The Alien Years (63 page)

Now, he supposed, nothing at all. No more great plans. No grand new schemes for throwing off the Entity yoke with a single dramatic thrust. They were finished with such projects now.

A strange dark thought, that was. For generations now his whole family had channeled its energies into the dream of undoing the Conquest. His whole life had been directed toward that goal, ever since he was old enough to understand that the Earth once had been free and then had been enslaved by beings from the stars: that he was a Carmichael, and the defining trait of Carmichaels was that they yearned to rid the world of its alien masters. Now he had to turn his back on all that. That was sad. But, he asked himself, standing there at the edge of the rubble that had been the ranch, what other attitude was possible, now that this had happened? What point was there in continuing to pretend that a way might yet be found to drive the Entities away?

His great plan—

A failure—a failure—a failure—

A thousand deaths a day. A thousand deaths a day. Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Cindy said.

He managed a feeble smile. “You really want to know?”

She didn’t even bother to answer. She simply repeated the question with her unrelenting eyes. He knew better than to refuse again. “That it’s all over with, now that the mission’s failed,” he said. “That I guess we’re done with dreaming up grand projects for the liberation, now. That we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that the Entities are going to own the world forever.”

“Oh, no,” she said, astounding him for the second time in the past two minutes. “No. Wrong, Frank. Don’t you dare think any such thing.”

“Why shouldn’t I, then?”

“Your father’s not even in his grave yet, but he’d be turning in it already if he was. And Ron, and Anse, and the Colonel, in theirs. Listen to you!
‘
We just have to resign ourselves. ‘“

The sharpness of her mockery, the vehemence of it, caught Frank off guard. Color came to his cheeks. He struggled to make sense of this. “I don’t mean to sound like a quitter, Cindy. But what can we do? You just said yourself that my father’s plan had failed. Doesn’t that end it for us? Is it realistic to go on thinking we can defeat them, somehow? Was it ever?”

“Pay attention to me,” she said. She impaled him with a stark, unanswerable glare from which there could be no flinching. “You’re right that we’ve just proved that we can’t defeat them. But completely wrong to say that because we can’t beat them we should give up all hope of being free.”

“I don’t underst—”

She went right on. “Frank, I know better than anyone alive how far beyond us the Entities are in every way. I’m eighty-five years old. I was right on the scene, the day the Entities came. I spent weeks aboard one of their starships. I stood right before them, no farther from them than you are from me, and I felt the power of their minds. They’re like gods, Frank. I knew that from the moment they came. We can hurt them—we just demonstrated that—but we can’t seriously damage them and we certainly can’t overthrow them.”

“Right. And therefore it seems to me that it’s useless to put any energy into the false hope of—”

“Pay attention to me, is what I said. I was with the Colonel just before he died. You never knew him, did you? —No, I didn’t think so. He was a great man, Frank, and a very wise one. He understood the power of the Entities. He liked to compare them to gods, too. That was the very term he used, and he was right. But then he said that we had to keep on dreaming of a day when they’d no longer be here, nevertheless. Keeping the idea of resistance alive despite everything, is what he said. Remembering what it was like to have lived in a free world.”

“How can we remember something we never knew? The Colonel remembered it, yes. You remember. But the Entities have been here almost fifty years. They were already here before my father was born. There are two whole generations of people in the world who never—”

Again the glare. His voice died away.

“Sure,” Cindy said scornfully. “I understand that. Out there are millions of people, billions, who don’t know what it ever was like to live in a world where it was possible to make free choices. They don’t mind having the Entities here. Maybe they’re even happy about it, most of them. Life is easier for them, maybe, than it would have been fifty years ago. They don’t have to think. They don’t have to shape themselves into anything. They just do what the Entity computers and the quisling bosses tell them to do. But this is Carmichael territory, up here, what’s left of it. We think differently. And what we think is, the Entities have turned us into nothing, but we can be something again, someday. Somehow. Provided we don’t allow ourselves to forget what we once were. A time will come, I don’t know how or when, when we can get out from under the Entities and fix things so that we can live as free people again. And we have to keep that idea alive until it does. Do you follow me, Frank?”

She was frail and unsteady and trembling. But her voice, deep and harsh and full, was as strong as an iron rod.

Frank searched for a reply, but none that had any logic to it would come. Of course he wanted to maintain the traditions of his ancestors. Of course he felt the weight of all the Carmichaels he had never known, and those that he had, pressing on his soul, goading him to lead some wonderful crusade against the enemies of mankind. But he had just returned from such a crusade, and the ruins of his home lay smoldering all around him. What was important now was burying the dead and rebuilding the ranch, not thinking about the next futile crusade.

So there was nothing he could say. He would not deny his heritage; but it seemed foolish to utter some noble vow binding him to make one more attempt at attaining the impossible.

Abruptly Cindy’s expression softened. “All right,” she said. “Just think about what I’ve been saying. Think about it.”

A horn sounded in the distance, three honks. Cheryl returning, or Mark, or Charlie.

“You’d better go up there and meet them,” Cindy said. “You’re in charge, now, boy. Let them know what’s taken place here. Go on, will you? Hurry along. See who it is.” And as he started up the path to the gate he heard her voice trailing after him, a softer tone now: “Break it to them gently, Frank. If you can.”

9

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS FROM NOW

It was the third spring after the bombing of the ranch before the scars of the raid really began to fade. The dead had been laid to rest and mourned, and things went on. New plantings now covered the bomb craters, and generous winter rains had nurtured the young shrubs and freshly seeded grass into healthy growth.

