Authors: Robert Silverberg
They kissed. Her tongue slipped between his lips. She pressed herself very close. She slowly moved her hips from side to side. She led him easily onward, step by step, until he needed no further leading.
Her breasts were heavier than Jill’s, and softer, and subject to the laws of gravity in a way that Jill’s did not yet seem to be. Her belly was more rounded, her thighs were fuller, her arms and legs shorter, making Jill seem almost boyish in comparison, and when she opened herself to him she held her legs in a different way from Jill, her knees drawn up practically to her chest. All that seemed strange and fascinating to Steve, at first; but then he stopped noticing, stopped comparing. And very soon Lisa became the norm of womanhood for him, the only true yardstick of love. The things he had done with Jill became mere fading memories, odd adolescent amusements, episodes out of ancient history.
They made love every time they were together. She seemed as hungry for it as he was.
They talked, too, before, afterward: talked computers, talked programs, talked of contacts they had sporadically succeeded in making with hackers in the farthest reaches of the conquered world. Put their implants together and exchanged little data tricks. She taught him some things he had never known an implant could do, and he taught her a few. The silent assumption emerged between them that before long they would meet each other’s families and begin to plan their life together. But as the relationship moved on into its sixth month, its seventh, its eighth, they never actually got around to bringing each other home for introductions. What they did, mainly, was to meet outside the Mission, drive down to Mugu, into the oak grove, lie down together on the carpet of fallen leaves.
On a day in early spring she said, apropos of nothing at all, “Have you heard that they’re building a wall around Los Angeles?”
“On the freeways, you mean?” He knew about the concrete-block wall that cut Highway 101 in half, a little way beyond Thousand Oaks.
“Not just the roads. Everywhere. A huge wall clear around the whole city.”
“You aren’t serious!”
“No? You want to see?”
He had not been any closer to Los Angeles than this park itself since the day, ten years before, that his father and mother had thrown in their lot with the old Colonel at the mountaintop ranch. There was no occasion ever to go there. These days you needed to get an entry permit from LACON, the administrative body that ran the city on behalf of the Entities, for one thing. Besides, the place was said to have become a huge teeming slum, ugly and dangerous; and such contact as was necessary to maintain with Resistance operatives there could be and was maintained via on-line means, safe enough so long as proper coding precautions were observed.
But a wall around all of Los Angeles, if the Entities were really constructing such a thing: that was news, that was something that they needed to know about back at the ranch. The existing limitations on entry and departure were purely bureaucratic ones, a matter of documents and electronic checkpoints. An actual tangible wall would be a surprising new development in the ongoing tightening of Entity control of human life. He wondered why no word of it had reached them from Andy Jackman or one of the other Resistance agents within the city.
“Show me,” Steve said.
Lisa drove. It was a slow, difficult business. They had to take all mountain roads, because of the long-standing blockage on Highway 101 and some new problem on the Pacific Coast Highway just before Malibu, a rock slide during a recent rainy spell that had never been cleared away. She was forced to turn inland at Mulholland Highway, and then to wiggle interminably onward along one narrow pot-holed road after another, going through sparsely inhabited high country that was rapidly reverting to a primitive state, until at last they emerged onto Highway 101 beyond the Agoura end of the zone where it had been walled off. Steve wondered why the Entities were bothering to have Los Angeles itself surrounded by a wall, when it was this difficult to access already.
“The new wall cuts in at Topanga Canyon Boulevard,” Lisa said, but that name meant nothing to him. They were traveling eastward through steep, hilly countryside along a wide freeway in a relatively good state of repair. There was practically no traffic. He could see that this once had been a heavily populated region. The crumbling ruins of sprawling shopping malls and large residential subdivisions were still apparent everywhere, on both sides of the road.
Just before an exit that was marked Calabasas Parkway Lisa braked suddenly, startling him.
“Oops: sorry. Checkpoint up ahead. I almost forgot.”
“Checkpoint?”
“Nothing to worry about. I’ve got the password.”
A ramshackle array of wooden sawhorses blocked the freeway before them. A couple of LACON Highway Patrol officers were sitting by the side of the road. As Lisa drew up, one of them wandered out and held a scanner out toward her. She rolled her window down and pressed her implant against its sensor plate. A green light flashed, and the patrolman waved them onward, through the zigzagging assemblage of sawhorses and back onto the open freeway. A routine affair.
“Now,” Lisa said, some minutes later. “Look there.”
She pointed ahead. And he saw the new wall, rising beyond and below them, where the subsidiary highway labeled Topanga Canyon Boulevard ran at right angles to their freeway.
It was made of square concrete blocks, like the pair that cut a big section out of Highway 101 behind them from Thousand Oaks to Agoura. But this wall didn’t simply close off the hundred-foot width of the freeway, as the other ones did. It was a great long dinosaur of a thing that stretched as far as the eye could see, up and down the land. It came curving down out of the region to the northeast, which was or at least once had been a densely occupied suburb, and not only crossed the highway but continued on south of it, disappearing in a gently bending arc that appeared to head on down to the coast.
The wall looked to be about a dozen feet high, Steve thought, judging its height by the size of the men in the work crews bustling about it. It wasn’t as easy to guess how thick it was, but it appeared to be seriously substantial, even deeper than it was high: an astoundingly massive barrier, far thicker than any imaginable wall would need to be.
She said, “It gets to the coast near Pacific Palisades, and runs right down the middle of the Pacific Coast Highway to somewhere around Redondo Beach. Then it turns inland, and goes on eastward past Long Beach, where it peters out. But I hear that they plan to extend it back northward along the route of the Long Beach Freeway until it reaches to around Pasadena, and then they’ll close the circuit. It’s really only just in the beginning stages, you know. Especially what you see here. There are places off to the north of here where it’s already two and three times as high as this section of it in front of us.”
