Then she said, as though unable to allow it to last another moment, reaching for something and coming up with the most obvious gambit, “What they tell me is that you’re, like, the naughty boy of the family.”
Ronnie laughed. “I have been, I suppose. At least by my father’s standards. I never thought of myself as a particularly bad guy, just an opportunist, I guess. And some of the business deals I got myself involved with were, well, not altogether nice deals. The way the Colonel saw it, there was a certain element of chicanery about them. To me they were just deals. But the true issue, the basic thing for him, is that I never went into the military, which for the Colonel is an unpardonable sin for a member of our family. Though he seems to have pardoned me.”
“He loves you,” Peggy said. “He can’t understand where you went wrong.”
“Well, neither can I. But not for the same reason. By my lights I was just doing what made sense to me. Not every idea I had was a good one. But that doesn’t make me a villain, does it? Of course Hitler could have said the same thing.—Hey, tell me about yourself, okay?”
“What’s to tell?” But she told a little anyway: growing up on the outskirts of Los Angeles, family, high school, her first couple of jobs. Nothing unusual; nothing intimate. No mention of her sojourn aboard the Entities’ starship.
She was perky, cheerful, straightforward, very likable, nothing tricky about her. Ronnie understood now why the Colonel had asked her to come to live with him and help him run the ranch. But ordinarily Ronnie’s own tastes ran to women of a more baroque sort. He was surprised how attractive he found her. He began to see that he was getting snared more deeply than he had bargained for. Something was happening to him, here, something strange, even inexplicable. Well, so be it. A lot of inexplicable things were loose in the world these days.
“Ever been married?” he asked.
“No. Never occurred to me. What about you?”
“Only twice so far. Both youthful mistakes.”
“Everybody makes mistakes.”
“I think I’ve already had my full quota, though.”
“What does that mean?” she said. “Like, no more marriages?”
“No more inappropriate ones.”
She didn’t respond to that. After a while she said, “It’s a pretty night, isn’t it?”
It certainly was. Big bright moon, glittering stars, soft balmy air. Crickets singing somewhere. The scent of gardenia blossoms aloft. The nearness of her, the sense of her trim little body within easy reach, of the powerful pull that it was exerting on him.
Where was the source of that pull, which seemed out of all proportion to her actual qualities? Did it lie in the fact that she was a planet in orbit around the sun that was his father, and by laying hold of her he would attach himself more firmly to the Colonel, which was something that apparently was important to him now? He didn’t know. He refused even to seek an answer. That had been the root of Ronnie’s success all through life, the refusal to look closely into that which he knew he was better off not understanding.
“We can’t do white Christmases here in Southern California,” he said, after a short while, “but we sure can do nice ones of the sort that we do.”
“I’ve never seen snow, do you know that? Except in the movies.”
“I have. I lived in Michigan for two years, my first marriage. Snow’s a very pretty thing. You get tired of it when you live with it day after day, but it’s nice to look at, especially when it’s coming down. Everybody should see it once or twice in their lifetime. Maybe the Entities will arrange for it to start snowing in California as their next trick.”
“Do you seriously think so?” she asked.
“Actually, no. But you never can tell what they’ll do, can you?”
And just at that moment a cold hard point of brilliant blue-white light blossomed suddenly in the sky, to the left of the moon. It was so intense that it seemed to be vibrating.
“Look,” Ronnie said quickly. “The Star of Bethlehem, making a return appearance by popular demand.”
But Peggy wasn’t amused. What she was was scared. She caught her breath with a little hissing intake and pressed herself up against his ribs, and without hesitating he slipped his arm around her and gathered her in.
The point now elongated, becoming a long streaking comet-like smear of brightness that went arcing across the sky from south to north, a blurry white blare, and was gone.
“An Entity ship,” he said. “They’re traveling around somewhere, delivering their Christmas presents a couple of days early.”
“Don’t make jokes about them.”
“I can’t help joking about things like the Entities. I’d go out of my mind if I had to take them as seriously as they deserve.”
“I know what you mean. I still can’t believe it really happened, you know? That they dropped down out of the sky one day, these big hideous monstrous beings, and just took over the whole world. It doesn’t seem possible. It’s all like something you would read about in a comic book. Or a bad dream.”
Very cautiously Ronnie said, “I understand that you were actually a captive on one of their ships.”
“For a little while, yes. That was really like a dream. The whole time I was there I was like, ‘This isn’t really happening to me, this isn’t really happening to me.’ But it was. It was the strangest thing I could ever have imagined.—I met a relative of yours while I was up there, did you know that?”
“Cindy, yes. My uncle’s wife. A little on the eccentric side.”
“She sure was. What a weird woman! Went right up to the aliens, and she was like, ‘Hi, I’m Cindy, I want to welcome you to our planet.’ Just like they were long-lost friends.”
“To her they probably seemed that way.”
“I thought she was outrageous. A lunatic, too.”
“I never cared for her very much myself,” said Ronnie. “Not that I knew her very well, or wanted to. And my father—he absolutely loathed her. So the invasion hasn’t been such a bad thing for him, has it? In one stroke he gets rid of his sister-in-law Cindy and is reconciled with his rogue son Ronnie.”
Peggy seemed to think about that for a moment.
“Are you really such a rogue, then?” she asked.
He grinned. “Through and through, top to bottom. But I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am, like some people have red hair and freckles.”
A second point of light appeared, elongated, streaked across the sky to the north.
She shivered against him.
“Where are they going? What are they doing?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody knows the first goddamned thing about them.”
“I hate it that they’re here. I’d give everything to have them go back where they came from.”
“Me too,” he said. She was still shivering. He pivoted ninety degrees and bent from the hips until his face was opposite hers, and kissed her in a tentative way, and then, as she began to respond, uncertainly at first and then with enthusiasm, got less tentative about it, a good deal less tentative. Quite a good deal less.
And now it was Christmas Eve, and they had had their festive dinner just as though everything was right in the world, plenty of turkey for all and the proper trimmings and any number of bottles from the Colonel’s stock of quite decent Napa Valley wines. And then, when a glossy after-dinner glow had come over everybody, the Colonel stood up and announced, “All right, now. It’s time to get down to brass tacks, folks.”
Anse, who had been expecting this moment since his arrival but in the past thirty-six hours had not managed to garner a single clue about what was coming, sat up tensely, wholly sober even though he had allowed himself an extra glass or two of wine. The others appeared less attentive. Carole, sitting opposite Anse, had a glazed look of satiation. His brother-in-law Doug Gannett, untidy and uncouth as always, seemed actually to be asleep. Rosalie might have been dozing too. Anse’s unhappy cousin Helena seemed several million miles away, as usual. Her brother Paul, ever vigilant for her, was watching her warily. Anse noticed disapprovingly that Ronnie, wide-awake but looking even more than usually flushed from all the wine he had had, was nuzzling up against Peggy Gabrielson, who did not appear to mind.
The Colonel said, launching right into things in a crisp, overly fluent way that suggested that these were well-rehearsed words, “I think you all know that I’ve moved quite some distance out of retirement since the beginning of the invasion crisis. I’m active in Southern California liberation-front circles and I’m in touch, as much as
