Authors: Robert Silverberg
“American cars are different,” Cindy said. “At least you’ve been in a car before, I see. Even if you don’t know how to drive one.”
“I would go driving sometimes in my father’s car. On Sundays he would take me to places like Stonehenge.”
She looked at him sharply. “You never knew your father, you said.”
“I lied.”
“Oh. Oh. Oh. You play a lot of head games, don’t you, Khalid?”
“There was one thing I said that was true. I hated him.”
“For being a quisling? You said that he was. Was that part true?”
“He was one, but that was of no importance to me. I hated him because he treated Aissha badly. And, sometimes, me. He was probably bad to my mother, too. What does any of this matter now, though? The past is far away.”
“But not forgotten, I see.” She put the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine sputtered, coughed, caught, failed, sputtered again and this time came to life. Noisily the car moved forward through the detention compound. Cindy flashed her identification at the gate, the guard waved, and off they went.
They were out in the desert almost immediately.
For a time neither of them said anything. Khalid was too appalled by the hideous landscape all around him to speak; and Cindy, who was so small she could barely see over the top of the steering wheel, was concentrating intently on her driving. The surface of the road was a bad one, cratered and cracked in a million places, and the car, venerable ruin that it was, unceasingly groaned and grumbled, jouncing and jiggling them in merciless fashion and occasionally emitting ominous knocking noises as though getting ready to explode. He looked over at her and saw her sitting with her shoulders tensely hunched, biting down on her lower lip, gripping the wheel with all her strength as though to keep the car from skittering off into the sandy wasteland beyond the pavement’s edge.
“The speed limit on this freeway used to be seventy miles an hour. In kilometers that’s—what, a hundred ten? A hundred twenty? Something like that. And we all used to drive it at eighty or eighty-five—miles an hour, I mean— when I was a kid. Of course you’d have to be crazy to do that now. Assuming this car was capable of it, which it isn’t. It’s probably older than you are. It’s the kind that people had to use until just a few years before the Conquest, the sort you have to operate manually, because it doesn’t have a computer brain and won’t understand spoken, commands. An antique. And definitely coming to the end of its days, too. But we’ll make it to L.A., one way or another. On foot, if we have to.”
“If you are supposed to be delivering me to a place called Barstow,” Khalid said, “how can we continue on to Los Angeles? Won’t they wonder about us when we don’t show up at this Barstow?”
“No reason why they should. We’re going to die in an auto accident tomorrow, before we ever get to Barstow.”
“Excuse me?”
“The accident’s already programmed into the computer. My pal in Leipzig fed it in. A crackerjack pardoner, he is. Do you know what a pardoner is, Khalid?”
“No.”
“Pardoners are very clever hackers. They’re something like borgmanns, except they do their hacking on our behalf instead of the Entities’. They cut into the Entity net and make revisions in the records. If you’ve been transferred someplace you don’t want to go, for example, it’s possible to get a pardoner to undo the transfer. For a price, of course. What has been programmed in here by my pardoner friend is that Agent C. Carmichael, transporting Detainee K. Burke, met with an unfortunate freeway accident on the 18th of this month, which is to say, tomorrow, ten miles north of Barstow while driving south on Interstate 15. She lost control of her manually operated vehicle and crashed into a roadside barrier. The car was totally demolished and she and the passenger were killed. Their bodies were cremated by local authorities.”
“She met with this accident tomorrow, you say?”
“When tomorrow comes up on the computer net, the accident will come up with it. So I use the past tense. It’s already in there, waiting to activate itself. Agent C. Carmichael will be removed from the system. So will Detainee K. Burke. We will vanish as though we never existed. Since the car will also no longer exist, any official scanner that happens to pick up its license plate as we continue on will most likely assume that the reading is erroneous. Once we’re in L.A., I’ll arrange to obtain a new license for the car, just to be on the safe side.—Are you getting hungry yet?”
“Yes.”
“So am I. Let’s do something about it.”
They stopped at a woebegone highway cafe in the middle of nowhere, where the heat outside the car closed around them like a great fist. She bought a dinner of sorts for them both simply by showing her I.D. card. It was terrible food, some sort of cardboardy and tasteless grilled meat on a bun and a cold bubbling drink, but Khalid was used to terrible food of all sorts by this time.
Onward, again, through the sandy emptiness. There was very little traffic. None at all going in the direction they were traveling; perhaps one car every half hour going the other way. Whenever they passed someone, Cindy kept her eyes fixed rigidly on the road ahead, and Khalid noticed that the drivers of the other cars never looked toward them, either.
The road was climbing, and good-sized mountains were visible all around them now, bigger than he had ever seen before. But the landscape was still as ugly as ever, rocky and sandy, not much vegetation and most of that stunted and gnarled. At one point Cindy said, as they went flashing past a sign by the edge of the road, “We’re in California now, Khalid. Or what used to be California when this country still had such things as separate states. When there were still such things as countries.” He imagined palm trees and soft breezes. Not so. Everything was just as ugly here as it had been on the Nevada side of the line.
“Getting dark,” Cindy announced, an hour later. “The driving’s going to get tougher. These old crates are a lot of work to operate on a bad road. So I’m going to pull off and rest for a little while before we try to go further. You’re sure you don’t know how to drive?”
“Would you like me to try?”
“Maybe not, I think. Just stay awake, keep watch, let me know if you see anything strange.”
She left the freeway at the next exit and brought the car to a halt just off the road. Pushing her seat back until it was practically horizontal, she reclined against it, closed her eyes, and seemed to fall asleep almost at once.
Khalid watched her for a while. There was a look of great peace on her face.
