The Serene Invasion

CHAPTER ONE

SALLY SAW HER last patient of the day, finished writing up her notes, then turned off the softscreen and pushed her chair away from the desk. She turned to face the picture window and stared out on a scene that never failed to fill her with delight.

The mellow Shropshire countryside rolled away to the south in a series of hills and vales, softened by the late afternoon sunlight. Here and there she made out villages and small towns — revitalised since the coming of the Serene — and the manufactories that were run almost exclusively by robots, the factories’ aesthetically pleasing silver domes concealing the ugly subterranean industry which plumbed the countryside in places to the depth of a kilometre. To the south was the Malvern Energy Distribution Station, an array of silver panels as wide as a couple of football pitches. Twice a day a great pulse of energy was beamed to the EDS from an orbital relay station, the last leg of a journey that had seen the energy transmitted light years through space from stellar supergiants around the galaxy. On grey winter days the bright golden pulses lit the land like falling suns in a display that always cheered Sally.

Between the EDS and the small town of Wem where Sally lived and worked was a network of farms producing the food which fed the nation. She had read somewhere that since the changes wrought by the Serene, forty per cent of Britain’s landmass was given over to food production — which was low in comparison to some countries. Uganda, for instance, was almost seventy per cent cultivated, and many other African countries even more so.

Frequently over the past few days — the tenth anniversary of the Serene’s arrival — she had thought back to her time in Uganda, contrasting her life then to what she had now. It was only in retrospect that she realised that, for much of her time while in Africa, she had been desperately unhappy. She would never have admitted as much at the time, convincing herself that in working in a country sorely deprived of medical aid she was not only helping others but fulfilling some deep-seated psychological need of her own, but now she could see that she had been sublimating her own desires and needs by losing herself in good deeds. It was a time in her life she was pleased to have experienced, perhaps had had to go through in order to grow, but she was glad that it was over.

First Geoff Allen had come into her life, and then the Serene… She often wondered if she would have turned her back on Uganda if the aliens had not arrived and promised to make things better — and was honest with herself and realised that she would have done. She had planned to get out before the coming of the Serene, anyway — and her kidnap at the hands of terrorists had been the final straw. Strung-out, a nervous wreck and jaded with the stultifying routine of treating preventable diseases month after month, she had had to leave for the sake of her sanity. She sometimes felt pangs of guilt — which Geoff, with his easy-going approach to life, often jibed her about — when she realised that the Serene had made her decision that much easier.

She had so much to thank the extraterrestrials for.

She activated her softscreen on impulse, tapped into her favourites, and seconds later routed the image to the wallscreen.

She sat back, smiling, and stared at the scene showing the main street in Kallani — though a street vastly changed since Sally had last been there. Then it had been an unmade, dusty road flanked by crumbling concrete buildings and stunted trees, thronged by impoverished locals on the verge of malnutrition.

Now the road was metalled and the buildings largely replaced by poly-carbon or synthetic timber structures, and the people walking down the street appeared well-fed. North and south of Kallani, all across the Karamoja region which a decade ago had been a drought-stricken wilderness, the land had been revitalised and given over to farms run by locals. This was the pattern that existed across all Africa, in fact across much of the world — deserts reclaimed, wildernesses turned into either sources of food production or sanctuaries for native wildlife. The industries that had threatened vast areas of the world, principally mining and logging, had been wound down, redundant now that abundant stellar energy was online and synthi-timber was such an easily manufactured commodity. The Serene had given humanity the technological wherewithal to venture out into the solar system and mine the asteroids for metals, both relieving a tired Earth from the need to give up these resources and eliminating the resultant pollution.

She instructed the image to pan down the main street and turn left. She swung the view to focus on the building that nestled between two carbon fibre A-frames. Mama Oola’s was one of the few old concrete buildings remaining in the street — Sally could well imagine Mama’s objections to having new premises foisted on her — and little seemed to have changed over the years. The façade was still crumbling and distressed and adorned with bountiful bougainvillea, and occasionally Mama Oola herself could be glimpsed bustling to and from the local market. She’d appeared, the last time Sally had seen her, as ageless as ever.

Now Sally moved the focus along the street and across town to the new medical centre — no longer a tumbledown compound of aging prefabs and corrugated huts. A white carbon fibre complex, all arcs and stylish domes, occupied the old site. And Sally knew that the treatment that went on there was very different to that of her time; gone the cases of malnutrition, preventable maladies and the victims of violence both domestic and political. She suspected that the day to day cases that presented in Kallani would be little different to those she treated here in Wem.

Dr Krasnic, whom she emailed from time to time, had decided to stay on at the centre in Kallani, but Ben Odinga had moved to a practice in Kampala. She smiled to herself, killed the image and not for the first time thought how good it would be, one day, to return.

She was about to leave the office and walk home when her softscreen chimed.

She was tempted to ignore the summons and sneak off, suspecting that her manager wanted to see her before she left. Guilt got the better of her and she accepted the call. The image of a woman in her mid-fifties expanded into the ’screen and it was a few seconds before Sally recognised her.

“Kath?” she said, surprised and delighted. “My word, where are you?”

“Would you believe here in Wem? In fact, about half a kay from where you’re sitting.” Kathryn Kemp raised a glass and Sally saw that she was beside the canal in the garden of the Three Horseshoes.

“Wonderful. Look, I’ve just finished work. I have a couple of hours before I’m due home. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Kathryn laughed. “I’ll get you as a drink. Leffe?”

“As ever.”

“I’ll get them in,” Kath said and cut the connection.

Sally locked the office, took the open staircase to the sun-filled atrium, and stepped out into the warm summer afternoon. She hurried through the surgery’s garden and took the path along the canal.

Kath Kemp was her oldest friend. They’d met nearly thirty years ago as medical students in London, hit it off immediately and stayed close ever since. Kath was grounded and serious, a private person who let very few people into her life; she had never married, never — as far as Sally was aware — had a boyfriend or girlfriend, and as Kath seemed reluctant to broach the matter of intimate relations, Sally never pressed her on the subject.

Despite their closeness, she had to admit that Kath was something of an enigma. They spoke at length, and at great depth, about their work, the world, politics — and Kath was happy to listen as Sally opened her heart and poured out her troubles, or her joys. But Kath never reciprocated; Sally had been piqued in the early days of their relationship, and then come to accept this as merely a facet of Kath. Sally loved the woman for her warmth, her empathy; she trusted Kath more than anyone else in the world, except perhaps Geoff, and enjoyed basking in her sheer… there was no other term for it… humanity.

It had been to Sally’s great joy that Geoff, when he’d first met Kath nine years ago, had formed an immediate rapport. “She’s a remarkable person, Sal. She exudes empathy.”

Their careers had diverged after graduation. While Sally had specialised in tropical medicine, Kath had practised psychiatry. She’d worked first in London, and then five years ago moved to New York, specialising in the treatment of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics.

They kept in contact with regular emails and online chats, and caught up in the flesh perhaps once every couple of years when Kath returned to London on business.

The Three Horseshoes dated from the sixteenth century, a former coaching inn with bulging walls, a twee bonnet of thatch, and a magnificent beer garden. She and Geoff had spent many a quiet early evening here in the summers, before their daughter Hannah’s arrival on the scene; Sally liked to watch the seven o’clock pulse of energy drop from the troposphere and plummet beyond the inn’s thatch, marvelling at the contrast of ancient and ultra-modern.

She stepped off the canal path and ducked beneath a strand of wisteria, knocking a bloom and inhaling the wonderful scent.

There were few people in the garden; Kath sat beside the well-stocked fishpond, facing Sally with a welcoming smile on her broad, homely face.

She stood and held out her arm. “And look at you!” Kath said. “Motherhood obviously becomes you.”

They embraced, and as always Sally had the odd sensation of hugging her own mother, dead these past thirty years.

They sat down, toasted each other, and Sally took a long drink of sharp, ice cold Leffe.

Kath Kemp was short, a little stout now in her early fifties, with a cheerful face that exuded good will. Sally had no doubt that she was loved and trusted by her patients.

“What a lovely surprise. But you said nothing about coming over! How long are you here for?”

“A last minute decision to attend a conference in Birmingham. I arrived in London this morning, but the conference doesn’t start for a couple of days.”

Sally reached out and gripped her friend’s hand. “You’re staying with us, and no arguments. You’ve not booked in anywhere?”

“I was about to try here.” She indicated the inn at her back.

“Don’t be silly. I want you to see Hannah.”

Kath beamed. “Can’t wait. She’s five now? She must have grown in the past two years…”

“It’s really that long?” Sally shook her head.

“And Geoff?” Kath took a sip of her orange juice.

“He’s very well. You know him — Mr Imperturbable. He never changes. He’s in Tokyo at the moment, covering the opening of a big art gallery, then moving north to shoot the opening ceremony of the latest arboreal city.”

“He certainly gets about.”

Sally smiled. She had told no one about the fact that Geoff liaised for the Serene; she suspected that Kath knew but was too diplomatic to mention the fact.

“I’ll cook you something tonight and I’ll take tomorrow off. Let’s go for a long walk.”

“Just like old times.”

In their student days they’d gone on jaunts along the Thames to Richmond, and spent hiking holidays in Wales and Scotland. Sally squeezed Kath’s hand. “It’s great to see you again.”

“It’s nice to come home,” Kath said, smiling around at the idyllic setting.

“You still think of England as ‘home’?”

“For all the greening of New York and Long Island, it will never be my ‘green and pleasant land’.” She smiled. “Anyway, how’s work?”

“I’m still enjoying it.”

“And still general practice.”

She nodded. “We got away from London over a year ago. I don’t know… perhaps I was getting old, but I couldn’t hack city life. I saw this post advertised, and the thought of rural Shropshire…”

“‘Westward on the high-hilled plains, Where for me the world began…’” Kath quoted, and Sally laughed.

“Housman, right? He always was one of your favourites.” Another odd side of Kath’s nature was her love, her adoration, for old poetry. Sally suspected that much of what she quoted were lines from obscure English poets.

“And you’re settled here?”

Sally nodded emphatically. “Very. Hannah’s taken to it like a fish to water.”

“And Geoff?”

Sally laughed. “I often think he’d be happy anywhere, just as long as he had me and Hannah and a good pub.” She looked at her friend, a suspicion forming. “Why do you ask?”

Kath considered her orange juice. “Well… I’m recruiting good people, doctors in all fields, for a new project. I’m putting out feelers, testing the water with certain people I know and trust.”

“A new project?” Sally echoed.

“Before I talk about the project, Sally, I’ll tell you about what I’ve been doing.”

Working with recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, Sally thought — and in the US at that. It was everything she considered anathema and contrary to the life she’d built for herself and her family here in Shropshire.

“About six months ago I changed jobs,” Kath said. “Nearly a decade ago a Serene-sponsored think-tank was set up to look into humanity’s response to all the changes. Recently they began recruiting for more staff. The offer was too good to refuse.”

“I thought you’d be working with your reclamation projects forever.”

“Do you know something, the incidence of alcoholism and drug dependency has decreased by something like seventy per cent over the course of the past ten years.”

Sally looked at her friend. “Since the arrival of the Serene.”

“That’s right. Drug and drink dependency was always, largely, a class and income linked phenomenon. Cure poverty, joblessness, give people a reason to live, and the need for an opiate is correspondingly reduced. Since the coming of the Serene, and the societal changes they’ve brought about… Well, my job became little more than a sinecure. I was bored. I didn’t feel in the least guilty for leaving the post.”

“Good for you. Wish I could say the same about Uganda.”

“Still beating yourself up over that?” Kath admonished.

Sally smiled ruefully. “Not really. I was washed up…” She waved. “Water under the bridge, Kath. I’ve bored you with all that before. Anyway, the new post…”

Kath drained her orange juice and set the empty glass down on the condensation ring it had formed on the wooden table top. “For the vast majority of the human race,” she said, “the coming of the Serene has been a beneficial thing. No one can argue against that. Look at the changes — the reduction of poverty, famine, not to mention the fact that wars and violence of all kinds have been banished to the…” She stopped and laughed, “to the ‘dustbin of history’! Listen to me, Sally. I’m sounding like a textbook!”

Sally smiled and pointed to Kath’s empty glass. “I don’t know about you, but I could kill another one.”

Kath nodded. “And while you’re at the bar I’ll try to work out what I’m going to say without recourse to tabloid platitudes… Hey, recall those?”

“Platitudes?”

“Tabloids. Another vestige of a long gone era.”

Sally picked up the empty glasses. “I’ll get those refills.”

While she was at the bar, she looked at her friend through the mullioned window and thought about relocating Geoff and Hannah to the faraway USA. No matter how good the offer, how rewarding the work, she thought, I’m not going to do it.

She returned with the drinks and took a mouthful of lager.

“Where was I?” Kath said.

“‘For the majority of the human race’…” Sally recapitulated.

“Right. Well, in the early days there was lots of opposition. And understandably, on a superficial, knee-jerk reaction level. Some people, especially those in power and the rich, had a lot to lose. Everything was changing. All the old certainties were gone. For decades, centuries, we in the West had turned a blind eye to the inherent unfairness of how the world worked. We led easy, affluent life-styles for the most part, and who cared if that meant that the good life was at the expense of millions, billions, in the so-called third world whose poverty subsidised our greed?”

Sally interrupted mildly, “Well, a few of us did object, Kath.”

Her friend nodded. “Of course we did. But we were — if you don’t mind the phrase — pissing in the wind. We had too much against us. The combined might of government with vested interest and economic institutions that feared an upsetting of the status quo. But then the Serene come along and sweep everything aside.”

“And…? Where is this leading, Kath?”

“Sorry. I’m waffling. Right, so in the early days there was opposition, and a lot of it, which died off as the years progressed and the average citizens could reap the benefit of the changes. Who cared about a few powerful politicians, generals and fat cats who were no longer powerful or rich?” She paused, then went on, “The opposition didn’t vanish entirely, though — it went underground, developed an intricate, complex nexus of secretive cadres and cells made up for the most part of politicians, former tycoons, military leaders and their ilk. They assumed new roles in the new system — their expertise in many matters was considered valuable — but they remained discontented and…”

“But surely they’re no threat to the new system?”

Kath frowned. “Not as such, but they’re still a… a worry.”

Sally regarded her friend, sure that there was something Kath was holding back. “So what has this got to do with your new post?”

“Right. Well, I was contacted by a consortium of politicians, backed by the Serene, to trace and keep tabs on these people. I know — it sounds like something from a bad espionage novel. But when you think about it, it makes sense. My specialism is in psychiatry, and my early studies were in the field of power structures in industry. Anyway, for the past year I’ve been seconded to certain enterprises headed by former tycoons who, ten years ago, were vocal in their opposition to the Serene, and who still hold these views.”

Sally regarded her drink and let the silence stretch. At last she said, “Right. I understand. What I fail to see is how I can be useful in all this.”

“I’m not trying to inveigle you into some undercover spying network, Sally. I’ve told you all this to explain that the people I work for are close to the Serene, the so-called ‘self-aware entities’ we’ve all seen around. As an aid to my current work I’ve been asked to sound out a few professionals, mainly in the area of health care, and see if I could lure them into new posts. You wouldn’t be working with the old, recalcitrant tycoons, might I add.”

Sally took a long drink, then asked, “So… what would the new post be?”

Kath shrugged. “Very much like the job you hold here, general practice in a small, rural community.”

Sally sat up. “So not in New York?”

Kath smiled “No, not in New York.”

“But in America, right?”

“Wrong, not in America.”

Sally laughed with exasperation. “Kath! Will you please tell me… where on Earth is this small rural community, then?”

Kath held her gaze, silently, across the table. “That’s just it, Sally,” she said, “it’s not on Earth. It’s on Mars.”

Sally blinked and lowered her glass. “Mars?” she said incredulously. “Did I hear you right? You said Mars?”

Kath nodded. “Mars.”

Sally shook her head. “Impossible. Do you know what conditions are like on Mars? An unbreathable atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide…” She tailed off as she saw Kath staring at her.

“What?”

Kath murmured, “Not anymore.”

“You mean…?”

“The Serene. They have terraformed the planet, made it habitable. It’s a new, pristine world. A garden world. It’s… dare I say it?… a paradise.”

Sally laughed. “So that’s what all the reports about ‘clandestine work’ on Mars was all about?”

Kath smiled. “That’s right. And we — they — are looking for colonists.”

“But…” Sally was aware that she was not thinking logically as she asked, “But doesn’t it take years to get there? I mean…”

“Think about it, Sally. The Serene are from Delta Pavonis. They can travel light years in weeks. The jaunt to Mars takes their ships a few hours, and that’s the slow way.”

Sally stared at her. “What do you mean, the slow way?”

Kath shrugged. “They have other technologies, apart from their starships. But I really shouldn’t be talking about that. Anyway, a decision isn’t required immediately, of course. I’ll give you a few days to think about it. When does Geoff get back?”

Sally shook her head, still dazed. “The day after tomorrow. But… but Geoff, he…” She stopped herself.

Kath was smiling. “I know what Geoff does, Sally. It’s been cleared with the SAEs who control him.”

Sally looked around her at the beer garden, the rolling hills beyond. Mars, she thought. It still sounded unrealistic, some kind of practical joke.

“If… if we did go. Then how often would we be able to return?”

Kath shrugged. “How about every couple of months?”

Sally shook her head. “But, I mean… why Mars? Why leave this planet? It’s not overcrowded, is it?”

“Planet Earth eventually will be. The Serene are looking at things long-term. And by that I don’t just means decades or centuries, but millennia. They see Mars as the first step on the long outward push from Earth, an inevitable start of the human diaspora.”

“But what will it be like? I imagine red sands, desolate, bleak…”

“Forget about everything you know, or thought you knew, about the red planet. The Serene have changed all that, as they have a habit of doing. Imagine rolling countryside not dissimilar to Shropshire, vast forests, great oceans… A temperate world that will easily accommodate two billion human beings.”

“This is… staggering.”

“I know. Hard to take in at first. That’s how I felt when I was told.”

Sally looked at her friend. “You’ll be going, too?”

She nodded. “Eventually, perhaps in a year or two, when my work finishes on the current project. Look, talk it over with Geoff when he gets back, give it some serious thought. I’ll leave you a few e-brochures, for your eyes only. I’ll call in again in a few days, on my way back from Birmingham, and we can all discuss it then.”

Sally nodded, “Yes. Yes, of course.”

Kath smiled. “Now, did you say you’re cooking dinner tonight? Mind if I give you a hand?”

Sally laughed. “I’d love it, and no doubt Hannah will join in too.”

They left the garden and Kath said that she’d hired a car in London. “I’ll drive you back.”

“It’s not far, about half a kay on the edge of town overlooking the vale.”

“Sounds idyllic.”

“It is,” she said, and thought: too idyllic to leave. But Mars… what an opportunity!

They walked from the pub garden to the quiet, tree-lined road that led into town. As they walked towards the car, parked a little way along the road, Kath asked, “Why Shropshire?”

“As ever, there was a job advertised. I grew up just a few miles south of here, so it was like coming home.”

Kath stepped into the road and moved towards the driver’s door. She looked at Sally over the curving, electric-blue roof, and smiled. “‘That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain’…”

“Meaning?”

“One can never go back, Sally. Only onwards…” She smiled again.

Sally would recall that smile for a long time to come.

The truck seemed to appear from nowhere. Sally saw a flash of movement in the corner of her eye as it swept past from the right. She heard a short scream and screamed herself as Kath was dashed away, rolled between her car and the flank of the speeding truck and deposited ten metres further along the road.

Sally ran to her friend and dropped to her knees, taking Kath’s limp hand to feel for a pulse but knowing what she would find.

Kath lay on her back, wide open eyes staring at the sky. She seemed physically uninjured, at first inspection; at least there were no wounds, no blood…

But the oval of her skull was misaligned, her jaw set at an odd angle, and the lack of pulse at her wrist confirmed everything Sally had feared.

She screamed, then scooped Kath into her arms and rocked back and forth, sobbing.

She looked down the road for the truck, but it had sped away as fast as it had appeared.

She fumbled with her phone, rang the emergency services and then just sat at the side of the road, holding Kath’s dead hand. There was no one else about, for which she was thankful. She did not want her grief intruded upon. It would be bad enough when the police and ambulance arrived, without the spurious sympathy of bystanders.

Memories flashed through her head, images of her time with Kath. They went back so far, had shared so much. It seemed so cruel to the girl and young woman Kath had been that, all along, her arbitrary end had awaited her like this in a future country lane.

What seemed like only minutes later an ambulance pulled up and two paramedics leapt from the cab and hunkered over Kath’s body. A police car pulled in behind Kath’s rented car and a tall officer climbed out, took Sally firmly by the shoulders and led her away from Kath.

Stricken, Sally watched the paramedics lift her friend’s body onto a stretcher, cover her face with a blue blanket with a finality she found heart-wrenching, and slide her into the back of the ambulance.

THE POLICE OFFICER was young, and seemed even younger in his summer uniform of light blue shirt and navy shorts. He indicated the pub garden and said, “You need a stiff drink, and I’ll take a statement. Did you see the vehicle that…?”

Sally shook her head. “Just a flash, then it was away.”

He nodded and moved to the bar. Sally chose a table well away from the fishpond. She slumped, dazed, still not wholly believing what had happened. She thought of the dinner they would have prepared together…

She gulped the brandy the officer provided, then almost choked as the liquid burned down her throat. She took a deep breath. The young man was speaking, asking her questions. She apologised and asked him to repeat himself.

She told him Kath’s name, her occupation. No, Kathryn Kemp had no living relatives, no next of kin. The only people to contact would be her employers… and at the thought of this Sally broke down.

The officer offered to drive her home, but Sally said she lived just around the corner and that the walk would help to clear her head.

She sat for a while when the officer departed, staring across the lawn at the fishpond.

She gazed at the bulbous koi, breaking the surface for food. She recalled something Kath had said, when they had met in London not long after the arrival of the Serene. They had strolled to a newly opened gallery, toured the exhibition, and later sat at an outdoor café beside a well-stocked fishpond. They had discussed the changes wrought by the aliens, and Sally had wondered about the changes that would affect the world’s economy.

Kath had indicated the fish cruising the pond and said, “A crude analogy, Sally. The Earth is a fishpond, with finite resources. The fish would survive for a while without intervention, eating pond life, but eventually their food resources, their economy if you like, would break down. But humans kindly feed them a few crumbs, sustain them…”

“So you’re comparing the human race to fish?” Sally had laughed.

“I said the analogy was crude.” Kath shrugged. “The Serene come along, save an ailing world, pump energy into the system. Our economies will collapse, but they were corrupt anyway, and will be replaced by something much better. We were in desperate need of the crumbs the Serene are throwing us.”

Sally recalled Kath’s smile on the sunny London day nine years ago, and all of a sudden she felt very alone. She wanted to go back to the house and have Geoff hold her, comfort her.

She left the beer garden. Instead of going by the road, which would have been the quickest route, she took the canal path behind the pub and cut across the fields on the edge of town. As she walked, she was aware of a sudden brightening in the air above her head, and looked up.

An energy pulse lit the heavens, dazzling. She looked away as the entire sky brightened and the pulse fell towards the energy distribution station to the south. A few crumbs… She laughed to herself, then wept.

She approached the house through the gate in the back garden, then stopped and stared across the lawn. The house was a rambling Victorian rectory, cloaked in wisteria, a little shabby but in a comfortable, homely way. The garden was typical ‘English cottage’, loaded with abundant borders and strategically placed fruit trees, pear, apple and cherry. At the far end of the lawn Hannah played on a swing, pushed by Tamsin, her child-minder. Sally leaned against the yew tree beside the gate and watched for a minute, preparing herself like an actor about to step on to the stage.

She fixed a smile in place and breezed into the garden. Hannah saw her, launched herself from the swing, and ran across the lawn. Sally picked her up and smiled at Tamsin.

The young woman stared at her. “Sal,” she murmured. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Sally lowered Hannah to the grass and she ran off. “I… I’ve just heard that a good friend has died.” She could not, for some reason, tell Tamsin that she had witnessed the accident. “It… it’s a hell of a shock.”

