The Alien Years

by Robert Silverberg

  “Too harsh a word, is it? I don’t think so. Not from the things I’ve heard. Why did you come back here, Andy?”

  “I’m not sure. A touch of homesickness, maybe? I can’t say. I was on my way to Frisco and suddenly something came over me and I thought, Well, what the hell, I’m driving up that way anyway, I think I’ll go to the dear old ranch, I’ll see the folks again, good old Mom and Dad, good old tight-assed Anson, good old red-hot La-La.”

  “La-La, yes. She prefers to be called Lorraine now. That’s her real name, you may remember. She’ll be glad to see you. She can introduce you to your son.”

  “My son.” Not a flicker of animation appeared on his chilly face.

  Steve smiled. “Your son, yes. He’s five years old. Born not too long after you skipped out of here.”

  “And what’s his name, Dad? Anson?”

  “Well, actually, you’ll be surprised to learn that it is. Anson Carmichael Gannett, Junior. Wasn’t that sweet of Lorraine, naming him after you, all things considered?”

  It was Andy’s turn not to seem amused. He gave Steve a long, steady, sullen look. In an absolutely flat, cold voice he said, “Well, well, well. Anson C. Gannett, Junior. That’s very nice. I’m terribly, terribly flattered.”

  Steve chose to take no notice of Andy’s mocking tone. Smiling still, he said, “I’m glad to hear it. He’s a really lovely child. We call him ‘Anse.’—And just how long are you planning to stay with us, son, now that you’re here?”

  “As least as long as Frank is sitting out there in the hall with his shotgun, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry about the gun. Frank overreacted a little, I think. But he didn’t know what to expect from you. We know that you’ve been living on the edge of the law ever since you left here. Working as a pardoner, right?”

  Stiffly Andy said, “The laws that pardoners break are Entity laws. The things that pardoners do save people from Entity oppression. I could make out a case for looking upon pardoner activity as being one aspect of the Resistance. A kind of freelance Resistance effort. Which would make me just as decent and law-abiding a citizen as you claim to be.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Andy. Even so, the fact remains that pardoners live a kind of shady underground existence and not all of them are completely honest. I like to think that you were more honest than most, though.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.” There was a crackle in Andy’s voice and a glint in his eye that led Steve to think that he might actually be telling the truth, for a change. “I wrote a few stiffs, yes—you know what those are?—but only because the pardoner guild told me I had to. Guild rules. Most of the time I played it straight and did the job right. A matter of professional pride as a hacker. I got to know the Entity net inside and out, too.”

  “That’s good to know. We rather hoped you had. That’s why we’ve been looking all over for you, all these years.”

  “Have you, now? What for?”

  “Because we’re still running the Resistance up here, and you have unique skills that could be of service to us in a major enterprise that we’ve been working on for a long time.”

  “And what kind of enterprise might that be? Let’s get down to it, all right? Just what do you want from me, Dad?”

  “To begin with, your cooperation on a little hacking project of critical importance, one that happens to be too tough even for me, but which I think you can handle.”

  “And if I don’t cooperate?”

  “You will,” Steve said.

  Andy was astonished. The Borgmann archive! Well, well, well.

  He remembered having gone looking for it once or twice or thrice—when he was fourteen, fifteen, somewhere back there. Everyone did. It was like looking for El Dorado, King Solomon’s mines, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The legendary Borgmann data cache, the key to all the Entity mysteries.

  But the quest had brought no payoff for him, and he had lost interest quickly enough, once it started petering out into useless trails. You went sniffing up this promising pathway and that one, and for a time you were sure that you actually had found the way to reach the goodies that the sly and malevolent Borgmann had stashed away for his own private amusement in some unspecified zone of memory in somebody’s computer somewhere on Earth. And then just as you were pounding down the road to success and had worked up a really good sweat you discovered that you had been turned around without noticing it and were disappearing up your own anal orifice, so to speak, and the ghostly cackle of Borgmann’s laughter was resounding in your ears. Andy had decided, after a few such experiences, that there were better things in life for him to be doing.

