The Alien Years (40 page)

“No. Went right by, paid no attention. I told you that they wouldn’t. I wasn’t there.”

“It was crazy to take the chance.”

“Maybe I’m crazy,” Khalid said cheerfully, as she started the car and pulled back out onto the freeway.

“I don’t think you are,” she said, after a moment. “Why did you do it?”

“To be able to look at them,” he told her, in absolute sincerity. “They are so beautiful, Cindy. They are like magical creatures to me. Jinn. Angels.”

She swiveled around in her seat and gave him a long strange look. “You really are something unusual, Khalid.”

He made no answer to that. What could he say?

After another lengthy silent stretch she said, “I lost my cool back there, I guess. There wasn’t any real reason why they’d have stopped to interrogate us, was there?”

“No.”

“But I was afraid. A quisling and a detainee out driving together on an empty road late at night, well beyond the city that I was supposed to be taking you to, and both our I.D.s already invalidated on the master net because we’ve been reported as dead—we’d have been in a mess. I panicked.”

A little way farther onward she said, breaking the next silence into which they had slipped, “Exactly what was it that you did, Khalid, to get yourself interned in the first place?”

He hesitated not at all. “I killed an Entity.”

“You what?”

“In England, outside Salisbury. The one that was shot along the side of a road. I did it, with a special kind of gun that I took from my father. They collected everyone in the five towns closest to the place of the killing and executed some of us and sent the rest of us into the prison camps.”

She laughed, in a way that told him she hadn’t for a moment believed him. “What a wild sense of humor you have, Khalid.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I have no sense of humor whatever.”

Now morning had come and they were out of the desert and among a scattering of towns—a few cities, even, a little later on—and there was some traffic on the road. “That’s San Bernardino,” she said. “Redlands is that place over down there. We’re about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, I’d say.”

He saw palm trees now, huge and strange against the brightening sky. Other plants and trees that he could not identify, spiky, odd. Low buildings with roofs of red tiles. Cindy drove with exaggerated precision, so much so that the cars behind her honked their horns at her to get her to move along. To Khalid she said, “Got to be very careful not to get into any accidents here. If a highway patrolman wanted to see my identification, we’d be cooked.”

They came to a place where they switched from one freeway to another. “This is called the San Bernardino Freeway,” Cindy explained. “It takes us westward, through Ontario, Covina, towns like that, toward the San Gabriel Valley and on into Los Angeles itself. The one we were on goes down through Riverside toward San Diego.”

“Ah,” he said knowingly, as though these names meant something to him.

“It’s over twenty years since I was last in L.A. God knows how much it’s changed in all that time. But what I figure on doing is driving straight out to the coast. Siegfried gave me the name of a friend of his, too, who lives in Malibu. I’ll try to track him down and maybe he can plug me into the local communications channels. I had a lot of friends out in that part of town once, Santa Monica, Venice, Topanga. Some of them must still be alive and living in the vicinity. Siegfried’s buddy can help me find them. And get me a new license plate, too, and new I.D. for us both.”

“Siegfried?”

“My hacker friend from Leipzig.”

“The pardoner.”

“Yes. The pardoner.”

“Ah,” said Khalid.

The freeway was huge here, so many lanes wide that he could scarcely believe it. The traffic, though heavier than he had seen anywhere else, was swallowed up in its vastness. But Cindy assured him that in the old days this freeway had been busy all day and all night, thousands of cars choking it all the time. In the old days, that was.

A little way farther on they came to an immense yellow sign stretching across all the lanes, high overhead, that said, FREEWAY ENDS IN FIVE MILES.

“Huh?” Cindy said. “We’re only in Rosemead! Nowhere near Los Angeles yet. Are they telling me I’m going to have to do all the rest of it on surface streets? How the hell am I supposed to find my way through all these little towns on surface streets?”

“What are surface streets?” Khalid asked, but she had already pulled off the freeway and into a dilapidated service station just at the exit. It looked deserted; but then a stubbly-faced man in stained overalls appeared from behind the pumps. Jumping from the car, Cindy trotted over to him. A long conference ensued, with much pointing and waving of arms. When she returned to the car she had a stunned, disbelieving look on her face.

“There’s a wall,” she told Khalid, in a tone of awe. “A great humongous
wall,
all around Los Angeles!”

“Is that something new?”

“New? Damned right it’s new! He says it’s sky-high and runs clear around the whole place, with gates every five or six miles. Nobody gets in or out of the city without giving a password to the gatekeeper.
Nobody.”

“You have your official identification number,” Khalid said.

“I’ve been dead since late last night, remember? I give the gatekeeper my number and we’ll both be in detention five minutes later.”

“What about your pardoner friend’s friend? Can’t he get you a new identification pass?”

“He’s in there, on the other side of the wall,” Cindy said. “I’ve got to be able to get to him before he can do anything for me. There’s no way I can reach him from out here.”

“You could hook into the computer net and reach him that way,” Khalid suggested.

“With what?” She held forth her arms, wrists turned upward. “I don’t have an implant. Never bothered with them. Do you? No, of course you don’t. What am I supposed to do, send him a postcard?” She pressed her fingertips against her eyes. “Let me think a minute. Shit.
Shit!
A wall around the entire city. Who the hell could have imagined
that?”

In silence Khalid watched her think.

“One possibility,” she said eventually. “A long shot. Santa Barbara.”

“Yes?” he said, if only to encourage her.

“That’s a little city a couple of hours north of L.A. They can’t have run the goddamned wall that far up. I used to have a relative up there, my husband’s older brother. Retired army colonel, he was. Had a big ranch on a mountain above the town. I was there a couple of times long ago. He never cared for me very much, the Colonel. I wasn’t his kind of person, I suppose. Still, I don’t think he’d turn me away.”