She was, he thought, an unusual woman, very much in control of herself at all times, self-assured, confident. Avery capable person. Possessing much inner serenity, of that he was certain. Inner serenity was something Khalid admired very much. He had worked very hard to attain it himself, and he had, he believed, succeeded; surely he would never have been able to kill that Entity without it.
Or
did
he have it? What had she said, on the plane?
I think you’re angry all the time.
A seething volcano inside him, she said, with a tight lid clamped down on it to keep it from erupting. Was that true? He didn’t know. He always felt calm; but perhaps, somewhere deep down inside, he was really raging with red-hot fury, killing Richie Burke a hundred times a day, killing all those who had made his life such a misery ever since the moment when he had understood that his mother was gone and his father was a monster and the world was under the control of bizarre, bewildering creatures who ruled, so it seemed, purely by whim and savage caprice.
Perhaps so. He didn’t choose to look within and see.
But he was sure that there were no hidden volcanoes in this woman Cindy. She seemed to take life as it came, easily, day by day; very likely always had. Khalid wanted to know more about her, who she was, what her existence had been like before the Entities came, why she had become a quisling, all of that. But probably he would never ask. He was not used to asking people such things about themselves.
He left the car, walked around a little, glanced up at the moon and stars as night settled in. It was very quiet here, and with the coming of darkness the day’s blistering warmth was fleeing into the thin desert air. Already it had become quite cool. There were scrabbling sounds somewhere nearby: animals, he supposed. Lions? Tigers? Did they have such things in California? This was a wild land, fierce and harsh. It made England seem very placid. He sat on the ground beside the car and watched shooting stars go streaking across the black dome overhead.
“Khalid?” Cindy called, after a time. “You out there? What are you doing?”
“Just looking at the sky,” he said.
She had rested enough, she told him. He got back in, and they drove onward. Sometime during the night they came to the exit for Barstow.
“We died ten miles back,” she said. “It was all over so fast we never knew what was happening.”
A little before dawn, as they were descending a long gentle curve in a hilly part of the route, Khalid saw the turquoise lights of an Entity transport convoy far below, making its way uphill toward them. Cindy did not appear to notice.
“Entities,” he said, after a moment.
“Where?”
“That light down there.”
“Where? Where? Oh.
Shit!
Sharp eyes you have. —Who would expect them to be driving around in a place like this in the middle of the night? But of course, why wouldn’t they?” She swerved the car roughly to the left and brought it to a screeching halt on the outer margin of the freeway.
He frowned at her. “What are you doing?”
“Come on. Get out and let’s run for it. We’ve got to hide in that ravine until they go past.”
“Why is that?”
“Come on,” she said. She was anything but serene now. “We’re supposed to be dead! If they detect us, and decide to check out our I.D.—”
“They will pay no attention to us, I think.”
“How do you know? Oh, Jesus, Jesus, you
idiot!”
She could not wait any longer. She made a furious snorting sound and leaped from the car, plunging off straightaway into the steep brushy drop alongside the highway. Khalid remained where he was. He watched her dwindle into the darkness until the angle of the ravine hid her from his sight; and then he leaned back against the head-rest of his seat and waited for the Entity transport to approach.
He wondered whether they would notice him, sitting here in a parked car by the side of a dark road in an empty landscape, and whether they would care. Could they reach into his mind and see that he was Khalid Haleem Burke, who had died in an accident some hours earlier on this road, on the other side of the city called Barstow? Would they know anything about the supposed accident without consulting their computer net? Why would they bother? Why would they care?
Perhaps, he thought, they would look into his mind as they went past and discover that he was the person who had killed a member of their species seven years ago on the highway between Salisbury and Stonehenge. In that case he had made a mistake, very likely, by remaining here, staying within range of their telepathy, instead of running off into the underbrush with Cindy.
The image blossomed in his mind of that night long ago on the road to Stonehenge, the beautiful angelic creature standing in the transport wagon, the gun, the crosshairs, the head perfectly targeted. Squeezing the trigger, seeing the angel’s head burst apart, the bright fountain of flame, the radiant fragments flying outward, the greenish-red cloud of alien blood swiftly expanding into the air. The other Entity going into that frantic convulsion as its companion’s spirit went whirling out into the darkness. He was as good as dead, Khalid knew, if the Entities detected that image as they passed by.
He pushed it aside. He emptied his mind entirely. He sealed it off from intruders with iron bands.
I am no one at all. I am not here.
Glimmers of turquoise light now ascended heavenward right in front of him. The transport had almost reached the top of the hill.
Khalid waited for it in utter tranquillity.
He was not there. There was no one at all in the car.
Three aliens rode in the transport: one of the big ones who were the Entities, and two of the lesser kind, the Spooks. Khalid ignored the Spooks and fixed his eyes in wonder on the Entity, enraptured as always by its magical gleaming beauty. His soul went out to it in love and admiration. If they had stopped and asked him to give them the world, he would have given it to them. But of course they already owned it.
He wondered why, as he watched the convoy go by, he had never become a quisling, if he admired the Entities so much. But the answer came just as quickly. He had no desire to serve them, only to worship their beauty. It was an aesthetic thing. A sunrise was beautiful too, or a snowcapped mountain, or a lake that reflected the red glow of the end of day. But one did not enroll in the service of a mountain or a lake or a sunrise simply because one thought it was beautiful.
He let the time slide along: five minutes, ten. Then he left the car and called down to Cindy, in the ravine, “They’re gone, now. You can come back.”
A faint, distant reply came to him: “Are you sure?”
“I sat here and watched them go by.”
It was a while before she reappeared. At last she came scrambling up out of the brush, out of breath and looking very rumpled and flustered and flushed. Collapsing down next to him in the car, she said, between deep gulps of air, “They—didn’t bother—you—at all?”