Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

or less to make out the basic raw material of the landscape, the underlying barren dry New Mexico/Texas nowheresville that he had spent his entire life in. But here on the far side of the barrier the invaders had done some serious screwing around with the look of the land. The jagged buttes and blue-green arroyos that Demeris had glimpsed through the barrier field from the other side were no illusions; somebody had taken the trouble to come out here and redesign the empty terrain, sticking in all sorts of bizarre structures and features. He saw strange zones of oddly colored soil, occasional ramshackle metal towers, entire deformed geological formations—twisted cones and spiky spires and uplifted layers—that made his eyes hurt. He saw groves of unknown wire-leaved trees and arroyos crisscrossed by sinister glossy black threads like stitches across a wound. Everything was solid and real, none of it wiggling and shifting about the way things did inside the barrier field. Wherever he looked there was evidence of how the conquerors had put their mark on the land. Some of it was actually almost beautiful, he thought; and then he recoiled, astonished at his own reaction. But there was a strange sort of beauty in the alien landscape. It disgusted him and moved him all at once, a response so complex that he scarcely knew how to handle it.

      They must have been trying to make the landscape look like the place they had originally come from, he told himself. The idea of a whole world looking that way practically nauseated him. What they had done was a downright affront. Land was something to live on and to use productively, not to turn into a toy. They didn’t have any right to take part of ours and make it look like theirs, he thought, and anger rose in him again.

      He thought of his ranch, the horses, the turkeys, the barns, the ten acres of good russet soil, the rows of crops ripening in the autumn sun, the fencing that he had made with his own hands running on beyond the line of virtually identical fencing his father had made. All that was a real kind of reality, ordinary, familiar, solid—something he could not only understand but love. It was home, family, good clean hard work, sanity itself. This, though, this—this lunacy, this horror—!

      He tore a strip of cloth from one of the shirts in his backpack and tied it around the cut on his arm. And started walking east, toward the place where he hoped his brother Tom would be, toward the big settlement midway between the former site of Amarillo and the former site of Lubbock that was known as Spook City.

      He kept alert for alien wildlife, constantly scanning the landscape, sniffing, watching for tracks. The Spooks had brought a bunch of their jungle beasts from their home world and turned them loose in the desert. “It’s like Africa out there,” Bud had said. “You never know what’s going to come up and try to gobble you.”

      Once a year, Demeris knew, the aliens held a tremendous hunt on the outskirts of Spook City, a huge apocalyptic round-up where they surrounded and killed the strange beasts by the thousands and the streets ran blue and green with rivers of their blood. The rest of the time the animals roamed free in the hinterlands. Some of them occasionally strayed across the border barrier and went wandering around on the Free Country side: while he was preparing himself for his journey Demeris had visited a ranch near Bernalillo where a dozen or so of them were kept on display as a sort of zoo of nightmares, grisly things with red scaly necks and bird-beaks and ears like rubber batwings and tentacles on their heads, huge ferocious animals that seemed to have been put together randomly out of a stock of miscellaneous parts. But so far out here he had encountered nothing more threatening-looking than jackrabbits and lizards. Now and again a bird-that-was-not-a-bird passed overhead—one of the big snake-necked things he had seen earlier, and another the size of an eagle with four transparent veined wings like a dragonfly’s but a thick mothlike furry body between them, and a third one that had half a dozen writhing prehensile rat-tails dangling behind it for eight or ten feet, trolling for food. He watched it snatch a shrieking bluejay out of the air as though it were a bug.

      When he was about three hours into the Occupied Zone he came to a cluster of bedraggled little adobe houses at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression that had the look of a dry lake. A thin fringe of scrubby plant growth surrounded the place, ordinary things, creosote bush and mesquite and yucca. Demeris saw some horses standing at a trough, a couple of scrawny black and white cows munching on prickly pears, a few half-naked children running circles in the dust. There was nothing alien about them, or about the buildings or the wagons and storage bins that were scattered all around. Everyone knew that Spooks were shapeshifters, that they could take on human form when the whim suited them, that when the advance guard of infiltrators had first entered the United States to prepare the way for the invasion they were all wearing human guise. But more likely this was a village of genuine humans. Bud had said there were a few little towns between the border and Spook City, inhabited by the descendants of those who had chosen to remain in the Occupied Zone after the conquest. Most people with any sense had moved out when the invaders came, even though the aliens hadn’t formally asked anyone to leave. But some had stayed.

      The afternoon was well along and the first chill of evening was beginning to creep into the clear dry air. The cut on his arm was still throbbing and he didn’t feel much like camping in the open if he didn’t have to. Perhaps these people would let him crash for the night.

      When he was halfway to the bottom of the dirt road a gnomish little leathery-skinned man who looked to be about ninety years old stepped slowly out from behind a gnarled mesquite bush and took up a watchful position in the middle of the path. A moment later a boy of about sixteen, short and stocky in torn denim pants and a frayed undershirt, emerged from the same place. The boy was carrying what might have been a gun, which at a gesture from the older man he raised and aimed. It was a shiny tube a foot and a half long with a nozzle at one end and a squeeze-bulb at the other. The nozzle pointed squarely at the middle of Demeris’s chest. Demeris stopped short and put his hands in the air.

      The old man said something in a language that was full of grunts and clicks, and some whistling snorts. The denim boy nodded and replied in the same language.

      To Demeris the boy said, “You traveling by yourself?” He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, mostly Indian or Mexican, probably. A ragged red scar ran up along his cheek to his forehead.

      Demeris kept his hands up. “By myself, yes. I’m from the other side.”

      “Well, sure you are. Fool could see that.” The boy’s tone was thick, his accent unfamiliar, the end of each word clipped off in an odd way. Demeris had to work to understand him. “You making your Entrada? You a little old for that sort of thing, maybe.” Laughter sparkled in the boy’s eyes, but not anywhere else on his face.

      “This is my first time across,” Demeris said. “But it isn’t exactly an Entrada.”

      “Your first time, that’s an Entrada.” The boy spoke again to the old man and got a long reply. Demeris waited patiently. Finally, the boy turned back to him and said, “Okay. Remigio here says we should make it easy for you. You want to stay here your thirty days, we let you do it. You work as a field hand, that’s all. We even sell you some Spook things you can take back and show off like all you people do. Okay?”

      Demeris’s face grew hot. “I told you, this isn’t any Entrada. Entradas are fun and games for kids. I’m not a kid.”

      “Then what are you doing here?”

      “Trying to find my brother.”

      The boy frowned and spat into the dusty ground, not quite in Demeris’s direction. “You think we got your brother here?”

      “He’s in Spook City, I think.”

      “Spook City. Yeah. I bet that’s where he is. They all go there. For the hunt, they go.” He put his finger to his head and moved it in a circle. “You do that, you got to be a little crazy, you know? Going there for the hunt. Sheesh! What dumb crazy fuckers.” He laughed and said, “Well, come on, I’ll show you where you can stay.”

      ***

      THEY PUT HIM UP IN a tottering weather-beaten shack made of wooden slats with big stripes of sky showing through, off at the edge of town, a hundred yards or so from the nearest building. There was nothing in it but a mildewed bundle of rags tied together for sleeping on. Some of the rags bore faded inscriptions in the curvilinear