Authors: Robert Silverberg
“Good. Good. That’s wonderful, Ronnie. What about the rest of you, now? Doug, Paul, you guys are both computer experts. I don’t know beans about computers, and I need to. We get a little on-line communication with other places here, but it isn’t nearly enough. If you were living here, you could click right into the Resistance net and do some very necessary programming for us. Rosalie, you’re with a money broker of some sort now, is that right? In the next stage of the breakdown of society you could probably help us figure out how to cope with the changes that will be coming. And you, Anse—”
Anse’s head was swimming. He still could not bring himself to accede. Across the way from him, Carole, reading his mind without the slightest difficulty, was saying silently, lips exaggeratedly pursed,
No. No. No. No.
“Anse?” the Colonel said again.
“I think I could use a little fresh air,” Anse said.
He went outside before his father had any chance to respond to that.
It was cooler tonight than last night, but still on the mild side. There was rain coming soon: he could feel it. Anse stood looking down at little Santa Barbara and imagined that it was the gigantic city of Los Angeles, and imagined that city in flames, its freeways impenetrably blocked, vast armies of refugees on the march, heading toward his very street. Swarms of gleeful Entities floating along behind them, herding them along.
He wondered also what was behind Ronnie’s quick acquiescence. Buttering the old man up, gliding cunningly toward the foremost place in his heart after the long estrangement? Why? What for?
Maybe Peggy Gabrielson had had something to do with it. Anse was pretty sure that Ronnie and Peggy had spent last night together. Did the Colonel know that? The body language was obvious enough. Except, perhaps, to the Colonel. The Colonel would not have been pleased. The Colonel took a very Victorian view of such goings-on. And he was so protective of Peggy. He would surely intervene.
Well, Colonel or no, Ronnie almost certainly was up to something with Peggy, and was even willing to move to the ranch to keep it going. For one wild moment Anse found himself arguing that he would have to move here too, to protect his father against Ronnie’s schemes, whatever they might be. Because Ronnie was totally amoral. Ronnie was capable of anything.
Anse had been troubled by his younger brother’s amorality since he was old enough to understand Ronnie’s nature. That was what he was, Anse thought—not immoral, as the Colonel took him to be, but
amoral.
Someone who does as he pleases without ever pausing a millisecond to consider issues of right and wrong, of guilt or shame. You had to be very cautious when you were dealing with somebody like that.
But also Anse was, and always had been, intimidated by Ronnie’s volatile intelligence. Ronnie’s mind moved faster and took him into stranger places than Anse could ever enter.
Anse knew that he himself was a fundamentally ordinary, decent man, flawed, weaker than he would like to be, occasionally guilty of acts of which he disapproved. Ronnie never disapproved of anything having to do with Ronnie. That was frightening. He was demonic; diabolical, even. Capable of almost anything. To prosaic diligent imperfect Anse, who loved his wife and yet was often unfaithful to her, who obeyed his iron-souled father in all things and yet had not troubled himself to have the expected distinguished military career, Ronnie—who had not bothered with
any
sort of military career, nor offered the slightest explanation for bypassing one—was terrifying to Anse, a superior being, forever outflanking him with maneuvers he could not comprehend.
Ronnie was always a step ahead, acting out of motives that Anse could not fathom. His two quick marriages and lightning-fast divorces, no visible reasons for either. His equally swift and puzzling shifts from one sort of lucrative borderline-legal business operation to another. Or, for that matter, the time once when they were both still little boys and Ronnie had justified some terrible act of hostile mischief by explaining that it made him angry that Anse, and not he, had been given the sacred privilege of carrying the family name, Anson Carmichael IV, and that he, Ronald Jeffrey Carmichael, was going to get even with Anse for that a million times over during all the days of their lives.
And now here was Ronnie improbably jumping at the Colonel’s unexpected offer, instantly agreeing to move up here and dwell forever after at the right hand of their father while the rest of Southern California went to hell around them. What did Ronnie know? What did he see in the days ahead that was invisible to Anse?
