and he was allowed to live? Everyone died, some sooner, some later. Aissha would have said that what was happening was the will of Allah. Khalid more simply put it that the Entities did as they pleased, always, and knew that it was folly to ponder their motives.
Aissha was not available to discuss these matters with. He was separated from her before reaching Portsmouth and Khalid never saw her again, either. From that day on it was necessary for him to make his way in the world on his own.
He was not quite thirteen years old.
Ron Carmichael said, trotting up toward the main house along the grassy path from the gray stone building that was the Resistance communications center, “Where’s my father? Has anyone seen the Colonel?” The dispatch from London was in his hand.
“On the patio,” Jill called to him. She was descending the same path, on her way down to the vegetable garden with a pail for tomatoes. “In his rocking chair, as usual.”
“No. I can see the patio from here. He’s not there.”
“Well, he was five minutes ago. It’s not my fault if he isn’t there now, is it? Man gets up and moves around sometimes, you know.”
He gave her a scowling look as they passed each other, and she stuck her tongue out at him. She was such a sour bitch, was his pretty niece. Of course, what she needed was a man, he knew. Getting on into her twenties and still sleeping alone, and even her dorky cousin Steve married now and about to be a father—it made no sense, Ron thought.
Time for Jill to find someone, yes. Ted Quarles had been asking about her just the other day, at the last meeting of the Resistance committee. Of course that was a little odd, Ted being at least twenty years her senior, maybe more. And Jill had never given him so much as a glance. But these were odd times.
The first person Ron encountered within the house was his older daughter, Leslyn. “Do you know where Grandpa is?” he asked her. “He’s not on the porch.”
“Mommy’s with him. In his room.”
“Is something wrong?”
But the little girl had already gone skipping away. Ron wasted no time calling her back. Hurrying through the maze of slate-floored corridors, he made his way to his father’s bedroom, at the back of the house with a grand view of the mountain wall above the ranch, and found him sitting up in bed, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe and a red muffler about his throat. He seemed pallid and weary and very old. Peggy was with him.
“What’s going on?” he asked her.
“He was feeling chilly, that’s all. I brought him inside.”
“Chilly? It’s a bright sunny morning out there! Practically like summer.”
“Not for me,” the Colonel said, smiling faintly. “For me it’s starting to be very, very late in autumn, Ronnie, going on winter very fast. But your lovely lady is taking good care of me. Giving me my medicine, and all.” He patted Peggy affectionately on the back of one hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. What I would have done without her, these many years.”
“Mike and Charlie have been all the way up to Monterey and back,” Peggy said, looking up from the bedside at Ron. “They found a whole new supply of the Colonel’s pills in a store up there. They brought a girl back with them, too, a very nice one. Eloise, her name is. You’ll be impressed.”
Ron blinked a couple of times. “A girl? What are they going to do, share her? Even if they are twins, I don’t see how they can seriously propose—”
Laughing, the Colonel said, “You’ve become stuffier than Anse, do you know that, Ronnie? ‘I don’t see how they can seriously propose—’ My God, boy, they aren’t marrying her! She’s just a houseguest! You sound like you’re fifty years old.”
“I am fifty,” Ron said. “Will be in another couple of months, anyway.” He paced restively around the room, clutching the Net message from London, wondering if he ought to bother his obviously ailing father with this startling news now. He decided after a moment that he should; that the Colonel would not have had it any other way.
And in any case the Colonel had already guessed.
“Is there news?” he asked, with a glance at the crumpled grayish sheet in Ron’s hand.
“Yes. Pretty amazing stuff, as a matter of fact. An Entity has been assassinated in the English town of Salisbury. Paul just picked up the story on a Net link.”
The Colonel, nestling back against his mound of pillows and giving Ron a slow, steady, unflustered look, said quietly, as though Ron had announced that word had just arrived via the Net of the second coming of Christ, “Just how reliable is this report, boy?”
“Very. Paul says, unimpeachable authority, London Resistance network, Martin Bartlett himself.”
“An Entity. Killed.” The Colonel considered that. “How?”
“A single shot on a lonely road, late at night. Hidden sniper, using some sort of homemade grenade-firing rifle.”
“The very plan that Faulkenburg and Cantelli and some of the others were so hot to put into being two or three years ago, and which we ultimately voted down because it was impossible to kill Entities that way anyhow, because of the telepathic screening field. Now someone has gone and done it, you tell me? How? How? We all agreed it couldn’t be done.”
“Well,” Ron said, “somebody found a way, somehow.”
The Colonel considered that for a time, too. He sat back, there among his framed diplomas and military memorabilia and innumerable photographs of his dead wife and his dead brothers and his sons and daughters and growing tribe of grandchildren, and he seemed to vanish into the labyrinth of his own thoughts and lose his way in there.
Then he said, “There’s really only one way that would work, isn’t there? Getting around the telepathy, I mean. The assassin would have to be like some sort of machine, practically—somebody with no more emotion and feeling than an android. Someone completely stolid and unexcitable. Someone who could wait there by the roadside holding that rifle and never for a moment let his mind dwell on the notion that he was going to strike a great blow for the liberation of mankind, or for that matter that he was about to murder an intelligent creature. Or any other sort of thought that might possibly attract the attention of the Entity who was going to be his victim.”
“A total moron,” Ronnie suggested. “Or an utter sociopath.”
“Well, yes. That might work, if you could teach a moron to use a rifle, or if you found a sociopath who didn’t get some kind of sick kick out of the anticipation of firing that shot. But there are other possibilities, you know.”
“Such as?”
“In Vietnam,” said the Colonel, “we ran across them all the time: absolutely impassive people who did the goddamnedest bloody things without batting an eye. An old woman who looked like your grandmother’s grandmother who would come up to you and placidly toss a bomb in your car. Or a sweet little six-year-old boy putting a knife into you in the marketplace. People who would kill or maim or mutilate you without pausing to think about what they were about to do and without feeling a gnat’s worth of animosity for you as they did it. Or remorse afterward. Half the time they blew themselves up right along with you, and the likelihood that that was going to happen didn’t faze them either. Perhaps it never even entered their minds. They just went ahead and did what they’d been told to do. An Entity mind-field might not be any defense against somebody like that.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine a mentality like that.”
“Not for me,” the Colonel said. “I saw just that kind of mentality in action at very close range indeed. Then I spent much of my academic career studying it. I even taught about it, remember? Way back in the Pleistocene? Professor of non-western psychology.”
He shook his head. “So they’ve actually killed one. Well, well, well.—What about reprisals, now?”
“They’ve cleaned out half a dozen towns in the vicinity, London says.”
“Cleaned them out? What does that mean?”
“Rounded up every person. Taken them away somewhere.”
“And killed them?”
“Not clear,” Ronnie said. “I doubt that anything nice is going to happen to them, though.”
