The Serene Invasion

CHAPTER ONE

ON THE DAY everything changed, Sally Walsh finished what was to be her last shift at the Kallani medical centre — though she didn’t know that at the time — and stepped out of the makeshift surgery into the furnace heat of the early afternoon Ugandan sun.

The packed-earth compound greeted her with its depressing familiarity. A dozen crude buildings, looking more like a shanty town than a hospital, huddled in the centre of the sere compound, surrounded by a tall adobe wall. Beside the metal gate rose a watchtower, manned in shifts by a dozen government soldiers. When she began work at Kallani five years ago, it struck her as odd that a hospital had to be so protected, but after a few months in the job she had seen why: as fortification against rebel insurgents bent on kidnapping Westerners to hold hostage, to deter local gangs from raiding the hospital for drugs, and to stop the flood of refugees from over-running the centre in times of drought.

Last winter Sally had attempted to grow an olive tree in the shade of the storeroom; but the drought had killed it within weeks. How could she lavish water on the tree when her patients were so needful? Now the dead twigs poked from the ground, blackened and twisted.

Ben Odinga stepped from the storeroom, saw her and raised his eyebrows.

She shook her head.

“Have you finished?” he asked.

“I’m well and truly finished, Ben.”

He looked at her seriously. “Come to my room, Sally. I have some good whisky. South African. You look like you need a drink.”

She followed him across the compound to the prefab building that comprised the centre’s residential complex. He held open the fly-screen door and she stepped into the small room. A simple narrow bed, a bookshelf bearing medical textbooks, a dozen well-read paperback novels and a fat Bible.

She sat on a folding metal chair by the window while Ben poured two small measures of whisky into chipped tumblers.

She took a sip, winced as its fire scoured her throat, and smiled at Ben’s description of it as ‘good whisky’. What she’d give for a glass of Glenfiddich.

He said, “The infection?”

She nodded. “There was nothing we could do, short of flying her to Kampala.” Which, on their budget, was out of the question.

She went on, “I’m worried about Mary. They were close.”

“I’ll look in on her later, talk to her.”

“If you would, Ben.” She sighed. “Christ, I told her not to worry…” She looked up, then said, “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, smiling tolerantly. He had become accustomed to the frequency of her blaspheming.

A week ago a mother from a nearby village had brought in her malnourished daughter. Her complaint was not malnutrition, but a swollen abdomen. Ben had diagnosed appendicitis and operated, and all seemed well until, a couple of days ago, the five-year-old developed a high fever. Mary, a nurse six months out of medical college in Tewkesbury, had committed the cardinal sin of identifying with the kid.

Sally had long ago learned that lesson.

Ben said, “What’s wrong?”

She looked up. “What makes you think…?”

“I’ve known you for years, Sally Walsh. I know when you have something on your mind.”

She hadn’t wanted to tell him like this; she had wanted to break it to him gently — if that were possible.

“I hope you won’t think any less of me for this, Ben.” She stared into her glass, swirled the toxic amber liquid. “I’ve had enough. I’ve had five years here and I’ve had enough. I’ll be leaving in May.”

She had expected his reaction to be one of disappointment, maybe even anger. Instead he just shook his head, as if in stoic acceptance. This seemed to her even more of a condemnation of her decision.

He said, quietly, “Why?”

She shrugged and avoided his gaze. “I’m burned out. I’m… perhaps I’ve come to understand, at last, that the reality here hasn’t matched my expectations.”

He said, “That is no reason to give in, Sally.”

She looked across at him. He perched on the bed in his stained white uniform, a bony, whittled-down Kenyan in his early fifties, with disappointment burning in his nicotine-brown eyes.

“There comes a time, Ben, when we have to move on. I’ve had five years here. I’m jaded. The place needs someone new, someone with fresh enthusiasm, new ideas.”

“The place needs someone like you, with empathy and experience.”

“Please,” she snapped, “don’t make me feel guilty. I’m going in May and you’ll be getting a replacement fresh from Europe, and after a few weeks it’ll be as if I were never here.”

“Don’t kid yourself on that score, Dr Walsh.”

She smiled. “I’ll miss it — you and the others. But I’ve made my decision.”

They drank in silence for a time. A gecko darted across the wall behind Ben. Cicadas thrummed outside like faulty electrical appliances. It was mercilessly hot within the room and Sally was sweating.

“Do you know why I became a doctor?” she said at last.

“You told me…” He waved his glass. “Wasn’t it something to do with your Marxist ideals?”

“That was why I volunteered to work in Africa,” she said. Ideals, she thought, that had long perished. What was that old saw: If you’re not a communist when you’re twenty, then there’s something wrong with your heart; if you’re still a communist when you’re forty, then there’s something wrong with your head… Well, she was just over forty now and had lost her faith years ago.

“When I was fourteen, Ben, my mother was diagnosed with inoperable and terminal cancer. My father had died of a heart attack when I was two. I have no memories of him. When my mother told me she was ill…” She stared into her whisky, recalling her thin, pinch-faced mother, in her mid-forties, calmly sitting Sally down after dinner one evening and telling her, with a light-hearted matter-of-factness that must have been so hard to achieve, that mummy was ill and might not live for more than a year, but that Aunty Eileen and Uncle Ron would look after her afterwards.

She felt then as if she had run into a brick wall that had knocked all the breath from her body; and, later, a sense of disbelief and denial that had turned, as the months elapsed and her mother grew ever thinner and more and more ill, into an inarticulate anger and a sense of unfairness that burned at the core of her being.

An abiding memory from near the end of that time was when Dr Roberts came to her mother’s bedside and simply sat with her for an hour, holding her hand. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Sally that she wanted to become a doctor. Not the cures Dr Roberts might have effected, or the pain she might have relieved, but the fact of the woman’s simple humanity in giving up so much of her time to hold the hand of a dying patient.

Now she told Ben this, and he listened with that tolerant, amused smile on his handsome face, and nodded in the right places, and commented occasionally.

They finished their whiskies and he refilled their glasses.

“What will you do when you leave here, Sally?”

“Probably take up a practice in some leafy English village.” How her younger self would have railed at her for admitting as much. She recalled, vividly, wondering how her fellow graduates could consider taking up practices looking after privileged English patients when men, women and children were dying of diarrhoea in Africa. What a sanctimonious little prig she must have been back then!

Ben broke into her thoughts. “So, Sally — and don’t be offended when I say this — but you think that you have paid your dues?”

She said nothing, just stared down at the desiccated linoleum curling in the sunlight by the door. She felt terrible. She shook her head. At last she said in a whisper, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I did feel this, Ben. It would be… understandable. The thing is, I don’t feel I’ve paid my dues, and I probably would never think that I had, even if I stayed here for the rest of my life. My reasons are more personal, selfish if you like, than that. You see,” she looked up, “it’s just that I look at what’s happening here and I despair.”

He smiled. “Don’t we all?”

“Do you know, Ben, in the five years I’ve been here, nothing, not one bloody thing, has got better. Nothing! The government is still corrupt, full of rapacious fat cats all sincere smiles one minute, and behind your back raking off profits that should go to help their people. And then the Chinese and the Europeans and Americans… using the continent like a gameboard. It makes me sick, Ben, what the Chinese are doing north of here.”

“They’ve brought wealth, jobs, security for thousands,” he said.

She stared at him. “You don’t really believe that, don’t you? You’re not toeing the party line?” She held up her hand and counted off points on her fingers. “Eighty-five per cent of all profits made in Xian City go straight back to the mafia fascists in Beijing who still have the gall to call themselves communists. Ten per cent is raked off by Ugandan middle-men, and the rest goes to middle-class Africans who employ locals at slave labour rates. And have you seen the slums growing up around Xian, and have you read the reports of prostitution in the area? The Chinese are no better than all the other colonials who came before them — in it for what they can take out. Christ, Ben, you’re Kenyan. You should know that!”

He was smiling at her, his calm face a picture of tolerance. “Anger doesn’t help anything, Sally.”

“I’m sorry… But do you know what angers me most, Ben? Me. I’m angry at myself for letting it get to me. I’m angry at myself for giving in.”

He frowned, as if at a complex mystery. He whispered, “Then don’t give in, my friend. Stay here.”

She held back her tears and said, “I can’t. I’ve made my decision.”

With an acuity belied by his bland, smiling face, Ben said, “It’s Geoff, isn’t it?”

She looked at him, surprised by his deduction. “Partly, but I was thinking of leaving before I met Geoff. So don’t go blaming him.”

She’d met Geoff Allen a year ago when he flew to Africa to cover the drought in the Karamoja region of northern Uganda. He’d impressed her with his naïve simplicity, his apolitical childishness: drinking with him one evening in her room, after she’d shown him around the Kallani medical complex, he had admitted that the reason he was a photo-journalist was that he hoped that by reporting the conditions of people less fortunate than himself, all around the world, the results of his work might provoke the citizens of Europe to do something about the poverty and injustice.

At first she had laughed at his political naivety, wondering where the hell to begin to put this big, handsome man right in his endearingly simplistic world-view. She had restrained herself, and after a few days in his company, as she toured with him around the various medical centres in the region, she had come to understand that his beliefs, no matter how misguided, were sincerely held. He believed that as an individual he could effect change at a higher level.

Perhaps, in Geoff Allen, she was reminded of the idealism and naivety she herself had possessed in her early twenties, which had now been eroded by cynicism and experience.

And as to what Geoff saw in her? After the first time they had made love, he’d held her and expressed his admiration at what she was doing here.

They’d seen each other just six times in the following year, and the last time — a snatched weekend in Kampala where Geoff was en route to cover the terrorist atrocities in Zambia — she had told him that she was leaving Uganda and returning to London.

“I’d be going back regardless of Geoff,” she said now, “but when I get back we’ll be buying somewhere together.”

Ben raised his glass. “I sincerely hope that you find happiness. Geoff is a good man.”

His approbation cheered her. Tomorrow Geoff was flying from London to Entebbe and making the long drive north — ostensibly to do another piece on the drought, in reality to see her. The thought made her a little drunk.

Ben raised his empty glass. “Would you like another whisky?”

She was wondering whether to accept the offer — despite the fact that she had an early shift in the morning — when the sound of gunfire rattled through the hot afternoon air.

HER FIRST IMPULSE was to rush to the door and see what was happening, and she was obeying the urge by the time common sense kicked in and suggested that it might not be the best idea. She stood in the doorway, staring across the compound. She saw the watchtower bloom in a sudden orange fireball, and a split-second later the sound of the explosion hit her. Three soldiers dropped from the tower, one by one, and lay twitching on the ground as they burned.

She watched with incredulity as another soldier ran towards his burning colleagues. He directed his rifle at them, and even as she watched she assumed that what he did then was an act of mercy: he unloaded a blast of bullets into each of the three flaming soldiers, instantly stilling their agonised spasming.

Then he moved to the gate, unbolted the locking mechanism, and hauled it open. A battered Ford utility truck, with a machine gun welded to its cross-bar, revved through the gate and into the compound.

Before she could move, the soldier turned, looked across the compound, and raised his gun at her.

She stared at him, uncomprehending. His name was Josef Makumbi, and she had chatted with him in the canteen during the periods when he was not manning the watchtower.

He yelled something at her.

Behind her, she felt Ben’s hand on her arm, drawing her back into the room.

Josef fired. The bullets smacked into the timber above her head. He yelled again. “Here! Both of you!”

She stepped forward, sensing Ben behind her. She looked across at the corpses of Josef’s colleagues. They were still burning. She had the absurd urge to ask him why he had killed his friends.

Ben whispered to her, “Be calm. Do exactly as he says. We will be okay, Sally.”

Two men leapt from the cab of the truck. One was a Somali, and the other Arabic. A third terrorist, another Arab, remained on the flat-bed, manning the machine gun. He turned it on Sally and Ben as they moved across the compound towards the government soldier.

She caught his eyes. “Josef?”

The Somali and the Arab looked around the compound, spoke rapidly, and came to some decision. The Arab spoke to Josef in the local language. Josef nodded and twitched his rifle towards Sally and Ben.

“Get onto the back of the truck. Move! Do as I say or I’ll shoot.”

Sally stared at him. “Josef, how can you…?”

Ben’s hand gripped her upper arm and urged her towards the truck. “Be silent!”

She allowed herself to be propelled along. She should have felt fear, then — she realised much later — but all she experienced at the time was bewilderment at Josef’s treachery.

Ben assisted her onto the flat-bed. The machine-gunner swivelled his weapon and trained it on them. As they knelt on the corrugated bed of the truck, Josef ordered them to place their hands behind their backs. The Arab tied their wrists with twine, the cord digging into her flesh.

With a touch of sadism she came to see, later, as characteristic of him, the Arab prodded her between the shoulder blades. Unable to bring her hands up to cushion her fall, she fell face down and smacked the metal deck with her cheek. Ben fell beside her.

She wept, and rolled onto her side.

Josef grabbed her under the arms, dragged her across the flat-bed and propped her in a sitting position against the hot metal, then did the same with Ben.

Josef jumped from the truck, fastened the back flap, and stood in the compound watching the truck as it revved up, turned in a wide circle, and raced through the open gates. Sally fastened her eyes on the soldier’s, hoping to cow him with her silent accusation, but his expression remained impassive as they drove away.

The Arab sat across from his captives, rocking with the bucketing motion of the vehicle as it accelerated along the sandy track. His face was thin, and running from his right ear to his hawk-like nose was a scar, a jagged wadi suppurating with some untreated infection.

The machine-gunner, a youth with a sickle-thin face and a milky left eye, stood with an arm slung negligently over his rattling weapon. He stared down at them, his expression contemptuous.

The direct sunlight was punishing. Normally Sally would have either rubbed high factor sun cream into her arms, face and neck, or ensured she was suitably covered. Now she felt her exposed skin burn.

They were heading north, she realised, into terrorist country.

She looked at Ben. His face was a mask carved from ebony. He whispered, “Try not to worry. They will make a ransom demand. We will be free in a day or two.”

She said, “I have a bad feeling…”

The Arab kicked out, the heel of his boot gouging Sally’s shin. “Be silent!” She pursed her lips rather than cry out at the pain.

They raced through the lifeless desert landscape, hitting potholes at speed. Sally rocked against Ben, his solidity reassuring. The metal ridge of the truck’s side panel scored her shoulder blades.

They passed a village — Mullambi. They had travelled over ten kilometres already. It struck her that she was in greater danger the further they travelled away from familiar territory. She felt the sun fry her head. She thought of her tiny room back at the compound and wanted to weep.

Across from them, the Arab closed his eyes, his head lolling. He appeared to be sleeping, his rifle propped across his lap.

“We will be fine,” Ben said in a whisper. “We must do as they say, and do not question them. Whatever you do, Sally, do not argue with them.”

“That,” she said bitterly, “might not be easy.”

“Just do not question what they are doing, okay?”

“Why? Because I’m a woman, and they don’t like –”

He said impatiently, “Whatever the reasons! We should not antagonise these men.”

She was silent for a time, then said, “They’re going to kill us. I know it.”

Ben turned to look at her. “That is not how these people work,” he said patiently. “They will ransom us, makes demands for cash so that they can buy weapons.”

The Arab opened his eyes and stared across at his captives.

Sally licked her rapidly drying lips and said, “Who are you?”

She felt Ben stiffen beside her.

The Arab stared at her, a potent distillation of contempt in his narrowed eyes. “My name is Ali,” he said.

“I meant,” she said, “which organisation do you represent?”

The man smiled. “Boko Haram,” he said.

She wished she had never asked. Northern Uganda was plagued by competing bands of Islamic fundamentalists — each one a little more fundamental, it seemed, than the other. Originally from Nigeria, Boko Haram was the most hard-line of them all: bloodthirsty, uncompromising, and intolerant of everything Western.

“What do you want with us?”

Ben hissed, “Sally!”

The Arab said, “To… make example.” He spat at her feet. “You come here, you fill my people with your ways –”

“Your people? Are you Ugandan?”

He said, “My people, my Muslim brothers.”

“We’re here,” she said, “to help your brothers, to help your men, women and children. There is a drought, or haven’t you noticed? Your people are dying.”

“A drought? The drought is God’s punishment. We do not need your help. You should go, all of you. Americans, Chinese, all of you infidels.”

Anger rose within her. She wanted to argue with him, attempt to point out the absurdity of his argument, but knew that it would serve no purpose.

“Sally,” Ben said again, almost inaudibly.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

Smiling, evidently satisfied that his little speech had silenced the Western whore, the Arab closed his eyes and dozed.

They drove on, to the north. The sun was going down behind her head, affording her face a modicum of shade even as the back of her head burned.

They left the crude track an hour later, slogging through sand and along a dried-up river bed before coming to a sun-warped timber hut leaning so much that it resembled a parallelogram.

Ali dragged Sally from the flat-bed, and then Ben. She stood on the sand, her left leg paralysed with pins and needles. The driver climbed from the cab and moved into the hut. Ali gestured with his rifle. “Inside.”

She limped away from the truck and stepped through the doorway, into the shade of the hut. The machine-gunner remained where he was on the back of the truck.

The instant shade was welcome — but the sight of what greeted them, when her eyes adjusted to the half-light, was not.

The room was empty but for three things.

A tiny camera mounted on a tripod, what looked like a butcher’s chopping block positioned in the centre of the room and, propped up against the far wall, point down, a long, curved sword.

ALI PRODDED HER into a corner and ordered them to sit down. Sally squatted, her back against the wall. Just above her head a broken window allowed blistering heat to fall across her cheek. Glass crunched beneath her canvas pumps.

She glanced at Ben. He bowed his head and closed his eyes.

Ali and the other Arab stood behind the mounted camera, speaking in hushed tones.

Sally looked from the sword, to the butcher’s block, and finally at the camera. It came to her that the most barbaric item of the three was the camera, because of what it denoted. The sword and the butcher’s block she could almost understand, but the fact that their deaths were to be recorded, and ultimately broadcast, added a twist of voyeuristic sadism.

Ali and his colleague appeared to be arguing about the camera. Ali knelt and tinkered with it, speaking in rapid Arabic to the other. He flicked it with the back of his hand and stood, striding to the door and staring out.

He lit a cigarette and calmly smoked. He appeared bored, and Sally wondered how many other innocent Westerners he had casually slaughtered. There had been an aid worker kidnapped and shot a year ago, she recalled, and three Catholic nuns abducted from a mission in the west of the country earlier this year. Nothing had been heard of them since.

She had been well aware of the trouble in the area when she accepted the job, but assurances from her employers that the compound would be well guarded, and that not one medical worker had lost their life in the ten years that the Red Cross had been working in northern Uganda, had convinced her that any danger was negligible.

The second Arab was fiddling with the camera in mounting frustration.

She found herself saying, “What’s wrong with it? Maybe I can fix it?”

Ben hissed, “Sally!”

Ali turned from the door, removed the cigarette from his lips, and said, “You are a woman. How can you know about cameras?”

“I am a woman, Ali, and I know many things.”

He sneered. “You know nothing. You put Western drugs into our people, and also Christian evil.”

She stared at him, restraining the urge to laugh. Soon she would be dead at the hands of this uneducated bigot, and her anger was overcome by despair.

She stared at the scar on his cheek. “I know, Ali,” she said quietly, “that your scar is infected. If you don’t get it treated, that there will be a possibility that the infection will poison your blood, and you will die. When… when you have finished what you are doing here, take my advice and see a doctor. You need antibiotics and antiseptic cream.”

He stared at her. “Why are you bothered?” he asked.

She held his gaze. “When I trained to become a doctor, back in England, I swore something called the Hippocratic Oath. I swore to do all within my medical capabilities to save life…” She paused, then went on, “That’s the difference between us, Ali.”

He thought about this, then said, “No. The difference is that you are wrong and I am right. You are a Western infidel and I am…” he said a word in Arabic that she didn’t catch.

She said, “And your god sanctions this taking of life?”

“God is great. What I do I do for God.”

She closed her eyes and wondered what her Muslim friends back at Kallani would have to say about his corrupted, twisted form of faith.

She gestured to the camera with a nod of her head. “Untie me, Ali, and I will try to mend the camera.”

Even if he consented and untied her, which she doubted, then what were the chances of her reaching the sword, or Ali’s gun which he had lodged beside the sword, and using one of them before they retaliated?

The idea of being forced to act sent a wave of fear through her.

Ali appeared to be considering her suggestion, but a second later the Arab gestured to the camera and stood up. He spoke to Ali, who smiled at Sally. “It is working now,” he said.

Beside her, under his breath, Ben was murmuring a prayer.

She said, “Why are you doing this, Ali?”

He said matter-of-factly, “We will kill both of you, and the film we will put on the internet to warn others like you, to say: Westerners, you are not welcome here. If you come, you can expect this, to be killed like pigs.”

“And do you think this will stop people like me coming to help your people? It didn’t stop me, Ali. Others will come, like me, and our governments, the Chinese, will search for you and eradicate you and others like you.”

He said, “Chinese,” and spat on the floor.

Ben whispered to her, “You’re wasting your breath, Sally. They don’t hear what you are saying.”

“That’s no reason not to say it,” she said.

She closed her eyes. She thought of Geoff, probably in the air above northern Africa now and blissfully unaware of what was happening to her. She felt sorry for him, and almost sobbed as she thought of him hearing the news.

She hoped he would be spared ever seeing the film of her death.

She heard a sound from outside. The Somali appeared at the window and spoke to the Arabs. Sally looked up. The Somali tapped a big, old-fashioned silver watch on his thin wrist. She supposed he was telling them that they were wasting time talking. She found it suddenly impossible to swallow.

She was wrong about what the Somali was saying, however.

Ali picked up his rifle and stepped from the hut, followed by the other Arab. She heard the sound of their footsteps as they passed the window.

She pressed herself against the timber wall and pushed her legs so that she slid up the cracked timber planks. She twisted her head and peered out.

“What are they doing?” Ben asked her.

She smiled. “Praying,” she said. “All three of them, praying…”

Ben began to laugh. “My Lord,” he said. “Oh, my Lord…”

Sally allowed herself to slip down the wall. Something sharp bit into her buttock. She looked down and saw the broken glass around her boots.

“Ben,” she said. “Ben, please stop praying and do something useful.”

His laughter, then, sounded manic. “Like what, Dr Walsh?”

“Like grab a shard of glass and cut the twine around my wrists.”

He stared at the shattered glass, then nodded shuffled on his bottom and turned so that his bound hands approached a long shard of glass. His fingers fumbled with it, blindly.

They manoeuvred so that they were back to back. Sally felt his fingers questing around the area of her wrists as he attempted to locate the twine.

“Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t slit my wrists. I don’t want to bleed to death.”

He grunted something. Sally wanted to weep and laugh at the same time.

She felt the glass bite into the twine, felt the up and down motion of the glass shard as Ben worked it patiently.

She tried not to hope. How long did Muslim prayers last? She thought back to her friends at Kallani, slipping out of the ward to the makeshift prayer room beside the surgery. They had always seemed to be gone an age, though she suspected they took the opportunity to sneak a quick cigarette at the same time.

The sword stood on its point against the far wall, its blade glinting in the sunlight slanting through the window. She was struck by its duality, now; a weapon existing in two mutually potential states, as the means of her liberation, or her death.

She tugged on her binds, attempting to assist Ben’s cutting action. She felt a little give in the twine. She pulled harder; something gave again, the twine fraying.

Ben grunted. She tugged her wrists apart and the twine separated. She was taken by a quick panic. What to do now? Take up the sword and rush from the hut, and attack while they prayed? She turned and peered cautiously through the window, then swore under her breath.

“What? Ben asked.

The Somali was back on the truck, stationed behind the machine gun. The Arabs were standing, brushing sand from their faded military garb.

She turned and sat down quickly, placing her hands behind her back. She glanced at Ben. Great beads of sweat stood out like dew on his face.

The Arabs stepped back into the hut. Ali propped his rifle in the corner near the open door. He approached the camera, knelt and fingered the controls. Sally watched the other man move across the hut and take up the sword. He hefted it in both hands, assessing its balance. His face was expressionless as he concentrated on the weapon. He really does not feel a thing, she thought; we might indeed be pigs to the slaughter.

Ali was looking from Sally to Ben, as if trying to decide which one of them should die first. When his attention returned to the camera, she thought, she would make a run for the gun beside the door.

She had never in her life fired a weapon. Did the rifle have a safety mechanism, a catch that had to be switched before she could fire? Or could she simply aim the rifle and pull the trigger?

She decided to shoot the sword-wielder first, and then aim at Ali. She would keep him alive, tell Ben to order the Somali to jump from the truck and move away. She would like to keep Ali alive, deliver him to the authorities…

She smiled at the absurdity of the thought.

“You,” Ali snapped, gesturing to Ben. “You first.” He moved from the camera, reached down and took Ben’s arm, dragging him towards the butcher’s block. Ben caught her eyes, desperation and pleading on his face.

Ali pushed him into a kneeling position before the block, head down. The swordsman stepped forward, took Ben roughly by the scruff of his neck and forced his face towards the curved timber slab. He pushed down brutally. Ben’s chin hit the timber, slid over the edge. His neck looked horribly exposed.

“Sally…” Ben sobbed.

The Arab stepped back, positioning himself with a fidgeting two-footed shuffle like a golfer addressing a tee-shot. He adjusted his hold on the hilt of the sword until he’d achieved a comfortable grip.

I must act, she thought; I must act now.

She screamed and launched herself forwards. She scattered the camera and tripod, caroming into Ali and knocking him off his feet. She reached out and grabbed the gun. Fumbling with the remarkably heavy weapon, she slipped her forefinger around the curved metal of the trigger.

She lifted the rifle, swaying, and pointed it at Ali and the other Arab.

Both men stared at her, frozen. Ali had picked himself up from the floor and was crouched, stilled by the weapon in her hands. The Arab with the sword was poised as if flash-frozen, his expression incredulous.

Before she thought what to do next, Ali’s eyes lifted, flicked behind her, and in that instant Sally thought: I should not have screamed…

Something slammed into the back of her head and she yelled in pain and fell to the floor, spilling the rifle.

Someone kicked her in the stomach — the swordsman — and the Somali who’d attacked her now dragged her in the corner and squatted over her, forcing the muzzle of his pistol against her temple.

She breathed hard, fighting the pain that throbbed in the back of her skull.

On the floor, foetal, Ben was sobbing to himself.

Ali was yelling at her, incoherent with rage, spittle flying.

The Somali said, “He says, you watch your boyfriend die, then your turn.”

On the floor, Ben began to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Sally curled against the wall and stared at Ben, unable to close her eyes despite knowing what — thanks to her incompetence — was about to happen.

Ali picked up the camera and reassembled the tripod. He switched it on, caught Sally’s eye and smiled.

The swordsman stepped up to the block for the second time, adjusted his footing, then his grip, and lifted the sword.

Sally wanted to cry out, vent her rage, but all she could do was cower into herself and sob.

The swordsman raised the weapon above his head, its blade catching the sunlight.

Sally looked away, biting her lip, steeling herself for the terrible sound of the sword as it hit the back of Ben’s neck.

The moment seemed to go on forever.

Through the window, she saw something flash high in the sky. She looked up, experiencing the ridiculous hope that it might be a helicopter, searching for them. She saw nothing more than a glint of light high up, soon gone. The blue sky seemed to have dulled, as if a mist had descended.

She stared at the timber beside her head, holding herself tight, the point of the Somali’s pistol still pressed, painful and hot, against the skin of her temple.

“…for ever and ever, Amen…”

Then silence.

She wondered if the swordsman was playing a vindictive game, delaying the inevitable so that Ben should suffer all the more.

She forced her gaze from the wall and stared at the swordsman. He stood, legs apart, sword half raised, a curious expression of puzzlement on his bearded face.

Ali yelled at him in Arabic.

Sword still poised, horizontal to his body above Ben’s bared neck, the swordsman replied. He appeared faintly comical, frozen in position, speaking in a low voice.

Beside her, the Somali sniggered to himself.

Ali strode over to the swordsman, reached out and slapped his face softly, almost mockingly.

On the floor at their feet, Ben still murmured the Lord’s Prayer with quiet dignity.

As she watched, the swordsman turned away from Ben and dropped the sword on the floor, and Sally could only assume that, for some reason, he had been unable to bring himself to murder Ben.

