The Serene Invasion

CHAPTER ONE

ALLEN LEFT HIS office, took the elevator down to the busy atrium, then strolled out into the sprawling gardens that surrounded the Mare Erythraeum administrative centre.

He bought a coffee at an open-air café overlooking the plain, selected a table and admired the view. He wondered if this was the finest panorama in the solar system. Once he would have said that the countryside of Shropshire provided the finest unspoilt rural views in the world, but that was before he had travelled to Mars, and beyond. Now he knew that the Mare Erythraeum, the methane plains of Titan, and the equatorial jungle zones of Venus all vied for contention.

The administrative centre was situated five kilometres along the escarpment from where, ten years ago, he had first fetched up on the planet. From the café on the lip of the drop he had an uninterrupted view for a couple for hundred kilometres across rolling farmland, shimmering canals — a conceit that proved the Serene possessed a sense of humour — to the mountains on the horizon. It was a combination of the dozen pastel shades, he decided, and the hazy quality of the air which gave the panorama such an idyllic atmosphere. There was little noise, too; the quiet trilling of parakeets high in the elms which lined the escarpment, and the distant buzz of the electric carts that beetled across the farmland far below.

He glanced at his watch. Ana was late, which was unusual for her. He drained his coffee and decided, as he was finished early for the day and the temperature was climbing, to order a cold beer.

Sipping it, he sat back and considered his situation. He was sixty-two, and he had been on Mars now for ten years; he had often wondered of late which was the more remarkable: the fact of his age or his residency for a decade on the red planet. He felt well for his age, though his hairline was receding and he’d put on a few pounds.

In the early days he, Sally and Hannah had returned to Earth every few months to see friends and renew their connection with all that was familiar about their home planet. Then, after a few years, their visits had become less frequent; it was as if they did not need to quench the nostalgic urge, as if Mars provided everything they required. Certainly most of their friends had now relocated here, and the landscape of the planet was becoming familiar and sustaining. They had found themselves spending more and more holiday time on far-flung outposts of the solar system — Venus, the asteroid resorts, and Ganymede.

And three years ago Allen had finished his last commission for the photo-agency he had worked for for over twenty years and begun work as a ‘social administrator’ of the Mare Erythraeum region of Mars. He was, in effect, a glorified civil servant, sitting on government committees that oversaw the smooth functioning of all aspects of life on Mars. A few years ago he’d found himself increasingly interested in the political set-up in the area, and it had seemed the natural thing to do, little by little, to move from the photo-agency and into local administration, first on a part-time voluntary basis and then, as he gained experience, on a more permanent footing.

Now he was not so sure that the decision had been wholly his own. He had fallen in with a set of people working in local admin, and they had suggested that he was just the type, with his broad knowledge of politics and people — they were flattering him, he thought — to work as a social administrator. He often wondered if he detected in his vocational shift the discreet, manipulative machinations of the Serene. But, he often wondered, to what end?

“Sorry I’m late!”

Ana Devi beamed down at him, stroking a long strand of hair from her face and bending down to kiss his cheek. He half-rose to facilitate the greeting, then sat back and watched her as she ordered an iced coffee.

Ana was thirty-six, tall and self-possessed, and had been one of Allen and Sally’s best friends for the past seven or eight years. The flesh of her forearm pulsed with an incoming call, which she killed and turned the flesh-screen to the shade of her dark, Indian skin. Discreetly, not wanting their time together to be interrupted by business calls or any others, Allen tapped his own forearm-screen into quiescence.

“Kapil and Shantidev?” he asked. It was a couple of months since he and Sally had last invited Ana and her family round to their cottage on the escarpment, and a fortnight since Allen had last seen Ana.

“They’re well. Kapil seems happy down at the farm and Shantidev has decided he wants to drive a tractor for a living when he grows up.”

Allen laughed. “You make Kapil sound like a gentleman farmer.”

She regarded him over her glass. “I often admire Kapil for his… centredness,” she said, and shrugged, “his contentment. He keeps my feet on the ground.”

Kapil managed the production output at the vast Ibrium farm, a logistical nightmare of a job which Allen knew just enough about to realise that it was demanding and high-powered.

“There’s nothing like having children to make you realise how old you’re getting,” Ana said now.

“You don’t need to tell me that. I’m sixty-two. Hannah’s fifteen, going on thirty. The last ten years have gone by like that…” He snapped his fingers.

“It seems like just a few weeks ago that I was working on Earth.”

“And speaking about the last ten years…”

“Yes?”

He shrugged, wondering how to broach the subject. Ana, practical, down-to-Earth Ana Devi, would tell him he was imagining things. “We both left our old jobs and moved into admin around the same time.”

She sipped her iced coffee. “Mmm…”

“Well… have you wondered how much that was, on your part, a conscious choice?”

She pulled a face and stared at him. “Of course it was a conscious choice,” she said. “You don’t think I was ordered by my subconscious one day to pack it all in at the farm and apply for the government post?”

“Of course not. I mean… I was thinking back to when I left the agency, and it came to me that it was a combination of factors out of my control: dissatisfaction with shooting the same old things, the opening that just happened to be there in admin.”

“Just what are you trying to say, Geoff?”

He shrugged, suddenly unsure of his footing. “I sometimes wonder how much we’re being… propelled — I nearly said manipulated — by the Serene.”

Ana twisted her lips into a frown. “I think that’s something we’ll probably never know.”

“But you admit that it’s a possibility?”

“I… Maybe, I don’t know. But to what end?”

He considered her question. “Not long after we joined the admin team,” he said, “our work for the Serene increased.”

From doing the bidding of the Serene on a monthly basis, he, Ana and all the other ‘representatives’ of their acquaintance were informed that they would now be required to travel around the system for two days every fortnight — and most of their work would be centred on the giant obelisk situated on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Ana nodded. “That’s right. So…?”

“So… it occurred to me that it was a bit of a coincidence.”

She pointed at him. “And that’s all it was, Geoff. A coincidence. Nothing more.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I’d still like to know what it is we actually do for the Serene in the obelisk every two weeks.”

“I think that, Geoff, might remain a mystery for ever.”

They sipped their drinks in companionable silence for a while, and then Ana said, “I’ve been thinking recently about the past twenty years, the arrival of the Serene and how things have changed. You?”

“Just a bit,” he said.

“You don’t see much spasming these days, do you?”