Anse thought of his children in the midst of civil strife. A replay of the Troubles, only really
bad
this time. Gunfire in the street, fires raging on the northern horizon, black smoke filling the sky, maddened hordes of people converging on Costa Mesa, his very district: hundreds of thousands of people from Torrance and Carson and Long Beach and Gardena and Inglewood and Culver City and Redondo Beach and all those million other little places that made up the giant amoebic thing that was Los Angeles, people who had been driven from their own homes by Entity edict and now proposed to take shelter in his. And there were Jill and Mike and Charlie peeking hesitantly out from behind him on the porch, mystified, frightened, their faces gone completely bloodless, asking plaintively, “Daddy, Daddy, why are there so many people on our street, what do they want, why do they look so unhappy?” While Carole, from within the house, called to him again and again, a strangled terrified moan, “Anse—Anse—Anse—Anse—”
It would never happen. Never. Never never never. It was just the old man’s wild apocalyptic fantasy. Probably he was having Vietnam flashbacks again.
Even so, Anse was surprised to find that he had somehow decided to move to the ranch after all, in the time it took him to walk back from the edge of the patio to the door of the house. And he discovered, too, once he was inside, that all the others had come to the same decision also.
Christmas morning, very early. The Colonel lay dreaming. More often than not, what he dreamed of was that happy time right after the war, reunited with his family at last, his children around him and his wife in his bed every night in that pretty little rented house in that cheery Maryland suburb. He was dreaming of that time now. Halcyon days, at least when seen in the warm pink glow of a dream. The Johns Hopkins days, getting his doctorate, working toward it in the library all day, then coming home to robust little Anse, who was always ten or eleven in the dreams, and Rosalie, a pretty little girl in smudged jeans, and Ron, no more than two and already with that rapscallion gleam in his eye. And best of all Irene, still healthy, young, just turned thirty and delicious to look at, strong sturdy thighs, high taut breasts, long dazzling spill of golden hair. She was coming toward him now, smiling, radiant, wearing nothing but a filmy little amethyst-colored negligee—
But, as ever, he remained on the edge of wakefulness even while asleep, the ancient inescapable discipline of his profession. The soft bleebling of the telephone by the bedside sounded, the private line, and by the second ring Irene and her negligee were gone and the phone was in his hand.
“Carmichael.”
“General Carmichael, it’s Sam Bacon.” The former Senate Majority Leader, with the fine tennis-player legs. Now one of the ranking civilian officials of the California Army of Liberation. “I’m sorry to be awakening you so early on Christmas day, but—”
“There’s probably a good reason, Senator.”
“I’m afraid there is. Word has just come through from Denver. They’re going to do the laser thing after all.”
“The stupid fucking sons of bitches,” said the Colonel.
“Ah—yes. Yes, definitely,” said Bacon. He seemed a little taken aback at the sound of such colorful language, coming from the Colonel. That was not the Colonel’s custom. “They’ve seen Joshua Leonards’s report, and Peter’s comments too, and the response is that they’re going to go ahead with it anyway. They’ve got an anthropologist of their own—no, a sociologist—who says that if only for symbolic reasons we need to begin some sort of counter- offensive against the Entities, in fact it’s long overdue, and now that we have the actual capacity to do so—”
“Symbolic lunacy,” the Colonel said.
“We all second that, sir.”
“When will it happen?”
“They’re being very cagey. But we’ve also intercepted and decoded a Net message from the Colorado center to their adjuncts in Montana that seems pretty clearly to indicate that the strike will occur on January 1 or 2. That is, approximately seven days from now.” “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“We’ve already notified the President, and he’s sending a countermanding order through to Denver.”
“The President,” said the Colonel, making that sound like an obscenity also. “Why don’t they notify God, too? And the Pope. And Professor Einstein. Denver isn’t going to pay any attention to countermanding orders that come out of Washington. Washington’s ancient history. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say that to you, Senator. What we need to do is get somebody into Denver ourselves and disable that damned laser trigger ourselves before they can use it.”
