The Alien Years (47 page)

“Thirty-four.”

“Thirty-four. By that age you should have learned how to keep yourself from flying off the handle.”

“I don’t think I
am
flying off the handle. But what I’m afraid of is that Tony’s training will lose its edge if we hold him back much longer. We’ve been winding him up for this project for the past seven years. He could be getting overtrained by now.”

“Fine. So first thing tomorrow you’ll send him into L.A. with a gun on each hip and a belt full of grenades around his waist, and he’ll walk up to the first Entity he sees and say, ‘Pardon me, sir, can you give me Prime’s address?’ Is that how you imagine it? If you don’t know where your target is, where do you throw your bomb?”

“I’ve thought of all these things.”

“And you still want to send him? Tony’s your brother. It isn’t as though you’ve got lots of others. Are you really ready to have him get killed?”

“He’s a Carmichael, Dad. He’s understood the risks from the beginning.”

Ron made a groaning sound. “A Carmichael! A Carmichael! My God, Anson, do I have to listen to that bullshit right to the end of my days? What does being a Carmichael mean, anyway? Disapproving of your own children’s behavior, like the Colonel, and cutting them out of your life for years at a time? Twisting yourself inside out for the sake of an ideal and obliterating yourself with drink so you can go on living with yourself, the way Anse did? Or winding up like the Colonel’s brother Mike, maybe, the one who got himself into such a bind over his notions of proper behavior that he went and found himself a hero’s death the day the Entities landed? Is it your notion that Tony’s supposed to go waltzing to his certain death on a crazy mission simply because he had the bad luck to be born into a family of fanatic disciplinarians and hyper-achievers?”

Anson peered at him, horrified. These were words he had never expected to hear, and they came crashing into him with stunning impact. Ron was red-faced and trembling, practically apoplectic. But after a moment he became a little calmer.

He said, once more smiling in that bemused way, “Well, well, well, listen to the old guy rant and rave! All that sound and fury. —Look here, Anson, I know you want to be the general who launches the victorious counteroffensive against the dread invaders. We all wanted that, and maybe you’ll actually be the one. But don’t waste Tony so soon, all right? Can’t you hang on at least until you’ve got some decent idea of where Prime may be? Aren’t Steve and Andy still trying to work out some kind of precise pinpointing?”

“Steve has been doing just that, yes. With occasional help from Andy, whenever Andy can be bothered. They’re pretty sure that L.A.’s the place where Prime is stashed away, probably downtown, but they can’t get it any more precise than that. And now Steve tells me, though, that he’s hit a wall. He thinks Andy’s the only hacker good enough to get beyond the blockage. But Andy’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Skipped out in the night, last night. Something about getting La-La pregnant and not wanting to stay around.”

“No! The miserable little bastard!”

“We’ll try to find him and bring him back. But we don’t even know where to begin looking for him.”

“Well, figure it out. Catch him and yank him home and sit him down in the communications room until he tells you exactly where Prime is, which part of town, what building. And
then
send in Tony. Not before, not until you know the location right down to the street address. Okay?”

Anson rubbed his right temple. Was the pounding subsiding a little in there? Perhaps. A little, anyway. A little.

He said, “You think sending him now is really crazy, then?”

“I sure do, boy.”

“That’s what I needed you to tell me.”

Khalid said, pointing toward the hawk that came riding up over the crest of the mountain on the wind from the sea, “You see the bird, there? Kill it.”

Unhesitatingly Tony raised his rifle, sighting and aiming and pulling the trigger all in one smooth unhurried continuous process. The hawk, black against the blue shield of the sky, exploded into a flurry of scattering feathers and began to plummet toward the bare stony meadow in which they stood.

Tony was perfect, Khalid thought. He was a magnificent machine. A machine of Khalid’s own creation, flawless, the finest thing he had ever shaped. A superbly crafted mechanism.

“Very nice shot. Now you, Rasheed.”