“Sally said the same thing just last week, and I hadn’t realised — but you’re right. You don’t.”

“Have you wondered why not?”

“Sally suggested that it’s a conditional thing. Collectively, on some psychological level, we know that violence is futile so the brain is inured not to initiate the impulse.”

She nodded. “She’s been reading the psychology reports. That’s roughly the thinking. In the early days you saw instances of spamsing all over… remember all the comedians telling jokes about politicians dancing like marionettes?” She smiled. “Then… over the years… the instances of people spamsing grew less and less.”

He looked at her. “Did you spasm in the early days?”

Her expression clouded as she recalled something, he guessed, from her childhood. She was sixteen when the Serene arrived, though she had not spoken much about her life as a street kid in Kolkata. Now she nodded. “Once or twice, just after they came… It was a strange sensation, a kind of powerlessness, and yet a great urge to carry out the act.”

“Do you recall,” he went on, “how some psychologists were predicting terrible consequences of the human race being unable to fulfil what they saw as an elemental desire, the desire to commit violence? They said there would be unforeseen repercussions of the sublimation…”

“They got it wrong, which I suppose isn’t that surprising when you think about it. I mean, the way some people were going on it was as if violence and the need to commit it was something that the majority of us felt and did on a daily basis. But how many times have you spasmed in the past twenty years?”

He thought about it. “I think just once, a year after the Serene arrived. I was debating with a colleague about the politics of their arrival, and he was against it. For a second, the briefest second, as he goaded me…” He shrugged. “I don’t even know if I really spasmed — he certainly didn’t notice anything, thankfully. I just felt a tremor, a sense of impotence.”

“And I think that goes for the majority of the human race,” Ana said. “So how would the inability to do violence have any long-term, or short-term, come to that, consequences for most of us?”

“And for the tiny minority, the psychopaths amongst us?”

“I rather think that they were… healed by the Serene self-aware entities among us,” she said.

People like Kath Kemp, he thought; yes, that would make sense.

She sipped her iced coffee, staring over the escarpment at the pacific vista. Phobos tumbled, end over end, across the far horizon — and its rapid transit contrasted with and pointed up the serenity of the land beneath.

She said, “Do you know what the most shocking thing was, ten years ago?”

“You mean, when the Serene fought off the attack and brought us here?” He shook his head. “I don’t know… The fact that the Serene were not… invincible, that they had enemies?”

She nodded. “Yes, all that. You’re right. I was being selfish when I asked the question. That was shocking, too. But for me, on a personal level… I told you about my brother, didn’t I?”

“Bilal?”

“Bilal. Right.”

“You said he worked for the Morwell Corporation, and that he was opposed to the Serene.”

“And how,” she said, her expression hardening. “But what I’ve never told you… never told anyone other than Kapil… was that it was my brother, my big brother, who tried to attack me that day on behalf of the Obterek. He set me up, was willing to use me as a pawn to undermine the Serene.” She stopped, her lips compressed as she fought with the notion. “He felt nothing for me.”

Allen said, “I’m sorry.”

“At the time it hurt more than I cared to admit. You see, until the age of six he and me were…” She shrugged. “We lived rough on Howrah Station, and Bilal looked after me. Then one day he just vanished, and I thought for a long time that he’d died. Years later, after the Serene came, I found out he was still alive and I tracked him down. And I found that he’d changed. He was shallow and mercenary… someone I should have despised. But he was my brother, after all… and I wanted to get to know him again. I suppose I wanted… I know this sounds silly… but I think I wanted him to love me.”

She fell silent again, and Allen said nothing, but let her wrestle with her emotions. At last she said, “After his betrayal, in the years that followed, I often wondered how — or even if — the Serene had punished him.”

He said, “I don’t think that that’s their way.”

“Nor do I. But I wondered what had become of him.”

“You never found out?”

She shook her head with vehemence. “No. I didn’t want to. I tracked him down once, and look what happened then. But recently…”

“Yes?”

She gave a long, heartfelt sigh. “You’ll think me silly, but recently I’ve been… curious. I suppose I look at Shantidev, and he so much reminds me of Bilal… and I can’t help myself thinking back to those days. Anyway, recently I’ve wanted to go back to Earth, find him, discuss what he did ten years ago… find out what I really mean to him, if anything.”

He nodded, considering her words. “It might be… painful.”

She held his gaze. “I know that,” she said, “but I’ve got to do it. Anyway, I’ve discussed it with Kapil, and next week I’m taking a few days off and going to Earth, to New York.”

“I want to hear all about it when you get back.”

“Oh you will, Geoff. I’ll bore you and Sally to tears about what I did.”

His forearm tingled, signalling that a priority incoming call had overridden the quiescent function. He apologised and accepted the call.

A familiar face expanded in the screen on his forearm. Nina Ricci smiled out at him. “Nina… this is a welcome surprise. It’s been months.”

“Six,” she said with her customary precision. “I’d like to see you, Geoff.”

“Great. When are you next over our way?”

Nina Ricci was a high-level politico with administrative duties that extended over the entirety of Mars’s southern hemisphere. “How about the weekend?” she said.

“Wonderful. Stay at our place for the weekend. I’ll get a few people together and we’ll make a party of it on Saturday.”

“That sounds like a good idea, though I would like to see you alone at some point.”

He nodded. “Fine… But what about?”

She pulled a face. “About many things, but principally about the Titan obelisk, our increased duties… I have an idea.”

“What a coincidence. I was just talking about those very things.”

“With whom?”

Allen lifted his forearm and directed it across the table at Ana, who smiled and waved her fingers. “Hi, Nina!”

“Ana, good to see you. I take it that you will come on Saturday too?”

Ana nodded. “I’m sure Geoff will invite me,” she said.

To Allen, Nina said, “Midday Saturday, then. Ciao, Geoff.”

He cut the connection, sat back and smiled at Ana. “Now, I wonder what all that was about?”

Ana laughed. “That,” she said, “was Nina, being all conspiratorial again. You know her!”

“And I know that when she has ideas they can often be very interesting.”

They ordered more drinks and chatted as the Martian afternoon mellowed towards evening.

A COUPLE OF weeks after their arrival on Mars, as they sat in the garden with a bottle of red wine, Sally had said to him, “Do you know what’s wrong with this house, Geoff?”

He looked at her. “Isn’t it perfect? That’s what you always said — it’s perfect.” He paused. “Okay, is it because it’s on Mars?”

