“Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “Before my time, if he did.” Steve merely shrugged. But Paul said, “How old is she? Older than I am, would you say?”
“I’d say so. Older even than Uncle Ron, maybe. About Aunt Rosalie’s age, maybe.”
“She tell you her name?”
“Cindy, she said.”
Paul’s eyes grew very wide. “I’ll be damned.”
“So you surely will, cousin,” said Ron, entering the room just then. “What’s going on?”
“You aren’t going to believe this. But apparently the ambassador from outer space has returned, and she’s waiting at the gate. Cindy, I mean. Mike’s wife Cindy. How about that?”
So the whole place was a kind of Carmichael commune now, the Colonel’s entire family living together on the hilltop. Cindy hadn’t expected that. That was a whole lot of Carmichaels, counting in the kids, and all. She felt a little outnumbered.
It was amazing to see them all again, these people who for a few years had been her kinfolk, after a manner of speaking, so many years ago. Not that Cindy had ever been particularly close to any of them, back in her freewheeling old Los Angeles days. Taking their cue from the formidable old Colonel, they had never really allowed her into the family circle, except perhaps for Mike’s nephew Anse, who had treated her politely enough. To the others she was just Mike’s crazy hippie wife, who dressed funny and talked funny and thought funny, and they had made it pretty clear that they wanted very little, if anything, to do with her. Which had basically been okay with Cindy. They had their lives; she and Mike had had theirs.
But that was then and this was now, and Mike was long gone and the world had changed beyond anybody’s ability to imagine, and she had changed too, and so had they. And these people were the closest thing to family that she had left. She could not let them reject her now.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to be here, to be back among the Carmichaels again. Or to be among the Carmichaels for the first time, really. I never was much of a family person back in the old days, was I? But I’d like to be, now. I really would.”
They were gawking at her as though an Entity, or perhaps a Spook, had wandered somehow into their house on the mountainside and was standing in their midst.
Cindy looked right back at them. Her gaze traveled around the room. She summoned up what she could remember of them.
Ronnie. That one had to be Ronnie, there in the middle of the group. He seemed to be running things, now. That was odd, Ronnie being in charge. She remembered sly Ronnie as a wild man, a trickster, a plunger, an operator, always on the outside in family stuff. If anything he had been more of the black sheep of the family than she. But here he was, now, fifty years old, fifty-five, maybe, big and solid, grown very stocky with the years, his blond hair now almost white, and you could see immediately that he had changed inwardly too, in some fundamental way, that he had grown stronger, steadier, transformed himself colossally in these twenty-odd years. He had never looked serious, in the old days. Now he did.
Next to him was his sister, Rosalie. A nice-looking woman then, Cindy remembered, and she had aged very well indeed, tall, stately, controlled. She had to be around sixty but she seemed younger. Cindy recalled Mike telling her that Rosalie had been a big problem when she was a girl—drugs, a great deal of screwing around—but all that was far behind her now. She had married some fat nerdy guy, a computer man, and become a reformed character overnight. That must be him with her, Cindy thought: that big bald doughy-faced fellow. She didn’t remember his name.
And that one—the stringy-looking blond woman—she must be Anse’s wife. A suburban-mom type back then, somewhat high-strung. Cindy had found her to be of absolutely no interest. Another name forgotten.
The younger man—he was Paul, wasn’t he? Mike’s other brother’s son. Pleasant young fellow, science professor at some college south of L.A. Figured to be forty-five or so, now. Cindy recalled that he had had a sister. She didn’t seem to be here now.
As for the others, four of them were kids in their middle or late twenties, and the other, the teenager, was Ron’s kid, who had met them at the gate. The rest were probably Anse’s children, or Paul’s. They all looked more or less alike, except for one, clearly the oldest, who was heavyset and brown-eyed and balding already, with only the faintest traces of Carmichael about him. The son of Rosalie and her computer guy, Cindy supposed. There would be time to sort the others out later. The remaining person was a woman in her late forties who was standing just alongside Ron. The late-fortyish woman seemed vaguely familiar to Cindy but plainly was no Carmichael, not with those dark eyes and that smallish, fine-boned frame. Ronnie’s wife, most likely.
She said, as she completed her survey, “And the Colonel? What about him? Could he still be alive?”
“Could be and is,” Ronnie said. “Almost eighty-five and very feeble, and I don’t think he’ll be with us much longer. He’s going to be damned surprised to see you.”
“And not very pleased, I bet. I’m sure you know he never thought very highly of me. Perhaps for good reasons.”
“He’ll be glad to see you now. You’re his closest link with his brother Mike, you know. He spends most of his time in the past these days. Of course, he doesn’t have much future.”
Cindy nodded. “And there’s somebody else missing. Your brother Anse.”
“Dead,” Ronnie said. “Four years back.”
“I’m so sorry. He was a fine man.”
“He was, yes. But he had a lot of trouble with drinking, his later years. Anse wanted so much to be as strong and good as the Colonel, you know, but he never quite managed it. Nobody could have. But Anse just wouldn’t forgive himself for being human.”
Was there anyone else from the old days that she should ask about? Cindy didn’t think so. She glanced toward Khalid, wondering what he was making out of all this. But Khalid appeared utterly placid. As though his brain had gone off on a voyage to Mars.
The late-fortyish woman standing near Ronnie said cheerily, “I guess you don’t recognize me, do you, Cindy? But of course we were only together for a very few hours.”
“We were? When was that? I’m sorry.”
“On the Entity spaceship, after the Porter Ranch landing. We were in the same group of prisoners.” A warm smile. “Margaret Gabrielson. Peggy. I came here to work for the Colonel, and later I married Ron. No reason why you would remember me.”
No. There wasn’t. Cindy didn’t.
“You were very distinctive. I’ve never forgotten: the beads, the sandals, the big earrings. They let most of us go that afternoon, but you volunteered to stay with the aliens. You said they were going to take you to their planet.”
“That’s what I thought. But they never did,” Cindy said. “I worked for them all those years, doing whatever they wanted me to do, running detainee centers for them, transporting prisoners around, waiting for them to make good on their promise. But it didn’t happen. After a while I began to wonder if they had ever promised it. By now I’ve decided that it was all my own delusion.”
“You’re a quisling, then?” Ronnie asked. “Are you aware that this is a major center of the Resistance?”
“Was a quisling,” she said. “Not any longer. I was working at a detention center on the Turkish coast when I realized I had wasted twenty years playing footsie with the Entities for nothing. They hadn’t come here to turn our world into a paradise, which is what I used to believe. They had come here to enslave us. So I wanted out; I wanted to go home. I arranged for a pardoner I know in Germany to have me shipped out to the States, escorting a batch of prisoners to Nevada, and he rewrote my personnel code to say that I had been killed in an auto accident between Vegas and Barstow while driving this young man to his next detention camp. That’s why he’s here. The pardoner rewrote his code too. We’re permanent vanishees, now. When we got to L.A., I discovered that there’s a wall around the place. No way for us to get in, because we don’t officially exist any more.”
“So then you had the notion of coming here.”
“Yes. What else could I do? But if you don’t want me, just say so, and I’ll take off. My name is Carmichael, though. I was a member of this family once, your uncle’s wife. I loved him very much and he loved me. And I’m not about to interfere with any of your Resistance activities. If anything, I can help with them. I can tell you a lot of stuff about the Entities that you may not know.”
Ronnie was eyeing her reflectively.
