Authors: Robert Silverberg
“Specifically,
I said.”
“Very well. He will not go on this mission unless you prepare the way fully for him. What I mean by that is that you must be altogether sure that you are sending him to the right place, and that when he gets there, the doors of it must be open to him. He must know the passwords that will admit him. I understand about these passwords. He must be able to walk into the place of Prime in complete safety.”
, “We have Andy working on extracting the location of Prime and the password protocols right this minute. We won’t be sending Rasheed until we have them, I assure you.”
“Assurance is not enough. This is a sacred promise?”
“A sacred promise, yes,” Anson said.
“There is more,” said Khalid. “You will see to it that he comes safely back. There will be cars waiting, several cars, and care will be taken that confusion is created so that the police do not know which car he is in, and so he can be returned to the ranch.”
“Agreed.”
“You agree very quickly, Anson. But I must be convinced that you are sincere, or otherwise I will see to it that he does not go. I know how to make a tool, but I know how to blunt its edge, too.”
“I lost my brother to this project,” Anson said. “I haven’t forgotten what that felt like. I don’t intend to lose your son.”
“Very good. See to that, Anson.”
Anson made no immediate reply. He wished there were some way that he could transmit telepathically to Khalid his absolute conviction that this time the dung would be done right, that Andy would find in Borgmann’s archive every scrap of information that they would need in order to send Rasheed to the true location of Prime and to open all the hidden doors for him, so that Rasheed could carry out the assassination and make good his escape. But there was no way for Anson to do that. He could only ask for Khalid’s help, and hope for the best.
Khalid was watching him calmly.
That cool gaze of Khalid was unnerving. He was so alien, was Khalid. That was how he had seemed to the sixteen-year-old Anson on that day, decades ago, when he had turned up here out of the blue, traveling with Cindy; and after all this time, he was alien still. Even though he had lived among them for so many years, had married into their family, had shared in the splendor and isolation of their mountaintop existence as though he were a born Carmichael himself. He still remained, Anson thought, something mysterious, something
other.
It wasn’t so much that he was of foreign birth, or that he had that strange, almost unearthly physical beauty, or that he worshipped a god named Allah and lived by the book of Mohammed, who had been a desert prince in some unimaginably alien land thousands of years ago. That was part of it, but only part. Those things couldn’t account for Khalid’s formidable inner discipline, that granite-hard calm of his, the lofty detachment of his spirit. No, no, the explanation of his mystery must lie somewhere in Khalid’s childhood, in the very shaping of him, born as he had been in the earliest and harshest years of the Conquest and raised in a town infested by Entities, under hardships and tensions whose nature Anson could scarcely begirt to guess at. It was those hardships and tensions that must have led to his becoming what he was. But Khalid never would speak of his early years.
“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” Anson said. “If you have so little desire to place Rasheed at risk, why did you give him the same assassin training you gave Tony? I remember very clearly the time you told me that you didn’t give a damn about killing Prime, that the whole project was simply no concern of yours. So surely it wasn’t your intention to set up Rasheed as someone to be put into play if Tony failed.”
“No. That was not my intention at all. I was training Tony to be your assassin. I was training Rasheed to be Rasheed. The training happened to be the same; the goals were different. Tony became a perfect machine. Rasheed became perfect too, but he is much more than a machine. He is a work of art.”
“Which you now are willing to place at our service for a very dangerous mission, knowing that we’re going to do everything we can to protect him, but there’s going to be some element of risk nevertheless. Why? We would never have known what Rasheed was, if you hadn’t happened to say to Cindy that you felt he could handle the job. What made you tell her that?”
“Because I have found a life here among you,” said Khalid unhesitatingly. “I was no one, a man without a home, a family, an existence, even. All that had been stripped from me when I was a child. I was merely a prisoner; but Cindy found me, and brought me here, and everything changed for me after that. I owe you something back. I give you Rasheed; but I want you to use him wisely or else not at all. Those are the terms, Anson. You will protect him, or you will not have him.”
“He’ll be protected,” Anson said. “We aren’t going to repeat the Tony event. I swear it, Khalid.”
“Are you getting anywhere?” Frank asked, as Andy looked wearily up from the screen.
“Depends how you define ‘anywhere.’ I’m discovering new things all the time. Some of them are actually useful. —Would you mind getting me another beer, Frank? And have one for yourself.”
“Right.” Frank moved hesitantly toward the door.
“Don’t worry,” Andy said. “I’m not going to jump through that window and run away the moment you leave the room.”
“I know that. But I’m supposed to be guarding you, you know.”
“You think I’m going to try to escape? When I’m this close to breaking through into the most secret Entity code?’“
“I’m supposed to be guarding you,” Frank said again, patiently. “Not thinking about what you might or might not do. My father would roast me alive if I let you get away.”
“I would work much better if I weren’t so thirsty, Frank. Get me a beer. I’m not going anywhere. Trust me.” Andy smiled slyly. “Don’t you think I’m a trustworthy person, Frank?”
“If you do go anywhere, and I don’t get roasted alive because you do, I’ll personally hunt you down and roast you myself,” Frank said. “I swear that by the Colonel’s bones, Andy.”
He went down the hall. When he returned, about a minute and a half later, Andy was bent over the computer screen again.
“Well, I escaped,” Andy said. “Then I thought of a new approach I wanted to try, and I decided to come back. Give me the goddamned beer.”
“Andy—” Frank said, handing the bottle over.
“Yes?”
“Look, there’s something I’ve been intending to tell you. I want to apologize for all that shotgun stuff, the day you arrived. It wasn’t very pretty. But I knew what my father and Steve would say if they found out you had been here and I had let you go away again. I couldn’t take the chance that you would.”
“Forget it, Frank. Don’t you think I understand why you pushed that gun in my face? I’m not holding any grudge.”