“Of course not. I like it here. And Hannah has settled in wonderfully.”

“So what’s wrong with the house?”

“It’s the wrong way around.”

“Come again?”

“The garden,” she said, indicating the lawn, “should be on the other side, overlooking the escarpment. The Serene didn’t get it right.”

“I think, if you recall, it was rather a rushed job. They had other things to think about, after all.”

She hit his arm. “I know that! It’s just… I wonder if we could get them to turn it around?”

“Tell you what, next time I see Kath, I’ll mention it to her.”

It was said in jest, of course, as it was a week later when he met with Kath Kemp and mentioned Sally’s criticism of the Serene’s architectural prowess. She had smiled and murmured an apology — but a few days later, on arriving home with Sally, he had braked their buggy before the house, stared at Sally and laughed aloud.

The Serene had turned the cottage around so that now the back garden overlooked the escarpment and the five-hundred-metre drop to the plain below.

It made a great venue for the parties and get-togethers that he and Sally hosted every month.

Now thirty friends and neighbours thronged the garden, setting up a pleasant hubbub of chatter; Martian tablas played in the background, and somewhere one of Hannah’s friends was attempting — not altogether successfully — to coax a raga from a sitar.

The majority of the guests were workmates of Allen and Sally’s, professionals in their forties and fifties and their teenage children. Ana had come early and with Sally had cooked up an Indian feast, which they were carrying with triumphal pride from the kitchen to trestle tables set up at the end of the garden. Shantidev, Ana’s six-year-old son, was dangling contentedly from the rope-swing that Allen had made, twelve years ago, for Hannah. The sight of the child penduluming back and forth beneath the sturdy branch of the ash tree brought back a slew of pleasant memories.

He knocked back his fifth beer and listened to Kapil and a colleague at the farm talking shop.

It was six o’clock, and the sun was setting on a short Martian day. It was warm — as it was all the year round at this equatorial latitude — and the party was set to go on quietly until midnight, when the last of the guests would wander off home until next time. As Allen sipped his beer and stared around at the happy revellers, he realised that he had not felt so contented in years.

Nina Ricci had arrived a little after midday, tall, elegant and regal as ever; if anything, the passing years had done something to mature and deepen her Latin beauty. She was in her late forties now, with the poise and gravitas of an emeritus ballerina, and a restless, questing intelligence.

A murmur had passed around the gathering on her arrival; she had risen from being a nondescript journalist ten years ago, to her current, elevated position as one of the leading political thinkers on Mars.

Allen had introduced her to various friends and then, later, they had chatted about nothing in particular, catching up on each other’s recent exploits — Allen realising, as he recounted council meetings, how humdrum his life had become of late, at least relative to Ricci’s hectic lifestyle.

He had been eager to hear her latest theories, but it was evident from the line of her conversation that that would be saved until later.

Now he saw her in earnest conversation with a professor at the local university, a man known for his trenchant views who, on this occasion, seemed to have found his conversational match.

Allen looked around the gathering but could not see Sally.

He moved back into the house and found her in the kitchen. He leaned against the door-frame and watched her putting the finishing touches to three vast bowls of trifle. He was overcome with a strange sensation; it came to him from time to time, unexpectedly, surprising him with its power. It was an upwelling of love for this woman who had shared his life now for twenty years. She was sixty-two, upright and slim, her face lined, her hair grey, and he realised that he had never found her as beautiful as he did now. The emotion almost choked him.

Sensing his presence, Sally turned quickly. With the back of her hand — her fingers sticky — she brushed away a strand of hair and smiled at him. “What?” she asked. “You’re staring at me very oddly, Geoff.”

“I know you’re probably sick and tired of me telling you this, but you’re very beautiful.”

“Give over, you.”

He crossed the room and took her in his arms, thrilled by the feel of her. He pressed her to him and kissed her lips. “I came in to see if you needed any help.”

“Typical. Just as I’ve nearly done in here.”

“Sorry.”

Someone ran into the kitchen with a clatter of shoes, stopping short. “Ugh! Do you have to, at your age?” Hannah stared at them. “Anyway, the beer’s running low and Professor Hendrix sent me in for more.”

Sally said, “You’ll find it in the cooler.”

Their daughter hauled open the door and dragged out the beer. As she left the kitchen, she called back over her shoulder, “And when you’ve quite finished in here, you should be sociable and circulate.”

Allen said, “Maybe she’s right.”

“Help me out with these and then get me a drink, would you?”

They carried out the trifles to applause, and Allen opened a bottle of Sally’s favourite white wine — a locally grown Chardonnay — and later they sat under the cherry tree with Ana, Kapil and a few other friends and drank and chatted as an indigo twilight rapidly descended.

He stared across the lawn at Nina Ricci, watching her holding forth to a group of scientists from the nearby research lab.

Sally leaned against him and murmured, “I wonder why Nina invited herself, Geoff?”

He smiled. “No doubt she has some wild theory to regale us with. You know Nina.”

She looked at him. “The strange thing is, I don’t think I do. I’ve known her for… what, ten years now, and I don’t really think I know the real woman, what she feels or thinks on a personal level. Oh, I know what she thinks intellectually — she never tires of telling me that! But emotionally…” She shook her head. “She gives nothing away.”

“That’s Nina. I’m not sure she has an emotional life.”

“If I didn’t know better, if I didn’t know Kath — to prove to me that self-aware entities can be imbued with just the same emotions as we humans… I would have said that Nina was an SAE.”

He shook his head. “I know what you mean, but I think not. She’s too critical of the Serene to be of them. And I don’t mean critical in her being opposed to their regime… I mean critical of their methods, their lack of — as she sees it — openness.”

“She still not married?”

“No. But rumour has it that she has a long-term lover, a woman twenty years her junior.”

“You should ask Nina to bring her along to one of our soirées.”

Nina disengaged herself from the knot of scientists and strolled past the cherry tree. She stepped onto the terrace which the Serene, when they had thoughtfully turned around the house, had cantilevered over the drop. She walked to the far rail and leaned against it, a study in isolated elegance.

Seconds later Allen’s forearm tingled, and he accepted the call. He glanced across at Ricci. She was staring at her own forearm.

She looked up at him from the screen. “Geoff, why not join me? Bring Ana.”

He said, “I’d like Sal to come too.”

A hesitation, then Nina Ricci nodded minimally. “Very well, but bring only four chairs so that people know that we are not to be interrupted.”

