Anse heard the sound of a car door slamming outside.
Carole heard it too. “I think someone else just got here,” she called from the bathroom. She appeared in the doorway, all pink and gold, toweling herself dry. “You don’t think it’s your brother, do you?”
Could it be? The troubled shadowy sibling, reunited with his family at last? But no: looking out into the gathering darkness toward the parking area, Anse saw a woman getting out of the car, followed by a big, ungainly man and a plump preadolescent boy.
“No,” he said. “It’s just Rosalie and Doug, with Steve.”
Then, no more than ten minutes later, he saw another set of headlights glowing on the mountain road below the ranch. His cousins Paul and Helena, probably, who were supposed to be driving up together from Newport Beach. Paul had lost his wife in the Troubles, Helena her husband. They had gravitated toward each other, brother and sister forming a solid little unit in this time of tragic loss for each. But no again: by the last fading gleam of daylight Anse was able to tell that this was a trim little sports car, not the great hulking ancient van that Paul would be driving. This was his brother’s car. “My God,” Anse gasped. “I think it actually is Ron!”
In the beautiful city of Prague, which had been the capital of the Czech Republic until that day two years and two months ago when such things as capitals and republics had ceased to be of any real significance on Earth, and which now was the site of the central communications nexus for the Entities who occupied the mainland of Europe, the weather on this night, a few days before Christmas, was highly non-Californian, though it was pleasant enough for midwinter Prague. The temperature had been hovering just above the freezing mark all day and now, at nightfall, was beginning to slip below zero Celsius. It had snowed yesterday, though not really heavily, and much of the city was mantled now in a thin coating of white; but tonight the air was clear and still, just the slightest whisper of breeze rising off the river that ran through the heart of the old town but otherwise all was calm.
Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, sixteen years old, the son of a German electrical engineer who had been living in Prague since the mid-1990s, moved quickly through the gathering darkness, light on his feet like the predatory cat he conceived himself to be, stalking his prey. He was, in truth, something other than cat-like: short and thick-waisted, actually, flat face with jutting cheekbones, heavy wrists and ankles, dark hair and swarthy complexion, everything about him rather more Slavic than Teutonic in appearance. But in his mind he was a cat on the prowl, just now. His prey was the Swedish girl, Barbro Ekelund, the University professor’s daughter, with whom he had been secretly, desperately, deliriously in love for the past four months, since the time they had met and briefly talked at the chopshop in Parizska Street, near the old Jewish quarter.
He trailed her now, staying twenty meters behind her and keeping his eyes fixed rigidly on her jeans-clad buttocks. This was the day he would at long last approach her again, speak to her, invite her to spend some time with him. His Christmas present to himself. A girl of his own, finally. The beginning of the new beginning of his life.
In his mind’s eye he imagined her to be walking naked down the street. He could see with incandescent clarity those two smooth, fleshy white cheeks flaring startlingly out of her narrow waist. He could see everything. The slim pale back rising up and up above her rump, the thin dark line of her spine plainly visible. The delicate bones of her shoulder blades. The long thin arms. The wonderfully attenuated legs, so slender that they didn’t meet and touch at the thighs the way the legs of Czech girls always did, but left a zone of open air from her knees all the way up to her loins.
He could spin her around to face him, too, if he wanted to, rotating her through a hundred-eighty-degree movement as easily as he could rotate an image on his computer screen with two quick keystrokes. He turned her now. Now he could see those ripe, round, pink-tipped breasts of hers, so incongruously full and heavy on her lean elongated form, and the long deep indentation of her navel framed to right and left by her jutting hipbones, and the sliver of a birthmark beside it, and the dense, mysterious pubic jungle below, unexpectedly dark for all her Nordic fairness. He imagined her standing there stark naked on the snowy street, grinning at him, waving to him, excitedly calling his name.
Karl-Heinrich had never actually beheld the nakedness of Barbro Ekelund, nor that of any other girl. Not with his own eyes, at any rate. But he had, through much trial and error, managed to attach a tiny spy-eye to a thin catheter-like metal tube and slide it upward from the basement of her apartment building along the building’s main data conduit into her very own bedroom. Karl-Heinrich was very good at managing such things. The spy-eye caught, now and then, delicious fugitive glimpses of Barbro Ekelund rising naked from her bed, moving about her room, doing her morning exercises, rummaging through her wardrobe for the clothes she meant to wear that day. It relayed those glimpses to the antenna atop the main post office that captured them for Karl-Heinrich’s private data box, from which he could retrieve them with a single mouse-click.
Over the past two months Karl-Heinrich had assembled and enhanced and in various ways edited his collection of Barbro shots so that, by now, he possessed an elegant little video of her as seen from every angle, turning, reaching, stretching, unwittingly displaying herself to him with utter candor. He never tired of watching it.
But watching, of course, was nowhere near as good as touching. Caressing. Experiencing.
If only, if only, if only—
He walked faster, and then faster still. She was heading, Karl-Heinrich suspected, for that little coffee shop that she liked down toward the lower end of the square, just beyond the old Europa Hotel. He wanted to catch up with her before she entered it, so that she would enter it with him, instead of going immediately to some table filled with her friends.
