small children had emerged from somewhere, a boy and a girl, and stood staring in silence at him. Six or seven years old: the Colonel was confused for a moment about who they were, mistaking them for Paul and Helena, until he reminded himself that Paul and Helena had long since entered into adulthood. This boy here was his youngest grandson, Ronnie’s boy. The latest-model Anson Carmichael: the fifth to bear that name, he was. And the girl? Jill, was she, Anse’s daughter? No. Too young for that. This had to be Paul’s daughter, the Colonel supposed. What was her name? Cassandra? Samantha? Something fancy like that.
“The thing is,” the Colonel said, as though picking up a conversation they had broken off only a little while before, “that you must never forget that Americans were free people once, and when you grow up and have children of your own you’ll need to teach them that.”
“Just Americans?” the boy asked, the young Anson.
“No, others too. Not everyone. Some peoples never knew what freedom was. But we did. Americans are all we can think about now, I guess. The others will have to get free on their own.”
They were looking at him strangely, big-eyed, bewildered. Didn’t have a clue about the meaning of what he was saying. He wasn’t any too sure himself that it made any sense.
“I don’t really know how it’s going to come about,” he went on. “But we must never forget that it has to come about, someday, somehow. There has to be a way, but we haven’t discovered it yet. And meanwhile, while we’re biding our time, you mustn’t let the concept of liberty be forgotten, you children. We have to remember who and what we once were. Do you hear me?”
Blank looks of incomprehension. They did not understand, he was certain of that. Too young, perhaps? No. No. They ought to be old enough to grasp these ideas. He certainly had, when he was their age and his father was explaining to him the reasons why the country had gone to war in Korea. But these two had never known the world to be anything other than this. They had nothing to compare it with, no yardstick by which to measure the notion of “freedom.”
And so, as time went along and the ones who remembered the old kind of world gave way to these children, that notion would be lost forever.
Would it? Would it, really?
If no one ever lifted a finger against the Entities, then, yes, it would. Something had to be done. Something. Something. But what?
Right now there was nothing they could do. He had said so many times: The world is the toy of the Entities. They are omnipotent and we are weak. And so the situation was likely to remain, until somehow—he could not say how—we were able to change things. Then, when we had bided our time long enough, when we were ready to strike, we would strike, and we would prevail.
Wasn’t that so?
You could still see the ghostly lettering over the front door of the former restaurant, if you knew what to look for, the pale greenish outlines of the words that once had been painted there in bright gold: khan’s mogul palace. The old swinging sign that had dangled above the door was still lying out back, too, in a clutter of cracked basins and discarded stewpots and broken crockery.
But the restaurant itself was gone, long gone, a victim of the Great Plague, as was poor sad Haleem Khan himself, the ever-weary little brown-skinned man who in ten years had somehow saved five thousand pounds from his salary as a dishwasher at the Lion and Unicorn Hotel and had used that, back when England had a queen and Elizabeth was her name, as the seed money for the unpretentious little restaurant that was going to rescue him and his family from utter hopeless poverty. Four days after the Plague had hit Salisbury, Haleem was dead. But if the Plague hadn’t killed him, the tuberculosis that he was already harboring probably would have done the job soon enough. Or else simply the shock and disgrace and grief of his daughter Yasmeena’s ghastly death in childbirth two weeks earlier, at Christmastime, in an upstairs room of the restaurant, while bringing into the world the bastard child of the long-legged English boy, Richie Burke, the future traitor, the future quisling.
Haleem’s other daughter, the little girl Leila, had died in the Plague also, three months after her father and two days before what would have been her sixth birthday. As for Yasmeena’s older brother, Khalid, he was already two years gone by then, beaten to death late one Saturday night during the time known as the Troubles by a gang of long-haired yobs who had set forth in fine English wrath, determined to vent their resentment over the conquest of the Earth by doing a lively spot of Paki-bashing in the town streets.
Which left, of all the family, only Aissha, Haleem’s hardy and tireless second wife. She came down with the Plague, too, but she was one of the lucky ones, one of those who managed to fend the affliction off and survive—for whatever that was worth—into the new and transformed and diminished world. But she could hardly run the restaurant alone, and in any case, with three quarters of the population of Salisbury dead in the Plague, there was no longer much need for a Pakistani restaurant there.
Aissha found other things to do. She went on living in a couple of rooms of the now gradually decaying building that had housed the restaurant, and supported herself, in this era when national currencies had ceased to mean much and strange new sorts of money circulated in the land, by a variety of improvised means. She did housecleaning and laundry for those people who still had need of such services. She cooked meals for elderly folks too feeble to cook for themselves. Now and then, when her number came up in the labor lottery, she put in time at a factory that the Entities had established just outside town, weaving little strands of colored wire together to make incomprehensibly complex mechanisms whose nature and purpose were never disclosed to her.
And when there was no such work of any of those kinds available, Aissha would make herself available to the lorry-drivers who passed through Salisbury, spreading her powerful muscular thighs in return for meal certificates or corporate scrip or barter units or whichever other of the new versions of money they would pay her in. That was not something she would have chosen to do, if she had had her choices. But she would not have chosen to have the invasion of the Entities, for that matter, nor her husband’s early death and Leila’s and Khalid’s, nor Yasmeena’s miserable lonely ordeal in the upstairs room, but she had not been consulted about any of those things, either. Aissha needed to eat in order to survive; and so she sold herself, when she had to, to the lorry-drivers, and that was that.
As for why survival mattered, why she bothered at all to care about surviving in a world that had lost all meaning and just about all hope, it was in part because survival for the sake of survival was in her genes, and— mostly—because she wasn’t alone in the world. Out of the wreckage of her family she had been left with a child to look after—her grandchild, her dead stepdaughter’s baby, Khalid Haleem Burke, the child of shame. Khalid Haleem Burke had survived the Plague too. It was one of the ugly little ironies of the epidemic that the angered Entities had released upon the world in retribution for the Denver laser attack that children less than six months old generally did not contract it. Which created a huge population of healthy but parentless babes.
He was healthy, all right, was Khalid Haleem Burke. Through every deprivation of those dreary years, the food shortages and the fuel shortages and the little outbreaks of diseases that once had been thought to be nearly extinct, he grew taller and straighter and stronger all the time. He had his mother’s wiry strength and his father’s long legs and dancer’s grace. And he was lovely to behold. His skin was tawny golden-brown, his eyes were a glittering blue-green, and his hair, glossy and thick and curly, was a wonderful bronze color, a magnificent Eurasian hue. Amidst all the sadness and loss of Aissha’s life, he was the one glorious beacon that lit the darkness for her.
There were no real schools, not any more. Aissha taught little Khalid herself, as best she could. She hadn’t had much schooling herself, but she could read and write, and showed him how, and begged or borrowed books for him wherever she might. She found a woman who understood arithmetic, and scrubbed her floors for her in return for Khalid’s lessons. There was an old man at the south end of town who had the Koran by heart, and Aissha, though she was not a strongly religious woman herself, sent Khalid to him once a week for instruction in Islam. The boy was, after all, half Moslem. Aissha felt no responsibility for the Christian part of him, but she did not want to let him go into the world unaware that there was—somewhere, somewhere!—a god known as Allah, a god of justice and compassion and mercy, to whom obedience was owed, and that he would, like all people, ultimately come to stand before that god upon the Day of Judgment.
“And the Entities?” Khalid asked her. He was six, then. “Will they be judged by Allah too?”
“The Entities are not people. They are jinn.”
“Did Allah make them?”
“Allah made all things in heaven and on Earth. He made us out of potter’s clay and the jinn out of smokeless