He cut the connection and said to Sally, “We have our orders.”

Sally spoke to Ana, and between them they carried four wicker chairs across the lawn and over to the rail. Allen ventured out onto the cantilever as little as possible — he found the vertiginous drop to the plain below too reminiscent of the view from the Fujiyama city tree, all those years ago.

He recharged their glasses and proposed a toast. “To life on Mars,” he said, “almost exactly ten years on.”

Nina Ricci looked around the small group and said, “And have you settled down, all of you? Are you liking life on Mars?”

They nodded, to a person. Allen said, “It couldn’t be better. We were a little homesick at first, weren’t we?” He looked across at Sally, who smiled. “But that soon passed.”

“And you, Ana? Do you miss India?”

“I don’t. I have… outgrown the country of my birth. I like to think of myself as a citizen of the solar system.”

Allen smiled as she said this, and thought of the street kid Ana had been.

Nina said, “Do you ever consider what the Serene might want with us, their ‘representatives’?”

He shifted uneasily, wondering why her question unsettled him. Ana said, “I no longer question the Serene, Nina. They have brought unlimited good to humankind. Who am I to question what they want with me?”

“Or what they do to you, in that mysterious obelisk on Titan?”

Allen said, “Do to us?”

Nina shrugged. “We go there every two weeks now, we and thousands upon thousands of other human representatives… and we walk out a day or two later with no memory of what occurred in there. And don’t you think it strange?”

Sally spoke up. “The whole thing about the Serene is ‘strange’, if you’re inclined to phrase it like that.”

The Italian smiled. “We no longer travel to the obelisks on Earth or elsewhere. Almost everyone goes exclusively to the obelisk on Titan, the vastest manufactured object in the solar system. I wondered at first if it served as a device like the other obelisks–”

“A matter-transmitter,” Sally said.

Nina inclined her head. “That’s what I wondered. But why have one of that size situated so far out? For what purpose? And why have every representative go there every two weeks?”

Ana was doing her best to hide her smile. “And you have a theory, Nina?”

Nina Ricci allowed a silence to develop. Instead of assenting, which was what Allen had expected, she said, “I have one more question, Ana. And it is this: what are the Serene doing to our solar system?”

This was met with blank looks all round. “What do you mean?” Ana asked.

Ricci tapped her forearm, then typed in a command. From the olive skin of her arm was projected into the air before them a cuboid, three-dimensional screen.

Allen made out a representation of the outer solar system, with Saturn and Jupiter in the foreground, and the outer planets tiny dots behind them. Beyond, far stars twinkled.

Ricci said, “This has been suppressed by the various newsfeeds. I suspect SAEs in high places don’t want us to know, quite yet.”

Allen said, “Know what?”

“I was talking to the scientists from the university, among them a couple of astronomers — and even they are not aware of what is happening.”

“Which is?” Ana asked.

“Observe.” Ricci tapped her screen again and the scene hanging before them shifted. Gone were Jupiter and Saturn, to be replaced with the tiny, ice-bound orb of Pluto. “Do you see the stars immediately behind Pluto?” she asked.

Sally said, “Yes, but faintly.”

“Yes!” declared Ricci. “Exactly. Look, the stars in a quadrant — imagine an elliptical section of orange peel, if you will — appear faint, compared with those to either side.”

Allen peered more closely, and saw that she was correct. So…” he said.

“This appeared three weeks ago, for no more than an hour. A colleague — an amateur astronomer — brought it to my attention. When he checked again, the quadrant of faint stars was back to normal. When I saw Kathryn Kemp a week later, I asked her about the diminution of stellar luminosity.”

“And she said that you were imagining it,” Ana smiled.

Ricci stared at her. “On the contrary, Ana,” the Italian said, “Kathryn told me that on my next visit to Titan, she would be able to answer some of my questions, and specifically she would be in a position to tell me what the Serene were doing on the outer edges of the solar system.”

Allen stared at her. “So they are doing something?” he murmured.

Sally said, “Knowing you, Nina, you have an idea, yes?”

Nina smiled. “Would you believe me if I told you that I had no idea at all?”

They laughed, and Nina tapped her forearm. The three-dimensional screen in the air before them vanished in a blink.

She looked around the staring group. “In ten days,” she said, “we’ll meet up, as usual, following whatever it is that we do in the Titan obelisk. I have arranged for Kathryn Kemp to join us then. We might at last, my friends, find out what truly motivates the Serene.”

Allen sipped his wine, and stared up at the sector of stars way beyond the icy orbit of Pluto. Beside him, Sally took his arm and shivered.

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE EIGHT years since James Morwell stepped down as nominal head of the Morwell Organisation — ‘nominal’ because over the course of the previous two years he had been nothing more than a powerless figurehead — he had set himself on a course of merciless self-destruction.

It had become an obsession, a desire that filled his waking hours and often carried over into his sleep: he dreamed of oblivion, of finding a means to end his life in some spectacular and Serene-defying manner. Always he awoke with a new method of killing himself flittering elusively on the edge of his consciousness, and when he did recall the means bequeathed by his dream he often found that he’d tried it before, or that it was patently impossible. He dreamed of throwing himself off a tall building, of stepping out in front of a speeding truck; he dreamed of manufacturing a purposeful ‘accident’…

He’d lost count of the number of times he had tried to take his life. He was determined to show the Serene that there was at least one human being on the planet who did not intend to kow-tow to their imposition of charea, who would attempt to defy their edict on self-annihilation. Even if he failed to carry through his suicide, the very fact that he was constantly trying and would go on doing so was an act of defiance satisfying in itself.

Satisfying, but not wholly so. Only in oblivion, he told himself, would he find true peace of mind.

In 2040 he took up downhill skiing, and off piste in Switzerland swerved towards a stand of pine trees at a speed, he calculated, a little over seventy miles an hour. In the seconds before impact he knew the elation of imminent self-annihilation… Except he never hit the tree. Instead he impacted with something soft, something which cushioned him in slow motion and sent him skidding sideways harmlessly into a bank of snow.

A year later he tampered with the brake lining of his Ferrari, and set off on a jaunt into the Appalachians. On a downhill stretch of road he allowed his speed to mount until he was screaming along at ninety miles per hour with a tight bend looming, and he laughed like a maniac and cursed the Serene…

Until his car mysteriously slowed, seemingly of its own accord, and eased itself to a halt beside the curving crash-barrier. He’d set off again, more than once attempting to spin the wheel and send himself over the edge… he spasmed, and could not complete the manoeuvre — and this gave him an inspired idea. He would incorporate the very act of spasming into a series of actions which in themselves would bring about his death.