  He told all that to Steve and Anson, and to Frank, who had accompanied them on the way over to the communications center. Despite his tender years, Frank seemed to have become very important here during Andy’s absence.

  “We want you to give it another try,” said Anson.

  “What makes you think I’m going to get anywhere now?”

  “Because,” said Steve, “I’ve got a data path here that I don’t think anybody’s ever traveled up before, not very far, anyway, and I’m convinced it leads right to Borgmann. I’ve known about it for years. I fool with it, every once in a while. But there’s a lock across it that I can’t get through. Perhaps you can.”

  “You never told me anything about it. Why didn’t you bring me in on it then?”

  “Because you weren’t here. You chose to head out for Los Angeles the very night I stumbled on it, my friend. So how was I going to tell you?”

  “Right,” Andy said. “Right. And if I do get in there now, what is it that I’m supposed to find for you, pray tell?”

  “The location of Entity Prime,” said Anson.

  Andy turned and stared at him. “You still hung up on that bullshit, are you? I heard about Tony, you know. Wasn’t getting Tony killed enough for you?”

  He saw Anson flinch, as though Andy had gone at him with his fist. And for a moment Andy almost regretted having said what he had said. It was a dirty shot, he knew. Anson was too vulnerable in that area. Even more so than he had been before, possibly. Something had changed in Anson during the years Andy had been gone, he realized, and not for the better. As though some key part had broken inside him. Or as though he had aged thirty years in five. All those deaths hitting Anson one after another: his wife, his father, then his brother. The pain of all that must still be with him.

  Still, Andy had never liked Anson much. A stuffed shirt; a fanatic; a pain in the ass. A Carmichael. If he was still hurting for people who had died five or ten years ago, too bad. To hell with him and his tender feelings, Andy thought.

  Anson said, obviously keeping himself under tight check, “We still believe that there is such a being as Entity Prime, Andy, and that if we can find him and kill him we’ll do tremendous damage to the whole Entity control structure.” He clamped his lips tightly together for a moment, a thin straight line. “We sent Tony, but Tony wasn’t good enough, somehow. Somehow they caught wise to what he was going to do, but they let him plant the bomb anyway, because we had the wrong place. And then they grabbed him. The next time, we need to have the right place. Which we hope you can find for us.”

  “And who’s going to be the next Tony, if I do?”

  “Let me worry about that. Your job is to go into the Borgmann archive and tell us where Prime is and how we can get access to him.”

  “What makes you so sure I’ll find any such material?”

  Anson shot an exasperated look at Steve. But otherwise he continued to hold himself under steely control.

  “I’m not in any way sure of that. But it’s a reasonable assumption that Borgmann, considering all that he achieved and the degree of authority that he was able to attain under the Entities in the earliest days of the Conquest, had found some way of making direct contact with the Entity leadership. Which we define as the creature we call Entity Prime. It’s reasonable to believe, therefore, that Borgma
nn’s protocols for approaching Prime are archived somewhere in his files. I don’t know that they are. Nobody does. But if we don’t go in there and look, Goddamn it—”

  Anson’s forehead and cheeks, seamed and corrugated by lines of stress that Andy did not remember, now had begun to turn very red. His left arm was shaking, apparently uncontrollably. Frank, looking worried, moved closer to Anson’s side. Steve gave Andy the most ferocious look of rage that Andy had ever seen to cross his father’s bland, plump face.

  “All right,” Andy said. “All right, Anson. Show me the stuff and I’ll see what I can do.”

  It was a little before midnight. They sat side by side, Steve and Andy, father and son, in the communications center with Anson and Frank standing behind them. Steve had one screen, Andy had another. As Andy watched, abstract patterns began to stream across his father’s screen, the fluid lines of data trails that had been converted into visual equivalents.

  “Give me your wrist,” Steve said.

  Andy looked at him uneasily. It was a long, long time since the two of them had done any implant stuff with each other. Andy had never had any trouble with making bio-computer connections with anyone before, but suddenly he felt himself hesitating at opening his biochip to Steve, as though even a mere interflow of data was too terrifying an intimacy.

