Authors: Robert Silverberg
Steve ran his hand in anguish through what was left of his hair. The man seemed to be having a breakdown right before his eyes.
“Cut it out, Anson, will you? It’s very late in the game to be spouting crap like this.”
“But is it such crap? The way it looks to me, all of a sudden, is that in my godawful impatience to do something big, I’ve done something very, very dumb. Which my father and my grandfather before me had the common sense not to try. —Call him back, Steve.”
“Huh?”
“Get him out of there.”
“Jesus, he’s practically at the site now, Anson. Maybe half a block away, looks like. Maybe less than that.”
“I don’t care. Turn him around. That’s an order.”
Steve pointed to the screen. “He
has
turned around. You see those bleeps of light? He’s signaling that he’s already placed the explosive. Leaving the scene, heading for safe ground. So the thing’s done. In five minutes or so I can detonate. No sense not doing it, now that the bomb’s been planted.”
Anson was silent. He put his hands to the sides of his head and rubbed them.
“All right,” he said, though the words came from him with a reluctance that was only too obvious. “Go ahead and detonate, then.”
Tony heard the sound rising through the air behind him, an odd kind of hissing first, then a thud, then the first part of the boom, then the main part of it, very loud. Painfully loud, even. His ears tingled. A hot breeze went rushing past him. He walked quickly on. Something must have exploded, he thought. Yes. Something must have exploded. There has been an explosion back there. And now he had to return to the wall and go through the gate and find Mark and go home. Yes.
But there were figures, suddenly, standing in his way. Human figures, three, four, five of them, wearing gray LACON uniforms. They seemed to have sprung right from the pavement before him, as though they had been following him all this time, waiting for the moment for making themselves known.
“Sir?” one of them said, too politely. “May I see your identification, sir?”
“He’s off the screen,” Mark said, from the car outside the wall. “I don’t know what happened.”
“The bomb went off, didn’t it?” said Steve.
“It went off, all right. I could hear it from here.”
“He’s off my screen too. Could he have been caught up in the explosion?”
“Looked to me like he was well clear of the site when it blew,” Mark said.
“Me too. But where—”
“Hold it, Steve. Entity wagon going by just now. Three of them in it.”
“Behaving crazily? Signs of shock?”
“Absolutely normal,” Mark said. “I’d think I’d better begin getting myself out of here.”
Steve looked toward Anson. “You hear all that?”
“Yes.”
“Entity wagon going by. No sign of unusual behavior. I think the site we blew might not have been the right one.”
Anson nodded wearily. “And Tony?” he asked.
“Off the screen. Allah only knows.”
In the three days after Andy had written the self-canceling pardon for the woman with fluffy red hair, he wrote five legitimate ones for other people who were in various sorts of trouble. He figured that was about the right proportion to keep the guild happy, one stiff per every five or six legits.
He wondered what had befallen her when she showed up at the wall and presented her dandy little exit permit, the one he had written that granted her the right to change her residence to San Diego. The gatekeeper would disagree. And then? Off to a labor camp for trying to use a phony permit, most likely. What a pity, Tessa. But no pardoner ever offered guarantees. They all made that clear right up front. You hired a pardoner, you had to understand that there were certain risks, both for you and the pardoner. And it wasn’t as if the customers had any recourse, did they? You couldn’t hire somebody to do illegal work for you and then complain about the quality of the job. Pardoners didn’t give refunds to dissatisfied customers.
Poor Ms. Tessa, he thought. Poor, poor Tessa.
He put her out of his mind. Her problems were not his problem. She was just a job that hadn’t worked out.
Not long after the Tessa event, Andy decided that it was time to begin raking off a little of his fees from the top. Mary Canary and his gang didn’t need quite that much out of him, he figured. A little here, a little there: it could mount up very nicely.
Soon, though, he began to see signs that they might be tapping in on him, checking on his figures. Did they suspect something, or was this just a routine check? He didn’t know. He wrote a cute little cancel that would keep them in the dark. But also he decided that he had had enough of Los Angeles for the time being. He didn’t love the place much. It was time to move along, maybe. Phoenix? New Orleans? Acapulco?
Someplace warm, at any rate. Andy had never liked cold weather.
At the ranch, Anson waited for a sign that the explosion in Los Angeles had had some effect on things.
What kind of reprisal would there be—arrests, plagues, disruptions of electrical service?—and when would it come? The Entities were certainly going to send mankind a message, now, to the effect that it was unacceptable to set off bombs in the middle of a major Entity administrative district.
There did not seem to have been any reprisal.
Anson waited for it for weeks. Waited. Waited.
But nothing happened. The world went on as before. Tony did not reappear, nor could he be traced via the Net; but that was no surprise. And otherwise everything was as it had been.
