The Alien Years

by Robert Silverberg

  “Do you know what a pardoner is?” Andy asked the father-in-law.

  Which produced a quick excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. And just as quickly the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.

  “They all cheat you,” he said.

  “Not all.”

  “Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”

  “You know that isn’t true. Sometimes things don’t work out, sure. It isn’t an exact science. But everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”

  “Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly.

  “You know of such a person?”

  “For three thousand dollars,” Andy said quietly, “I can take the TTD off her ticket. For five I can write an exemption from service that’ll be good until her children are in high school.”

  He wondered why he was being so tenderhearted. A fifty percent discount, and he hadn’t even run an asset check. For all he knew the father-in-law was a millionaire. But no, if that was so he’d have been off long ago cutting a deal for a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this, weeping and wailing in Pershing Square.

  The old man gave Andy a long, deep, appraising look. Peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.

  “How can we be sure you’ll do what you say you’ll do?” he asked.

  Andy might have told him that he was the king of his profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch. Who could slip into any data network there was and get it to dance to his tune. That would have been nothing more than the truth. But all he said was that the man would have to make up his own mind, that Andy couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that he was available if they wanted him and otherwise it was all the same to him if she preferred to stick with her TTD ticket.

  They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, the old man silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant. Andy keyed his credit balance: thirty thou or so, not bad. He transferred eight of it to his accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Honolulu. Then he took the woman’s wrist, which was about two of his fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life.

  “Go on,” Andy said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”

  Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow—”

  “I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”

  “This will work?” the old man asked.

  “You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  He didn’t seem convinced. Andy suspected the man was more than half sure that he had just been swindled out of one fourth of his life’s savings. The hatred in his eyes was all too visible. But in a week he would find out that Andy really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he would rush down to the Square to tell Andy how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feelings toward him. Only by that time Andy expected to be somewhere else far away.

  They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to look back over their shoulders at Andy as if they thought he was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.

  In short order Andy had earned enough now to get him through his week in L.A. But he stuck around the park anyway, hoping for a little more. That proved to be a mistake.

  The next customer was Little Mr. Invisible, the sort of man no one would ever notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. He and Andy struck up a conversation and very quickly they were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told Andy he was from the Silver Lake neighborhood. That conveyed very little to Andy. Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big LACON building on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. Andy smelled a deal.

  Then the gray little man wanted to know where Andy was from—Santa Monica? West L.A.? Andy wondered if people had a different kind of accent on that side of town. “I’m a traveling man,” he said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.”

  The little man looked at Andy as though he had said he was planning a voyage to Jupiter.

  He knew now, though, that Andy had wall-transit clearance, or else that he had some way of getting it when he wanted it, or at least was willing to claim openly that he did. Which was as good as Andy’s advertising that he was something special. That was what the little man was looking to find out, obviously.

  In no time at all they were down to basics.

  The little gray man said that he had drawn a new labor ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. Bad news, bad, bad, bad. People died like mayflies out there, Andy had heard. What he wanted, naturally, was a transfer to something softer, like Operations & Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean where the air was cool and clear.

  “Sure,” Andy said. “I can do that.”

  Andy quoted him a price and the little man accepted without a quiver.

  “Let’s have your wrist,” Andy said.

  The little man held out his right hand, palm upward. His implant access was a pale yellow plaque, mounted in the usual place but rounder than the standard kind and of a slightly smoother texture. Andy didn’t see any great significance in that. As he had done so many times before, he put his own arm over the other’s, wrist to wrist, access to access.

  Their biocomputers made contact.

  The moment that they did, the little man came at him like a storm, and instantly Andy knew, from the strength of the signal that was hitting him, that he was up against something special and very possibly in trouble; that he had been hustled, in fact. This colorless little man hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he had been looking for, Andy realized, was a data duel. Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.

  It was a long, long time since Andy had ever been involved in something like this. Dueling was adolescent stuff. But back in Andy’s dueling days no hacker had ever mastered him in a one-on-one anywhere. Not a one, ever. Nor was this one going to. Andy felt sorry for him, but not very much.

  He shot Andy a bunch of fast stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out Andy’s parameters. Andy caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. His turn to do the testing, now. He wanted the other man to begin to see who he was fooling around with.

  But just as Andy began to execute, the other man put an interrupt on him. That was a new experience. Andy stared at him with some respect.