  “Your wrist,” Steve said again.

  Andy stretched forth his arm. They made contact.

  “This is what I think might be the Borgmann access line,” Steve said. “This, this here.” Data began to cross over from father to son. Steve pointed to nodes in the picture on Andy’s screen, whorls of green and purple against a salmon-toned background. Andy cut his bioprocessor into the system and began to manipulate the data that had come to him by way of his father’s implant. What had seemed abstract, even formless, a moment ago now began to have meaning. He followed along, nodding, humming, murmuring to himself.

  “And here,” Steve said, “is where I ran into the blockage.”

  “Right. I see. Okay, Dad. Everybody all quiet now, please.”

  He leaned into the screen. He saw nothing else but that glowing rectangular surface. He was alone in the room, alone in the world, alone in the universe. Anson, Frank, Steve, were gone from his perceptions.

  Some mainframe in Europe was welcoming him online, now. Andy clicked himself into it.

  Where was he? France? Germany? Those were only names. All foreign places were mere names to him. Though he had traveled hither and yon across what had once been the United States of America, he had never been outside its former boundaries.

  Prague, I want. Which is in Czech-land. Czechia. Whatever the hell they call the place. Click, click, click. Give me Prague, Prague, Prague. Prague. Borgmann’s hometown. Is that it? Yes. That’s it. The city of Prague, in Czecho-whatever.

  The patterns on the screen looked very familiar. He had been down this trail once before, he realized. Long ago, when he was a boy: this narrowing tunnel, this set of branching forks. Yes. Yes. He had entered it and hadn’t even known where he was, how close he stood to the pot of gold.

  But of course he had lost his way, then. Would he lose it now?

  He was starting to get verbals. Words in some foreign language floated up to him. But which language? He had no idea. There must have been some reason why his father had thought this path was the way into Borgmann’s files, though. Well, Borgmann had been a Czech, hadn’t he? So maybe this language was Czechian, or whatever it was that they spoke in the Czech country. Andy called up a translator file and asked it to do Czech, and got an error message back. He told the translator to run a linguistic scan for him. Mystery language, here. What is it?

  Deutsch.

  Deutsch? What the fuck was Deutsch? The language of Czechia? That didn’t sound right. Whatever Deutsch was, though, Andy needed it translated. He gave the translator a nudge and told it to do Deutsch. Jawohl. It did Deutsch for him.

  Dirty Deutsch, at that. A spew of filthy words such as startled even Andy went rocketing across the screen. Whoever had written that file was foaming at the mouth at him across the decades, really running berserk, welcoming him to this sealed archive with an unparalleled stream of derisive muck.

  Yes. Yes. Yes. This had to be the Borgmann trail, all right!

  He went a little deeper, down that tunnel of forking paths.

  “And now,” Andy said, talking entirely to himself, because there was no one left in the universe except him, “I should hit the lock that Steve ran into, right—around—here.”

  Yes.

  It was a real lulu, that lock. On the surface it was very innocent. It looked like a friendly invitation to go forward. Which Andy proceeded to do, knowing full well what would happen, and carefully marking his position before it did. Onward, onward, onward. Then one step too many, and he found himself crashed. There was nothing he could have done to save himself. The trapdoor had opened in a billionth of a nanosecond and that was that, whoosh, gone! Goodbye, chump.

  Right. If this lock had defeated a hacker like Steve, again and again over the past five years, it had to be something special. And it was.

  Andy got himself back to his marker and started again. Down the tunnel, yes, take this fork, take that one. Yes. There was the lock coming into view a second time, so beguilingly telling him that he was going the right way, urging him to continue moving ahead. Instead of moving ahead, though, Andy simply looked ahead, sending a virtual scout forward and watching through the scout’s eyes until he could see the pincers of the lock coyly waiting for him at the edges of the data trail a short distance onward. He let them grab the scout and backed up once again to his point of entry.

  Slowly, slowly. This thing could be beaten.

  His many trips through the Entity mainframes in the course of his pardoning work had taught him how to deal with stuff of this kind. You don’t like one route, just carve yourself another.