Yelling his disgust, Ali snatched up the sword, pushed the Arab to one side, and stood over Ben. He raised the sword, and this time Sally could not bring herself to avert her gaze.

When Ali had raised the sword so that it was at a right angle to his body, he paused. Or, at least, that was what it looked like to Sally. He held the sword at arm’s length, directly above Ben’s neck, and seemed unable to lift the weapon any further. He appeared to be shaking as if with suppressed rage.

From where he was leaning against the wall, in a state of shock, the watching Arab said something.

Beside her, the crouching Somali shouted at Ali. He turned to Sally and said, “They are cowards. Typical Yemenis.” He spat something at them in Arabic.

Dazed, Ali backed from the chopping block until he fetched up against the wall, the sword dangling in his grip.

On the floor, Ben timorously looked up. He raised himself so that he was kneeling, and stared at his tormentors with nascent hope on his face.

The Somali swore, surged to his feet and crossed the floor in two strides. Before Sally could cry out in horror at what he was about to do, he raised the gun to Ben’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

Or attempted to pull the trigger.

He stood with the pistol connected to Ben’s sweat-beaded forehead, arm outstretched, an expression of ridiculous concentration on his thin face, like an infant attempting to perform a feat beyond his capabilities. He was convulsing, his whole body taken by a violent tremor.

No matter how hard he tried, the gun would not go off.

He cursed, flung the pistol aside, and grabbed Ali’s rifle from where it lay on the floor. He swung the gun, inserted his finger into the trigger guard, and aimed at Ben.

The doctor closed his eyes, his lips moving in silent prayer.

As if released from paralysis, acting without fully knowing what she was doing, Sally pushed herself across the floor, grabbed the Somali’s discarded pistol and stood quickly.

She held the weapon at arm’s length, hands trembling, and directed it at the Somali. “Drop the rifle,” she said in a voice that quavered maddeningly.

The Somali seemed to be caught in indecision. His eyes flicked towards the Arabs, as if seeking orders.

Ali moved towards her, reaching out.

Sally lifted the pistol, aimed above his head, and pulled the trigger. This time the weapon fired, deafeningly loud in the confines of the hut. The Arabs flinched and cowered back against the wall. The Somali dropped the rifle and stared at her.

The bullet had splintered the timbers in the ceiling, and a brilliant shaft of golden sunlight fell through like a spotlight, falling on Ben as he knelt in prayer in the centre of the room.

“If you move,” she said, aiming at the terrorists, “you die…” Her voice trembled. She said to Ben, “Go out to the truck. See if the keys are in the ignition.”

Ben rose to his feet and moved slowly, his arms still bound behind his back, and walked towards the door. “Sally…?”

“Just get out of here!”

“Sally, don’t shoot them, okay. Just don’t shoot them…”

He left the hut.

She said to Ali, “Where are the keys?”

He licked his lips. “In the…”

He was interrupted by Ben’s shout. “They’re here.”

Sally backed to the door, gripping the pistol in her outstretched hands.

Despite what the three had put her through, Ben’s abjuration to leniency was redundant. She had no desire to exact revenge.

“If you move,” she said, “I will shoot. Don’t move until we’ve driven away from here.”

She backed through the door, aiming at the cowering trio all the while, until she came to the truck.

She cursed Ben silently for not having the engine revving, then remembered that his hands were still tied. She reached behind her with one hand, found the door handle and pulled. Within the hut, the terrorists stood watching her, frozen.

She slipped into the driver’s seat, expecting them to rush her at any second. Ben was beside her, sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat, knotted hands behind his back. With a surge of adrenaline she lodged the pistol between the dashboard and the windscreen and gunned the engine. The truck bucked, jolted, and surged forward.

She glanced back at the hut as she turned the truck and accelerated away. There was no sign of Ali or the others.

Ben said something over the roar of the engine.

“What?” Sally yelled.

Ben said, “My prayers were answered, Sally.”

She looked up, through the windscreen. It was late afternoon, and the sun should have been bright above the distant tree line. All she saw was a diffuse blur where the fiery ball should have been.

She said, “Their guns jammed, Ben. We were lucky.”

“You saw them, saw what happened. It was the work of the Lord. Their guns did not jam, Sally. They just could not bring themselves to kill us.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what the hell happened. I’m just grateful…”

She brought the truck to a sudden stop, leaned through the window and vomited.

SHE FOLLOWED THE wadi to the road running north-south, and turned left.

She accelerated, residual fear pushing her to drive at speed. She knew the terrorists had no means of leaving the hut other than on foot, but it was as if what they had subjected her to was affecting her rationality. She half expected the men to leap out at them from behind the passing trees.

They came to a T-junction and Sally braked.

Ben said, “I know where we are. See, in the distance, the village of Moganda. We are perhaps one hour away from Kallani.”

“Turn around, Ben, and I’ll try to untie you.”

She picked at the tight knot until she had worked the twine loose and pulled the binds free. He smiled at her, rubbing his wrists.

She gunned the engine and turned right. She checked the fuel gauge, smiled when she saw that it indicated the tank was a little less than half full.

The decision came upon her unexpectedly. She knew, once she arrived back at the medical centre, that she would locate Dr Krasnic and resign then and there. Krasnic would demur, tell her to take a break and think through her decision. But she also knew that she was never going to work at Kallani again.

She had given the place five years of her life, and that was quite enough.

They came to the outskirts of Kallani just under an hour later. A crowd surged along the high street. An almost palpable sense of excitement filled the humid late afternoon air. The attack at the medical centre was big news, in a place where for month after month nothing ever happened.

They edged through the crowds, drove through the centre of town, and minutes later arrived at the medical centre. The gates were open, and within Sally made out two Ugandan army trucks, a police car and a Red Cross jeep.

Crowds milled outside and within the compound so that their return, edging through the citizens and into the medical centre, was hardly commented upon.

The charcoaled bodies of the dead soldiers had been covered in dark green military tarpaulins. The watchtower still burned feebly, a mere blackened timber skeleton against the hazy sky.

Army officers, fat Ugandan policemen, and Red Cross officials stood about in small groups, conferring and consulting softscreens and speaking into wrist-coms.

Sally killed the engine, the truck just another vehicle amongst many. The engine ticked, cooling. She stared out at the activity in the compound.

A tiny African girl moved from a prefab ward and crossed towards the truck. She paused to turn and call something, and a dozen faces appeared at the windows. Sally opened the door and climbed out. The little girl ran to her, repeating her name and saying in Swahili. “You come back! You come back! Kolli, she says bad men took you.”

“I’m back, Gallie. I’m back. Don’t worry.” Sally swept up the child, hugged her to her chest and carried her over to the prefab. Inside, twenty children were cowering in their beds, staring at her with wide eyes.

Mary, the nurse fresh out from England, hurried to her and said, “It’s Dr Krasnic. You must see him. He’s… he’s in his office. He has a pistol. I tried talking to him, but…”

Sally transferred Gallie to Mary’s custody, turned and hurried from the prefab. She almost collided with Ben on the way out.

“Sally?”

“Come with me!” she ordered. “It’s Yan.”

She feared what she might find as she ran across to Krasnic’s office. His frequent depressions, allied to what had happened that afternoon at the complex, was a combination that did not bode well.

She came to the office and pushed open the fly-screen door.

Krasnic sat at his desk, looking like a statue carved from grey granite. He looked up when she entered. Ben stood behind her, a hand on her shoulder.

Krasnic said, incredulously, “Sally? Ben?” His eyes brimmed.

“We… got away, Yan.”

Only then did she see the pistol lying on the table between his outstretched hands.

“I saw the carnage…” Yan said. “Mary told me you’d been taken.” He shook his head. “I… I don’t know what happened. I’d suddenly had enough, all I could take. So I filled my pistol…” He gestured to the gun on the desk, “raised it to my head and tried to pull the trigger. And nothing happened. So I tried again, yes? And… again, nothing. Was it God, telling me something?”

Sally opened her mouth to speak, but the words would not come.

She stepped forward, reached out and took the pistol. It was far heavier than she had expected, and cold.

“Yan, we need to talk…”

She was interrupted. Someone barged into the room, shouting. “Dr Krasnic!” The Ugandan orderly stared at Sally and Ben, then went on. “Dr Krasnic, amazing events in the south! You must come and see. The road is blocked!”

Before anyone could question him, he ducked back through the door and sprinted across the compound.

Sally looked out. The police car, the Red Cross truck and the army vehicle were rumbling in convoy from the compound.

Sally turned to Krasnic. “Yan, come with me.”

She waited until he stood, like a tired old bear, and she took his arm. They crossed the compound to the terrorist’s truck and all three shuffled along the front seat. Sally stowed Krasnic’s pistol alongside the other above the dashboard.

Five minutes later they left the compound behind the slowly moving convoy and headed south.

Krasnic was the first to see it. He pointed, stirred from his suicidal fugue by what had appeared in the distance. Sally recalled the flash high in the sky earlier that afternoon and, later, the diffuse nature of the sun.

The convoy had halted in the road ahead, along with dozens of other vehicles, cars, motorbikes and bicycles. A crowd of perhaps two hundred citizens milled about at the end of the road — the end of the road because, spanning the patched tarmac that should have headed ruler-straight south without hindrance across the sun-parched desert, was what appeared to be a wall of glass.

Dazed, Sally climbed from the cab, eased her way through the crowd, and approached the silvery membrane. She could see through it, to the road on the other side, the dun African land stretching away to the horizon.

She looked up and stared in wonder at the concave expanse of diaphanous material that stretched high above their heads. It appeared that the town of Kallani was enclosed within the confines of a vast dome.

Krasnic was beside her. “What the hell…?”

Ben said, “It’s a sign, Sally. A sign…”

She reached out and touched the sun-warmed membrane.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BOARDING OF the Air Europe flight from Heathrow to Entebbe was delayed for two hours due to a bomb scare in terminal six. Geoff Allen bore the hold up with customary patience. His job entailed prolonged travel, and these days delays were an inevitable part of the process. He unrolled his softscreen and spent the time editing a file of shots taken on his last assignment, a freelance trip to cover the aftermath of the bombings in Ankara.

A rainstorm was lashing the tarmac, and when the time came to board the ancient Boeing 747 the passengers were informed that, because of ‘technical difficulties’, the umbilical corridor leading from the terminal building was out of commission. As he dashed through the rain, he looked ahead to the sun of Africa and the week he was due to spend with Sally.

There was another delay, this time lasting thirty minutes, while the plane took its place in the take-off queue. He spent the time writing a short email to Sally and sending it as the plane climbed and banked over the dreary grey suburbs of south-west London.

See you in a little over ten hours. I can’t wait. Work has been hell, I’ll tell you all about it later. There I go again, complaining about my job, when yours… Anyway, things are just the same in England. Food-shortages and riots. Could be worse: look at France…

He went on in this rambling vein for another couple of pages, the epistolary logorrhoea a prelude to the oral: when he met Sally they’d talk non-stop, catching up on the mutual missed events of the past three months.

The plane flew west, out over the Atlantic and south over the Bay of Biscay, giving French airspace a wide berth. A nationalist terrorist group had brought down three planes in as many months over the south of France, in response to the number of foreigners flooding into the country. Airlines were taking no risks.

Allen lost himself in work, cropping images of bombed-out houses, the dazed victims in the streets of the Turkish capital. The country was paying the price for its acceptance of the West, its repudiation of ‘traditional’ values. Repression of dissidents, including Kurds and Islamists, had been severe and uncompromising, in the grand tradition of Turkish state heavy-handedness. The result was an anarchic free-for-all in which ideologically opposing terror groups, of every shade of political and religious persuasion, cut swathes through the country’s innocent population.

A little while later he felt a tap on his shoulder. A woman peered around the seat behind him. “Do you think that’s appropriate for children to view?”

“Excuse me?” Allen turned awkwardly to look at her.

The woman leaned to one side and indicated a small girl seated beside her. “My daughter saw what you were doing as she went to the toilet…”

His first reaction was to apologise — the typical English, deferential climb-down hardwired into every citizen of his class and age. His second, to tell the woman that her daughter should mind her own business.

He indicated the vacant window-seat beside him, “I’ll move,” he said, and did so.

In the aftermath, he wished he had said something caustic, along the lines of, “Perhaps you shouldn’t shield your precious daughter from the realities of the world…” but on reflection he was relieved he’d not had the gall to do so; that would have started him on his hobby-horse, the sanitised, advertisement-led vapidity of the British news media these days, which was happy to report atrocities with lip-smacking gusto, but was prudishly reluctant to show the effects of bombings and similar attacks. Even the internet, once the bastion of laissez faire content, had been hamstrung by recent government restrictions.

The website and sister magazine he freelanced for was based in Germany, where restrictions were a little less draconian.

He worked on the photography for another hour, by which time a hostess was processing down the aisle handing out shrink-wrapped trays of fodder the blandness of which was calculated to offend the least number of passengers. Allen chewed on a cheese roll — the cheese the latest milk-free version, cheap, rubbery and tasteless — while staring through the window at the ocean far below.

They overflew a vast hydraulic wave-farm, a series of great metal platelets connected by tubular pistons the width of the Channel Tunnel. He’d covered a story down there a few years ago. The Spanish government had flown him to Cadiz, then ferried him out by hydrofoil, to witness an amazing sight. A hundred boat-people, refugees fleeing the revolution in Morocco, had set up camp on the back of one of the farm’s great see-sawing plates, subsisting on fish and little else, until evacuated by the Spanish authorities.

The farm was free of inhabitants now, other than its skeleton crew of engineers, but he did see a tangle of wreckage and a sprawling scorch mark on one of the heaving pontoons: the result of a terrorist attack last year.

The last he’d heard, the Spanish government was thinking of closing down the farm on grounds of inefficiency, and building nuclear reactors to supply the nation’s rapacious energy needs. Opposition voices pointed out the dangers of reactors prone to terrorism…

An elderly man hobbled down the aisle towards him, smiled and inclined his head, and walked on past. Allen responded with a vague smile of his own, wondering if he’d met the man somewhere recently. His memory for faces, as well as names, was appalling, which was odd as he thought of himself as a visual person. He was endlessly fascinated by the appearance of things, of how reality presented itself visually — his degree had been in art history, and he’d been a photo-journalist for the past ten years — and yet he was forever unconsciously snubbing people because he failed to recognise their faces.

A little later the old man paused in the aisle beside Allen, cleared his throat and, when he had his attention, murmured, “I hope you don’t think this impertinent of me, but I was wondering if you’re Geoffrey Allen?”

The man had the diffident, old-school manners of a much earlier generation. Allen guessed he was in his eighties.

He smiled, wondering if the man had recognised him from one of the ID mugshots that occasionally accompanied his pieces in British colour supplements. He felt at once obscurely pleased and embarrassed.

He smiled. “That’s right.”

The man extended a frail hand. “James Cleveland. I worked with your father many, many years ago, and I once met you when you were this high. I’ve followed your career over the years.” After they had shaken hands, Cleveland indicated the aisle seat. “You don’t mind…?”

“Not at all.” Though, truth be told, the last thing he wanted was to be pinned in situ by someone reminiscing at length about the greatness of his father — a situation he’d suffered on more than one occasion over the years.

“Your father was a wonderful politician, Geoffrey — I may call you Geoffrey, by the way?”

Allen smiled his assent and groaned inwardly.

“We were on the same back-bench committee many years ago, investigating police corruption. I have never worked with a finer mind…”

Cleveland continued in this vein, and Allen responded with nods and the occasional monosyllabic agreement.

The fact was that his father had been a great man, and that rare animal: a politician loved by the people, a reformer who worked tirelessly for his constituents. That he had rarely shown himself at home was a side-issue that few knew or cared about, outside of the immediate family, Allen himself and his younger sister Catherine. Perhaps it might not have been so bad if their mother had not also been a parliamentary politician, if not of his father’s eminence, then certainly as hard-working. Allen was raised by a series of European nannies with, in the background, two distant figures called mother and father who he knew he should feel something for — as he had read about in books — but for whom he felt almost nothing other than resentment.

His parents worked hard for years, tirelessly for the people they represented… and where did it get them, he thought?

Now Cleveland said, “And I was so sorry to read about…”

“Yes,” Allen interrupted, fearing what the politician emeritus might say next, “yes, it was a… terrible shock for all of us.”

Tactfully, Cleveland changed the subject. “Well, I’m visiting my grand-daughter in Durban. She’s just given birth.”

“Congratulations.”

“And you? Work, no doubt?”

“Actually, a working holiday. I’m visiting my fiancée.”

“In South Africa?”

“Uganda. She’s a doctor working with the emergency services in Karamoja.”

Cleveland’s rheumy eyes widened. “Not the most… stable, shall we say, area in the world. Your fiancée must be a remarkable person, Geoffrey.”

Allen smiled. “She is,” he said.

The old man patted Allen’s hand like a beneficent grandfather. “Well, it has been wonderful talking to you. I hope you have a pleasant time in Uganda. Take my advice and visit Lake Edward in the south. Just the place for young lovers.” With a smile he lifted himself from the seat and limped back along the aisle.

Allen glanced through the window and stared down at the brilliant blue, beaten expanse of the ocean, feeling obscurely troubled. It was always the same when he was forced to consider his parents, and their deaths.

He tipped back his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to fill his mind with other things.

HE WAS AWOKEN a little later by the sound of activity around him. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Passengers were releasing their folding trays, preparatory for whatever culinary delights Air Europe had prepared for dinner.

He ate a bland curry, overcooked dal and undercooked rice, followed oddly by a slice of polystyrene Victoria sponge, then glanced at the time on his softscreen, which he’d fastened round his forearm. It was five o’clock British Summer Time. Estimated time of arrival in Entebbe was a little after midnight, Ugandan time. He’d booked a hire car and would drive up to Kallani overnight. Time with Sally was precious and he didn’t want to waste a second.

They were flying over the coastline of Northern Africa. The scalloped littoral of Morocco showed as a series of golden scimitars, the destination — before the revolution — of hordes of sun-starved northern Europeans and Chinese.

The plane thrummed inland, and an hour later the first of the Chinese mega-cities came into view.

It looked, he thought, like some kind of computer circuit board, a grid-pattern of prefabricated buildings and domes extending for tens of miles across the parched land. Monorails connected outlying towns which were rapidly being absorbed into the sprawling Cathay conurbation, eating up the terrain towards the Atlas mountains.

At first Allen had viewed with indifference the wholesale economic invasion of northern Africa. It struck him as the inevitable process of colonisation that the communist party of China had so vilified the West for in the past — the inevitable, rapacious rampaging of a regime turning from communism to capitalism.

Sally had set him right on that, listing a catalogue of abuses, both humanitarian and ecological, being committed by the fascist mafia, as she called them, of Beijing. She’d spent an hour telling him about specific instances of Chinese abuse, before relenting and changing the subject.

Afterwards, Allen had thought twice about suggesting ordering a Mandarin take-away.

He unrolled his softscreen and accessed the file containing the images he’d taken on his last trip to Uganda. He scrolled through shots of Sally beside Lake Kwania, looking tired and drawn after a shift at the medical centre lasting for three days with precious little sleep.

The pictures showed a thin-faced woman, not in the least photogenic, with a pinched expression and straggly hair. She was thin, pared down by a combination of a bad diet and overwork, constantly edgy and nervous and burning with the conviction of her political and humanitarian passions.

Allen loved her. For the first time in his life he had found someone he could trust, who he could talk to about his past, who listened to him and understood. As he gazed down at her thinly-smiling face, he realised that she was beautiful, and he felt a little drunk with the thought that in a few hours they’d be together again.

He noticed the first of the domes ten minutes later. He was staring out of the window, watching the rilled foothills of the Atlas mountains drift serenely by far below. They were flying over the southern slopes of the range now, and ahead was the vast stretch of the Sahara. He made out a flash of silver to the west, tucked into the foothills, and assumed it to be the glint of a river. Then he saw another, and another, and was surprised to note that they were domes, great silver hemispheres straddling towns and villages — perhaps a dozen in all, of various sizes, covering the centres of occupation along a winding road that snaked through the foothills.

Ahead to the right was a sizable town, and as the plane overflew it he had a closer view of the dome that arched over its entirety, encompassing its sprawling suburbs and two-storey central buildings like a vast snow globe.

Cleveland, making another trip to the loo, stopped in the aisle. “I suspect it’s the Chinese again,” he said, indicating the dome.

Allen frowned. “But why on Earth would they cover entire towns and villages?” he asked.

The old man shook his head. “They’ll have their reasons,” he said. “They always do, the Chinese — and you’ll find that it will make absolute sense in the long term.”

Cleveland shuffled on and Allen returned his attention to the silvery dome far below. The minute shapes of cars and trucks had halted on the road that appeared to run right into the sheer wall, and he made out what might have been tiny, ant-like crowds of people down there.

He unrolled his softscreen, accessed the net and was about to tap in Africa + Domes + Chinese, when the screen flashed a systems error and closed down. He strapped the screen round his forearm again, eased back his seat and stared out at the passing land far below.

THEY WERE FLYING over the Sahara an hour later when the plane stopped.

The first thing he noticed was the sudden, utter silence — startling after the constant thrumming of the engines. He looked out of the window. Five metres ahead of where he sat, the silver wing — which should have been vibrating ever so slightly — was absolutely still… and, more worryingly, the line of the aileron was unshifting against the arabesque of sand dunes of the distant desert. Startled, he peered directly down. They were passing over a road that cut from right to left through the sand, with a tiny truck on its tarmac’d surface. As he stared, the vehicle remained exactly where it was, unmoving in relation to the line of the wing.

Only then did he look up, across the aisle, and realise that his fellow passengers were likewise frozen. The woman across from him was lifting a sweet to her mouth, her fingers stilled an inch from her lips. Beyond her, a man was in the process of turning a page of the in-flight magazine. In the aisle, a smiling hostess was as immobile as a shop window mannequin.

Allen was about to stand up in alarm, attempt to see if everyone was similarly stricken with this paralysis, when an incredible rush of heat passed through his head and he was no longer aboard the plane.

He was flat on his back, seemingly floating in mid-air. He could feel no support beneath him. All was grey above. He tried to move his head, to look to either side, but was unable to do so. He wanted to cry out, but he could not move his mouth to articulate the words. He felt naked, though he was unable to look down the length of his body to see if this were so.

Later, he would wonder why he did not panic. It would have been a very reasonable reaction, given the circumstances. The fact was that he felt very calm, not in the least frightened. He felt a certain odd distance, a sense of remove he had once experienced when being sedated for a minor operation.

He recalled articulating the thought, What is happening to me? — and receiving a reply, as if in his head: Do not be afraid.

He wanted to laugh out loud but was unable to do so.

Seconds later he saw a bright light directly above him, dazzling. Silhouetted in the light was the outline of a human form, leaning over him. He felt only peace, as if he were in the presence of someone who, he knew, wanted only the best for him. The head-and-shoulders shape was dark, shadowy, there for a second and then gone.

He felt something ice cold on his chest, frozen pin-pricks dancing up his sternum towards his head. His instinct to cry out in alarm was stilled by the strange conviction that all was well, that he had no cause to panic.

Even when he saw what was dancing up the length of his body, climbing over his chin, then his lips and nose, and progressing to his forehead, he did not attempt to cry out. He felt no dread or horror, even though what might have been a flashing, silver-limbed mechanical spider was squatting above his forehead and lowering an ovipositor towards his skin.

Later he would describe what followed as being like the sensation of a dentist’s drill, accompanied by a high-pitched sound, felt rather than heard, a droning conducted through the bone which the ovipositor was presumably boring. Oddly he felt no pain.

A second later he experienced a blinding mental flash — which he could only describe, later, as feeling as if all his synapses had fired at once.

Then the spider, its job done, was dancing back down his face and body. He saw the human shape again, dark but benign, lean over him as if in inspection.

He was washed with a sensation of ineffable peace.

He blacked out, and an instant later was back in his seat on the plane.

He sat very still, sweating, and gripped the arm-rests. The engine was droning, the plane vibrating slightly. A glance through the window assured him they were in motion once again, the wing shaking, the desert passing by below. He glanced across the aisle: the woman was chewing the sweet that just seconds ago she had conveyed towards her mouth, and her neighbour was flipping through the magazine. The smiling air hostess approached, eyes flicking professionally over her charges.

She registered something in his expression and leaned towards him, her smile expanding in query. “Can I help?”

Before he could stop himself, he said, “Is everything okay? I mean… the plane…?”

She must have dealt with a thousand air-phobics in her time. She said reassuringly, “Everything is fine; no need to worry. We’ve lost on-line capability, but it should be up and running shortly. We will be arriving at Entebbe in a little over three hours.”

“I thought…” He shook his head. “No, I must have been dreaming.”

She smiled again. “If I can get you anything?”

“No. No, I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” she said, laid a perfectly manicured set of crimson-glossed nails on his hand, then moved off down the aisle.

The aftermath left him feeling both embarrassed and frightened. What he had experienced was as real as everything else that had happened over the course of the past few hours: the plastic meals he’d consumed, his chat with Cleveland…

The plane had stopped dead in its flight, along with everyone aboard… except him. Then he’d found himself floating naked in a grey space, with a spider drilling into…

He gave a small involuntary gasp and reached up to touch his brow, expecting to feel the messy evidence of an incision there.

All he felt was a coating of clammy sweat.

He recalled the peace he’d experienced, the reassuring words in his head, exhorting him not to fear. The odd thing was that he had felt no fear then, while undergoing whatever had been happening to him, but now, looking back at the episode, he was overcome by a wave of retrospective dread.

Could some form of dream be held accountable? He thought not. Epilepsy, then? A brain seizure resulting in a hypnagogic hallucination? But the experience had seemed so damned real. He had seen his fellow passengers freeze… and yet they had experienced nothing.

He stood and walked down the aisle, scanning the seats for the ex-MP. He found the old man reading a Kindle. Cleveland looked up and smiled.

Allen said, “This might sound strange…” He paused, licked his lips, and was aware of Cleveland, and the elderly lady beside him, looking up at him expectantly. He went on, “You didn’t happen to notice anything… odd, a few minutes ago?”

“Odd, dear boy?”

He wished he’d never asked the question. “I mean… did the plane seem to… No, I’m sorry… I must have been hallucinating. I must have dropped off… a nightmare.”

Cleveland reached out, solicitous at Allen’s agitated state. “Are you sure you’re okay, Geoffrey?”

Allen smiled. “Absolutely. A dream, that’s all. I’m sorry…”

Cleveland smiled his reassurance that it was no bother at all, and Allen returned to his seat.

He stared down at the distant desert and attempted to regain some measure of the sense of peace he had experienced during the hallucination.

ENTEBBE RUSHED HIM with its usual sensory overload of chaotic, over-populated, frenetic activity he should have been accustomed to by now — from his many visits to cities in Africa and Asia — but which always struck him anew.

The press of importuning humanity and the accompanying noise was a shocking assault. Crowds surged in the streets outside the airport, a morass of brightly coloured humanity seething even now, a little after midnight, under the glare of halogen floodlights. The constant babble of voices, blaring music, and traffic noise only confused the visual chaos — and, as if this were not enough, the stench of Africa, diesel, dung and cooking food, overlay everything. Even the humidity, he thought, was an unwelcome sensory burden.

Clutching his holdall, he pushed his way through the crowd towards the Hertz car rental office. A military convoy raced along the road, a phalanx of black faces staring at him impassively from the back of a troop-carrier. There seemed to be increased military and police activity in the streets around the airport, an atmosphere of tension in the air. There had been an attempted coup here just six months ago, and the situation was still pretty tense.

He made it to the office, presented his softscreen to the harassed woman at reception, and waited a minute for the transaction to be processed.

The women smiled at him and said, “And where are you heading, Mr Allen?”

“North. Karamoja,” he replied, wondering at the question.

She beamed at him. “Travel north is not recommended, Mr Allen.”

He immediately assumed she was referring to terrorist activity and felt a stab of alarm when he thought about Sally. “What’s wrong?”

“The Chinese,” she said.

He pulled a face. “The Chinese?”