  Usually any hacker anywhere would recognize Andy’s signal in the first thirty seconds, and that would be enough to finish the interchange. He would know that there was no point in continuing. But this one either hadn’t been able to identify Andy or just didn’t care, and so he had come right back with his interrupt. Andy found that amazing. The stuff the little man began laying on Andy next was pretty amazing too.

  He went right to work, energetically trying to scramble Andy’s architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at Andy up in the heavy megabyte zone.

  —jspike. dbltag. nslice. dzcnt.

  Andy gave it right back, twice as hard.

  —maxfrq. minpau. spktot. jspike.

  But the other hacker didn’t mind at all.

  —maxdz. spktim. falter. nslice.

  —frqsum. eburst.

  —iburst.

  —prebst.

  —nobrst.

  Mexican standoff. The gray little man was still smiling. Not even a trace of swe
at on his forehead. There was something eerie about him, Andy thought, something new and strange.

  This is some kind of borgmann hacker, he realized suddenly. Working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for freelancers like me.

  Good as the man was, and he was plenty good, Andy despised him for that. There was just enough Carmichael blood in his veins for Andy to know which side he was on in the Entity-human struggle. A borgmann—now, that was something truly disgusting. Using your hacking skills to help them—no. No. A filthy business. Andy wanted to short him. He wanted to burn him out. He had never hated anyone so much in his life.

  But Andy couldn’t do a thing with him.

  That baffled him. He was the Data King, he was the Megabyte Monster. All these years he had gone floating back and forth across a world in chains, blithely riding the data stream, picking every lock he came across. And now this nobody was tying him in knots. Whatever Andy gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. The little man was working with an algorithm Andy had never seen before and was having major trouble solving. After a little while he couldn’t even figure out what was being done to him, let alone what he was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so he could barely execute. The little man was forcing him inexorably toward a wetware crash.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Andy yelled, furious.

  The little man laughed in Andy’s face.

  And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of Andy’s implant, going at him down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging his gates, turning his circuits to soup. The computer that had been implanted in Andy’s body was nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So was his brain. If he kept this up the biocomputer would go, and the brain to which it was linked would follow.

  This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.

  Andy reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages he could invent. Things he had never had to use in his life; but they were there when he needed them, and they did slow his opponent down. For a moment he was able to halt the onslaught and even push the other man back a little, giving himself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of his own. But before he could get them running, the little man shut Andy down once more and started to drive him toward crashville all over again. The guy was unbelievable.

  Andy blocked him. He came back again. Andy hit him hard and the little man threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.

  Andy hit him again, harder. Again his thrust was blocked.

  Then the little man hit Andy with a force that was far beyond anything he had used before, enough to send him reeling and staggering. Andy was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss when he managed, but by no more than a whisker and a half, to pull himself back.

  Groggily, he began to set up a new combination. But even as he did it, he was reading the tone of the other man’s data, and what Andy was getting was absolute cool confidence. The little man was waiting for him. He was ready for anything Andy could throw. He was in that realm of utter certainty that lies beyond mere self-confidence.

  What it was coming down to was this, Andy saw. He was able to keep the little man from ruining him, but only just barely, and he wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And the little man seemed to have infinite resources behind him. Andy didn’t worry him. The fellow was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all Andy could give and kept throwing new stuff at him, coming at him from six sides at once.

  Now Andy understood for the first time what it must have felt like for all the hackers he had beaten over the years. Some of them must have felt pretty cocky, he supposed, until they had run into him. It costs more to lose when you think you’re good. When you know you’re good. People like that, when they lose, they have to reprogram their whole sense of their relation to the universe.

  He had two choices now. He could go on fighting until the little man wore him down and crashed him. Or he could give up right now. Those were the only real choices he had.

  In the end, Andy thought, everything always comes down to that, doesn’t it? Two choices: yes or no, on or off, one or zero.

  He took a deep breath. He was looking straight into chaos.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m beaten. I quit.” Words he had never thought he would hear himself say.

  He wrenched his wrist free of his opponent’s implant, trembled, swayed, went toppling down on the ground.

  A minute later five LACON cops sprang out of nowhere and jumped him and trussed him up like a turkey and hauled him away, with his implant arm sticking out of the package and a security lock wrapped around his wrist, as if they were afraid he was going to start pulling data right out of the air.

  Steve Gannett said, coming out on the patio where Anson was sitting in the Colonel’s old chair, “Look at this, will you, Anson?”

