

“Tell me something else,” Ronnie said, choosing trousers at last and stepping into them. “Who’s the woman who showed me to my room? Peggy, she said her name was.”

There was something in his brother’s eyes suddenly, a glint, that Anse didn’t like.

“His secretary. Woman from Los Angeles, but he met her in Washington when he went back there for a meeting at the Pentagon right after the Invasion. She was actually taken captive by the Entities the first day, in the shopping-mall thing, the way Cindy was, and she was in

Washington to tell the chiefs of staff what she had seen. She ran into Cindy while she was aboard the alien ship, incidentally.”

“Small world.”

“Very small. Peggy says she thought Cindy was pretty nutty.”

“No argument there. And Peggy and the Colonel—?”

“Colonel needed someone to help him with the ranch, and he liked her and she didn’t seem to have any entanglements in L.A., so he asked her to come up here. That’s about all I know about her.”

“Quite an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”

Anse let his eyes glide shut for a moment, and breathed slowly in and out.

“Don’t mess with her, Ron.”

“For Christ’s sake, Anse! I simply made an innocent comment!”

“The last innocent comment you made was ‘Goo goo goo,’ and you were seven months old.”

“Anse—”

“You know what I’m telling you. Leave her alone.”

An incredulous look came into Ronnie’s eyes. “Are you saying that she and the Colonel—that he—that they—”

“I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it very much.”

“If there’s nothing between them, then, and I happen to be here by myself this weekend and she happens to be an unattached single woman—”

“She’s important to the Colonel. She keeps this place running and I suspect that she keeps him running. I know what you do to women’s heads, and I don’t want you doing anything to hers.”

“Fuck you, Anse.” Very calmly, almost amiably.

“And you, bro. Will you be kind enough to put your shoes on, now, so that we can go up front and have drinks with our one and only father?”

For the past hour the locus of the tension had gone sliding downward in the Colonel’s body from his head to his chest to his midsection, and now it was all gathered around his lower abdomen like a band of white-hot iron. In all his years in Vietnam he had never felt such profound uneasiness, verging on fear, as he did while waiting now for his reunion with his last-born child.

But in a war, he thought, you really only need to worry about whether your enemy will kill you or not, and with enough intelligence and enough luck you can manage to keep that from happening. Here, though, the enemy was himself, and the problem was self-control. He had to hold himself in check no matter what, refrain from lashing out at the son who had been such a grievous disappointment to him. This was the family Christmas. He dared not ruin it, and ruining it was what he feared. The Colonel had never particularly been afraid of dying, or of anything else, very much, but he was afraid now that at his first glimpse of Ronnie he would unload all the stored-up anger that was in his heart, and everything would be spoiled.

Nothing like that occurred. Anse came into the room with Ronnie half a step behind him; and the Colonel, who was standing at the sideboard with Rosalie on one side of him and Peggy on the other, felt his heart melting in an instant at the sight at long last, here in his own house, of his big, blocky, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked second son. The problem became not one of holding his anger in check but of holding back his tears.

It would be all right, the Colonel thought in giddy relief. Blood was still thicker than water, even now.

“Ronnie—Ronnie, boy—”

“Hey, Dad, you’re looking good! After all this time.”

“And you. Put on a little weight, haven’t you? But you were always the chunky one of the family. Plus you’re not a boy any more, after all.”

“Thirty-nine next month. One year away from miserable antiquity. Oh, Dad—Dad—it’s been such a goddamn long time—” Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, a big messy embrace, Ronnie slapping his hands lustily against the Colonel’s back and the Colonel heartily squeezing Ronnie’s ribs, and then they were apart again and the Colonel was fixing drinks, the stiff double Scotch that he knew Ronnie preferred and sherry for Anse, who never drank anything stronger nowadays; and Ronnie was going around the room hugging people, his sister Rosalie first, then Carole, then his moody cousin Helena and her even- tempered brother Paul, and then a big hello for Rosalie’s clunky husband Doug Gannett and their overweight blotchy-faced kid Steve, and a whoop and a holler for Anse’s kids, sweeping them up into the air all three together, the twins and Jill—