“Let’s go talk to the Colonel,” he said.
Khalid watched her go from the room, followed by most of the others. Only a few of the younger ones remained with him: two men who were obviously twin brothers, though one had a long red scar on his face, and the tense, earnest, boyish-looking one, plainly related to the twins, who had met them at the gate with the shotgun in his hand. And also a girl who looked like a female version of the two brothers, tall and lean and blond, with those icy blue eyes that almost everyone around here seemed to have. The rest of her seemed icy too: she was as cool and remote as the sky. But very beautiful.
The brother with the scar said, to the other one, “We’d better move along, Charlie. We’re supposed to be fixing the main irrigation pump.”
“Right.” To the boy with the shotgun Charlie said, “Can you manage things here on your own, Anson?”
“Don’t worry about me. I know what to do.”
“If he does anything peculiar, you let him have it right in the gut, you hear me, Anson?”
“Go on, Charlie,” Anson said stiffly, gesturing toward the door with the shotgun. “Go fix the goddamned pump. I told you, I know what to do.”
The twins went out. Khalid stood patiently where he had been standing all along, calm as ever, letting time flow past him. The tall blond girl was looking at him intently. There was a detachment in her curiosity, a kind of aloof scientific fascination. She was studying him as though he were some new kind of life-form. Khalid found that oddly appealing. He sensed that she and he might be similar in certain interesting ways, behind their wholly different exteriors.
She let a moment or two go by. Then she said to the boy, “You run along now, Anson. Let me have the gun.”
Anson seemed startled. He is so very earnest, Khalid thought. Takes himself very seriously. “I can’t do that, Jill!”
“Sure you can. You think I don’t know how to use a shotgun? I was shooting rabbits on this mountain while you were still shitting in your diapers. Give it here. Run along.”
“Hey, I don’t know if—”
“Go, now,” she said, taking the gun from him and pointing with her thumb toward the door. She had not raised her voice at all throughout the entire interchange; but Anson, looking bewildered and cowed, went shuffling from the room as though she had struck him in the face with a whip.
“Hello,” the girl said to Khalid. Only the two of them were left in the room, now.
“Hello.”
Her eyes were fixed steadily on him. Almost without blinking. The thought came to him suddenly that he would like to see her without her clothes. He wanted to know whether the triangle at her loins was as golden as the hair on her head. He found himself imagining what it would be like to run his hand up her long, smooth thighs.
“I’m Jill,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Khalid.”
“Khalid. What kind of name is that?”
“An Islamic name. I was named for my uncle. I was born in England, but my mother was of Pakistani descent.”
“Pakistani, eh? And what may that be?”
“Pakistanis are people who come from Pakistan. That’s a country near India.”
“Ah-hah. India. I know about India. Elephants and tigers and rubies. I read a book about India once.” She waggled the gun around in a careless, easy way. “You have interesting eyes, Khalid.”
“Thank you.”
“Do all Pakistanis look like you?”
“My father was English,” he said. “He was very tall, and so am I. Pakistanis aren’t usually this tall. And they have darker skin than I have, and brown eyes. I hated him.”
“Because he had the wrong color eyes?”
“His eyes did not matter to me.”
Hers were staring right into his. Those blue, blue eyes.
She said, “You were in Entity detention, that woman said. What did you do to get yourself detained?”
“I’ll tell you that some other time.”
“Not now?”
“Not now, no.”
She ran her hand along the barrel of the shotgun, stroking it lovingly, as though she just might be thinking of ordering him at gunpoint to tell him what the crime was that he had committed. He remembered how he had stroked the grenade gun, the night he had killed the Entity. But he doubted that she would shoot him; and he did not intend to tell her anything about that now, no matter what kind of threats she made. Later, maybe. Not now.
She said, “You’re very mysterious, aren’t you, Khalid. Who are you, I wonder?”
“No one in particular.”
“Neither am I,” she said.
The Colonel looked to be about two hundred years old, Cindy thought. There didn’t seem to be anything left of him but those outrageous eyes of his, blue as glaciers, sharp as lasers.
He was in bed, propped up on a bunch of pillows. He had a visible tremor of some kind, and his face was haggard and deathly pale, and from the look of his shoulders and chest he weighed about eighty pounds. His famous shock of silvery hair had thinned to mere wisps.
All around him, on both night-tables and on the wall, were dozens and dozens of family photographs, some two-dimensional and some in three, along with all manner of official-looking framed documents, military honors and such. Cindy spotted the photo of Mike at once. It leaped out instantly from everything else: Mike as she remembered him, a vigorous handsome man in his fifties, out in the New Mexico desert standing next to that little plane he had loved so much, the Cessna.
“Cindy,” the Colonel said, beckoning with a claw-like palsied hand. “Come here. Closer. Closer.” Faint and papery as it was, it was still unmistakably the voice of the Colonel. She could never have forgotten that voice. When the Colonel said something, however mildly, it was an order. “You really are Cindy, are you?”
“Really. Truly.”
“How amazing. I didn’t ever imagine that I’d see you again. You went to the aliens’ planet, did you?”
“No. That was just a pipe dream. They just kept me, all those years. Put me to work, moving me around from this compound to that, one administrative job and another. Eventually I decided to escape.”
“And come here?”
“Not at all. I had no way of knowing I’d find anyone here. I went to L.A. But I couldn’t get in, so I took a chance and went up here. This was my last resort.”
“You know that Mike is long dead, don’t you?”
“I know that, yes.”
“And Anse, too. You remember Anse? My older son?”
“Of course I remember him.”
“My turn’s next. I’ve already lived ten years too long, at the very least. Thirty, maybe. But it’s just about over for me, now. I broke my hip last week. You don’t recover from that, not at my age. I’ve had enough, anyway.”
“I never thought I’d hear you say anything like that.”
“You mean that I sound like a quitter? No. That’s not it. I’m not giving up, exactly. I’m just going away. There’s no preventing it, is there? We aren’t designed to live forever. We outlive our own time, we outlive our friends, if we’re really unlucky we outlive our children, and then we go. It’s all right.” He managed a sort of smile. “I’m glad you came here, Cindy.”
“You are? Really?”
“I never understood you, you know. And I guess you never understood me. But we’re family, all the same. My brother’s wife: how could I not love you? You can’t expect everybody around you to be just like yourself. Take Mike, for instance—”
He began to cough. Ronnie, who had been standing to one side in silence, stepped forward quickly, snatching