  There’s plenty of megabytage in here to work with. Call in assistance if you need it; link yourself up with other areas of the operation. Tunnel around the block. Borgmann had been one clever cookie, that was clear, but a whole lot of interfacing had gone on since Borgmann’s day, and Andy had the benefit of everything that had been learned about the Entity computers in the past quarter of a century.

  He came at the Borgmann data sideways. He routed himself through computers in Istanbul, in Johannesburg, in Jakarta; and also he went through Moscow, through Bombay, through London, simultaneously tiptoeing up on the Czecho data cache from any number of different directions. He built a double trail for himself, a triple trail, letting himself seem to be in all sorts of places at once, so that nobody could possibly could track him to any one point in his journey and come along in back of him and short him out. And finally he shot into the Prague mainframe through the back door and went whizzing toward the Borgmann cache hind-end first.

  He could see the lock, shining bright as daylight, up there in the tunnel waiting for new patsies to show up. But he was behind it.

  “Hello, there,” he said, as the secret files of Karl-Heinrich Borgmann came swimming up into his grasp like so many friendly little fish asking to be tickled.

  It was amazing, even to Andy, how disgusting some of Borgmann’s stuff was.

  Layer after layer of porno, stacked a mile high. Videos of naked European-looking women with hairy armpits and spread crotches, staring into the camera lens in sullen resignation as they went through curious and, to Andy, highly non-enthralling movements of a blatantly sexual nature.

  Andy didn’t have any particular problem with the sight of naked women. But the sullen looks, the barely concealed anger of these women, the absolutely unavoidable sense that the camera was raping them—all that was very distasteful. Andy could imagine, easily enough, what must have gone on. Borgmann had been the boss puppet-master, hadn’t he, the voice through which the Entities made known their commands to the conquered planet? The Emperor of Earth, pretty much, the highest authority in the world
below Entity level. He had been that for a while, anyway, until that woman had walked into his private office—she had been someone he must have trusted, it would seem—and put the knife into his guts. With the powers he held he could have made anybody do anything he wanted, or else they would face the worst of punishments. And what Borgmann had wanted, evidently, was nothing more profound than for women to take off their clothes in front of him and follow his loathsome instructions while he made videos of them and filed them in his permanent archive.

  There was other stuff here, too, that indicated that Borgmann had done even creepier things than making unwilling women gyrate on command while he sat there drooling and took movies of them. Borgmann had been a secret voyeur, too, a peeping Tom, spying on the women of Prague from afar.

  Moving deeper, Andy found whole cabinets of video documents that could only have been made by snaking spy-eyes into people’s houses. These women were alone, unsuspecting, going about their business, changing their clothes, brushing their teeth, taking baths, sitting on the john. Or making love, even, with boyfriends or husbands. And all the while there was sweet lovely Karl-Heinrich gobbling it all up by remote wire, taping it and stashing it away where it would eventually be found, twenty or thirty years later, by none other than Anson Carmichael (“Andy”) Gannett, Senior.

  They went on and on and on, these porno films. Borgmann must have had half the city of Prague wired up with his spy-eyes. No doubt he had put the cost of it all into the municipal budget as necessary security monitoring. But the only thing he had monitored, it seemed, was female flesh. You didn’t have to be any kind of puritan to find the Borgmann files repellent. Moving swiftly from cabinet to cabinet, Andy felt his eyes glazing over, his head beginning to throb. How many breasts could you stare at before they came to lose all erotic value? How many crotches? How many waggling fannies?

  Sick, he thought. Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.

  But there was no way to get to the Entity material he was looking for, it appeared, except by wading through these mountains of muck. Perhaps Borgmann himself had had an automatic jump-command that took him past them, but Andy didn’t see any quick and convenient way of looking for it and was unwilling to try anything that might deflect him from the main path. So he went on slogging inward the old-fashioned way, file by file by file, through mountains of flesh, tons of tits and ass, hoping that there would indeed be something in this much-sought-after archive of Borgmann’s beside this unthinkable record of the invasion of the privacy of hundreds and hundreds of girls and women of a bygone era.