“Have some more?”
“Thanks, no. I’m still working on this.”
“Mind if I?”
Ronnie shrugged. Anse filled his glass practically to the brim.
“This fucking meeting,” Anse said in a low, somber tone, when he had put another goodly slug of the grappa away. “This whole fucking Resistance, Ronnie.”
“What about it?”
“What a sham! What a miserable idiotic sham! We hold these meetings, and all we’re doing is making empty gestures. Spinning our wheels, don’t you see? Appointing committees, making studies, cooking up grand plans, sending e-mail about those grand plans to people just as helpless as we are all around the world. That’s a Resistance? Are the Entities giving ground before our valiant onslaughts? Is the liberation of Earth practically within our grasp, do you think? Are we doing the slightest fucking thing, really, to achieve it?—There isn’t any Resistance, not really. We’re just pretending that there is.”
“As long as we go on pretending,” Ronnie said, “we keep the idea of being free alive. You’ve heard the Colonel say that a million times. Once we give up even the pretense, we’re slaves forever.”
“You really believe that shit, bro?”
Some grappa was needed before replying to that one. Ronnie tried to gulp the stuff without tasting it. “Yes,” he said, fixing his gaze squarely on Anse’s squinting bloodshot eyes. “Yes, bro, I really do. I don’t think it’s shit at all.”
Anse laughed. “You sound so amazingly sincere.”
“I am sincere, Anse.”
“Right. Right. You say that very sincerely, too.—You’re still a con man at heart, aren’t you, bro? Always were, always will be. And very good at it.”
“Watch it, Anse.”
“Am I saying anything other than the truth, bro? You can tell me that you believe the old man’s bullshit, sure, but don’t ask me to start believing yours, not this late in the game.—Here. Here. Have some more grappa. Do you some good. Oil up your sincerity glands a little more for the next sucker, right?”
He extended the bottle toward Ronnie, who peered at it for perhaps ten seconds while trying to gain control over the anger that was surging upward in him, anger at Anse’s drunken mocking accusations and the partial truths that lay not very far beneath their surface, at the Colonel’s deterioration, at his own growing sense of mortality as the years went along, at the continued presence of the Entities in the world. At everything. Then, as Anse pushed the grappa bottle even closer, thrusting it practically into his face, Ronnie slapped at it with a hard backhand blow, knocking it out of Anse’s hand. The bottle struck Anse across the lip and chin and went bouncing to the floor. A stream of grappa came spilling forth. Anse grunted in fury and burst from his chair, clawing at Ronnie with one hand and trying to swing with the other.
Ronnie pressed one hand against the middle of Anse’s chest to hold him at bay and tried to push him back into his chair. Anse, eyes bright now with rage, growled and swung again, with the same futility as before. Ronnie shoved hard. Anse went toppling backward and sat down heavily, just as Peggy came scurrying into the room.
“Hey! Hey, guys! What is this?”
Ronnie looked shamefacedly toward his wife. He could feel his face growing hot with embarrassment. All his anger was gone, now. “We were discussing today’s meeting, is all.”
“I’ll bet you were.” She scooped the fallen grappa bottle up, sniffed at it disgustedly, tossed it into a wastebasket. She gave him a withering look. “Yes, you ought to blush, Ron. Like little boys, the two of you. Little boys who’ve found their way into their father’s liquor closet.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, Peg.”
“Sure it is. Sure.” Then she turned away from him, toward Anse, who sat now with his head bowed, hands covering his face. “Hey,” she said. “What’s this, Anse?”
He was crying. Great blubbering racking sobs were coming from him. Peggy put an arm around his shoulder and bent close to him, while signaling fiercely with her other hand for Ronnie to get himself out of the room.
“Hey,” Peggy said softly. “Hey, now, Anse!”
