Better off? Could that be true? Frank needed to think about that.
He disengaged his arm and took a few steps away from her, toward the jumble of blackened granite and flagstone that was the smoldering house, and dug the toe of his boot into the heaps of charred wood scattered along the path.
The bitter smell of burning things stung his nostrils. Cindy’s harsh words sounded and resounded in his ears, a doleful clamor that would not cease.
Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day—a thousand deaths—a thousand deaths—
His great plan a failure—
A failure—
A failure—
Failure—failure—failure—failure—
After a few moments it seemed to Frank that he could almost agree with her about Anson. He could never have withstood the immensity of the fiasco, the totality of it. It would have wrecked him. Not that that made his death any easier to accept, though. Or any of the rest of this. It was hard to take, all of it. It stripped all meaning from everything Frank had ever believed in. They had made their big move, and it had failed, and that was that. The game was over and they had lost. Wasn’t that the truth? And now what? Frank wondered.
Now, he supposed, nothing at all. No more great plans. No grand new schemes for throwing off the Entity yoke with a single dramatic thrust. They were finished with such projects now.
A strange dark thought, that was. For generations now his whole family had channeled its energies into the dream of undoing the Conquest. His whole life had been directed toward that goal, ever since he was old enough to understand that the Earth once had been free and then had been enslaved by beings from the stars: that he was a Carmichael, and the defining trait of Carmichaels was that they yearned to rid the world of its alien masters. Now he had to turn his back on all that. That was sad. But, he asked himself, standing there at the edge of the rubble that had been the ranch, what other attitude was possible, now that this had happened? What point was there in continuing to pretend that a way might yet be found to drive the Entities away?
His great plan—
A failure—a failure—a failure—
A thousand deaths a day. A thousand deaths a day. Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Cindy said.
He managed a feeble smile. “You really want to know?”
She didn’t even bother to answer. She simply repeated the question with her unrelenting eyes. He knew better than to refuse again. “That it’s all over with, now that the mission’s failed,” he said. “That I guess we’re done with dreaming up grand projects for the liberation, now. That we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that the Entities are going to own the world forever.”
“Oh, no,” she said, astounding him for the second time in the past two minutes. “No. Wrong, Frank. Don’t you dare think any such thing.”
“Why shouldn’t I, then?”
“Your father’s not even in his grave yet, but he’d be turning in it already if he was. And Ron, and Anse, and the Colonel, in theirs. Listen to you! ‘We just have to resign ourselves.’”
The sharpness of her mockery, the vehemence of it, caught Frank off guard. Color came to his cheeks. He struggled to make sense of this. “I don’t mean to sound like a quitter, Cindy. But what can we do? You just said yourself that my father’s plan had failed. Doesn’t that end it for us? Is it realistic to go on thinking we can defeat them, somehow? Was it ever?”
“Pay attention to me,” she said. She impaled him with a stark, unanswerable glare from which there could be no flinching. “You’re right that we’ve just proved that we can’t defeat them. But completely wrong to say that because we can’t beat them we should give up all hope of being free.”
“I don’t underst—”
She went right on. “Frank, I know better than anyone alive how if far beyond us the Entities are in every way. I’m eighty-five years old. j I was right on the scene, the day the Entities came. I spent weeks aboard one of their starships. I stood right before them, no farther from them than you are from me, and I felt the power of their minds. They’re like gods, Frank. I knew that from the moment they came. We can hurt them—we just demonstrated that—but we can’t seriously damage them and we certainly can’t overthrow them.”
“Right. And therefore it seems to me that it’s useless to put any energy into the false hope of—”
“Pay attention to me, is what I said. I was with the Colonel just before he died. You never knew him, did you?—No, I didn’t think so. He was a great man, Frank, and a very wise one. He understood the power of the Entities. He liked to compare them to gods, too. That was the very term he used, and he was right. But then he said that we had to keep on dreaming of a day when they’d no longer be here, nevertheless. Keeping the idea of resistance alive despite everything, is what he said. Remembering what it was like to have lived in a free world.”
“How can we remember something we never knew? The Colonel remembered it, yes. You remember. But the Entities have been here almost fifty years. They were already here before my father was born. There are two whole generations of people in the world who never—”
Again the glare. His voice died away.
“Sure,” Cindy said scornfully. “I understand that. Out there are millions of people, billions, who don’t know what it ever was like to live in a world where it was possible to make free choices. They don’t mind having the Entities here. Maybe they’re even happy about it, most of them. Life is easier for them, maybe, than it would have been fifty years ago. They don’t have to think. They don’t have to shape themselves into anything. They just do what the Entity computers and the quisling bosses tell them to do. But this is Carmichael territory, up here, what’s left of it. We think differently. And what we think is, the Entities have turned us into nothing, but we can be something again, someday. Somehow. Provided we don’t allow ourselves to forget what we once were. A time will come, I don’t know how or when, when we can get out from under the Entities and fix things so that we can live as free people again. And we have to keep that idea alive until it does. Do you follow me, Frank?”
She was frail and unsteady and trembling. But her voice, deep and harsh and full, was as strong as an iron rod.
Frank searched for a reply, but none that had any logic to it would come. Of course he wanted to maintain the traditions of his ancestors. Of course he felt the weight of all the Carmichaels he had never known, and those that he had, pressing on his soul, goading him to lead some wonderful crusade against the enemies of mankind. But he had just returned from such a crusade, and the ruins of his home lay smoldering all around him. What was important now was burying the dead and rebuilding the ranch, not thinking about the next futile crusade.
So there was nothing he could say. He would not deny his heritage; but it seemed foolish to utter some noble vow binding him to make one more attempt at attaining the impossible.
Abruptly Cindy’s expression softened. “All right,” she said. “Just think about what I’ve been saying. Think about it.”
A horn sounded in the distance, three honks. Cheryl returning, or Mark, or Charlie.