“Is Anse really that sick?”
“Sick? I don’t know if he’s sick, no. But he’s done for, Peg. All these years trying to run a Resistance, trying to find some way to beat the Entities because the Colonel thinks we should, although there isn’t any way and Anse has had to live in perpetual simmering rage inside because he’s been trying to accomplish the impossible. His whole life has gone by, trying to accomplish things he wasn’t meant to do, things that maybe couldn’t even have been done. Burned him out.” Ron shrugged. “I wonder if I’ll get like that when my turn comes: shrunken, frail, defeated- looking? No. No, I won’t, will I? I’m a different kind. Nothing in common but the blue eyes.”
Was that really true? he wondered.
There was noise, suddenly, down the hall, a clattering, some whoops. Mike and Charlie appeared, Anse’s boys, taller now than their father, taller even than him. Seventeen years old. Blue Carmichael eyes, light-hued Carmichael hair. They had a girl with them: the one from Monterey, it must be. Looked to be a year or two older than they were.
“Hey, Uncle Ron! Aunt Peg! Want you to meet Eloise!”
That was Charlie, the one with the unmarked face. The brothers had had a terrible fight when they were about nine, and Mike had come out of it with that angry red scar down his cheek. Ron had often thought it was very considerate of Charlie to have marked his brother like that. They were, otherwise, the most identical twins he had ever seen, altogether alike in movement, stance, voice, patterns of thought.
Eloise was dark-haired, pretty, vivacious: sharp cheekbones, tiny nose, full lips, lively eyes. Leggy below and full on top. Very nice indeed. Ancient lustful reflexes stirred for an instant in Ron. She is only a child, he told himself sternly. And to her, you are simply some uninteresting old man.
“Eloise Mitchell—our uncle, Ronald Carmichael—Peggy, our aunt—”
“Pleased,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling. Impressive, yes. “It’s so beautiful here! I’ve never been this far south before. I love this part of the coast. I never want to go home!”
“She isn’t going to,” Charlie said. And Mike winked and laughed.
Then they were off, running down the hall, heading for the sunlight and warmth outside the old stone house.
“I’ll be damned,” Ron said. “Do you think they are sharing her?”
“That isn’t any of your business,” Peggy told him. “The younger generation does as it pleases. Just as we did.”
“The younger generation, yes. And we’re the stuffy old geezers now. There’s the world’s future rising up before our eyes. Charlie. Mike. Eloise.”
“And our Anson and Leslyn and Heather and Tony. Cassandra and Julie and Mark. And now Steve’s baby soon too.”
“The future, crowding in on the present all the time. While the past makes ready to clear out. Been like that for a long while, hasn’t it, Peg? And not going to change now, I guess.”
TWENTY-NINE YEARS FROM NOW
Khalid was at work in the cluttered corner of the dormitory that he used as his studio, carving a statuette from a bar of soap, when Litvak came in and said, “Start packing, guys. We’re all being transported again.”
Litvak was the communications-net man in the group, the one with the implant jack who knew how to rig the house telephone to pick information off the Entity net. He was the dormitory’s borgmann, in a manner of speaking: a borgmann in reverse who spied on the Entities rather than working for them, a compact diminutive Israeli with an oddly triangular head, very broad through the forehead and tapering downward to a sharp little pointed chin.
It was an interesting head. Khalid had sculpted portraits of him several times.
Khalid didn’t look up. He was fashioning a miniature figure of Parvati, the Hindu goddess: high tapering headdress, exaggerated breasts, benign expression of utter tranquillity. Lately he had been carving the entire Hindu pantheon, after Litvak had pulled photos of them out of some forgotten archive of the old Net. Krishna, Shiva, Ganesha, Vishnu, Brahma: the whole lot of them. Aissha probably wouldn’t have approved of his making statuettes of Hindu gods and goddesses—for that matter, a good Muslim should not be making graven images at all—but it was seven years since he had last seen Aissha. Aissha was ancient history to him, like Krishna and Shiva and Vishnu, or Richie Burke. Khalid was a grown man now and he did as he pleased.