Once or twice a month, more often if he could manage to scrape up the gas, Steve Gannett descended the mountainside from the ranch and made his way down the battered and dilapidated highway that was Route 101 as far as the city of Ventura, where Lisa would be waiting for him downtown, near the San Buenaventura Mission. Then they would continue on together in her car along the Pacific Coast Highway, past the abandoned Point Mugu Naval Air Station and on into Mugu State Park itself. They had a special place there, a secluded woodsy grove up in the hilly inland part, where they could make love. That was the deal, that he drove as far as Ventura and Lisa would drive the rest of the way. That was only fair, considering the current tight gasoline quotas.
It still amazed Steve that he had a steady girl at all. He had been such a lumpy, ungainly, nerdy kid, fat and awkward, good for very little except working with computers, at which he was very good indeed. Like his father Doug, he had never fitted very well into the Carmichael family, that tribe of crisp, strong, hard, cold-eyed people. Even when they were weak—the way the Colonel was weak, now, getting so old and vague, or Anse was weak, hitting the bottle whenever he thought nobody was looking—they were still somehow strong. They would give you a look with their blue Carmichael eyes that said, We come from a long line of soldiers. We understand what the word ‘discipline’ means. And you are fat and sloppy and lazy, and the only thing you know how to do is fool around with computers. Even his twin cousins Mike and Charlie had given him that look, and they were only little boys.
But Steve was half Carmichael himself, and by the time he had been living at the ranch a few years that part of his heritage had at last started to show. The outdoor life, the fresh mountain air, the need for everyone to put in some hours of hard manual labor every day, had done the trick. Gradually, very gradually, the baby fat had burned away. Gradually his coordination had improved and he had learned how to run without falling on his face, how to climb a tree, how to drive a car. He would always be chunkier and less agile than his cousins, his hair would always be floppy and unruly and his shirttails would always have a way of working their way out of his pants, and his eyes would never be icy Carmichael blue, but always that mousy Gannett brown. Still and all, by the year he turned fifteen he had shaped up in a way that surprised him immensely.
The first real sign that he might actually be going to have a life came when Anse’s daughter Jill allowed him to take some sexual liberties with her.
He was sixteen then, and still hideously unsure of himself. She was two years younger, a slim leggy blonde like her mother Carole, handsome, athletic, lively. It would not have occurred to Steve that anything might happen between them. Why would such a gorgeous girl—and one who was his cousin, as well—be interested in him? She had never given the slightest sign of caring for him: had, in fact, always been cool toward him, remote. He was just her nerdy cousin Steve, which is to say, nobody in particular, simply someone who happened to live at the ranch. But then, one hot summer day when he was far up the mountain by himself, in a sheltered rocky place out beyond the apple orchard where he liked to come and sit and think, Jill appeared suddenly out of nowhere and said, “I followed you. I wanted to see where you went when you went off by yourself. Do you mind if I sit down here?”
“Suit yourself.”
“It’s pretty up here,” she said. “Quiet. Real private. What a great view!”
That she had any curiosity about him at all, that she would give even a faint damn about where he might go when he went off by himself, astounded and bewildered him. She settled down beside him on the flat slab of rock from which he could see practically the entire valley. Her proximity was unsettling. All she wore was a halter and a pair of shorts, and a sweet, musky odor of perspiration was coming from her after the steep climb.
Steve had no idea what to say to her. He s
aid nothing.
Abruptly she said, after a time, “You can touch me, if you like, you know.”
“Touch you?”
“If you like.”
His eyes widened. What was this? Was she serious? Cautiously, as if inspecting an unexploded land mine, he put his hand to her bare knee, gripped it lightly with his fingertips a moment, and then, hearing no objections, moved his hand upward along her long smooth thigh, scarcely allowing himself to draw a breath. He had never felt anything so smooth. He reached the cuff of her shorts and paused there, doubting that his fingers would reach very far beyond that point. And in any case he was afraid to risk the attempt.
“Not my leg,” she said, sounding a little annoyed.