Thinking about Tony was almost unbearable for him. Sickening waves of guilt came sweeping through him, dizzying him, giving him attacks of the staggers, whenever he allowed himself to dwell on his brother’s probable fate.
Anson couldn’t understand how it had been possible for him to act on so little information—or how he could so coolly have let his brother go to his death. “I should have gone myself,” he said over and over. “I should never have let him take the risk.”
“The Entities wouldn’t have allowed you to get within ten miles of Prime,” Steve told him. “You’d have been broadcasting your intentions every step of the way.”
And Khalid said, “You were not someone who could have done it, Anson. Tony was the one to go. Not you. Never you.”
Gradually Anson came to admit the truth of that, though not before his brooding had reached such a pitch of despondency that Steve and Mike and Cassandra had seriously discussed the desirability of keeping him on suicide watch. Things never came to that; but the dark cloud that had settled on Anson did not seem ever to lift, either.
The great puzzle now was why had there been no response to the bombing. What were the Entities up to? Anson had no answer to that.
It was almost as if they were mocking him, refusing to strike back. Saying to him,
We know what you were trying to do, but we don’t give a damn. We have nothing to fear from insects like you. We are too far above you even to be angry. We are everything and you are nothing.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was nothing at all like that. The thing about aliens, Anson reminded himself, is that they are
alien.
Whatever we think we understand about them is wrong. We will never understand them. Never. Never. Never.
Never.
8
FIFTY-TWO YEARS FROM NOW
“Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” Andy said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.
He didn’t generally expect software to be suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—he could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff, Andy thought.
He stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.
“Name, please,” the gatekeeper said, what could have been a century later, in its kludgy robotic gatekeeper voice.
“John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon I04324X.”
He extended his wrist. A moment for implant check. Tick tick tick tick. Then came confirmation. Once more Andy had bamboozled a keeper. The gate opened. He walked into Los Angeles.
As easy as Beta Pi.
He had forgotten how truly vast the wall that encircled Los Angeles was. Every city had its wall, but this one was something special: a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty feet thick, easily. Its gates were more like tunnels. The total mass of it was awesome. The expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle— must have been phenomenal, he thought. Considering that the wall ran completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it was at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep. That was something to think about, a wall that size. So much sweat, so much toil. Not his own personal sweat and toil, of course, but still—still—
What were they for, all these walls?
To remind us, Andy told himself, that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there.
We made you build them,
is what they say,
and don’t you ever forget that.
Just within the wall Andy caught sight of a few Entities walking around right out in the street, preoccupied as usual with their own mystifying business and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were high-caste ones, the boss critters, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. Andy gave them plenty of room. They had a way sometimes, he knew, of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they studied him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. Old Cindy, back at the ranch, had told tales of being snatched up that way right at the beginning of the Conquest.
Andy didn’t think he would care for that. You didn’t get hurt, apparently, but it wasn’t dignified to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles.
His first project after entering the city was to find himself a car. He had driven in from Arizona that morning in quite a decent late-model Buick that he had picked up in Tucson, plenty of power and style, but by now he expected that there were alerts out for it everywhere and it didn’t seem wise to try to bring it through the wall. So, with great regret, he had left it parked out there and gone in on foot.
On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall he came upon a late-model Toshiba El Dorado that looked pretty good to him. He matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to his personal metabolic cues. The previous owner, he thought, must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.
“Pershing Square,” he told the car.
It had nice capacity, maybe 90 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. Andy figured he’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three quick pardons to keep his edge sharp, get himself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. Stay in L.A. a week or so, no more than that. Then head out to Hawaii, maybe. Or down to South America. Meanwhile, L.A. wasn’t such a bad place to be, this time of year. It was the middle of winter, yes, but the Los Angeles winter was a joke; that golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons. Andy was glad to be back in the big town at last, at least for a little while, after five years roving the boondocks.
A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange, traffic suddenly began to back up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock: no way of knowing until he was there. Andy told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.
Slipping through roadblocks could have its scary aspects and even under favorable conditions called for a lot of hard work. He preferred not to deal with them. He knew that he probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you didn’t have to?
After some zigging and zagging, heading basically in the general direction of the downtown towers, he asked the car where he was.
The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. Right at the edge of downtown, looked like. He had the car drop him at Spring Street, a couple of blocks from Pershing Square. “Pick me up at 1830 hours,” Andy told it. “Corner of—uram—Sixth and Hill.”
It went away to park itself and he headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.
It wasn’t Andy’s plan to check in with the Mary Canary syndicate. They wouldn’t welcome him very warmly, and in any case he was planning to be in town only a short while, too short for them to be able to track him down, so why split the fees with them? He’d be gone before they ever knew he was here.