“I’ll stay, Sal. I’ll put Hannah to bed. It’s fine, I’ve got nothing on tonight.”

“No you won’t, Tamsin. But thanks anyway. I’ll be okay, honestly. Get your bag and go home.”

“Hannah’s eaten.” Tamsin looked at her, concerned. “Look, it would be no trouble for me to stay.”

Tamsin took some persuading, but Sally was adamant. She wanted to be alone with Hannah tonight, read her a story before bedtime. Geoff might be away, but normality would be achieved with the daily routine of putting her daughter to bed.

When Tamsin had reluctantly departed, Sally started the familiar bedtime process. Pyjamas, brushed teeth and washed face, toilet and snuggle down in bed. She asked Hannah about her day at school, an enquiry which as usual was stonewalled with a child’s innate reluctance to vouchsafe any information she regarded as solely her own.

She read a few pages of Hannah’s current school-book, kissed her and said goodnight, feeling guilty for the perfunctory performance as she turned off the light and left the room.

She stood in the middle of the lounge, crammed with bookcases, old chairs and sofas, the walls hung with pictures and prints. Kath had never seen the house, and Sally would have enjoyed giving her a guided tour. On top of one bookcase was an old photo of Sally and Kath in their college days, picnicking beside the Thames. Sally picked it up and stared at the twenty-two year-old Kath laughing at something she, Sally, had said or done.

She ran to her study, activated her softscreen and tapped in Geoff’s code. The time here was eight, which meant that it would be five in the morning in Japan — but would Geoff have finished his work for the Serene yet? Even though Geoff had told her what time he was due to complete what he called his ‘shift,’ for the life of her she could not remember what he’d said.

The screen remained blank and a neutral female voice said, “Geoff Allen is unable to take your call at the moment. If you would like to leave a message after the tone…”

She held back a sob and said, “Geoff. Something awful… Hannah’s fine and so am I. It’s Kath. There was an accident. I saw it.” She wept, despite her best intentions not to. “Oh, Geoff, it was awful, awful… Please ring me back as soon as you can. I love you.”

She cut the connection and sat staring at the blank screen.

She emailed her manager at the practice, told him that she wouldn’t be in tomorrow due to the sudden death of a very close friend, then moved to the kitchen and made herself a big pot of green tea. She thought about eating and vetoed the idea. Food, at the moment, was the last thing she wanted.

She curled up in her chair by the picture window, as the sun lowered itself towards the hazy Shropshire hills, and sipped the tea. Somehow the picture of herself and Kath was in her lap, though she had no recollection of carrying it into the study.

A thought flashed across her mind and would not go away. What a stupid, stupid death… A death that someone like Kath did not deserve. She was exactly Sally’s age, fifty-three, far too young to die when she had so much life ahead of her, so much important work to do, so much to see… She thought of Mars, and how wonderful it would have been to walk together across the meadows — or whatever! — in the shadow of Olympus Mons.

Always assuming, of course, she and Geoff had agreed to the move.

And what of the job offer now? Should she relocate to the red planet, leave behind all that was familiar, merely because the Serene had suggested it? Without Kath there to shepherd her through, it seemed unlikely.

Lord, but she missed Geoff on his days away. It was only for two or three days a month, but it always seemed much longer to her. In between his work for the Serene, he worked from home editing the photos taken on his previous trip, and was away for two days or so on commissions for the agency, which somehow never seemed as long as his Serene work.

They had discussed this, and wondered if it was something to do with the fact that there was an unknown element about the Serene commissions. For half of the time he was away he was unconscious, his body a puppet of the Serene, to do with as they wished. Perhaps, she thought, it wouldn’t be so bad if she knew exactly what kind of work he was doing.

She finished her tea and made her way to the bedroom in the eaves of the house.

She lay awake for a couple of hours, her head full of Kath — flashing alternative images of her friend in her college days, and the smile she had given Sally across the top of the car as she’d quoted Housman just seconds before…

She slept badly and awoke, with a start, at seven when Hannah — a ball of oblivious energy — sprinted into the bedroom and launched herself onto the bed.

They had breakfast together and Tamsin arrived at eight-thirty to tidy up and take Hannah to school. Sally told Tamsin to take the day off — normally on Thursdays she came back and did the cleaning and washing, but today Sally wanted to lose herself in the routine of housework.

“If you’re sure…”

“I’m not going into work, Tamsin. I need to fill the time with something.”

At ten to nine she accompanied Hannah and Tamsin outside and waved them off as Tamsin pulled her electric car from the drive. She sighed, standing alone and hugging herself in the bright summer sunlight, then returned inside.

A strong coffee, housework…

An insistent pinging issued from her study, and her heart kicked. Geoff, getting back to her.

She hurried through the house and accepted the call.

The screen was briefly blank, then flared. The image showed a woman in her early fifties, smiling out at her apprehensively.

Kath…

Sally sat back in her chair as if something had slammed into her chest.

Then she knew what had happened. Kath had called the previous afternoon, and the message had been delayed.

“Sally, I know this will be something of a shock.”

Blood thundered through her head, slowing her thinking.

“Sally, it’s me, Kath. I’m sorry for doing this. Perhaps I should have come round to the house in person, in the flesh…”

Her voice croaked, “Kath?”

Her friend’s expression was filled with compassion, understanding. She said, “Sally, what happened yesterday… I’d like to come around, see you and explain.”

Sally managed to say, “But you were dead. I saw it happen. I saw it… You were dead!”

“I’ll be around to see you in a few minutes, Sally.” Kath smiled one last time and cut the connection.

Sally sat very still, hugged herself and repeated incredulously, “But you were dead…”

CHAPTER TWO

AS THE TRAIN pulled into Howrah station, Ana Devi had no sense at all of coming home.

She had assumed, on the long journey north across the Deccan plain, that she would feel a certain identification with the place where, from the age of six to sixteen, she had spent all her life. She had a store of memories both good and bad — with the good, oddly enough, outweighing the bad. She supposed that that was because she had not been alone here, a street kid scraping a living on an inimical city station, but had been surrounded by a makeshift family which had shared her experiences. She had transplanted her family to central India, and the fact that they had taken on good jobs and prospered meant that, despite their harsh upbringing, they had prevailed.

The station was a strange mixture of the old and the new. Much of it she recognised with a throbbing jolt of nostalgia, and then her recollections would be confused by the position of a new poly-carbon building or footbridge. As the train slid into the station, they passed the goods yard and the rickety van where she and twenty other kids had slept at night. The yard was surrounded by containers and new buildings, and she hardly recognised the place. The train eased to a halt on the platform, and Ana smiled as she stared across at the Station Master’s office. She wondered if Mr Jangar still ruled Howrah with a rod of iron.

She stepped from the train and allowed the crowds to drain away around her until the platform was almost deserted. She glanced up at the footbridge, where she had spent many an hour as a child watching the trains come and go, and caught a fleeting glimpse of a darting figure up there on the criss-crossed girders. She caught her breath, at once dismayed that children still haunted the station and alarmed at this individual’s daring. The girder was almost twenty metres high, and one wrong step would send the kid tumbling to the tracks below. Then the figure halted suddenly, squatted and stared down at her — and Ana laughed aloud. It was not a street kid but a slim grey monkey.

She looked around the platform, seeking out the nooks and crannies where, ten years ago, she would have seen evidence of the street kids — or the ‘station rats’ as Mr Jangar had called them — but only commuters occupied the platform, awaiting their trains. Of course, she told herself, street kids were a thing of the past, now. Her generation had been the very last.

She pulled the silver envelope from the side pocket of her holdall and crossed to the station master’s office.

A secretary sat before a softscreen. He looked up enquiringly as Ana entered.

“I am looking for the station master, Mr Jangar,” she said. “I have an appointment with him at three o’clock.”

The young man referred to his screen and nodded. “Ana Devi?” He indicated a door to Ana’s right. “Mr Jangar will see you straight away.”

She hurried through the door and found herself in a small waiting room. She approached a door bearing the nameplate “Station Master Daljit Jangar,” and knocked.

A deep voice rumbled, “Come in.”

Ana pushed open the door, suddenly a child again, her heart thudding at the thought of meeting the feared Jangar after all these years.

She stepped into the room and he rose to meet her, the very same barrel-bellied, walrus-moustachioed, turbaned Sikh she recalled from her childhood, only a little fatter now, a little slower.

They shook hands and he indicated a seat, then sat down behind his impressively vast desk and stared at her. “Now what can I do for you, Miss…?”

“I am Ana Devi,” she said, “and I am the senior food production manager at the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city.”

He nodded, peering at her closely. “If you don’t mind my saying, Miss Devi, your face is very familiar.”

She smiled. “And so it should be, Mr Jangar. You made the lives of myself and my friends a constant misery.”

He shook his head in confusion. “I don’t quite understand…”

“As a child I lived here on the station. I begged and stole, played on the girders beneath the footbridge, slept in the van in the goods yard.”

“Ah, a station rat. You were a nuisance, I will say that much. The trouble I got from the police superintendent to clear the station of kids.” He chuckled, as if reflecting on good times.

Ana said, “We had nowhere else to live, Mr Jangar. Oh, sometimes we slept in the park, but it was a dangerous place. At least here there was food to be had, and shelter, and crowds to hide among.”

She glanced across the room to the stick propped in the corner, Mr Jangar’s dreaded lathi. She remembered one occasion, when she was seven or eight, and a ticket collector had caught her stealing biscuits from the station canteen and dragged her kicking and screaming to Jangar’s office. She had half a mind to remind him of the beating he had dealt her then, but restrained herself.

“You no longer have occasion to use your lathi?” she asked.

“Oh, I threaten dilatory workers with it from time to time, Miss Devi, but gone are the days when…”

She said, “Thanks to the Serene.”

He stared at her. “There was something to be said for a little constructive punishment, in the right place.”

Ah, she thought, so that’s what it was, that beating and others that had left her black and blue and unable to walk properly for a week: constructive punishment. Would it have pained her any less, she thought, to have known that as a tiny seven-year-old?

Jangar cleared his throat. “But I take it that you did not come here merely to reminisce, Miss Devi.”

She smiled. Part of her motive for delivering the letter — which might as easily have been sent by email — was to visit the station again and impress upon Jangar how she had overcome her lowly origins.

She slid the silver envelope across the desk and watched him slit it open and read the letter.

He harrumphed. “From the wilderness city director himself,” he muttered.

“And as the letter states, he is not impressed by the continual lateness of the Kolkata trains, Mr Jangar. We depend upon punctuality in order to maximise the distribution of our produce, as I’m sure you understand.”

“Quite, quite…”

“This could have been sent by email, Mr Jangar, but Director Chandra wanted me to stress the importance of the matter, and to say this: if things do not improve, Mr Jangar, then the matter will be presented to the city council.”

Jangar looked up, but could not bring himself to look her in the eye. “I will have my transport manager look into the matter forthwith, Miss Devi.”

“Excellent.” Ana stood, reached out and shook Jangar’s hand. “It has been a pleasure to talk of old times,” she said, and swept from the office as if walking on air.

One demon from her past confronted and exorcised, she thought.

She booked into a new hotel complex across the road from the station, showered and rested on the bed for an hour before leaving the hotel and strolling through the busy streets.

Everything changed, she had once read somewhere, but India changed more gradually than anywhere else. She saw prosperity on the streets, where ten years ago she had seen poverty — families living in the gutters, maimed beggars on street corners, kids trapping rats and birds in order to provide their only meal in days…

Now she saw well dressed citizens promenading, and stalls selling fruit and vegetables — she felt a sense of pride in this — and new poly-carbon structures nestling alongside ancient temples and scabbed buildings. Tradesmen still plied their crafts beside the roads: cobblers and shoe-shiners alongside hawkers selling freshly-pressed fruit- and sugar-cane juice. But gone was the grinding poverty that had once given the streets an air of hopeless desperation.

She made her way to Station Road and stood outside Bhatnagar’s restaurant where, as a girl, she had pressed her nose against the window and stared at the ziggurats of gulab jamans, the slabs of kulfi and dripping piles of idli, and beyond them to the fat, wealthy diners filling their faces with food that Ana had only dreamed of eating.

Now she stepped through the sliding door — metaphorically taking the hand of the timid girl she had been — and was met by a liveried flunky who bowed and showed her to a table beside the window.

She ordered a vegetable pakora starter followed by a dal mushroom masala, then finished off with barfi and a small coffee. She glanced through the window, half expecting to see hungry faces pressed to the glass; but the children she did see out there were clutching the hands of their parents and did not spare a glance at the diners beyond the wondrous piles of sweetmeats.

As she was about to leave, Ana caught the eye of an old waiter and said, “Do you know if a gentleman by the name of Sanjeev Varnaputtram still orders food from this restaurant?”

The old man appeared surprised by the enquiry. “Varnaputtram has fallen on hard times. No longer can he afford to dine on food from Bhatnagar’s.”

“So he’s still alive?”

“So I have heard, but he is old and very ill these days.”

“And do you happen to know where I might find him?”

The man laughed, showing an incomplete set of yellowed teeth. “Where he is always to be found. His house on Ganesh Chowk. He is so fat, Miss, that no one can move him!”

Smiling, Ana tipped the waiter, settled her bill and left the restaurant.

She made her way back towards the station, then turned from the main street and paced down the narrow alleyways to the house where Varnaputtram still lived.

She had tried to look ahead and guess what her feelings might be when she made this journey back into her past, and this specific walk down Ganesh Chowk to confront the monster who was Sanjeev Varnaputtram. She had assumed she would feel fear — a vestige of the dread from all those years ago — and also apprehension, but the surprising truth was that she felt none of these things: what she did feel was anger.

She came to the familiar gate in the wall and pushed it. To her surprise it was not locked — Gopal’s doing, she thought, and it had not been repaired in a decade.

She was confronted by an almost solid wall of vegetation, through which she could barely make out the narrow path. She ducked along it, batting fronds and branches from her face, and came at last to a pair of pink doors, flung open to admit the slight evening breeze.

She stepped into the tiled hallway, expecting to be stopped by Sanjeev’s lounging minions, Kevi Nan, the Sikh double-act and other hangers-on. But the hall was empty, and as she crossed the tiles towards the pink-painted timber doors to Sanjeev’s inner sanctum, she heard a querulous voice call out, “Datta? Is that you?”

She reached out, pushed open the door, and stood on the threshold.

She had assumed that Sanjeev might have shrunk over the years — following the rule that all things returned to in adulthood appear smaller — but she had assumed wrongly. Sanjeev might no longer dine on Bhatnagar’s finest take-aways, but he had evidently found an alternative supplier. He was vast, with gross rolls of fat overflowing the narrow charpoy. A towel — made tiny by comparison to his splayed thighs — covered his manhood.

A bald head sat atop the mound of his body, and tiny marble eyes peered out. He was sweating, and he stank.

“Who are you? What do you want, girl?”

She remained on the threshold, staring at her erstwhile tormentor.

“I said what do you want?” Sanjeev shrilled. “And where is Datta?”

She stepped into the room, pulled up a rickety chair, and positioned it before the bed. She sat down in silence, never taking her gaze from the appalling specimen of humanity before her.

She said quietly, “Where are your henchmen now, Sanjeev?”

His eyes, deep in their pits of flesh, stared at his with incomprehension. “What do you mean?”

“Kevi Nan, the Sikhs, the other thugs you paid to abduct street kids from the station and bring here. Where are they now, Sanjeev? Left you, moved on?”

“You haven’t heard? Kevi is dead, fell under the Delhi Express years ago. The others…” He waved a tiny hand and Ana was reminded of a seal’s twitching flipper. “I am an old man, and ill, and they have left me like the vermin they were. Only Datta remains, in the hope that when I die he’ll get the house.”

Ana felt a strange emotion somewhere deep within her, and fought to suppress it.

She said, “You have really no idea who I am?”

He peered at her. “Police? Or from the council?”

“I am Ana Devi, and ten years ago I lived at Howrah station. Six years before that, Kevi Nan captured me one day and dragged me here, and you ripped the t-shirt and shorts from my body — the only clothing I possessed at the time — and dragged me onto…” She stopped, her voice catching, and worked at withholding her tears. “Then you buggered me all night with your pathetic, tiny cock…”

She stared at him, attempting to discern the slightest sign of remorse in his features.

She said, “And then, ten years ago, just as the Serene arrived, you had me dragged back here, and again you tried to rape me, only this time…” She smiled at him. “This time, the Serene had arrived and I got away.”

He pointed with his ridiculous flipper hand. “I remember you!” He wheezed, his breath coming unevenly. “You escaped through the window. The beginning of the end! Only it was not quite the end…”

She said, “Kevi Nan abducted my friend, Prakesh, and you plied him with rum and…”

Sanjeev chuckled. “And you and your station rats came and carried him off and that, sadly, was the very end.”

She shook her head. “The end of the abuse?”

He lifted his fat fingers and tapped something on his upper arm. Ana stared at the square protuberance of an implant, as Sanjeev explained, “Six months after the aliens came, the authorities arrived here, burst in and issued a warrant. I had to go to court! Me, Sanjeev Varnaputtram! It was the very last time I left this room.”

“And you were found guilty, and your punishment was…”

“This! Chemical castration, they call it. Do they realise what they did to me, do they? Me, Sanjeev Varnaputtram!”

She stared at him, and that earlier, incipient emotion — pity, it had been — was washed away as she realised that he had no comprehension whatsoever of the depravity of his crimes.

She said, “It was the least you deserved. Some would say you got off lightly.”

“Get out!” he spat. “I said, get out.”

She remained sitting on the chair, staring at him.

“Before I go,” she said softly, “I’d like to tell you about some of the boys and girls you victimised over the years.” She paused, took a breath and said, “Gopal Dutt is now a train driver in Madras, with a wife and three children. Danta Malal is a botanist working with me in the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city; he is to be married later this year. Prakesh Patel is a biologist in the same place, and the father of three boys. And I… I am a senior manager working in food production in the same city.” She smiled at him. “We have survived our childhoods, we have overcome the poverty and abuse, and every one of us has moved forward and prospered.”

She stood and moved to the door, then turned and stared at him. “And you, Sanjeev Varnaputtram, what have you done?”

She hurried from the room before he could muster a reply, and only when she reached the sanctuary of the alleyway did she break down and weep.

SHE LEFT THE hotel at ten the following morning and strolled across the city. She sat at a café, ordered a sweet lassi, and watched the passing crowds.

At the far side of the square the Serene obelisk rose, sheer and jet, into the dazzling summer sky. At first the arrival of these singular towers in all the major cities of the world had divided aesthetic opinion. Experts opined that they were the height of architectural ugliness, others that they were in their own way things of severe beauty. Ana tended to agree with the latter school of thought: she never looked upon an obelisk without being reminded of the good that the Serene had brought to Earth, and she thought of these towers as monuments to that good.

She sometimes found it hard to believe that she had been working for the Serene for ten years now. The time since leaving Kolkata seemed to have flown. So much had changed in the world — change, she realised, that sequestered with her work in the wilderness city she had hardly noticed. It was only when she fulfilled the needs of the Serene once a month, and found herself waking up in various locations around the world, that she came to realise the extent of the changes. She had seen cities transformed, slums giving way to new poly-carbon developments, impoverished citizens replaced by well-fed and well-dressed individuals; and, most of all, pessimism receding on a wave of optimism.

She had visited every continent on Earth now, and at least a hundred cities — though, over the course of the past five years, those visits had been restricted to the cities which contained the obelisks. She wondered why this was so. Every time she came to her senses, she was in the vicinity of a jet black tower. There had to be a link, though one to which she was not privy. Yet another enigma of the aliens who had changed the world.

In the early days she had found herself fearing coming to her senses in these strange and far-flung places, and she would flee to the airport and wait until the sleek Serene jet was ready to take her back to India. She was allowed a day or two to herself in these exotic cities — a reward, she supposed, for whatever work she did for the Serene while unconscious. Over a period of time, as she gained confidence, she remained in the cities and explored a little, knowing that physically she could come to no harm. She had experienced other cultures, other ways of thinking, other foods — strange, at first, after her staple diet of curry in India — and met people of all colours and creeds.

A couple of years ago it came to her that she was, truly, a citizen of the world. She had learned to speak English, was learning French, and had a smattering of Italian and German. She wondered what the ignorant girl she had been, ten years ago, would have thought of this sophisticated woman she had become, who wore Western clothing and could order food in three or four different languages.

She looked at her watch and smiled. Kapil was late, which was not unusual. Despite his many excellent qualities, punctuality was not one of them. He often kept her waiting — up to two hours on one occasion! — and he blamed it on having a mother and father who had both worked for the Indian railways, where good time-keeping was a given. He said he had grown up despising the tyranny of the clock, though Ana teased him that he was making excuses.

She had met Kapil Gavaskar at the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city two years ago when he had flown in from America on a fact-finding mission. Ana’s city had just achieved record levels of fruit production, and the world was lining up to find out how.

She had been immediately attracted to the tall, slim Indian-American, who spoke Hindi with an odd twang and professed a dislike of Indian food. She had set about remedying the latter by taking him to her favourite restaurants, and even tutoring him in how to pronounce certain Indian words without a Texan vowel extension.

They tried to see each other once a month, which sometimes didn’t happen. When their itineraries proved impossible to match — like last month — Ana felt bereft, but it only served to make their next meeting all the more exciting.

They had not talked of marriage, yet, though Ana often considered life with Kapil on a permanent basis. She had yet to meet his parents — old-school Brahmins, who would doubtless turn up their noses at her lowly dalit origins.

She jumped as she felt hands on her shoulders — then relaxed as he kissed the top of her head. “Ana,” he murmured, “I’ve been watching you for the past minute. You were miles away.”

She clutched his hand as he took a seat at the table. “I was thinking about you.”

“Flatterer!”

“It’s true.” She stared at his face, drinking him in. “Oh, it’s so good to see you!”

He ordered a coffee and sipped it as he stared at her. He was thin-faced, handsome, with humorous eyes and a quick smile.

He frowned. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

She had told Kapil about her childhood shortly after they’d met — thinking that it was best to get the truth out of the way early on, so that he could leave her without breaking her heart. One of the many things that made her love him was that he had listened to her admission in silence, then kissed her on the lips and said that if it was her upbringing that had made her who she was, then he could not fault it.

But she had never told him about Sanjeev Varnaputtram, and what he had done to her and countless other street kids.

She did so now, choosing her words with care, and finished by recounting their encounter yesterday.

“The bastard!” he cried. “I’ll have him arrested!”

She smiled. “He is already chemically castrated, which is punishment enough. And he is old and ill.” She shrugged. “But it was so good, Kapil, to tell him that his victims are all now prospering. I felt… empowered.”

He took her hand and kissed her fingers.

She said, “How long do we have?”

“Until the morning. I must leave for China at ten tomorrow. I’m advising them on their sustainability program.”

“One whole day!” she laughed.

“I haven’t been to Kolkata for at least fifteen years. I was thirteen, and my parents were taking me to see an ancient aunt before we left for America.”

“Perhaps I could give you a guided tour — show you Howrah station, the streets I played in, Maidan Park where I watched the rich kids flying their expensive kites.”

He looked reflective. “I might have been one of them…”

She drained her lassi, and he his coffee, and they strolled from the square hand in hand.

They spent the day wandering around the city, visiting the sites of her childhood, the station and the park, the once mean streets between them, and Ana relived memories of her childhood, but told him only of the good ones.

She took him to Bhatnagar’s that night, and she feasted again. Kapil, thanks to Ana’s expert tutoring, had come to appreciate the cuisine of his home country. They finished the meal and strolled through the warm night, bought ice creams and promenaded along the revamped sea front, watching the liners and cruise ships leave the port and head off into the Bay of Bengal.

On the way back to the hotel they passed a store selling softscreens and other hi-tech goods, and the window was a flickering panoply of visually discordant images. One caught Ana’s eye and stopped her in her tracks. Kapil stopped too and glanced from screen to screen, unable to discern which image had arrested her attention.

Ana stared, open-mouthed, at the Indian with the long ponytail and ear-stud, who was mouthing silently to the camera.