Steve whistled. “But what’s it all for? The Entities have us where they want us already, haven’t they? Why put in so much effort building a stupid enormous wall around Los Angeles?”
“It isn’t
their
effort that’s being put in,” Lisa said, and laughed. “Anyway, who understands anything about what the Entities want? They don’t explain anything, you know. They just give a Push, and we do what we’re Pushed to do, and that’s all there is to it. You know that.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
He sat there with her for a long while, numbed by the incomprehensible magnitude of the vast project that was under way before them. Hundreds of workers, swarming about the wall like so many ants, were hard at work lifting new blocks into place with mighty cranes, squaring them off, mortaring them. How high was the wall ultimately going to get? Twenty feet? Thirty? And forty or fifty feet deep? Why?
Why?
There wasn’t enough time for them to go to their secluded grove in the park that day, not if Steve hoped to get back to the ranch at any reasonable hour. But they made love anyway, in the car, twisted around crazily, Lisa’s legs splayed up over the backseat as they parked in a turnout along Mulholland—a frenzied, breathless, uncomfortable coupling, but it was unthinkable for him to go home without their having done it. He reached the ranch at ten that evening, rumpled, tired, a little depressed. He had never come back from a day with Lisa depressed before.
As Steve put together a late dinner for himself, his uncle Ron appeared, winked, salaciously pumped his fisted arm back and forth, and said, “Hey, boy, that was a long day you put in, gone by dawn, back after dark. You do the old razzmatazz a couple of extra times today?”
Steve reddened. “Come
on,
Ron. Let me be.” But he couldn’t help being amused and flattered. Secretly it pleased him that Ron would talk to him this way, one man to another, tacitly acknowledging the fact that his fat, nerdy little nephew Steve had made the transition into manhood.
He had decided some time ago that the jaunty, somehow slightly disreputable Uncle Ron was his favorite member of the family. He had heard, of course, that Ron had been pretty wild when he was younger, involved in all sorts of dodgy and probably illicit financial deals and maneuvers back in the days before the Entities came. But there was no sign that he was involved in any of that stuff now, such of it as might still be possible to carry on.
So far as Steve could see, Ron was the real center of the family: keen-witted and hardworking, a dedicated Resistance leader, probably the real king-pin of the whole operation. In theory Anse was in command now, by direct succession from the aging, increasingly feeble Colonel, who still held the official rank of chairman. But Anse drank. Ronnie
worked.
He was the one who was constantly in touch, thanks to the on-line skills of his brother-in-law Doug and his cousin Paul and his nephew Steve, with Resistance people all around the world, coordinating their findings, keeping everything moving along, as well as anyone could, toward the distant ultimate goal of human liberation. And he was good company, too, Steve thought. So different from the brooding Anse and his own glum, humorless father Doug.
Steve said, grinning up from his soup, “Did you know they’re building a wall all the way around Los Angeles?”
“Been some rumors about that, yes.”
“They’re true. I saw it. Lisa took me there. Through the mountains to the far side of the Highway 101 blockade, and then down the highway to where they’re doing the construction work. The new wall crosses 101 at a place called Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It’s a real monster. You can’t believe the size of it, Ron, the height, the width, the way it goes on and on and on.”
Ron’s chilly blue eyes were studying him shrewdly.
“There’s a LACON checkpoint, isn’t there, between Agoura and Calabasas? How were you able to get through it, fella?”
“You know about that?” Steve asked. “Then you even know about the wall, don’t you? And not just from rumors.”
Ron shrugged. “We try to keep on top of things. We have people out there moving around all the time. —How did you get through the Calabasas checkpoint, Steve?”
“Lisa had the password software. She put her implant right to the highway patrolman’s scanner, and—”
“She
what
?” His whole face tightened up. A vein popped into sudden prominence on his forehead.
“Gave the password with her implant. Jesus, Ron, you look absolutely appalled!”
“She lives in Ventura, your girlfriend, right?”
“That’s right.”
“All existing entry permits to Los Angeles for Ventura County people and beyond were revoked by LACON a couple of months ago. Except for those people living in the outer counties who work for the Entities and might have reason to commute into the city, and members of their families.”
“Except for—people who work for—”
“My God,” Ron said. Steve felt those eyes of his cutting into him in a way that was almost impossible to bear. “You know what kind of a girlfriend you’ve got, boy? You’ve got yourself a quisling. And she’s a computer nut too, right? A real borgmann, I bet. From a whole family of quislings and borgmanns. Oh, kiddo, kiddo, kiddo, what have you done? What have you done?”
It was after the time that Richie beat Aissha so severely, and then did worse than that—violated her, raped her—that Khalid definitely decided that he was going to kill an Entity.
Not Richie. An Entity.
It was a turning point in Khalid’s relationship with his father, and indeed in Khalid’s whole life, and in the life of any number of other citizens of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, that time when Richie hurt Aissha so. Richie had been treating Aissha badly all along, of course. He treated
everyone
badly. He had moved into her house and had taken possession of it as though it were his own. He regarded her as a servant, there purely to do his bidding, and woe betide her if she failed to meet his expectations. She cooked; she cleaned the house; Khalid understood now that
sometimes,
at his whim, Richie would make her come into his bedroom to amuse him or his friend Syd or both of them together. And there was never a word of complaint out of her. She did as he wished; she showed no sign of anger or even resentment; she had given herself over entirely to the will of Allah. Khalid, who had found no convincing evidence of Allah’s existence, had not. But he had learned the art of accepting the unacceptable from Aissha. He knew better than to try to change what was unchangeable. So he lived with his hatred of Richie, and that was merely a fact of daily existence, like the fact that rain did not fall upward.