“Fuck you, Anse.” Very calmly, almost amiably.
“And you, bro. Will you be kind enough to put your shoes on, now, so that we can go up front and have drinks with our one and only father?”
For the past hour the locus of the tension had gone sliding downward in the Colonel’s body from his head to his chest to his midsection, and now it was all gathered around his lower abdomen like a band of white-hot iron. In all his years in Vietnam he had never felt such profound uneasiness, verging on fear, as he did while waiting now for his reunion with his last-born child.
But in a war, he thought, you really only need to worry about whether your enemy will kill you or not, and with enough intelligence and enough luck you can manage to keep that from happening. Here, though, the enemy was himself, and the problem was self-control. He had to hold himself in check no matter what, refrain from lashing out at the son who had been such a grievous disappointment to him. This was the family Christmas. He dared not ruin it, and ruining it was what he feared. The Colonel had never particularly been afraid of dying, or of anything else, very much, but he was afraid now that at his first glimpse of Ronnie he would unload all the stored-up anger that was in his heart, and everything would be spoiled.
Nothing like that occurred. Anse came into the room with Ronnie half a step behind him; and the Colonel, who was standing at the sideboard with Rosalie on one side of him and Peggy on the other, felt his heart melting in an instant at the sight at long last, here in his own house, of his big, blocky, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked second son. The problem became not one of holding his anger in check but of holding back his tears.
It would be all right, the Colonel thought in giddy relief. Blood was still thicker than water, even now.
“Ronnie—Ronnie, boy—”
“Hey, Dad, you’re looking good! After all this time.”
“And you. Put on a little weight, haven’t you? But you were always the chunky one of the family. Plus you’re not a boy any more, after all.”
“Thirty-nine next month. One year away from miserable antiquity. Oh, Dad—Dad—it’s been such a goddamn long time—” Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, a big messy embrace, Ronnie slapping his hands lustily against the Colonel’s back and the Colonel heartily squeezing Ronnie’s ribs, and then they were apart again and the Colonel was fixing drinks, the stiff double Scotch that he knew Ronnie preferred and sherry for Anse, who never drank anything stronger nowadays; and Ronnie was going around the room hugging people, his sister Rosalie first, then Carole, then his moody cousin Helena and her even-tempered brother Paul, and then a big hello for Rosalie’s clunky husband Doug Gannett and their overweight blotchy-faced kid Steve, and a whoop and a holler for Anse’s kids, sweeping them up into the air all three together, the twins and Jill—
Oh, he was slick, Ronnie was, thought the Colonel. A real charmer. And cut the thought off before it ramified, because he knew it would lead him nowhere good.
Ronnie was introducing himself to Peggy Gabrielson, now. Peggy looked a little flustered, perhaps because of the way magnetic Ronnie was laying on the beguiling introductory charisma, or maybe because she knew that Ronnie was the family pariah, a shady unscrupulous character with whom the Colonel had had nothing to do for many years, but who now for some reason was being taken back into the tribe.
Loudly the Colonel said, when the highballs had been handed around, “You may be wondering why I’ve called you all here tonight. And in fact I have a very full agenda for the next few days, which calls for a great quantity of eating and drinking, and also some discussion of Highly Serious Matters.” He made sure they heard the capital letters. “The drinking is scheduled to occur—” He paused dramatically and shot back his cuff to reveal his wristwatch. “—at precisely 1900 hours. Which is in feet, right now. With dinner to follow, and the Highly Serious Discussion tomorrow or the day after.” He hoisted his glass. “So: Merry Christmas, all of you! Everyone that I love in the whole poor old battered world, standing right here in front of me. How wonderful that is. How absolutely wonderful.—I’m not getting too mushy in my old age, am I?”
They agreed that he was well within his rights to get too mushy tonight. But what they did not yet know and he did was that most of the mushiness—not all, but most—was little more than a tactical maneuver. As was the reconciliation with Ronnie. The Colonel had things up his sleeve.
He went around the room clockwise, giving a little time to each in turn, and Ronnie went around the other way, and eventually they were face-to-face again, father and son. The Colonel saw Anse watching protectively from a distance, as though considering the merits of joining them as a buffer; but the Colonel shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Anse backed off.
In a quiet voice the Colonel said to Ronnie, “I’m tremendously glad you came here tonight, son. I mean that.”
“I’m glad too. I know we’ve had our problems, Dad—”
“Put them away. I have. With the world in the mess it’s in, we don’t have the luxury of carrying on feuds with our own flesh and blood. You made certain choices about your life that weren’t the choices I would have wanted you to make. All right. There are new choices to make, now. The Entities have changed everything, do you know what I mean? They’ve changed the future and they’ve damned well blotted out the past.”
“We’ll find a way of getting them off our backs sooner or later, won’t we, Dad?”
“Will we? I wonder.”
“Is that a hint of defeatism that I hear in your voice?”
“Call it realism, maybe.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing Colonel Anson Carmichael III saying any such thing.”
“Strictly speaking,” said the Colonel, smiling obliquely, “I’m a general now. In the California Army of Liberation, which hardly anybody knows about, and which I’m not going to discuss with you right now. But I still think of myself as a colonel, and you might as well too.”