“Ana?”

She pointed.

“Ah… handsome, no?” he said.

She dug her elbow into his ribs. The young man vanished on the screen, replaced by sports news.

Ana walked on in silence, lost in thought. That was only the third time in ten years she had seen Bilal on television, and always the sight of him touched some deep regret within her.

“Well…?” Kapil prompted.

She stopped and faced him in the moonlight. “I’ve never told you this, Kapil. But I had a brother… I mean, I have a brother.” She pointed back to the shop-front. “That is him. Bilal Devi. He ran out on me when I was six.”

He guided her to a coffee house, sat her down at a quiet table, and demanded the full story.

She told him how Bilal had protected her from local children, made her cheap kites from newspaper and twine — and how, when she was almost seven and Bilal sixteen, he had vanished without a trace.

“Ten years ago I found out… from Sanjeev Varnaputtram, of all people, that he had been taken up by a philanthropist, and educated, and then selected to work for a big American corporation.”

“But he never contacted you?” Kapil asked.

She shook her head. “Never. Nothing. Not even a letter… For a long time I thought he must be dead, and I sometimes wished that it were so. Then I wouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that he deserted me and never thought to get in touch.”

He gripped her hand. “And you’ve never thought to try and contact him?”

She shook her head. “And the thing is, I don’t know why. Fear, perhaps. A part of me so much wants to see him again. But… but what if he spurns me, doesn’t want anything to do with me?” She shrugged. “How would I cope with that?”

He walked her home, murmuring that she had him now, and back in their room he undressed her slowly and they made love.

Afterwards, as always, she pressed her lips against his chest and wept.

He stroked her hair and whispered, “Why, Ana? Why do you always cry?”

She laughed through her tears, reached up and caressed his cheek. She wanted to say, “Is it not little wonder? But you would never understand…”

He left for the airport at seven the following morning, and they parted before the hotel with kisses and promises to see each other in one month.

Later, back in her room as she was preparing to leave and catch the train to Andhra Pradesh, a familiar soothing voice sounded in her head.

“Ana, a flight to Tokyo at eleven, and then tomorrow a fact-finding tour of the Fujiyama arboreal city…”

She smiled to herself. She had not visited Tokyo for years, and she had read a lot about the arboreal cities.

She contacted her manager at the wilderness city and arranged for her deputy to cover her shifts, then packed her holdall and took a taxi to the airport.

CHAPTER THREE

JAMES MORWELL SAT in the penthouse office of Morwell Towers and stared down the length of Manhattan. Not that the tower was strictly speaking Morwell Towers any more; the lower stories had been taken over by other concerns, and only the top two floors remained in the control of the organisation. The tower resembled a block graph, with the gradual leasing out of floor after floor to other companies representing the diminution of the once great empire of the Morwell Corporation. Within days of the arrival of the Serene, shares in the arms and energy branches of the corporation had plummeted, while across the board his other enterprises had suffered almost as much. The only section of his business empire to have survived, after a fashion, was his various media outlets.

Now James Morwell was effectively little more than a manager overseeing the smooth running of his news networks, with control but little power. He likened what had happened to the emasculation that might have taken place in the old days, if some communist dictator had assumed control and put an immediate end to all forms of free enterprise. Everything, now, was in effect under state control — that state being the hegemony of the alien Serene.

He was little more than a party functionary giving orders to others who did the real work. Gone were the days when his decisions, along with that of his board, could add millions to the price of Morwell shares, bankrupt a country or bankroll the rise to power of friendly politicians in far-flung corners of the world.

Not that he was accepting what had happened without a fight. Ten years had elapsed, and he might be the powerless puppet figurehead of a once proud business empire, but Morwell still harboured dreams of returning the planet to its pre-Serene days.

It might have been no more than a futile gesture of resistance, but not long after the coming of the Serene he had started a website devoted to the promulgation of ideas opposing the pacifist regime of the extraterrestrials. He had expected the website to be closed down summarily, but that had never happened. A decade later the website — rousingly entitled The Free Earth Confederation — boasted more than ten million subscribers worldwide. They ranged from disgruntled individuals whose lives and livelihoods had been affected by the changes — boxers and self-defence experts, anglers and hunters and many more — to former dictators and high-up military personnel, as well as free-thinkers and scientists from various fields. He had realised, early on in the campaign, that it was important to get big-name thinkers and philosophers on his side. He had contacted those with known Republican sympathies, the so-called climate change sceptics and the libertarian mavericks who, years ago, had opposed the liberals on ecological issues, and sorted out those who had done so through genuine belief from opportunists who had been bought by government research grants and funding. He had organised forums, seminars, and gathered every dissenting voice together on his website.

He genuinely believed that there was a groundswell of public opinion growing for the restitution of the old way of life.

He genuinely believed that when the Serene had imposed — without consent — their charea on the people of Earth, humanity had been robbed of something fundamental. Not for nothing had mankind evolved, by tooth and claw, over hundreds of thousands of years. We became, he reasoned, the pre-eminent species on the planet through the very means that the Serene were now denying us. It was his opinion, and that of many eminent social thinkers and philosophers, that the human race had reached the peak of its evolution and was now on an effete downward slope, little more than the pack-animals of arrogant alien masters.

Violence was a natural state. Violence was good. Violence winnowed the fittest, the strongest, from the weak. The only way forward was through the overthrow of the Serene and the subversion of the unnatural state of charea.

Of course, these were fine words. The reality was that the Serene were so far in advance of humanity in terms of science and technology that it was analogous to a band of Cro-Magnon spear-carriers taking on the might of an elite Delta Force.

With the added complication being that the Serene were an enemy which did not show itself. And its minions, the golden figures, were as elusive as they were enigmatic. Not one of his sympathisers had ever been able to open communications with the so-called self-aware entities.

His softscreen chimed, pulling him back to the real world, and Lal’s face flared on the screen. “A little more information regarding the representatives, sir.”

“Fine. Come on up.”

He had first set Lal the task of tracking down these ‘representatives’ ten years ago. In the early days he had not even been certain of their existence — from time to time, as Lal’s searches got nowhere, he thought the notion of humans in the employ of the aliens was no more than a rumour — but Lal through persistence and ingenuity had come up with occasional pay dirt. He had identified individuals who did move around the globe with erratic and seemingly motiveless purpose, individuals from all walks of life in whom the Serene should have no interest. But just as soon as Morwell hired people to apprehend and question these people, they vanished as if spirited away.

A knock sounded on the door and his facilitator Lal Devi, who’d stood by him through thick and thin since the coming of the Serene, slipped into the room, as sharp as ever with his silk suit, ponytail and air of optimistic efficiency.

He set his own softscreen on the desk top and tapped it into life.

“Two suspects, sir. The first…”

A face appeared on the screen, an African women in her fifties. “Chetti Bukhansi, 53, from Chad. An engineer. We’ve been tracking her for a month, on a tip-off from one of our sympathisers. I gave the order for a mole to be introduced, and the insertion was successful but came up with nothing substantial. Bukhansi travels a lot with her work, and it might not be the ‘cover’ of a representative.”

Morwell frowned. “So in effect a big fat blank.”

Lal nodded. “Just so.” He tapped the screen again and the African face was replaced by that of a European in his twenties. “This is Markus Dortmund, 28, from Germany. An artist. His girlfriend is a Free Earth Confederation member and contacted me via the website. We put someone on his trail…”

“And?”

Lal shrugged his slim shoulders. “The jury is still out. He travels a hell of a lot, but then his line of work calls for it. That’s the difficulty we face, sir — we just cannot be sure with any of them when they’re doing their own legitimate work, and when they might be working for the Serene.”

Morwell said, “But surely…”

“It’s impossible to be with the subjects twenty-four seven, sir, impossible to attend all their meetings. It’s quite possible that when they’re conducting seemingly casual meetings with other individuals, work for the Serene is taking place.”

Morwell nodded his understanding, impatient though he was.

“Very well. Keep tabs on this individual, Dortmund, and for chrissake don’t get too close. We don’t want to spook the Serene and lose him.”

“Understood.”

“And anything further on the idea that the Serene have been amongst us for longer than the ten years since their obvious arrival?”

It was a schizoid French philosopher who’d first posited this theory, and Morwell still didn’t know how seriously to take it.

The philosopher argued that for the Serene to institute the changes in the infrastructure of the economy of the planet in such an apparently short time, thousands of ‘operatives’ must have been in place pulling various strings and laying the ground-work for the revolution. Businesses had gone under overnight, only to be resurrected days later; banks had been run dry and then re-capitalised… And then there had been the logistical, organisational changes that had taken place: entire industries had vanished — meat farming among others — and yet within days all workers had been allocated other jobs. Such a smooth and painless transition pointed, so the philosopher argued, to careful planning and the placement of experts in a hundred different specialisms.

Now the Indian stroked the line of his jaw. “I’ve had investigators checking the backgrounds of more than a hundred individuals, and they have unearthed certain anomalies. People whose life histories seem to have started from nowhere in their mid-twenties or -thirties; people without family or friends whose background has proven impossible to trace, as if they just popped out of nowhere ten, twenty, thirty years ago.” Lal shrugged again. “But the exasperating thing is, sir, that these anomalies might be caused by nothing more than incomplete or inefficient records. I’ll keep my team investigating and report when we come up with anything more conclusive.”

They chatted about other matters for a while, then Morwell dismissed Lal and returned his attention to the view of sprawling Manhattan.

He spent hours like this, he realised, staring out at the city but in reality thinking back to a time very different from this one. A time when he worked an eighteen-hour day and made a dozen vital decisions every hour; a time when he courted politicians and had them know that a vote the right way, or a bill passed in favour of a certain policy, could mean the difference between their party gaining millions in funding and getting nothing. Nowadays the world seemed to be run by a bunch of liberal bureaucrats whose favour could not be bought for love nor money. All the more ammunition for the mad Frenchman’s idea that they had been amongst us for centuries, Morwell thought.

His softscreen chimed again and the beautiful young face of his latest escort, as he liked to call these women, smiled out at him. What was her name? Suzi, Kiki? She was new — had been recommended to him just last week — and knew how to satisfy his needs.

“James… I’m here.” She blew him a kiss.

He smiled. “I’ll have security send you up to the penthouse. And you’ll find five bottles of Perrier in the cooler.”

She pulled a pretty moue. “Five?”

“Just drink them and I’ll be up in an hour, okay?”

She pulled a face, hit the deactivate key with ill-grace, and vanished from the screen.

HE WAS ABOUT to leave the office and indulge himself in one of the few activities he enjoyed these days — even though his sex-life, since the coming of the Serene, had been diminished — when he noticed something in the corner of the room.

He turned quickly in his swivel chair and stared.

Something was flickering in the angle created by the two plate-glass windows, and at first he thought it an effect of the light on the glass. As he watched, however, the flickering light intensified and resolved itself into a standing blue figure.

“What the fuck–” Morwell kicked off and launched his chair across the room away from the figure. He fetched up against the wall and exclaimed again.

The figure was tall, well over two metres high, and composed of a swirling blue light. It seemed to contain azure spiral galaxies that rotated and shifted as he stared.

It stood with its arms at its side, totally silent, and gazed directly at him — though its face was the same swirling blue as the rest of its body, and featureless.

He managed, “What do you want?”

Some envoy of the Serene, come to end his opposition? His heart began to beat faster and he realised he was sweating.

The figure spoke — or rather its words sounded in his head. “Do not be afraid.”

“Wh-what are you?”

“We are the Obterek,” said the figure, still unmoving, “and my time here is limited.”

Morwell eyed the door, four metres away. He wondered if he could reach it before the figure moved to stop him.

“What do you want?”

A beat, then the figure said, “We desire the same outcome as you, James Morwell.”

His heart skipped. “You… you’re nothing to do with the Serene?”

“We oppose the Serene; we oppose everything the Serene are doing to your planet and to your people. The Obterek are ancient enemies of the Serene.”

Morwell nodded slowly, taking all this in. “And you are here because…?”

“Because we believe you can help us in our opposition of the Serene.”

He stared at the figure, smiling to himself. “You appear here out of nowhere, a figure of pulsing light. You’ve obviously travelled light years to reach Earth and possess technologies we have yet to dream of… And you think I can help you?”

“We do not have the time to explain fully, James Morwell. Also, your understanding of the terms we use would be insufficient. Suffice to say, we the Obterek can insert ourselves into the reality of your solar system for brief periods only, for scant minutes every month. The Serene are vigilant, and watch for us, and we can compromise their surveillance only temporarily; likewise, we can breach their charea only briefly.”

He pounced on this. “You can breach the charea?”

“With extreme care and a great expenditure of energy, yes,” said the figure. “But to answer your question: you can help the Obterek undermine the Serene, and return the planet and its people to the Natural Way, because you inhabit this reality in a way that we do not. Together we can bring an end to the regime of the Serene on Earth.”

Morwell gained confidence. He moved his chair closer to the figure and said, “And how might I accomplish this? And why me, of all…”

The blue figure interrupted. “You maintain an opposition, feeble though it is, to the Serene. You have contacts, a network of agents working to your ends. One of these: to locate the Serene’s human representatives.”

Morwell nodded. “That is so, yes.”

“We, too, are interested in these people. We, the Obterek, believe they hold the key to what the Serene are planning in this system. The Serene are using them in ways we cannot quite fathom. To capture a representative, to find out from these people how they are being used, will mark a step change in our opposition to the Serene.”

Morwell nodded. “We have been attempting to trace these people, which is easier said than done. We have leads, suspects. But when we get close…” He snapped his thumb and forefinger, “they go to ground.”

“In that, James Morwell, we can assist.”

For the first time the figure moved. It took a step forward, and then another, and there was something startling about the strength of purpose it exhibited, as if battling against a gravity greater than that to which it was accustomed.

It stood before his desk, pulsing, and from just a couple of metres away Morwell could feel the heat radiating from its body.

The figure reached out a hand, and opened it.

A shower of what looked like sparkling blue coins — the same shade and make-up as the body of the Obterek — spilled across the desk.

Morwell stared at the dozen discs as they glowed on the desk-top.

He looked up at the figure. “And these are?”

“What they are called does not matter, nor how they work. I could not explain their mechanics in any way that you would understand. Put simply, though erroneously, they transmit the content of a sentient’s mind to us through a breach in the space-time continuum. This explanation is imprecise, but will suffice.”

“And you would like my agents to…?”

“When you apprehend a suspect, one of these attached to that person will be enough to begin the transmission process.”

He stared at the discs. “And just how do we attach them?”

“By simply placing a disc against the skin of a suspect. The disc will do the rest, will insert itself instantly under the skin of the suspect, who will feel nothing. One hour later, however, the subject will die — an unavoidable consequence of the transmission.”

“Die…” Morwell said to himself. He gestured towards the discs. “But I can handle them with… impunity?”

“You will not be harmed.”

He was silent for a time. At last he asked, “And how do I know I can trust you? How do I know that these… these discs will do what you say they will?”

He had a dozen more questions, but these would do to start with.

The figure said, “The fact is that you do not know, for certain. You must merely trust. And hope, James Morwell. And hope is a commodity of which you have had little over the course of the past ten years.” The figure paused, pulsing beautifully, and went on, “We have read your manifesto. We have studied your online pronouncements. The Serene, too, are aware of you, but in their complacency they allow you to conduct your opposition, such as it is. But that is the difference between the Obterek and the Serene: if you were opposed to the Obterek, we would have no compunction in carrying out your summary extermination.”

Morwell almost smiled with the thrill of hearing such threats. He was thirteen again, and his father was approaching him with a baseball bat…

He leaned forward and said, “And after the Serene have been vanquished, and the Obterek rule, what then?”

The figure standing before his desk began to fade. Its last words sounded in his head: “Then you, the human race, will be alone again, such is the Natural Law…”

“But –” he began, meaning to ask what the Obterek would gain from a return to the old ways.

A second later the blue figure vanished.

Morwell leaned forward and touched the closest disc. It was warm, and pulsed against his fingertips. Smiling, he reached out and trawled the rest towards him like a gambler scooping his winnings.

CHAPTER FOUR

ALLEN HAD TWO hours to wait before the monotrain was due to leave Tokyo and head north to the Fujiyama arboreal city, so he sat in the plaza outside the station and sipped a coffee.

The city skyline was dominated by a thousand-metre-tall obelisk, jet black and slightly tapering towards its summit. It was one of a dozen identical buildings gifted by the Serene, along with the eight ‘wilderness towns’, the hundred-plus littoral domed cities, and the arboreal cities, numbering in their thousands, that were springing up all around the world. The difference with the black obelisks was that they were the only Serene buildings placed within already existing cities, and they were the only constructions not purposefully created for human habitation. In fact, no one knew why the obelisks had appeared simultaneously five years ago in the centres of twelve of the largest cities on Earth.

Since their arrival Allen’s monthly missions, as he thought of them, were always to the cities occupied by the obelisks. The routine was always the same. He would be alerted by a golden figure’s calm voice in his head telling him to make his way to London Airport, where he would board a Serene plane and instantly lose consciousness.

The next thing he knew it would be one or two days later and he’d be sitting on a bench near one of the obelisks. In the early days the same routine would transpire, and he would come to his senses in various far-flung cities around the world. He would check his softscreen and more often than not find he had a photo-shoot appointment the very same day somewhere not far away. For the past five years, however, every time he regained consciousness he was close to an obelisk — leading him to assume that his ‘missions’ and the obelisks were in some way linked.

A few months ago he’d taken the monorail into London with Sally, and after a morning spent in the National Gallery Allen had suggested a stroll to Marble Arch. There they, along with thousands of other curious sightseers, walked around the base of the obelisk, marvelling at its seamlessness, its lack of features, the faint pulsing warmth it gave off.

The media had not been slow in suggesting what the towers might be: they were, opined a respected international newsfeed, where the Serene themselves dwelled, looking out with sophisticated surveillance apparatus at the doings of the human race. More bizarre suggestions included the idea that they were the very engines that maintained the Serene’s regime of non-violence across the face of the Earth, that they were the physical essence of the extraterrestrials themselves, or that they were alien prisons where malcontents from across the galaxy were suspended and stored.

Allen subscribed to none of these theories. The obelisks were, he surmised, meeting places where summits between fellow representatives like himself gathered to conduct Serene business — fulfilling much the same role as did the amphitheatre in the conjoined starships a decade ago.

Of course, quite what business he and the other representatives were conducting was another mystery.

He sat back and watched the crowds of Japanese workers and shoppers pass back and forth across the plaza. Visually not much had changed in the populated centres of the world. The scene here ten years ago, before the coming of the Serene, would be much the same as this one, other than the minor changes of fashion, advertisements and some architecture. The changes were on a more substantial, psychological level, he thought — which had an effect on the people of the plaza. There seemed to be a more carefree atmosphere wherever crowds gathered now, a realisation that the threat of violence, however remote, was no more, so that individuals were no longer burdened with the subconscious fear of their fellow man. It was the same wherever he went, a joyful absence of fear which promoted, in turn, a definite altruism: he was sure he’d seen, over the course of the last few years, acts of kindness, generosity and selflessness in a larger measure than before the arrival of the aliens.

He considered his own life over the past ten years, and smiled to himself as he realised that perhaps the greater difference made to it had not been the coming of the Serene, but the arrival of Sally Walsh and his daughter, Hannah.

He often experienced a retrospective shiver of dread at the thought that he might never have met Sally Walsh. He had been in the right place at the right time: a photo-shoot in the drought-stricken region of Karamoja where, just an hour before he was due to pack up and leave, Sally had arrived in a battered Land Rover to treat seriously malnourished tribespeople.

He’d liked the look of the thin, washed-out doctor instantly, and had made an excuse to extend his photographic session.

Their life together in England since then had been little short of idyllic.

He missed Sally and Hannah on his days away, and when he worked in locations around Britain between missions for the Serene, but he counted himself fortunate that he had the majority of every month — perhaps twenty days — to get under their feet while he ostensibly did the housework.

Thoughts of Sally made him reach for his softscreen. It would be the middle of the night in England, but she might have left a message.

He smiled as he saw her name at the top of the list, and accessed her call. A second later he sat up with alarm as his wife’s distraught face filled the screen. “Geoff. Something awful…”

His heart jumped sickeningly, but her next words reassured him on that score: “Hannah’s fine and so am I. It’s Kath. There was an accident. I saw it.” Her face crumpled, and Allen wanted nothing more than to hold her. “Oh, Geoff, it was awful, awful… Please ring me back as soon as you can. I love you.”

He checked the time of the message: she had left it over three hours ago.

He called back immediately, realising that Sally was likely to be sound asleep. There was no reply, so he left a message, whispering urgently into the screen, “Sally… I got your call. I’ll be home in around ten, twelve hours. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. I’m thinking of you. I love you.”

He signed off, aware of the inadequacy of his words, and stared unseeingly across the plaza.

A TALL, TANNED, dark-haired woman in a short yellow sun dress had turned on her seat a couple of tables away and was watching him. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties, with the poised elegance of a film star or ballerina. Her face was hauntingly familiar, and he wondered if that was where he’d seen her at some point, on screen or stage.

Her gaze persisted and she smiled, and Allen, being English and unused to the attention of glamorous women, looked away and felt himself colour maddeningly.

He was aware, peripherally, of her uncrossing her long legs, standing and striding across the plaza towards his table.

Only when her shadow fell across him did he look up. His smile faltered.

She said, in Mediterranean-accented English, “I never forget a face.”

“Then you have the advantage of me,” he said, “because I do. Forgive me, but have we met?”

She touched the back of an empty chair with long fingers. “Would you mind…?”

“No, please.”

She sat down, signalled to a waiter with the air of one accustomed to attracting instant attention, and ordered an espresso.

She offered her hand. “Nina Ricci, and we have not met. But, ten years ago, we did attend the same gathering, and I have seen you once or twice since.”

“I’m Geoff,” he said, and only then did the belated penny drop. “Ah,” he said, relieved. “The Serene starships…” The tall, Italian-sounding woman who had been the first person to ask the Serene a question.

“That’s right. We were among the few who asked questions back then. I think most people were petrified by fear, but not we…”

He wondered why she had come to speak to him. He said, “For the ten years I’ve been a representative, I’ve never met another one.”

She sipped her coffee and smiled dazzlingly. “Ah, but I think that is because you have not been looking, Geoff.”

“And you have?”

“I am by nature a curious person. I want always to know how, what, why, when, who…”

“You’d make a fine journalist.”

“That is what I am, Geoff. A feature writer for the Corriere della Sera, Roma. I’m here to cover the opening of the arboreal city in Fujiyama.”

“Snap. That’s where I’m going.” He patted his bag hanging from the back of his chair. “Photographer.”

“But of course” — she pierced him with her olive-dark eyes — “that was not the principal reason we were brought here.”

He smiled. “Of course not. And your journalist’s curiosity would like to know why?”

In reply, she turned in her seat — the graceful torque of her back suggestive again of a ballerina — and pointed a long finger at the sable obelisk towering over the plaza.

She said, “Have you made the connection, Geoff?”

“That for the past few years we always wake up close to an obelisk? Yes, it had occurred to me.”

“And do you wonder what we do in there?”

“So… you think that we actually enter the obelisks?”

“I do, and so do the other three or four representatives I’ve met over the years.”

He shook his head. “Anyway, as to your question: pass. I’ve no idea.”

She pulled a mock-shocked expression. “No? Surely you must have? An intelligent Englishman like yourself?” She was baiting him.

“My wife would disagree about the intelligent bit,” he said, pleased for some reason that he’d mentioned Sally. He shrugged. “I don’t know… We’re conducting Serene business. So… I assumed in the early days we were meeting business people, heads of state, the powerful movers and shakers of the world. I see no reason why we’re not still doing that. Maybe… maybe we’re passing down the wisdom of the Serene.”

She was looking at him askance. She had a repertory of practised facial expressions, like an actress forever anticipating the close-up shot. “Do you really think this, when the Serene have in their service a legion of the so-called ‘golden figures’?”