If he spasmed in the course of attempting to shoot himself in the head while climbing a sheer rock-face… then surely he would achieve his aim and fall to his death?

Three days later he drove into the Catskills and found a likely looking cliff. Armed with a pistol, he climbed for fifteen minutes, a frantic, suited businessman wholly out of place clinging to the side of the cliff. He laughed at the thought, then raised the gun to his temple and tried to pull the trigger. He spasmed and lost his grip on the rock, and fell, thinking in the brief seconds of his descent that surely now he had succeeded in killing himself.

He should have known. As with the attempt on the ski-slope, he found himself mysteriously cushioned, his fall decelerating as if he’d impacted with a mattress… And he lay uninjured on his back, staring up at the wispy cirrus high in the blue sky, weeping in rage and frustration.

That same year he had become a drug addict. He tried heroin at first, injecting prescribed doses enough to get him high, and found the resultant euphoria a balm. Over the weeks he increased the dosage, and sourced pure heroin which should, by rights, have killed him outright. Every time he injected himself he slipped into welcome oblivion, praying on the way that maybe this time he had succeeded.

And every time he came to his senses, alive and unharmed. He persevered, thinking that surely his addiction must have some long-term cumulative effect. But the fact was that it was as if his metabolism became inured to the effects of the drug. The more he injected, the less effect it had. He talked with other one-time addicts and found that the drug now had no effect on them, and so they had ceased taking it; the work of the Serene, they said, and gave thanks.

And then, just two weeks ago, while drinking himself senseless in front of a wildlife documentary — a binge which had lasted the better part of a week to little deleterious effect — he had an epiphany.

He watched in amazement as a cobra leapt towards a wild boar, struck and killed its prey.

The following day he booked a flight to Venezuela.

HE STAYED A few days in an Indian village on the edge of the Amazonian jungle, a thousand miles south of the capital of Caracas, and then bought from the tribal headman a dugout canoe and paddled it upstream. He set out without provisions or even water, much to the alarm of the tribespeople. Half a day later, when he judged that he was far enough away from the village, and from civilisation in general, that his corpse would not be stumbled upon and brought back to New York for burial — he loathed the idea of his funeral attended by colleagues crying crocodile tears and later laughing amongst themselves about what a bastard he had been — he paddled to the bank, climbed out and pushed the dugout back into the current. He watched it drift away, spinning lazily, and smiled to himself.

Then he set off into the jungle, towards the oblivion which awaited him.

There were, he had read before setting off, at least a dozen types of poisonous snake in the Venezuelan jungle, as well as half a dozen varieties of toxic spider and many other wild animals eager, he was sure, to carry out their biological mandate to protect their territory or attack him as nourishing prey.

He walked into the sweltering jungle, falling again and again, laughing like a maniac, swearing at the Serene and at his father and frequently weeping at the mess his life had become.

He fell and slipped into unconsciousness, and woke hours later to find that he’d spent a night propped against the bole of a tree overlooking a narrow gulch sparkling with a twisting, silver stream. The water looked so fresh, inviting, but he ignored his raging thirst and willed himself to die.

He passed in and out of consciousness in the hours that followed, and was visited by a series of hallucinations.

At one point Kat came to him and knelt, reached out a solicitous hand and mopped his feverish brow.

He stretched out a hand, eager to touch her pale skin. She smiled at him. “I want to help you,” she said now, as she had said many times in the past.

He had met Kat ten years ago, just after the abortive attempt to ‘mark’ the Serene representatives. He had been at his lowest ebb, reconciled to humanity under the yoke of the alien invaders and powerless to do anything about it. He had begun to dabble with suicide, although it had not yet become the preoccupation it now was. In retrospect he thought that the arrival of Kat into his life had slowed his downward spiral, and invested his life, for a year, with some semblance of happiness… though he had hardly realised that at the time.

She had been working as a psychologist for a government run scheme helping recovering drug addicts — this was before his attempts at pharmaceutical oblivion — and he had met her at an uptown party which, he recalled, he had been loath to attend. It was only on the insistence of Lal — that greasy, betraying bastard — that he had shrugged off his apathy and gone along.

Kat had homed in on him, talked to him with warmth and understanding, and a day later they had met for dinner and something within him had succumbed and allowed this dumpy, homely woman — ten years his senior and with a penchant to mother him — into his life.

For a year he had enjoyed an easy, affectionate relationship with this calm, meditative English woman; he would never have admitted that he loved her, and she never vouchsafed the same to him, but they were close, and she helped him confront his past, his relationship with his abusive father, and helped him overcome his desire to be dominated and demeaned… But he had never, for all their intimacy, both physical and psychological, told her of his deep-seated distrust of the Serene, nor of his occasional desire to kill himself. For all he held her in respect intellectually, he could not reconcile this with her avowal that the coming of the Serene had been beneficial for the human species. He had ventured once, when drunk, that perhaps their charea edict had robbed humankind of its primal urge, its genetic manifest destiny to conquer and rule — but playfully she had laughed and called him a caveman… and had never mentioned his outburst again.

They had drifted apart after a year, seen each other less and less. They remained friends for a time, and then lost contact altogether. Kat had called James her ‘reclamation project’, helping him to find his feet so that, from then on, he could make his own way in the world… Or perhaps he was being unfair.

Now she came to him in his fever dreams, bending over him and saying, “Let me help you, James.”

He awoke with a start and stared about him. The sun was coming up, sending slatted glints of gold through the jungle foliage. He wondered how long he had been here, propped against the tree, and wondered how long it might be before he died.

He saw a snake slither by a foot away, and lashed out with his foot to kick it, provoke it into striking him. But the snake ignored his boot and slithered on, vanishing into the undergrowth.

Next to visit him in the cinematic, hallucinogenic rerun of his life, was Lal Devi, and the sight of the slimy Indian bastard brought him upright and lashing out at the slim, sneering figure.