“I’d like to believe that.”
“You might just as well, then.”
“Just why did you come back here?” Frank asked him.
“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer. Part of it was just a wild impulse, I guess. But also— well—look, Frank, I’ll kill you if you say anything about this to anybody else. But there was something else going on in my mind too. I did some shitty things while I was wandering around the country. And when I headed north out of Los Angeles I found myself thinking that maybe I just ought to stop off here and make myself of some use to my family, if I could, instead of acting like a selfish asshole all of the time. Something like that.”
“You almost turned right around and left again, though. Before you were even inside the gate.”
Andy grinned. “It isn’t easy for me not to act like a selfish asshole. Don’t you know that about me, Frank?”
Eleven at night. No moon, no clouds, plenty of stars. Frank was off duty now; Martin had taken over the job of guarding Andy. Frank stood outside the communications center, looking up into the darkness, thinking about too many things at once.
His father. This mission, and whether it would achieve anything. Andy, about whom so many terrible things had been said, suddenly becoming so repentant, sweating away in there to find the secret that would let them overthrow the Entities. And how wonderful everything would be if by some miracle they did overthrow the Entities and regain their freedom.
He closed his eyes for a moment; and when he opened them again, the blazing stars arrayed in that great arch above him seemed to engulf him, to draw him up into their midst.
Cindy knew all their names. She had taught them to him long ago, and he still remembered a great many of them. That was Orion up there, an easy one to find because of the three stars of his belt. Mintak, Alnillam, Alnitak, they were. Strange names. Who had first called them that, and why? The one in the right shoulder, that was Betelgeuse. And there, there in the warrior-god’s left knee, that was Rigel.
Frank wondered which star the Entities had come from. We’ll probably never know, he thought. Were there different kinds of Entities living on the different stars? Might there be a world of Entities greater than our Entities somewhere, beings that would conquer ours someday, and devour their civilization, and set free their slaves? Oh, how he hoped that would happen! He loathed the Entities for what they had done to the world. He despised them. He envied Rasheed for being the one who had been chosen to kill Entity Prime, a task he had desperately wanted for himself.
Stars are suns, he told himself. And suns have planets, and planets have people.
He wondered what kept the stars from felling out of the sky. Some of them did, he knew. He had seen it happen. Often on August nights they would go streaking across the sky, plummeting toward doom somewhere far away. But why did some fall, and not others? There was so much that he didn’t know. He would have to ask Andy some of these questions, one of these days.
Maybe the Entities’ star was one of those that had fallen. Was that why they went around to other stars and stole the worlds of those who lived there? Yes, Frank thought, that must be it. The Entities’ star has fallen. And so have the Entities, in a way: they have fallen on us. Looking up into the dark glittering beauty of the night sky, Frank felt a second fierce surge of hatred for the conquerors of Earth who had come out of that sky to steal Earth from its rightful owners.
One day we’ll rise up and kill them all.
It felt very good to think that, even though he had trouble making himself believe it ever would happen.
He glanced toward the communications center, and wondered how Andy was coming along in there. Then Frank looked up at the stars one last time; and then he went off to get some sleep.
Andy worked through the night, which was the way he preferred to do things, and put the last pieces of the puzzle together at the very moment when the sun was coming up. It was the time of the changing of his guard, too, James’s shift ending and Martin’s beginning.
Or perhaps it was the other way around, Martin going off duty and James arriving. Andy had never been very good at telling them apart. Frank stood out from the others to some degree—there was an extra spark of intelligence or intuition somewhere in him, Andy thought—but the rest of Anson’s kids all seemed interchangeable, like a bunch of androids. It was mostly that they all looked alike, poured from the same mold: that awesome Carmichael mold that never seemed to relinquish its grip on the family protoplasm. Glossy blond hair, chilly blue eyes, smooth even features, long legs, flat bellies—the entire crowd of them here at the ranch had been like that, boys and girls alike, decade after decade. Martin and James and Frank and Maggie and Cheryl in this generation; La-La, Jane, Ansonia, that whole bunch, too, just the same; Anson and Tony before them, and Heather and Leslyn, Cassandra and Julie and Mark, Jill and Charlie and Mike; and, even farther back, the Colonel’s three children, Ron and Anse and Rosalie. And the near-mythical Colonel himself. Generation after generation, going back to the primordial Carmichael at the beginning of time. Outsiders might come in, Peggy, Eloise, Carole, Raven, but the genes of most of them were gobbled up, never to be seen again. Only the Gannett input, the genes for brown eyes and too much weight and brown hair that went thin early, had somehow persevered. And, of course, so had Khalid’s, in spades; Khalid’s huge brood only too plainly bore the mark of Khalid. But Khalid was truly an outsider, so thoroughly non-Carmichael that his genetic heritage had succeeded in dominating even that of the indomitable Colonel.
Andy knew that he was being unfair: they must really be very different inside, Martin and James and Maggie and all the rest of the tribe, actual separate persons with individual identities. No doubt they would be indignant at being clumped together like this. So let them be indignant, and to hell with them. Andy had always felt overwhelmed by them all, outnumbered, outblonded. As his father also had been, Andy was sure. And probably his grandfather, also, Doug, whom he only faintly remembered.
“Tell your father I’ve finished the job and I’ve got the stuff he wants,” Andy said to Martin, or perhaps it was James, as the young man went off duty. “The whole business, every parameter lined up just right. No question of it. If he’ll come over here, I’ll lay it all out for him.”
“Yes,” said James, or perhaps it was Martin, with absolutely no inflection in his voice. He showed hardly any more comprehension of what Andy had just told him than if Andy had said to him that he had discovered a method for transforming latitude into longitude. And off he went to bear the news to Anson.