system together in which they made all the rules and everybody did whatever they told them to do. No more private ownership of anything, no more individual initiative, just keep your head down and work at whatever job the Entities may give you and live wherever the Entities want you to live and it’ll all be nice and sweet, no war, no poverty, nobody going hungry or sleeping in the streets.”
“I know all this,” Frank said, irked a little by Andy’s tone.
“But do you understand that in time most people came to prefer the new system to the old one? They adored it, Frank. Only a few isolated crackpots like the ones at a certain ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara thought there might be anything wrong with it. For some reason the Entities chose to leave those crackpots alone, but just about everybody else who didn’t love the system wound up in prison somewhere, or getting dead very fast. And now, poof, the Entities are gone and there’s no system any more. All these people feel abandoned. They don’t know how to deal with things on their own, and there’s no one to tell them. Do you see, Frank? Do you see?”
He nodded, his face reddening.
Yes, Andy. Yes. He saw. Of course he saw. And felt very foolish for having needed to have it all spelled out for him. He supposed he was just being slow-witted today, amidst the general startlement of this day’s bewildering events.
“You know,” Frank said, “Cindy made pretty much the same point to me, the day the ranch was bombed. How there were all these millions of people in the world who found life much easier just doing what the Entities told them to do.” He chuckled. “It was like, the gods were here and then just like that they went home, and now nobody can figure out what it all means. As Khalid likes to say, the ways of Allah are beyond our comprehension.”
Now it was Andy’s turn to look baffled. “Gods? What the fuck are you talking about, Frank?”
“That was something else Cindy said to me, once. That the Entities were like gods who had come down among us from heaven. The Colonel believed that too, she said. We never understood a damned thing about them. They were too far beyond us. Nobody ever figured out why they came here or what they wanted from us. They simply came, that’s all. Saw. Conquered. Rearranged the whole goddamned world to suit themselves. And when they had accomplished whatever it was that they had wanted to accomplish, they went away, without even telling us why they were going. So the gods were here, and then they went home, and now we’re left in the dark without them. That’s it, isn’t it, Andy? What do you do, when the gods go home?”
Andy was looking at him strangely. “And was that what they were for you, too, Frank? Gods?”
“For me? No. Devils, is what they were, for me. Devils. I hated them.” He walked away from Andy and began to move forward through the lines of numbed, dazed-looking people standing in front of the LACON building. No one paid any attention to him.
He passed among them, peering into their faces, their empty eyes. They were like sleepwalkers. It was frightening to look at them. But he understood their fear. He felt some of it himself. That confusion, that despair, that had come over him when he first heard that the Entities were leaving: it stemmed from the same uncertainty as theirs. What, Frank wondered, was going to happen in the world now that the Entity episode was over?
Episode. That was what it had been, he knew. The invasion, the conquest, the years of alien rule—just a single episode, if a very strange one, in humanity’s long history. Fifty-some years, out of thousands. The alien years, is what they would be called. And, thinking about it that way, giving it that name, episode, Frank felt himself at last beginning to come out of the fog of bewilderment that had engulfed him these few hours past since Andy first had told him of the Entities’ withdrawal.
The alien years had changed things very greatly, yes. Such episodes always did. But this wasn’t the first time that some great calamity had transformed the world. It had happened again and again. The Assyrians would come, or the Mongol hordes, or the Nazis, or the Black Death, or alien beings from the stars—whatever—and afterward nothing would be the same again.
But still, Frank thought, come what may, the basic things always continued: breakfast, lunch, love, sex, sunshine, rain, fear, hope, ambition, dreams, gratification, disappointment, victory, defeat, youth, age, birth, death. The Entities had arrived and they had wiped the world clean of everything fixed and stable, God only knew why; and then they went away, he thought, God knows why; and we are still here, and now we must start over, just as inevitably as spring starts everything over once winter is done with us. Now we must start over. God knows why, yes, and we don’t. He would have to talk to Khalid about that when he returned to the ranch.
“Frank?”
Andy had come up behind him. Frank glanced at him over his shoulder, but said nothing.
“Are you all right, Frank?”
“Of course I’m all right.”
“Walking away from me like that. Wandering around among these people. Something’s bothering you in a big way. You miss the Entities as much as they do, is that it?”
“I said I hated them. I said they were devils. But yes, yes, I do miss them, in a way. Because now I know that I won’t ever get a chance to kill any of them.”
Turning, Frank faced Andy squarely. “You know,” he said, “when you told me they were gone, it made me furious. After my father died, I had wanted so bad to be the one who drove them away. Even though I knew we probably weren’t capable of doing it. But now, coming right out of the blue, I lose even the possibility of my doing it.”
“Like father, like son, eh?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Frank asked.
“Right. Anson was so goddamned eager to go down in history as the man who got us out from under the Entities. And it broke him in half, wanting that. Broke him right in half. Is that what you want to happen to you?”
“I’m not as brittle as my father was,” said Frank. “—You know, Andy, the only people who ever actually killed any Entities were Khalid and Rasheed, and they hadn’t given a damn about it at all. Which was why they were able to succeed at it. And I did give a damn, but I’m not ever going to get a chance to do anything about it, and for a while today it really set me back, realizing that. So I guess it’s pretty much the same for me as for them,” he said, waving an arm at the ghostly, shuffling people all around them. “They’re upset because they’ve lost their beloved Entities. I’m upset because I don’t have the Entities to hate any more.”
“You want to do something to work the hate out of your system, then? Go into that building and drag that LACON quisling out of it, and get these people here to string him up to a lamppost. He collaborated with the enemy. Collaborators will have to be punished, won’t they?”
“I don’t think killing quislings is the answer, Andy.”
“What is, then?”
“Tearing down the walls, for a starter. How big a job will it be, do you think, tearing down the walls?”
Andy was staring at him as if he had lost his mind. “Plenty big. Plenty.”
“Well, we’ll do it anyway. We built them, we can tear them down.” Frank took a deep breath. That other wall, the one within him, that wall of numb despair and bafflement, was beginning to break up and fall away. It was all going from him, his uncertainly, his confusion in the face of the Entities’ departure.
He looked up into the bright, clear sky: through the sky, to the hidden stars, to the unknown star that was the home of the Entities.
He would have incinerated that star with his gaze, if he could, so hungry was he for revenge against them.
But what revenge was possible against gods who had come here and changed the world beyond recognition, and then had fled like thieves in the night?
Why, to restore the world to what it had been; and then to make it even finer than that. That was what he would do. That would be his revenge.
He thought he understood, now, what had happened to the world. By sending us the Entities, the universe has sent us a message. The problem is that we don’t know what it is. The job that faces us in the next hundred years, or five hundred, or however long it takes, is to find the meaning in the message that came to us from the stars.
And meanwhile—
Meanwhile, through some miracle, we are free again. And now, he thought, someone has to step forward and say, This is what freedom is like, this is how free people behave. And a new world would come forth out of the rubble of the one that the Entities had abandoned.