She passed him his softscreen and the car key. “They are dropping domes on our cities, Mr Allen. Dropping them from the air. They started in the north and they are heading south. Soon Kampala and Entebbe will be covered.” The pronouncement, imparted with the brazen confidence of the reliably informed, took him aback.

She glanced over his shoulder at the next customer in line, effectively dismissing him before he could question her further.

Bemused, he pushed through the press, exited the office and found his Volvo in the vast parking lot. He bought a bottle of chilled water from a vendor and sat in the driver’s seat, took a drink of water and tried to work out what the woman had meant.

The domes he’d seen in the northern Sahara… He’d assumed them to be the work of the Chinese, but the idea that they were actively dropping them from the air, starting in the north and heading south, was absurd.

She had obviously got hold of a rumour, some anti-Chinese scare-mongering in the area.

He activated his softscreen and attempted to access the web, but connectivity was down. He tried to phone Sally, but the line was dead.

He took another long drink of water, consulted the map he’d pre-loaded on the ’screen, then began the long drive north despite the receptionist’s alarmist warning.

HE WAS SOON out of Entebbe and the sprawling outskirts of Kampala, driving away from the conurbation on a motorway that for the first ten kilometres was well-lit but after that turned into a darkened road barely wide enough to contain two lanes of traffic. The only other vehicles he saw heading north through the sultry darkness was a convoy of military trucks — but the flow in the opposite direction was substantial. Trucks, cars and motorbikes jammed the road for kilometres, cacophonous with blaring horns and shouted curses. He wondered if these people too had heard rumours of the vile Chinese imprisoning towns under dropped domes…

Two hours later he was barrelling through parched grassland at a steady fifty miles an hour, and the flow of traffic heading south had dried to a trickle. There was no sign of any other military vehicles. He tried to find a news station on the car radio, but all he picked up were several music stations playing European rock classics and Baganda music.

A couple of hours later the sun came up with tropical rapidity to his right, revealing a seared landscape of stunted bushes stretching to the flat horizon. He reckoned he had another three hours to go before reaching Kallani and decided to find somewhere to stop for a rest and food.

He thought of Sally as he drove. She’d booked a five-day leave period, and said she’d take him west, to the Murchison Falls National Park. Zoologists there were working to reintroduce elephants back into the wild, and this was the reason his magazine had sent him out here. He’d spend the next few days catching up with Sally and taking a little time out to shoot the elephant story.

And in May, she had promised, she would leave Africa and come back to England, and they would set up home together somewhere in London.

The thought was still fresh enough to amaze him.

He was still thinking of Sally Walsh, half an hour later, when he saw his first dome from the ground.

It perfectly encapsulated a small town to the right of the road, perhaps two kilometres away. Its parabolic curve caught the light of the sun, its modernistic architecture striking him as bizarre out here in the African bush.

He decided to take a detour and turned along the sandy road that headed towards the town, steering around huge potholes in the approach road. Ten minutes later he braked suddenly and stared through the windscreen.

The wall of the dome cut across the road, effectively barring the way. A truck had halted before the sheer transparent wall, along with a couple of motorbikes and a battered police car. A dozen bewildered Ugandans stood before the rearing wall, staring through at the town.

On the other side, perhaps a hundred citizens, men woman and children, stared mutely out, imprisoned.

He opened his holdall, retrieved his camera, and took a dozen shots through the windscreen, then climbed out and approached the dome, stopping to take more shots.

He halted a foot from the glass — or whatever material it was — and found it to be perfectly clear, allowing him to see through without distortion. He reached out and laid a hand on the warm membrane, then knocked on it experimentally. It was not like knocking on a thin pane of glass — a window, say — but seemed much more solid, substantial. He looked down, then knelt and dug a trench in the fine sand at the foot of the dome. He reached the depth of a couple of feet, and still the membrane continued.

He’d thought the idea of the Chinese dropping them from the air ludicrous, but it seemed even more so now that he had seen a dome with his own eyes. And yet how to explain the phenomenon?

A young girl, perhaps ten years old, approached him on the other side of the glass. She stood mutely, watching him as he knelt beside the hole he’d dug. He reached out and splayed his fingers on the glass, and she laughed suddenly, silently, turned and ran away.

“Hello there!”

A portly Ugandan police sergeant was waddling across to him, smiling. “Good day to you, sir. You want to go to Morvani?” he asked, gesturing through the dome.

“Kallani,” Allen said.

The sergeant shook his head woefully. “Bad luck, sir. Kallani just the same. All towns and villages north of here the same. All covered by these…” He reached out and slapped the glass.

Allen shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible, sir. Here they are. It has happened. Radio reports say that the Chinese dropped them on all our towns, but I tell you that is not so.”

“No, of course not.”

“No, my friend here saw what happened. Akiki!” he shouted towards the gathered Ugandans. A bare-chested old man in baggy shorts trotted across to them on stick-thin legs, bobbing his head at Allen. He clutched a malnourished brown goat on a length of twine.

The police officer quizzed him in the local language, and the man replied.

The sergeant translated, “Akiki says he was out here at dawn, looking for a goat that had escaped. He came into the bush, then turned to look back at his house. And he saw between himself and his house this thick glass wall. It appeared in seconds with no noise at all. In seconds…” The sergeant laughed. “And Akiki is most upset, for his wife said that his breakfast is ready and she will eat it if he does not return by noon.”

Akiki gestured to a toothy, fat woman on the other side of the glass.

The sergeant said, “Akiki says that he has not eaten since midday yesterday, and he is starving. He says his wife does not need the food.”

Allen backed away from the dome and stared up at the great rearing bubble. It stood perhaps five hundred metres high at its apex, and was approximately a kilometre in diameter. It appeared to contain the town neatly, as if positioned with care to include every building within its circumference.

The policeman called, “Akiki thinks it’s a sign from god.”

Allen looked at him. “And you?”

The Ugandan shrugged. “Who am I to know, sir? Perhaps Akiki is right.”

Allen waved in farewell, climbed back into the car and U-turned. He rejoined the main road and continued north.

As he drove, he could not dismiss the fantastic notion — which had occurred to him while the policeman was speaking — that the arrival of the domes and his episode aboard the plane were in some way related.

Over the course of the next couple of hours he made out a dozen other domes, near and far, scattered across the face of the Ugandan bush. They were of differing sizes and shapes; some, like the ones he had seen from the air, were classically-shaped geodesics, perfect half-spheres, while others appeared lower and wider, more resembling watch-glasses.

Despite telling himself that there had to be some logical explanation for the sudden appearance of the domes, he could think of none. A one-off dome he might have put down to some elaborate and expensive art installation, though quite how it might have been achieved was beyond him. But this mass endoming of entire towns and villages, stretching from the Sahara in the north, thousands of miles south to Uganda…

Do not be afraid… the voice — no, the thought — had appeared in his head, along with the visions…

TWO HOURS LATER he arrived on the outskirts of Kallani.

It was a sizable town of some six thousand citizens, its population swelled by the influx of Red Cross and UN aid workers. It was also one of the poorest centres of habitation in an infamously poor region of the country. A collection of two story sand-coloured buildings, a mile square, comprised the town’s centre, but a wave of slum dwellings constructed from flattened biscuit tins and hessian sacking extended south for a couple of kilometres.

A line of vehicles — Allen counted thirty before giving up — blocked the approach road. He tried getting through to Sally again on his ’screen and mobile, but the lines were still dead.

He left his car at the back of the queue, locked it and strode down the road towards the silvery wall of the dome.

Citizens were lined two deep around its southern circumference, and on the inside as many people were pressed up against the concave membrane. Husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers… all separated by a few inches of clear, impermeable membrane.

The silence was what struck Allen as strange. Normally such a gathering would have been attended by noise, chatter, laughter. But the people assembled here in their hundreds were absolutely mute, staring, some mouthing in the hope of being understood while others silently pressed palms to the glass, their gestures matched by partners and friends on the other side.

Allen left the road and walked around the curve of the dome, peering over the heads of the citizens gathered there.

Again, every building in the town had been contained. There were no outlying, individual buildings, no matter how small, not under glass. It was as if the positioning of the domes had been planned… he smiled at the absurdity of the idea.

He came to a section of the wall not thronged by citizens. On the other side, a gaggle of schoolgirls, in bright blue uniforms but barefoot, giggled out at him. He had an idea, unrolled his softscreen, summoned the word processing programme and tapped in twenty-four point font: Dr Sally Walsh, Medical Centre. Can you please tell her that Geoff Allen is here. He fished a twenty shilling note from his wallet and held it up beside the ’screen.

The girls read the message in an eager scrimmage, smiling all the time, then waved at him and ran off on the errand.

They were gone for what seemed like a long time. He chastised himself for his impatience. Sally might very well be working, pressed into service despite today being, technically, the first day of her holiday. It was an aspect of her job he found exasperating if understandable: the fact that she was on constant call, liable at any minute of the day or night to be summoned to minister to the need of her patients.

Twenty minutes later the girls returned, accompanied, Allen saw with alarm, by a khaki-uniformed police officer.

What followed was a ridiculous pantomime that might, in other circumstances, have struck him as comical.

The policeman approached the glass wall, accompanied by the schoolgirls, and peered through at him. Allen raised the screen again, probably needlessly, he thought. The officer read the words, nodded and regarded Allen with an odd expression combining unease with uncertainty.

Allen gestured, a pantomime shrug as if to say, “Where is she?”

The officer turned and spoke to a lanky schoolgirl, whose face expressed exaggerated alarm.

Allen rapped on the dome, attracting their attention. “What?” he mouthed at them.

The policeman shrugged helplessly, then said something, speaking slowly so that Allen might read the words.

He followed the man’s lips, but the movements meant nothing to him.

A schoolgirl tapped the policeman on the shoulder, then dug around in her satchel. She produced an exercise book and a pencil, which the officer took with what Allen interpreted as a sheepish expression.

Tongue-tip showing in concentration, the officer wrote a line of laborious capital letters and pressed it against the wall of the dome.

Medical centre closed — Allen read — attacked yesterday by terrorists. I will go and try to find out more.

Allen nodded, a cold feeling of numbness spreading upwards from his chest.

The policeman hurried away.

Allen slumped to the ground and leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the dome, watched in silent sympathy by the schoolgirls on the other side.

CHAPTER THREE

JAMES MORWELL JNR. liked to think of himself as an altruist.

As a billionaire, his opponents and detractors liked to say, he could afford to be. But the fact was that many of his rich friends and colleagues hoarded their wealth like misers, pathologically opposed to giving away the odd few hundred thousand to good causes. Not James Morwell Jnr… He had a slush fund of five million US dollars which, every year, he dispensed with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, bestowing tens of thousands on charities and good causes around the world — tax deductible though it might be.

His father, who had risen from working-class obscurity in inner-city Toronto to become a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty, had insisted that James’s philanthropy was nothing more than a sop to his conscience. “You’re a lily-livered milksop, boy, and you don’t like the darker side of what we do…”

Which was wrong, James had tried to argue to no avail. He had no qualms about the millions he invested in the arms industry, and certainly none about the millions he took from it in profits. War was a function of what it meant to be a human being, and always had been; if people were willing to fight, then Morwell Enterprises was more than willing to furnish them with the means to do so. And anyway, these days the arms that he supplied to various regimes around the world functioned often as a deterrent against military aggressors — so his detractors had no moral legs to stand on.

Not that the arms industry was the only arrow in Morwell Enterprises’ well-stocked quiver. He owned, at the last reckoning, over a thousand companies worldwide which traded in everything from cosmetics to couture, oil to nuclear energy. He even owned three of the top ten sub-orbital airlines.

But his abiding pride — perhaps because it had been the branch of Morwell Enterprises that his father had been least interested in — were the dozen companies which gave citizens the information they needed to make judgements about the world in which they lived and worked. He owned the world’s largest internet newsfeed, TV channels in every continent, a thousand newspapers globally, and three of the biggest publishing companies in the West.

It was said, and Morwell was proud to quote the statistic, that on average nine out of ten individuals on the face of the planet digested news put out by some organ of Morwell Enterprises every day.

Little wonder that he was a personal friend of the current US president, the Republican Lucas Blanchfield, and counted several of the British royal family as intimate acquaintances.

Even his father, a famous misanthropist who guarded his privacy with the same suspicion as he hoarded his millions, had not had anything like the degree of influence that his son, over the years, had carefully acquired.

Morwell Jnr. was young, healthy, and fabulously rich, and his greatest fear in life was losing what he had.

He was still in his early thirties — an age when the spectre of mortality was yet to appear above the mental horizon; he had rude good health maintained by well-monitored physical exercise and the country’s finest doctors; and his business ventures had never been in better shape.

HE WAS IN his penthouse office when the dome appeared miraculously over New York.

He had just stepped from the gym where he kept a rubber effigy of his father, which he cathartically beat with a baseball bat every morning. In consequence he was feeling revitalised and ready for whatever the day might bring.

In thirty minutes, at eleven, he had an informal get-together with his team of advisers, specialists who kept him abreast of world events. He enjoyed these sessions, enjoyed listening to experts expounding. He had a keen analytical mind himself, and an ability to synthesise what he learned at these meetings and then recycle it, at swish Manhattan soirées, as his own original observations.

He crossed to his desk and was about to summon Lal, his personal assistant — or facilitator, as he liked to call the young Indian — when he caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Something coruscated a matter of metres above Morwell Tower, the country’s tallest building.

It looked, for all the world, like the inner curve of a dome seen from just beneath its apex. As if all New York had been placed under a mammoth bell-jar.

He noticed his softscreen flashing on his desk, and said, “Activate.”

Lal’s thin, keen face flashed onto the screen. “Sir, I think you should take a look through the window.”

“So I’m not hallucinating, Lal. What in God’s name is going on?”

“I… I don’t know, sir. It happened around thirty minutes ago. I tried to summon you.” Lal hesitated. “There have been other… ah, developments.”

“Go on.”

“I think it would be best if I were to show you, sir.”

Morwell was in a mood to humour his facilitator. “Very well, Lal. We have a little time before the think-tank cranks in to action.”

“I think they’ll have a lot to talk about,” Lal said cryptically. “I’m on my way.”

While Lal took the elevator up from the seventy-fifth floor, Morwell turned to the window and stared out. He could see, in the distance, the great convex arc of the bell-jar sweeping out over Long Island, and in the other direction over New Jersey… So what was it? Some vast and ingenious prank? A fabulous and daring work of improvisational art? Whatever it was, he reasoned, it was not real… in the sense that it not was a solid, physical thing, but more likely a projection of some kind.

“Sir.”

Lal crossed the penthouse office and stood before the desk, his carob-brown eyes ranging over its surface as if in search of something.

Lal was in his mid-twenties and a direct beneficiary of one of Morwell Enterprises’ humanitarian projects. Morwell funded schools and academies across the world, and from them drew the finest pupils to work in his many companies. Lal had been plucked from the slums of Calcutta at the age of fifteen, educated to a high standard and processed through the Morwell business empire. Five years ago James Morwell had installed Lal as a researcher in one of his newsfeed companies. In three years he’d worked himself up to become its editor, at which point Morwell swooped again and promoted Lal to the role of his PA.

Now Lal took up Morwell’s stiletto letter opener and slapped his palm with its blade.

Morwell gestured to the bell-jar. “Any ideas?”

“I have people working on it, sir. But one thing is for certain — it’s not an illusion, as I first thought. Reports are coming in from Long Island, sir. People are reporting that the dome is solid, a wall that has cut off the entire city of New York. But not only that, sir — the domes have covered all areas of population, no matter how large or small, starting in northern Canada and sweeping the globe. There are reports from every northern continent… every village, town and city is at present under a similar dome to this one. And as I speak, they are appearing over areas to the south of here.”

Morwell sat down in his swivel chair.

Not likely, then, to be a daring work of art…

“You said there have been other developments?”

“That is right, sir. Observe.” Lal placed his left hand flat on the table top and — before Morwell could stop him — raised the paper-knife and made to bring it down on his palm.

Morwell winced, then looked up and saw Lal’s oddly comic grimace of effort. The man was shaking.

“Lal? What the hell…?”

“I… am trying… sir… to stab… my… hand!”

“Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t want blood all over my…”

Lal lowered the knife. “I cannot do it, sir. That is the thing. It is impossible. Reports from all across the northern hemisphere — acts of violence are no more. Boxing matches have ended in farce, with opponents unable to trade punches. Police report aborted bank raids and gunmen unable to pull the trigger…”

Morwell’s first impulse was to laugh and accuse Lal of playing a practical joke. He glanced at the calendar, but it was April the 30th, not the first.

He stood quickly, crossed the room to the gym and slipped inside. He snatched up the baseball bat, strode across to the rubber effigy of James Morwell Snr., and raised the bat.

He had no trouble at all in beating the figure to hell and back.

He returned to the office with the bat, and Lal was staring at the carpet and pretending he hadn’t witnessed his boss’s little weakness.

“Sir?

Morwell approached Lal. “If you’re pulling some kind of joke, Lal, you’re gonna be awful sore in the morning.”

Impulsively he raised the bat, meaning to swing it with reasonable force into the Indian’s midriff.

He stood with the bat in mid-air, and tried to swing…

He was frozen, as if the impulse to act had lodged somewhere between brain and arm.

He strained in an attempt to swing the bat, but the only result was that his arm began a palsied tremor.

Sweating, and not only with the effort of the abortive exertion, Morwell slumped into his swivel chair and told Lal to get the experts in here, on the double.

CHAPTER FOUR

ANA DEVI SQUATTED on a girder beneath the footbridge at Howrah station and watched the Delhi Express slide alongside platform ten. She shared her perch with a grey-furred, red-bottomed monkey a couple of metres away, but that’s all she was sharing with the devil. She clutched a banana to her ragged t-shirt, and the monkey eyed the fruit with greedy, beady eyes.

“Chalo!” she yelled at the animal. It remained where it was, watching her impassively. It would be a mistake to start eating the banana now, even though she was hungry, because the monkey would be incensed by the aroma and try to snatch the fruit from her.

And every fool knew that the station monkeys were diseased, and that one scratch or bite could spell a lingering, painful death.

Down below the train halted and disgorged a thousand passengers. The crowd flowed along the platform towards the exit and the stairs to the other platforms, and seconds later Ana heard the thunder of footsteps just above her head.

The cacophony of the pedestrians succeeded in doing what she had failed to do: the monkey pulled back its lips to reveal a set of wicked, curved incisors, gave a howl, and bounded off along the girder-work of the bridge.

Ana laughed, peeled the banana and wolfed it down.

The footfalls above her head diminished, the train eased itself with a hiss from the platform, and comparative calm settled over Howrah station.

Ana missed her brother, Bilal.

Most of the time she was fine. She had friends among the kids who made Howrah station their home, a gang of boys and girls fiercely loyal to each other because they had no one else. It was the only family she had ever known, though she had a vague recollection of the aunt and uncle who had looked after her and her brother when their parents died in the cholera epidemic of 2014. Then Ana’s aunt had fled her uncle when Ana was six, and had been unable to fend for two hungry, growing children. Bilal, fifteen at the time, had taken Ana to Howrah station, where he had friends among the street kids who lived like monkeys in the rotting infrastructure of the old buildings. He’d lived with her there for a time, begging and stealing and making sure that she was provided for. Then, just as she was settling into life at the station, Bilal disappeared.

He’d gone to sleep with her one evening in the ancient goods truck they used as a bedroom, tucked up with her and a dozen other children like sardines in a can, and in the morning he was gone. There wasn’t even a gap where he had been, because the other kids had shuffled up to let another child lie down. He’d owned nothing other than a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and an enamelled metal cup, white with a blue rim, and much chipped. After a day of searching the station and the streets around about, she’d given up in despair.

Then Prakesh, a friend a year older than Ana, had dragged her along to platform fourteen and pointed down at the silver tracks. There, crushed flat and the enamel shattered, was a cup just like Bilal’s. She’d jumped down, despite the danger, and retrieved it. On its flattened underside was the letter B that Bilal had scratched to make the cup his very own.

But Ana had refused to believe that Bilal had gone the same way as his cup, squashed beneath the merciless wheels of a train, because there was no blood on the oil-stained gravel between the timber ties, and when she asked a friendly chai-wallah if a street kid’s body had been found that morning, he had shaken his head and told her no, only the bodies of a station monkey and a dozen rats.

So what had happened to her brother?

Ten years ago now… and Ana recalled the sense of desolation, of disbelief and loneliness, as if it had been just yesterday.

For years she had thought that one day he would return, fabulously wealthy, and whisk her away from a life of begging and stealing. And even now, at the age of sixteen, she still harboured a tiny hope that this might be so. But sometimes she gave in to despair, and wondered what kind of death her brother might have met.

She heard a sound behind her and turned quickly to throw the banana skin at the approaching monkey — but it was not a monkey, or at least not a furry monkey. Prakesh, whose protruding ears gave him the appearance of a little wise ape, swung onto the girder and hunkered down beside her.

“Station Master Jangar has just said the word, get out!” he reported, staring at her with alarmed eyes.

Ana produced a gob-full of spit and dropped it onto the tracks below. Dead shot! It hit the silver rail and sizzled in the midday sun.

She shrugged. “So, the bastard is always saying get out. That’s his job.”

“No, this time he means it. Lila and Sara and Bijay have left for the park, and Gupta and Sanjay are packing up.”

Ana smiled to herself. Gupta and Sanjay, miniature businessmen in the making, had a shoe-shine box between them, a possession that legitimised their presence on the station, if only to themselves. It made no difference to Station Master Jangar when the word came down from the politicians to clean up the station.

“So if everyone goes, leaving only me, then they won’t think I’m a street kid, will they? They’ll overlook me and I’ll just stay where I am, resting in the sun…” She stretched out her short length along the girder, placing her hands behind her head, then squinting up at Prakesh with one eye.

He looked alarmed — his default expression — at both Ana’s reckless posture on the girder twenty metres above the rails, and at her defiance of Jangar’s wishes.

“But Ana, he said that Sanjeev and his thugs are on their way! And you know what that means!”

His small hands were on her now, trying to tug her into a sitting position. Reluctantly she sat up, for mention of Sanjeev sent a cold jolt of dread down her spine.

Sanjeev was a fat thug and a bugger. He liked to corner boys and girls, smother them into submission with his great rolls of flab, then shove his greased and tiny tool up their bottoms. Those who protested too loudly he strangled and had his cohorts leave the bodies on the tracks for the trains to mangle in the night. If you bore the buggering in silence, you might live. Ana had survived a night with fat Sanjeev, thanked Kali that his cock was the size of a chilli pepper, and vowed never to be caught again.

“When are they coming?” she asked.

“Now!”

She scanned the length of the platform. “Where are they?”

Prakesh shook his head. “They started in the goods yard, moving west. I don’t know where they might be now.”

“Ah-cha, Prakesh. Let’s get out of here, let’s ‘don our masks and fly with the night!’”

Prakesh grinned. He couldn’t read, like so many of the other kids, so Ana often read to them from her comics. Her favourite strip was Superhero Salam and the Warriors of Dawn, who helped the poor and fought the rich and corrupt.

They mimed donning invisible masks, stood up and walked wobblingly along the girder to the timber signal box. From the underside of the footbridge they scrambled onto the sloping, slipping tiles of the box, crawled along the gutter, and shinned down the drainpipe.

They were on platform ten, in the very centre of the station, and from here they had to make their way to platform one and the unofficial exit in the fence.

They set off, zigzagging between commuters, earning curses from some and swipes from others. Ana just ducked and laughed and, a safe distance away, turned and pulled a disgusting face.

They raced up the steps and along the footbridge where, just a minute ago, they had concealed themselves from view. Two minutes now and they would be away from the station and across the Hoogli bridge to Maidan Park, a fine place to play cricket and watch the rich kids fly their kites, but nothing like the station for begging, stealing or finding a safe, warm place to spend the night.

They came to the end of the footbridge. Stairs descended to their right and left. They turned right, but Prakesh halted her headlong descent. “Stop! Look, Ana…”

The crowds on the steps were thinning now and Ana saw, staring up at them, the thin sly face of Kevi Nan, Sanjeev’s one-armed minion. He let out a piercing cry and darted up the stairway. Ana and Prakesh turned and ran down the flight of steps at their backs.

Ana stopped. Ascending the steps, pushing roughly through the commuters, was another of Sanjeev’s greasy henchmen.

She grabbed Prakesh and they ran back up the steps, turned left and raced along the footbridge.

She was accustomed to running. Every day someone tried to catch her, arrest her, or chase her away. She was adept at flight — but usually there were only one or two people in pursuit. Now, it seemed, Sanjeev had mobilised his entire street army of pimps, crooks and hangers-on. She heard more than one cry from behind her, and from the stairways ascending to the walkway.

Ana found Prakesh’s hand and pulled him close as they ran. “I know where to go. Follow me! They won’t dare to come after us!”

The footbridge was enclosed in a shell of grey corrugated metal, the rectangular panels riveted together. Here and there the rivets had loosened, or been forced, and the corrugated panels flapped. Directly above platform three, Ana knew, there was a gap in the metal.

She dragged Prakesh through the crowd until they reached the metal cladding and ran along until they came to the vertical gap, little more than a slit between the panels. In one swift movement she knelt and forced the panel outwards, revealing a gap that gave onto a supporting girder.

“Follow me!” she said, and slipped through.

She was out on the girder high above platform three, standing with her back to the drop and gripping a perspex window ledge to stop herself from tumbling backwards.

Prakesh squirmed after her, grimacing as his t-shirt was snagged on a loose rivet. He pulled himself through, tearing his shirt and almost falling forward.

Ana reached down and steadied him. Wide-eyed with fear, he stood with his back to the drop and edged towards her.

“This way,” she said, and stride by sideways stride made her way along the length of the footbridge.

Once before she had evaded a policeman this way, and her escape had become a legend among the kids of the station. The cop, a stick-thin youngster, had managed to squeeze through the gap in pursuit and follow her along the outside of the footbridge. He had gained on her, but he had reckoned without Ana’s daring. They had been directly above platform two, with the train just leaving the station, and Ana had waited until the very last carriage was directly underneath. Then she jumped the three metres to its cambered roof, landed with a jarring impact and lay face-down and trembling as the train flashed beneath the bridge and away from the station, carrying her to safety. She had jumped from the train at its first stop and caught a night train back to Howrah and to a hero’s welcome from her street kid family.

She hoped they would not be forced to jump onto the roof of a train this time.

She looked back along the length of the footbridge, but there was no sign of pursuit. Periodically they came to the grimy windows, and every time they did so Ana ducked and edged along beneath the window. As they approached the last one, however, she chanced a glance through. Kevi Nan was standing with his back to the window, smoking a bidi and shouting orders to his cohorts. Ana ducked.

“What?” Prakesh asked, fear in his voice.

“Kevi,” Ana spat. “But he didn’t see me.”

“Ana…” Prakesh looked fearful, clinging to the ledge like a baby monkey. “How do we get down from here?”

“Don’t worry. Follow me and do just what I do, ah-cha?”

They inched along the ledge, over platform two and approached platform one. At the end of the footbridge was a loose drainpipe, its metal streaked with slime, which descended to the platform. She had once climbed up this to reach the roof of the signal box — but the rickety section of the pipe was above the level of the roof, and now it would be the first section they’d have to negotiate on their descent.

A minute later they came to the pipe and Ana paused. She looked back at Prakesh and smiled. “We are doing well. They have not found us. Let’s rest before we climb down, ah-cha?”

Smiling bravely, Prakesh nodded.

She scanned the platform. A train was due in, and platform vendors were preparing for the rush. Chai-wallahs jostled each other for the best positions, along with kids selling trays of biscuits, cigarettes and lighters.

“We’ll wait till the train pulls in,” she told Prakesh, “and climb down then.”

Concealed by the crowds alighting from the train, they would squirm across the platform and through the gap in the fence. In Ana’s mind she was already free, and recounting their escape to their friends in Maidan Park.

Two minutes later she heard a distant, mournful hoot and the Lucknow Mail eased itself into platform one. Doors sighed open and, amid a cacophony of vendor’s cries, a thousand passengers surged from the carriage and along the platform.

“Follow me!” Ana cried.

She clung to the slippery drainpipe and slid down painfully, pausing at each joint to rest and look up. Prakesh was just above her, the corrugated soles of his feet gripping the curve of the pipe.

