“I remember the day it happened. For five minutes the Entities all went crazy. Jumping around like they’d been given a high-voltage jolt. Then they calmed down. Some wild day, that was. I was at the Vienna center, then. Like a circus, that day. And then we found out what had happened, that somebody had actually knocked one of them off, back in England. It hit me very hard, personally, when I heard that. I was, like, totally shocked. A terrible, terrible crime, I thought. I was still in love with them, then.”
The conversation was making Khalid uncomfortable. “Are we near Los Angeles yet?” he asked.
“This is all Los Angeles, more or less. These were independent towns, but everything was really Los Angeles except they called themselves separate towns. The actual official Los Angeles is all on the far side of the wall, though. Maybe twenty miles away.”
You could tell when you were leaving one little city and entering another, because the street lamps were different and so were the houses, one city having splendid mansions and the very next one very small half-ruined ones. But there was a certain sameness to everything, beneath it all: the huge glossy-leaved trees, the lush gardens that even the smallest and poorest houses had, the low buildings and the bright eye of the sun blasting down onto everything. There were mountains just up ahead, stupendous ones, looking right down onto all these little towns. They had snow on their summits, though it was as warm as a summer day down here.
Cindy called off all the names of the cities to him as they passed through them, as if giving him a geography lesson. “Pasadena,” she said. “Glendale. Burbank. That’s Los Angeles down there, to our left.”
They had turned, now, and were heading west, toward the sun, driving on a freeway again. The wall was quite distant from them along this part of the route, though later on they came near it again, and, later still, they were forced off the freeway into another region of what she called surface streets. The terrain here was flat and monotonous and the streets were long and straight.
“We’re very close to the place where the Entities made their first landing,” Cindy told him. “I hurried right to the spot, that morning. I had to see them. I was in love with the whole idea that the space people had come. I gave myself to them. Offered my services: the very first quisling, I guess. Not that I saw myself as a traitor, you understand, just an ambassador, a bridge between the species. But they let me down. They just shuffled me around from one job to another all those years while I waited for them to put me aboard a ship going to their home world. And finally I realized that they never would.—Look, Khalid, you can just about manage to see the wall again in that valley to our left, all the way down there, curving off toward the Pacific. But we’re outside it now. We should have clear sailing all the way to Santa Barbara.”
And they did. But when they got there, late in the day, they found the town practically deserted, whole neighborhoods abandoned, block after block of handsome stucco-walled tiled buildings that had fallen into ruin. “I can’t believe this,” she said, over and over. “This beautiful little city. Everybody must have just walked away from it! Or been taken away.” Pointing toward the lofty mountains rising behind the oceanfront plain on which the city stood, she said, “Use those sharp eyes of yours. Can you see any houses up there?”
“Some, yes.”
“Signs that they’re inhabited?”
“My eyes aren’t that sharp,” he said.
But Santa Barbara wasn’t wholly desolate. After driving around for a time Cindy found three short, swarthy- looking men standing together on a street corner in what must once have been the main commercial sector. She rolled down her car window and spoke to them in a language Khalid did not understand; one of them answered her, very briefly, and she spoke again, at great length this time, and they smiled and conferred with one another, and then the one who had answered before began to gesture toward the mountains and to indicate with movements of his hands and wrists a series of twisting, turning roads that would take her up there.
“What language was that?” Khalid asked, when they were moving again.
“Spanish.”
“Is that the language they speak in California?”
“In this part,” she said. “Now, at any rate. He says the ranch is still there, that we just keep going up and up and up and eventually we’ll come to the gate. He also said they wouldn’t let us in. But maybe he’s wrong.”
It was Cassandra, on duty in the children’s compound, who was the one that heard the distant honking: three long honks, then a short one, then three more. She picked up the phone and called down to the ranch house. A voice that was either her husband’s or her husband’s twin brother answered. Cassandra was better at telling Mike’s and Charlie’s voices apart than anyone, but even she had trouble sometimes.
“Mike?” she said, guessing.
“No, Charlie. What’s up?”
“Someone at the gate. We expecting anybody?”
She could hear Charlie asking someone, perhaps Ron. Then he said, “No, nobody that we know of. Why don’t you run up there and take a look, and call me back? You’re closer to the gate than anybody else, where you are.”
“I’m six months pregnant and I’m not going to run anywhere,” said Cassandra tartly. “And I’m in the kiddie house with Irene and Andy and La-La and Jane and Cheryl. And Sabrina, too. Besides, I don’t have a gun. You find somebody else to go, you hear?”
Charlie was muttering something angry-sounding when Cassandra put down the receiver. Not my problem, she thought. The ranch was crawling with small kids and right this moment it was her job to look after them. Let Charlie find someone else to trot up to the gate: Jill, or Lisa, or Mark. Anybody. Or do it himself.
Some minutes went by. There was more honking.
Then she saw her young cousin Anson go jogging by, carrying the shotgun that was always carried by anyone who went to meet unexpected callers at the gate. His face was set in that clenched, rigid way that it always took on when one of the older men gave him a job to do. Anson was a terribly responsible kind of kid. Rain or shine, you could always get him to jump to it.
Well, problem solved, Cassandra thought, and went back to changing little Andy’s diaper.
“Yes?” Anson said, peeping through the bars of the gate at the strangers. The shotgun dangled casually from his hand, but he could bring it up into position in an instant. He was sixteen, tall and strapping, ready for anything.
These people didn’t seem very threatening, though. A thin, tired-faced little woman about his mother’s age, or even a few years older; and an unusual-looking man in his twenties, very tall and slender, with huge blue-green eyes and darkish skin and an enormous mop of shining curly hair that was not quite red, not quite brown.
The woman said, “My name is Cindy Carmichael. I was Mike Carmichael’s wife, long long ago. This is Khalid, who’s been traveling with me. We have no place to stay and we wonder if you can take us in.”
“Mike Carmichael’s wife,” Anson said, frowning. That was confusing. Mike Carmichael was his cousin’s name; but Cassandra was Mike’s wife, and in any case this woman was old enough to be Mike’s grandmother. She had to be talking about some other Mike Carmichael, in some other era.
She seemed to understand the problem. “Colonel Carmichael’s brother, he was. He’s dead now.—You’re a Carmichael yourself, aren’t you? I can tell by the eyes. And the way you stand. What’s your name?”
“Anson, ma’am.” And added: “Carmichael, yes.”
“That was the Colonel’s name, Anson. And he had a son by that name too. Anse, they called him. Are you Anse’s boy?”
“No, ma’am. Ron’s.”
“Are you, now? Ron’s boy. So he’s a family man these days. I suppose a lot of things have changed.—Let me think: that would make you Anson the Fifth, right? Just like in a royal dynasty.”
“The Fifth, yes, ma’am.”
“Well, hello, Anson the Fifth. I’m Cindy the First. Can we come in, please? We’ve been traveling a long way.”
“You wait here,” Anson said. “I’ll go and see.”
He jogged down to the main house. Charlie, Steve, and Paul were there, sitting at a table in the chart room with a sheaf of printouts spread out in front of them. “There’s a strange woman at the gate,” Anson told them. “And somebody foreign-looking with her, a man. She says she’s a Carmichael. Was married to a brother of the Colonel named Mike, once upon a time. I don’t know who the man is at all. She seems to know a lot about the family.—Did the Colonel ever have a brother named Mike?”