Steve looked up at her. Thunderstruck, he saw that she had opened the clasp of her halter. It slid down to her waist. She had lovely breasts, white as milk, that thrust out straight in front of her. He had seen them before, spying on her one night last summer through her window, but that had been from fifty yards away. He stared now, goggle-eyed, astonished. Jill was looking at him expectantly. He wriggled closer to her on the rock and slipped his right arm around her, bringing his hand up so that it cupped the smooth taut undercurve of her right breast. She made a little hissing sound of pleasure. He gripped a little tighter. He did not dare touch the hard little nipple, fearing it might be tender, fearing he might hurt her. Nor did he try to kiss her or do anything else, though his whole body felt ready to explode with desire.
They sat there that way for a long while. He sensed that she might be as terrified as he was, as confused about what the next move ought to be. And finally she said, shrugging his hand away and primly pulling the fallen halter back into place, “I’d better go now.”
“Do you have to?”
“I think it’s a good idea. But we’ll do this again.”
They did. They made appointments to go up to the high outcropping together, elaborate schemes for traversing the routes from opposite sides of the hill. They progressed in easy stages to the full exploration of her body, and then his, and then, one utterly astounding autumn morning, to his sliding himself inside her for a few seconds of gasping excitement followed by a headlong tumble into explosive ecstasy, and then a longer, less frenzied repetition of the act twenty minutes later.
They did it five or six more times that season, and on a dozen or so very widely scattered occasions over the next couple of years, always at her instigation, never at his. Then they stopped.
The risks were becoming too great. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Colonel would say or do, or her father, nor his, if she turned up pregnant. Of course, they could always get married; but they had both heard dire stories about the evils of marriage between cousins, and in any case Steve had no great yearning to be married to Jill. He didn’t love her, so far as he comprehended that word, nor did he even feel much affection for her, only gratitude for the sense of confidence in his own maleness that she had given him.
He was disappointed when it ended, but he had never expected it to last anyway. He understood, by then, what had led Jill to him in the first place. It wasn’t that she found him attractive—oh, no, hardly that. But the hormones had begun to flow freely through her ripening body, and he was all there was for her at the ranch, the only male under forty other than her brothers and baby Anson. He had always sensed that she was merely using him, that she felt nothing whatever for him. He was convenient, that was all. Almost anyone else would have served in his place. That she had wonderfully transformed his own sorry life by giving her luscious self to him was incidental. It had probably never occurred to her that she was doing any such thing.
Not very flattering to consider; but still, still, whatever her motives, the fact remained that they had done it, that she had met his needs even while he was meeting hers, that she had ushered him into manhood on that hill and he would always be grateful for that.
What Jill had awakened in him, however, could not easily be put back to sleep. Steve began to rove the countryside beyond the ranch, searching for a mate. Everyone in the family understood what he was doing, and no one objected, though he used a lot of precious gasoline doing it. Of all the cousins in his generation—he, Jill, Mike, Charlie, Cassandra, Ron’s son Anson—he was the first one reaching adulthood. The only way to avoid inbreeding on the mountaintop was for the clan members to look outward.
But it was definitely inconvenient that when he did find a girl, she was one that lived all the way down the road in Ventura. The pickings were slim along the depopulated coast, though, and even the new and more confident Steve Gannett was not exactly an expert lady-killer. He could hardly come swaggering into some little nearby place like Summerland or Carpinteria, where there might be no more than five or six single girls anyway, and coolly announce that he, the great Steverino, was holding auditions for a mate. So he roved farther and farther afield. And even so he had no luck finding anybody.