She set off again and looked down. The next section of the drainpipe was where it was loose. She looked up and said, “Prakesh, the pipe just below me will not take the weight of both of us. Let me go first, and when I shout up, you follow, ah-cha?”

“Ah-cha,” he said, peering down at her.

She reached the loose section and slipped down carefully, feeling the pipe wobble with her weight. She reckoned she was about three metres above the concrete platform, and would have risked jumping but for the constant to-and-fro of commuters directly below.

She felt herself tip slowly and looked up in time to see the pipe come away from the joint just above her head. For a long second she was held in the perpendicular, like a monkey balancing on a pole, and then the drainpipe dropped outwards like a felled tree. Down below, Ana caught a glimpse of startled commuters moving to avoid her. She let go of the pipe and leaped, falling painfully on the soles of her bare feet and rolling. The pipe clanged down beside her, hitting the concrete like a tubular bell but missing her by a fraction. The crowd flowed around her, muttering their displeasure, but Ana was oblivious.

She leapt to her feet, looked up and down the platform in case her sudden arrival had alerted Kevi Nan and his men, then peered up.

Prakesh was clinging tearfully to the pipe high above, his descent halted. There was now a two metre gap in the drainpipe between the boy and the next section of pipe. He peered down at her, eyes wide and wet with tears.

“Ana,” he called down pitifully, “don’t go!”

“I won’t!” she cried. “Listen to me — you’ve got to jump, ah-cha? I’ll catch you.”

“I can’t!”

“You must. There’s no other way, and soon Kevi Nan will be here! Jump and I will catch you.”

Peering down in fear, he nodded.

“I’ll catch you, Prakesh. After three. One… two… three!”

He launched himself, all flailing arms and legs, and Ana reached out and closed her eyes. He hit her and they rolled across the platform, Ana clinging to him despite the pain. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, and her elbow throbbed when it struck the ground.

“Prakesh?”

“I’m fine, Ana! You caught me!”

She stood and pulled him to his feet — then yelped in fright as a hand gripped the back of her neck and squeezed.

She looked up, fearfully, into the fat face of Station Master Jangar, with his vast grey moustache and turban. The Sikh was jabbering to someone at his side, and she recognised the thin, rat-like squeak of Kevi Nan. She attempted to peer around and up, her movement restricted by Jangar’s grip, and managed to see a hand slip a fifty rupee note into the Station Master’s breast pocket.

Then Kevi Nan gripped her upper arm and half dragged her along the platform. She looked back at Jangar and Prakesh. Her friend had his fist crammed into his mouth, his eyes wide and tearful.

Ana managed a smile and a quick wave before Prakesh was lost to sight in the surging crowd.

She struggled, but Kevi Nan just increased the force of his pincer grip and Ana wept in pain. She hopped along as Kevi raced through the crowd towards the station’s exit, holding her breath against his stench. Kevi Nan had only one hand, which he used for eating, and consequently his backside went unwashed. He tried to disguise the smell with rosewater, but for some reason this just made it worse.

He hauled her from the station and along a busy street, then down a quiet alleyway. From time to time when his crab-like grip seemed to slacken, Ana put in a token struggle — but Kevi Nan’s one hand seemed stronger than two and he just sneered at her feeble attempts to get away.

At one point as they hurried down the alley, something flashed high overhead, and both Kevi Nan and Ana looked up. She saw a bright glint of light, like sunlight glancing off a pane of glass, but nothing else.

“Let me go!”

“And deprive Sanjeev his pleasure, Ana Devi?”

She was shocked that he knew her name, as if this, along with his grip, was another violation. “Sanjeev-ji has been watching you, Ana, watching you and waiting.”

What was he talking about, she wondered. Sanjeev was so fat that he hadn’t left his room for years, so how could he have been watching her?

“I have rupees,” she said. “Twenty rupees. I’ll give them to you if you let me go!”

Over the years she had managed to save a rupee here and there, and had amassed the grand total of twenty which she had concealed behind a loose stone in the outer wall of the station’s Brahmin restaurant.

Kevi Nan laughed. “Twenty rupees? Sanjeev will pay me ten times that for your yoni, Ana!”

Something froze within her. Her yoni… Sanjeev was going to take her properly, this time, draw blood and deprive her of her virginity. She stared ahead, unseeingly, frozen at the thought.

Kevi Nan dragged her down a rat-infested alleyway, past slums where infants stared out with huge, kohl-black eyes. Some of the kids were older, perhaps her own age, and she hated the quick look of pity in their eyes as she passed.

They came to a high wall and a green-painted gate. Kevi Nan called out, and the gate opened just enough to allow them to squeeze through. He dragged her along a garden path overhung with a riot of unkempt trees and bushes, towards a familiar house painted as pink as a chunk of barfi. Ana felt her stomach turn as she recalled her first time here, years ago, and what Sanjeev had done to her.

They passed into the house, across a cool tiled hallway, towards a green double door. Kevi Nan called out, “I have the girl, Sanjeev-ji!” He eased open the door with his right foot and thrust her into the room.

The door closed quickly behind her. Ana stopped her headlong rush, regained her balance, and stood blinking in a room illuminated by a thousand flickering candles.

The heat was overpowering, along with the cloying scent of incense and dhoop.

When her vision adjusted to the glittery twilight, she gasped as she made out the figure ensconced in the corner of the room.

Sanjeev Varnaputtram was fatter than any fat man she had ever seen, and far fatter than when Ana had last seen him. He sat on a bed in the glow of the candles, naked but for a towel draped across his lap. The rolls of fat that made up his chest and belly were slick with either sweat or massage oil. His arms and legs stuck out at odd angles, forced apart by the amount of fat that encircled his upper arms and thighs.

His head, perfectly circular and absolutely bald, was a tiny thing perched on the mountain of his shoulders.

Sanjeev’s appetite was prodigious. Rumour was that he consumed six take-away curries from Bhatnagar’s — an expensive restaurant Ana had only ever dreamed of entering — every day. On the rickety table beside him a pile of a dozen ghee-coated silver trays suggested that the rumour might be true.

Now he was smiling, and a gold tooth — the tooth she recalled with horror from all those years ago, when he had tried to kiss her — caught the candle-light and winked.

She backed up against the door, pushing against it. The wood rattled but did not give, and she knew that Kevi Nan had bolted the door from the outside, just like last time.

“My, my,” Sanjeev purred. “How you have grown. How, Ana Devi, you have blossomed from the vicious little she-cat you were, into a beautiful woman… Yes, indeed you are — a woman. Now…” he patted his lap, “come and sit down, Ana.”

“No!”

He chuckled, as if delighted at her spirit. “In that respect you have changed little, Ana Devi. Still you are as feisty as you were… what, five, six years ago? You fought, then, if you recall, scratched like a lion cub. It made for even more enjoyment.”

He gestured to the wall. “I have been watching you, Ana, watching you grow, mature, become the beautiful young woman you are now.”

She stared at the wall beside the bed, and saw what he was talking about. Stuck to the wall was a photograph of her, taken very recently. She wanted suddenly to sob. It was as if Sanjeev had stolen a part of her. She wanted to take the photograph from him; that it belonged to Sanjeev seemed wrong.

“I have been waiting, Ana, biding my time. When I received the photograph…” He gestured with a tiny hand. “I knew that the time was right.”

The actual photo was not the only violation, she knew; someone had stalked her, sneaked up on her and taken the picture without her knowledge. What should have been her privacy had been despoiled. She felt sick. She was a street kid, but surely this did not mean that her life was not her own, a thing to be shared, abused, without her consent…?

“But if I may say, Ana, a beautiful woman such as yourself should no longer be wearing the apparel of a child. Look at that t-shirt! Filthy, and ragged, and doing little justice to the delights it conceals. Your breasts are those of a goddess, Ana Devi, and yet you choose to cloak them in rags! And your shorts…” He shook his head and tutted. “Are you aware of how wonderful you would look in new clothes, a sari, a shalwar kameez?” He pointed across the room to a table bearing a pile of folded, silken clothing.

“They are yours, Ana Devi. Please, take off those rags.”

She stared at him and almost sobbed, “No!”

He chuckled, and the sound sickened her; it was the sound of privilege, and power, the sound of someone who knew full well that his desires would be satisfied.

He reached down, took hold of the corner of the towel which covered his midriff, and cast it aside.

She could only stare at his manhood.

His balls were huge, grotesque things, surely as big as coconuts, and by comparison his cock was tiny, really and truly like a small chilli pepper, apart from the domed, shiny thing at the end. It stood to attention above the coconuts, and Ana would have laughed had she not felt so terrified.

He reached out to a small bedside table, picked up a golden genie-lamp, and tipped it.

A thread of golden oil drizzled out, saturating his manhood.

“Ana,” he said, “take off your clothes and come to me.” And his voice was no longer tender, cajoling, but hard and forbidding.

He reached down and played with his oiled cock, coaxing it further upright. Its dome strained, empurpled.

“I said, come to me!”

The words to deny him would not form in her mouth, so she just shook her head and darted a glance around the room, searching for something she might use as a weapon against him.

She saw nothing, and anyway knew that resistance was useless: his leering cohorts were outside the room, very likely now laughing at what their boss was about to do to her.

She backed up against the wall, shaking her head.

“Very well, if you will not come to me…”

He called out, and instantly the door burst open, startling her. One-armed Kevi Nan and a rat-faced man strode into the room, staring from the naked Sanjeev to the cowering Ana.

“Shall we rip off her clothes?” Kevi asked, eyeing her.

“Nai!” Sanjeev said. “Here.”

They hurried over to him, took his arms and hauled him to his feet.

Ana glanced through the door. Two other men stood there, big Sikhs with their arms crossed on their broad chests, barring her escape.

“Chalo!” Sanjeev shouted, shooing his aides from the room. They hurried out, closing and locking the door behind them.

Sanjeev faced her. His enormous gut had slipped. His erection peeked out from the fatty overhang, its oiled and swollen end shining in the candlelight.

He grabbed a stick from where it leaned against the wall and waddled towards her.

She had assumed the stick was a walking stick, but as he advanced he raised it at her and said, “Now, undress quickly! Quickly!”

She pressed herself against the wall, her arms tight across her breasts. He advanced, his flesh-rolls wobbling, his absurd cock bobbing.

He paused before her. His sudden closeness filled her with dread. If he were to reach out now he would be able to touch her. She made a feeble whimpering sound and was ashamed of her fear.

His face was drenched in sweat and he was shaking with lust.

He raised the stick again and said, “We can do this one of two ways, Ana Devi. You can come willingly to my bed, or I can beat you senseless. Either way, the end result will be the same. You will be mine, whether you like it or not.”

She shook her head, mute and terrified.

“But if you come willingly,” he said, “I will be gentle, and afterwards… the new, fine clothes will be yours, along with a hundred rupees. A hundred, Ana, think of all the things you could buy with a hundred rupees.”

She began weeping then, despite her best efforts not to.

“Never,” she cried, “never!”

“So you cannot be bought,” he laughed, “with money, but I wonder…”

He towered above her, a giant mound of flesh. His tiny, greedy eyes gleamed. “But I wonder if you would be more amenable if I were to tell you about Bilal?”

She stared up at him. She had doubted she could be shocked any more, or frightened further. But the way Sanjeev said her brother’s name filled her with fear.

“Bilal?” she said. “What about him?”

“You miss him, Ana. Oh, I know how much you miss him. My little spies… Rajeev, Kallif…” He smiled. “They tell me all about your dreams of the day when Bilal will return…”

She had wondered about Rajeev and Kallif, where they disappeared to for days on end, suddenly reappearing with rupees and bags of barfi.

“What do you know about Bilal?” she asked.

His eyes twinkled. “Take off your clothes, Ana, and let me see the perfection of your little body.”

“Tell me what you know about Bilal!” she demanded. “Where is he? Is he alive?”

“Oh, he is very much alive, Ana, alive and prospering.”

She felt hope beyond hope, even if it was being granted her from the mouth of a monster.

“How do you know this?”

“I have my spies, Ana, my informants.”

“Where is my brother?” she demanded.

“He is alive and well, but he will have forgotten his little sister, long ago.”

“No! No, Bilal would never forget me. Never…”

Sanjeev laughed. “Then why haven’t your dreams come true, Ana? Why hasn’t he returned to rescue you from a life of thieving and beggary?”

She shook her head, crying openly now, past all shame. “I don’t know,” she said in a tiny voice. “Please, tell me…”

“Bilal left Kolkata,” he said, amazing her. “He was plucked off the streets by the representatives of an agency which educates street kids like yourself. Eventually, according to my sources, he left India and was taken to America.”

But why didn’t he come for me…? she wanted to ask.

“Now, Ana,” Sanjeev wheedled. “Please take off your filthy t-shirt and shorts.”

She pressed herself against the wall and shook her head.

“Would you prefer the stick, Ana? Would you like me to take you the hard way?”

She wanted to lash out at him, push his fat bulk so that he fell over and bashed his head on the marble floor, but she was paralysed with fear.

Sanjeev raised the stick and Ana winced and closed her eyes.

A second passed, then two, three…

An agonising eternity seemed to elapse.

She peeped out between her fingers, which she had raised to protect her face.

Sanjeev appeared to be frozen, the stick high above his head. His eyes bulged and his fat arm shook with the effort of attempting to bring the stick down. She wondered if he were having a heart attack.

To her left was a shuttered window. She summoned all her courage and made a decision. She ducked beneath Sanjeev’s raised arm, ran to the window and pulled it open, knowing that it would be barred. Her heart leapt when she saw not bars but a flimsy fly-screen. She reached out to steady herself — and her hand touched something soft on the table. The pile of expensive clothing…

As Sanjeev gasped behind her, wheezing as he turned and attempted yet again to hit her with his stick, she kicked out at the fly-screen and, as it shuddered and fell out from the window frame, she grabbed the clothing and leapt through the open window.

She was in the riotous garden surrounding the house. She hesitated, looking right and left. Sanjeev’s strangled cry from inside the house galvanised her into action. She gained her bearings and stumbled to her left, through fronds and ferns towards what she hoped was the garden gate. Seconds later she came to the concrete path. To her left the front door of the house was still shut. She turned right and sprinted to the gate, reached it and hauled on the circular, wrought iron handle. She heard the door open behind her and an explosion of outraged cries.

The heavy gate opened slowly and Ana dived through, turned right down the alley and ran like the wind.

A minute later she came to the main road and the surging crowd, and with elation swelling in her chest she threw herself into the flow of humanity and allowed herself to be carried away to safety.

TWILIGHT CAME DOWN swiftly across the city and Ana made her way to Maidan Park.

She would lie low for a few days, allow perhaps a week or so to elapse before she returned to the station. Sanjeev would have his men on the lookout for her, eager to exact his revenge. To her knowledge no one taken into Sanjeev’s lair had emerged without giving him what he wanted, and many a child had met their deaths by denying him.

Perhaps, she thought, she should leave the city altogether?

And what he had told her about Bilal? Had her brother really, truly left the city, been educated and taken to America? But why would Sanjeev have lied about such things? Why would he have told her that he had been educated and taken to America — unless it were true?

Perhaps, she thought, something had stopped Bilal from coming back for her. Perhaps, one day, soon, he would do just that.

She came upon a crowd of excited rich people pointing into the sky, where the light of the emerging stars seemed dulled, and the sun, on the horizon, was bloated to fully twice its size.

She thought of Prakesh, and hoped that Station Master Jangar had let him off with a warning and a minor beating, and thrown him from the station. She searched the park, but found neither Prakesh nor any of her friends.

She slipped into the shrubbery where a few months ago she had concealed a bedroll she had found in a skip. Now she curled up on it and, using the silken clothing she had stolen from Sanjeev’s room as a pillow, settled down to sleep.

She was listening to the sound of the city, the roar of distant traffic, the tragic hoots of the trains, when suddenly all noise seemed to stop — and a sudden, eerie silence reigned. Above her, the branches of a tree, formerly moving back and forth against the moon, were still.

Then she was asleep, or assumed she was asleep, though it had come upon her suddenly, and she was visited by a strange dream — but not the usual one of vicious policemen and angry station masters.

She was lying on her back on… No, not on anything, but floating in a grey mist. She felt naked, and she thought she should be frightened, but a calming voice in her head told her not to be afraid. The odd thing was, the voice was not her own.

She tried to struggle, but she was paralysed. All she could move was her eyes; all she could see was the grey mist… and something in the distance, the head and shoulders of a man or woman, watching her in silence.

Then she felt something dancing on her chest, and swivelled her eyes to look down her body. What she saw sent a jolt of alarm through her. There was a big spider down there, on her belly and climbing slowly towards her head, a spider with long legs as silver as the cutlery in the Howrah station restaurant.

She wanted to scream, but could not make the sound.

The spider approached her, its limbs tickling her chest. Then it was crawling over her chin, her face. It paused, pulsing slowly up and down, above her forehead.

She felt something touch the skin of her brow, as if the spider were applying a tikka mark to the centre of her forehead. She felt pressure then, and wondered if the spider was pushing something into her head.

She closed her eyes, and the voice in her head told her to be calm.

Seconds later she felt the spider skitter back down the length of her body. She tried to sit up but could not.

She awoke suddenly, and then did sit up.

She was in the bushes in the park, on the bedroll with the new clothes she had snatched from Sanjeev’s room. She remembered what had happened there, how she had escaped.

Her thoughts were interrupted by something in the bushes to her right.

She turned, gasping. She made out a golden glow, and a shape that was in some way familiar.

A figure was seated in the bushes perhaps three metres from her, and she recognised its head and shoulders from her dream.

The figure was golden, and featureless, and its interior swam and pulsed with light.

It sat cross-legged, watching her calmly.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The figure — man or woman, she could not tell — stared at her even though its face did not possess eyes, and said, even though it did not have a mouth, “Do not be afraid, Ana Devi.”

“How do you know my name?” She felt strangely calm. “What do you want?”

She had the impression that the golden figure was smiling.

“We want you,” it said.

CHAPTER FIVE

FOLLOWING THE KIDNAPPING, Sally spent the night at Mama Oola’s Guest House in the centre of town, a ramshackle Victorian building comprising bedrooms on two levels around a courtyard overgrown with bougainvillea and frangipani. Sally considered Mama’s a bolt-hole, an oasis of tranquillity in a noisy town and, on a metaphorical level, from the stress of her job. She often booked into the guest house when she had a couple of days free, to allow Mama Oola to mother her and to feed her up on the Indian curries that were her speciality.

She slept late, dreaming of her ordeal of the day before. The scar-faced Ali haunted her sleep. Once she awoke screaming, convinced that the man had somehow entered the room.

Late morning sunlight slipped in through the slats of the louvered window, waking her to the realisation that she was no longer imprisoned by the terrorists. She crossed from her bed and flung open the window, letting in a blast of sunlight and the scent of frangipani. Overhead, the sun created a slick highlight on the meniscus of the dome, reminding her of a more enigmatic imprisonment.

She considered what had happened in the tiny hut, and the arbitrary nature of the event that had saved her and Ben. The thought sickened her.

She washed in the refreshingly cold water at the stained sink, dressed and hurried downstairs. She would go to the medical centre, see if she could be of any help there until Geoff arrived.

Geoff… She felt at once a wave of guilt at having forgotten him in the melee of recent events, and then a buoyant joy at the thought that soon they would be together. She dug her mobile from her shoulder bag and tried to get through to him.

The line was dead, not even a dial tone.

He was due to arrive at some point this morning. After checking in at the medical centre, she would go to the wall of the dome near the road south and try to find Geoff there when he arrived.

Mama Oola bustled from the kitchen and hurried across the courtyard towards her. She was a gargantuan woman resplendent in colourful traditional costume and gold bangles. She was in her sixties, but her big, round face was as unlined as a babe’s.

“Sally! Sally!”

They hugged, and Mama’s breasts wobbled against Sally like packets of mozzarella the size of footballs.

“I heard about the attack! I wept when I thought of you, then this morning Jenny told me you were safe and sleeping upstairs. You don’t know how happy I was!”

She gripped Sally’s hands, beaming at her.

“Strange things are happening, Sally. The dome. And…” She leaned close, drenching Sally in her rosewater and patchouli scent. “And this morning, Papa couldn’t beat me…”

“Couldn’t…?” Sally echoed. It was a relationship that Sally found incomprehensible. Mama Oola and Papa had been married for almost forty years, and it seemed to Sally that their conjugal day did not start well if Papa failed to attack her and Mama Oola didn’t retaliate, giving as good as she got, with stentorian curses thrown in for good measure.

“Oh,” Mama went on, “he was angry, he said his porridge was cold, so he came for me…” She stared at Sally, wide-eyed. “And he just stood there, mouth open, shaking uncontrollably.” She laughed and slapped her ample thigh, then leaned towards Sally confidentially. “It was just like when Papa wants jiggy-tumble — he had the urge, but couldn’t do it!” Mama shook her head, ear-rings the size of ladles dancing. “And the oddest thing was, Sally, I wanted to go for Papa, too — give him a good slapping round that silly toothless face of his! But do you know something, for all I wanted to slap him, I couldn’t.”

Across the courtyard, Jenny the house-girl appeared in the door to the kitchen and called across to Mama. She squeezed Sally’s hand and shuffled away. “Come for coffee later, you hear? We have a lot to talk about!”

Sally promised she would and slipped through the flimsy metal gate that led from the courtyard.

As she made her way through the curiously deserted streets, she thought of what Mama had just told her, and considered Dr Krasnic and his abortive suicide attempts. And yesterday, the terrorists, unable to behead Ben, or pull the triggers of their weapons…

A cordon of soldiers and police stood before the fire-blackened gate of the medical centre. Dr Krasnic stood outside, in conversation with a tall Swiss woman Sally recognised as a Red Cross liaison officer.

When he saw Sally approach he excused himself and crossed to her.

“Sally, what do you think you’re doing here?”

“I thought I’d see if I were needed.”

“You booked five days leave, didn’t you, and after what happened yesterday… Look, take some time off. You deserve it. We’ve enough staff to cover you, and anyway there’s a relief team coming up from Kampala in the morning. I booked them after the raid, and before …” He gestured into the sky, at the glistening dome overhead.

“A lot of good a relief team will be if they can’t get in,” she commented.

He shrugged. “Like I said, we can cover you. If we need help, I’ll shout… I take it you’re at Mama’s?” He hesitated, then brought himself to look her in the eye. “Sally, what happened yesterday, when you found me…”

She interrupted. “That’s between you, me and Ben,” she said.

He shook his head as if in wonder. “I’d had a tough shift. After Kola’s death, and Mary taking it so badly. And then the raid, the soldiers… and Josef, what he did…”

“What happened to him?”

“He fled, but didn’t get far, of course. A unit of troops cornered him. They were seething with anger and wanting revenge. Only…”

“Let me guess. They couldn’t shoot him dead, right?”

“Couldn’t so much as lift a hand, though they tried, apparently. Lined up to shoot the traitor. They ended up escorting him to the police cells like a pickpocket.” He looked at her. “What the hell is going on, Sally? I’ve tried to reach HQ in Kampala, friends in Europe. Nothing. We’re completely cut off.”

She shook her head. “All the violence, the soldiers shot dead. And then…”

He said, “Ben thinks it’s a judgement from God.”

She snorted. “And you know my reaction to that.”

He looked up at the underside of the dome. “I don’t know. It makes you wonder, Sally.”

She made to leave. “If you’re absolutely sure you don’t need me…”

He shooed her away. “Go, go! Enjoy Mama’s curries and have a beer on me.”

She was walking down the street away from the medical centre when she looked up suddenly, alerted by what might have been a flash high above. She discerned a subtle shift in the quality of the light; the sunlight seemed suddenly brighter. She shielded her eyes and realised that the dome seemed no longer to be covering the town.

Heart thumping, she hurried to the main road heading south, along with what appeared to be the town’s entire population. There was a carnival atmosphere in the air, and the reason was obvious: half a kilometre ahead, where yesterday the sheer crystal wall of the dome had blocked the road, the barrier was no more.

The two crowds, separated until seconds ago, now merged and mingled, embracing like survivors of some terrible natural catastrophe.

Someone called her name. “Dr Walsh!”

Sergeant Mesenevi was coming towards her, fighting his way through the tide of humanity. He gripped her hand. “Dr Walsh! Good news! Mr Allen is here. He thinks you are dead!”

“What?”

“I told him about the attack on the medical centre. Of course we didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

“Just take me to Geoff, okay?” she demanded, emotion making her voice unsteady. She just wanted to hold him.

“Sally!”

And there he was, being dragged along by a posse of grinning barefoot schoolgirls, waving at her above the heads of the milling crowd.

She struggled through the press towards him and they collided and held on. She said his name over and over, inhaling the wonderful scent of his sweat, listening to his almost incoherent litany. “…told me about the attack… didn’t know what the hell had happened to you… feared the worst. Christ, it’s good to hold you!”

She gripped his hand and, watched by the beaming schoolgirls and the police sergeant, she dragged him back to the centre of town and Mama Oola’s.

BY UNSPOKEN CONSENT they made love on the narrow, squeaking bed in the shadowy room, both of them weeping and murmuring almost incoherently. It was a more desperate and tender coming together than Sally had ever experienced before — the usual animal need of sexual desire and something more, some affirmation of life after so much death.

She switched on the ceiling fan and the downdraft laved their naked bodies, cooling.

She had not meant to tell Geoff everything that had happened to her the day before; had intended to downplay the kidnapping and her subsequent escape. But in his company, when they had shared so much, it seemed pointless to hold back on the experience.

“The attack…?” he began.

“They took me and Ben,” she murmured. She pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m okay now. Don’t worry. They… they didn’t hurt me. They took us to a hut in the bush kilometres north of here.”

Geoff’s expression was set in stone.

“And when we got there…” She took a deep breath, her voice wavery. “Three things. A camera on a tripod, a chopping block, a sword…”

She wept, the tears coming in a heaving wave all of a sudden, unbidden, and she realised that she’d held in all the emotion, all the terror, until now, until she was safe with Geoff and could let it all out in a great cathartic damburst of retrospective fear.

He held her, kissing her sweat-damp hair, as she sobbed against him.

She took a deep shuddering breath, smiled up at him through her tears. “Oh, I was so frightened, Geoff. So disbelieving… that, that someone would do this to us. For ideological reasons. And film it, Geoff. I don’t know where this is rational, but that’s what horrified me more than anything else. Not the evil of their intent to kill us, but the callousness of their desire to film our deaths.”

He kissed her eyes, her mouth. “How the hell did you get away?”

She thought about it, ordering the events. The incidents had an air of unreality, like a film watched a long time ago and imperfectly recalled. All she remembered, with crystal clarity, was how she had felt at the time.

Slowly, hesitantly, she told Geoff about her kidnappers’ inability to kill her and Ben.

He said, “You were so lucky, Sally.”

She shook her head. “No. No, Geoff. It… I know this sounds ridiculous… but it wasn’t luck. Something was stopping the Somali from pulling the trigger.”

Geoff said, “His conscience.”

“No,” she said, “because when I got back to the compound, I found Dr Krasnic…”

And, despite her promise to Krasnic that morning that his secret was safe with her, she told Geoff about the doctor’s multiple suicide attempts. “And just this morning… Mama Oola told me that Papa had tried to beat her again, only he couldn’t, and when she tried to hit him… she said she was unable to do it.”

He reached from the bed, found his holdall and pulled out his softscreen. She watched him attempt to access the net, to no avail. “Still dead.”

She stroked his face with her fingertips.

“When I was on the plane,” he began, his eyes narrowing with recollection.

“Yes?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” He laughed. “I just recall thinking how much I love you.”

Something rose in her chest, sadness and joy combined. “Whatever the hell happens, Geoff, whatever happens, we have each other.”

They came together again and, gently this time, made love once more.

THEY TOOK A cold shower together in the communal bathroom at the end of the landing, then descended to the dappled courtyard where Mama Oola served them piled plates of vegetable pilau and ice cold lager. She winked at Sally when she presented the plates with a flourish, as if to say that after such lovemaking a hearty meal was necessary.

Geoff was quiet during the meal, which was unlike him. She had never met a more talkative person; he was usually forever telling her, during their snatched time together, about everything he had done since he’d last seen her. She sensed that his taciturnity now was due to more than just a lack of sleep.