He thought about it. “I might be wrong, but I always thought the self-aware entities manifested themselves only to us, the representatives — and in the early days stationed themselves on high rooftops and mountain summits, of course.”

She considered him for a few seconds, then said, “Reality check, Geoff. The golden figures are amongst us.”

He stared at her. “They are?” He made a show of looking around the plaza and finding none. “Strange, but I don’t see a single one.”

She leaned forward, elbows on table, pointed chin lodged in her cupped palm. “That is because, unobservant Englishman, they are in disguise.”

“Ah…” he said, and pointed at her. “But if they are disguised, then how could I be observant enough to spot them?”

She nodded. “Point taken. Perhaps I am lucky, because once I observed an accident.”

He finished his coffee. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” He smiled, intrigued by this beautiful, inquisitive Italian.

“I one day was walking down the avenue in Barcelona when I saw a man run over by an automobile. Splat! Dead and no doubting the fact. Only, a day later I saw the same man walking as large as life down the street a mile or so away… I never forget a face, as I said. So, being the curious type of girl, I accosted the man and asked him how, since I saw him die pretty messily the other day, he was now as fit as fit can be and showing no signs of his injuries.”

“And he told you?”

“He smiled and said my name, and took me to a quiet park nearby–”

“You should be wary of men who suggest quiet parks.”

She smiled. “But you see, I knew then that he was not a man, I mean a real man.” She waved a hand. “And then, when we are quite alone in the park, he becomes a golden figure and tells me that there are hundreds of thousands of his kind passing as human — and, moreover, have been for many, many decades.”

She stared at him with large eyes as much to say, “So, what do you think of that?”

“Amazing,” he responded on cue. “What else did he say?” He thought of the self-aware entities going among the human race for decades, doing their good work…

“Not a lot, other than if I were to try to broadcast what he had told me, or write about it for publication, I would find myself unable to do so. I would… what is the English word…? spasm.”

“But I take it it’s okay to tell an audience of just one?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Evidently. Anyway, do you see me spasming?”

He recalled her original question. “So… because there are a legion of golden figures working amongst us, you think that the reason we… we gather in the obelisks is not merely to hand down the wisdom of the Serene, liaise with the powerful and such?”

She pointed a pistol finger at him. “Exactly so, Geoff.”

He nodded. “Intriguing. So… what do you think we do in there?”

She pulled a glum face. “Ah, now — I was hoping that you might be able to shed some illumination on that.”

“Sorry to disappoint, Nina. I’ve no idea. But what about the other representatives you’ve met?”

She made a carefree gesture. “Oh, they too do not know.”

“But do you have a theory? Come on, an intelligent journalist like you…” he said mockingly.

She smiled. “Of course. I think they are studying us.”

“Studying us?”

“I think, like in a horror movie, once we are inside the obelisks they take us apart atom by atom and see how we work.”

He tried not to laugh. “Funny, when I leave the obelisks — always assuming, of course, that I enter them in the first place — I feel pretty well for a man who’s been deconstructed atom by atom. I don’t suppose you have any valid reason to think this?”

She shrugged her tanned shoulders again. “Just, as you say, a hunch.”

He shook his head. “A wild hunch, if you don’t mind me saying. The Serene have had plenty of time to study us, take us apart, before they came here — if what you say about the SAEs being here for ages is correct. At this stage I’d say it was pretty late to be studying us.”

“Well, what is your hunch?”

“I don’t have one. Sorry, but in this instance I think speculation is useless. We couldn’t have guessed at the capabilities of the Serene before they came here, so trying to second guess their methods now is futile.”

“So you’re happy to be their tool, and ask no questions?”

He thought about it. “Yes, I am. The Serene have rendered the human race incapable of committing acts of violence. That’s a pretty magnanimous gift. I’m happy to do their bidding in return.” He looked at her. “What about you?”

She nodded. “I think what the Serene have done here is wonderful.”

“Did you listen to the nay-sayers in the early days? The right-wingers and libertarians who foresaw the end of the human race as we knew it?”

“I listened, and thought them wrong. You?”

“I heard what they said and hoped they were wrong, but feared they might be right.”

The newsfeeds and internet had been rife with doom-mongers in the first couple of years after the Serene intervention in human affairs. They forecast that such a radical alteration in the mechanism of the human psyche — the total abnegation of an individual’s ability to carry through acts of violence — would have dire psychological consequences. So-called experts stated that violence was a safety-valve which, if not allowed to blow from time to time, would store up untold mental pressure which would in time burst with catastrophic results.

Now Nina said, “I always thought they were wrong, Geoff. Okay, so if everyone on the planet committed acts of violence every day, day in day out, then they might have had a case. But think about it — how many acts of violence did you perpetrate before the coming of the Serene?”

He shrugged. “Not many. In fact… I can remember defending myself against a bully when I was twelve, and once or twice wanting to hit someone, but never carrying out the urge.”

“There you are then. I am the same, along with the majority of the people in this square, I think. The nay-sayers, as you call, them were wrong. Violence is not a pre-requisite of being human, just a nasty side-effect of social conditions. And violence is certainly not a right, as some would claim it is.”

He smiled. “I think you’re correct there. Nina.”

She pointed to his empty cup. “Would you care for another coffee?”

“I’ve had two already. Another one and I’d be hyper.” He looked at his watch. “Our train is in forty minutes. Tell you what, a beer would go down nicely. For you?”

“Do you think they have Peroni, Geoff?”

He asked the waiter, but the only foreign lagers available were Leffe and Red Star. She said she would prefer Leffe, and he ordered two glasses. “My wife’s favourite,” he said.

“And what does she make of being married to a representative of the Serene?”

The beers arrived and Allen took a refreshing mouthful. “I think she’s… proud, and intrigued.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Proud to be married to you, because the Serene picked only the best?”

He looked at her. “Did they? I never claim that.”

“When I was chosen, Geoff, I asked the golden figure who was shepherding me: why me? It replied that I was selected because of my humanity.”

He nodded. “I recall being told something similar. But there are millions of others out there with just such qualities who weren’t selected.” He shrugged. “Sally, my wife, was a doctor in Africa before the Serene arrived. She had a… a deep-seated need to help others, which I suppose came from being the daughter of dyed-in-the-wool socialists. I don’t know. My wife is just as good a person as I am, if not better.”

Nina nodded without replying and watched him as she sipped her drink. “Can you think of any negatives to the coming of the Serene?” she asked at last.

He had to think about that. “Personally, no. I know that some evolutionary biologists have argued that the Serene intervention has steered our race away from the course on which it was set…” He shrugged. “But then who’s to say that that course was in anyway sacrosanct, or the right one, so to speak? It’s an argument that has raged in politics since the days of colonialism — should ‘super-powers’ dabble in the affairs of so-called lesser or undeveloped nations, even if for their good? The Serene are here. That’s a fact, and in my opinion the world is a better place because of it.” He sipped his beer and added, “Of course, some religious fundamentalists still claim the Serene are in league with Satan.”

She waved that away as if swatting a fly. “Nut cases and cranks.”

He smiled. “The world’s religions have taken something of a battering, thanks to our alien friends,” he said.

“The traditional religions. Do you know how many religions have sprung up over the past few years, inspired by the Serene?”

He’d heard of the phenomenon, and said, “Half a dozen, or even fewer?”

She shook her head, smiling. “Would you believe over five thousand?”

“No. Five thousand? Where did you read that?”

“I actually wrote a feature for my paper on the new religions. For some deep-seated reason, the human race needs to believe in a god-like figure, a deity, and in the eyes of many the Serene amply fill that god-shaped hole.”

“But five thousand?”

She shrugged. “And these new religions span the globe, from east to west, north to south, supplanting the old religions and gaining strength.”

“I wonder how the Serene regard them?”

She made a rosebud of her lips, then said, “My guess is that they despair.” She smiled. “The Serene strike me as supremely rationalist.”

“Another of your hunches?” he asked.

She laughed. “Maybe so.”

“Well, I suppose if the Serene come here and perform miracles, they can’t be surprised at the reaction of some of our more credulous cousins.” He tipped his head back and forth. “They certainly fit the bill. Our saviours, who set us on a new moral course…”

She squinted at him. “I never had you down as a religious type, Geoff Allen.”

He smiled at her. Her familiarity, her assumed knowledge of him, he might have found discomfiting in one less affable than Nina Ricci, but she made her personal pronouncements with an easy, almost mocking candour that he found at once charming and disarming.

Only then did he wonder how she knew his surname, for he was sure he had introduced himself only as ‘Geoff’.

He asked, “What other Serene-related stories have you worked on recently?”

“The big one was an investigation into how the Serene have been ‘assisting’ some of our biggest drugs companies.”

He smiled. “Before their coming, I would have said that the drugs companies certainly needed ‘assisting’,” he said with sarcasm.

“Of course, the Serene have changed everything to do with the business model of the pharmaceuticals,” she said. “Now instead of working for their share-holders, like every other company before them, they are working for the people. My investigations uncovered the fact that many of the newly released drugs of recent years have their origins off-planet. I spoke to experts who assured me that they were derived from chemical bases that did not exist on Earth.” She shrugged. “Which would go to support the fact that in the last decade human life-expectancy, worldwide, has increased by an average of a little over twelve years.”

He thought about it. “I suppose the resulting increase in population will be sustained by the limitless supply of energy and the vast new cities… But even so, the planet is finite.”

She was smiling at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Would you like to hear another of my hunches?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No,” she said. “My hunch is this: I think soon the Serene will take us off-planet, away from Earth, to colonies in the solar system…”

“Nice idea,” he said. “Imagine living on a moon beneath the rings of Saturn…”

“You mock me, but I am deadly serious. As you say, the planet is a finite system, and the population is increasing dramatically. So where will we go, but off-planet?”

He shrugged. “You might be right,” he said. “If the Serene can bring other forms of life here, then I see no reason why they can’t take us… elsewhere.”

“‘Other forms of life’? Oh, you mean the arboreal cities?”

He nodded. “I’m looking forward to seeing them. I’m told they’re the eighth wonder of the world.”

“But shouldn’t that be eleventh, coming after the eight joined starships, the greening cities, and…” — she pointed a crimson lacquered nail at the towers across the plaza — “the obelisks?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve lost count.”

He’d read online accounts of the arboreal cities, and the mammoth trees from Antares II which made terrestrial giant redwoods seem like saplings in comparison, and when his editor had suggested he do a photo-shoot of the Fujiyama arboreal city — as he would be visiting Japan anyway — he had jumped at the chance.

He checked his watch. “But speaking of arboreal cities… our train leaves in ten minutes.”

They finished their drinks and crossed the plaza to the station, had their softscreen reservations scanned, and strolled the length of the platform to the second carriage. Allen relaxed in a luxurious window seat and minutes later the torpedo-train slipped from the station.

Nina Ricci sat opposite him, silent as she regarded the reforestation projects north of Tokyo.

Allen stared through the window, noting the new sea defences that had been erected along the coast after the tsunami of 2018. They slid past a vast energy distribution station just as a beam of concentrated light fell to Earth like a meteor, dazzling him and the hundred other passengers who ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ like school children.

As the train sped around the bend of a bay he closed his eyes, feigning sleep, and considered Sally and her distraught message.

CHAPTER FIVE

SALLY FOUND A post-it note and wrote: I’m in the back garden. Take the side path to the left and I’ll see you there. She tore off the yellow rectangle, stuck the note to the front door beside the big brass knocker and retreated to the back garden.

For some reason she didn’t want to open the front door and confront Kath — or whatever it was that Kath had become. She did not, she thought, want to be confined in the house with her. It was not a thought she could rationalise, and part of her felt guilty for having it. But it came to her that she needed to meet this new, resurrected Kath in the open, in the sunlight, so that she could run if she needed to.

She was still in a state of shock. She recalled the dazed disbelief she had experienced just after the coming of the Serene. This was similar, only intensified a hundredfold. She felt abstracted from reality, as if she were moving in a bubble secluded from everything, her every sense retarded.

She crossed the garden and sat on the wooden bench beneath the flowering cherry tree. From here she could look back at the house, and the wicket gate to the side path through which, in a matter of minutes, Kath would walk. Kath Kemp, whom Sally had watched die yesterday…

It was an idyllic scene, with the sun shining and the wisteria giving off its heavy scent which wafted to her across the garden. The mullioned windows winked in the sunlight, and the borders were abundant with blooms. It was a scene that might be a hundred years old, so little had changed here in the past century.

The gate beside the house squeaked open and Sally sprang to her feet with a sharp, indrawn breath.

Kath Kemp paused, holding the gate open. She was perhaps twenty metres away from Sally and smiled that familiar smile at her.

Sally took a step forward, and then another. She felt like an invalid, learning to walk again after a terrible accident. She was aware of a pain in her chest and shortness of breath.

Kath too began walking, slowly, and they met in the middle of the lawn, drenched in sunlight, for all the world as if they had never met before.

Sally stared at the woman before her, stared at her broad, smiling face, her swept back hair. Her skin was flushed, alive; she exuded, as she had yesterday, a radiant compassion that Sally found impossible to describe or to quantify: it was who Kathryn Kemp was, an identifying signature, which filled Sally whenever she thought about her friend in absentia.

Kath reached out a small, broad hand, tentatively, as if unsure how she might be greeted.

After a second, Sally took it, almost gasped at its warmth, its… humanity.

She knew, then, suddenly, what had happened.

The Serene had somehow, with the superior technology they possessed, brought Kathryn Kemp back to life. They had deemed her too valuable a person in their schema to allow to die. This was essentially the same Kath as before, but new, remade.

Kath squeezed her hand and said, “Shall we sit down?” She indicated the bench beneath the cherry tree. They crossed the lawn and sat side by side in the dappled shade.

Sally turned and stared at her friend. “I saw it happen, Kath. You quoted Housman, and then… then the truck came around the corner and…”

“I’m sorry,” Kath said. “I can’t imagine what you must have gone through.”

Sally smiled to herself. That was Kath, the compassionate: she had died, and been brought back to life, and she apologised for the hurt that this had occasioned.

“I have a lot to tell you,” Kath said in a soft voice, “to explain.”

“I… I think I know what happened. You are important to the Serene, Kath. And they’re so powerful. I mean, look how they’ve banished human violence. What is it to bring the dead back to life?”

Kath stared at her with wide eyes.

Sally said, “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Kath shook her head. “No,” she said gently.

“I don’t understand. You’re the same Kath I’ve always known. I saw you die, and here you are, alive… The Serene must have brought you back to life. You were dead, Kath!”

“I was dead, and the Serene did resurrect me — I am the same Kath Kemp you have always known, but the truth of it is that I am not, and never was, human.”

Sally felt dizzy. Had she not been sitting down she would have slumped into the seat. A hot flush cascaded across her face.

“Then what?”

“I am what you call a self-aware entity.”

Sally shook her head in a mute negative, unable to find her voice. At last she said, “No. No, that can’t be right, can it? I mean… I knew you before the Serene arrived. I knew you at college. We were twenty. That first meeting, in the canteen and we both reached for the last…”

“Vanilla slice.”

“And we were friends from the start, best friends, and that was years and years before the Serene arrived… And I remember you saying — I remember it clearly! You said you didn’t believe in UFOs and little green men. You called it all…”

“A wish-fulfilling delusion…” She nodded, smiled. “Yes, I did.”

Sally took a deep breath. She felt as if she were about to faint. She fought to remain conscious. “Then… in that case…”

“I am and always have been a self-aware entity,” Kath said.

Sally sprang to her feet and ran off down the garden, hugging herself tightly, her thoughts in turmoil.

She stopped before the swing, brought up short by its ridiculous, meretricious essence. The swing made her think of Hannah, and what she might be doing now. Break time — so she would be chomping on her health bar, sipping apple juice.

Sally knew that when she turned around and looked at the bench beneath the cherry tree, it would be empty. She had hallucinated the meeting with Kath, was suffering hysteric delusions brought about by the shock of her friend’s death last night.

She turned around.

Kath Kemp sat on the bench in the shifting, dappled sunlight, gazing across the lawn at her.

Sally hugged herself, as if protectively, and stared across at Kath Kemp, or at whatever Kath Kemp was.

A self-aware entity?

The idea was impossible.

Slowly, hesitantly, she retraced her steps and paused before the bench, staring down at her friend. Kath looked up, squinting against the sunlight.

She found her voice at last. “But you look so human, Kath.” You are so human, Kath…

“Of course.” Kath smiled. “I had to pass for human.” She patted the bench. “Please, sit down.”

Sally obeyed, then said, “But everything we shared, the friendship. You were… my best friend, Kath. We shared everything. I told you…” She stopped, staring at Kath. She had told Kath everything, had opened her heart to the woman… and Kath had listened, taken it all in, and for her own part had reciprocated… nothing about herself.

Had that been, Sally thought, because she had nothing human to say about herself?

“But I am still your best friend, Sally. I might not be human, but that doesn’t mean that everything we shared is invalidated. I am an empathetic, thinking, feeling, being. I have emotions, emotions that over the years of interacting with your kind have flourished, become almost human. Your friendship means everything to me. This… my death, your learning of my true nature, should not come between us.”

Sally sat in silence, trying to order her thoughts. At last she said, “A self-aware entity…” She shrugged. “It means nothing really, does it? Surely everything sentient in existence is a self-aware entity?” She stopped, staring at her friend, and asked softly, “Just what are you?”

Kath took a deep breath, as Sally had seen her do on a thousand previous occasions when preparing to answer a complex question. “I will give you my history, Sally, and see what you make of it.”

Sally had the ridiculous impulse, then, to ask Kath, to ask this self-aware entity, if she would care for a cup of tea. She restrained herself.

Kath said, “I am an organic somatic structure grown around a programmable sentient-core nurtured to term in a vat on the planet of Delta Pavonis V, twenty light years from Earth.” She paused, then went on, “I am partly organic, partly artificial. I am what you humans describe, crudely, as a cybernetic organism. In the Serene system, I am accorded full citizen’s rights; I am beholden to no one. I have what you call free will.”

“But you said you were programmable.”

“My sentient core, in infancy, was programmable — but then you could say the same of a human baby’s brain. It is programmable, and is programmed, by its environment, by its parents and peers. It is a question, I suppose, of defining one’s terms. Because I was programmable does not de facto make me some soulless machine in the employ of the Serene.”

“But you work for them?”

“Through choice, yes. Because I perceive what the Serene are doing, here and elsewhere, as a wholly beneficial and good endeavour.”

“But… you were programmable. Therefore, you were programmed.”

“In my early years, yes. I was programmed with the knowledge of what the Serene were doing. But, later, I was given the choice of whether to serve them, or not.”

A silence came between them, and at last Sally asked, “And you are… immortal?”

Kath smiled and shook her head. “I will live for a long time, perhaps a thousand years, before my mind and body… degrades, and I die.”

Sally stared at the entity she had thought of, over the years, as her best friend, and something struck her. She asked in almost a whisper, as if afraid of the answer, “And how old are you?”

Kath tipped her head, closed one eye, and looked at Sally. How familiar that semi-amused expression was! How many times had Sally seen it in the past? A hundred, a thousand?

Kath said, with a twinkle in her eye, “I am a little over two hundred years old.”

Sally nodded, as if it were perfectly acceptable to have one’s best friend inform you that she was over two centuries old.

“And before you came to Earth… you lived on Delta Pavonis V?”

“For a hundred years,” Kath said, “while in training for my assignment on Earth.”

“So… so you have been on Earth for more than a hundred years?”

“A little over one hundred, in various guises.”

Sally took a breath, her heart racing. She felt as if she were hyperventilating, and tried to assess what she was thinking, feeling.

She had always assumed that she had been Kath’s best friend — as they had shared so much in the past — and to find out now that Kath had had a previous incarnation, or many incarnations on Earth, gave her an obscure sense of being let down, of not being unique in Kath’s estimation.

Ridiculous, she knew.

She said, “A hundred years? So the Serene have known for that long that one day they would come to Earth and… change things?”

“For much longer than that,” Kath said.

“And they sent you here to…?”

“Initially I was sent here on a fact-finding mission, to gather and collate information and send it back to our home planet.”

“And then?”

“And then, along with other self-aware entities, I helped to smooth the way, to create benevolent institutions, create an intellectual atmosphere wherein the very notion of the other, the alien, could be discussed, accepted.”

“You had a different guise? You were not always Kathryn Kemp, of course?”

“Of course. I was a male for many years, then female, and then a male again.”

“And… how many of your fellow self-aware entities were there, and still are?”

“We numbered, in the early years, in our hundreds, and then fifty years ago in our thousands. Now… there are perhaps a million of us on the planet.”

A million, Sally thought.

“And you were never found out? There were never accidents like last night, when you might have been hospitalised, examined and discovered?”

“We are similar, physiologically, to yourselves. A surgical examination of our bodies would reveal nothing — only a neurological scan, or neurosurgery might give away the lie, but we had means of ensuring we never compromised our identities.”

She smiled at Sally, then surprised her by saying, “I don’t know about you, Sally, but I would love a cup of tea…” She gestured to the house. “Let me go and potter about in the kitchen, while you sit here and think about what I’ve said. Earl Grey?”

“My favourite.”

“I know…”

Impulsively, both Sally and Kath, human and Serene self-aware entity, came together in a hug. Sally held on and closed her eyes, and told herself that it really didn’t matter that her friend was not human.

Kath moved into the house and Sally sat in the shade, watching her as she moved back and forth behind the kitchen window.

Kath was Kath, she told herself — the friend she had had for more than thirty years. Did it matter, really matter, that she was alien? Perhaps if Kath had befriended Sally back in their college days with some ulterior motive in mind, then Sally would have cause for unease. But as far as she could tell they had come together spontaneously, drawn to each other by that inexplicable personal chemistry that attracted human beings to each other… or in this case humans and self-aware entities.

Unless…

A thought struck Sally as she watched Kath ease herself sideways through the back door bearing a tray.

Sally drew up a small table and Kath poured two cups of Earl Grey.

They sat side by side and Kath said, “I hope this doesn’t change things between us, Sally. I value our friendship.”

“So do I, of course. But there is something I’d like to know.”

“Go on.”

“Our friendship… Why? I mean, when we met, I was instantly attracted to you. It was spontaneous.” She looked at her friend, then away across the garden. “What I’d like to know is… was it planned on the part of the Serene, for some ultimate purpose?” She took a breath, and voiced her fear: “Were you aware of what would happen, with Geoff being a representative…?”

“Do you mean,” Kath asked, “can we see into the future?”

“I suppose I do mean that, yes.”

“Well, of course not. The Serene are powerful, that I will admit, and much of our science might seem to you like magic, but there are some things that are even beyond the remit of the Serene.”

“So our friendship?”

“Is nothing more than friendship, and nothing less. A coming together of like souls, if you will. We… are encouraged by our overseers to inhabit our lives as humans, to live and think and feel as you do. Part of that is to experience what makes being human so often rewarding, to share friendships and…”

“And love?”

Kath nodded. “That too, occasionally.”

Sally asked, “And you have known love?”

“Not this time, Sally. For the past thirty years I have been so busy with… with laying the groundwork, that I have had little time left for affairs of the heart. But in a previous life…yes, I loved a woman.”

Sally sipped her tea and regarded her friend. “That must have been hard.”

“In some ways it was, but in others it was not. We were together for twenty years. We self-aware entities are… developed with an aging capability, for want of a better expression. I grew old and watched my lover grow old too, and I felt sadness that her time was so brief while mine, comparatively, was so extended. To watch her die was painful, but an experience, I told myself, that was essential in order to fully understand what it is to be human.”

Sally looked at her friend, wondering at her past lives. “When was this?”

“In the middle of the last century. My guise was that of a British diplomat working at various postings around the world. I met and fell in love with a wonderful woman, a novelist whose work I still keep, and read. It’s a comfort to have her voice to hand.”

They drank their tea in silence for a time. A slight wind stirred the boughs of the cherry tree, and its scent descended like a balm.

Sally said at last, “I would have thought, when you ‘died’ this time, that… I don’t know; that the life you had would have ceased and you would have started a new incarnation.”

