（外文电子版资料）Robert Silverberg - Beauty in the Night.pdf

====================== Beauty in the Night by Robert Silverberg ====================== Copyright (c)1997, Agberg, Ltd. First published in Science Fiction Age, September 1997 Fictionwise Contemporary Science Fiction Years Best SF Pick NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from F then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines. Please visit to purchase a legal copy. F offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright violators of Fictionwise ebooks. ONE: NINE YEARS FROM NOW He was a Christmas child, was Khalid -- Khalid the Entity-Killer, the first to raise his hand against the alien invaders who had conquered Earth in a single day, sweeping aside all resistance as though we were no more than ants to them. Khalid Haleem Burke, that was his name, English on his fathers side, Pakistani on his mothers, born on Christmas Day amidst his mothers pain and shame and his familys grief. Christmas child though he was, nevertheless he was not going to be the new Savior of mankind, however neat a coincidence that might have been. But he would live, though his mother had not, and in the fullness of time he would do his little part, strike his little blow, against the awesome beings who had with such contemptuous ease taken possession of the world into which he had been born. * * * * To be born at Christmastime can be an awkward thing for mother and child, who even at the best of times must contend with the risks inherent in the general overcrowding and understaffing of hospitals at that time of year. But prevailing hospital conditions were not an issue for the mother of the child of uncertain parentage and dim prospects who was about to come into the world in unhappy and disagreeable circumstances in an unheated upstairs storeroom of a modest Pakistani restaurant grandly named Khans Mogul Palace in