She said, “You okay?”

He forked his pilau, looked up. “I was just thinking, we don’t have to go to the reserve, if you’re not up to it after…”

She reached out and gripped his hand. “I want to get away from here. Anyway,” she smiled, “you have work to do.”

He nodded, and returned to his food.

“Geoff,” she said a little later, “you began to tell me something earlier, about what happened on the plane.”

He stared at her, smiling like a schoolboy caught out. “I didn’t think you’d pick up on it.”

“I can read you like a book,” she said. “What happened?”

He had an expressive face, a way of pantomiming what he was thinking with exaggerated facial gestures. He frowned heavily. “I don’t know. It seemed so real at the time, but now it seems like a hallucination.”

She listened as he told her a fantastic story of reality coming to a halt, and how he had found himself floating in a grey void and being visited by a silver spider…

He stared down at his meal. “The thing was, Sally, it all seemed so damned real. And then what happened with the domes, and…” He looked up. “It occurred to me that it might in some way be connected.”

She pursed her lips, considering. “I’d say… probably not. You’ve been working hard, and it was a late flight, and you hadn’t slept.” She shrugged. “And,” she smiled, “you did once tell me that you’re afraid of spiders.”

He laughed. “Was. When I was a child.”

She tilted her head and looked at him, dubious. “Thought you said tarantulas still gave you the heebie-jeebies?”

He smiled. “Touché,” he said. “I remember when I was in Singapore –”

Jenny appeared in the doorway to the lounge, clutching the frame with both arms and hanging forward. “Sally! Come and watch! Mama! Mama! Come now!”

Mama Oola squeezed from the kitchen. “What now girl?”

Jenny was goggle-eyed. “Amazing! Come and see!”

She vanished inside, and Sally exchanged a look with Geoff and rose from the table. Geoff took his bottle of beer. Sally found his hand as they entered the shadowy lounge.

It was a long, low room, hung with drapes and furnished with multiple ancient sofas, opening onto a balcony at the far end. In the corner of the room, incongruous amid such genteel shabbiness, a vast flatscreen TV pulsed out garish images.

Sally sank into a deep sofa, Geoff beside her. Mama Oola eased herself into her own sofa, almost filling it. Jenny squatted before the TV, staring up at it with a houseboy and the girl who cleaned the rooms.

The TV was tuned to BBC World and a desk-bound reporter was saying, “…hope to be bringing you pictures and reports just as soon as they’re available. To repeat, reports are coming in from around the world confirming what our reporter in London was just saying… In Laos, where the war with Thailand is in its third year, people are speaking of mass desertions from the armies on both sides of the conflict. In Botswana, our reporter on the ground has an eye-witness account of front-line troops being unable to operate their weapons… Now, this tallies with domestic news coming in from London and elsewhere.”

Sally gripped Geoff’s hand, tightened.

The reporter said, “One moment…” He touched his ear-piece, nodded and went on, “I’m told we can now join Rob Hudson in Alice Springs, Australia, where footage of a… vessel has just come through.”

Sally sat forward, battling to free herself from the depths of the sofa. The scene switched to a reporter standing in the desert, staring up in wonder at the sky. The camera swung, showing a dizzy flash of bright blue sky and then, filling the entirety of the screen, a vast convex expanse of silver-blue metal, like a close-up shot of a mystery object the identity of which the audience had to guess.

The shot pulled out, steadied, and established itself.

On the sofa, Mama Oola rocked back and forth, clasping be-ringed hands to her ample bosom, her tearful eyes wide.

Beside Sally, Geoff swore under his breath.

An airborne vessel was moving slowly through the cloudless Australian sky. It was the only thing in the frame, so that its true dimensions were impossible to determine. Bull-nosed, splayed like a manta ray but much thicker, and silver-blue, it resembled some futuristic starship beloved of science fiction book covers.

Geoff whispered, “Foss…”

“What?” Sally asked, glancing at him.

“A cover artist, Chris Foss. It’s just like one of his illustrations.”

She said, half to herself, “But this is real, Geoff.”

Then, sliding into view beneath the vessel, Sally made out the unmistakable shape of Ayers Rock — and the airborne vessel, as it moved over the sacred aboriginal landmark, was fully ten times the size.

“I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

Mama Oola was clapping her hands in delight, or in fright.

An awed voiceover was saying, “It appeared in the skies of Southern Australia just twenty minutes ago, heading north-west at approximately fifty miles an hour. It moved in absolute and eerie silence. I can confirm that jets from the Australia Air Force were scrambled to intercept, but that for some reason they were unable to leave the ground.”

“It’s beautiful,” Sally said, “truly beautiful…”

She had never, she thought, seen anything quite as vast or magnificent in her life.

“And terrifying,” Geoff said.

She looked at him.

He said, “Think about it, Sally. What happened yesterday. The domes, our inability to…”

She shook her head, slowly.

“It makes sense. What would an invading army do, if they had the capability? Somehow inhibit our ability to… to fight back.”

She gestured at the slow, beautiful vessel. “This is a… an invasion?”

Geoff was silent, staring at the screen.

The scene shifted, returned to the studio. “Sorry to cut Rob off there… but we’re getting reports, several reports from around the world. Okay, let’s go over to Amelia Thirkell in Paris…”

“Thank you, Dan.” A trim blonde woman in a stylish raincoat was standing before the Eiffel Tower, clutching a microphone to her chest and staring wide-eyed into the sky. “Just twenty minutes ago, twelve-thirty-one European time, a vessel identical to the ones that have been reported appearing in Australia, China, Argentina and elsewhere, manifested itself in the sky just north of Paris. Eye-witnesses, I’m told, say that it simply appeared as if from thin air. And then moved south slowly, as you see now…” The camera swung, and it was as if they were watching a re-run of the Australian ship’s progress, only this time the backdrop was grey with rainclouds.

The beautiful, colossal ship was identical in every respect.

Jenny and the houseboy were shrieking with delight before the TV.

“I can confirm that, as in Australia, the air force scrambled jets to intercept, but that those jets could not, I repeat, could not, take off.”

The shot lingered on the slowly moving vessel, occasionally swooping in for close-ups as if attempting to establish fine detail, decals or some other feature on the silver-blue tegument of the craft.

The superstructure, however, appeared featureless, as seamless as the surface of an egg.

It hovered over the Eiffel Tower, reducing the landmark to the size of a needle.

“…the strange thing is,” Amelia Thirkell was reporting, “that the crowds massed here and on the banks of the Seine don’t seem in the least phased by… by what we have here. And I can report myself that there is no sense of… of threat emanating from the ship.”

“Angela,” the anchorman back in London said, “sorry to have to interrupt there. We’ll be back, but we have interesting developments here in London. With me in the studio are the physicists Dr Ed Danbridge and Dr James Chamberlain. Gentlemen, many thanks for coming here at such short notice. Now, you’ve both been doing calculations based on the vessels’ trajectories…”

“That’s right, Rob,” Chamberlain said. “To remind viewers, the starships –”

The anchorman interrupted. “Now that’s the first time we’ve used the s-word, but you think…?”

“The assumption is, Rob, that only an extraterrestrial intelligence could be behind the various odd phenomena reported over the past twenty-four hours. Anyway, the vessels appeared in the skies of Earth at precisely the same time all around the world, 11.31 Greenwich mean time. Interestingly, each ship is heading on a trajectory that we’ve plotted, Jim and myself, which will meet at some time in the near future, at a point a hundred kilometres north-west of the Malian city of Timbuktu in the Saharan Desert.”

“Can anything be made of that, at this early stage?” the anchorman asked.

“I think it’s too early to say yet. All we can do is watch and wait…”

“And speaking of watching, we can switch to David Runciman in Tanzania with reports of another starship…”

“Thanks, Rob. David Runciman here, in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, where as your studio guests reported, at 11.31 Greenwich mean time a vessel appeared in the sky above the park, heading slowly north-west…”

Geoff unrolled his softscreen from his arm, spread it on his lap and tapped the control bar.

Sally tore her gaze from the TV screen. “Geoff?”

“Just checking something…”

He brought up a map of Africa on the softscreen, zoomed in on Namibia, pushed the map north-west through Tanzania and Uganda, until arriving at the city of Timbuktu.

He said, “The ships are pretty amazing even on TV, Sally. Imagine seeing them in the flesh.”

Her heart did a quick somersault. “You mean…?”

“If we get to the park before six,” he said, “we’ll be able to witness the ship’s fly-by.”

“Even if it is an invading ship?”

He squeezed her hand. “I can’t miss an opportunity like this, Sal.”

CHAPTER SIX

ALLEN SLAPPED HIS softscreen to the dashboard and kept half an eye on events unfolding around the world.

They left Kallani and headed west, in a couple of hours leaving the drought-stricken area of Karamajo far behind them. The terrain changed, became rolling and relatively green — not as sodden and fecund as the English countryside he’d left, but nothing like the dead, parched land of Karamoja.

“…and the outbreak of non-violence continues,” said the London-based BBC anchorman. “LA is reporting its first day in living memory when there have been no reports of murders or muggings. The same is true around the world. Some governments have welcomed the phenomenon, while others have counselled caution. Meanwhile, world religions…”

He glanced across at Sally. She had drawn her hair back and tied it in a ponytail. She turned her head on the head-rest and smiled at him.

“Can you tell me, Geoff, why I don’t feel… threatened?”

He’d been thinking the very same thing. Since his earlier suggestion that the ‘outbreak of non-violence,’ as the BBC had it, might be a prelude to alien invasion, he’d had time to reconsider.

“What happened to me aboard the plane,” he said. “I know I wasn’t hallucinating. It happened. It was real. And I know it was linked…” He gestured to the softscreen. “There was something I forgot to tell you earlier — about the experience. While I was flat out in the grey fog… before and after the silver spider did whatever it did to me… I saw a figure, a shape. Just the head and shoulders of someone. And I felt… I don’t really know how to explain it… I felt reassurance in my head, and the words, Do not be afraid.” He shook his head. “And I wasn’t. I was suffused by peace.”

“I thought you said, earlier, that the non-violence suggested invasion?”

“I know I did. And it does. Rationally, what has happened — our inability to fight, the arrival of the ships… it all points to an invasion. And yet the overwhelming sensation I received while they were doing whatever they were doing to me was one of peace.”

She reached out and stroked his thigh. “Don’t. That frightens me, the thought of their doing something to you.”

He shook his head. “The odd thing is, Sally, that it doesn’t frighten me in the slightest.”

He felt her gaze on him, and when he looked at her she was frowning. “You said it was a human head and shoulders..?” she said.

“That’s how it appeared to me, and yet at the same time it felt… alien.” He stopped himself there. “Or did it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s only in retrospect, after the arrival of the ships, that it occurred to me that the figure was alien.”

They fell silent. On the softscreen, studio guests were debating the starships’ arrival.

“Of course,” a uniformed General was saying, “everything suggests that we should proceed with utmost suspicion. The fact that our military capability, worldwide, seems to have been compromised is an indication that the vessels’ arrival is hostile in intent–”

“On the other hand,” a scientist interrupted, “their preventing our ability to commit violence might be seen as a blessing, an endowment, and not necessarily as a precursor to hostilities.”

“I am merely stating the need for caution,” the General said.

The anchorman stepped in, “That’s an interesting point Jim Broadbent makes there, General; we’ve been assessing what has happened in terms of potential threat. Perhaps we should take time to look at other possibilities…”

“Of course,” Broadstairs said. “As a scientist I like to run a number of thought experiments, initially giving equal validity to all possibilities before dismissing them. One thing that has occurred to me is the nature of the starships’ arrival here. They in no way seem to me the harbingers of invasion. Look at the facts. They appeared simultaneously at eight locations around the world, and they seem to be making their way — if our calculations prove correct — to one of the most uninhabited regions on the planet. This, to me, is not the manoeuvring of an invading army.”

The General said, “I merely counsel caution. If we are dealing here with… with extraterrestrials… then it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to second-guess their motivations.”

The scientist was about to step in with a rejoinder to that when the anchorman said, “Gentlemen, I’m afraid we must leave it there for the time being, though undoubtedly we’ll return to the debate as events unfold worldwide. In our Cambridge studio we have Xian Chen Li and Peter Walken, professors respectively in neuroscience and sociology… If I might begin with you, Professor Walken, and ask you what the long term consequences of this so-called outbreak of non-violence might be?”

“If, that is, the outbreak is indeed long term,” Walken stipulated, “and not a temporary effect…”

Allen was listening to the broadcast while concentrating on the track ahead. They had left the metalled highway an hour ago and proceeded along a sandy track winding through hilly terrain. He calculated they were an hour from the park, with another couple of hours to go before sunset. The starship, if it kept to its current speed, was due to overfly the park at approximately six o’clock.

A while later, Sally said, “Geoff… You okay?”

He smiled reassuringly. “Fine.”

“It’s just…” She gestured at the screen, where the professors had given way to a reporter already in the Saharan desert north-west of Timbuktu. “What they were saying about our inability to commit violence…”

He knew what she was driving at, and he nodded. “Of course it… hurts,” he admitted.

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean, it’s so bloody arbitrary.” He glanced at her. “Take what happened yesterday, at the medical centre. The terrorists attacked, killed half a dozen soldiers, and took you and Ben…” He stopped, gripping the wheel at its apex. “It frightens me to think that if the attack had happened an hour earlier…”

He stared out at the rolling bush. Ahead and to their right a vortex of vultures swirled on a thermal. He went on, “And if the ships had arrived a couple of days ago, then the soldiers guarding the centre would still be alive. Like I said, so arbitrary.”

She murmured, “And if they had arrived here three years ago…”

He smiled at her. “You’re probably thinking me selfish that I’m viewing this, probably the most momentous event in human history, so personally.”

“Of course not! It’s entirely understandable, Geoff. I’d be looking at it in the same way.”

He’d never spoken to anyone other than Sally and his sister about what had happened to his parents. He’d given her a sketched outline of the incident, and left it at that, not caring to describe his feelings at the time.

For some reason, now, he felt the need to unburden himself.

“The thing is that I almost understood why they did what they did. They were old and very, very ill. My father was eighty-nine, my mother a couple of years younger. My father’s heart was rapidly failing, and my mother had terminal leukaemia. Their quality of life…”

“I understand. There were other ways of going about… ending it.”

“The odd thing is that both my parents for all their lives had campaigned and fought — what a word to use! — for non-violence. So to end it like that was… shocking, somehow not right. What hurt me, and hurts me still, is that they didn’t tell me or my sister about how they were feeling. I understand why — they didn’t want to upset us. But they could have said something; we could have talked about euthanasia. It was a measure of their desperation, their extreme unhappiness, that they were driven to end it as they did. It was obviously a sudden thing, done on the spur of absolute despair. And thinking about their last few hours… that’s what hurts so much.”

Fortunately it was he who had found their bodies, not his sister Catherine.

He had taken to crossing London every other day, from his flat in Battersea to his parents’ three story townhouse overlooking Hampstead Heath, to check on them, cook them a meal and chat about what he was working on at the moment. While they were slowly crumbling physically, mentally they were as alert as they’d ever been.

That spring morning he’d not visited his parents for a couple of days. He had phoned the night before, to apologise and say he’d be around in the morning — but had received no reply. He was not unduly worried, as both were half deaf and often missed his calls.

He let himself in with the spare key, called out that it was him, and ran up the stairs to the commodious, sunny lounge on the first floor.

They were seated together on the sofa facing the big bow window. At first he thought they’d fallen asleep while appreciating the spring morning.

His mother’s head was resting on his father’s shoulder.

He rounded the sofa and stopped dead in his tracks, shock pummelling his solar plexus.

The chest of his mother’s white blouse was soaked in a bib of startling bright blood. Similarly, his father’s waistcoat was stained. The pistol lay on his lap, his fingers loose around its butt.

Allen had staggered backwards, fallen into an armchair, and wept.

Later, when the bodies had been removed, Allen drove to Catherine’s in Belsize Park and broke the news. He recalled little of the hour they spent together, other than telling her that at least his father had not shot his mother and himself through the head. It had seemed an important distinction at the time.

SALLY WAS STILL stroking his thigh, a while later, when they came to the road-block.

It occurred to Allen that it was an odd place to mount a road-block, on a flat stretch of land a couple of kilometres before the boundary of the national park. An ugly green military truck was drawn up by the side of the road and a dozen troops had erected a makeshift barrier consisting of two trestles and a length of red and yellow crime-scene tape.

The troops stood around in postures of boredom and negligence — always, Allen thought, a dangerous combination. They had rifles and machine guns at the ready, but oddly enough he wasn’t encouraged by the thought that they wouldn’t be able to use them.

Sally sat up. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. There’s no reason for the road-block, as far as I can make out.”

“How far are we from the park?”

“About two kilometres.”

He slowed down as he approached the fluttering length of tape. Their arrival had galvanised the soldiers who approached the car and stood flanking it, staring in at Allen and Sally with sullen, almost petulant expressions. He glanced at their forefingers, hooked inside the trigger-guards of their respective weapons.

A sudden, alarming thought occurred to him. They were near the border with the Congo. Might these be Congolese troops, taking advantage of the arrival of the starships to cross the border to the relatively affluent Uganda in order to do a little pilfering?

He scanned the uniform of the sergeant, who had disengaged himself from his men and was striding over to the car, but he couldn’t make out the soldier’s insignia.

He murmured, “Keep your hands in sight at all times and don’t make a sudden move.” He smiled across at her. “And don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

He unpeeled the softscreen from the dashboard, set it on his lap, and kept his hands on the apex of the steering wheel. He smiled out at the approaching officer.

The sergeant halted a metre from the car and said, “Will you please climb out, sir, and the lady also.”

He nodded at Sally, opened the door and climbed out. He felt conscious of being separated from her. The late afternoon sun beat down on his face.

The sergeant reached out. “Papers.”

Allen tried not to smile at the anachronism. No one had papers these days. He proffered his softscreen. On the other side of the car, Sally was passing her ID card to another soldier.

The sergeant jacked a monitor into Allen’s screen and, frowning, scanned the read-out on his own.

He said, “And why are you in Uganda, Mr Allen?”

“To cover a story in Murchison Falls park — the elephant breeding programme. I’m a photographer.”

The sergeant looked over the top of the car. “And you, madam, why are you in Uganda?”

She told him that she worked for the Red Cross in Kallani.

“So you are based there?”

Sally nodded. “That’s right. Yes.”

“And why are you here?”

“Accompanying Mr Allen. I’m on holiday.”

The sergeant looked from Allen to Sally, his gaze unreadable. “There is a state of emergency in the country now. My government has ordered that all foreign nationals must report to the Ugandan embassy for registration.”

Sally made a sound of disgust. “But that’s back in Kampala!”

“Nevertheless, you must report to the embassy, or you will be in breach of regulations.”

Before Sally could argue, Allen said, “That’s fine. We’ll do that. We’re due in Rangay before sunset, so if you would kindly let us past.”

The sergeant stared at him, unmoving. “I must request that you turn back now, go back to the highway and head south.”

Allen smiled and said patiently, “I have work to do in Rangay, a story to cover. We will head to Kampala first thing in the morning.”

The sergeant stared him down. “Mr Allen, you will turn around now, head back to the highway and continue south. The country is under a state of emergency.”

Allen nodded. “Very well.”

The sergeant passed Allen his softscreen and he climbed back into the car. Sally slipped in beside him and slammed the door.

Allen started the engine. “So… what do we do?” He watched the troops mosey back to their truck.

The sergeant turned and stood watching him.

“What do you mean? I thought you’d agreed to the…”

“I mean, do we drive on, through the tape, ignoring the kind sergeant?”

Sally considered, smiling at him like a kid considering a dare. “Do you think they’d try to shoot if we did disobey them?”

“I very much doubt they’d risk shooting two foreign nationals…”

She nodded. “You’ve stirred the troublemaker in me, Mr Allen. Let’s go.”

He revved the engine and rolled the car forward through the tape. As it snapped and fluttered around the windscreen, he accelerated. He heard cries from the soldiers, saw them dash into the middle of the road behind the car. Sally swivelled in her seat. Allen kept his eyes on the road ahead.

“What are they doing?”

“The sergeant’s pointing, giving orders. One of them is raising his rifle…”

Allen hunched in his seat, expecting the sound of gunshots at any second.

“And now?”

She laughed. “Nothing. The soldier’s just standing there, aiming… The sergeant’s yelling something. Right, he’s aiming his own rifle…”

“If he aims at our tyres,” Allen said, “does that constitute violence?”

“If he thinks of that, we might find out,” she said.

It came to him, then, that the sociologists and philosophers would have a fine time trying to work out the parameters of intent, and how they pertained to the blanket proscription on violence.

“They’re just standing there, Geoff. Not even coming after us…”

Allen relaxed, let out a long breath and finally laughed. “I don’t think I’ve truly realised, until now, quite what this means.”

Sally picked up his softscreen from where he’d tossed it between the seats, fastened it to the dash and accessed the memory cache. “Listen,” she said.

She found the broadcast of an hour ago. The neuroscientist and the sociologist were debating the embargo on violence.

Chen Li said, “What is even more fascinating is how the embargo — which we will call it until a better term presents itself — is facilitated. It appears, from reports, that individuals intent on committing acts of violence are prevented from doing so despite their desires. They are paralysed, frozen on the spot. They report a mechanical, a physical, inability to carry through the action their brain intends. This suggests that whatever agency is responsible for the… embargo… can effect change on some fundamental neurological level. This is both tremendously exciting, but also terrifying in its indication of the power of… of these visitors.”

“What interests me,” Professor Walken the sociologist said, “is the consequences of this intervention on both the individual and societal level. One thing is certain, if the embargo continues, then nothing, nothing, will ever be the same again on planet Earth. Violence will be a thing of the past… But, and it’s a fascinating ‘but’, will our inability to commit violence, and our resulting repression of the act, have unforeseen psychological consequences on us as a race? Or will the fact that we cannot commit violence in time mean that we lose the desire, that the desire will be, as it were, bred out of us? That’s the interesting question.”

“And that, gentlemen, is where we must leave it, I’m afraid,” said the anchorman. “The debate will run and run, I’m sure.”

One hour later they arrived at the national park.

THERE WAS NO one in the log cabin that served as the gatehouse to the park, other than a houseboy who told Allen that everyone was up at the ‘hill’ to watch the passing of the starship.

He showed Allen and Sally to their cabin, a small but comfortable three room dwelling on the edge of the lake. Sally found the refrigerator stocked with food, as per her instructions, and opened a couple of beers. Allen unfastened the French windows that gave onto a veranda overlooking the lake and stepped out, admiring the view. The sun was low in the west, smearing a gorgeous tangerine and cerise light over the bush. He looked south, but there was no sign of the approaching starship.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’d rather set up my stuff here than join the others on the hill.”

“Me too. I don’t particularly feel like company at the moment.” She leaned against him, sipping her beer.

He set up his camera and checked his softscreen. He had one email from Wolfgang back at the London agency. He laughed and showed it to Sally. She read it out, smiling, “Forget the bloody elephants and concentrate on the aliens!”

“Will do, Wolfgang,” he said.

He stuck his softscreen to the outside wall of the hut and set it running. The BBC was shuttling between their correspondents who were following the progress of the starships around the world.

According to their man in Africa, that continent’s ship was passing over southern Uganda.

They stood on the veranda, arms around each other and gazing south. According to Allen’s calculations the starship was three or four minutes away.

When it came, three and a half minutes later, he was surprised by his response.

He knew he would be awed, the visual artist in him impressed by the aesthetics of the experience, the brilliance of the silver-blue extraterrestrial vessel as it traversed the beautiful African sky, but he had never expected to be so moved by the event.

“But it’s… massive,” Sally gasped.

The ship slid over the southern horizon in absolute silence. Like all the others it was snub-nosed, splayed, a wedge that most resembled a manta ray. The dying sun caught its silvery tegument, giving it the lustre of a genie’s lamp. Allen smiled at the not inappropriate metaphor: but what kind of genie, he wondered, might emerge?

It would not fly directly overhead, he saw, but between where they stood and the horizon. He raised his camera and took a continuous series of shots, pausing now and then to lower his camera and watch the ship’s silent passage.

He calculated that the behemoth was perhaps five kilometres long, two wide from wing-tip — if they were indeed wings — to wing-tip.

To the west, silhouetted on the hilltop against the dying light, he made out a celebrating crowd, tourists and Africans alike. Their cries of delight and surprise drifted across the water. It was as if they were toasting the alien ship, welcoming it to planet Earth.

“Geoff, look…” She pointed to the softscreen on the wall. Evidently someone on the hill had a feed to the BBC, as the image of the starship above the lake was being beamed live online.

The announcer was saying, “And just in from Murchison Falls, Uganda, these images of the African starship.”

It was at its closest now, directly opposite them across the lake. He tried to make out any sign of sigils or decals on its sleek flank, or seams and viewports. Even its bullish snout, where in a Terran vessel one would expect some kind of flight-deck or bridge to be positioned, was smooth and featureless. A technology beyond our ability to comprehend, he thought.

He marvelled at the privilege of being able to watch the arrival of the ship as it happened; it would be something he could tell his grandchildren.

“I remember the day the extraterrestrials arrived on Earth…”

He considered what had happened aboard the plane, the spider drilling into his head, and again he knew that, rationally perhaps, he should be apprehensive. Was it worrying, he wondered, that he was not?

He laughed aloud and pulled Sally to him, planting a big good-natured kiss on her temple.

“We’re living in interesting times, girl,” he said.

She looked up at him. “Isn’t that a Chinese curse?”

The light diminished and slowly the starship slipped away to the north. When the vessel vanished from sight, Allen busied himself beaming his pictures back to London, then fixed a meal of salad, rice and chicken.

They ate on the veranda and then sat looking out over the lake with their beers, the softscreen playing at their side — a constant accompaniment.

At last Sally said, “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, Geoff. Since yesterday, and what happened. I know I told Krasnic that I’d be leaving in May…”

He looked at her, recalling when she’d told him, last November, that she’d had enough of work in Africa and was coming home to London in May. His joy had been overwhelming.

Had she decided to stay, he wondered? Had the events of yesterday made her feel beholden to the medical centre, its staff and patients?

She turned to him. “But why wait until May, Geoff? I want out now. When we get back, I’ll tell Krasnic I’ll work till the end of the month, so he can find a replacement.”

He reached out and took her hand. “I’m delighted, but you’re absolutely sure?”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life, Geoff,” she said. “I want to be with you in London.”

He fetched two more beers from the cooler, and they toasted each other as the sun went down.

Beside them, ten minutes later, the tone of the announcer’s voice made Sally sit up and pull the softscreen across the table.

“And there have been developments on the starship front. First, Bob Hudson in southern Spain…”

“Thank you, Sue. Yes. Just minutes ago as I speak the ship I’ve been tracking south across Europe suddenly disappeared, along with the seven other ships converging on the Saharan desert. We have footage here of the second it happened…” The softscreen showed the European starship moving slowly over Gibraltar when, in a flash, it was gone. “It just… winked out of existence…” the reporter concluded breathlessly.

“We must interrupt you there, Bob. We cross now, live, to Amelia Thirkell who has just arrived in the press encampment a hundred kilometres north-west of Timbuktu. Amelia, there have been developments…”

“There certainly have, Sue. If I can just set the scene here. We are — that is, the world’s media — are encamped in a vast arc around what some of my colleagues have termed ‘ground zero’ — the locus where the starships will meet. The first people to arrive here reported that they could get no nearer than ten kilometres to ground zero, and seemed to be prevented by a… a force-field or barrier…” She pointed across the desert. “It’s just a hundred metres in that direction, and surrounds ground zero in a vast circle.”

Thirkell looked into the sky, an expression of wonder on her face.

“And then, literally minutes ago, just after the starships vanished, they appeared again over the darkening sands of the Sahara.”

The image panned away from the reporter and lifted into the sky, where a strange and beautiful choreography of interstellar vessels was playing itself out.

Allen found himself gripping Sally’s hand as they stared at the screen. Against the darkening skies, the eight identical starships approached a central locus, slowing as they came together. They hovered, silently, nose to nose, for all the world like the silver-blue petals of some vast intergalactic flower.