They had been so close, for so long — over a dozen years — that Lal’s betrayal was all the more devastating. It was after he had drifted away from Kat, and the desire to kill himself had returned. He had tried a couple of times to throw himself, spontaneously, through the window of his office on the hundredth floor, only to go into a ridiculous fit of spasms on every occasion. Then he had climbed onto the roof, and up the Morwell logo, with a bottle of Jack Daniels and the intention of drinking himself into oblivion.

That time loyal Lal had talked him down, carried him back to his suite and put him to bed.

It had been the very last thing Lal had done for him, before his betrayal.

Lal had found a woman, the whore responsible for changing the puppyish, subservient yes-man into an opponent.

A few months after the logo incident, Lal had strode into his office and handed in his resignation. He told James that he no longer wished to work as his PA, that he found James’s opinions, indeed everything he stood for in his opposition to the Serene, odious in the extreme. James had tried to argue his corner, question this sudden volte face from the man he considered an ally, a loyal servant whose opinions regarding the aliens mirrored his own exactly… But Lal was adamant. He had met someone, he said, who had made him face his past, his present, and look forward to a future filled with hope rather than a corrosive, stultifying resentment of the Serene.

James had exploded, and the ensuing argument had been bitter in the extreme, with both men at one point spasming in their thwarted desire to do the other physical injury. In the end Lal had turned and strode from the room, with James yelling curses in his wake — and in retrospect James cited the confrontation as the beginning of what he hoped would be the end.

A week later he had given himself wholly to finding a way to end his life.

Now he came awake again. Thirst was an acid pain in his throat and hunger clawed at his innards like cancer. He laughed, then wept, and wished for a swift end rather than this eternal, drawn-out suffering.

He saw something move on the periphery of his vision and swivelled his head painfully.

A scorpion…

It regarded him from the vantage point of a tree root beside his head, the question mark of its tail pulsing with intent.

He smiled and reached towards it, then lashed out — aiming not to kill the creature but to provoke it into attack.

He should have known… The scorpion danced forward, hesitated, then began to… vibrate… It was, he realised with incredulity, spasming.

Laughing in despair, Morwell sank back against the tree and closed his eyes.

HE CAME AWAKE suddenly, knowing that he was still in the jungle, sitting against the tree, and that the scorpion had been no more than another hallucination.

He stared about him in disbelief.

He was in a hospital bed in a bright, shining room, and through the window he could see the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan.

A nurse was leaning over him, and she smiled brightly when he turned to her.

“Ah, Mr Morwell… You’re back with us at last.”

He wondered, then, if he had truly taken himself to Venezuela — or had that too been no more than an illusion?

“How…?” he croaked.

“You were found by natives and brought down-river to a port. The Morwell Organisation arranged for you to be airlifted back to New York. The odd thing is, Mr Morwell, you were found by a tribe who, but for the coming of the Serene, wouldn’t have had second thoughts about killing you there and then. Now aren’t you,” she went on, rearranging the pillow beneath his head, “a lucky man?”

Morwell laughed at the very idea and then, as the nurse left from the room, his laughter turned to tears.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS NOON when Ana arrived in New York.

She stepped from the obelisk into bright summer sunlight, hotter and brighter than the light back on Mars. She should have remembered and brought her sunglasses, but it was almost eight years since she’d last been on Earth in summer.

She crossed Times Square and made her way to the café where, almost a decade ago to the day, Bilal had attempted to infect her with the Obterek device. She had a ghost to lay: when the idea of coming to New York to track down her brother had first occurred to her, a month ago, she had known that she must return to the coffee house.

It was still there, a narrow premises with chrome chairs and tables set outside on the sidewalk. She entered the café and saw that the table in the window, where she had sat ten years ago, was vacant. She ordered a mocha and was immediately flooded with a slew of memories. She found herself fighting back the tears at Bilal’s betrayal. She stared through the window at the crowds passing by oblivious outside and wondered what Bilal was doing now.

She had adapted quickly to life on Mars. Of course she had had Kapil with her, which made all the difference. They had married within a year of settling in the city of Escarpment, and had soon found themselves with a network of friends, the core of which was Geoff and Sally Allen. She had always been a survivor, but had always needed to have the safety net of friends — in the early days the children who lived with her at Howrah Station and later on at the wilderness city. The first few years on Mars had been eased by Geoff and Sally’s warmth, which had gone a long way towards banishing the pain she felt at what her brother had tried to do to her.

At first it was as if she had excised the incident from her memory; she had not allowed her thoughts to dwell on New York and Bilal, had not even discussed the incident with Kapil.

Then, shortly after the birth of her son, all that had changed; it was as if she had reached a place of safety from which she could look back with impunity and consider what had happened all those years ago.

And, surprising herself, she found that she did not hate Bilal for what he had tried to do. Despite the hurt that she still felt, she pitied him. He had been driven by motives unknown to her, motives imparted no doubt by the organisation for which he worked. Slowly the idea of tracking him down and confronting him had taken root and grown, to be dismissed at first and then, latterly, to be considered as a very real option if she wished to move on. She wanted to put the incident behind her, find out just why he had done what he had done, and perhaps learn if he’d had time to regret his actions. She thought that that would be unlikely, but she was curious to find out nevertheless.

She was curious, too, about how the Serene might have censored, or even punished, her brother. He had committed a crime directly opposed to the Serene’s regime on Earth, had sided with the Obterek, and she wondered what punishment, if any, the Serene might have seen fit to mete out to Bilal.

She finished her mocha and realised that the anguish she thought she might experience here, a recapitulation of the confusion and fear she had gone through ten years ago, had failed to transpire. Smiling to herself, she left the café and walked south towards the rearing skyscraper where the Morwell organisation had its headquarters.

She strolled in the sunlight with crowds of smiling New Yorkers. There was a carnival atmosphere in the air, and she might have been forgiven for thinking that there was some special event towards which the citizens were heading, a concert or arts festival.

She stared around her at the smiling faces. Many people here were so young that they had never known a world without the influence of the Serene; others were old enough to recall the old times, and to cherish the new.

As she turned along the street on which the Morwell tower stood, she thought back to what Nina Ricci had told them at the Allen’s party. It was odd, but she had never really questioned the motives of the Serene; she had seen the beneficial effect of their intervention in the affairs of humankind, and felt disinclined to ascribe any motive other than altruism. So she had no idea exactly what she and thousands of other human representatives did in the obelisks, but so what? And as for what the Serene were doing on the outer edges of the solar system…? Again, she felt disinclined to enquire; she trusted the Serene, and left it at that.