“I hear that you went face-to-face with the Entities in their own lair. So to speak. They don’t actually have faces, do they? But you went right in there, you looked them in the eye, you gave them what-for. Isn’t that true, Dad?”
Actually seems curious about it, the Colonel observed. Actually appears to be interested. That in itself is pretty unusual, for Ronnie.
“More or less true,” he said. “Rather less than more.”
“Tell me about it?”
“I’d just as soon not, not right now. It wasn’t pleasant. I want tonight, this whole week, to be nothing but pleasant. Oh, Ronnie, Ronnie, you scamp, you miserable rogue—oh, how happy I am to see you here—”
It had not been pleasant at all, the Colonel’s meeting with the aliens. But it had been necessary, and, after a fashion, instructive.
The mystifying ease of the collapse of all human institutions almost immediately upon the arrival of the Entities was the thing that the Colonel had never been able to comprehend, let alone accept. All those governmental bodies, all those laws and constitutions, all those tightly structured military organizations with their elaborate codes of duty and performance: they had turned out, after thousands of years of civilization, to be just so many houses of cards. One quick gust of wind from outer space and they had all blown away overnight. And the little ad-hoc groups that had replaced them were nothing more than local aggregations of thugs on the one hand and hotheaded vigilantes on the other. That wasn’t government. That was anarchy’s second cousin.
Why? Why? Goddamn it, why?
Some of it had to do with the dramatic breakdown of electronic communication, on which the world had become so dependent, and on the chaos that that had caused. What had taken three hundred years to happen to the Roman Empire was bound to happen a lot faster in a world that lived and died by data transmission. But that wasn’t a sufficient explanation.
There hadn’t been any overt onslaught, nor even any threat of it. The Entities, after all, had not gone riding out daily among mankind like the warriors of
Sennacherib or the hordes of Genghis Khan. For the most part they had remained, right from the beginning, immured within their own invulnerable starships, issuing no statements, making no demands. They went about their own inscrutable tasks in there and emerged only now and then, just a few at a time, to stroll casually around like so many mildly curious tourists.
Or, to put it more accurately, like haughty new landlords making their first inspection of properties that had recently come into their possession. Tourists would have been asking questions, buying souvenirs, flagging down taxi drivers. But the Entities asked no questions and hired no cabs and, though they did seem to have some interest in souvenirs, simply walked off with whatever they liked wherever they found it, no transaction having taken place, not even a semblance of by-your-leave being offered.
And the world stood helpless before them. Everything that was solid about human civilization had shattered by virtue of their mere presence here on Earth, as though the Entities radiated some high-pitched inaudible tone that had the capacity to shiver all human social structures into instant ruin like so much fragile glass.
What was the secret of their power? The Colonel yearned to know; for until you begin to understand your enemy, you have not a grasshopper’s chance of defeating him, and it was the Colonel’s hope above all else to see the world free again before the end of his days. That was something he could not help wanting, folly though the notion probably was. It was in his bones; it was in his genes.
And so when an opportunity presented itself for him to go right into the lair of the enemy and look him in the glittering yellow eye, he seized the chance unhesitatingly.
No one was quite able to say by what channels the invitation had come forth from them. The Entities did not speak to human beings in any of the languages of Earth; essentially, they did not speak at all. But somehow, somehow, their wishes were communicated. And they communicated a wish now to have two or three intelligent, perceptive Earthlings come aboard their Southern California flagship for a meeting of the minds.
The informal group that called itself the California Army of Liberation, to which the Colonel belonged, had repeatedly petitioned the Entities based in Los Angeles to allow just such a delegation of human negotiators to come aboard their ship and discuss the meaning and purpose of their visit to Earth. These petitions met with total lack of response. The Entities paid no attention at all. It was as if the ants were trying to negotiate with the farmer who had turned his hose on their anthill. It was as if the sheep were attempting to negotiate with the shearer, the pigs and cattle with the slaughterer. The other side seemed not to notice that any request whatever had been made.
But then, unexpectedly, they did seem to notice. It was all very roundabout and indirect. It started with the exercise of the telepathic means of compulsion that had become known as the Push against the bearers of a similar petition that had been presented to the Entities of London; it had been a fairly complex kind of Push, one that seemed to be pulling, after a fashion, as well as repelling. In Resistance circles, an analysis was undertaken aimed at comprehending just what it was the Entities might have been attempting to accomplish by Pushing the London people in the way that they had; and a belief began to emerge that the invaders had been letting it be known that they would indeed entertain such a delegation, a maximum of three human persons. In California, though, not in London.
That could all be a total misinterpretation of the facts, of course. The whole theory was guesswork. Nothing explicit had been said. It was a matter of actions and reactions, of powerful but inarticulate forces operating in a certain way that could be construed as meaning such-and-such, and had been so construed. But in years gone by astronomers had discovered entire hitherto-unsuspected planets of the solar system by studying cosmic actions and reactions of that sort; the California people decided that it was worth gambling on the hope that their interpretation of the London maneuvers was correct, and going forward on that basis with a delegation.