“Their nose-cones seem to be actually touching,” Thirkell reported. “It’s as if they’re fitting together to form a vast pattern. Because of each ship’s identical delta shape… they can join to form what looks like a great… snowflake.”

The BBC camera looked up at the configuration at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees, and from this viewpoint the eight starships no longer resembled so many individual vessels but one vast, interlocked shape, a great interstellar cartwheel lambent in the light of the setting sun.

Seconds later, a bright flash emanated from the hub of the configuration, a pulse of white light that spread in a concentric circle from the conjoined nose-cones to the outer edge of the ships. It did not stop there but fell, like a vast halo, towards the desert far below.

“It’s coming down slowly, silently,” Thirkell said in a wavering voice. “I… it looks as if it will land, or hit the ground… in the exact place where the invisible barrier or force-field prevented our forward progress…”

Beside him, Sally murmured something in wonder.

The halo of white light, perhaps a hundred metres high, reached the ground and settled. Three or four reporters — and then more and more — began to walk towards the effulgent light, their shapes silhouetted against the glow.

One or two reached out, touched the wall of light; the camera zoomed in, catching their expressions of wonder as they looked back and smiled.

Suddenly, the light began to lift. The cameraman followed its ascent to the circumference of the interlocked starships.

A chorus of cries greeted the ascent. Thirkell was saying, “I… I’ve never seen anything like it. This is miraculous! I don’t know how to describe what has happened here in the middle of the Sahara, one of the driest, most inhospitable areas on the face of the Earth…”

The image on the screen showed the light settling around the rear of the ships and moving inwards, retracing its path towards the conjoined nose-cones.

The image, blurred, danced, as the cameraman panned down to show what was revealed on the ground.

Sally gasped, fingers to her lips, and Allen just stared in silent wonder.

The sands of the Sahara had been transformed. What before had been an undulating landscape of limitless sand was now a vast expanse of rolling green meadows, occasional oases, or lakes, with clusters of what appeared to be low-level domes occupying the glades and meadows.

The more audacious reporters, the same ones who had approached the white light earlier, now stepped forward and walked towards the margin of the paradise that had appeared as if by magic. Hesitantly, Thirkell followed them, tracked by her cameraman.

She approached the edge of the greening, rimmed by a circular silver collar that came to the height of her knees, and stepped over it. She climbed the gradient of a grassy knoll, staring about her in wonder, and when she came to the crest she turned and beamed at the camera.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry… This is the most amazing… Excuse me, I’m overcome by the most… I can only describe it as… as a feeling of optimism. I know that must sound crazy, even in the context of what has happened here, but…” She shook her head, words at last failing her.

The cameraman joined her on the summit of the knoll and panned, then zoomed in on the nearest dome. It was surrounded by what appeared to be a ring of cultivated land, where plants and shrubs grew in profusion.

And all around, hardened reporters were coming together and hugging. The image wobbled, showed a blur of Thirkell’s blouse as she embraced her cameraman. She pulled away and looked into the sky, at the underside of the starships. “And as I stand here in this… this wonderland… I can’t help but wonder when they might communicate with us…”

“And on that note,” Sue said back in the London studio, “we’ll leave it there. Let’s stay with the images from the Sahara, the momentous images I might say, while we discuss recent events with my studio guests. Ladies, gentlemen, what is to be made of these developments…?”

Allen sat back in his seat, staring into the northern darkness where the incredible events were being played out.

Sally found his hand. “What’s happening, Geoff?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. But I do know that we’ll find out, in time.”

They sat side by side long into the evening, sipping their beers and watching events unfold on the softscreen.

It was after midnight when a wave of lassitude swept over him, a sudden incredible tiredness, and he tried to think back to the last time he’d slept. He’d snatched a couple of hours on the flight, and before that a few hours back in London.

He switched off the ’screen and they moved back into the hut.

They lay face to face on the bed, holding each other, and within minutes Allen was asleep.

SOMETHING WOKE HIM from a dreamless sleep.

He lay on his back, blinking up at the ceiling, and it was a few seconds before he became aware of the soft golden glow emanating from the adjacent lounge.

He sat up carefully, so as not to disturb Sally, pulled on a pair of shorts and moved to the open door. On the way he took the softscreen from where he’d left it on the bedside table, an instinctive action he was hardly aware of making.

He moved to the threshold of the lounge, and stopped.

Someone… something… was sitting on the edge of an armchair on the far side of the room.

Allen took a step forward, then another, and dropped into a chair opposite the figure.

It was humanoid and glowed with a golden lustre, its surface seamless and unmarked, but beneath its surface, within the creature, paler golden lights moved and roiled. It sat forward on the chair, its elbows on its knees, hands clasped, and seemed to be staring across at Allen. Seemed to be, for its face was without eyes or other features.

Allen thought of the head-and-shoulders shape that had stared down at him during his episode aboard the plane, and now, as then, felt an abiding sense of peace.

He surprised himself by asking, “Why don’t I feel in the least frightened?”

The figure stared at him. He had the odd, inexplicable impression that it was somehow larger than the dimensions it presented here.

It replied, but he was unable to tell if he heard the words, or if they somehow simply manifested in his head.

“Because there is nothing to be frightened about, Geoffrey Allen.”

“This… why you are here… it’s about what happened to me on the flight out?”

“This is the corollary of that experience, yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“We mean, I am here because of what we did to you then, Geoffrey Allen.”

He sat back in the chair. He needed its support. He took deep breaths and asked, “And what did you do to me?”

“We chose you,” it said.

Allen nodded, as if this were a very reasonable explanation. “And why did you choose me?”

“Because you were deemed suitable.”

“Suitable…?” he echoed. He glanced back at the bedroom door, slightly ajar, and considered Sally sleeping in there. Was this a hallucination, a hypnagogic episode brought about by lack of sleep and the excitement of recent events?

“Suitable for what?”

The figure did not answer at once, and the wait was almost unbearable.

“Suitable for what lies ahead, for the changes that will visit your race, your planet. We need people like you to present the human face of that change.”

His blood felt as if it had turned to a slurry that his heart was having difficulty pumping around his body. He said, “Who are you, and why are you here, and… and what changes are you speaking of?”

“We are in the employ of the S’rene, or the Serene, as you will come to call them.”

“But… but you’re not one of the S’rene yourself?”

The figure inclined its featureless domed head. “I am a self-aware entity in the employ of the S’rene,” it said.

“And the S’rene? Who are they? What are they?”

“The S’rene are a race that hails from a star known as Delta Pavonis. They are peaceable, and benign.”

“And the reason you, they… are here?”

A pause. Then, “To help you,” it said.

“To help us?” he echoed, with the first stirrings of excitement.

“To help you, before you destroy yourselves,” said the golden figure.

“That would be inevitable?”

The figure, the self-aware entity as it called itself, inclined its head again. “That would be inevitable. The S’rene have seen it happen before, to other races, before they were in any position to help.”

“Other races…?” Allen said, his mind spinning.

“Hundreds…” It paused, then went on, “The galaxy teems with life, with civilisations, a concordance rich beyond your imagining.”

His cheeks felt suddenly wet. He realised he was weeping.

“And how will you help us?”

“We have started already,” it said. “But that is only the start. Much work lies ahead, much change. The world, life as you know it, will alter for you out of all recognition.”

Allen nodded. “And how can I help?”

The figure stood suddenly. When seated, it had given no indication of its true dimensions. Standing, it appeared at least seven feet tall, as proportionally broad, and it reached out a hand to him now.

“Your softscreen…”

He fumbled with it, standing before this towering giant, and held out the softscreen. The golden figure touched it, then dropped its hand to its side.

“That is all?” Allen asked.

“You will go to Entebbe at eleven in the morning. Present your ’screen at the information desk in terminal two. A vessel will be waiting to take you to the Nexus.”

“The Nexus?”

The figure gestured to the screen in Allen’s hand. It flared, startling him. Upon the screen, he saw, was an image of the conjoined starships above the greened Sahara.

“The Nexus,” said the figure.

“And there?”

“There, you will learn how you and others like you will help to bring about the change.”

Allen sat back down again, or rather slumped, and when he looked up he saw that the figure that had stood before him, so imposing and dominant, had vanished.

He was aware of another figure on the edge of his vision.

Sally stood, naked, in the doorway to the bedroom.

“Geoff… I heard you talking, and when I…” She came to him. He stood quickly and hugged her to him, needing her reassurance.

“Christ, Sally…”

“What happened?”

“You didn’t see…?” He gestured to the opposite chair.

“I saw you talking to yourself. You seemed agitated, overcome with emotion. I saw you stand, and then you held out the ’screen, and moments later it suddenly flared, and you gasped.”

He stared into her eyes in the semi-darkness of the room. “Sally,” he said, “they are the Serene, and they have come to help us.”

She took his hand and led him gently back into the bedroom.

“Come to bed,” she said, “and tell me all about it.”

THEY LEFT THE park at first light and drove south-east to Entebbe.

“Apprehensive?”

He thought about it for all of three seconds. “Oddly, no. Like last night, that figure… had someone said beforehand that I’d be confronted by an extraterrestrial… self-aware entity, as it called itself, I would have thought I’d’ve been scared to death. As it was…” He shook his head. “They instil reassurance in us, Sally. We have nothing to be apprehensive about.”

“It’s a lot to take on trust.”

He agreed. “It is.” But how to explain the sensation of benignity that the representative of the Serene had emanated last night?

They arrived at Entebbe fifteen minutes before eleven and parked in the shadow of terminal two. Allen had no idea what to expect as he entered the airport and approached the information desk, Sally at his side.

A smiling Ugandan woman took his ’screen, scanned it and passed it back. “If you would like to make your way to departure lounge three, there will be a representative waiting.”

They crossed the busy concourse and hesitated before the check-in.

“So much for a week’s quiet holiday together,” she said.

They stood facing each other, Geoff began to speak, then fell silent.

“What?” Sally asked.

He laughed. “Oddly, I don’t want to go, Sal. I don’t want to leave you.”

She pushed him playfully. “Don’t be silly. You’ve got to go.”

“I know. It’s just…”

They kissed.

“I’ll be in touch just as soon as…” he shrugged, “as it’s all over.”

“I’ll go back to Kallani,” Sally said, “settle a few things there, then take the first available flight to London.”

“I’ll tell Catherine you’re on your way. She’ll give you the spare pass key to my place. And then…” He smiled and drew her to him. “Why do we always have less time together than we want? If it’s not work, it’s blessed extraterrestrials!”

They laughed, then kissed farewell.

He presented his softscreen at the check-in, turned to wave at Sally, and passed through.

He was alone in a vast lounge. A sliding door at the far end, giving onto the tarmac, opened and a figure stepped through. A tall, dark European woman, in her thirties, strode through and fixed him with a professional smile. “Mr Allen, if you would care to follow me.”

They left the lounge and stepped into the blistering sunlight, and crossed the tarmac.

“Are you…?”

“I was hired by an agency to meet you and your colleagues.”

“My colleagues…?”

If she heard him, the woman gave no sign.

They paused before a silver, corrugated hangar, and the woman indicated a sliding glass door.

Allen stepped through. When his vision adjusted to the shadows within, he saw a sleek, jet black delta-winged plane in the centre of the hangar.

He looked behind him. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

He crossed to the plane. At his approach, a ramp extruded. He hesitated at its foot, peering up into the vessel’s darkened interior.

He climbed.

Again his vision took time to adjust as he ducked through the plane’s entrance. The interior was furnished with four seats, two to a side, facing each other. Three of the seats were occupied. He made out a tall African woman, a young man of Asian origin, and a middle-aged woman who might have been Arabic.

As he stared at each of them in turn, he realised that they were unconscious.

The fourth seat was empty.

He moved forward, hesitated, then sat down.

Instantly a luxurious lassitude engulfed him. He wanted to laugh out loud at the wondrous sensation as he descended towards oblivion.

He felt a subtle vibration — the plane, moving? — and then lost consciousness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SALLY HAD AN aversion to using bribery to get what she wanted — aiding and abetting a system that was responsible for much that was at fault in the continent of Africa — but in this instance it was the only way to achieve her goal.

It cost her one hundred US dollars, slipped into the cold palm of the desk sergeant, to be allowed into the holding cell at the Kallani police headquarters.

She was taken to a tiny concrete room, divided by floor-to-ceiling bars, with a plastic bucket seat positioned on either side of the bars.

She sat down. A minute later the door in the other half of the cell opened and Josef Makumbi, shackled hand and foot, shuffled through.

He looked sullen, and his eyes widened fractionally when he saw her.

He slumped into the seat and stared at her.

“Hello, Josef.”

He stared at his lap, then looked up at her. “What do you want, Dr Walsh?”

She looked at the man who had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of at least four of his colleagues. She was tempted to ask him why, but restricted herself to the reason for her visit.

She said, “Three days ago I was taken, along with Dr Ben Odinga, by three men who drove us north and held us prisoner. One of the men was named Ali.” She hesitated. “Who was he, Josef?”

He stared at her with bloodshot eyes, and surprised her by asking, “Why haven’t they beaten me, Dr Walsh? They brought me here, locked me up, and then one man, a big sergeant, he comes in with a baseball bat… I could see the look in his eyes. He wanted to kill me, Dr Walsh. He wanted to punish me for what I did.” He shook his head. “And he tried to. He lifted the bat, tried to hit me, but something stopped him.”

She said, “I want you to tell me the full name of your accomplice, Ali, and where I might find him.”

“Will they kill me, Dr Walsh? I know they want to, for what I did.”

She shook her head and ran a tired hand over her face. She felt the sweat and grime of her long drive north. She said, “Please, tell me Ali’s full name and where I might find him.”

He stared at her.

She returned his gaze, looking into the eyes of one of the last men on Earth, she realised, to commit the act of murder. At any other time she would have been curious to know what had motivated the man to turn on his colleagues — but all she wanted now was to confront the man who had tormented herself and Ben, to hear his side of the story.

“Well?” she said.

“If I tell you, they will not beat me to death?”

She inclined her head. “I promise.”

He nodded, licked his lips. “His name is Ali al-Hawati, and he is from the village of Benali. He has a wife there, but no children. He works as a fisherman on the river.”

The village was a hundred kilometres east of Kallani, on the border with Kenya. It would be a long, hot drive, with no guarantee at the end of it that she would be able to find and confront the man who would have willingly taken her life and filmed the process for all the world to see.

She would never have had the courage to attempt to track down her tormentor, normally. But, with the coming of the Serene, things were very different.

She stood. “Thank you, Josef.”

“You will make sure they will not beat me to death, Dr Walsh?”

She stared down at him. “You have nothing to worry about on that score,” she told him, and left the cell.

EARLIER THAT DAY, after arriving at Kallani from Entebbe, she had met Yan Krasnic and told him of her decision to leave Kallani and return to England. She offered to work until the end of the month, but Krasnic smiled and said, “No, you can go now. The relief team arrived yesterday, and since the coming of the starships… well, we can concentrate on treating victims of the drought, of famine. No more do we have to contend with the casualties of war and bush skirmishes, though for how long that might last…”

“And you?” she asked.

He looked through the window of his surgery. Krasnic was in his early fifties. He looked about seventy. “I’m okay… After what happened the other day, I too have decided to return home, to Croatia. It’s a beautiful country, Sally. I miss it. I think I will retire.”

She hugged him before leaving, then found Ben Odinga and said goodbye.

“God is great,” he said, smiling at her. “I will miss you.”

She returned to Mama Oola’s, packed her scant belongings, and said a tearful goodbye to the matriarch, promising to return one day.

Then she had made her way to the police headquarters and bribed the grinning desk sergeant.

She left Kallani at one o’clock and drove east. While at Entebbe that morning she had booked a flight to London on a plane leaving Uganda at noon the following day. That would leave her with enough time to do what she had to do, for her peace of mind, and return to Kampala in the morning.

As she drove through the drought-stricken, sun-pummelled land, a hellish landscape devoid of life, where even the trees stood stark and leafless like charcoal twigs in the parched earth, she considered her motives in confronting Ali al-Hawati.

What did she want? For that matter, what did she expect?

She did not want to know of his motivations, for she could guess them. He was politically driven, or religiously driven — they were one and the same. He wanted his worldview to prevail, and saw her and her fellow aid workers as legitimate targets in the war against decadent Western liberalism.

She had no illusions that she would gain his forgiveness; he would hate her now — if not more so, given her escape — as he had hated her the other day.

No, what she wanted was to look him in the eye and tell him that his chance had come and gone, that, with the coming of the Serene, the opportunity to get what he and his fellow believers wanted was a thing of the past. She wanted to tell him that he had lost the war, and that everything would be very different, now.

She wanted to tell Ali al-Hawati that no longer did she fear him and his kind.

Then she would smile, and turn her back on him, without flinching at the thought of attack, and walk away.

AS SHE DROVE through the punishing afternoon heat, she turned the car radio to Uganda FM and listened to the latest reports from around the world.

She would have liked to have had Geoff’s softscreen with her now, despite her frugality and anti-materialism that had never allowed her to indulge herself. For the past few years she had made do with a cheap wind-up radio to provide her with news of the outside world.

Republicans in America were encamped outside the White House in protest at their government’s inability to confront the extraterrestrials. Shares in arms manufacturers around the world had tumbled, and in the States the gun lobby and pro-hunting groups were vociferous in their complaints about having their rights violated by the aliens. The President had gone on live TV last night to demand a meeting with the leader of the ‘alien invasion.’

Sally smiled to herself and tuned into a music station.

Three hours later she came to the river and the village of Benali, its inhabitants stirring in the cooler hours of late afternoon. Women washed clothes in the river and children played with tyres in the dusty streets. It was a scene, typical of Africa, which had changed little in a hundred years.

She made out a large number of Yemeni men and women among the Ugandans. After the Israeli strikes on Sana in 2019, displaced Yemenis had fled south, settling in Ethiopia, Somalia, and even as far as Uganda. They were largely fisher-folk, drawn to the coastal regions or, in this case, the wide river on the border with Kenya.

She braked on the crest of the road overlooking the village and the river. The shanty town looked impoverished, a series of corrugated metal huts, patched with multi-coloured polythene sheets — where Islamists must have found eager recruits among the poor, displaced Yemenis.

She wondered if al-Hawati had been lured into terrorism by the promise of riches, or the reward of a martyr’s place in paradise. Would she despise him any the less had his motivations been the former?

Her arrival caused a commotion amongst the village children. They flocked around her car, keeping a safe distance, watching her with big eyes, mistrustful yet curious.

She climbed out and smiled at the children, African and Yemeni, and singled out the tallest — a boy clutching a deflated vinyl football — and said, “I am looking for Ali al-Hawati, a fisherman. Do you know where he lives?”

This provoked an intense and noisy debate among the crowd. The boy with the football shouted loudest, then looked at Sally. “He lives beside the river. Come with me.”

She followed the boy, followed, in turn, by the ragged posse of village children, chattering among themselves.

A few days ago, she thought as she hurried down the sandy track after the boy, she would never have dared enter a Yemeni village known to harbour terrorists. Even now she experienced a residual fear at what she was doing, tempered by the knowledge that no one, now, could harm her physically.

Nevertheless, as they turned a corner and came to a line of huts fronting the river, her heart set up a laboured pounding.

A Yemeni woman in a stained shalwar kameez and a half niqab veil sat before the second hut, mending a fishing net. She looked up and stared at Sally, her brown eyes massive above the fabric that covered her mouth and nose.

The young boy said something to the woman, and without a word she stood and hurried into the hut. Behind Sally, the children stopped as one and watched in silence.

Seconds later a man, wearing only shorts and a ripped vest, stepped out.

He stopped dead when he saw Sally, and she was gratified at the expression of shock on his thin face. The jagged scar that ran across his cheek was red raw; he had declined her advice to seek medical help.

In English he said, “What do you want?”

“I came to see you, Ali.”

His eyes narrowed, flicked beyond her to see if she were alone.

“Why?” he snapped. “What do you want with me?”

Behind him, the woman — presumably his wife — ducked from the hut and stood watching them.

Ali turned and, with surprising vitriol, shouted at the woman. Her gaze fell from Sally, as if in shame, and submissively she scurried back inside.

“I came, Ali, simply to talk.”

Her words discomfited him; his sneer faltered. He looked beyond her at the gallery of watching children, and he gestured with anger and yelled at them in Arabic.

When Sally turned, she saw that every last one of them had fled.

She wondered at the power this man had wielded in the village, and if the reason for the anger that manifestly simmered beneath the surface of his superior demeanour was that he realised, with the coming of the Serene, that his ability to command fear, and therefore respect, would in time diminish.

They stood in the late afternoon sunlight, facing each other, and Sally felt as if they were the only people in the world.

“I came to tell you,” she began, “that what you did the other day, when you attacked the medical centre and kidnapped me and my colleague, made me more fearful than I had ever been in my life. I feared what you were going to do to me. And at the same time I was angered by my powerlessness to do anything to prevent what you were doing. To you, I was nothing — I, who had for years helped Ugandans and Yemenis, was less than nothing in your eyes. You would kill me and film my death, and show it to the world… and that filled me with anger and hatred and fear.”

He spat, “You are all the same, Westerners, men and women, you bring your ideas here and we do not want them!”

Sally smiled. “And that’s where you’re very wrong, Ali. You see, we are not the same at all. It’s convenient and easy for you to think that we are all the same, but unlike you and people who think like you, we, my colleagues at the centre, are all very different in our opinions and politics, our beliefs or non-beliefs. I work with Muslims and Christians and atheists, with many nationalities… We are all very different, but we work together for the common good.” She shook her head. “But I could talk to you for a million years, and I would never make you understand the values by which I live.”

“I despise your values!”

She smiled at him, and said softly, “But you do not know my values, Ali. You do not know who I am, or what I believe.” She waved, as if to dismiss all this, and went on, “But the reason I came here is to tell you, Ali, that I no longer fear you. Everything is different now, with the coming of the aliens. They have brought a truth to our planet which you, in your ignorance, will have to come to terms with. Perhaps, in time, you will learn peace, and look back and see the wrong you did. I hope so. But…” she smiled at him, radiantly, suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of liberation, “I want to tell you that I no longer fear you, and nor do I hate you.”

She reached into the breast pocket of her shirt. “I have brought you something, Ali.”

She held it out.

He stared at the small tube of antiseptic in her hand.

“For your infection. It needs treatment.”

With great deliberation, he filled his mouth with phlegm and spat in the sand at her feet. “I do not need your Western medicine!”

She shrugged, returned the tube to her pocket, and turned to leave. This was the moment she would turn her back on him, fearing nothing, and walk away.

He said, “What now?”

She hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“You have told the police about me, where I am?”

“I’ve told them nothing,” she said. “But I think Josef Makumbi might. He is in jail now, and in time he will be questioned by the police, and in fear I think he will tell them everything.”

She smiled at the sudden flare of alarm in his eyes, and it filled her with satisfaction.

He stepped towards her, his intent obvious. She held her ground, did not flinch as he came within half a metre of her and tried to raise his arm.

His inability to carry through the action that his will dictated, the thwarted expression on his face, was almost comical to behold. He began to shake.

She peered at him. “Go on, Ali. Try it. Hit me. That’s what you would like to do, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “The days when you could dominate with violence are gone, Ali. Goodbye.”

She turned, a feeling like jubilation swelling within her, and walked away.

She was halted by another cry, but this one was not from Ali.

His wife had emerged from the hut, a plastic carrier bag clutched in her right hand.

She surprised Sally by saying in English, “You are leaving Benali?”

Sally nodded. “I’m going to Kampala.”

The woman hesitated. Ali stared at her, a look of terrible realisation dawning in his eyes.

At last his wife said, “Please, take me with you. I wish to leave.”

Ali shouted something in Arabic, took a step towards his wife. She flinched, cowering and bringing her arm up to protect her face. Ali stood over her, frozen, and tears tracked down his face, trickling into the runnel of his scar.

Slowly, Sally stepped forward and took the woman’s arm. “Come with me,” she said softly.

Silent, eyes fixed in fright on her husband, the woman nodded. Sally drew her away, along the track from the river towards the road and the hill where her car was parked.

Behind them, Ali cried out. He was giving chase, calling out almost incoherently. His cries drew an audience of faces which emerged from the huts on either side and stared at him, which enraged him further.

They reached the car and Sally opened the passenger door and the woman, clutching her scant possessions to her chest, slipped inside.

Ali stood beside the car, ranting now, attempting to reach out but each time finding his movement restricted like a puppet whose controller was suffering a fit.

Sally climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. Beside her, the woman pulled down her veil and spoke quietly to her husband through the open window. Ali opened his mouth to reply but, this time, no words came.

Sally looked at Ali, and their eyes met. He spat, “You will not win!”

“This is not about winning or losing,” she said. “It is not a contest.”

They left the village of Benali and headed south.

They were silent for a time, and then Sally asked, “What did you say to him?”

The woman stared ahead. “I simply told him that I have never loved him, and that every day with him I dreamed of escaping,” she said, then went on in almost a whisper, “Four days ago he told me what he was going to do to the people he took from the medical centre — to two doctors. He was proud and boastful, but when he came back here yesterday he was quiet, and he said nothing about what had happened.”

“We escaped, my colleague and I.”

The woman smiled. “Escaped, like I am doing now.”

They drove on in silence, and a little later Sally asked, “You have money? Will you be okay in Kampala?”

“I have saved a little. I will be fine. In Kallani I trained to be a secretary. I can use a computer and many programs, though for many years I have mended fishing nets and suffered my husband’s beatings.”

Sally slowed down and held out her hand. “I’m Sally,” she said.

The woman smiled and took her hand. “I am Zara,” she said, “and I am very happy to be leaving.”

Sally smiled. “I know exactly what you mean, Zara,” she said.

She accelerated, heading south towards Kampala, and smiled as she considered the new life awaiting her in England.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ALLEN CAME AWAKE instantly. He knew exactly where he was and experienced no sense of dislocation. He looked across the aisle at the two facing seats, and then at the one beside him. They were empty. He wondered if the others had been awoken one by one so that, for whatever reasons, they could not confer.

A golden strip pulsed on the floor before him, the only light in the darkness. He stood and followed it, stepped from the plane and found himself in an identical darkness, illuminated only by the golden strip that extended for perhaps five metres before him. He followed it, walking steadily. The odd thing was that, as he went, the length of the strip remained the same; he had the peculiar sensation of walking on a treadmill.

Another odd thing was that he was not in the slightest apprehensive or even overawed. He was aboard an alien starship, he told himself, experiencing that which no human being, other than those who had accompanied him aboard the plane from Uganda, had experienced before. Yet he felt only an intense curiosity. He wondered if the Serene were responsible for this state of mind, too; they had the capability of inhibiting the act of violence in human beings, after all. Perhaps they were dictating his feelings now… and what about his thoughts?

That way, he realised with a smile, lay madness.

He must have been walking for five minutes. He stared into the darkness but could make out nothing, and the glow in the floor revealed nothing of his surroundings either. He realised, then, that although he had carried his holdall aboard the alien plane, he had left without it.

A minute later the glow stretching out before him became shorter, then vanished. He came to a halt in the absolute darkness and waited. Again he felt no fear.

Seconds later he felt something touch the back of his legs; some slight force applied pressure behind his knees; quickly, and involuntarily, he fell into a sitting position. He was caught by something soft and accommodating, like the world’s most comfortable armchair. He sat back, his head against softness, his arms outstretched on some kind of rest.

Then the darkness lifted slowly.

He was seated in what might have been some kind of vast amphitheatre created from the soft, black substance which cradled him — cradled him, he saw, and thousands of others. To either side, and above and below, he made out men and women of all races. Like him, they were staring around in awe. His nearest neighbour, a young Indian woman, was perhaps three metres away, a distance sufficient to make casual conversation difficult. She caught his eye and smiled briefly, and Allen smiled and shook his head in complicit wonder.

The amphitheatre swept around in a vast ellipse, dotted with representatives of humanity ensconced in the sable padding.

He felt an immense emotion — joy and privilege — swell in his chest.

Only then did he turn his attention to the well of the amphitheatre. A glow resided there, like a pool of molten gold, and he knew where he had seen it before: emanating from the nose-cones of the conjoined starships. He guessed, then, where he was; the amphitheatre was somehow formed from the front sections of each of the eight Serene starships.