The damaged buildings had been either repaired or demolished, and some new ones constructed. Removing the debris of the burned-out main house had been the biggest task, a two-year job; the place had been built to last through the ages, and dismantling it using simple hand tools was a monumental task for one small band of people. But finally that was done, too. They had managed to salvage the rear wing of the house, at least, the five rooms that were still intact, and had recycled sections of wall and flooring from the rest to construct a few rooms more. The communications center was back on its foundation also, and Andy had even succeeded in reopening on-line contact with people elsewhere in California and other parts of the country.

It was a quiet existence. The crops thrived. The flocks flourished. Children grew toward maturity; couples came together; new children were born. Frank himself, almost twenty-two years old, was a father now. He had married Mark’s daughter Helena, and they had two so far, both named for his parents: Raven was the girl’s name, and Anson the boy’s—the newest Anson Carmichael in the long sequence. Some things would never change.

The Colonel’s library was gone forever, but at Frank’s suggestion Andy succeeded in downloading books from libraries as far away as Washington and New York, and Frank spent much of his time reading, now. History was his great passion. He had not known much about the world that had existed before the Entities, but he spent endless hours now discovering it, Roman history, Greek, British, French, the whole human saga swimming about in his bedazzled mind, a horde of great names all mixed together, builders and destroyers both, Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Augustus, Hider, Stalin, Winston Churchill, Genghis Khan.

He knew that California had once been a part of the country that had been known as the United States of America, and he pored over that country’s history, too, swallowing it whole, learning how it had been put together out of little states and then had nearly come apart and had been united again, supposedly for all time, and had grown to be the most powerful nation in the world. He heard for the first time the names of its famous presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and the two great generals Grant and Eisenhower, who had become presidents also.

The names and details quickly lost themselves in a chaotic welter. But the patterns remained discernible enough, how all through history countries and empires had been formed, had grown to greatness, had overreached themselves and crumbled and been replaced by new ones, while in each of those countries and empires people constantly struggled toward creating a civilization built on justice, on fairness, on open opportunity in life for all. The world had, perhaps, finally been on the verge of attaining those things just when the Entities arrived. Or so it seemed to him, anyway, half a conquered century later, knowing nothing but what he could find in the books that Andy plundered for him from the on-line archives of the conquered world.

No one spoke of the Resistance now, or of assassinating Entities, or of anything much but the need to get the crops planted on time and to bring in a good harvest and to look after the livestock. Frank had not lost his hatred for the Entities who had stolen the world and killed his father. It was practically in his genes, that hatred. Nor had he forgotten the things Cindy had said to him the day he had returned from Los Angeles to find the ranch in ruins. That conversation—the last one he had ever had with Cindy, for she had died a few days later, peacefully, surrounded by people who loved her—was forever in the back of his mind, and now and again he took out the ideas she had expounded and looked at them for a while, and then put them away again. He could see the strength of them. He understood the worth of them. He would pass them dutifully along to his children. But he saw no practical way to give them any life.

On an April day in the third year after the bombing, with the rainy season finished for the year and the air warm and fragrant, Frank set out across the ravine to Khalid’s compound, where Khalid and Jill and their many children lived apart from the others in an ever-expanding settlement.

Frank went there often to visit with Khalid and sometimes with his gentle, elusive son Rasheed. He found it curiously comforting to spend time with them, savoring the peacefulness that was at the core of their souls, watching Khalid carve his lovely sculptures, abstract forms now rather than the portraits of earlier years.

He liked also to talk with Khalid about God.
Allah,
is what Khalid called Him, but Khalid said that it made little difference what name one used for God, so long as one accepted the truth of His wisdom and perfection and omnipotence. No one had ever said much to Frank about God while he was growing up, nor could he find much evidence for His existence as he contemplated the bloody saga that was human history. But Khalid believed unquestioningly in Him. “It is a matter of faith,” Khalid said softly. “Without Him, there is no meaning in the world. How could the world exist, if He had not fashioned it? He is the Lord of the Universe. And He is our protector: the Compassionate, the Merciful. To Him alone do we turn for help.”

“If God is our compassionate and merciful protector,” said Frank, “why did He send the Entities to us? And, for that matter, why did He create sickness and death and war and all other evil things?”

Khalid smiled. “I asked these same questions when I was a small boy. You must understand that God’s ways are not for us to question. He is beyond our comprehension. But those who are rightly guided by God, they shall surely triumph. As is revealed on the very first page of this book.” And he held out to Frank his old, worn copy of the Koran, the one that he had carried around from place to place all his life.

The problem of the existence of God continued to mystify Frank. Again and again he went to Khalid for instruction; and again and again he came away unconvinced, and yet still fascinated. He wanted the world to have pattern and meaning; and he could see that for Khalid it did; and yet he could not help wishing that God had given the world some tangible evidence of His presence, revealing Himself not just to specially chosen prophets who had lived long ago in far-off lands, but in modern times, day in and day out, everywhere and to everyone. God remained invisible, though. “God’s ways are not for us to question,” Khalid would say. “He is beyond our comprehension.” The ways of the Entities were also, apparently, not for us to question; they were as mysterious in their aloofness as was God, and just as incomprehensible. But the Entities had been visible from the first. Why would God not show Himself to His people even for a moment?

When he went to visit with Khalid, Frank usually would stop also at the nearby cemetery to pass a quick moment at the graves of his father and mother, and at Cindy’s grave; and sometimes at those of others who had died in the bombing attack, Steve and Peggy and Leslyn and James and the rest, and even the graves of people of the olden days whom he had never known, the Colonel and the Colonel’s son Anse and Andy’s grandfather Doug. It gave him a sense of the long past, of the continuity of human life across time, to walk among the resting-places of all these people and contemplate the lives they had led and the things they had sought to achieve.