The Alien Years (38 page)

Khalid was pleased to see, not long after the plane had taken off, that she was still on board. She emerged from the front compartment, walking carefully in the steeply climbing plane, and halted when she reached the mattress where Khalid and the North African man were sitting.

“May I join you?” she asked.

“You need to ask permission, do you?” said Khalid.

“A little politeness never hurts.”

He shrugged. She spiraled down next to him, lowering herself to the floor in a quick, graceful way that belied her age, and folded herself up opposite him on the mattress with her legs crossed neady, ankles to knees.

“You’re Khalid, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Cindy. You’re very pretty, Khalid, do you know that? I love the tawny color of your skin. Like a lion’s, it is. And that crop of dense bushy hair.” When he offered no reply, she said, “You’re an artist, I understand.”

“I make things, yes.”

“I made things once, too. And I was also pretty, once, for that matter.”

She smiled and winked at him, rendering Khalid somehow a co-conspirator in the agreement that she had once been pretty. It hadn’t occurred to him before this that she might have been an attractive woman once upon a time, but now, taking a close look at her, he saw that it was quite possible that she had been: a small and energetic person, trimly built, with delicate features and those bright, bright eyes. Her smile was still very appealing. And the wink. He liked that wink. She was definitely unlike any quisling he had ever encountered. With his artist’s eye he edited out the grooves and wrinkles that her sixty years had carved in her face, restored the darkness and glossiness of her hair, gave her skin the freshness of youth. Yes, he thought. No doubt quite pretty thirty or forty years ago.

“What are you, Khalid?” she said. “Some sort of Indian? At least in part.”

“Pakistani. My mother was.”

“And your father?”

“English. A white man. I never knew him. He was a quisling, people told me.”

“I’m
a quisling.”

“Lots of people are quislings,” Khalid said. “It makes no difference to me.”

“Well,” she said. And said nothing further for a while, simply sat there cross-legged, her eyes looking into his as though she were studying him. Khalid looked back amiably. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. Let her stare, if she wanted to.

Then she said, “Are you angry about something?”

“Angry? Me? What is there to be angry about? I never get angry at all.”

“On the contrary. I think you’re angry all the time.”

“You are certainly free to think that.”

“You seem very calm,” she said. “That’s one of the things that makes you so interesting, how cool you are, how you just shrug within yourself at everything that happens to you and around you. It’s the first thing anyone would notice about you. But that kind of calmness can sometimes be a mask for seething anger. You could have a volcano inside you that you don’t want to allow to erupt, and so you keep a lid on it a hundred percent of the time. A hundred twenty percent of the time. What do you think of that theory, Khalid?”

“Aissha, who raised me like a mother because my mother died when I was born, taught me to accept the will of Allah in whatever form it might manifest itself. Which I have done.”

“A very wise philosophy. Islam: the word itself means ‘absolute submission,’ right? Surrendering yourself to God. I’ve studied these things, you know. —Who was Aissha?”

“My mother’s mother. Her stepmother, really. She was like a mother to me. A very good woman.”

“Undoubtedly she was. And I think you’re a very, very angry man.”

“You are certainly free to think that,” said Khalid again.

Half an hour later, as Khalid sat by the window peering incuriously out at the vast island-dotted blue sea that stretched before him, she came back again and once more asked if she might sit down with him. Such politeness on the part of administrators puzzled him, but he beckoned her with an open palm to do as she pleased. She slipped with wonderful ease again into the cross-legged position.

With a nod toward Mulay ben Dlimi, who sat with his back against the wall of the plane, eyes veiled as though he were in a trance, she said, “Does he really not understand English?”

“He never appeared to. We had a woman in our group who spoke to him in French. He didn’t ever say a word to any of the rest of us.”

“Sometimes people understand a language but still don’t want to speak it.”

“I suppose that’s so,” said Khalid.

She inclined her torso toward the North African and said, “Do you know any English at all?”

He glanced blankly at her, then off into space again.

“Not even a word?” she asked.

Still no response.

Smiling pleasantly, she said, in a polite conversational tone, “Your mother was a whore in the marketplace, Mulay ben Dlimi. Your father fucked camels. You yourself are the grandson of a pig.”

Mulay ben Dlimi shook his head mildly. He went on staring into space.

“You really don’t understand me even a bit, do you?” said Cindy. “Or else you’ve got yourself under even tighter control than Khalid, here. Well, God bless you, Mulay ben Dlimi. I guess it’s safe for me to say anything I want in front of you.” She turned back to Khalid. “Well, now. Let’s get down to business. Would you ever do anything that’s against the law?”

“What law do you mean? What law is there in this world?”

“Other than Allah’s, you mean?”

“Other than that, yes. What law is there?” he asked again.

In a low voice she said, leaning close to his ear, “Listen carefully to me. I’m tired of working for them, Khalid. I’ve been their loyal handmaiden for twenty-odd years and that’s about enough. When they first arrived I thought it was a miraculous thing that they had come to Earth, and it could have been, but it didn’t work out right. They didn’t share any of their greatness with us. They simply
used
us, and never even told us what they were using us
for.
Also they promised to show me their world, you know. But they didn’t deliver. They were going to take me there as an ambassador from Earth: I’m sure that’s what they were telling me with their minds. They didn’t, though. They lied to me, or else I was imagining everything and I was lying to myself. Well, either way, to hell with them, Khalid. I don’t want to be their quisling any more.”

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“What do you know about the geography of the United States?”

“Nothing whatever. It is a very big country very far away, that’s all I know.”