And so. The Liberation Army chose Joshua Leonards, for his anthropological wisdom. Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, for general savvy and scientific insight. Plus Colonel Anson Carmichael III (U.S. Army, Ret.) for any number of reasons. And there on a mild autumn morning the Colonel stood with the other two in front of the sleek gray bulk of the Entity vessel that had begun the whole shebang by making that fiery landing in the San Fernando Valley two years before—Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy once more, the only remaining residue in the Colonel’s life, aside from Peggy Gabrielson, of that grandiose, ambitious, utterly futile What-Shall-We-Do-About-It meeting at the Pentagon the day after the invasion.
“Is it a trap?” Joshua Leonards asked. “I heard this morning that they let five people on board a ship in Budapest last month. They never came out again.”
“Are you saying you want to back out?” Peter Carlyle-Macavoy asked, looking down almost distastefully at the stocky anthropologist from his great height.
“If they don’t let us out, we can study them from within while they study us,” said Leonards. “That’s fine with me.”
“And you, Colonel?”
The Colonel grinned. “I’d surely hate to spend the rest of my life aboard that ship. But I’d hate it worse to spend the rest of my life knowing that I could have gone in there but I said no.”
There was always the curious possibility, he thought, that he might wind up being shipped off to the Entities’ home world the way his former sister-in-law Cindy supposedly had been. That would be strange, all right, finishing his days in a P.O.W. camp on some weird alien world, undergoing perpetual telepathic interrogation by fifteen-foot-tall squids. Well, he would take the risk.
The big hatch in the side of the immense shining starship opened and the covering slid some twenty feet downward along an invisible track to become a platform on which all three of them could stand. Leonards was the first to mount it, then Carlyle-Macavoy, then the Colonel. The moment the last of the three men had come aboard, the platform silently ascended until it reached the level of the dark opening in the ship’s side. Dazzling brightness came splashing out at them from within. “Here we go,” Leonards said. “The three musketeers.”
The Colonel’s mind in that initial moment of entry was full of the questions he hoped to ask. All of them were variations on Where have you come from and why are you here and what do you plan to do with us? but they were couched in an assortment of marginally more indirect conceptualizations. Such as: Were the Entities representatives of a galactic confederation of worlds? If so, would the entry of Earth into that confederation be possible, either now or at some time in the future? And was there any immediate intention of working toward more constructive human-Entity communication? And did they understand that their presence here, their interference with human institutions and the functioning of human economic life, had caused great distress to the inhabitants of a peaceful and by its own lights civilized world? And so on and so on, questions that once upon a time he would never in a million years have imagined himself ever asking, or ever needing to ask.
But the Colonel did not, of course, get to ask any of them, so far as he could tell.
Upon entering a kind of vestibule of the alien ship he was swallowed up in a world of bewildering light, out of which a pair of mountainous alien figures came swimming gracefully toward him amidst veils of even greater brightness. They moved in an air of glory. Long flickers of cold flame rose up about them.
When he could see them clearly, which they permitted him to do after some indeterminate period of time, he was startled to discover that they were beautiful. Awesome and immense, yes. Frightening, perhaps. But in the subtle opalescent shimmer of their glossy translucent integuments and the graceful eddying of their movements and the mellow liquid gaze of their great eyes there lay a potent and ineffable beauty—a delicacy of form, even—that surprised him with its benign impact.
You could disappear into the shining yellow seas of those eyes. You could vanish into the pulsing radian
t luminosity of their powerful intelligences, which surrounded them like whirling capes of light, an aura that partook of something close to the divine. You were overwhelmed by that. You were amazed. You were humbled. You were suffused with a sensation that hovered bewilderingly midway between terror and love.
Kings of the universe, they were, lords of creation. And the new masters of Earth.
“Well,” the Colonel wanted to say, “here we are. We’re very happy to have been given the opportunity to—”
But he did not say that, or anything else. Nor did Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy say anything. Nor did either of the aliens, at least not as we understand the meaning of the verb to say.
The meeting that took place in that vestibule of the starship was defined, mostly, by what did not happen.
The three human delegates were not asked their names, nor given any chance to offer them. The two Entities who had come forth to interview them likewise proffered no introductions. There was no pleasant little speech of welcome by the hosts nor expression of gratitude for the invitation by the delegates. Cocktails and canapes were not served. Ceremonial gifts were not exchanged. The visitors were not taken on a tour of the ship.
No questions were asked, no answers given.
Not a word, in fact, was spoken by either side in any language either human or alien.
What did happen was that the Colonel and his two companions stood side by side in awe and wonder and utter stunned silence before the two extraterrestrial titans for a long moment, an infinitely prolonged moment, during which nothing in particular seemed to be happening. And then, gradually, each of the three humans found himself dwindling away within, experiencing in the most excruciating fashion an utter diminution and devaluation of the sense of self-worth that he had painstakingly constructed during the course of a lifetime of hard work, study, and outstanding accomplishment. The Colonel felt dwarfed, and not just in the physical sense, by these eerie giants. The Colonel felt deflated and impaired—shriveled, almost. Reduced in every way.