From across the room the Bulgarian, Dimiter, said, “Are we going to be split up, do you think?”
“What do you suppose, dummy?” Litvak asked tartly. “You think they find us so charming as a group that they’re going to keep us together for the rest of eternity?”
There were eight of them in this sector of the transportee dormitory, five men, three women, tossed together higgledy-piggledy by the random-scoop arrangements that the Entities seemed to favor. They had been together fourteen months, now, which was the longest period Khalid had stayed with any group of transportees. The dormitory, the whole prison camp, was located somewhere along the Turkish coast—“just north of Bodrum,” Litvak had said, though where Bodrum was, or for that matter Turkey itself, was something not very clear to Khalid. It was a pretty place, anyhow, warm sunny weather most of the year, dry brown hills running down to the coastal plain, a beautiful blue ocean, a scattering of islands just offshore. Before this place he had been in central Spain for eleven months, and in Austria for seven or eight, and in Norway for close to a year, and before that—well, he no longer remembered where he had been before that. The Entities liked to keep their prisoners on the move.
It was a long while since he had been housed with anyone from the vicinity of Salisbury. Not that that mattered greatly to him, since there was no one in Salisbury for whom he had cared in any special way except Aissha and old Iskander Mustafa Ali, and he had no idea where Aissha might be and Iskander Mustafa Ali surely was dead by this time. In the beginning, in the camp at Portsmouth, most of his fellow prisoners had been people from Salisbury or one of the neighboring towns, but by now, after five or six (or was it seven?) changes of detention center, he no longer lived with anyone from England at all. Apparently there were many people throughout the world, not just his own English neighbors, who had displeased the Entities in some manner and now were subjected to this constant rotation from one prison camp to another.
In Khalid’s group there was, aside from Litvak and Dimiter, a Canadian woman named Francine Webster, and a man from Poland named Krzysztof, and a perpetually sulky Irish girl, Carlotta, and Genevieve from the south of France, and a small, dark-skinned man from somewhere in North Africa whose name Khalid had never managed to catch, though he had not tried very hard. They all got along reasonably well together. The North African man spoke only French and Arabic; everybody else in the group spoke English, some better than others, and Genevieve translated for the North African whenever it was necessary. Khalid had little interest in getting to know his roommates, since they were almost certainly temporary. He found jittery little Litvak amusing, and the hearty, good-humored Krzysztof was pleasant company, and he liked the warm, motherly Francine Webster. The others didn’t matter. On several occasions he had slept with Francine Webster and also with Genevieve, because there was no privacy in the dormitory nor much remaining sense of individual boundaries, and nearly everybody in the group slept in a casual way with nearly everybody else now and then, and Khalid had discovered, during the years of his imprisoned adolescence, that he was not without sexual drive. But the sexual part of things had made little impact on him either, other than pure physical release.
He went on with his sculpting, and offered no comments about the impending transfer, and three days later, just as Litvak had predicted, they were all ordered to report to Room 107 of the detention center’s administration sector. In Room 107, which was a large hall entirely unfurnished except for an empty bookcase and a three-legged chair, they were left by themselves to stand for close to an hour before someone came in, asked them their names, and, referring to a sheet of brown paper in his hand, brusquely said, “You, you, and you, Room 103. You and you, Room 106. You, you, you, Room 109. And make it snappy.”
Khalid, Krzysztof, and the North African were the ones who were sent to room 109. They went there quickly. No time was spent on offering farewells to the other five, for they all knew that they now were disappearing from each other’s lives forever.
Room 109, which was mysteriously distant from Room 107, was much smaller than 107 but just about as sparsely furnished. A picture-frame that held no picture hung on the left-hand wall; on the floor against the wall opposite it stood a large green ceramic flower-vase with no flowers in it; there was a bare desk in front of the far