“Barbro!” he called. His voice was husky with tension, little more than a hoarse ragged whisper. He had to force it out. It was always a formidable effort for him, making any sort of overture to a girl. Girls were more alien to him than the Entities themselves.
But she turned. Stared. Frowned, obviously puzzled.
“Karl-Heinrich,” he announced, coming up alongside her, compelling himself now to affect what he hoped was a jaunty, debonair ease. “You remember. From the chopshop in the Stare Mesto. Borgmann, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. I showed you how to jack the data wand to your implant.” He was speaking in English, as nearly everyone in Prague under twenty-five usually did.
“The chopshop?—” she said, sounding very doubtful. “Stare Mesto?”
He grinned up at her hopefully. She was two centimeters taller than he was. He felt so stocky, so bestial, so coarse and thick-set, next to her willowy radiant long-legged beauty.
“It was in August. We had a long talk.” That was not strictly true. They had spoken for about three minutes. “The psychology of the Entities as Kafka might have understood it, and everything. You had some fascinating things to say. I’m so glad to have run into you again. I’ve been looking all over for you.” The words were tumbling out of him, an unstoppable cascade. “I wonder if I could buy you a coffee. I want to tell you about some wonderful new computer work that I’ve been doing.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling almost shyly, plainly still mystified. “I’m afraid I don’t recall—look, I’ve got to go, I’m meeting some friends from the University here—”
Push onward, he ordered himself sternly.
He moistened his lips. “What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line!” He was astounded to hear himself say a thing like that, so fantastic, so untrue. But he waved his arm in a vague way in the direction of the river, and of the great looming medieval bulk of Hradcany Castle high on its hill beyond it, where the Entities had made their headquarters in the lofty halls of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. “Isn’t that extraordinary? The first
direct entry into their system. I’m dying to tell someone all about it, and it would make me very happy if you—if we—you and I—if we could—” He was babbling now, and knew it.
Her sea-green eyes were dishearteningly remote. “I’m terribly sorry. My friends are waiting inside.”
Not only taller than he, but a year or two older. And as beautiful and unattainable as the rings of Saturn.
He wanted to say, Look, I know everything about your body, I know the shape of your breasts and the size of your nipples and I know that your hair down below is dark instead of blonde and that you’ve got a little brown birthmark on the left side of your belly, and I think you’re absolutely beautiful and if you will only let me undress you and touch you a little I will worship you forever like a goddess.
But Karl-Heinrich said none of that, said nothing at all, just stood mute where he was, looking longingly at her as though she were a goddess in actual feet, Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, and she gave him another sad little perplexed smile and turned from him and went into the coffee shop, leaving him alone and crimson-cheeked and gaping like a fish in the street.
He felt shock and anger, although no real surprise, at the rejection. He felt great sadness. But also, he realized, a touch of relief. She was too beautiful for him: a cold pale fire that would consume him if he came too near. He would only have behaved like a fool if she had gone inside with him, anyway. In his reckless hungry overeagerness, he knew, he would have ruined things almost immediately.
Beautiful girls were so frightening. But necessary. Necessary. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Why, though, did it always end like this for him?
A swirling gust of snowy wind came roaring down the square at him and sent him shivering off toward the north, lost in a daze of bitter self-pity. Aimlessly, planlessly, he went wandering up along Melantrichova and into the maze of ancient little cobblestoned streets leading to the river. In ten minutes he was at the Charles Bridge, peering across at the somber mass of Hradcany Castle dominating the other bank.
They didn’t floodlight the castle any more, now that the Entities were here. But you could still make it out, the great heavy blackness of it on the hill, blotting out the stars of the western sky.
The whole castle area was sealed off now, not just the cathedral but the museums, the courtyards, the old royal palace, the gardens, and all the rest that had made the place so attractive to tourists. Not that there were any tourists coming to Prague these days, of course. Karl-Heinrich’s mind summoned the image of the gigantic aliens, the Entities, moving around within the cathedral as they went about their unfathomable tasks. He thought with some astonishment of the boast that had so unexpectedly sprung from his lips. What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line! Of course there was no truth to it. But could it be done? he wondered. Could it? Could it?
I’ll show her, he thought wildly. Yes.
Go up to the castle. Break in somehow. Connect with their computers. There has to be a way. It’s only a sequence of electrical impulses; even they need to use something like that, ultimately, in any sort of computational device. It will be an interesting experiment: an intellectual challenge. I am a failure with women but I have a very fine mind that needs constantly to be kept in play so that its edge will remain keen. I must forever improve my own range of mental ability through constant striving toward excellence.
And so. Connect with them. And not just connect! Open a line of communication with them. Offer to teach them things about our computers that they can’t possibly know and want to learn. Be useful to them. Somebody has to be. They are here to stay; they are our masters now.
Be useful to them, that’s the thing to do.