Kath nodded. “It sometimes does happen like that, Sally. It’s a ‘natural’ transition, so to speak. But not this time. I have important work which it is essential I continue in my guise as Kathryn Kemp.”

“And I suppose you can’t tell me of this work?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. The work is sensitive and confidential.”

She looked at her friend, who was holding the small china teacup in both hands before her wide lips and smiling across the garden, considering who knew what memories? Sally said, “But you need not have told me all this, Kath. You could have been resurrected, and gone back to your life and our paths might never have crossed again.”

What did she hope would be Kath’s reply? That their friendship meant so much that she, Kath, could not continue living without telling Sally that she had not in fact met her end in a leafy English lane?

Kath was nodding. “I could have done that, but I would have been uncomfortable, both on a personal level and on a more fundamental, logistical level. I, Kath, your friend, would have been distressed at your pain, your grief — quite apart from the fact that, one day, our paths might have crossed… and I am human enough to envisage the hurt this would have caused you.” She reached out and squeezed Sally’s hand. “Also, I wanted to tell you what really happened last night.”

“What really happened? But I saw what happened? The speeding truck…”

Kath was regarding her earnestly. “Didn’t it occur to you that the truck came out of nowhere rather fast?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“And the rapid response of the ambulance and the police? They arrived in minutes after your call — a world record, wouldn’t you say?”

“I… I don’t know. I was in shock. Numbed. I lost all track of time.” She stared at her friend. “But I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“The ambulance and the paramedics, the young police officer who questioned you, they were all, like me, self-aware entities.”

Sally said tentatively, “Yes, that makes sense. When one of their own dies, I can see that it’s best that they respond to the incident themselves.”

“That’s true, and we do institute such procedures, but in this instance there were… special circumstances, is perhaps the best way to put it.”

Sally repeated the phrase.

Kath paused for a second or two, regarding her tea. She looked up. “This is what I, we, wanted you to know. You, and people around the world like your husband Geoff, the special representatives of the Serene, are essential to our regime on Earth and beyond. It is only fair that we share with you the facts of the situation.”

“Now you’re sounding like a character from a bad spy novel.”

They both laughed. Back in their twenties, in their student days, as a relief from course work Kath had taken refuge in spy novels of the fifties and sixties, often reading out lurid passages to Sally over breakfast.

It was one of the many hundreds, thousands, of memories Sally had of her friend which she would be forced to reassess, in light of recent revelations. Why was an alien self-aware entity reading cold war spy novels? As part of her deep cover guise, as an attempt to understand the machinations of human politics?

She shook her head, clearing her thoughts, and asked, “And what are the facts of the situation?”

Kath regarded her half-empty cup. It was a while before she spoke. “The Serene, in what they are doing here on Earth and elsewhere, have opposition; enemies, if you like.”

“Enemies?”

“The universe is vast. This small galaxy alone has at least a hundred sentient, space-faring races, though only two as evolved as the Serene.”

“And one of these…?”

Kath nodded. “I’ll spare you the lurid details, but the Serene and our opponents have been pitched against each other for millennia.”

“And they oppose what you are doing here on Earth?”

“One day, Sally, when I have more time, I will tell you the history of our mutual opposition, our mutually exclusive philosophies of species evolution. Suffice it to say that they will do everything to halt our progress here on Earth and across the solar system.”

“And last night — how did they manage to…?” She thought of the truck, and what Kath had said about it appearing from nowhere.

“Sally, our opponents are not here, physically. That eventuality would be a disaster — but they infiltrate our ranks on a virtual level, let’s say.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Kath nodded, and paused to consider her explanation. “The way the Serene have turned the human race against violence is to… manipulate reality on a quantum level. To use a crude analogy, they re-program the ‘strings’ that are the fundamental building blocks of reality. Now, on occasions, our opponents are able to get past our defences and infiltrate this virtuality, re-program events to their own desires. Last night was one small, and very insignificant example — but they are becoming more frequent of late and what we fear is that they are a precursor to a greater, more sustained attack. Last night’s incident and others like it was our enemy testing the waters, so to speak, stretching the parameters of our defences. My death was trivial, but we fear what they are building up to.”

Sally finished her tea and set the cup on the seat beside her. “Geoff and I… over the years we’d lie awake and stare out at the stars, and do you know what? We’d speculate about the Serene… what was out there, what the Serene were doing. I think Geoff even surmised that the Serene must have enemies, political, if not military.”

She looked at her friend. “I believe that the Serene are working for the best interests of humanity, Kath.” She shrugged and smiled. “I suppose I have to believe that, don’t I? I have only the evidence of my experience, limited though that is, and the parameters of my prejudice. But, really, what as human beings do we know?” She thought of the fishpond analogy and said, “We are like fish being fed crumbs by vastly superior benefactors. We know nothing, really, of what lies beyond our pond.”

“I can only tell you what you would expect to hear from the representative of the Serene,” she said, “and that is that we have the best interests of the human race at heart. You are destined for great things; please believe me when I say this, and that your destiny lies beyond the bounds of your home planet, and will be determined by the success of the Serene in defeating the objectives of our enemy.”

“Which is why you told me about the push to Mars?”

“And beyond. We will move from Earth, terraforming and inhabiting the planets, first Mars, then Venus; we will set up colonies among the asteroids — vaster and more complex than the mining outposts that exist out there now — and then you will colonise the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and beyond.”

“And one day, the stars?”

“Not for a long, long time, Sally,” Kath said. “There is much to be done before then, much to prepare the human race for. There is work to be done in the solar system itself.”

“Work?”

“One day, when we are on Mars or beyond, it might be safe to confide in you. For the present, and especially after last night’s events, I must be wary.”

“So… your enemies don’t know of your ultimate objectives?”

Kath smiled, then laughed. “It is always unwise, and dangerous, to underestimate the knowledge of one’s opponents. I sincerely hope that they are unaware of what we plan, but who can tell?” She stood. “I mentioned an e-brochure last night, about the colonisation of Mars. I have it in the car. I’ll fetch it and then, maybe, it would be nice to prepare lunch together, yes?”

“That would be wonderful.”

Kath set off across the lawn, and Sally called after her. “Kath, be careful…”

Her friend turned and beamed her a wonderful smile. “I’ll do my best.”

Sally sat in silence in the shifting sunlight and realised that she felt an odd, lazy contentment; Kath, her best friend, was back from the dead, and the Serene were leading the human race towards its destiny…

And, tomorrow, Geoff would return.

Kath was back minutes later with the brochure. “In a couple of days I’ll drop by and we’ll discuss everything,” she said.

“And when Geoff gets back I can tell him about last night?”

Kath nodded. “Everything.”

They passed into the house and, together, prepared lunch.

CHAPTER SIX

THE FUJIYAMA ARBOREAL city occupied the entirety of the coastal valley basin and the hills on the far side. It appeared on the horizon as the monotrain rounded a long bend, and a murmur of appreciation passed through the carriage. Allen stared, attempting to make sense of what he saw. He had expected a large forest of trees similar to sequoia, but each one tall and broad enough to house thousands of citizens, set in an idyllic garden vale.

What he saw was a series of silver-grey skyscrapers, each one several kilometres high, tapering to points. Located at intervals on the flanks of each tower were what looked like platforms, similar to bracket fungus, and above each platform an array of silver antennae that sprouted from the side of the tree and terminated in large crimson globes.

It was a sight eerily alien, he thought.

“It’s not what I was expecting,” he admitted to Nina Ricci.

She looked at him. “You haven’t seen pictures of them before?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to come to this project fresh, with no preconceived views of what I was about to see. It sometimes helps me to see things from a new, fresh angle.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I’m not sure. It’s visually arresting. Very alien. I wonder what it’d be like to live in one of those things?”

“That’s what I hope to find out when I interview the first people selected for the honour.”

He glanced at her. “And who are they?”

“Coastal farmers, mainly, and fisher-folk. The people who lost everything in the last tsunami.”

“Makes sense. But with the proscription on fishing…?”

“The Serene found occupations for everyone in a profession hit by the charea. The fisher-folk became farmers, along with many of the world’s formerly unemployed.”

He looked at the bristling city of alien trees. “And they farm what…?”

“See the vast green area at the base of each tree?” She pointed. “From a distance, the arboreal city appears closely packed, but in actual fact there is something like a kilometre between each one. This makes for a lot of land to farm. Also, see those platforms climbing the towers in a helical formation?”

“I was wondering what they were.”

“Well, I suppose you might call them fields, though it would be something of a misnomer. They grow micro-protein spores that are processed into a high protein food — each platform provides sufficient food to supply its section of the tower’s inhabitants all the year round. Not that this is what they solely live on. Much of the processed spores are exported — I’m sure you’ve eaten it at some point.”

“And these spores are alien?”

She nodded. “But tailored to our metabolisms.”

The monotrain eased itself into a station unlike any other Allen had experienced. It was as if the train had come to an unscheduled halt in the country. He looked through the window at a greensward rolling away from the train, planted with regimented flower-beds and crossed by raised timber walkways. Only a sign, ‘Welcome to Fujiyama Arboreal City,’ told him that this was where the journey terminated.

They left the train and Allen found that many of the passengers were, like Nina and himself, accredited journalists and photographers. They were divided into small groups of four or five individuals and allotted a smiling, punctilious Japanese guide.

The plan was to tour the fields between the towers first, have a light meal in an al fresco cafeteria, and then visit one of the towers itself.

Allen was already shooting, then pausing between shots to marvel at the city. It was as if he’d been transported to the surface of some planet light years away. The trees towered overhead, taller than any structure he’d experienced, diminishing to vanishing points in the blue, cloudless sky.

The base of each dwelling tree was surrounded by a margin of garden, beyond which the farms proper began. The guide conducted them on a tour of the farms, transporting them on the raised timber walkway in small electric buggies. She gave a running commentary, detailing crop yields and growing patterns, which Allen recorded on his softscreen.

They motored above the level of the fields, passing human workers and automated pickers, silver spider-like robots with busy, multiple appendages.

“Each worker is required to put in a shift of four hours a day,” their guide said. “The rest of their time is free to do with as they wish. Each city tower is equipped with recreational facilities, schools, art colleges, etcetera, as you will see later.”

There was only so much he could photograph from the buggy. What he was cataloguing here was no more than what every other photo-journalist was getting; he decided that at some point during lunch he would slip off and snap some unofficial shots.

“There are more than two hundred city trees in the Fujiyama basin,” their guide explained. “Each tree is inhabited by approximately ten thousand citizens, though such are the dimensions of each tree that living accommodation is more than spacious.”

In a whispered aside to Nina, Allen said, “I thought studies done in the last century concluded that high-rise living was far from beneficial?”

She whispered in return, “I think that was due more to socio-economic factors than to the actual type of habitation, Geoff. If you put poor people in a confined space anywhere on Earth, with inadequate amenities and low employment… well, what would you expect the conditions to be like?”

He nodded. A cursory examination of the workers in the fields — along with what the guide had said about the living regimes here — suggested that conditions in the arboreal city were far preferable to the lives these people had led before they were relocated here.

The buggy arrived at a covered circular area between four rearing tress. Allen made out people eating at low tables and realised that he was hungry.

He, Nina, the guide and the three others in their group left the buggy and strolled across to the cafeteria. They sat cross-legged at a low table and scanned the menu.

They ate a surprisingly good seaweed salad with yadha — the local name for the spicy processed spores — accompanied by another local speciality, a sweet beer again derived from the alien spores.

Allen finished his beer and was about to tell Nina that he intended to slip off to get some ‘local colour’ shots, when she restrained him with a hand on his arm and said, “I have seen a friend over there–” she indicated a nearby table “–I would like you to meet. She too is a representative of the Serene.”

Allen nodded, a little impatient at the delay. Nina rose from the low table, crossed the cafeteria and spoke to an Indian woman in her mid-twenties. The Indian rose with the sinuous grace of an uncoiling cobra and followed Nina back to Allen’s table.

She sat down and smiled at him as Nina made the introductions. “Geoff Allen, this is Ana Devi, from India.”

Ana Devi gave him a dazzlingly white smile and they shook hands. “Delighted to meet you, Mr Allen,” she said.

The woman had a curiously handsome face that might, in other circumstances, be seen as beautiful. He saw strength in her eyes and line of jaw, a certain rawness that spoke to him of lowly origins and a hard childhood.

Nina murmured, “Geoff, too, is a representative.”

Ana laughed and said to him, “Why am I not in the least bit surprised, Mr Allen? Nina makes it her duty to collect us, for some reason — is that not so, Nina?”

“Well, in the interest of possible future stories…”

“You will one day write about us, no?” Ana asked. “My story would fill a book, and maybe even two. Oh, some of the tales I could tell you!”

Allen looked at Nina. “How many others have you traced?”

She pursed her lips. “Perhaps a dozen. It’s not that difficult.”

Ana rocked her head in amazement. “Do you hear her? ‘Not that difficult’! But Nina has probably told you that she has a photographic memory, and can recall the face of everyone she saw ten years ago when we came together in the Serene’s starships.”

“So all I have to do now is keep a close eye out for those faces when we come to our senses after our ‘missions’,” Nina explained.

Ana looked at Allen. “You are a photographer, no?”

Allen told her something about his life and work, and Ana stared at him with massive brown eyes and said, “Ah, Shropshire. I would one day love to visit that county. Wasn’t there a poet…?” Her wide brow corrugated in concentration.

“Housman,” Allen supplied, wondering why the recollection of the old poet should bring him a fleeting sense of melancholy.

“Ah, yes, Housman. A Shropshire Lad.” She beamed. “I have visited London, of course, but never even left the capital. Is that a disgrace, Mr Allen?”

He murmured, “Of course not,” and asked her what she was doing here.

“I am on an official visit to the arboreal city as I work in one of the wilderness cities. Mine is in India, and I supervise the city’s food production. I am here to see how things are done on a much larger scale, and maybe pick up some useful tips. Also, I am looking into the feasibility of growing the alien spores at our commune, too.”

“A remarkable foodstuff,” he said.

She laughed. “I think it would go very well in curries, Mr Allen!”

They chatted for a further five minutes and, when Ana was talking to Nina about her life back in India, Allen excused himself and slipped away.

He left the cafeteria and strolled between a long row of fruit canes. In the distance, reduced by the perspective, a Japanese worker plucked raspberries from the canes with incredible speed and dexterity. He took a dozen shots, one of her blurred hands, high up in the cane, against a backdrop of a distant arboreal tower.

He thanked her, finding himself mirroring her repeated bows, and moved on.

He left the quadrant of soft fruit and came to an area where melons grew on abundant vines. Here, silver robots danced at speed, plucking full, ripe melons from the bushes and loading them into buggies affixed to their torsos.

They skipped around him while he took dozens of photographs. Later, in the peace and quiet of his study, he would take his time and crop the images, selecting the best to send to London.

He came to the end of a row and turned, brought up short by what he saw there.

A tall golden figure, intimidating in its immobility, stood upright with its arms at its sides, staring straight ahead. Allen stopped in his tracks, took an involuntary breath, and stared at the figure.

It was the first one he’d seen, at close quarters, for many years, and he was struck anew by the sense of peace that emanated from its swirling, lambent depths. He wanted to ask it what it was doing here, but the question for some reason seemed ridiculous, and he held his silence and just stared in fascination.

It remained unmoving, pulsing with an inner illumination that held Allen’s attention as if he were hypnotised. At last, smiling at the figure, he backed off and returned to the cafeteria. He felt oddly refreshed, even renewed, by the unexpected encounter.

AFTER LUNCH ALLEN, Nina and the others took the buggy back to the arboreal city and commenced a tour of the soaring alien tree.

“The city trees,” said the guide, “are living entities with a cellulose basal structure. They achieve great material density through having evolved on a high gravity planet, Antares II, and such height because Antares II is covered by low level cloud, necessitating the growth of the trees above the cloud level. This tree is of average size, being a third of a kilometre in diameter at its base, and a little short of five kilometres high.”

They were on the ground floor of the city tree, in a vast cavity like a concert hall. The guide explained that the length of the tree was filled with air pockets — like cinder toffee, Allen thought — which provided living space for families. Elevators, using thermal energy, carried citizens to the higher levels.

“We will ascend to the mid-point of the city tree,” their guide said, “and examine a spore garden.”

They crossed the echoing atrium and entered an elevator. Ana Devi had joined their group on Nina’s invitation, and she marvelled at the cell structure of the walls as they rose smoothly on the elevator platform. The material of the trees, on closer inspection, reminded Allen of the cross section of a sponge.

They emerged in another, though slightly smaller, chamber, this one given over to various sports. Allen saw people playing tennis and baseball on purpose-built courts and diamonds, and reckoned that this cavity was perhaps two or three hundred metres in diameter.

Their guide led them across the cavity towards a great arched window, into which was set a series of doors. She stood aside and invited them to pass through.

From the ground it had been hard to assess the size of the spore gardens, and Allen’s fear had been that when he stepped out onto the platform he would be overcome by crippling vertigo. They were, after all, now almost three kilometres above the surface of the world, level with an armada of cirro-cumulus clouds.

As he followed Nina Ricci through the archway, he realised that he had no reason to fear the elevation. The platform was vast — not the narrow, flimsy structure he had thought it might be from the ground — and gave the impression of solidity. He could easily believe that he was on terra firma, strolling across a patio given over to the cultivation of some exotic alien fungus.

The platform was the size of two football fields laid side by side, but red rather than green, and comprised of hundreds of metre-square trays bearing the alien spores. On closer examination the crimson growth resembled bloody lichen and gave off a pungent, peppery aroma.

Their guide knelt, plucked a small wad of the stuff, and popped it into her mouth.

“Please help yourself,” she said. “I think you will find it rather delicious.”

Allen watched Ana Devi sample a mouthful, and nod in agreement. “It reminds me in texture of paneer, Mr Allen, perhaps flavoured by turmeric. I think it would go down well in India.”

He tried some, agreeing that the spongy, spicy food was not at all unpleasant.

“One of the marvellous things about the spores,” their guide went on, “is that, quite apart from their protein content and adaptability to human cuisine, they grow from mycelia to maturity in a matter of days.”

The group broke up and strolled across the platform.

A guard rail ran around the circumference of the perimeter. Determined not to let his fear of heights spoil his appreciation of the view, Allen strode down the aisle between the spore cells and came, hesitantly, to the rail. He reached out, gripped its upper spar and, only when he was satisfied that his hold was secure, leaned forward and peered down.

He stepped back, dizzied by the view.

He gripped the rail with greater force and laughed at his cowardice. Not, he told himself, that he had any conscious control over it. A wave of nausea swept through him at the sight of the vertiginous drop… but even so he stepped forward again and stared down at the ground almost three kilometres below.

There were even, he saw, strings and scraps of cloud floating by below where he stood. He made out the much reduced radial gardens, the toy-like cafeteria and, off to the right, the thin thread of the monorail line.

It was almost like looking at the world in a satellite photograph, he thought, then remembered himself and took a series of shots he hoped would convey the sense of immense, god-like elevation.

“You look like a seasick cruise passenger, Geoff,” Nina Ricci said as she joined him, Ana Devi at her side.

He smiled queasily. “I feel like one. Have you looked over?” He stepped back from the rail and gestured.

Nina smiled and leaned over daringly, peering down and laughing out loud. “Why, it’s wonderful! Look at the view! I’ve never seen anything like it! Come and see, Ana.”

The Indian smiled at Allen with complicity. “I think I will not get too near the edge,” she said. “As a child I climbed the footbridges of Howrah station like a monkey, but I am no longer so daring.”

“Glad I’m not alone,” he muttered. He glanced at Nina and wished she’d move away from the edge. He almost reached out and dragged her back, but resisted the impulse.

As he stepped back towards the centre of the platform, meaning to investigate and maybe even taste a section of the spores coloured a shade deeper than the rest, he felt a tremor beneath his feet. He put it down to the vertigo affecting his balance, and paused to steady himself.

The tremor continued and behind him Ana Devi gave a sudden, small cry of alarm.

He felt a strong hand grip his upper arm, and looked around to see Nina dragging both himself and Ana across the platform towards the arched entrance. The guide was ushering the others back inside too. Something plummeted in Allen’s gut as another tremor shook the platform. He staggered and almost fell.

As they passed into the tower, relief flooding through him, Allen glanced over his shoulder. He could not make sense of what he saw. The platform, far from shaking as he’d expected, was undergoing a strange visual transformation. He wondered, fleetingly and absurdly, if this were some form of Serene safety mechanism.

The guard rail where he’d stood was no longer the barred silver barrier; it had taken on a grey and pitted aspect, almost as if its atomic structure were decaying and crumbling before his eyes. The decay crept little by little across the platform, eating up the spore trays and approaching the tower itself.

Someone screamed. In the panic that ensued, Nina Ricci, still gripping Allen and Ana, pushed them across the chamber towards the lift entrances set into the far wall. They ran.

Allen heard a sound at his back, like the crepitation of encroaching fire. He looked back and saw not the expected flames but the entire far wall transform from a curving, mural-covered surface to a grey decaying concavity which threatened at any second to crumble into nothingness.

Then, in the blink of an eye before Nina pushed him into the lift, he saw the first of the electric-blue figures.

He gave a strangled cry as the lift-door whisked shut and the elevator plummeted. As horrific as the grey-decay had been, the sight of the electric-blue men filled him with dread. They suggested an intentional agency in whatever was happening here, not just some accidental dysfunction of the fabric of the tower.

He was packed tight into the elevator with Nina, Ana, and a dozen others. He stared at Nina and asked. “What was that? I saw…”

Ana said, “Blue figures? I saw them too. A glimpse. They appeared out of nowhere.” Her brown eyes rounded on Nina. “What were they? What is happening?”

The Italian shook her head, unable to mask her fearful expression.

Allen looked up, almost expecting to see the ceiling of the lift turn grey, a blue man peering through vindictively…

The electric-blue figures, he thought, were identical in every respect but one to the Serene’s golden self-aware entities.

The lift dropped at speed. Allen closed his eyes, willing the elevator to reach the ground. He would feel immeasurably safer, then.

He thought of Sally, and his one wish was to be back home with her.

Someone said, “The platform was eaten up from the outer edge. I saw a couple of people fall…”

Allen felt sick. He recalled old footage of the jumpers from the World Trade Centre, and felt the same gut-wrenching shock at the thought of what those victims must have experienced.

Three kilometres, he thought. With luck, they would be unconscious through oxygen deprivation, caused by the speed of their descent, long before impact.

He tried to clear his head of the images.

But what if the decay reached across the chamber back there and ate into the mechanism of the elevator? They still had a long way to fall…

The elevator gave a sudden lurch. He closed his eyes. This is it, he thought, futilely gripping a handrail.

But Nina was urging him forward with a shouted command, and he opened his eyes to see that the elevator door was open and the people before him were rushing out. He followed Ana Devi, Nina’s hand still painfully gripping his upper arm, and all three ran across the ground-floor cavity towards the yawning exit, along with hundreds of other alarmed citizens.

He felt another wave of relief — a sense of having achieved some small degree of sanctuary — when they emerged from the tower into the dazzling afternoon sunlight.

Something other than Nina’s grip on his arm, and her urgent shouts, kept him running, and he was assailed by a new fear.

What if the tower fell while they were still running, crumpled vertically so that its debris spread in an even, radiating shock wave, felling everything in its path?

He sprinted. At one point he found Ana Devi’s hand in his as they ran side by side, and all three now left the flower garden surrounding the tower and ran down an aisle between rows of low-lying vegetables. Courgettes — he realised with dreamlike inconsequence — Sally’s favourite.

Ahead, a crowd of people had come to a halt, turned to face the tower, and were pointing.

Nina turned, forcing Allen to do the same. He looked back at the tower and saw what had arrested the attention of the crowd.

The city tree was not falling — neither crumpling vertically nor toppling like the tree it was — but gradually vanishing. From its distant, cloud-wreathed summit down, it turned deathly grey, pitted and atomised — a creeping decay which ate down the length of the tower until it reached its midpoint. Allen looked up, towards the summit… or rather towards where the summit should have been. It was no longer there, and as he stared, disbelieving, the rest of the structure, from its mid-section down, turned grey and gradually vanished from sight.