The Nexus?

As he stared down, the glow swelled from a flattened disc to a pulsing globe, and from it strode a number of golden figures identical to the one which had presented itself to Allen back at Murchison Falls.

He counted a dozen figures ranged in a semi-circle and facing the massed representatives of humanity, and he knew that they continued all around the amphitheatre, hidden by the spherical golden glow. The one before Allen’s section seemed to hover in mid-air, staring directly at him.

Behind the figures, the golden glow diminished, sank, became again a disc. Then that too vanished, to be replaced by an aerial view of the verdant paradise created in the Saharan desert. As he watched, the oases appeared to be increasing in size, growing ever outwards.

A voice, issuing from the golden humanoid before him, said, “The new city continues to grow, and will soon cover the entirety of what was once the Saharan Desert.”

Allen heard a collective gasp from those around him.

“The city is the first of many we will grow around the globe,” the figure — or rather all the figures around the amphitheatre — went on. “In two days we will move on, first to central China, then India and Siberia, followed by Alaska, Brazil, Australia and Borneo.”

Further around the amphitheatre, someone stood up, a tall, southern European woman, who said, “If I may ask: why are you doing this?”

“We are creating the cities as the second phase of the programme to assist humanity in its growth towards stability and continuance. An immediate need for much of humanity is a number of sustainable mass living areas, integrated urban units where millions can live and work without fear of poverty, starvation, violence, political subordination or intimidation.”

“And who will govern these cities?” the same woman enquired.

“They will be self-ruled by elected representatives of each city’s population.”

“And the governments in whose countries these cities are situated?”

“In time,” came the reply, “the function of national governments will be a thing of the past. Nationalism will fade, along with concepts such as national borders and boundaries.”

A murmur of comment swept around the amphitheatre.

A human voice, belonging to someone on the far side of the vast chamber, said, “You’ve created this… this city in the Sahara, one of the most desolate, inimical regions on Earth… but how will it be sustained? What about things like energy, water…?”

“We are in the process of creating desalination plants to convert sea water,” came the reply, “and as for energy… The Serene possess the technological wherewithal to beam limitless energy to the surface of your planet. We have solar converters, machines which transfer the energy of your sun — and others — to wherever in the galaxy we require it.”

Allen smiled at the very idea, then laughed aloud.

The woman who asked the original question stood again. “If I may say this — my original question has not been answered. Why are you doing this?”

There was a pause, then the figure spoke. “We are intervening here on Earth because your race has, in the past few hundred years since what you term your industrial revolution, grown exponentially, a growth fuelled by a fatal combination of political greed and lack of foresight. What is even more tragic in your situation is that many of you — both on an individual level and on that of institutions — know very well what needs to be done in order to prevent a global catastrophe, but cannot enact change for the better because power and vested interest rest in the hands of the few.”

Allen sat back and closed his eyes, and wished that Sally was here to hear what the Serene were saying; she would be unable to restrain her tears of joy.

The voice went on, “No shame should accrue in light of these facts; no individual is really at fault. The process was vastly complex and incremental, a slow-motion, snowballing suicide impossible to stop. A hundred, a thousand races across the face of the galaxy have perished in this way, before we had the wherewithal to step in and correct the aberrant ways of emerging races.”

A ringing silence greeted the words, before someone asked, “And how many races have you saved from themselves?”

“Approaching one hundred.”

“And did they ask for your intervention?” It was a rhetorical question.

“That was impossible, as you well know, for they did not know of our presence until our arrival, just as you did not know of the Serene until recently.”

“And they welcomed your actions to save them?”

“There are always, among the races we assist, those individuals and organisations who oppose our intervention, for they have much to lose: namely, power and wealth. However, these people in time come to realise the rightness of what we are doing.”

Someone nearby stood up, a small Oriental man who asked, “And what say will the human race have in how these changes will be instituted?”

“That depends on the nature of the changes in question: some, like the creation of the green cities, the institution of solar energy — and the concomitant cessation of the production and use of current, polluting forms of energy — are non-negotiable, for they are fundamentally necessary for the safe continuance of the human race. Other changes, political changes, will be in your hands, though guided by our suggestions and expertise.”

An African woman stood and said tremulously, “You… you have banished violence from the planet. I… I would like to know how long will this last? Did you do it so that we could not oppose you with our armies, or…?”

The golden figure spoke. “We have assisted you to achieve the state of non-violence — which several of your philosophies have been advocating for centuries — not so that you would be unable to oppose us, which would have been impossible, but so that you can live now without fear of violence, either individual or state. This is not a temporary measure, but ever-lasting.”

A gasp raced around the amphitheatre. Someone said, “But… violence is something inherent in the psyche of the human race, an action and reaction hardwired into us on some fundamental, chromosomal level, surely…”

“Violence has been inherent in the evolution of the human race, just as it has been and is in the animal kingdom. But there comes a time when the urge to violence needs to be outgrown, when the consequences of violence threaten the very chances of racial, global survival.”

“But surely there will be… psychological, not to say societal, consequences of our inability to commit violence?”

The golden figure pulsed. It spread its arms in an all-encompassing gesture. Allen saw the other golden figures, arced around the amphitheatre, do likewise. “You are correct, there will be consequences, and some of them will be adverse… But none will be as destructive or damaging as the continuance of your ability to conduct violence upon each other would have been. We will ease you through the transition, be assured of that.”

Someone said, “You said you have intervened with other races? And these have managed to overcome their species’ violence?”

“All races are different, as you might imagine. Some fare better than others in their periods of… readjustment. We know that the human race will thrive and prosper.”

A silence grew, before the next question. The small Indian girl next to Allen stood up and said, “This must have taken a… a long time to set up. How long have you been… watching us?”

Allen had the impression then that the golden figures around the chamber were smiling. “We have been aware of the human race for centuries,” they said. “When the time was right, we applied ourselves to the study of your particular problem. We have been closely monitoring developments for the past two hundred years, and working to intervene for the past one hundred.”

“You saw us develop nuclear weapons,” someone said, “and use them… and yet you did not see fit to step in then?”

“But when,” said the figures reasonably, “would have been the right time to step in? Appalling though nuclear weapons are, they are responsible for fewer deaths than the invention of the simple sword. Should we have intervened then? No, the time was right when two factors concurred: when you became technologically capable of wiping yourselves out, and when you had the intellectual capability to understand your place in the universe and the rightness of our need to intervene.”

A silence lengthened, and Allen found himself standing. “Why,” he asked, “are we here? Why have you chosen us to tell all this to?”

He sat back down, frustrated that he had not asked more — like, what had happened aboard the plane, with the silver dancing spider; just what had the Serene done to him and, presumably, to everyone else in the amphitheatre?

“You were chosen,” said the golden figure before Allen, “because the Serene need human representatives to assist with the many changes that will affect Earth over the coming decades. You were chosen, all ten thousand of you, because you were assessed and found to possess the attributes required by the Serene.”

Someone asked, “Which are?”

Again Allen gained the impression that the figure before him was smiling. It gestured with an outstretched hand and said simply, “Chief of all, you posses humanity, an empathy with your fellow humans, a common decency. You are, if you like, representatives of your race.”

Allen stood again. “But what exactly do you want with us?”

The figure inclined its head, a gesture he recalled from the figure which had visited him back in Uganda. “One day a month, maybe two, you will be required to work for the Serene, to travel the world and, in time — when we have established settlements on other planets of the solar system — to those too. You will liaise with people working in various positions on the many projects we are establishing to bring change to the world, whether these projects are political, technological, scientific, social… For the duration you are working for the Serene, you will be unaware of what you are doing. Those days will be, as it were, blank; you will have no memories of what you did, who you met, or what you talked about.”

Someone objected, “But that’s wholly unreasonable!”

“But necessary,” said the golden figure. “There will be those amongst your kind who are opposed to the Serene and the changes we are instigating. If you retained awareness of the work you do, you could be compromised, endangered. It will be safer, for yourselves and for the success of the various projects undertaken, for you to work in ignorance. However,” the figure went on, “those amongst you who do not wish to lend themselves to our ends, who feel they cannot work within this remit, are free to absent themselves from proceedings.”

Seconds elapsed. Allen considered what they had been told, thought through what he was allowing himself to do, and did not demur. He swept his gaze around the auditorium. Here and there he saw figures disappear, absorbed back into the padding which cradled them. Someone nearby was thus retracted, his place taken by a seamless black void.

The golden figure went on, “Very well. Thirty of you from a total of ten thousand have decided not to take part in what lies ahead. They will be returned to their lives without prejudice, but without any knowledge of what occurred here today.”

“And the rest of us?” someone asked.

“Shortly, you too will be returned. You will retain memories of what happened here, and in a little under a month you will be contacted.”

“And will we be… compensated for the work we do for the Serene? Many of us have jobs which…”

The golden figure interrupted. “You will not be paid, as such, to work as representatives of the Serene; however, nor will your work situations be prejudiced.” The figure spread its arms. “In time, the nature of work as you know it will change, as your society changes. With limitless energy, with advanced computer systems, with much production automated, you will find that you have increased leisure time… which in turn will bring its own demands.”

A silence developed, and then someone asked, “Why should we trust you? Why should we take on trust everything you have said? For all we know, you might be the front for some hostile alien invasion.”

“I assure you that that is not the case, as you know…” And, again, the intimation that the figure was smiling. And the representative of the Serene was right: Allen knew, somehow without knowing quite how, that the invasion was wholly peaceable.

The African woman stood up again. “You said that there are other races that you’ve helped, out there in the universe… But when will we meet them? When will the human race be allowed out of the solar system to mix with these other races?”

He looked across at the woman, admiring her foresight.

“It will happen in time,” the golden figure said. “You are not prepared, quite yet, but that will change. One day you will meet beings similar to yourselves, and many wholly dissimilar, which inhabit the breadth of the galaxy.”

Allen looked at the African. Her mouth was open in wonder.

The golden figure finished, “Shortly you will meet individually with us, and any last questions will be answered.”

Seconds later the golden figures fade from sight. The panoramic view of the Saharan city vanished, to be replaced with the golden glowing disc, and suddenly it felt as if he was being absorbed into the very fabric of the padding around him.

He was back in darkness, with a golden strip glowing on the floor before him.

He was eased into a standing position, and stepped towards the lighted strip. He followed the light, but this time walked only a few paces before he found himself once again taken up by the padding. He sat, waiting, and a second later a golden figure manifested itself before him.

As earlier, in the lounge back at the national park, Allen made out flashes and pulses of light within the body of the figure, and again he wondered at the nature of this ‘self-aware entity’…

The figure reached out towards Allen’s right hand. It held something — a band of gold the identical colouration of itself — and slipped it over his hand. Allen looked down. A slim bangle sat on his wrist, warm to the touch. As he stared, it seemed that the band was absorbed into his flesh. Seconds later it had vanished.

The figure spoke. “Mere monitoring devices. Do not be alarmed. They also allow us to communicate with you.”

Allen said, “You said that you’d answer any final questions?”

The figure inclined its head. “That is so.”

“In that case, what happened to me, and presumably to the others out there, when time seemed to stop and I saw a silver…?”

The figure raised a hand. “It was not as you assumed. You saw what you thought was a spider, felt it invade you… This was your mind, making sense, as it were, of sensual inputs which were beyond its comprehension. It merely substituted images, sensations, that you could readily comprehend.”

“Then what did happen to me?”

“Your mind was audited,” the golden figure told him. “Your identity was accessed, recorded, and found suitable. The exact process of what we did would be beyond your scientific comprehension.”

“And… and how you managed to stop the entire human race from committing violence? Presumably that, too, would be beyond my puny intelligence to comprehend?”

“Intelligence does not come into the equation,” it said. “Rather, you — and I speak here of ‘you’ as the human race — you do not have the required scientific knowledge to understand the process whereby the Serene facilitated charea, as we term it, a word allied to the Hindu concept of ahimsa. Suffice to say that on a level of reality beyond the sub-atomic, there are fundamental particles — which you call strings — which are accessible and are… the only word I can find that remotely suggests the term we use, is ‘programmable.’ Through this readjustment of fundamental reality, the Serene brought about charea.”

“The domes…?” Allen began.

“The placement of the domes was necessary in order for the Serene to bring about the successful implementation of the charea.”

“And the Serene?” Allen asked. “You are their… their acceptable face, perhaps? What are they like in reality? Why don’t they show themselves?”

“They are humanoid in appearance… not dissimilar to yourselves.”

“And not monsters, repellent to our senses?”

“By no means.”

“Then why don’t they show themselves to us? I take it they are somewhere aboard these ships? Would it be possible to meet one…?” The very idea of it, he thought; to meet the aliens responsible for the salvation of the human race…

The figure hesitated. “There are no Serene aboard the kavala, the eight ships. They are few in number, and spread wide throughout the galaxy. We do their bidding, in their absence.”

Allen wondered whether he should be put out, on behalf of the human race, that the Serene did not see fit to be present during the momentous changes taking place on his planet. He said, “The golden figure I met earlier, in Uganda… it said that it, you, were ‘self-aware entities’… But what does that mean? Are you… robots, androids, or something my puny intellect cannot comprehend?”

“We are living, biological beings, self-aware, individual, conscious — but grown, as it were, and programmed with the… desires, is the right term… of our mentors, the Serene.”

“And have you yourself ever met a member of the Serene?”

The figure gazed at him. “That honour has never befallen me, but several of my contemporaries have had the privilege.”

“And what are the chances that I might one day meet a Serene?”

He sensed the being smile. “As a selected representative of an uplifted race,” it said, “the chances I would assess as… good.”

Allen smiled, then laughed. “If I’d been told about any of this a few days ago…” he began.

The golden figure said, “And now, if you have no more questions…”

“I have about a million, but it’d take a year to think of how to phrase them.”

“There will be time enough in the years ahead, my friend. Now, you wish to be transported to London?”

He stared. “How could you possibly know that?”

The figure inclined its domed and pulsing head. “The Serene know so much,” it said, and faded from view.

The padding around Allen flowed, returned him to an upright position. He followed the golden strip-light on the ground, and minutes later found himself aboard the alien plane. He was the first human of four to take his seat, and the second he did so he slipped into unconsciousness.

SPRING HAD COME to London, sunlight replacing the grey drizzle he had left just days before — but that was not the only change. The ad-screens plastered across the walls of buildings as he came into Victoria monorail station no longer flashed with tawdry advertisements. Every one of them showed the eightfold coming together of the alien starships over rural China, and the growth, on the parched land far below, of a second green city.

He noticed a change among his fellow Londoners, too. There was a collective air of excitement about the place, a buzz he had experienced only in times of momentous events — the outbreak of war, or Great Britain’s victory in the 2022 World Cup. Everyone was discussing the arrival of the aliens — the fact that they were called the ‘Serene’ was not public knowledge yet — and it appeared that even now, in the early days of the charea, some subtle change had come over the citizens of the capital. Was he imagining it, or were people more polite to each other, more respectful? As if, concomitant to the blanket ban on violence, individuals were wary of showing even such nascent signs of violence as bad temper or irritability with their fellow man.

He wondered how long it might be before a more unconscious psychological response manifested itself? Denied the cathartic release of violence might some individuals, the psychotic and unstable, suffer increased mental conflict? And what about citizens who never thought of resorting to violence? Would the very fact of violence being denied have some effect on society as a whole? No doubt, over the days and weeks ahead, the newsfeeds and TV channels would be bursting with pundits expounding their views at length.

On the way from Heathrow he read on his softscreen that the very first official communiqué from the alien ships had been received at the UN headquarters. The Visitors — as the news media had dubbed them — had announced that they would broadcast their intentions to the world at three that afternoon, Greenwich mean time.

Just as he was about to alight at Victoria, and take the underground to Notting Hill — where Sally would be awaiting him — he heard a couple of businessmen discussing in anxious tones what the aliens might have planned. One invoked the old film Independence Day, another The War of the Worlds, and both agreed that the end was nigh… Nursing his knowledge like a privilege, Allen felt like telling them that they were foolish and that there was nothing to worry about.

He left the carriage and took the packed escalator down to the Tube, and as he made his rattling journey west to his apartment and Sally, he saw his first case of ‘spasming,’ as it came to be known.

A dozen school kids were arguing in the aisle. In the general verbal to and fro, one particular insult was taken badly and a youth moved towards another, anger on his thin face. He pulled a knife, drawing gasps from nearby passengers, then stopped suddenly, his face twitching, his entire body convulsing as if in the grip of some autonomic malaise.

“He’s spasming! Spasming!” the others taunted, dancing around the stricken youth.

Allen stepped from the train at Notting Hill, thinking that the display of spasming and the resulting taunts were eminently preferable to the violence that had been circumvented.

HE UNLOCKED THE door to his flat and stepped into the hall, the pleasurably tight pressure of anticipation within his chest. He heard a sound from the lounge, dropped his holdall and waited for Sally to emerge. She appeared in the doorway in faded blue jeans and a white cheese-cloth blouse. She stopped there, her breath caught, then rushed at him. He lifted her off the floor and it came to him that the heft of her in his arms, her reality, was far more meaningful, far more emotionally resonant, than his recent encounter with the extraterrestrials.

He carried her into the lounge and collapsed on the settee; they kissed and hugged, pulling away frequently to look at each other.

She appeared far more beautiful than he recalled her ever being in Africa; her face was fuller now, no longer taut and stressed, and she’d had her hair cut and styled, shortened to shoulder-length.

“You look… incredible.”

She laughed. “It’s great to be back. I can’t believe the range of food. I forgot what London was like… I’m eating well. I’ve put on pounds!” She patted her perfectly flat stomach and laughed.

“All the more to love,” he said.

She tugged at his shirt, and they undressed and moved to the bedroom.

Later, lying face to face in the sun that slanted in through the bay window, she stroked his arm and murmured, “Tell me all about what happened on the alien ship.”

“The Serene,” he said, “hail from a star twenty-odd light years from Earth, a star we call Delta Pavonis.”

He told her about his experience aboard the nexus of alien ships, the amphitheatre containing ten thousand fellow human representatives, and what the ‘self-aware entities’ had said.

He seemed to talk for a long time, recounting his impressions, his feelings.

“And they chose you,” she said, as if in awe.

He laughed. “For my humanity, my empathy.”

She whispered, “Which is the reason I fell in love with you, Geoff Allen.”

“Thank you. But enough of me. What have you been up to?”

“Well…” she began, then told him about the encounter with her kidnapper in the village of Benali.

“And… how did he react?”

“With anger, especially when I offered him antiseptic for his face… He came for me and…”

He said, “There’s already a term for it.” He described the youths he’d seen on the Tube earlier. “It’s called spasming.”

“That’s exactly what happened when he tried to attack me. He stopped dead, taut, and… spasmed.”

She was silent for a while, thinking back. He said, “It must have been… satisfying.”

She nodded. “Yes. Yes, it was. But then… then something happened, and I don’t know whether I did the right thing, or…”

“What?”

She sighed. “Ali had a wife, Zara. It was obvious from how he spoke to her that… that he treated her like an animal, to be blunt. When I was about to leave, she ran from their hut and asked to come with me. I… I don’t know whether what I did then was a sadistic impulse, done to get another one over on my enemy… or done out of altruism. I said she could come with me, and we made for the car, Ali following in distress and anger, and spasming as he tried to prevent Zara from leaving him.”

She fell silent, shaking her head.

She murmured, “She told me about her life as I drove down to Kampala. You wouldn’t believe it, in the twenty-first century. She was little more than a slave. Ali wanted a son, but Zara fell pregnant twice and both times with a girl, so he forced her to terminate the pregnancies. And he beat her, abused her. She’s an educated woman, not that that makes the slightest bit of difference to the reprehensibility of his attacks. But she was clever enough to know that she deserved more. And then with the coming of the Serene… this gave her the courage to act.”

He thumbed a tear from her cheek. “Sally, you did the right thing. Don’t browbeat yourself trying to scrutinise your motivations.”

“But one’s motivations are important, Geoff. They’re who we are, after all.”

He smiled and shrugged and wondered why some people tortured themselves like this, needlessly examining their actions and reactions and the reasons for them.

“You’re a good person, Sally.”

She looked momentarily unhappy, then said, “Don’t you question yourself, Geoff? Analyse your motivations?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, maybe…”

She smiled, reached out and stroked his cheek. “That’s one of the things I love about you, you know, you’re so…”

“Go on, say it. ‘Simple’.”

She laughed. “Uncomplicated.”

He remembered something, looked across the room at the wall clock and said, “It’s a quarter to three. The Serene are broadcasting an announcement on the hour. We could go down to the King George and watch it there?”

“Let’s do that,” she said, jumping out of bed and dressing hurriedly. “I could kill a G&T.”

On their way to the pub, arm in arm, they discussed the ramifications of the Serene’s charea.

“So much will change, Geoff. It’ll take us a long time, and much soul-searching, to adjust ourselves, our psyches, to the consequences. I was reading yesterday about suicides, or potential suicides. They can’t kill themselves, though dozens have blogged about trying to find inventive, non-violent ways to do so… Intentional ‘accidents’, by whatever means — but they all fail.”

“Which will have its own psychological fall-out,” he said. “The shrinks will have a field day.”

“Have you seen the coverage from America? The Republicans are up in arms — well, they would be, if…” She laughed. “They’re demanding action from their government — as if the government could act! It’s nice to see the all-powerful demon rendered impotent for once.” She smiled. “The gun lobby refuse to believe it’s not some temporary thing that will go away so they can go back to the good old days of being able to shoot each other with the slightest provocation.”

“Well, they can still bear arms, as per the Second Amendment… They thankfully just can’t use them.”

“You obviously haven’t heard the latest. I don’t know if it’s any more than a rumour — but I wouldn’t put it past them. Apparently some arms manufacturer is looking into developing something called Random Factor Weaponry. It’s based on the theory of intended or unintended consequences. If you pull a trigger, they say, and the obvious consequence is that it will result in the death or injury of someone, then the act is rendered impossible thanks to charea. But if there were some randomised factor built into the pulling of the trigger, or the pressing of the button… so that the action might not result in death or injury, then, according to the theorist, this could be a way of getting around the Serene’s proscription on violence.”

Allen shook his head. “I sometimes despair…”

“The delights of capitalism for you.”

For a Saturday afternoon, the streets of London were preternaturally quiet; he put it down to the imminent announcement from the Serene. Everyone was at home in front of their televisions, awaiting the most momentous broadcast in history.

Sally said, “And your golden men, the ‘self aware entities’, have been seen all over the place.”

“They have?”

“Reports have come in from around the world. Citizens have seen them standing on rooftops, on mountainsides, just standing there, absolutely motionless and silent, just watching…”

They pushed through the entrance of the King George, and Allen was surprised to see that the main bar was only half full. A flatscreen TV played in the far corner. He ordered a pint of Fuller’s best bitter and a gin and tonic, and carried them to a table before the flatscreen.

They clinked glasses. “Here’s to the Serene.”

“To the Serene.”

They stared up at the screen, which showed an aerial shot of the eightfold arrangement of starships over China, and the expanding green city far beneath. Seconds later the image switched; the murmuring of fellow drinkers ceased and a sudden silence fell across the bar.

A golden figure, swirling with interior light, stared out of the screen.

It spoke — its tone, Allen realised for the first time, neither male nor female.

Beside him, Sally reached out and gripped his hand.

“We are the Serene,” said the figure, “and we have come to aid the people of planet Earth.”

CHAPTER NINE

JAMES MORWELL COWERED in the corner of the bathroom, naked, as the woman — also naked — advanced on him.

Every Friday morning at nine o’clock Cheryl, a statuesque mulatto hired from a very discreet escort agency, visited him at his penthouse suite for a little recreational rough and tumble. Today they had started in bed, where Cheryl usually warmed up with a few well aimed slaps preparatory to a barrage of fists. This morning, however, she could not even manage the slaps. She straddled him, lifted a hand, and spasmed.

He glanced down at his flaccid member, knowing that it would only respond when the first blow landed. Even closing his eyes and thinking of past times, Cheryl drawing blood from his lips with her jabbing uppercuts, failed to stir his quiescent libido.

He’d rolled off the bed, shouting at her to follow him, and retreated to the bathroom. This, usually, was the culmination of the session and the high point of her visit. His father had once, and only once, taken a bat to James in his fourteenth year, and far from shying away from the pain, Morwell Jnr. had relished it.

As with most things in his life these days, he thanked, and blamed, his father.

“Hit me, for chrissake!” he yelled, curled like a foetus between the bath and the toilet bowl.

Cheryl picked up the baseball bat and advanced, a look of determination on her beautiful face. She raised the bat, paused, and froze in that position like some perfect statue of Amazon power.

“Do it!” Morwell yelled.

She strained. The muscles of her upper arms spasmed.

She lowered the bat, sobbing. “I… I’m sorry. It’s impossible. I can’t…”

Damn the Serene, he thought. Not content with undermining his business ventures, their charea injunction had brought an end to one of the few pleasures he had left in life.

He stared up at her as she towered over him.

“Jesus… Okay, take a piss. You can do that at least, can’t you?”

With luck, a little golden shower might retrieve the situation.

Cheryl lodged a bare foot on the toilet cistern, squatted above him, and obliged.

LATER MORWELL SLIPPED Cheryl a cheque for a thousand dollars, showered, and took the elevator down to the boardroom.

Yesterday, just after the Serene had addressed the world, he’d called in the heads of his various corporations. The earliest they’d been able to gather had been eleven this morning, and Morwell had spent a tortured evening fretting about the collapse of his empire; not even Lal’s honeyed words of reassurance had helped him this time.

He stepped into the boardroom and looked around the oval table. Everyone was present, and a gallery of more terrified faces he’d never seen. Terrified, he thought, for the most part; though one or two cocky bastards looked almost smug — no doubt relishing his predicament.

He sat at the head of the table, Lal at his side, placed his fingertips together, and said, “Right, no beating around the fucking bush this morning. Let’s have it. As usual, from my left. Jennings?”

Ralph Jennings, the CEO of Morwell Media, an organisation spanning the globe and encompassing TV channels, online sites and a thousand newsfeeds, was a bulky, tanned Texan who exuded confidence. He, of everyone around the table today, appeared the least concerned.

“I know the coming of the Serene is a double edged sword, but in terms of Morwell Media it’s proved a helluva draw. Viewing figures across the board are up seventy-three per cent and advertising revenue has consequently rocketed by some seven billion, total. Of course, that was before yesterday’s announcement.”

“Of course,” Morwell said with bitterness. He looked along the table at Raul Nader, the smug European bastard in charge of Morwell Energy. “So… give me the bad news, Nader.”

Nader cocked an impeccably plucked eyebrow. “To employ an Americanism, Mr Morwell, we are going down the john. We’re stuffed. When the Serene announced the limitless flow of solar energy… our shares plummeted even further than they had been doing. Not that we’re alone in this–”

Morwell leaned forward. “I couldn’t give a shit whether we’re alone or not. All I want to know is how Morwell Enterprises is affected, okay?”

Nader gave one of his smug smiles. “I would have thought the larger picture, the vaster scheme of things, is the only way to approach what’s happened over the past couple of days. Merely concentrating on our own performances…”

“Go on.”

“…is pointless. We might as well admit that nothing will be the same again. Everything is changed, now. You heard what the Serene said.”

“I heard the fuckers very well, and I want to salvage what I can.”

The bastard had the temerity to laugh in his face. “Salvage what? This is the end of everything as we know it. Capitalism, as such, is history. You might as well face it, sir: Morwell Enterprises is dead in the water.”

What hurt so much, Morwell thought, was to hear the truth from such an arrogant slime-ball as Nader.

Composing himself, he looked down the table at Valery Rasnic, the Serb who headed Morwell Defence, the arms division of Morwell Enterprises. “Valery?”

The slab-faced Serb looked grim. “Our shares were wiped off the board overnight, sir. They’re valueless. We can’t even sell our holdings at a ninety per cent loss.”

“We could,” Nader put in silkily, “always start producing ploughs…”

Rasnic glared at Nader.