Earn their respect and admiration. I can be very helpful, that I know. Get them to trust me, to like me, to become dependent on me, to offer me nice rewards for my further cooperation.
And then—
Make them give her to me as a slave.
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Anse said, “You won’t fuck around with him, will you, Ronnie? Promise me that. You won’t do a single goddamn thing to ruin the old man’s Christmas.”
“Cross my heart,” Ron said. “Last thing I would want, anything that would hurt him. It’s all up to him. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t start in. If he goes easy on me, I won’t have any quarrel with him. But remember, this was your idea, my coming up here.” Wearing only a bath towel around his waist, he moved briskly about the room, fastidiously unpacking, arranging his things just so, his shirts, his socks, his belts, his trousers. Ron was a very tidy man, Anse thought. Even a little prissy.
“His idea,” Anse said.
“Same thing. You be of one blood, you and he.”
“And so are you. Keep it in mind, is all I ask, all right?” They were four years apart in age, and they had never liked each other very much, though the animosity between them was nothing at all compared with that between Ronnie and his father. While they were growing up Anse had rarely been amused by Ronnie’s habit of borrowing things from him without troubling to ask—sneakers, joints, girlfriends, cars, liquor, et cetera et cetera et cetera—but he hadn’t regarded Ronnie’s lighthearted unprincipled ways with the same sort of lofty condemnation that the Colonel had. “You’re his son and he loves you, whatever has gone on between you over the years, and this is Christmas and the whole family is together, and I don’t want you to make trouble.”
Ronnie glanced back over his meaty shoulder. “Enough already, Anse. I told you I’d be good. What do you say, bro? Can we let it go at that?” He selected a shirt from the dozen or more that he had brought with him, unfolded it and tweaked the fabric thoughtfully between two fingers, shook his head, selected another from the stack, unbuttoned it with maddening precision and began to put it on.—“You have any idea why he wants us all here, Anse? Other than it being Christmas?”
“Isn’t Christmas enough?”
“When you came down to see me in La Jolla you told me that you thought something special was up, that it was important for me to come. Urgent, even, you said.”
“Right. But I don’t have a clue.”
“Could it be that he’s sick? Something really serious?”
Anse shook his head. “I don’t think so. He looks pretty healthy to me. A little run-down, that’s all. Working too hard. He’s supposed to be retired, but in fact he’s become involved in some way in the government, you know. What passes for a government now. They pulled him out of retirement after the Conquest, or he pulled himself out. He keeps a lid on the details, but he told me he recently led a delegation to the Entities in an attempt to open negotiations with them.”
Ronnie’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? Tell me more.”
“That’s all I know.”
“Fascinating. Fascinating.” Ronnie tossed his towel aside, slipped on a pair of undershorts, set about the process of selecting the perfect slacks for the evening. He rejected one pair, two, three, and was studying a fourth quizzically, tugging at one tip and then the other of his drooping blond mustache, when Anse, beginning now to lose the very small quantity of patience that he had for his brother, said, “Do you think you can move it along a little, Ron? It’s practically seven. The before-dinner drinks are called for seven sharp and he’s expecting us in the rec room right now. You remember how he is about punctuality, I hope.”
Ronnie laughed softly. “I really bug you, don’t I, Anse?”
“Anybody who needs to spend fifteen minutes picking out a shirt and a pair of pants for an informal family dinner would bug me.”
“It’s been five years since he and I last saw each other. I want to look good for him.”
“Right. Right.”
“Tell me something else,” Ronnie said, choosing trousers at last and stepping into them. “Who’s the woman who showed me to my room? Peggy, she said her name was.”
Ther
e was something in his brother’s eyes suddenly, a glint, that Anse didn’t like.
“His secretary. Woman from Los Angeles, but he met her in Washington when he went back there for a meeting at the Pentagon right after the Invasion. She was actually taken captive by the Entities the first day, in the shopping-mall thing, the way Cindy was, and she was in Washington to tell the chiefs of staff what she had seen. She ran into Cindy while she was aboard the alien ship, incidentally.”
“Small world.”
“Very small. Peggy says she thought Cindy was pretty nutty.”
“No argument there. And Peggy and the Colonel—?”
“Colonel needed someone to help him with the ranch, and he liked her and she didn’t seem to have any entanglements in L.A., so he asked her to come up here. That’s about all I know about her.”
“Quite an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”
Anse let his eyes glide shut for a moment, and breathed slowly in and out.
“Don’t mess with her, Ron.”
“For Christ’s sake, Anse! I simply made an innocent comment!”
“The last innocent comment you made was ‘Goo goo goo,’ and you were seven months old.”
“Anse—”
“You know what I’m telling you. Leave her alone.”
An incredulous look came into Ronnie’s eyes. “Are you saying that she and the Colonel—that he—that they—”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it very much.”
“If there’s nothing between them, then, and I happen to be here by myself this weekend and she happens to be an unattached single woman—”
“She’s important to the Colonel. She keeps this place running and I suspect that she keeps him running. I know what you do to women’s heads, and I don’t want you doing anything to hers.”