Nina Ricci stared with massive eyes and said, “Oh, no…”

Allen looked at her. There was something about the doom-laden timbre of her words which suggested more than just the horror of the tower’s disappearance.

“Nina?”

She shook her head as if in disbelief. “They’ve compromised the reality-structure paradigm,” she whispered, and Allen suddenly wanted to shake her and ask what the hell she was talking about.

At that second Ana Devi gave a startled cry and squeezed his hand. “Look!”

She was pointing to her right. In the distance Allen saw another city tower deliquesce from the top down. From this one, too, crowds of citizens were flooding out, fanning from the entrance in panic and taking refuge in the fields.

“And look,” Ana almost whispered, staring across at where the tower they had just left once stood.

A dozen electric-blue figures were spreading out from the tower’s footprint with malign purpose.

They had weapons, what looked like rifles, and they were using them. From time to time they stopped walking, raised their rifles, took aim and fired. They never missed. Blue lances of laser light vectored across the fields, cutting down men and women as they ran. Allen looked away, repulsed, unable to move for several seconds until Ana tugged at his hand and yelled, “Run!”

“This way,” Nina said, leading them through the vegetable fields towards the more substantial cover of the fruit sector. He sprinted with Ana and felt a measure of safety when they were hidden from sight by the melon vines, though he knew the idea was absurd. He had no doubt that he, Nina and Ana could be seen through the foliage, and all it would take was for one blue figure to take aim and fire.

He heard the crackle of the laser blasts, the cries of the fleeing citizens, along with the sound of a stampede as others beside himself attempted to escape the slaughter.

They must have put a couple of hundred metres between themselves and the blue figures when a pain in his side brought him up short. He wondered, for a second, if he’d been hit — then knew that the sharp pain was no more than a stitch. He gasped and kept running. Nina had raced ahead, and Ana had released her grip on his hand and joined her. Allen, giving them both several years and at least thirty kilos, struggled in their wake.

Ana turned and exhorted him to keep up. He would have gladly replied with some sardonic quip, had he the breath to do so.

Ahead was a poly-carbon shack. The women darted behind it, and when Allen turned the corner he saw that they’d ducked inside. He staggered after them and pulled the door shut behind him.

The women were crouching at the far end of the hut, peering through a horizontal slit window. He joined them, glad of the respite, fell to his knees and stared out.

“What the hell,” he gasped, “is happening?” He stared at Nina as if she should know the answer.

“They’ve compromised the nexus the Serene had in place,” she replied.

Allen nodded. “Fine. Now, first of all, who are ‘they’? And second, what the hell is the nexus?”

Before answering she paused to look through the window. There was no sign of the advancing blue figures, though the sound of their handiwork carried through the humid air. Allen heard the regular sizzle of lasers, followed almost instantly by the abbreviated cries of the slaughtered.

“‘They’ are the enemy of the Serene, the Obterek. And the nexus is the charea paradigm the Serene set in place around the planet. I’m pretty sure the Obterek couldn’t have compromised the charea worldwide, just locally. At least I hope so.”

Allen stared at her. “How do you know all this?”

She shook her head, as if to say that here and now was neither the time nor the place to tell him.

“Do you think we are safe here?” Ana asked, staring at the Italian with big, frightened eyes.

Nina bit her lip. “As safe as anywhere,” she said. “I’m pretty sure the Serene will be working to seal the compromise. It can only last for a matter of minutes.”

But, to Allen’s ears, she didn’t sound so sure.

Through the slit window he saw movement beyond a row of shrubbery. Seconds later a striding blue shape crashed through the foliage, shouldering its laser and firing. Ten metres to the figure’s right, a second figure emerged, and beyond that another one.

They ducked beneath the level of the window and Nina hissed, “When they pass the hut, we get out of here.”

Allen’s heart was pounding in fear. “Where?” he asked, not sure if her plan to leave their hiding place was a good one.

She thought about it, but before she could reply the hut disintegrated around them. Allen yelled and rolled with the impact of something hitting him from the right. He fetched up on his back metres from the wreckage of the hut.

He saw Nina scramble from the shattered poly-carbon rubble and take off, heading for the cover of the melon vines. She never made it.

Beyond the collapsed hut, a blue figure turned and took aim at her. Allen, watching, had the urge to cry out in warning — but self-preservation stopped him. He played dead and stared at the blue figure as it fired.

The laser beam lanced out and cut Nina down. He saw a wound bloom in her torso and heard her startled cry as she fell.

The figure turned and marched away. Raising his head from the ground, Allen looked around for Ana. He saw her seconds later, cowering in the ruins of the hut, her slim body covered with what remained of the poly-carbon door. It had effectively saved her life, shielding her from the attention of the blue figure which had accounted for Nina.

Their eyes met, and Allen raised a hand in a gesture for her to stay where she was.

He knew that, lying on his back in the open field, he was terribly exposed. Should one of the figures — what did Nina call them, the Obterek? — return this way, or simply look back the way they had come, then he was dead.

Without conscious thought he rolled onto his belly and scrambled back towards the ruined hut. There were sufficient scraps and shards of poly-carbon remaining to afford him minimal cover.

He reached the hut and put the ruin between himself and the line of blue figures. Ana grasped his hand and he held onto her warm fingers as if for dear life.

He thought of Sally and Hannah, and felt a flash of terrible dread at the possibility that he might not survive what was happening here.

Ana’s grip tightened on his hand. “Look, Mr Allen…”

She was staring, open-mouthed, across the ground to where Nina’s body lay, bloodily butchered by the laser fire.

Beyond the body, emerging from the shattered foliage, was a golden self-aware entity. Allen watched it as it approached Nina’s corpse and, in a bizarre act at once intimate and brutal, fell on top of it.

Ana gasped. Allen stared, disbelieving. Where Nina’s body had lain, there was now only the golden self-aware entity, its pulsing outline mimicking the posture the Italian women had assumed in death. For a few seconds the golden figure remained perfectly still, face down, and then it slowly rose into a crouched position, like a sprinter, and took off at speed towards an advancing phalanx of blue figures.

And where Nina had sprawled, she was no more.

“What… happened?” Ana managed at last.

Allen shook his head, lost for words.

“Look,” Ana said, pointing.

More golden figures had appeared as if from nowhere and confronted the Obterek, whose lasers seemed ineffective. Each blast directed at the golden figures’ torsos merely halted them in their tracks, briefly, before they surged on as if having absorbed the energy and gained extra momentum from it.

The self-aware entities gained on the blue figures. Just as Allen was wondering how they might conduct the imminent fight, instead of slowing down to confront the killers the golden figures ran into the blue men and absorbed them. The golden entities pulsed brightly for a brief second, halted and stood foursquare, rocking slightly, as if the absorption of their enemies was taking its toll.

From the direction of the now vanished tower, more blue figures were striding forth, lasers poised but inactive as the human populace had either fled the scene or been killed.

From behind where Allen and Ana cowered, a second phalanx of golden figures passed and strode forward in line to confront the advancing Obterek.

The blue men raised their weapons and fired, their barrage doing nothing to halt the golden figures’ advance.

Allen was dazzled as something coruscated to his right. Belatedly he realised that it had been a laser beam, and only when Ana gasped his name did he turn to see her slump back, a bloody hole opened in her chest.

He cried aloud and reached out for her hand. Before he could complete the action, he felt a lancing pain in his lower back. He yelled and turned in time to see his attacker, a blue figure not five metres away, swing its weapon towards an advancing golden figure. The Obterek fired, to no avail, and seconds later was taken into the corporality of the self-aware entity.

Allen lay on his back, gasping. The beam had skewered his flank, slicing through his torso, and the pain was indescribable.

He turned his head. Ana was propped beside him, eyes open in death, blood leaking from between her small breasts. He wanted to cry out at the injustice of what had happened, protest at his approaching end.

He felt something slam into him. It was like a jolt of energy, a blast of pure force that seemed to lift him off the ground with its momentum. He realised that he was on his feet, surrounded by what felt like a cocooning flow of energy. He felt at once petrified and exhilarated, and heard a familiar voice in his head. “Do not be afraid…”

Then he was moving. Or, rather, he was moving not under his own impetus but under that of his saviour. He was aware of his legs working, describing the motion of running, though he felt neither the impact of the ground nor the exertion of the act of sprinting. He was being carried through the air, he realised, inside the body of a self-aware entity.

They were leaving the Fujiyama arboreal city at great speed, outpacing his fellow humans who were still running from the scene of carnage. He was aware of the cessation of pain in his flank, and a consequent dulling of his senses. Seconds later he passed out.

He came to his senses an unknown time later, and he was still running, or rather the self-aware entity was running, tearing like an express train through hilly terrain. Trees flashed by, then buildings; the sense of speed, of forward motion, was incredible, and yet Allen felt nothing, no rush of air, no jarring impact with the ground. He was anaesthetised to all sensation and travelling like the wind.

He passed out again, and when he came to he saw that he was no longer in the countryside. He had no notion of how long he had been travelling, or how far he had covered. City blocks flashed by in a blur, and citizens around him appeared to be frozen, motionless.

Ahead, he saw a familiar sight, and could not bring himself to believe what it meant.

He was in Tokyo — but how could that be?

Directly before him was the rearing sable façade of the Tokyo obelisk.

They were heading towards it, accelerating, and Allen willed the golden figure to slow down before they impacted.

But the golden figure did not slow down — if anything it gained speed. The looming face of the obelisk rushed forwards to meet them.

Allen blacked out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANA FINISHED HER shift in the administration dome early and, on her way back to her rooms, dropped in to see how Prakesh was getting on in the labs.

Prakesh was supervising his team of biologists who were researching the genetics of a form of wheat seed donated by the Serene. The idea was that the extraterrestrial wheat might, when crossed with a Terran variety, produce a hybrid with a higher yield than anything grown on Earth to date.

She passed through the airlock and peered through the window at the clean area. Half a dozen white-suited scientists worked at long benches, while to the right Prakesh was bent over a softscreen.

He saw her and waved, then crossed to the window and switched on the intercom.

“Any progress?” she asked.

He lowered his face-mask and smiled. “It’s slow. We’re only just putting the markers down. It might be another day or two yet before we have results.”

She nodded. “Fine. Keep me posted, would you?”

She made to leave.

Prakesh said, “Ana, would you be free later? Since getting back from Japan, you’ve been…” He hesitated. “I was wondering if everything’s okay?” He looked, in his concern, like the young boy she’d known all those years ago.

She smiled. “I’m fine. Just very, very tired. I’m having an early night. And then… Look, I’ll be away for a few days, taking a break. But I promise we’ll have time to catch up when I get back, ah-cha?”

He nodded, but looked unconvinced. “Have a pleasant break, Ana.”

“I’ll be in touch.” She switched off the intercom and stepped from the dome.

The sun was going down slowly, but in the east, dropping like an accelerated sun, was the golden glow of the evening energy beam falling towards the distribution station a hundred kilometres north of Madras.

The sight of it never failed to fill Ana with reassurance.

She made her way to the residential block where she had a comfortable second floor apartment overlooking the fields which stretched, without interruption, to the horizon.

She sat on her bed, activated her softscreen, and summoned the library of images.

She scrolled through various media shots of her brother, Lal Devi as he was known now, which she had downloaded and stored over the course of the past few days since arriving back from Japan.

What had happened at Fujiyama had changed things.

She unbuttoned the front of her blouse and stared down at the smooth coffee-coloured skin of her chest. She touched the place where the laser had impacted and tried to recall the intense, shocking pain. She relived the mental anguish of knowing that she was about to die, and recalled her exact thoughts: Twenty-six years, and this is how it ends…

And then the breathtaking impact of something vital and strong slamming into her body and taking her over, raising her to her feet and carrying her at speed from the carnage…

And then she had awoken to find herself on the train heading south to the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city.

Not long after arriving home her thoughts had turned to her brother, and what she had told Kapil about not wanting to find him.

Well, the events at Fujiyama had changed her mind on that score.

She had been so close to death — had perhaps even died for a second — and the thought that she was mortal had hit her, later, along with the thought that had she died at Fujiyama then she would have left so much undone.

Earlier in Kolkata, before taking the Serene jet to Japan, she had faced her fears and approached both Station Master Jangar and Sanjeev Varnaputtram. She had confronted both men and in doing so had realised that the reality had not been as terrible as she had expected it to be.

She had learned a lesson from that and, with the knowledge that she was mortal and must do now what she would not always be around to do, had resolved to track down her brother and, eventually, confront him too.

In her free time over the past few days she had googled the company he worked for and the address of their head office in Manhattan. Yesterday she had booked a berth aboard the sub-orbital leaving Delhi for New York and arranged to meet Kapil on the evening of her arrival.

She slept badly that night, her dreams full of rampaging blue figures lasering down innocent humans; she relived her own death, and woke suddenly in the early hours drenched in sweat.

She rose, showered, then packed her holdall and took an electric cab to the train station.

The journey north to Delhi, through the flatlands of the Deccan changed now out of all recognition from the parched farmland of just ten years ago, gave her time to look ahead to her meeting with Bilal. He would be shocked, of course, when she turned up — a ghost from a past he thought he had left behind. But she would not accuse him, would not ask why he did not contact her — or at least say goodbye. To accuse him would be to risk alienating and angering him, and she feared that, after having waited for so long to be reunited, he would walk out on her and refuse to see her again.

They would talk, catch up on the lost years. She would tell him about growing up without him — though without censure — and recount what had happened to her since the coming of the Serene. Only if he was willing to talk about his past would she probe and ask what had happened to make him leave her without saying goodbye.

As field after field of alternating rice and corn sped past, she stared through the window and smiled to herself.

She caught the midnight sub-orbital shuttle from New Delhi airport and slept peacefully, untroubled by nightmares. She awoke to dazzling daylight outside the circular window, with a startling view of the New York coastline and the glittering length of Manhattan far below. Minutes later they were decelerating towards the airport on Staten Island, and thirty minutes later she passed through customs and was riding the monotrain across the bay to Manhattan.

Kapil met her at TriBeCa station and whisked her back to his apartment in Little Italy, where she showered, changed, and enjoyed a long, leisurely meal of strong coffee and croissants.

At one point Kapil asked, “But what made you change your mind?”

She had refrained from telling him about the events of Fujiyama. When she’d spoken to him briefly the other day, she had still not come to terms with what had happened there. She had trawled the newsfeeds for mention of the attack, but found nothing. Obviously the Serene were imposing a news blackout on the event.

Now, little by little, she described the afternoon, the wonder of the arboreal city, the other representatives she had met… and then the attack. As she spoke, she recalled new details she had either forgotten or repressed: seeing Nina Ricci lasered almost in half before her very eyes; a mother and child mown down mercilessly by a dispassionate blue figure… And then her salvation thanks to a Serene self-aware entity.

They held hands across the table, Kapil too shocked to speak for long minutes, until, “Well, all I have to complain about is a razor cut yesterday morning…”

She laughed and swiped his head.

“And after that…” She frowned. “I knew I had to contact Bilal.” She smiled at him. “None of us live for ever, Kapil, and I knew I had to act sooner rather than later. Did you…?”

He nodded. “I contacted his PA and explained that we had business interests in common, and my recent links with China which might prove beneficial to the Morwell Corporation.”

Ana bit her lip. “And?”

“Your brother is a very busy man, but I arranged an appointment for eleven this morning, but I could only get fifteen minutes.”

“That will be fine, to start with.”

“Then, as you instructed, at nine this morning I had my secretary contact his PA and tell her that, due to illness, I wouldn’t be able to make the meeting but would be deputised by my assistant. You’re going under the name of Sara Ashok, so remember that.”

She leaned across the table and kissed him. “Thank you so much, Kapil. This means a lot to me.”

“I’ll come with you as far as Morwell Towers. After that you’ll be on your own.” He gave her one of his lovely smiles. “I’ll wait for you, then we’ll go for a coffee and you can tell me all about it.”

She looked at her watch. Ten-thirty. “We’d better be setting off.”

As they left the apartment, Ana tried to quash her sudden apprehension at the thought of meeting her brother. She told herself not to be so stupid. She had faced down Sanjeev Varnaputtram after all, so what did she have to fear from Bilal?

SHE RODE THE elevator to the fortieth floor of Morwell Towers, her anxieties mounting in proportion to the rate of her ascent. Kapil had left her outside the building with a kiss and the assurance that he would be waiting for her — and that she had nothing to fear. Nevertheless she did feel fear: fear of an outright rejection from her brother, or an inadequate reason for his not saying goodbye all those years ago.

The lift doors swished open and she found herself in a plush carpeted corridor with a pulsing softscreen on the opposite wall. A name appeared on the screen, Lal Devi, underlined by a flashing arrow indicating that she should turn right. Hesitantly she stepped out and walked down the corridor, reading the nameplates on the doors to right and left as she went.

She came to the door bearing the name Lal Devi and stopped, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She took a deep breath and checked her watch. She was a couple of minutes late.

She knocked, and when she heard a voice call, “Enter,” opened the door and stepped inside.

The first thing she noticed was the opulence of the office. It occupied a corner site, with two great plate-glass windows looking down the length of Manhattan. Behind a big silver desk, shaped like an arrow-head with its point directed at the door, was a slim man with a thin, handsome face. He wore his hair long in a ponytail and sported an amethyst stud in his right ear.

She stared, comparing this slick, besuited businessman with the malnourished urchin she had last seen twenty years ago.

He hardly glanced away from his softscreen as he gestured her to take a seat at the point of his desk. “Ah, Miss… Ashok. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet your superior, Kapil Gavaskar, but illness knows no social boundaries.”

She forced herself not to dislike her brother for his opening words, as he rose and took her hand in a limp, perfunctory shake.

“I’m Lal Devi, James Morwell’s right hand man, as you no doubt know.” He gestured to the screen. “And we’re interested in what you have to offer as regards your Chinese links.”

She said, “Bilal…”

He looked up and frowned. “Now, no one has called me that for a long time.”

She stared at him, this slick, fast-talking, high-flying aide to a one-time billionaire tycoon. How did you come to this, she thought?

She found her voice and said, “Do you know who I am?”

He glanced at his screen, his face quirking with a quick frown. “Miss… Ashok. I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

“You don’t recognise me?”

He looked mystified, then a little annoyed. But was it any wonder that he didn’t recognise her? She had changed so much in appearance from the ragged street kid she had been.

Her heart laboured as if pumping treacle. She felt a hot flush rise up her face as she said, “We last saw each other, Bilal, many years ago. On Howrah station, the day before you disappeared.”

He stared at her and shook his head, and Ana wasn’t sure if he was totally confused or had realised who she was and was denying the fact.

Then he whispered, “Ana?”

She held his startled gaze. Despite her earlier resolutions not to intimidate him with accusations, she found herself saying, “Bilal, why didn’t you say goodbye? Why did you just leave like that? There one day, gone the next…”

He shook his head. “I…” he began, lost for words.

He reached out, tapped his softscreen, and said, “Amanda, cancel my appointment at 11.30. I’ll be free again at midday.”

He sat back in his swivel seat, the cushion squeaking, laid back his head and closed his eyes.

She had hoped his reaction would be one of joy at their reunion. She had foreseen tears, maybe, and apologies, and had expected him to move around his desk and embrace her.

He did none of these things, just lay back with his eyes closed, the expression on his aquiline face unreadable.

“Bilal, I have come a long way to see you. All the way from India.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Ana… This is something of a shock, to say the least.”

“A pleasant shock?” she asked. “Or…?”

“An unexpected shock.”

They stared at each other, Ana trying to hide her pain at his response. She said, “I just… I just wanted to know why you didn’t contact me before you left, why you didn’t say goodbye. You can’t imagine how I felt.” She reached into her handbag, pulled something out, and slid it across the desk to him.

He picked it up and turned the flattened enamel cup.

“I found this… on the tracks. For a long time I thought you might be dead, only no one had reported a street kid’s body on the tracks, so I hoped… Oh, how I hoped! But the years went by and there was no word from you.” She stopped, took a breath, and asked, “So, I would just like to know why you never said goodbye.”

He turned the flattened cup over and over, and said as if to himself, “I left it on the track, to be destroyed… A symbol, if you like, of my leaving.”

She repeated, “Bilal — why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

“Ana… it was a long time ago,” he said, as if this somehow excused his actions.

“What do you mean by that?” she snapped.

He gestured, spread his hands, and smiled disarmingly. “Twenty years, Ana… I hardly recall?”

“What happened?” she almost cried.

He shook his head.

She went on, “It was the day after Holi. We’d had so much fun throwing paint powder at commuters… How we laughed! We went to the sleeping van late that night, and in the morning when I woke up you were no longer beside me. That wasn’t unusual. Remember, you often got up at dawn and went out looking for food… But this time it was different. You never came back. And the following day I found your cup, squashed flat on the tracks… So what happened, Bilal?”

He nodded, as if in acknowledgment of all she said, and reassurance that he would come up with an adequate response. “Ana… a few weeks before Holi I met a man. A Westerner.” He waved a hand. “No, it was nothing like that. He wasn’t like Sanjeev Varnaputtram. Remember him?”

She felt a flare of anger. How could she forget Varnaputtram?

He went on, “This Westerner worked for a corporation in the States which ran schools and colleges in India. He wasn’t out scouting for pupils — our meeting was quite by chance. You know how I always loved reading the Hindustan Times, the Times of India — anything I could get my hands on, left by commuters on the trains. One day I was riding between stations, begging, when I picked up a paper and began reading. I was sitting across from a tall, pale American. We got talking. We discussed politics, and I think I — I don’t mean to sound arrogant here, Ana — but I think I impressed him. He was working in the city and would be there for a couple of weeks. He invited me to his apartment, where we talked and talked, and it was as if I’d found a teacher, someone who filled me with knowledge and respected me, a street kid.”

How wonderful for you, Ana thought.

“He told me who he was, what he represented, and asked if I would care to sit an entrance exam–”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Ana asked, fighting back the tears.

Bilal shrugged. “I… I honestly don’t know, Ana. I was so excited. The college was in Madras, and graduates were promised places in a business college here in New York.”

“But you could have told me! You could have said what was happening, told me where you were going, said goodbye!”

He shook his head. “It all happened so quickly. I sat the exam and a couple of days later the Westerner, Paul, he told me I had passed, and that the following day I should accompany him south to Madras.”

She stared at him. “Why didn’t you come and say goodbye?”

He looked down at his desk and said, “Because I didn’t want to hurt you, Ana. Also… you would have begged me not to leave, pleaded with me. I loved you… I didn’t want to see you hurt, upset. Because, don’t you see, I had to go. I had to get out of there. The opportunity was too great to pass up.”

“But you left me there, left me to scratch a living on the station, begging, stealing…”

Was she being unreasonable, she wondered? She tried to see the situation from his point of view. He was right in that she would have been devastated, and pleaded with him not to go, but even so she could not help but feel a sense of betrayal.

“I know, I know…” He shook his head. “Don’t you think it pained me? I was plagued with guilt for years and years. I thought of you every day…”

“But you never tried to get in contact with me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course I did…”

“But?” she pressed, leaning forward in her seat.

“One day, perhaps five years later, I was in India on business. I went to the station, looked for you. I asked around, asked Mr Jangar, a couple of porters. They said they hadn’t seen you for weeks and weeks… So I gave up and the following day came back to New York.”

She took a little hope from this. Five years after Bilal vanished, she would have been eleven. For a couple of months she and Prakesh and Gopal had ridden a night train to New Delhi to see what the living was like at the railway station there. But the street kids had been feral, hostile, and had repelled the invaders with stones and broken glass bottles. They had tried other stations along the line to Kolkata, but had found nowhere like Howrah, and had eventually returned.

She told him this, and said, “You tried once. Once in twenty years. If only you’d gone back, tried again…”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Ana. You’re right. I should have done. But… but after that time, I feared the worst, feared that you were dead, and I threw myself into my work. Try to see this from my point of view.”

She gave a long sigh, at once despairing and conciliatory. Of course, how much of what he said was true? He’d changed a lot over the years; he was a businessman, adept with words, with twisting meanings. He could easily be — what was the phrase? — spinning her a line so that he came out of the encounter with his pride intact and his actions justified.