  He put a long sheet of glossy green paper into Anson’s hand. Anson stared at it uncomprehendingly. It was all arrows and squiggles, Greek letters, a lot of indecipherable computer nonsense.

  “You know that I don’t understand this goddamned stuff,” Anson said sharply. He realized it was wrong to speak to Steve that way; but his patience grew thinner every day. Anson was thirty-nine years old and felt like fifty. He had been full of big plans, once, when he was young and full of juice and certain that he would be the one to free the world from its serenely tyrannical alien overlords; but everything had gone awry, leaving him with a chilly hollow zone within him that was gradually expanding and expanding and expanding until it seemed to him that there was very little of Anson left around it. For years, now—ever since the failure of the great Prime expedition—he had lived a life that felt as though it had neither past nor future. There was only the endless gray present. He schemed no schemes, dreamed no dreams. “What am I looking at, here?”

  “Andy’s fingerprints, I think.”

  “His fingerprints?”

  “His on-line coding profile. His personal touch. You could compare it to a person’s fingerprints, yes. Or his handwriting. I think this is Andy’s.”

  “Truly? Where’d you get it from?”

  “It came out of Los Angeles, picked up by a random line scan by one of our stringers down there. It’s new. If he’s there, he must have gone back there quite recently.”

  Anson examined the printout again. Arrows and squiggles, still. A hopeless maze. Something was beginning to throb within him that he had not felt in years, but he forced it back. He shrugged and said, “What makes you think this is Andy’s?”

  “Intuition, maybe. I’ve been looking for him for five years, and by now I think I know what to expect. This sheet yells ‘Andy’ to me, somehow. He used to use codes like these when he was a kid. I remember his explaining them to me, but I never had a clue about what he was trying to say. That was when he was ten, eleven years old. I have a feeling he’s started falling back on this stuff in the time that he’s been on the run. Reverting to his own private lingo. We’ve gone back in and set up a trace for it, and now we see that whoever’s been using it has been moving steadily westward across the country all year, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona. And now L.A. The hacker whose codes these are is working as a pardoner down there right this minute. A freelancer, operating outside the guild, from the looks of things. I’m sure it’s Andy.”

  Anson looked up into his cousin’s round, sincere, pudgy face. There was an expression of complete conviction on it. Anson was surprised to find himself swept by a sudden rush of admiration, even love, for him.

  Steve was fifteen years his senior and should have been the leader of the clan by now. But Steve had never wanted to be a leader. He wanted only to keep on plugging away at the things that mattered to him, sitting there in the communications center all day and half the nigh
t, pulling in data from everywhere in the world.

  Whereas he himself—

  The throbbing inside him was growing stronger, now. It would not be suppressed.

  “Tell me this,” Anson said. “Do you think you actually could track him down, on the basis of this stuff?”

  “That I can’t say. Andy’s very, very tricky, you know. I hardly need to tell you. He moves around fast. Simply picking up his trail gives us no guarantee that we could catch up with him. But we can try.”

  “We can try, yes. Christ, let’s give it a try, all right? Find him, bring him here, put him to use. That crazy mutant son of yours.”

  “Mutant?”

  “A wild man. Undisciplined, amoral, self-centered, egomaniacal—where did he get that stuff from, Steve? From you? From Lisa? I doubt it. And certainly not from the fraction of him that’s Carmichael. So he has to be a mutant. A mutant, yes. With enormous special skills for which we happen to have a great need. A gigantic need. If only he would deign to employ them on our behalf.”

  Steve said nothing. Anson wondered what Steve was thinking; but he had no reading, none at all. His mild chubby face was utterly blank. The silence stretched uncomfortably, and stretched some more, until it became unbearable. Anson rose and walked to the edge of the patio, gripping the rail and staring out into the great green gorge below. And found himself beginning to tremble.

  He knew what had happened. The grand old ambition had started suddenly to rise up in him again, the glorious dream of leading a successful crusade against the aliens, striking down Prime and shattering their dominion with a single blow. Ever since Tony’s ill-fated trip to Los Angeles, Anson had had all that locked away in some storage vault of his soul. But now it had broken loose, somehow; and with it, now, came fear, doubt, dark gloom, an agonizing shaft of fresh guilt over the way he had sent Tony foolishly to his death—a whole host of pessimistic self-accusing bleaknesses.

  He stood there, taking deep, slow breaths, trying to calm himself as he looked out into the tangled post-Conquest wilderness that had grown up, over the years, between the ranch and the town down there. And a strange vision suddenly went swirling through his mind.