“I concur. And so do Joshua and Peter. But we have some serious opposition right within our own group.”
“On the grounds that an act of sabotage aimed against our beloved liberation-front comrades in Denver is treason against humanity in general, is that it?”
“Not exactly, General Carmichael. The opposition comes on straight military grounds, I’m afraid. General Brackenridge. General Comstock. They believe that the Denver laser strike is a good and proper thing to attempt at this present time.”
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” the Colonel said. “So I’m outvoted, Sam?”
“I’m sorry to say that you are, sir.”
The Colonel’s heart sank. He had been afraid of this.
Brackenridge had been something fairly high up in the Marines before the Conquest. Comstock was a Navy man. Even a Navy man could be a general in the California Army of Liberation. They were both much younger than the Colonel; they had never had any combat experience whatsoever, not even a minor police action in some third-world boondock. Desk men, both of them. But they had two votes to his one in the military arm of the executive committee.
The Colonel had suspected they would take the position that they now had taken. And had fought with them about it.
Let me remind you, he had said, of a remarkably ugly bit of military history. The Second World War, Czechoslovakia: the Czech underground managed to murder the heal Nazi commander, a particularly monstrous character named Reinhard Heydrich. Whereupon the Nazis rounded up every single inhabitant of the village where it had happened, a place called Lidice, executed all the men, sent the women and children to concentration camps, where they died too. Don’t you think the same thing is likely to happen, only at least twenty thousand times worse, if we lay a finger on one of these precious E-Ts?
They had heard him out; he had given it whatever eloquence he could muster; it had not mattered.
“When was this vote held?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes ago. I thought it was best to let you know right away.”
The Colonel yearned to slide back into his dream. Once more, 17 Brewster Drive; the young Irene in her amethyst-colored negligee; the hard pink tips of the beautiful breasts that ultimately would kill her showing distinctly against the filmy fabric of the garment. But none of that was available just now.
What was available, sitting up there in low orbit around the Earth was a three-year-old laser-armed military satellite that the Entities had curiously failed to notice when they had neutralized the other human orbital weapons, or had not understood, or simply were not afraid of. It had the capacity to shoot a beam of very potent energy indeed at any point on Earth that happened to pass beneath it. It had been intended, in those long-ago idyllic pre-Entity days of three years ago, as the United States’ all-purpose global policeman, equipped with the high-tech equivalent of a very long billy-club: the ability to cut a nifty scorch-line warning across the territory of any petty country whose tinhorn despot of a ruler might suffer from a sudden attack of delusions of grandeur.
The problem was that the software that activated the satellite’s deadly laser beam had been lost during the Troubles, and so the thing was simply sitting up there, idle, useless, pointlessly going around and around and around.
There was a new and even bigger problem now, which was that the Colorado counterpart of the California Army of Liberation had discovered a backup copy of the activator program and was proudly planning to launch a laser strike against the Denver headquarters of the Entities.
The Colonel knew what the consequences of that were going to be. And dreaded them.
To Former Senate Majority Leader Sam Bacon he said simply, “So there’s no way, diplomatic or otherwise, of preventing them from launching the strike?”
“It doesn’t seem so, General.”
Lidice
, he thought.
Lidice
all over again.
“Oh, the damned fools,” said the Colonel quietly. “The hot-headed suicidal idiots!”
Across the world in England, Christmas Day had long since arrived.
A child had been born at Bethlehem on this day some two thousand years before, and two thousand years later children continued to be born at Christmastime all around the world, though the coincidence could be an awkward one for mother and child, who must contend with the risks inherent in the general overcrowding and understaffing of hospitals at that time of year. But prevailing hospital conditions were not an issue for the mother of the child of uncertain parentage and dim prospects who was about to come into the world in unhappy and disagreeable circumstances in an unheated upstairs storeroom of a modest Pakistani restaurant grandly named Khan’s Mogul Palace in Salisbury, England, very early in the morning of this third Christmas since the advent of the Entities.