She looked around the office and said, “You’ve done very well for yourself, Bilal. I bet you have a wonderful apartment, expensive things…” She almost broke down then, for some reason she could not fathom.

He smiled. “I do okay. Mr Morwell is very generous. Though I must say I do work hard for the Corporation. And things have changed a lot since the arrival of the Serene. Ten years ago the Morwell Corporation was worth billions. Our annual turnover was greater than the GDP of many sizable countries. We had real power; we were powerful movers, not just the effete, emasculated facilitators we are today.”

She stared at him and said, “You sound as if you resent what the Serene have done for us?”

He rocked his head from side to side. “I can see that in some ways, some people might think that we are better off for the apparent largesse of the Serene. But the fact is that the Serene have taken something away from us that was very important.”

She stared at him. “You mean,” she said with heavy sarcasm, “the ability to kill and torture and maim each other?

“That is only a part of it, a symbolic part, if you like. The Serene have taken away our evolutionary future and imposed upon us their own regime — their own, if you like, evolutionary game plan. And,” he went on, as if warming to his theme, “has it ever occurred to you that for all their largesse, the Serene have never made manifest why they are doing this for us, what their larger, grand plan might be?”

She interrupted, “I would have thought that that is obvious — that preventing the human race from destroying itself is reason enough.”

He smiled, somewhat smugly, and shrugged. “We have only the word of the Serene that we were heading for extinction. The point is debatable.”

She would not let him have the last word. “Even if it is debatable, what is not in contention is that millions of innocent lives have been saved by the Serene intervention. So much misery has been avoided…”

He shrugged again, a smug gesture she found insufferable. “The history of humanity, the history of the world, is one of mutual violence — the law of the jungle. It got us to where we were ten years ago — the pre-eminent species on the planet. It made us what we were, an independent, intelligent race questing ahead in the field of science and technology, forging our own way forward. Now…” He smiled sadly. “Now we are nothing more than the puppets of the Serene, jerking on the strings of unknown and unseen masters whose motives are opaque to us.”

She allowed a silence to develop, and then said quietly, “I see that our opinions are diametrically opposed, Bilal, as I have wholeheartedly embraced the coming of the Serene.”

That patronising smile again as he said, “You always were ruled by your heart, not your head, little sister. But tell me, what makes you think that the way of the Serene is the right way for the human race?”

“They have eliminated violence from the world,” she said, “and in so doing have banished fear. The powerful, the hostile powerful, no longer hold sway. The world is fair, equitable. There is no more poverty. Everyone has food, and a roof over their heads.”

“And we are in thrall to aliens whose raison d’êtreremains unknown.”

“The Serene,” she found herself saying, “are wholly good.”

He raised a supercilious eyebrow at this. “Oh, and you would know that personally, would you?”

She took a breath and said, “A week ago I was in Fujiyama when there was… a breach in the charea. The Obterek — other aliens, enemies of the Serene — attacked.”

He leaned forward. “I heard nothing of this.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have. The Serene imposed a news blackout.”

He said, “Typical of our oppressors…”

She went on, “I saw killing on a mass scale. I was killed myself, lasered here.” She smote the area between her breasts. “Only… a self-aware entity absorbed me, is the only way I can describe it, took me away from the slaughter and healed me.”

He stared at her, evidently wondering whether to believe her. He said, “And this makes the Serene wholly good? They save your life, so therefore…”

Exasperated, she interrupted. “I know the Serene are good. I have worked for them for ten years, and though the nature of the work is not known to me… something has… filtered into my consciousness, and I know the Serene are working for the good of humanity.”

He leaned back in his chair. “That’s a grand claim to make, isn’t it? Working for the Serene?”

She said proudly, and despised herself for it seconds later, “I am a representative of the Serene. Myself and thousands like me, selected ten years ago on the day the Serene came to Earth…”

It was a boast that, she was pleased to see, had silenced this arrogant man who was her brother.

At last he said, “So… I see that we obviously have our differences. But I can’t see why this should mean that we can’t get along in future like brother and sister…”

Despite herself, despite some deep dislike of the person Bilal had become, Ana found herself smiling. He was after all her big brother, who for many years had protected her, and maybe even loved her.

He got through to his secretary and had her fetch them coffee, then sat back in his chair and said, “Enough of the Serene, Ana. Do you recall the day I saved you from a beating by Mr Jangar?”

Ana looked past the slick businessman he had become, saw the scruffy street urchin with tousled hair and food around his mouth, who had caused a diversion in Mr Jangar’s office, allowing Ana to slip past the station master’s bulk and escape onto the crowded platform.

For the next hour they chatted about their old life on Howrah station.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ALLEN AWOKE AND found himself on a train in the middle of the English countryside.

To his fellow passengers it must have appeared that Allen had surfaced from a troubled sleep, but all he could recall was the jet façade of the obelisk rushing to meet him. He wondered how long had elapsed. He looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning on a beautiful sunny summer’s day, and the train was pulling into the stop before Wem. His watch also told him that it was the 10^th, the same day he had visited the Fujiyama arboreal city — so given the time difference he had made the journey from Tokyo to where he was now in a matter of an hour… Obviously his calculations were way out, but he felt no urge to work through them again. What mattered, after the nightmare of slaughter at Fujiyama, was that soon he would be home.

He sat up, recalling the events in the fields around the vanished city tower, and touched the place just above his right kidney where the laser had skewered him. There was no pain, no sensation at all. He recalled that a golden figure had seemingly absorbed Nina Ricci. And he too had been taken, saved, by the self-aware entity.

He wondered then if the black obelisk in Tokyo was some kind of medical centre, where he had been taken for surgery. But the surgery must have been swift if that were so, and he recalled the cessation of pain on the way from Fujiyama and reasoned that the golden figure had effected physical repairs then.

On the luggage rack above his head was his hold-all, and wrapped around his right forearm was his softscreen. The Serene, or their minions, had thought of everything.

He considered contacting Sally and telling her that he would soon be home — hours earlier than expected — but decided to surprise her. He imagined her in her study, or perhaps sitting beneath the cherry tree in the garden, catching up on the latest medical advances on the various softscreen feeds she subscribed to. The thought warmed him.

He considered her message of the day before; the accident in which her friend Kath had died. He would do what little he could to comfort her when he got back, rather than launching into an account of the horrors he had experienced.

Ten minutes later the monotrain pulled into Wem and Allen alighted. He left the station and walked along the high street, and after the impersonality of Tokyo he was cheered by the familiar faces of the locals who were out and about. He realised that it was a scene that had changed little over the years — apart from the absence now of once-familiar company names that had made every town and city the same. Gone were the chains, Macdonald’s and KFC and their like, which had force-fed a willing populace a diet of low quality food laced with addictive fats, salts and sugars. He wondered if this was not merely an obvious consequence of the Serene’s restructuring of the world’s economy, but a follow-on from their charea injunction. Did the Serene, in their wisdom, consider what the food industry had perpetrated on their customers a form of protracted and insidious violence?

Gone too were the butcher’s shops, of course. Only the occasional tiled frontage remained, showing euphemistic scenes of contented cows grazing bucolic meadows. Healthfood outlets, fruit and veg shops, proliferated, along with privately run family concerns prospering under the fiscal aegis of the alien arrival.

A few weeks ago Sally had mentioned the health benefits that had accrued from the changes. In her line of work, as a country GP, she saw fewer cases of obesity and heart disease, fewer cancers and stress-related maladies. All, she said, attributable to the Serene in one way or another.

He wondered at the die-hard few who opposed what the Serene were doing, and that led him to reflect on the attack at Fujiyama, and the motives of the Obterek.

HE CROSSED TOWN and took the canal path to the outskirts, and five minutes later came to the back gate that led into the long garden.

He paused for a second and stared at the idyllic scene, the lawn and the trees and the mellow, golden stone of the house. Sally was not sitting beneath the cherry tree, but she must have been in the kitchen because, as he pushed through the gate and walked down the lawn, she emerged from the back door and dashed to meet him.

They hugged for a long time, and when she pulled away she was beaming.

“I got your message,” he said. “I’m sorry–”

She shook her head. “It’s okay… Look, it’s hard to explain. I know I said I saw Kath… there was an accident, as I said. I saw her die.” She shook her head and laughed, and Allen stared at her.

“Sally?”

She tugged his hand. “Come. We’ll talk over a cup of tea. There’s a lot to tell you about.”

Bemused, he followed her into the house and sat at the kitchen table.

She made two mugs of Earl Grey and sat next to him. She took a deep breath, shook her head, and laughed again. “I honestly don’t know where to begin.” She reached out and stroked his cheek. “Geoff, you look so young when you pull that mystified expression.”

“You’re talking in riddles, Sal.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s been a strange couple of days. Look, Kath, my long-time friend Kath Kemp, is not what she seems. You might find this hard to believe, Geoff, but she’s a self-aware entity.”

He had a flash vision of Nina Ricci telling him about the man she had met in Barcelona…

He nodded. “And when you saw the accident, and you thought she’d died…?”

“Oh, it was horrible, horrible. She was dead. No pulse. You can’t imagine what…” She hugged her tea cup, then went on. “An ambulance came, whisked her away. And then… the following morning, she called me and arranged a meeting. She came over and told me she was a self-aware entity and had been here, on Earth, for a little over a hundred years.”

He stared at her. “Small, dumpy, mousey, homely Kath Kemp? A self-aware entity?”

“I know, I know… But somehow, it made sense. And, you know what? I see her still as the same person. Still a friend… My friend, the alien entity.”

“And did she tell you what she was doing here?”

“Not everything. A little. I think the best description would be that she’s a facilitator.”

He interrupted. “Don’t tell me. That accident… it wasn’t an accident, right?”

She was watching him closely. “No. No, it wasn’t, but how…?”

He told her about Fujiyama, the dissolution of the tower and his hairs-breadth escape, then the attack of the blue figures.

“They’re called the Obterek,” he said, “according to a journalist I met. Aliens who oppose the Serene. They… I can’t recall exactly the phrase she used, but the Obterek somehow reconfigured the reality of the arboreal city area and undermined the Serene’s charea injunction. Then they set about killing as many humans as possible.”

Sally said, “But there was nothing on any of the news channels…”

“I suspect the Serene imposed a blackout.” He paused. “I said the blue figures began killing humans… and they succeeded, but… I don’t really know how to explain this — but the golden figures, the self-aware entities, brought them back to life. I saw the journalist die. Then she was absorbed by a SAE…” He stopped, pulled the flap of his shirt from his trousers, and twisted to peer down at his midriff.

Sally slipped from the table and knelt beside him. “You? You were hit?”

His fingers traced where the laser had impacted. The skin was smooth, unblemished.

“It hit me here, and the pain…” He shook his head in wonder.

She took his hand and kissed his knuckles. “What happened?”

“I felt the impact, the pain…” As he spoke, tears came to his eyes. He dashed them away and went on, “And I thought I was dead. I… do you know something, I thought of you and Hannah, your grief…”

She sat on his lap and they hugged. “It’s fine now, everything’s okay.”

“Then something else hit me, a physical force, and I was… somehow inside… a self-aware entity. It left the area at speed. I passed out, and the last I recall was heading towards the obelisk in Tokyo, and I felt panic at the imminent impact. And then I woke up on the train ten miles south of Wem.” He looked up at her. “What’s happening, Sally? Fujiyama? Here? The Obterek? Did Kath say anything?”

She frowned. “A little, but not much more than I’ve told you. But she’s calling in tomorrow on the way back from Birmingham. She has something she needs to discuss with us.”

“I’m not sure I like the way you said ‘something,’ Sal.”

She looked up at the wall clock. “Three fifteen. Tell you what, let’s take the canal path to the school and pick up Trouble. I have something to tell you on the way.”

She stood up and fetched her handbag.

“That ‘something’ again.” He smiled. “Don’t you think you’ve told me enough already?”

They left the house and Sally locked the back door.

As they strolled hand in hand along the canal path, with insects buzzing in the hedges and water-boatmen skimming the still surface of the water, she said, “How would you like to live on Mars?”

He peered at her. He went for levity. “Well, all things considered, I’m pretty settled in Shropshire, and I’ve heard property prices there are astronomical.”

She feigned pushing him into the canal. “I’m serious.”

“Kath, right? That’s what she wants to talk to us about tomorrow?”

“She told me a little about it. They, the Serene and the SAEs, have terraformed Mars, and they won’t stop there. They’re pushing outwards, through the solar system… and they need colonists.”

“Us? Me and you and Hannah?”

She nodded. “I’m a medic, and in demand. You’re a representative –”

“Whatever that means.”

“Kath was serious. They want colonists to settle Mars first, and after that…”

He thought about it, about a terraformed Mars; it was the stuff of boyhood dreams. He considered strolling in the foothills of Olympus Mons and laughed aloud.

Sally nudged him. “What?”

He told her. “Hannah would miss her friends. But I suppose kids are adaptable…”

“You’re already considering it?”

“No, not really. Let’s wait to see what Kath has to say, okay?”

They collected Hannah from school, tired and rosy-cheeked from a long day. She ran on ahead, skipping and shouting with a couple of friends. On the way back, Geoff suggested they pop into the Three Horseshoes. “I could kill a pint.”

They sat at the table by the fishpond while Hannah lay on her belly and poked a finger into the water. The fish broke the surface, staring up at her. On his way to the bar, Geoff wondered what the koi made of the giant being whose pink finger promised, but did not deliver, food.

He carried two pints of Leffe and a fresh orange juice from the bar, and they sat in the westering sun and watched their daughter play with the fish. Sally said, “Mars…”

He smiled at her, and it struck him anew that his wife was quite beautiful.

He laughed. “Mars indeed!” he said.

HE SPENT A troubled night, his dreams plagued by images of Obterek blue men lasering down defenceless humans.

He woke around five, the room light despite the drawn curtains, and listened to the sound of Sally’s breathing. He reached out and slipped a hand across the small of her back, reassured by her warmth.

Hannah, their alarm clock, burst into the room at seven-thirty and woke Allen from a light slumber. She chattered constantly until breakfast, where a bowl of Weetabix shut her up. They walked her to school along the canal path and returned silently, each lost in their own thoughts.

“Tea?” Sally asked when they got back.

Allen nodded. “What time’s Kath due?”

“She said around ten.”

He looked at the clock. Nine-twenty. “Not long then.”

He was feeling curiously apprehensive, and he could not really say why — whether it was due to the idea of Mars, or of meeting, face to face, a self-aware entity in human form.

They sat on either side of the kitchen table and sipped their tea. At last Allen said, “How would you feel about moving to Mars, if it’s really on?”

She pursed her lips and rocked her head, considering. “I honestly don’t know. I suppose it would depend on the job, and the type of people we’d be with. I know, I know, we wouldn’t know about the latter until we got there. But I suppose I could adapt to living almost anywhere, so long as I had you and Hannah, a decent job, and we were surrounded by good people.”

“We have all that here, Sally.”

She nodded. “But even so, the idea of Mars. The experience. A part of me feels we’d be foolish to pass it up, while another…”

“And you accuse me of being a stick-in-the-mud.”

She smiled. “Well, I’m very happy with what I have here, thank you very much.”

“And so am I, but I know what you mean. The thought of Mars…” He slapped his leg with the flat of his hand. “But let’s wait until we hear what your self-aware entity friend has to say, hm?”

“All those years, the times we spent together…”

“How does it make you feel, the knowledge of who — what — she is?”

“I’ve thought about that a lot over the past couple of days. At first, I don’t know… but I felt as if our friendship had been somehow… devalued. As if for all those years Kath had been living a lie. But then I realised that was stupid. She wasn’t out to get anything from me — other than what every human being wants from someone, friendship, loyalty, understanding, being there when it matters… We shared all those things. So the fact that she’s also an alien, a self-aware entity… In a way, it doesn’t really alter anything.”

“And yet.”

She laughed. “And yet it does alter everything. I think now I can never be as… as open with her, I suppose. I’ll always be wondering about her motivations in being here, always wondering if she really understands me, or if it’s just simulating a response.” She waved. “I’m sorry, I’m expressing it badly.”

“I think I understand,” he said. “One of your best friends has turned out to be something other than what she purported to be, so of course you have every right to reassess your relationship with her.”

“And forge a new relationship with her, built on that new knowledge,” she said. She cocked her head, listening. “That’s the side gate. It must be her.”

Seconds later Kath’s head and shoulders passed the kitchen window and she knocked on the slightly open door.

From where he sat at the table, Allen watched the two women come together on the threshold and embrace. He had always been struck by the differences between these two good friends: whereas Sally was tall, elegant and — though he admitted bias in this — beautiful, Kath was small, thick-set and plain. She exuded a matronly bonhomie that he found endearing, and which people warmed to. And it was all, he reminded himself, a construct, a fabrication to humanise what was in fact an alien being.

He rose and crossed the kitchen towards Kath. He always found greeting women a little awkward — a handshake or a chaste peck on the cheek: one too formal and the other too intimate — and he ended up stooping a little to give her a hug.

“Geoff,” she said. “It’s lovely to see you. It’s been more than two years.”

“How about we sit in the garden?” he suggested. “Tea all round?”

While Sally ushered Kath into the garden and arranged a table and a spare chair beneath the cherry tree, Allen made three cups of Earl Grey, opened a packet of locally made shortbread, and carried them outside.

They sipped tea, nibbled biscuits, and traded the usual pleasantries for a few minutes — commenting on the weather, the fine state of the garden — though Allen was aware of the incongruity of the charade.

At last Kath paused and looked up from her tea. “I take it Sally told you all about what happened the night before last?”

“In detail,” he said, “and I filled Sal in on the events at Fujiyama.”

Kath pulled a quick frown at this, murmuring, “Ah, yes…” She looked from Sally to Allen, and said, “That was a breach we could have done without, but you’ll be pleased to know that no lasting damage was done, despite the appearance of initial conditions. Everyone ‘killed’ at Fujiyama was saved by the SAEs.”

“I was shot in the torso,” he began, shaking his head.

“My… colleagues melded with the dead and dying, imbued them with our life-force, and affected such repairs as were needed. On a quantum level, it was a simple procedure.”

“But the other evening? Couldn’t you have saved yourself, then?” Sally asked.

“It was a very different form of attack, Sally. Far more… lethal. I needed help, from my colleagues, in order to effect recovery.”

Allen said, “And the Obterek? Who are they? Why are they attacking you?”

Kath nodded, balancing her tea cup on her knee. “They are our opponents, or enemy, from the sector of the galaxy from where we hail. We are ideologically opposed, I suppose you could say. The history between us is long and complex. Anyway, they compromised the charea program we had in place — only locally, I’m glad to say, and staged a minor offensive.”

“Minor?” Allen queried. “It appeared rather major to me. The destruction of a couple of towers, the slaughtering of dozens, hundreds, of humans…”

“Believe me, Geoff, it was a minor incident. As the Obterek meant it to be — not so much the first stage of a concerted offensive, but a warning shot. It was a breach which told us that they were capable, given the opportunity, of much greater damage. Their attacks have been increasing of late, and although we are confident that we can counter everything they have to throw at us, the incidence of their attacks is nevertheless worrying.”

Sally leaned forward. “But what do the Obterek object to, Kath? Who can possibly oppose what the Serene are doing here?”

“The Obterek can. They are a military race, evolved in conditions far different from any you might be able to imagine. Their rise to eminence in their solar system, and the neighbouring ones, is a bloody catalogue of conflicts won and lost, the brutality and barbarity of which is hard to envisage, or believe. They are responsible for the annihilation of more than a dozen innocent races, and they see what we are doing as against the natural law. That is their great phrase — translated into English, of course — Natural Law, the edict of the universe which no race should contravene.”

“But surely,” Sally said, “a purely subjective idea?”

“Of course,” Kath said, “but try telling the Obterek that.”

“How long have the Serene and the Obterek been at loggerheads?” Allen asked.

“Would you believe over two hundred thousand Terran years?”

He shook his head at the very idea.

Kath went on, “The conflict exemplifies a typical pacifist-aggressor paradigm: what does a peaceful people, who live by rules of non-violence and respect for all life, do when attacked by a force who does not hold to such ideals? In the early years our people were split. There were those who said we should counter like with like, and defend ourselves by attacking. There were others, whose view thankfully prevailed, who maintained that we should abide by the ideals that had made our race what it was: humane, tolerant, compassionate. We inhabited many worlds by this time, and on one we set about working on a means of peaceable defence.”

Sally opened her mouth in a silent, “Ah…” She said, “Charea?”

Kath nodded. “And for forty thousand years, with frequent interruptions, charea has worked.”

A silence developed, each contemplating their own thoughts, until Sally asked, “You said that the incidence of Obterek attacks are increasing, but does this mean that one day they will prevail?”

“We certainly hope not. You must understand that to subvert, or compromise, the quantum structure of the charea requires such energies as you would find hard to conceive. And the Obterek simply do not have the resources to reconfigure more than a fragment of the basal structure of reality at any one time. Granted, they may attempt to take the life of a self-aware entity from time to time, or even stage a more daring attack like that at Fujiyama, but as I stated earlier these are, we think, merely warning shots. We live in preparation of the Obterek upping the stakes, of developing ways of countering the charea that we cannot foresee.”

“And if one day the Obterek prevailed, destroyed the charea? What then?” Sally asked.

“Their stated aim is to reinstate the Natural Law, but this is disingenuous. In the past they have promised certain races a return to the old, violent ways — but they lie. And the same would be true here, too.”

“So… what would they want?” Allen asked.

“What all aggressive, warlike races want — domination, complete and utter subjugation of your race. And they would be ruthless to their subjects if they ever succeeded in permanently subverting the charea and defeating us.” She paused, her gaze distant, then went on, “Five millennia ago there was a race which the Serene failed. I was not there to witness what happened, of course, but the story stands to serve as a warning should ever we become complacent.”

Sally said, “What happened?”

“The Serene brought the charea to this race, the Grayll; like your race, they were a technological, civilised people — but given to destructive internecine wars which, unchecked, would have resulted in their self-annihilation. The Serene intervened, bringing peace to their small world, and then made the fatal mistake, a hundred years later, of dropping our guard. We became complacent, left only a token force of self-aware entities in the Grayll’s system — and the Obterek struck massively, breaching the basal reality paradigm, destroying our means of maintaining the charea and driving our forces from the system. For the next fifty years the Obterek used the Grayll as little more than slave labour in order to mine the solar system of precious metals and resources. They were ruthless, thinking nothing of working to death thousands of innocent Grayll at a time, of summarily executing those they deemed to be subverting their cause. After half a century the Obterek withdrew to the fastness of their own system, leaving… leaving behind not a single living creature. Those Grayll still living at the end of the period of enslavement they put to death in the most horrific fashion. And what made the slaughter all the worse was that the Obterek had promised these deluded people ultimate freedom when they, the Obterek, had finished raping the star system. The remaining Grayll were gathered together at the site of a Grayll holy temple and… and firebombed.

“When the Obterek left, and the Serene returned… they found the incinerated corpses of ten thousand men, women and children, a terrible testament to our complacency. The Serene vowed, then, that slaughter should never happen again.”

After a short silence, Allen said, “And they would do the same to the human race?”

“Without question,” Kath replied.

Allen considered everything Kath had said. “Might the Obterek threat have some bearing on your decision to terraform the outer planets of the solar system, to promote our migration outwards? This way, spread across the system, we present a target difficult to locate and destroy?”

Kath smiled. “That is certainly one way of looking at the problem, yes. The other reason is simply that the natural evolution of a race is ever outwards, pushing into space and exploring new habitats, spreading the gene pool in a diaspora that will thus engender a greater chance of species survival.”

They were silent for a time. “It’s a big commitment you’re asking of us,” he said at last. “I mean, it’s difficult enough to think about emigrating to Australia, say, not to mention Mars.”

Kath smiled. “I know, and I do not ask lightly. But let me assure you that you would find Mars conducive to a happy life. The brochure I gave you sets out in detail everything you might need to know. Browse through it at your leisure. There is no real hurry…”

Allen caught something in her tone. “But..?”