Her husband.
She had said nothing about a husband until this moment.

“The Colonel! Haven’t thought of him in a million years,” Cindy said. “He’d be—I don’t know—eighty, ninety years old by now. But he’d still be there. I’d bet on it. Man was made out of leather and steel; I can’t imagine him ever dying. If he did, well, one of his children or grandchildren probably would be living there. Somebody would be, anyway, some member of the family. They might take us in. It’s worth a try. I don’t know what else to do.”

“What about your husband?” Khalid asked. “Where is he?”

“Dead, I think. I heard once that he died the day the Entities arrived. Cracked up his plane while on firefighting duty, something like that. A sweet man, he was. Sweet Mike. I really loved him.” She laughed. “Not that I can even remember exactly what he looked like, now. Except his eyes. Blue eyes that saw right into you. The Colonel had eyes like that, too. So did his kids. They all did. The whole tribe. —Well, what do you say, my friend? Shall we try for Santa Barbara?”

She returned to the freeway and continued along it, past more signs warning that it was ending, until in another few minutes the wall came into view before them.

“Joseph Mary Jesus,” Cindy said. “Will you
look
at that thing?”

It was impressive, all right. It was a solid gray mass of big concrete blocks extending off to the left and right as far as Khalid could see, rising about as high as Salisbury Cathedral. The wall was pierced, where the freeway ran into it, by an arched gateway, deep and dark. A long line of cars was strung out in front of it. They were passing within very slowly, one by one. Occasionally an eastbound car would emerge from the other lane of the gate and drive off onto the freeway.

Cindy turned off the freeway to a city street, a wide boulevard lined by shabby little shops that looked mostly to be out of business, and began following the line of the wall northward. It seemed impossible for her to get over her astonishment at its height and bulk. She kept muttering to herself, shaking her head, now and then whistling in wonderment as some particularly lofty section of it appeared before them. There were places where the pattern of the streets forced them a few blocks away from the wall, but it was always visible off to their left, rearing up high over the two- and three-story buildings that seemed to be all there were in this district, and she returned to its proximity whenever she could.

She said very little to him. The struggle to find her way through these unfamiliar neighborhoods seemed to be exhausting her.

“This is incredible,” she said, toward mid-morning, as they churned on and on through a series of towns all packed very close together, some of them much more attractive than others. “The immensity of it. The amount of labor that must have been poured into it. What sheep we’ve become! Build a wall all the way around Los Angeles, they tell us—they don’t even say it, they just give you a little Push—and right away you get ten thousand men out there building them a wall. Raise food for us! And we do. Put enormous incomprehensible machines together for us. Yes. Yes. They’ve
domesticated
us. A whole planet of sheep, is what we are now. A planet of slaves. And the damnedest thing is that we don’t lift a finger to undo it all. —Did you really kill that Entity?”

“Do you think that I did?”

“I think you might have, yes. Whoever did it, though, it’s the only time anyone ever succeeded at it.” She leaned forward, squinting at a faded highway sign, pockmarked as though someone had used it for target practice. “I remember the day it happened. For five minutes the Entities all went crazy. Jumping around like they’d been given a high-voltage jolt. Then they calmed down. Some wild day, that was. I was at the Vienna center, then. Like a circus, that day. And then we found out what had happened, that somebody had actually knocked one of them off, back in England. It hit me very hard, personally, when I heard that. I was, like, totally shocked. A terrible, terrible crime, I thought. I was still in love with them, then.”

The conversation was making Khalid uncomfortable. “Are we near Los Angeles yet?” he asked.

“This is all Los Angeles, more or less. These were independent towns, but everything was really Los Angeles except they called themselves separate towns. The actual official Los Angeles is all on the far side of the wall, though. Maybe twenty miles away.”

You could tell when you were leaving one little city and entering another, because the street lamps were different and so were the houses, one city having splendid mansions and the very next one very small half-ruined ones. But there was a certain sameness to everything, beneath it all: the huge glossy-leaved trees, the lush gardens that even the smallest and poorest houses had, the low buildings and the bright eye of the sun blasting down onto everything. There were mountains just up ahead, stupendous ones, looking right down onto all these little towns. They had snow on their summits, though it was as warm as a summer day down here.

Cindy called off all the names of the cities to him as they passed through them, as if giving him a geography lesson. “Pasadena,” she said. “Glendale. Burbank. That’s Los Angeles down there, to our left.”

They had turned, now, and were heading west, toward the sun, driving on a freeway again. The wall was quite distant from them along this part of the route, though later on they came near it again, and, later still, they were forced off the freeway into another region of what she called surface streets. The terrain here was flat and monotonous and the streets were long and straight.

“We’re very close to the place where the Entities made their first landing,” Cindy told him. “I hurried right to the spot, that morning. I had to see them. I was in love with the whole idea that the space people had come. I gave myself to them. Offered my services: the very first quisling, I guess. Not that I saw myself as a traitor, you understand, just an ambassador, a bridge between the species. But they let me down. They just shuffled me around from one job to another all those years while I waited for them to put me aboard a ship going to their home world. And finally I realized that they never would. —Look, Khalid, you can just about manage to see the wall again in that valley to our left, all the way down there, curving off toward the Pacific. But we’re outside it now. We should have clear sailing all the way to Santa Barbara.”

And they did. But when they got there, late in the day, they found the town practically deserted, whole neighborhoods abandoned, block after block of handsome stucco-walled tiled buildings that had fallen into ruin. “I can’t believe this,” she said, over and over. “This beautiful little city. Everybody must have just walked away from it! Or been taken away.” Pointing toward the lofty mountains rising behind the oceanfront plain on which the city stood, she said, “Use those sharp eyes of yours. Can you see any houses up there?”