But, she wondered now, shouldn’t she feel just the slightest curiosity?

She recalled an argument she’d had with the prickly Nina Ricci. Ricci had just been elected to the legislative assembly of Mars and was understandably full of herself. They had been at one of the Allens’ monthly parties, and Ana had said something about the effect of the Serene being wholly good. Nina, whose clinical intelligence and thick skin inured her to the criticism of her peers, had turned on Ana and snapped, “What an ill-considered statement, Ana. How can you say that when you are not in full command of all the facts?”

Ana had blinked, surprised at the vitriol in the Italian’s tone. “But I’m basing the statement on what I have experienced of society and how it’s been affected by the arrival of the Serene. Anyway, what facts might I possess that would make me think otherwise?”

Nina had smiled her insufferably self-satisfied smile and said, “Until we understand the motivations of the Serene, we can only make partial and ill-formed judgements. Stating that the effect of the Serene has been wholly good is dangerous.”

Others at this point had entered the argument, and Ana had taken the opportunity to slip away from the group.

Since then, she had wondered increasingly at the motives of the Serene — but for the life of her could only discern the benefits of their intervention.

She stopped on the sidewalk and craned her head to take in the enormity of the tower before her. It rose dizzyingly, and she experienced a kind of vertigo as she strained to see to the very summit of the glass-enclosed needle. At the top, tiny at this distance, was the rotating Morwell Organisation symbol, an entwined MO surrounded by laurel leaves — a touch which Ana thought either crass or ironic.

She wondered if she would find her brother unchanged in ten years; would he still be the same brash, materialistic, Serene-hating businessman she had encountered last time? Or might the intervening years and his experience of the Serene have worked to mellow him?

She stepped through the sliding glass doors and crossed an atrium the size of an arboretum — which it resembled, with its overabundance of potted palms and leafy ferns.

She found the reception desk and approached a smiling, uniformed woman in her twenties with the beauty and hauteur of a catwalk model.

“I wonder if you might be able to help me? I’d like to make an appointment to meet Bilal Devi, Mr James Morwell’s –”

Smiling the woman interrupted, “I’m afraid that James Morwell is no longer associated with the Morwell Organisation.”

Ana blinked. “And his personal assistant, Bilal Devi?”

“One moment, please…” She turned to a softscreen on her desktop and played long fingers across its surface.

She looked up, her smiled fixed, and said, “My records show that Mr Devi left the Organisation almost nine years ago.”

The information surprised Ana. “He left? Ah… do you have any idea where he might be found?”

The receptionist’s smile became sympathetic. “I’m sorry, no, Ms…?”

“Devi. Ana Devi. You see, Bilal Devi is my brother and I am trying to find him.”

The woman appeared sympathetic. “Perhaps…” She glanced at her screen again. “What I can do is refer you to Personnel. There is a chance that they might be able to help.”

Ana thanked the woman who stroked her screen, tapped her fingers in a blur, then looked up at Ana and said, “If you go to the Personnel office on the fiftieth floor, Helena Lopez will see you at once.”

She thanked the receptionist again and made her way to the elevator pods.

On her ascent to the fiftieth floor, Ana wondered why Bilal had left the Morwell Organisation. It was too much to hope that he had seen the error of his ways, she thought; more likely that he had been sacked — a demotion organised by the Serene?

The head of Personnel turned out to be a motherly woman in her sixties who listened to Ana’s story with a sympathetic smile, then referred to a softscreen.

“Here we are… Bilal Devi. He resigned his post as James Morwell’s PA in August 2037, just after James made an attempt to kill himself.”

“Do you have any record of where my brother went, or might be now?”

“That kind of information is not kept on our records… But I know someone who knew Bilal around the time of his resignation. If you would care to wait while I…?”

“Of course.”

The woman murmured something into a throat-mic, waited for a reply, then smiled across at Ana. “Ben will be down shortly. Can I get you a coffee?”

Ana thanked the woman but refused the offer of a coffee; she was feeling hyped enough at the idea of speaking with someone who knew her brother at the time of his resignation.

She looked at the woman. “You said that James Morwell attempted to kill himself?”

“More than once, I’m told. Of course he didn’t get far… but could you blame him, with a father like Edward Morwell?”

Ana shrugged. “I don’t know anything about…” she began.

“He was a tyrant, believe me. I worked here when Edward Morwell ran the ship. Ruthless? And the way he treated his son… Rumour is that he beat James daily. The poor man never recovered. Ah, here’s Ben.”

Lopez made the introductions and Ben Aronica hitched himself onto the desk and nodded at Ana. “I knew Lal. Not that we were close, but we worked on various projects. He was driven, and worshipped James. When the boss tried to jump off…” Ben raised a forefinger above his head… “the company logo, Lal brought him down. We were all watching. James began spasming well before he reached the plinth. It was… pathetic is the only way to describe what happened.” Ben shrugged. “James stood down after that, then vanished not long after. I’ve no idea where he is now.”

“And Bilal?”

“He resigned a few days after James attempted to kill himself.”

“Do you know why he resigned? Did he give you a reason?”

“I’m sorry. He never said.”

Ana took a breath and said, “Do you know where I might be able to find my brother now, Mr Aronica?”

Ben smiled. “He went back to India, to Kolkata.” He rolled up his right sleeve and accessed his softscreen implant. “And I might even have his address.”

Her heart beating wildly, Ana watched him stroke the screen.

India… she thought; he went back to Kolkata!

Ben said, “Here it is. We were in contact for a while, eight years ago. He sent his address, though of course he might have moved on since then. He was at 1025 Nanda Chowk,” He looked at Ana. “I hope that’ll be some use.”

Ana beamed. “I can’t begin to thank you…” she began, before something caught in her throat.

She thanked them again and made her way from the Morwell Organisation skyscraper, elation filling her chest. The sunlight greeted her as she stepped onto the sidewalk, and the people of New York seemed to be smiling with her.

She made her way to the Times Square obelisk and booked transit to India.

CHAPTER FOUR

IN MIAMI, JAMES Morwell purchased a Porsche 600 horsepower speedboat, moored it at the exclusive Simmons’ Marina, and stocked it with provisions sufficient to last a week. He wondered, while ferrying the cartons aboard the boat, what might have happened had he attempted to set off without food and water: would the boat refuse to start, or would he find himself going in circles and arriving back at the marina, his bid to end his life thwarted once again?