“There was a little hope in the hours before the announcement,” Rasnic said. “Perhaps the non-violence was only a temporary measure. But…” he spread his hands. “That’s not to be. We are dealing here with a race so far in advance, technologically, of ourselves…”

Morwell turned to Lal. “You’ve been looking into how the Serene effect what they call charea?”

Lal said, “I have experts in a dozen fields working on the problem, sir. The first reports should be with me in a matter of hours.”

“To what end?” Nader asked. “You saw their ships! Christ, they’re growing cities in the deserts out there with technology we can’t even dream about. They’ve stopped every citizen in the world from committing acts of violence. Let’s be honest with ourselves, we have no way of comprehending how the Serene are doing what they’re doing.”

A silence greeted his words. Morwell regarded his conjoined fingers. He looked up and said, slowly, “You sound, Nader, as if you think this… invasion… is a good thing.”

Nader pursed his lips, rocked his head in that insufferably arrogant manner of his. “You want my opinion, the planet was stuffed until the Serene came along. Global warming, resource depletion, wars and terrorism… The end was in sight. Only a fool could oppose what they’ve done.”

Morwell pointed a finger at him. “That’s where you’re very wrong, Nader. We at Morwell are proud of our optimism… You don’t think I was sitting back and doing nothing, for chrissake? Look at the billions I sank into clean fusion, the atmosphere clean-up technology… I had experts, futurologists working around the clock…”

“To come up with solutions that might ameliorate global conditions minimally, just as long as they didn’t impact on increased Morwell profits.”

Morwell made a pistol of his fingers and said, “Nader, you’re…”

The bastard climbed to his feet, smiling. “Save your breath, Morwell. I resign. Not,” he added, as he strode away from the table, “that there’s much left to resign from.”

He closed the door quietly behind him as he left the room.

Lal leaned towards Morwell and murmured, “I’ll have Nader’s deputy fly in and meet us. He’s an able man.”

Morwell nodded, distracted.

He looked around the table at the half-dozen silent men and women, heads of his chemical division, advertising, mining and the rest…

They were frozen, frightened of saying a damned thing lest they incur his wrath. The hell of it was that he understood something which they had so far failed to grasp: his wrath was worth jack-shit now. He was powerless, and he knew it. Perhaps it was sheer disbelief, or lack of imagination, which kept them looking to him loyally for all the answers.

He nodded, and one by one the rest of his team gave their bleak reports: they all said pretty much the same, that shares were plummeting, the market was moribund, that a hiatus existed until the Serene made their next announcement and the restructuring of world markets and global industry commenced.

Towards the end of the meeting he said, “I, along with every other head of industry in the US, have been summoned to the White House tomorrow to meet our illustrious, but impotent, president. Apparently we’re meeting with ‘representatives’ of the Serene, and there we will learn what the future holds for us, if anything. Word is that the existing infrastructure will remain, though altered, with experts in place to ease us through the interim period of… adjustment.”

He looked around the table. He was met with understanding nods, the occasional timid smile.

“Very well, that will be all. I’ll convene a meeting in five days to go over what we’ve found out. Thank you all for coming.”

As the boardroom emptied, he turned to Lal. “Fetch me a coffee. And then there are one or two further things we need to discuss.”

“SO WHAT’S THE story with these sightings of so-called golden men?”

He sat before the floor-to-ceiling window, cupping his coffee in both hands, and stared out down the length of Manhattan. Nothing at all seemed to have changed out there; life went on as usual. It might have been a week ago, with no one dreaming of the Serene…

“There were rumours at first. People reported seeing tall, silent golden figures. They were stationed in elevated positions, staring out, unmoving. Then footage started coming in.”

Lal tapped his softscreen and routed the image to the wallscreen. Morwell swivelled his chair and stared at the scene. A cityscape, somewhere in America, and on a tall building a golden figure, staring down with authority, a certain silent majesty.

“They remain in position for up to six hours,” Lal said, “then simply fade away. People have tried to get near them, but can only approach to a distance of a couple of metres, then they come up against a… some kind of barrier, sir. An invisible, irresistible force.” He tapped the screen again and the image changed. The next one showed a young man approach a golden figure on a hilltop. He reached out, his outstretched hand hitting something solid, then patted his way around the figure like a mime-artist.

“Okay,” Morwell said, “I get the picture.”

“I have our best people looking into the manifestations, sir,” Lal assured him.

Morwell nodded. “And what’s the situation with the random factor weaponry you told me about?”

Lal cleared his throat. “There have been… developments, sir,” he said, and tapped his softscreen.

“I had Adams in weapon technology and Abrahams in computing put their heads together and they came up with something. The basic idea is to utilise the idea of unintended consequence, or accidental ramifications, to develop an effective weapon that would circumvent the Serene’s charea.”

He tapped his screen again and the image on the wall showed a young man garbed in what looked like a prison uniform. He was seated in a chair with a skull-cap fastened to his shaved head. The man’s eyes looked dead, or drugged.

“We found a volunteer from a local psychiatric institute. He has a long history of suicide attempts and self-mutilation, occasioned by manic depressive episodes. He also happens to be terminally ill. We cleared it with the family’s lawyers, and agreed to pay out a generous compensation package.” Lal smiled. “The young man was the perfect guinea pig, as it were.”

Lal indicated a computer terminal to the left of the image. “What we have here, sir, is the working end of the device. It’s basically a computer system that randomises the results of certain initial inputs.”

“In plain English, Lal.”

On the screen, a white-coated figure swung a keyboard on a boom so that it hovered before the seated young man. The image froze.

“Put simply, the subject presses one button on the keyboard before him. Now, this command initiates over a thousand possible results. The initialisation begins a sequenced command cascade, the majority of which subsequent commands will result in the electrodes in the subject’s skullcap failing to work. However, just one command in the millions generated will result in the desired effect — the electrodes firing and bringing about the subject’s death.” Lal smiled. “It works on the principle that an action taken might, somewhere down the line, result in an accident — and accidental deaths are not proscribed by the Serene.”

Morwell frowned. “But doesn’t that mean the subject will have to hit the command millions of times to achieve the desired result?”

Lal smiled. “No. The single command initiates a million such commands within the system’s program.”

“I see,” Morwell said, leaning forward. “Ingenious. And?”

Lal tapped his screen and the still image unfroze.

The young man leaned forward, reached out and attempted to tap a key on the board before him. His hand froze and he spasmed.

Morwell grunted. “But did the subject know what he was trying to do?” he asked.

“That’s the worrying thing, sir. He didn’t.”

“And yet he was stopped by the Serene, by their charea, from going through with the action…?” He shook his head. “The Serene have got that one covered, too.”

He sipped his coffee and turned to the view over Manhattan. He recalled something Lal had told him late last night. “And what about these ‘representatives’ of the Serene? They’re human, I take it?”

Lal sat side-saddle on the desk. “Apparently, yes, sir. I’ve been collating reports from around the world and it appears that an unknown number of humans have been selected, randomly, to facilitate the work of the Serene on Earth. As of yet, the identities of these people are not known — we only know of the ‘representatives’ because a few individuals spoke of being approached by golden figures and being told of their selection, though they have no recollection of being ‘deselected,’ as it were — these memories have only been recovered later when these people became suspicious of ‘lost’ hours and underwent hypnotism. It appears that the Serene are keen to keep their representatives incognito.”

Morwell leaned back in his chair and considered what Lal had just told him.

He pointed at his Indian facilitator. “Lal, I want you to start an investigation. This is priority. It’s important to know who these ‘representatives’ of the Serene are, what the exact nature of their work is, and why they were chosen. Work on it.”

“Yes, sir. Is that all?”

Morwell nodded, and Lal hurried from the boardroom.

Alone, he contemplated the events of the morning, one of the most disastrous business meetings he’d ever chaired.

Still, not everything had gone wrong.

When Cheryl had copiously urinated over him that morning, he’d managed to achieve a brief erection.

CHAPTER TEN

DAWN WAS LIGHTENING the skies over the Bay of Bengal when the midnight train from Delhi pulled into Howrah station.

Ana Devi, dressed in the shalwar kameez she’d stolen from Sanjeev, and a new pair of sandals bought from her savings, jumped from the last carriage, squeezed through a gap in the corrugated iron fence, and made her way quickly across the goods yard to where her friends would still be sleeping. She high stepped over the rusty tracks, lifting the leggings of her shalwar so as not to dirty the bottoms.

She was still trying to come to terms with what had happened to her over the course of the past day.

She, dalit Ana Devi, an orphan street kid with no education, little money and few prospects, had been selected by an alien race known as the Serene to act as a representative, along with thousands of other people from around the world…

She had even stood up in the vast gathering of the representatives and found herself asking a question. Later, one to one with a golden being, she had asked further questions, and found out much more.

For one or two days every month, she would be called upon to travel the world and liaise with those working for change; before then, however, the Serene had given her a specific task to accomplish.

Everything had changed now; nothing would ever be the same. She thought of the people who had made her life a misery, starting with the low-lifes like Sanjeev Varnaputtram and Kevi Nan, then the various station workers and the corrupt policemen, right up to the scheming, greedy politicians… No longer would they be able to wield their power, backed by the threat of violence, that had made her life, and those of many others, a living hell for so long. The rich had a shock coming; the poor could anticipate poverty no longer.

She wondered what her friends might have to say when she told them that she was taking them away from the station and the hazardous, hand-to-mouth existence they had become accustomed to for years?

The goods yard was quiet, the silence broken only by the distant, familiar cannonade of dull successive clankings as engines buffered wagons together on the far side of the yard. She had often been awoken at dawn by the noise; she wondered if she would miss it.

She came to the wagon that doubled as the station kids’ bedroom. She stood on the cracked wheel below the sliding door, reached up and hauled it open. A gap of six inches allowed a shaft of sunlight to fall across perhaps twenty sleepy children, squirming like piglets and calling out in feeble protest at being woken.

Someone looked up, saw her and cried out, “Ana! It’s Ana!”

She climbed into the wagon and hugged her friends, tearful at her reception.

“But where have you been?”

“We thought you were dead!”

“We heard you’d got away from fat Sanjeev…”

“You been gone for days!”

Everyone was wide awake now and crowding around her, eager to hear her story.

She stared around at the wide-eyed, expectant faces.

“Kevi Nan took me,” she began. “Jangar caught me and Prakesh, and Kevi Nan paid the bastard for me. He took me to fat Sanjeev and the bugger tried to fuck me.” She stared around at the circle of faces, looking for Prakesh.

“Dalki told us you’d got away,” a tall boy called Gopal said. “He said you flew through the window and lost yourself on the crowds on Moulana Azad Road.”

“But that was two days ago, Ana. Where have you been all this time?”

“Why didn’t you come straight back to us?”

She raised a hand to silence the questions. “I got away from Sanjeev because of what the aliens, the Serene, have… have done to us, the human race.”

Danta, a six-year-old boy and the youngest of the group, held up a flattened, melted water bottle. “I put it on the chai-wallah’s brazier, Ana, and made my own spaceship!”

She smiled. The melted bottle did slightly resemble a Serene starship. She was always amazed at her friends’ imagination and ingenuity.

“No more can anyone harm us,” she said. “Sanjeev tried to hit me with a stick, but he couldn’t do it, so I jumped through the window and ran. After that I went to the park and slept in the bushes, and then…”

She stopped, staring around at the expectant faces. “And then I had a dream, and I was visited by a golden figure, someone who works for the aliens, and he told me to go to Delhi airport where a plane would take me to Africa.”

She had expected cries of “Liar!” or at least looks of disbelief, but all she saw on the faces of her friends were expressions of amazement.

She looked into their eyes, one by one. “The plane took me to the aliens’ starships high above the new city they have made in the African desert, and there I saw many other people from around the world who have been chosen to work for the Serene.”

They stared at her, comically open-mouthed. At last a little girl said, “You, Ana Devi…?”

She nodded, and was suddenly aware that she was weeping. “Me,” she said, “Ana Devi… They want me to help them bring peace and prosperity to everyone in the world.”

She dashed away her tears; she had to appear brave in front of her friends. She told them about the day or two every month when she would travel the world, working for the aliens. “But first,” she said, “the Serene asked me to do something very important. We are leaving the station,” she went on, raising her voice above the babble of excited chatter, “and travelling south to a new home.”

A tumult of questions greeted her words. Ana silenced them and said, “Gopal, what did you say?”

“But how will we leave Kolkata? We have no money!”

Anan reached into the pocket of her kameez and pulled out thirty silver tickets. “I have these,” she said. “We will leave on the eight o’clock train to Cochin, and get off at Andhra Pradesh in the middle of India.”

“Why there?” more than one child asked.

“Because that is where the Serene want us to live.”

“But how will we live?” someone else asked. “Will we steal and beg and sell lighters as we do here? And is there a big station there where we can make our home?”

Ana shook her head. “We will be given houses,” she said, “and we will work in proper, paid jobs.”

She saw flattened palms pressed to cheeks, wide astonished eyes, open mouths and many tearful eyes.

She looked around the group again; Prakesh was not among her friends.

She said, “Prakesh?”

Someone replied in a small voice, “When you got away from Sanjeev, he sent Kevi Nan for Prakesh, who was in Jangar’s office polishing his boots and cleaning his leather belt. Kevi Nan paid Jangar and took Prakesh to Sanjeev.”

Ana felt anger swell in her chest. “And he has been there ever since?”

Everyone nodded.

She thought about what to do, then said, “We cannot go without Prakesh, so together we will go to Sanjeev’s and free him! Do not be afraid. Remember, fat Sanjeev and his men can no longer harm us, ah-cha?”

She turned without a further word, jumped from the wagon and marched across the interlaced tracks. She paused before the iron fence, and only then looked behind her. She had expected perhaps three or four followers — but smiled when she saw that everyone, even little Danta, had crowded after her.

She led the posse through the fence, across the car park and down the warren of alleys towards fat Sanjeev’s house.

Five minutes later they came to the timber gate in the high wall. Gopal and three others had picked up a split railway tie from the goods yard, and now they used it to great effect. They battered the timber against the lock, and after three blows the gate shuddered open.

The kids surged in, led by Ana.

She ran up the overgrown path, through the open front door and into the tiled hallway.

Kevi Nan and the two big Sikhs sat crossed-legged on the floor, smoking a hookah. They looked up, surprised, when Ana appeared on the threshold, bumped forward by those behind her.

Kevi jumped to his feet, followed by the Sikhs. “What do you want?” Kevi said.

“Where is Prakesh?” Ana asked.

The Sikhs moved, stationed themselves before the door to Sanjeev’s room. Ana found Gopal and whispered, “Follow me.”

She hurried from the hallway and turned right, forcing her way through the shrubbery. They arrived at the shuttered window, and Gopal did not have to be told what to do.

He and a friend launched the battering ram at the shutters and they flew apart like kindling.

Ana climbed through the window, recalling when she’d escaped from here two days ago. Now she jumped down from the sill and stared around the glittering, candle-lit room.

Fat Sanjeev sat upright on his bed, naked and glistening with oil. Lying on his belly beside him, also naked but sound asleep, was Prakesh.

Sanjeev glared at Ana. “I thought, as violence failed to give me what I wanted with you, I would be gentle with the boy. But…” His gaze slipped to the sleeping child. “But it would seem that even peaceable pleasures are denied me. Take him!”Ana crossed to the bed, knelt and stroked Prakesh’s short hair. “Prakesh,” she whispered. “It is me, Ana. Wake up.” She shook his shoulder, gently.

His eyelids flickered and he stared up at her drowsily.

“Prakesh,” she said, “I have come to take you away from here.”

He sat up on the edge of the bed, and Ana found his shorts and t-shirt on the floor and dressed him.

Sanjeev said, “He might be a little unsteady on his feet, Ana Devi, as we shared a little Bombay rum.”

She averted her eyes from the fat man and tried to shut her ears to his words. She pulled Prakesh to his feet. He swayed against her, and Gopal took his arms and together they walked him across to the window. Outside, twenty faces peered into the room, staring at Sanjeev with fear and hatred in their eyes.

Ana helped Prakesh over the sill, then climbed out herself. She paused and turned, staring into the room illuminated like a stage.

Sanjeev was smiling at her. He even lifted a hand in farewell. “Until next time, Ana,” he said.

She shook her head. “We are leaving Kolkata,” she said, “and never coming back. I hope I will never see you again, Sanjeev Varnaputtram.”

She had the sudden urge to reach back into the room and upset a candle so that it set fire to the curtains… but something stopped her — and she did not know whether it was the charea of the Serene, or her own conscience which made her turn and hurry from the open window.

They returned to the goods yard and Ana ordered everyone to gather their scant belongings. As they were about to set off for the station, Ana cornered Rajeev and Kallif and said, “You are coming too?”

The pair of ten year-olds regarded her suspiciously. “You said…” Kallif began.

Ana interrupted, “I am not sure I want to take two little spies along with me.”

They stared at her in silence, their big brown eyes regarding their bare feet.

Ana said, “Why did you tell fat Sanjeev all about me, hm?”

On the verge of tears, Rajeev said, “He made us spy on you, Ana. Then he asked many questions. He said that if we didn’t tell him all about you… he said he would hurt us again.”

“So you told him all about me, and he gave you sweetmeats and barfi in payment for your treachery…”

Kallif began blubbering. “But we did share them, Ana.”

“Can we come with you?” Rajeev begged. “Please don’t leave us behind!”

How could she, in all fairness, leave them here to suffer at the hands of fat Sanjeev?

At last she nodded. “But from now on, no spying, ah-cha?”

They beamed at her. “Thank you, Ana! Thank you!”

THEY MADE THEIR way to platform six, where the Cochin Express was steadily filling with passengers for the long cross-country journey.

She found carriage C, the rag-tag gaggle of street kids on her heels. A liveried attendant barred her way. “The train is full!” he snapped. “Everyone is heading south to see the alien starships. Go back and watch the show on television. Chalo!”

Smiling, Ana withdrew the tickets from her pocket and waved them at the man. “I have tickets for my twenty-three friends and myself, with six to spare.”

He took the tickets, examined them with incredulity, and shook his head. “Where did you steal these from, girl?”

At the end of the platform, a whistle sounded and the guard shouted, “All aboard!”

“Allow us to board the train like all the other passengers with valid tickets,” Ana demanded.

“You are thieves and dogs–” the attendant began.

Ana squirmed past him, pulling Prakesh after her. The others followed quickly. The attendant cried out and tried to stop the snaking street kids. They evaded his grasp with practised ease, and he stepped forward and raised a hand to lash out at them.

Ana turned to see the mortified attendant spasming, and her friends filing past him with verbal taunts and their own mimicry of the man’s galvanic, puppet-like spasms.

She led the kids to their seats and eased Prakesh down beside her. The other passengers were staring at Ana and her friends, some with distaste and others with tolerant amusement. Ana smiled back at them, defiantly. Minutes later the train pulled slowly from the platform.

She stared through the window at the decrepit station sliding past. She saw the buildings and advertising hoardings that she had known for years, the familiar faces of the station workers. She looked up, at the footbridge high above, and saw a grey-furred monkey staring down at her. The odd thing was, she thought, that she felt not the slightest regret at her departure.

His head on Ana’s shoulder, Prakesh murmured, “Where are we going, Ana?”

As the train slid from the station, she told him.

GOPAL WAS THE first to see the Serene starships.

They had been travelling for hours when Ana fell asleep, tired from staring out of the window at the passing countryside, the farmers toiling in the fields, identical stretches of dun-coloured land passing by without variation.

Gopal’s cry woke her in an instant. She sat up quickly, then worked to control her panic. She no longer had to fear being awoken in the dead of night by someone’s alarmed cries, ready to run from whoever had a grievance against her and her friends.

“There!” Gopal pointed, pressing his face against the window. Ana peered and made out, high in the distance, the ellipse of the eight conjoined starships. At this distance and angle they presented a discus-shape hovering over a green blur of land on the horizon.

“What did the Serene look like?” Danta asked.

“Were they green?”

“Did they have big eyes and claws?”

“Were they monsters?”

Ana smiled and said that she had not seen the Serene aboard the starships. The golden figure had explained that they were few and far between, and were not monstrous but humanoid.

“But who are the golden figures?” Gopal wanted to know.

“They work for the Serene,” she replied.

“Like slaves?”

Ana laughed. “No, more like… like servants.”

Of course, she thought, the golden figures might not have been telling the truth: what if the Serene looked like monsters, like big hairy spiders which human beings would find horrible to look at; what if the golden figures were just human-shaped in order to set human minds at rest?

She realised that, even if this were so, it did not really matter. The Serene had brought peace to the Earth for the first time in living memory.

Two hours later the train drew to a halt at the town of Fandrabad and Ana led her little tribe out into the sweltering midday heat.

They left the station, along with a thousand other pilgrims, all chattering excitedly at what lay ahead. Ana came to a sudden halt on the steps of the station and stared in amazement at the sight that greeted her.

On the edge of the small town, a great shimmering wall of white light stretched away on either side for kilometres. If she stared hard she could see through the veil of light. She made out a stretch of green land, dotted with domes and other buildings, but faint as if seen through gauze.

It seemed as if every TV and satellite station in India, and beyond, was gathered at the foot of the shimmering light, along with crowds of curious Indians and even a few Westerners. In many places the crowd stood five deep, attempting to see what lay beyond the veil.

“What now?” Prakesh asked.

She looked around at her group. “Now we go to the light,” she said. “Follow me closely.”

She gripped Prakesh’s hand and led her band towards the noisy crowd. The hubbub of chatter increased as they drew nearer. Food vendors had set up stalls around the light’s perimeter, and big pantechnicons belonging to the satellite companies blocked the road. Ana led the way around the truck, and past reporters holding microphones and talking about the wondrous extraterrestrial visitation.

The crowd was thick before them, eager pilgrims pressing up to the white light and peering through. Ana watched as the occasional daring individual reached out and touched the light, then turned and excitedly reported that it felt solid…

Ana recalled what the golden figure aboard the starships had told her.

She looked back at her gaggle of rag-tag street kids, clad in torn shirts and shorts, most barefoot, some with flip-flops. “Now everyone hold hands so that we’re all linked together,” she instructed.

Like this they moved around the circumference of the light, Ana attempting to find an area where the crowd was not so thick. Their passage aroused much comment and the occasional insult. “What are these little animals doing here?” one fat Brahmin called out. “Cannot the police do their job for once?”

“Get back to the slums, harijans. There is nothing out here for you.”

Ana ignored the shouts, heartened that the name-callers were often shouted down by their fellows: “Show the children some respect, ah-cha? We are living in a time of peace.”

At last the crowd thinned before the wall of light, and Ana led her children towards an area where a line of citizens only three deep stood gazing through the light.

She stopped, turned and addressed her friends. “Make sure that we are all together and holding hands. Follow me, and do not stop walking as we approach the light…”

Prakesh stared at her. “We’re going through the light, Ana?”

She grinned. “Wait and see.”

“But someone said that the light was solid!”

“Just trust me, ah-cha?”

She stepped forward and tried to ease her way past the cordon of curious individuals. “Excuse me, please. Can we come through…?”

The crowd parted with reluctance, one or two people muttering at the kids.

Ana paused before the wall of light and looked up. It rose high into the sky, and to the left and right. She stared through the light and made out a rising stretch of green, like the brightest lawn she had seen on the softscreens in the restaurants along Station Road.

She turned to her children and said. “Remember, hold hands, and do not let go. Now follow me!”

People laughed. “And where do you think you’re going, slum-girl? Do you think you and your kind will be allowed into paradise?”

Hardly daring to hope that the next few seconds might make these people eat their words, she closed her eyes and stepped forward, into the light.

She heard gasps from behind her, then startled cries. She walked through the light and felt the ground beneath her feet change from sandy soil to soft, springy grass.

She opened her eyes and stared around her. The rest of the children had passed through the light with her, hand in hand, and stood about in mute startlement. Ana looked back through the light and made out faces pressed up against the barrier, staring at the street kids with envy and incredulity.

Before them, a great town spread out to the horizon, bright green grass and silver domes, tubular silver towers and other, similar-shaped buildings, but these ones laid out flat along the land.

She looked up and gasped. High above was the great conjoined disc, like a shield in the sky, of the Serene starships.

Ana led her children up the gentle incline towards the nearest dome.

THEY WERE MET by a tall Westerner who called himself Greg and led them further into the town to a building which, he said, they could call home. The low, brick-built dwelling was divided into several rooms, with a communal dining room, a lounge overlooking a vast garden, and bedrooms to the rear.

Greg introduced Ana and the children to an Indian woman called Varma, who called herself a supervisor and said that over the next few days she would instruct the children on life in the new town. First, they were to rest in their rooms, and in three hours meet in the dining room for a communal meal.

Ana selected a room, between Gopal’s and Prakesh’s, stepped over the threshold and moved to close the door behind her. She found that she was unable to complete the action, and something caught in her throat. She had lived for years with no idea of privacy, had slept every night packed tight with the other street kids — and now she could not bring herself to shut out her friends and family.

There was a narrow bed in the room, and a bedside table and a chair, and a window that looked out over the rolling green land.

She moved to the bed and sat down, bouncing a little to test its springiness.

She had shared a bed with her brother many years ago, at the age of five, when she had lived with her aunt and uncle, but she had forgotten quite how soft they were.

For the first time in sixteen years she had a room and a bed of her own.

The comfort would take some getting used to.

She lay down on the bed, rested her head on the pillow, and tried to relax. She opened her eyes and sat up. There was something wrong. She felt alone. She moved to the open door, stepped out and almost collided with Prakesh, who laughed and jumped back.

They grinned at each other.

“What do you think, Ana?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She took his hand on impulse and drew him into the room.

Lying on the bed, side by side, they began giggling uncontrollably and suddenly she no longer felt alone.

They ate at a big communal table at five o’clock, a simple meal of dal and chapatis, followed by bananas.

It was the best meal Ana had eaten in years.

Later, as the sun went down, Varma took the children on a tour of the garden, and explained, “We are self sufficient here at Fandrabad, or soon will be. You will be given a plot of land on which to grow the food you will consume, and every morning you will attend school classes.”

A buzz passed around the group.

Varma said, “How many of you can read?”

Of the twenty-four children, only Ana and Gopal raised their hands.

Varma smiled. “In a year from now, all of you will be able to read and write.”

Later the children sat around a patio area before the garden, staring up at the starships directly overhead. A circle of blue light marked the centre of the eightfold arrangement where the starship’s nose-cones came together. From the centre of the light, a broad, blue beam fell to Earth, connecting the land on the horizon with the joined starships.

Ana saw Varma in the garden, picking beans, and stepped from the patio to join her.

She gestured to the starships and they both stared upwards. “The light,” Ana asked. “What is it?”

Varma smiled. “Energy,” she said. “The concentrated energy from other stars. It is being beamed to Earth to supply the planet’s needs in the years to come.”

Ana smiled, not sure that she fully understood Varma’s words.

She reached out and found herself hugging the woman. She pulled away, hesitated, then looked into Varma’s deep brown eyes. “Are you human,” she murmured at last, “or are you really a golden figure?”

The women smiled, then reached out to stroke Ana’s hair. “What makes you think that, little wise one?” she said, but would say no more.

Ana had one more surprise in store for her that evening.

There was a wall-mounted softscreen in the lounge, which the children could watch if they wished. When she stepped inside on her way to bed, she saw that Gopal and Prakesh were watching a news programme.

She stopped and stared at the bright images. The screen showed crowds in America and Europe, protesting against the arrival of the Serene. Ana listened to the voiceover in English, but did not understand much of what was said.

Then the scene changed and a reporter said, “And from New York a spokesman for Morwell Enterprises had this to say…”

A handsome Indian man with a thin face, a ponytail and trendy ear-stud faced the camera. “That is correct. I can confirm that James Morwell is in negotiations with other businessmen and heads of state around the world in an attempt to formulate a united opposition to the regime imposed upon us, without our consent I might add, by the Serene…”

The scene switched, showing a meeting of politicians in Europe. Gopal called out to her to join them, but Ana just shook her head and hurried to her bedroom, stunned.

She lay down in the semi-darkness and stared at the ceiling, unable to believe what she had seen.

She was in no doubt. Ten years might have passed, and he had changed a lot, but she recognised the young Indian man on the softscreen, the spokesman for Morwell Enterprises.

It was her brother, Bilal.