“Nevada,” she said, “which is the place where we’re heading, is a dry empty useless place where nobody in his right mind would want to live. But it’s right next door to California, and California is where I come from. I want to go home, Khalid.”

“Yes. I suppose you do. How does this concern me?”

“I come from the city of Los Angeles. You’ve heard of Los Angeles? Good. —It’s about three hundred miles, I would guess, from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Los Angeles. Most of the way, it’s pretty bleak country. A desert, actually. One woman traveling alone, those three hundred miles, might run into problems. Even a tough old dame like me. You see where this might concern you?”

“No. I am in permanent detention.”

“A situation that could be reversed by a simple recoding of your registration. I could do that for you, just as I arranged to put myself aboard this plane. We could leave the detention compound together and no one would say a word. And you would accompany me to Los Angeles.”

“I see. And then I would be free, once I was in Los Angeles?”

“Free as a bird, Khalid.”

“Yes. But in detention they give me a place to sleep and food to eat. In Los Angeles, a place where I know no one, where I will understand nothing—”

“It’s beautiful there. Warm all year round, and flowers blooming everywhere. The people are friendly. And I’d help you. I’d see that things went well for you there. —Look, we won’t be getting to the States for a couple of days. Think about it, Khalid, between now and then.”

He thought about it. They flew from Turkey to Italy, stopping there to refuel, in Rome, and they refueled again in Paris, and then they stopped in Iceland, and after that came a long dreamlike time of flying over a land of ice and snow, until they landed again somewhere in Canada. These were only names to Khalid. Los Angeles was only a name, too. He rotated all these names in his mind, and from time to time he slept, and once in a while he pondered the quisling woman Cindy’s offer.

It occurred to him that it might all be a trick of some kind, a trap, but then he asked himself what purpose they would have in snaring him, when he was already their prisoner and they could do anything they wished with him anyway. Then, later, he found himself wondering whether he should ask her if they could take Krzysztof with them too, because Krzysztof was a cheerful, good-hearted man, and Khalid was fond of him, as much as he was capable of being fond of anyone, and, besides, the sturdy Krzysztof might be a useful person to have with them on the journey across that desert. And, wondering that, he realized that he had somehow managed to make his decision without noticing that he had.

“I can’t take him, no,” Cindy said. “I can’t risk getting two of you free. If you won’t come, I’ll ask him. But it can only be one or the other of you.”

“Well, then,” Khalid said. “So be it.”

He regretted leaving Krzysztof behind: as much as he was capable of regretting anything, at any rate. But that was how it had to be, was it not? And so that was how it would be.

Nevada was the ugliest place he had ever seen or even imagined, a nightmare land so different from green and pleasant England that he could almost believe he was on some other planet. It seemed as though no rain had fallen here for five hundred years. Turkey had been hot and dry, too, but in Turkey there were farms everywhere, and the ocean nearby, and trees on the hills. Here there seemed to be only sand and rocks and dust, and occasional gnarly shrubs, and dark twisted little mountains farther back that had no vegetation on them at all. And the heat came down out of the sky like a metal weight, pressing down, pressing, pressing, pressing.

The city where their long plane journey had ended, Las Vegas, was ugly too, but at least its ugliness was of a kind that amused the eye, no two buildings alike, one resembling an Egyptian pyramid and one a Roman palace and others like structures out of strange dreams or fantasies, and everything of such colossal size. Khalid would have preferred to remain longer in Las Vegas, to make a few sketches of those peculiar buildings that would fix them more firmly in his memory. But he and Cindy were out of Las Vegas almost as soon as they arrived, heading off together into the grim, terrible desert that surrounded it.

She had, somehow, arranged to get the use of a car to take them to Los Angeles. “You are being transferred now from the Las Vegas detention center to one in Barstow, California,” she explained. “I have been assigned to deliver you to Barstow. It’s all been quite legally recorded in the archives. A friend in Leipzig who knows his way around the Entity computer net set it all up for me.”

The car looked ancient. It probably was: pre-Conquest, even.

Its sides were dented and its silvery paint had flaked away in a hundred places, showing red rusty patches beneath, and it leaned badly on the left side, drooping so visibly that Khalid wondered whether the rim of the frame would strike the ground when the car moved.

“Can you drive?” Cindy asked, as they loaded their meager luggage into the car.

“No.”

“Of course you can’t. Where would you have learned to drive? How old were you, anyway, when they put you in detention?”

“Not quite thirteen.”

“And that was how long ago? Eight years? Ten?”

“Seven. I’ll be twenty-one on December 25th.”

“A Christmas baby. How nice. Everybody singing to celebrate your birthday. ‘Si-lent night, ho-o-ly night—’“

“Yes, very nice,” he said bitterly. “My birthdays were all extremely happy ones. We would gather around our Christmas tree, my mother and father and my brothers and sisters and I, and we would sing the Christmas songs, and we would give each other wonderful presents.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. There were some happy times.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “You told me on the plane that your mother died in childbirth and you never knew your father, and you were raised by your grandmother.”

“Yes. And I also told you then that I was Muslim.”

She laughed. “You were just trying to see if I was paying attention.”

“No,” he said. “I was just saying what came into my mind.”

“What an odd duck you are, Khalid!”

“Duck?”

“Never mind. An expression.” She unlocked the car’s doors and signaled for him to get in. He entered on the left-hand side, as he always had when he went out driving with Richie, and was surprised to find himself confronted by the steering wheel. It had been on the other side in Richie’s car: he was sure of that.