up a glass of water from a nearby table and offering it to him. Quietly he said, “You may be overexerting yourself, Dad.”
“No. No. All I’m doing is making a little speech.” The Colonel drank deeply, let his eyes droop shut for a moment, opened them and turned them on Cindy again. “As I was saying: Mike. A martyr, I used to think, to all the cockeyed ideas that went running through American life since we went to war in Vietnam. The things he did. Quit the Air Force, ran off to L.A., married a hippie, went out to the desert a lot to hide himself away and meditate. I didn’t approve. But what business was it of mine? He was what he was. He was already himself when he was six years old, and what he was was something different from me.”
Another deep drink of water.
“Anse. Tried his best to be someone like me. Failed at it. Burned himself out and died young. Ronnie. Rosalie. Problems, problems, problems. If my own children are this crazy, I thought, what must the rest of the world be like? One big lunatic asylum, with me stranded in it. And that was before the Entities came, even. But I was wrong. I just wanted everybody to be as stiff and stern as me, because that’s how I thought people should be. Carmichaels, anyway. Warriors, dedicated to the cause of righteousness and decency.” A soft chuckle came from him. “Well, the Entities showed us a thing or two, didn’t they? The good, the bad, the indifferent—we all got conquered the same day, and lived unhappily ever after.”
“You never got conquered, Dad,” Ronnie said.
“Is that how it seems to you? Well, maybe. Maybe.” The old man had not released his grip on Cindy’s hand. He said, “You lived among the Entities all this time, you say? So you must know a thing or two about them. Do they have any flaws, do you think? An Achilles’ heel somewhere that will let us defeat them, ultimately?”
“I wouldn’t say I saw anything like that, no.”
“No. No. They’re perfect superbeings. They’re just like gods. Can that be so? I suppose it is. But I wanted to go on resisting, all the same. Keeping the idea of resistance alive, anyway. The memory of what it had been like to live in a free world. Maybe we never even did live in a free world, anyway. God knows I heard plenty of that stuff during the Vietnam time, how the evil multinational corporations actually were the ones who ran everything, or some little group of secret political masters, conspiracies, lies. That nothing was what it seemed to be on the surface. All our supposed democratic freedoms just illusions designed to keep people from understanding the truth. America really a totalitarian state like all the rest. I never believed any of that. But even so, even if I was naive all my life, I want to think it’s possible for the America that I used to think existed to exist again, regardless of whether it ever did the first time around. Are you following me? That it can all be reborn, that we can come out from under these slave-master Entities, that we can repair ourselves somehow and live as we were meant to live. Call it faith in the ultimate providence of God, I guess. Call it—” He paused and winked at her. “Some speech, eh, Cindy? The old man’s farewell address. I’ve just about run out of steam, though. Are you going to live here with us from now on?”
“I want to.”
“Good. Welcome home.” For once the fierce eyes softened a little. “I love you, Cindy. It’s taken me thirty years to get around to being able to say that, and I guess the world had to be conquered by aliens, first, and Mike to die, and a lot of other wild stuff to happen. But I love you. That’s all I want to say. I love you.”
“And I love you,” she said softly. “I always did. I just didn’t know it, I guess.”
FORTY YEARS FROM NOW
It was eleven years after Khalid and Cindy had come to the ranch, and ten since he had married Jill, when he finally revealed to anyone what it was that he had done to warrant being put into detention by the Entities.
Eleven years.
And thirty-three since the Conquest; and the ranch still floated above the suffering world like an island in mid-air, sacrosanct. Somewhere out there were the impregnable compounds of the Entities—within which the conquering creatures from another world went about the unfathomable activities requisite to an occupation of the conquered planet, an occupation that now had lasted a full third of a century without letup or explanation; and, somewhere out there, labor gangs working under conditions amounting to slavery were building huge walls around all of Earth’s major cities, and doing, at the behest of human taskmasters who took their orders from the aliens, all manner of other things whose purpose no one could comprehend. And somewhere out there, too, there were prison camps in which thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had broken some mystifying and inexplicable regulation that had been decreed by Earth’s starborn monarchs were capriciously and randomly detained.
Here, meanwhile, were the Carmichaels up above the world. It was rare for any of them to leave their mountain home any longer. The ranch’s confines were much less confining, now; the Carmichael domain had spread outward and to some degree downward into the depopulated hillsides all about them. They spent their days raising tomatoes and corn and sheep and pigs and squadrons of new Carmichael babies. The making of babies was, in fact, a primary occupation there. The place swarmed with them, one generation tumbling fast upon its predecessor. And also, like some machine that has been set blindly into motion without any means of halting, going through the unending motions of running a Resistance that consisted mainly of sending strings of resolute and inspiring e-mail to other groups of Resisters all over the world. The Entities, inscrutable as ever, must surely must have known what was going on up there, but they stayed their hand.
The Carmichaels lived in such utter isolation that when some stranger, some spy, broke into their walled domain a few years after Khalid’s arrival there, it was an altogether astounding event, an unprecedented foray of reality into their charmed sphere. Charlie found him quickly and killed him and all was as it had been, once again. And the world went on, for the unconquered Carmichaels on their mountainside and for the conquered hosts below.
Eleven years. For Khalid they went by in a moment.
By then, the Carmichaels had just about forgotten the whole subject of Khalid’s detention. Khalid lived among them like a Martian among humans, he and the almost equally Martian Jill, in an isolated cabin of their own that he and Mike and Anson had constructed for them beyond the vegetable garden, and there Khalid spent his days fashioning sculptures large and small out of stone or clay or pieces of wood, and drew sketches, and taught himself how to grind pigments into paint and how to paint with them; and he and Jill raised their tribe of eerily beautiful children there, and no one, not even Khalid, ever thought much about Khalid’s mysterious past. The past was not a place Khalid cared to visit. It held no fond memories. He preferred to live one moment at a time, looking neither forward nor back.
The pasts of other people impinged on him all the time, though, because it was just a short way from his cabin to the ranch’s graveyard, off in a gravelly little rock-walled natural enclosure, a sort of box canyon, just to the left of the vegetable patch. Khalid went there often to sit among the dead people and look outward, thinking about nothing at all.
The view from the graveyard was ideal for that purpose. The little box canyon opened at its downslope end into a larger side canyon on the mountain’s western face, canted not toward the city of Santa Barbara but toward the next mountain in the series that ran parallel to the coastline. So you could sit there with your back against the steep mountain face and look right out into blue sky and wheeling hawks, with little else in your line of sight except the distant gray-brown bulk of the next mountain over, the one that bordered the ranch on the west.
Gravestones sprouted like toadstools all around him here, but that was all right. The dead were no more frightening to Khalid than the living. And in any case he had known very few of these people.
The biggest and most elaborate of the stones belonged to the grave of Colonel Anson Carmichael III, 1943- 2027. There always were fresh flowers on that grave, every day of the year. Khalid understood that the Colonel had been the patriarch of this community. He had died a day or two after Khalid’s arrival here. Khalid had never laid eyes on him.
Nor on Captain Anson Carmichael IV, 1964-2024. They loved that name Anson here. The settlement was full of them.
Ron Carmichael’s oldest son was an Anson; so was Steve Gannett’s boy, though everyone called him “Andy.” And Khalid thought there might be others. There were so many children that it was hard to keep track. At Jill’s insistence Khalid had even given the name to one of his own sons: Rasheed Anson Burke, he was. This one in the
