With dinner to follow, and the Highly Serious Discussion tomorrow or the day after.” He hoisted his glass. “So: Merry Christmas, all of you! Everyone that I love in the whole poor old battered world, standing right here in front of me. How wonderful that is. How absolutely wonderful.—I’m not getting too mushy in my old age, am I?”
They agreed that he was well within his rights to get too mushy tonight. But what they did not yet know and he did was that most of the mushiness—not all, but most—was little more than a tactical maneuver. As was the reconciliation with Ronnie. The Colonel had things up his sleeve.
He went around the room clockwise, giving a little time to each in turn, and Ronnie went around the other way, and eventually they were face-to-face again, father and son. The Colonel saw Arise watching protectively from a distance, as though considering the merits of joining them as a buffer; but the Colonel shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Arise backed off.
In a quiet voice the Colonel said to Ronnie, “I’m tremendously glad you came here tonight, son. I mean that.”
“I’m glad too. I know we’ve had our problems, Dad—”
“Put them away. I have. With the world in the mess it’s in, we don’t have the luxury of carrying on feuds with our own flesh and blood. You made certain choices about your life that weren’t the choices I would have wanted you to make. All right. There are new choices to make, now. The Entities have changed everything, do you know what I mean? They’ve changed the future and they’ve damned well blotted out the past.”
“We’ll find a way of getting them off our backs sooner or later, won’t we, Dad?”
“Will we? I wonder.”
“Is that a hint of defeatism that I hear in your voice?”
“Call it realism, maybe.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing Colonel Anson Carmichael III saying any such thing.”
“Strictly speaking,” said the Colonel, smiling obliquely, “I’m a general now. In the California Army of Liberation, which hardly anybody knows about, and which I’m not going to discuss with you right now. But I still think of myself as a colonel, and you might as well too.”
“I hear that you went face-to-face with the Entities in their own lair. So to speak. They don’t actually have faces, do they? But you went right in there, you looked them in the eye, you gave them what-for. Isn’t that true, Dad?”
Actually seems curious about it, the Colonel observed. Actually appears to be interested. That in itself is pretty unusual, for Ronnie.
“More or less true,” he said. “Rather less than more.”
“Tell me about it?”
“I’d just as soon not, not right now. It wasn’t pleasant. I want tonight, this whole week, to be nothing but pleasant. Oh, Ronnie, Ronnie, you scamp, you miserable rogue—oh, how happy I am to see you here—”
It had not been pleasant at all, the Colonel’s meeting with the aliens. But it had been necessary, and, after a fashion, instructive.
The mystifying ease of the collapse of all human institutions almost immediately upon the arrival of the Entities was the thing that the Colonel had never been able to comprehend, let alone accept. All those governmental bodies, all those laws and constitutions, all those tightly structured military organizations with their elaborate codes of duty and performance: they had turned out, after thousands of years of civilization, to be just so many houses of cards. One quick gust of wind from outer space and they had all blown away overnight. And the little ad-hoc groups that had replaced them were nothing more than local aggregations of thugs on the one hand and hotheaded vigilantes on the other. That wasn’t government. That was anarchy’s second cousin.
Why? Why? Goddamn it, why’?
Some of it had to do with the dramatic breakdown of electronic communication, on which the world had become so dependent, and on the chaos that that had caused. What had taken three hundred years to happen to the Roman Empire was bound to happen a lot faster in a world that lived and died by data transmission. But that wasn’t a sufficient explanation.
There hadn’t been any overt onslaught, nor even any threat of it.
The Entities, after all, had not gone riding out daily among mankind like the warriors of Sennacherib or the hordes of Genghis Khan. For the most part they had remained, right from the beginning, immured within their own invulnerable starships, issuing no statements, making no demands. They went about their own inscrutable tasks in there and emerged only now and then, just a few at a time, to stroll casually around like so many mildly curious tourists.
Or, to put it more accurately, like haughty new landlords making their first inspection of properties that had recently come into their possession. Tourists would have been asking questions, buying souvenirs, flagging down taxi drivers. But the Entities asked no questions and hired no cabs and, though they did seem to have some interest in souvenirs, simply walked off with whatever they liked wherever they found it, no transaction having taken place, not even a semblance of by-your-leave being offered.
And the world stood helpless before them. Everything that was solid about human civilization had shattered by virtue of their mere presence here on Earth, as though the Entities radiated some high-pitched inaudible tone that had the capacity to shiver all human social structures into instant ruin like so much fragile glass.
What was the secret of their power? The Colonel yearned to know; for until you begin to understand your enemy, you have not a grasshopper’s chance of defeating him, and it was the Colonel’s hope above all else to see the world free again before the end of his days. That was something he could not help wanting, folly though the notion probably was. It was in his bones; it was in his genes.
And so when an opportunity presented itself for him to go right into the lair of the enemy and look him in the glittering yellow eye, he seized the chance unhesitatingly.
No one was quite able to say by what channels the invitation had come forth from them. The Entities did not speak to human beings in any of the languages of Earth; essentially, they did not speak at all. But somehow, somehow, their wishes were communicated. And they communicated a wish now to have two or three intelligent, perceptive Earthlings come aboard their Southern California flagship for a meeting of the minds.
The informal group that called itself the California Army of Liberation, to which the Colonel belonged, had repeatedly petitioned the Entities based in Los Angeles to allow just such a delegation of human negotiators to come aboard their ship and discuss the meaning and purpose of their visit to Earth. These petitions met with total lack of response. The Entities paid no attention at all. It was as if the ants were trying to negotiate with the farmer who had turned his hose on their anthill. It was as if the sheep were attempting to negotiate with the shearer, the pigs and cattle with the slaughterer. The other side seemed not to notice that any request whatever had been made.
But then, unexpectedly, they did seem to notice. It was all very roundabout and indirect. It started with the exercise of the telepathic means of compulsion that had become known as the Push against the bearers of a similar petition that had been presented to the Entities of London; it had been a fairly complex kind of Push, one that seemed to be pulling, after a fashion, as well as repelling. In Resistance circles, an analysis was undertaken aimed at comprehending just what it was the Entities might have been attempting to accomplish by Pushing the London people in the way that they had; and a belief began to emerge that the invaders had been letting it be known that they would indeed entertain such a delegation, a maximum of three human persons. In California, though, not in London.