The slender boy with amber-toned skin at Khalid’s side lifted his gun and shot without seeming even to aim. The bullet caught the falling hawk squarely in the chest and knocked it spinning off on a new trajectory that sent it over to their left, down into the dark impenetrable tangle of chaparral that ran just below the summit.

Khalid gave the boy an approving smile. He was fourteen now, already shoulder-high to his long-legged father, a superb marksman. Khalid often took him along on these back-country training sessions with Tony. He loved the sight of him, his wiry athletic form, his luminous intelligent green eyes, his corona of coppery hair. Rasheed too was perfect, in a different way from Tony. His perfection was not that of a machine but of a person. It was wonderful to have made a boy like Rasheed. Rasheed was the boy Khalid might have been, if only things had gone otherwise for him when he was young. Rasheed was Khalid’s second chance at life.

To Tony, Khalid said, “And what do you feel, killing the bird?”

“It was a good shot. I’m pleased when I shoot that well.”

“And the bird? What do you think about the bird?”

“Why should I think about the bird? The bird was nothing to me.”

It was just before dawn when Andy reached Los Angeles. The first thing he did, after letting himself through the wall at the Santa Monica gate with the LACON credentials that he had whipped up for himself the week before, was to jack himself into a public-access terminal that he located at Wilshire and Fifth. He needed to update his map of the city. He might be staying here quite some time, several months at the very least, and Andy knew that the information about this place that was already in his files was almost certainly out of date. They kept changing the street patterns around all the time, he had heard, closing off some streets that had been perfectly good transit arteries for a hundred years, opening new ones where there had never been any before. But everything seemed pretty much as he remembered it.

He hit the access code for Sammo Borracho’s e-mail slot and said, “It’s Megabyte, good buddy. I’m down here to stay, and planning to set up in business. Be so kind as to patch me on to Mary Canary, okay?”

This was Andy’s fourth visit to Los Angeles. The first time, about seven years back, he had sneaked down here with Tony and Charlie’s son Nick, using Charlie’s little car, which Andy had made available to them by emulating the code for the car’s ignition software. Tony and Nick, who were both around nineteen then, had wanted to go to the city to find girls, which were of lesser interest to Andy then, he being not quite thirteen. But neither Tony nor Nick was worth a damn as a hacker, and the deal was that they had to take Andy along with them in return for his liberating the car for them.

Girls, Andy discovered on that trip, were more interesting than he had suspected. Los Angeles was full of them—it was a gigantic city, bigger than Andy had ever imagined, easily two or three hundred thousand people living there, maybe even more—and Tony and Nick were both the kind of big, good-looking guys who latched on to girls very quickly. The ones they found, in a part of Los Angeles that was called Van Nuys, were sixteen years old and named Kandi and Darleen. Kandi had red hair and Darleen’s was dyed a sort of green. They seemed very stupid, even dumber than the ones at the ranch. Nick and Tony didn’t seem bothered by that, though, and when Andy gave the matter a little thought, he couldn’t find any reason why they should be, considering what it was that they had come here for.

“You want one too, don’t you?” Tony asked Andy, grinning broadly. This was back in the era when Tony still seemed like a human being to Andy, a few months before Khalid had started teaching him Khalid’s crazy philosophy, which so far as Andy was concerned had transformed Tony into an android, pretty much. “Darlene’s got a kid sister. She’ll show you a thing or two, if you like.”

“Sure,” said Andy, after only a fraction of a moment’s hesitation.

Darleen’s sister’s name was Delayne. He told her he was fifteen. Delayne seemed exactly like Darleen, except that she was two years younger and about twice as stupid. She had a room of her own, a mattress on the floor, girl-clutter everywhere, photographs of long-ago movie stars tacked up all over the wall.

Andy didn’t care how dumb she was. It wasn’t her mind that he was interested in communing with. He winked and gave her what he hoped was a torrid look.

“Oh, you want to play?” she asked, batting her eyes at him. “Well, come here, then.”