Kath frowned. “But… we are eager to set up a vital, viable colony on Mars before the Obterek find new and potentially more lethal ways of going about their goals. We are recruiting colonists daily, and we need people like you to join us.” She finished her tea and checked her watch. “My train for London is due at twelve. I’d better dash.”

Allen smiled to himself. The banality of human concerns after such mind-stretching issues as galactic conflict…

Kath stood and hugged Sally.

“Look through the brochure, and consider what I’ve said. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me. If I don’t hear from you in a couple of weeks, I’ll be in touch.”

Allen embraced Kath and murmured goodbye, and Sally saw her across the garden and down the front path.

She returned a minute later, smiling to herself. “Well…” she said.

He tapped the softscreen into life. “Let’s take a look, Sal. But we can’t do this without a cup of tea.”

“Good idea,” Sally said. She sat down on the bench and took up the softscreen.

Allen picked up the tray and retreated to the kitchen.

CHAPTER NINE

JAMES MORWELL STARTED work at nine that morning and by eleven he was through with his duties for the day.

He sat at his desk and considered the appearance of the blue figure last week, its pronouncement that he and the Obterek were working towards the same end, and its gift of the shimmering blue discs. For a few days he had allowed himself a flicker of hope. He had contacted Lal and demanded the latest information regarding the suspected Serene representatives… And the news was not good. The two latest suspects had vanished days ago without trace. Lal assured him that he was working personally to track down other suspects, and promised that within weeks he would be able to present Morwell with a dossier of likely candidates.

The news had dispirited him, and for days he’d sunk into a depressed state, where nothing he did mattered at all and no hope glimmered on the horizon.

His life, of late, was becoming meaningless.

Three days a week he and four other once eminent businessmen, all of them self-made millionaires, met for a round of golf and dinner at their club on Long Island. But he was becoming jaded with the game of late; he detected that his passion to win was not matched by that of his colleagues, and what was victory against apathetic opposition? He blamed the Serene, of course. Their charea had affected not only humanity’s ability to commit violence, but also robbed the human spirit of something vital, the spark of life, of fight, that made individuals, tribes, nations, want to win.

So golf accounted for three afternoons a week, and sex — such as it was — the other three. On Sunday he rested by taking his yacht out to sea and losing himself in the blue immensity for hours on end.

Increasingly these days he enjoyed the luxury of being alone. On his yacht he cut all communications, deactivated his softscreen, and simply sailed.

It was while out on the ocean just a week ago that the idea had occurred to him, and he had greeted its sudden emergence in his head with uproarious laughter.

Along with other forms of violence, suicide was a thing of the past. These days, no one was allowed to kill himself. You spasmed if you tried to slice your jugular, or insert a rifle into your mouth and pull the trigger; you were unable to jump off buildings, or under trains. He was sure, idly thinking about it, that people must have found ways around the self-harming edict. But, if so, they had not survived to pass on the information, and Morwell himself could think of no way to subvert the Serene’s charea — which was a pity as, these days, he was increasingly wondering what was the point of being alive.

He had been out on his boat, staring into the clear blue sky and day-dreaming about possible suicide methods: somehow infect oneself with a lethal botulism, or lay oneself open to a fatal disease… but he suspected that at some point in the process one would begin spasming.

Could he purposefully allow himself to be pitched over the side when the boat yawed, and so drown — to all intents an accident…?

The next time he’d taken his yacht out, he’d tried to do this, and spasmed well before he got anywhere near the safety rail.

Then a few weeks later, while lying on the deck under the full might of the sun, he’d had his brainwave.

Rather than do something to kill oneself — perhaps the answer was simply to do nothing to stay alive?

So excited was he by the idea that he sat up and almost punched the air in elation.

He would board his boat with no provisions, no food or water, with his emergency radio left at home, lifebelts and safety jackets jettisoned; he would set the tiller and point the yacht east and simply… sail into the vast unknown.

He would starve to death — a protracted, painful death, no doubt — or the boat would find itself in a storm and, if he did nothing to steer it through, would capsize and take him with it. Surely then he would achieve his desire to end his life?

But always a niggling doubt remained: before he even set off, would he begin the involuntary spasming that would thwart his dreams of putting an end to himself?

His softscreen chimed, interrupting his reverie.

He answered the call. Lal’s sleek Indian face smiled out at him.

“I wonder if I might come up and see you, sir?”

“Is it really necessary, Lal? I was just about to leave.”

Lal’s smile widened. “If you could spare me just ten minutes, sir.”

Morwell sighed. “Very well. Ten minutes.” And it had better be good, he thought as he cut the connection.

A minute later Lal strode into the office and lounged in the seat across the desk from Morwell.

“You look, Lal, if you don’t mind the crudity, like a dog that’s learned how to fuck itself and suck its balls at the same time.”

Lal smiled. Morwell was sure his frequent vulgarisms offended the man’s deep-seated Hindu puritanism, but if so he didn’t let it show.

Lal said, “Did I ever tell you that I had a sister, sir?”

Morwell sighed. “No, Lal. No, you didn’t. And I don’t think I ever enquired, either.” Don’t tell me that you’re fucking her, he thought to himself, but refrained from asking.

“Ana,” Lal went on. “I was parted from her at the age of sixteen, when Paul Prentice found me in Kolkata.”

“That part of your life story, Lal, I am aware of.”

“We lived on Howrah station, and it was hard enough looking after oneself without taking into consideration a puling kid sister. I found Ana a millstone.” He paused. “I never said goodbye to her when Prentice enrolled me at the business school…”

Morwell smiled to himself and said, “With the greatest respect, Lal, why the hell are you telling me all this?”

“Because, sir, yesterday Ana tracked me down.”

“And should I be delighted that the Devi siblings are at last reunited?”

Lal smiled. “Not at all, sir. But I think you will be interested in what I have to tell you.”

“Go on, Lal,” Morwell said with heavy forbearance, “but make it quick, hm?”

“Very well.” Lal crossed his legs and leaned back even further in his seat. “After she’d shed her recriminations at the manner of my leaving, we shared a little history. I excused myself by saying that I’d not wanted to hurt her by telling her I was leaving — and that it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I think she was mollified. She told me what she was doing these days — working at the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city as a production manager. She’s done very well for herself.”

Morwell interrupted. “And I’m delighted for her, Lal. But I don’t quite see…”

“She told me that she is also,” Lal said, “a representative of the Serene.”

Morwell stared at the Indian. He felt as if his innards had been scooped from his torso, stirred up and returned. “Go on.”

“We chatted for a couple of hours yesterday, and I met her again this morning. She told me what she does for the Serene — not that she knows exactly what that is. Every month she leaves India for various cities around the world. She travels aboard what she calls a Serene jet — though it is interesting that we have never detected the flight of one of these planes. For the past five years the cities visited, she has noticed, have always been those that are occupied by Serene obelisks. There is obviously some link, sir.”

Morwell nodded, his pulse racing. “Well done, Lal.”

The Indian smiled. “There is more. This morning she told me about an incident in Fujiyama, Japan, which occurred a few days ago. Apparently there was an attack by extraterrestrials opposed to the Serene. Many humans were killed, though Serene self-aware entities apparently restored them to life. My sister was one of these people, along with two other Serene representatives.” Lal smiled at this point. “She mentioned their names in passing, and later I checked their identities. I have all their information here, sir.” He held up a memory stick. “One is a citizen of Italy, the other of the UK.”

Morwell nodded, letting Lal’s information percolate slowly through his consciousness.

At last he said, “This might be the break we’ve been waiting for, Lal.”

“The discs?” asked the Indian.

Morwell laughed. “The discs indeed, my friend.”

“I was wondering, as I have arranged to see Ana tomorrow, might I have the honour of…”

“We need to plan this carefully, Lal — but yes, I see no reason why not.”

He sat back and stared out at the vista of Manhattan. Suddenly, life did not seem to be so lacking in purpose.

In fact, for the first time in years, Morwell felt optimistic.

CHAPTER TEN

SALLY AND GEOFF did not mention Mars for a couple of days after the meeting with Kathryn Kemp.

The softscreen brochure remained on the kitchen table, waiting to be either considered or discarded along with all the other detritus of family life: notices of local events, bills, flyers from Hannah’s school…

Sally went back to the surgery the day after seeing Kath, and Geoff worked in his study editing the shots he’d taken at the Fujiyama arboreal city.

At dinner that evening Hannah chatted about school, who was friends with whom, and what Miss Charles had said about the forthcoming Serene Party, marking the tenth anniversary of the alien’s arrival on Earth. Mars was not mentioned until after dinner when, Hannah tucked up in bed, Sally opened a bottle of red wine and they sat in the garden and enjoyed the clement summer evening. She said, “Have you…?”

He glanced at her. “Mars?”

“Sometimes I think we’re telepathic.” She reached out and took his hand. It was good to have him back.

“Well, I suppose we really should look at the brochure… I’ll fetch it.”

While he was in the kitchen, Sally refilled their glasses and looked around the garden. It was, she thought, idyllic, with the wisteria in bloom and filling the air with its heavy scent, and the roses banked against the cottage wall. She would miss the house, the garden, their friends in Wem and London, if they did agree to the move.

She laughed, and looked above the horizon at the faint red pin-prick that was the planet Mars.

Geoff came back and activated the softscreen, and for the next half hour they sat side by side, the screen propped on Geoff’s lap and angled so they could both see it.

A series of images showed a terraformed Mars, a greened and rolling terrain under a blue sky streaked with brushstroke clouds. A vast area of land in the southern foothills of Olympus Mons, so they were informed, most corresponded in geographic aesthetics to rural southern England, and it was to here that the Allen-Walsh family would be located if they agreed to the migration.

There was a section showing artist’s impressions of towns and villages on the red planet, and they were not unlike towns and villages here, a combination of old architecture and new poly-carbon dwellings, with the odd dome thrown in for the sake of ultra-modernity.

Sally laughed. “They’re going out of their way to make us feel at home. Look, that building there…” Between a poly-carbon tower and a silver dome nestled what looked like a Tudor inn.

“Looks like some American theme park,” he grunted.

Aloud she read a little of the blurb, “The settling of Mars is the first step from planet Earth, the first small step in what is hoped will be the diaspora of humankind to the stars…”

They came to the end of the brochure as the sun was setting. The air was still warm. Sally sipped her wine and looked across at Geoff. She could tell, without asking, that he was in favour of the move.

“Well?” she asked at last.

He pursed his lips. “Well… there is that line about the move not being permanent. A minimum stay of two years, and if we don’t like it for whatever reasons…” he shrugged, “we could always come back. What do you think?”

“I… I must admit I’m attracted to the idea.”

“I’ll tell you what, let’s sleep on it. Let’s go to the Horseshoes for lunch tomorrow and talk it over, okay?”

She smiled at him. “Let’s do that, Geoff.”

They sat side by side in companionable silence as twilight descended and Mars twinkled above the horizon.

THEY WALKED ALONG the tow-path hand in hand.

Sally recalled coming this way with Kath just the other day, and what had happened a little later. The sun beat down and butterflies jinked above the surface of the canal.

Sally selected a table in the beer garden while Geoff went to the bar and ordered beer and food. There were only three or four people in the garden beside herself. She watched the koi navigate the confined waters of the pool, occasionally nudging the surface for food.

“You’re miles away.” Geoff set the beers down on the table.

She smiled. “Just thinking about the past ten years, and how different it would have been if the Serene hadn’t intervened.”

He watched her as he sipped his drink.

She said, “I’d be dead, killed by Islamic terrorists back in Uganda.”

The silence stretched. Geoff said, “I’d be alone, no you, no Hannah. And the world would be plagued by wars, murders… the same old routine of mindless violence and not so mindless violence — which was probably worse. When you think about it, all in all, we are a pretty despicable race.”

“Are?” she asked. “Or were?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He frowned, considering. “I mean, if the Serene lifted the charea, then it would be back to square one, wouldn’t it? We’d be killing each other, invading countries, bombing.”

She took his hand. “It will take more than just ten years for us to be able to turn our backs on violence,” she said. “Perhaps in centuries… perhaps then if the charea was lifted we might have become civilised to the point where the need, the desire, to do violence would be no more.”

He looked at her. “Do you think it is a need, a desire? Or just a response to circumstance?”

She considered this, then said, “I’d like to think the latter. Maybe violence was the end result of our inability to work things out in any other way. And with the influence of the charea, we’ll learn over time that there are other ways to resolve conflict and settle differences.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said.

Their food arrived, cheese soufflés and salad, and Geoff ordered two more halves of Leffe.“Right,” he said, “Down to business, Sal. Mars. Pros and cons.”

“Cons first,” she said, puncturing her soufflé with a fork.

“We’d miss England, Wem, London, our friends. Nothing would be familiar — and that counts for a hell of a lot. Also, Hannah would miss her school, her friends.”

“As you said the other day, children are adaptable. She’d soon make new friends.”

“And…” he said. “And I think that’s it. No more cons.”

She nodded. “And the pros?”

“The pros,” he began. “Well, we’d be living on Mars.” She smiled at the big grin on his face as he went on, “We’d be experiencing life on another planet, part of humanity’s first outward push from Earth. We’d be… and I know this sounds corny… but we’d be pioneers. And it needn’t be forever. If we don’t like it, we come back.”

“And we can always return to visit friends.”

He nodded, looking at her. “The thing is, do you want to go?”

“Yes, Geoff, I do. And you?”

“Me too. I’m ready for a change, a challenge.”

She laughed as if with relief, squeezed his hand. “I’m glad that’s settled, then. We’ll talk to Hannah about it later. There’s bound to be tears.”

She stopped and looked up, aware of something in the air.

“Sal? What is it?”

“I don’t know… Don’t you feel it? Like before a thunderstorm, a charge in the air.”

He shrugged. “Sorry…”

She looked around the garden. It seemed to have filled suddenly with a dozen well-dressed drinkers, but she thought the sudden odd atmosphere had nothing to do with the newcomers. She looked beyond the garden, as if searching there for the answer.

She shivered. “I don’t know… for a second there I certainly felt something.”

The people on the next table, two men and two women Sally had never seen before, drank and chatted amongst themselves. As Sally’s gaze passed over them, a woman happened to look up and catch her eye. She looked away quickly, and Sally felt uneasy.

“Sal, are you okay?”

She had the strangest feeling of premonition, as if something was about to happen that should concern her — the strange intimation she’d had once as a student when Kath Kemp and other friends had thrown a surprise twenty-first birthday party for her.

Now she felt suddenly panicky. “Geoff, let’s get out of here, okay?”

“Sal?” His expression was a strange mix of concern and amusement.

“No, I mean it. Something’s not right.”

At the nearby table, the woman who’d caught her eye briefly stood and moved towards their table. Sally watched her. The woman was heading for Geoff. She seemed to be moving in slow motion, or Sally’s perception had been somehow retarded. Later she recalled thinking what a beautiful blue ring the woman was wearing…

A dozen figures appeared on the periphery of the garden. One second they were there, a golden enfilade of self-aware entities surrounding the startled drinkers, and then they were rushing inwards towards the woman who was approaching Geoff.

He looked up, startled, as a golden figure flashed by him, and Sally watched it collide with the woman who was reaching out with her right hand towards Geoff, her blue ring resplendent.

The golden figure slammed into the woman, seemed to absorb her. She noticed a man run towards Geoff, only he too was intercepted by a self-aware entity.

Screams filled the garden and innocent drinkers caught up in whatever was happening cowered behind tables or ran towards the pub. Geoff was on his feet, tugging at Sally’s arm.

He turned as someone said his name, a bearded man who smiled and reached out. He carried a small blue disc — which was inches from Geoff’s chest when a golden figure slammed into the man. One second he was standing there, reaching out, and the next second it was as if he had been replaced by the self-aware entity who spun in search of other attackers.

Calmly, two golden figures walked towards Sally and Geoff, and she was startled to hear a voice in her head. “Do not be alarmed…”

The golden figures approached and did not stop, and Sally cried out as one of the self-aware entities came face to face with her and enveloped her in its warmth. She felt a sudden jolt of energy, a heart-stopping surge of power that made her gasp and cry out again.

Then she was moving, and before she knew it she had left the garden and was travelling at speed; trees and bushes passed in a blur. She tried to cry out for Geoff, and was aware of another figure at her side.

She had the impression of covering vast distances in an instant, and seconds later she passed out.

SHE CAME TO her senses and she was enveloped in blackness. She no longer felt the energy of the golden figure surrounding her. She was alone again, or rather not alone… She felt someone nearby in the darkness, reached out and with a thrilling sense of relief found a hand she knew to be her husband’s.

“Geoff!”

“Sal. We’re okay. As the golden figure said, don’t be afraid.”

“But where are we?”

It was a blackness she had never known before, total and unrelieved, and she felt nothing beneath her feet. She had the sensation of floating.

She repeated her question, and Geoff responded.

“I think I know…”

“But where?”

“Just walk.”

“How?” she almost wept.

“Move your feet. Lean against me and just move your feet.”

As she did so she had the strangest sensation of something gaining solidity beneath her shoes, as if the very action of walking had brought the ground into existence.

Light appeared ahead, an undefined brightness that suddenly exploded dazzlingly in her vision. She exclaimed and threw an arm across her face to protect herself, and she stumbled as solid ground came up to hit her feet.

Geoff steadied her and laughed aloud.

She lowered her arm and, when her vision adjusted to the sunlight, stared around her.

They were in the back garden of their cottage, beside the gate. Before them was the cherry tree and the bench. At the end of the garden the old rectory stood, mellow in the sunlight; Sally thought it had never looked so beautiful.

She stared at Geoff and whispered, “What happened?”

He shook his head in wonder. “We were saved. The golden figures saved us.”

She recalled the men and women bearing blue discs. “From what?”

“I don’t know, Sal. I honestly don’t know. All I know is that they saved us, brought us here — home… but not home.”

She stared at him. “What do you mean?”

In reply he pointed to the sky, and Sally looked up.

Only then did she see the gourd-shape of a silvery moon tumbling erratically through a sky that was a deeper blue than any she had ever seen on Earth.

Geoff took her hand and almost pulled her towards the house. They hurried down the side path, then down the garden path to the front gate.

There they came to a halt, and stared.

Their house, their one hundred and fifty-year-old rectory, was perched on an escarpment overlooking a vast rolling green plain, at once alien and yet oddly familiar. Gone was Wem; gone was the rest of Shropshire.

She turned and saw that their house was one of a dozen lining the very lip of the escarpment, each one of a different design. She made out domes and poly-carbon villas, A-frames and things that looked very much like giant snail shells.

No sooner had she cried out, “Hannah!” than a golden figure appeared on the path from the back garden, a sleeping child in its arms.

The figure approached, halted, and held out the small girl. Sobbing, Sally reached out and embraced her daughter.

The golden figure stood before them, silent, and slowly its swirling depths took on the appearance of a human being.

Kath Kemp smiled. “Welcome to Mars,” she said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ANA ARRIVED AT the coffee shop on 34^th Street fifteen minutes early.

She ordered a mocha and sat in the window seat, staring out at the passing pedestrians. She had the feeling that she had closed a door on the old part of her life, and a new door was opening. She had found Bilal at last, and in that she felt a sense of accomplishment. She believed what he’d told her about not wanting to hurt the little girl she had been, and accepted that he’d had to take the opportunity of an education when it had been offered to him. What still rankled a little was that in the intervening years he had never really attempted to seek her out. She understood that, in a way; he had his new, exciting life, and as the years passed he must have looked back on his old life, and his sister, and thought them perhaps too painful to resurrect.

Whatever, now she had found him.

A big disappointment to her was finding what kind of person he had become. While most of the human race saw the great benefits of the Serene, a tiny minority still held out. And it was just her luck that her brother belonged to this defiant minority.

It was an aspect of his character she was determined to come to understand; only when she fully comprehended his mindset, and how it had got that way, could she even begin to work out how to show him that he was wrong. He would need educating, and Ana had resolved that her long-term project would be to show her brother how right the Serene were. She would invite him to India; they would revisit their childhood haunts together, and she would show him the wonders of the wilderness city.

It would take time, but she had plenty of that.

“Ana…” Bilal smiled down at her.

She stood and they kissed cheeks a little awkwardly, like strangers. While he was at the counter, she took in his sharp black suit, his white shirt and long ponytail. She knew she shouldn’t criticise his style of dress — especially as she was wearing Western jeans and a blouse — but in these less formal times she saw his business attire as a uniform harking back to former, pre-Serene days.

He sat at her table and smiled at her. He appeared today, unlike at their first couple of meetings, a little nervous. He gestured to his coffee. “Old habits die hard. I always liked my coffee milky and sweet in India.”

“You had coffee in India?” It was a luxury she had never tasted until ten years ago.

He shrugged. “In college,” he said.

“They must have looked after you well. Quite apart from giving you a good education.”

He shrugged again. She noticed that his hands, as he stirred his coffee, were shaking. He saw that she was looking at his hand, and self-consciously slipped it into his jacket pocket.

She smiled. “I was thinking… it would be lovely if you could come to visit me in India soon.”

He nodded but did not look her in the eye. “I’d like that.”

“You haven’t been back for fifteen years?”

“I don’t cover India now, just the US. I’ve had no reason to go back.”

She sipped her coffee and asked, “So… what’s it like working for the Morwell Organisation?”

“It pays well, and sometimes the work is interesting.”

“And your boss… What’s his name, James Morwell?”

“I think we understand each other. We share the same views, the same philosophy…”

She winced inwardly, and said, “He indoctrinated you, Bilal?”

“Now, isn’t that a big word, sister?”

“Don’t patronise me.”

“And don’t call me Bilal, please. I left that name behind when I got away from Kolkata. I’m Lal now.”

She stared at him. The café was filling up, people queuing at the counter, others standing and eyeing their table as if suggesting they drink up and leave.

Ana felt an uneasy tension in the air, but knew it was all in her head. This meeting with her brother wasn’t going well.

He said, “I prefer to think that I was ‘educated’, Ana. The Serene are… wrong. I was educated –”

“Please, let’s not argue…”

“Just,” he said, taking his hand from his pocket, “as you one day will be educated.”

For some reason his fingers were glowing blue. She looked up, into his eyes, and tried to fathom what she saw in them.

Someone was moving towards her table, and a light had been switched on nearby, a dazzling golden light which intensified…

Bilal reached out for her hand, but before he made contact the golden light resolved itself into the shape of a self-aware entity and slammed into her brother. He vanished, absorbed into the form of the golden figure, which rolled with the impact of slamming into Bilal, stood and moved from the café in a blur of light.

Ana screamed.

She looked up at another approaching light and, for the second time that week, felt the life-force of a self-aware entity hit her.

SHE CAME TO her senses and found that she was surrounded by darkness. She felt the energy of the self-aware entity cocooning her.

“What happened?” she asked.

A voice sounded in her head, telling her everything.

She sobbed as she recalled the look in Bilal’s eyes as he reached out to her, the light of the betrayal he knew he was committing.

“What happened to him?” she asked — but the voice in her head chose not to reply.

Ana stepped forward, from darkness into dazzling light.

She was standing before her apartment in India… but something was wrong with the light. She looked up, into a bright blue sky streaked with impossibly high clouds. And overhead, tumbling end over end, was what looked like a huge, yam-shaped moon.

She turned suddenly and gasped at what she saw.

Her apartment was on the edge of a long ridge which overlooked a rolling green plane, at once exotic and idyllic. Other dwellings occupied the margin of the ridge; next to her apartment was an A-frame, and beyond that an ivy-covered, typically English house.

A small group of people were gathered before the English house, two of whom Ana recognised.

A golden figure stood before her, and Ana asked, “Where am I?”

“For your own safety, you are on Mars. Do not worry. We have contacted Kapil Gavaskar and he will soon be joining you.”

Before the English house, Nina Ricci said something to the Englishman, Geoff Allen, and a tall woman Ana did not know. Nina looked across at Ana and waved.

Smiling to herself, pushing the thought of Bilal’s betrayal to the back of her mind, Ana stepped from the shadow of her apartment and joined them.