Then he met Lisa Clive—not in his travels through the territory but in a way that was much more appropriate to his nature: through the on-line channels, which were open, more or less regularly and reliably, all up and down the coast now. She called herself “Guinevere,” which Steve’s Uncle Ron told him was a name out of a famous old story. “Call yourself Lancelot,” Ron advised. “You’ll get her attention.” He did. They courted at long distance for six months, exchanging quips, programming queries, little fragments of carefully veiled autobiography. Of course, she could have been any age, any sex, behind the line-name that she used. But something authentically youthful and female and definitely pleasing seemed to come through to Steve. He warily let her know, ultimately, that he lived in the vicinity of Santa Barbara and would like to meet her if she were anywhere nearby. She told him that she lived down the coast from him, but not as far as Los Angeles. They agreed to meet in Ventura, outside the Mission, which he supposed would be about halfway between their homes. He was wrong about that: Ventura was actually the place where she lived.
She said she was twenty-four, which was three years older than he was. He lied and told her, as they strolled together along the highway fronting the ocean, that he was twenty-four also; later he learned that she was actually twenty-six, but by then their ages didn’t matter. She was pleasant-looking, not at all beautiful the way Jill was beautiful, but certainly attractive. A little on the heavy side, maybe? Well, so was he. She had straight, soft brown hair, a round cheerful face, full lips, a snub nose. Her eyes were bright, alert, warm, friendly. And brown. After all those years spent among the blue-eyed Carmichaels he could love her for the color of her eyes alone.
She lived, she said, with her father and two brothers at the south end of town. In one way or another they all worked for the telephone company, she told him, doing programming work. She seemed not to want to go into details, and he didn’t press her. His own father, Steve said, had been a programmer himself before the Conquest, and he allowed as how he himself was pretty skilled in that area too. He showed her his wrist implant. She had one also. He told her that his family now lived by raising crops on the land of his grandfather, a retired army officer. About the Carmichaels’ Resistance activities he said nothing, naturally.
He was hesitant about making any sort of physical overtures, and in the end she had to take the initiative, just as Jill had. A kiss goodbye was the best he had managed, after three meetings; but on the fourth, a warm midsummer day, Lisa suggested a visit to a park that she was fond of. It was Point Mugu State Park, farther down the coast. The route took them past several Entity installations, great shining silo-like things along the tops of the hills that flanked the coast road, and then they turned off into the park, he driving and she navigating, and wound up in a secluded oak grove that Steve suspected was a place she had visited more than once before. The ground was thickly carpeted with last year’s fallen leaves and a dense layer of leaf-mold beneath; the air was fragrant with the sweet musky odor of natural decay.
They kissed. Her tongue slippe
d between his lips. She pressed herself very close. She slowly moved her hips from side to side. She led him easily onward, step by step, until he needed no further leading.
Her breasts were heavier than Jill’s, and softer, and subject to the laws of gravity in a way that Jill’s did not yet seem to be. Her belly was more rounded, her thighs were fuller, her arms and legs shorter, making Jill seem almost boyish in comparison, and when she opened herself to him she held her legs in a different way from Jill, her knees drawn up practically to her chest. All that seemed strange and fascinating to Steve, at first; but then he stopped noticing, stopped comparing. And very soon Lisa became the norm of womanhood for him, the only true yardstick of love. The things he had done with Jill became mere fading memories, odd adolescent amusements, episodes out of ancient history.
They made love every time they were together. She seemed as hungry for it as he was.
They talked, too, before, afterward: talked computers, talked programs, talked of contacts they had sporadically succeeded in making with hackers in the farthest reaches of the conquered world. Put their implants together and exchanged little data tricks. She taught him some things he had never known an implant could do, and he taught her a few. The silent assumption emerged between them that before long they would meet each other’s families and begin to plan their life together. But as the relationship moved on into its sixth month, its seventh, its eighth, they never actually got around to bringing each other home for introductions. What they did, mainly, was to meet outside the Mission, drive down to Mugu, into the oak grove, lie down together on the carpet of fallen leaves.
On a day in early spring she said, apropos of nothing at all, “Have you heard that they’re building a wall around Los Angeles?”
“On the freeways, you mean?” He knew about the concrete-block wall that cut Highway 101 in half, a little way beyond Thousand Oaks.