Within the past year Andy had accessed a dozen pre-Conquest porno videos that he had found cached in somebody’s Net library in Sacramento, and so he had an approximate idea of how to go about things, but it turned out to be a little more complicated than it seemed on video. Still, he thought that he had conducted himself creditably. And apparently he had. “You were okay, for your first time,” Delayne told him afterward. “Truly truly, I tell you. Not bad at all.” He hadn’t fooled her in the least, but she hadn’t let that be a problem. Which lifted her considerably in his estimation. Perhaps, he decided, she wasn’t quite as stupid as he thought.

He made his second trip to L.A. a year and a half later, when he had grown bored with trying out the things Delayne had shown him on various cousins at the ranch. Jane and Ansonia and Cheryl were willing to play, but La-La wasn’t, and La-La, who was two years older than Andy was, was the only one who held much appeal for him, because she was smart and tough, because she had the same kind of sharp edge on her that her father Charlie did. Since La-La didn’t seem to want to be cooperative, and fooling around with Jane and Ansonia and Cheryl was a little like molesting the sheep, Andy went off to try to find Delayne.

This time he went alone, borrowing his father’s car, which was a much newer model than Charlie’s, the voice- actuated kind. “Los Angeles,” Andy said, in a deep, authoritative tone, and it took him to Los Angeles. Like a magic carpet, practically. He found Darleen, but not Delayne, because Delayne had been caught in some infraction and reassigned to a labor gang working out of Ukiah, which was somewhere far upstate. Darleen, though, was willing enough to spend a day or two playing with him. Apparently she was as bored with her regular life as Andy was with his, and he was like a Christmas treat for her.

She took him around the city, giving him a good taste of its immensity. The place was made up, Andy realized, of a whole string of little cities pasted together into one gigantic one. And as he heard their names—Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Studio City, West Hollywood—he began to put together in his mind a more tangible sense of the physical location of some of the hackers whom he had dealt with by e-mail over the past few years.

They knew him as Megabyte Monster, alias Mickey Megabyte. He knew them as Teddy Spaghetti of Sherman Oaks, Nicko Nihil of Van Nuys, Green Hornet of Santa Monica, Sammo Borracho of Culver City, Ding-Dong 666 of West L.A. While driving around with Darleen, Andy jacked in at a series of widely separated access points and let them know he was in the vicinity. “Down here for a couple of days visiting a girl I know,” he told them. And waited to see what they had to say. Not much, is what they had to say. No immediate invitations to come around for face-to-face, eye-to-eye. You had to be careful, though, making eye-to-eye with other hackers whom you knew only electronically. They might not be quite the people you thought they were. Some could be stooges for LACON, or even for the Entities, happy to turn you in for the sake of getting patted on the head. Some could be predators. Some could be bozos.

But Andy felt them out, and they felt him out, and the time came when he decided it was safe to meet Sammo Borracho of Culver City, as a first move. Sammo Borracho’s on-line persona was quick and clever, and nevertheless he was always ready to acknowledge Andy’s superiority as a data-thrower. “You know how to get to Culver City?” Andy asked Darleen.

“All the way down there?” She wrinkled her nose. “What for?”

“Somebody there I need to talk to, face-to-face. But I can find it myself, if you don’t want to bother showing me how to—”

“No, I’ll go. It’s just straight down Sepulveda, anyway, miles and miles and miles. We can do a little of it on the freeway, but the road’s a wreck south of the Santa Monica interchange.”

The trip took more than an hour, through an assortment of neighborhoods, some of them burned out. Sammo Borracho had always come on like a big fat drunken Mexican in his e-mail, but in person he was small, pale, wiry, a little twitchy, with an implant jack in each arm and lines
of little purple tattoos across his cheeks. Not drunken, not Mexican, and no more than a couple of years older than Andy. Andy and Darleen met him, as arranged, at a swivel- ball parlor in the shadow of the ruined San Diego Freeway. From the way he kept staring at Darleen, Andy figured that he hadn’t been laid in at least three years. Or ever.

“I thought you’d be older,” Sammo Borracho told him.

“I thought you’d be, too.”