He recalled considering this form of suicide many years ago. He even wondered if, in the year lost to drug and alcohol addiction, he might have made a similar bid, and failed.

He wondered how the Serene would quash his attempt to end his life this time.

He set off at midday and headed south, then set the boat on auto-pilot and retired to the galley. There he cooked himself what he hoped would be his last meal, chicken kiev with roast potatoes, washed down with a bottle of champagne. He carried the tray to the foredeck and, as he sailed steadily away from the Florida coast, sat in the sunlight and ate.

By the end of the meal, and the bottle, he was a little drunk.

As the sun went down he returned to the galley and carried his provisions, box by box, to the foredeck. There he stacked them on top of each other until he had every scrap of food, and all the canisters of water, waiting to be despatched.

The question was, would the Serene allow him to jettison the provisions?

He stood beside the rail and considered the darkening ocean, then reached out and pushed the topmost carton. It tumbled over the side and splashed into the sea. Smiling, he pushed the second box and, encouraged, lifted the third and fourth and pitched them over the rail. Then the last box went over, and the final canister of water, and he laughed aloud in triumph and staggered below-deck to his berth.

The following day he sat in the light of the sun and stared at the horizon as the boat carried him south.

He wanted to die, but he had no desire to suffer the painful effects of starvation. To this end he had brought a supply of heroin, and when the first hunger pangs griped him, he injected himself and slipped into oblivion.

He had no recollection of how many days elapsed; one day phased into another, a long stretch of stupefied euphoria. His world consisted of the dazzling sun and the scintillating sea, the up and down motion of the boat as it rode the swell. At some point he must have switched off the engine, or the boat must have run out of diesel, as it sat becalmed on the ocean, laved alternatively by sunlight and moonlight while he sprawled on a mattress on the foredeck and laughed insanely to himself.

Kat came to him in his dreams, and in his waking hallucinations, offering a solicitous hand — and Lal showed himself too, always sneering.

He passed in and out of consciousness, in and out of periods of clarity, and during the latter he wondered if, truly, this time he might have beaten the Serene.

He was a thousand miles from civilisation and any hope of succour; he had no food and water… He must surely now be close to death?

Had a week elapsed, two? He was weak; he could hardly move from his prone position on the mattress. It was all he could do to raise his head and stare out across the calm waters of the ocean.

He saw flying fish glint in the air, and porpoises arcing from the sea in graceful parabolas.

The same day he made out another silver-blue glint across the foredeck. At first he thought that a flying fish had flopped aboard, but as he raised himself onto his elbows and stared, the glint expanded.

He wondered if this were yet another hallucination. A featureless blue figure sat cross-legged before him on the foredeck, serene in its motionlessness. He smiled at his choice of words. Serene? Very far from… But what did it want?

He sat up, his head spinning, his vision blurring. The figure stared at him; at least, its smooth, featureless headpiece looked in his direction. At last a voice sounded in his head, calm, neutral, soothing. “We want, James Morwell, exactly what you want.”

He blinked. He certainly was hallucinating — but, unlike the other visions that had haunted him, this one was welcome.

“And what is that?”

“An end to the regime of the Serene in this solar system, and… your annihilation.”

He stared at the pulsing blue figure, its depthless innards swirling with a dozen shades of lapis lazuli. “My annihilation?”

“Is that not what you have been attempting for ten years? Is that not why you are here, aboard this boat, in a futile attempt to end you life?”

He bridled. “Futile?”

The Obterek sat like Buddha, calm, unflappable. “Futile, because the Serene would not allow you to kill yourself.”

He laughed. “But how could they stop me this time?”

“You would be found, rescued, brought back from the brink of death. In fact, as we speak, a liner has been diverted and will arrive to effect your rescue in a little under three hours.”

He felt pain and despair well within him. “No!” he cried pathetically. “No, not this time!” He shook his head. “I want to die! You can have no concept of what it’s like to be denied…”

He hung his head and sobbed. He tried to stagger to his feet and pitch himself overboard, but he was far too weak to even climb to his knees.

The Obterek sat silently, watching him.

He said, almost pleading, “What do you want? Why are you…?” He stretched out his hand to the being.

“We want to help you, James Morwell. We want to assist you in your desire to kill yourself.”

He stared at the blue creature, not daring to laugh for fear of insulting the Obterek and sending it away.

He whispered, “You can do that? You can help me kill myself?”

The being inclined its head. “We can do that.”

He leaned forward, eager. “Then do it! Now! Kill me… I’ve had enough. I want nothing more than to be allowed to die.”

The Obterek sat impassively, staring at him with its featureless face.

“What?” Morwell whispered, fearful now that the creature would not carry out its promise.

“We will help you die, James Morwell, but in return we require your assistance.”

“My assistance? What could you possibly want from me?”

“We want you to help us assassinate someone — and in so doing bring about the beginning of the end of the Serene in the solar system.”

He stared, open-mouthed, and it was some time before he marshalled his thoughts and asked, “How would this be possible? Kill one person, and bring about the end…?” He shook his head. “And what of the Serene charea?”

“It is possible if we use you, James Morwell, if we — if I — inhabit you, take you over. If I became one with you, a tiny part of you, I would go undetected by the Serene. Then we would be able to approach the subject, and inhabit her. We would for brief second be in control of the subject, and be able to guide it into what the Serene call the takrea…”

Morwell repeated the word, excited by what the Obterek had told him.

The blue being said, “The takrea is the obelisk on Titan. It is the… quantum engine… if you like, that powers the charea in the solar system. I carry within me the means to destroy the takrea, and so cease the rule of the charea, and so free the human race at last and set it on its true course.”

“And in so doing,” Morwell said breathlessly, “grant me oblivion?”

“Precisely so.”

He recalled the last time he had had dealings with the Obterek, and how that had failed spectacularly. “And you would be more successful than the last time…?”

“We had… limited resources then, limited access to the requisite power. We have had ten years to plan our next move, to wait until the time was right… The power drain will be great, but it will be required for seconds only. We know we will succeed.”

Morwell thought about humanity released from the slavery of the charea, humanity allowed to fulfil its true, evolutionary destiny, to expand and conquer… He would not be around to see this happen, of course — but he would be the catalyst for the change, the martyr who sacrificed himself for the sake of humanity.

He flung back his head and laughed at the idea.

He reached out his arms as if seeking to embrace the Obterek. “Inhabit me.”

“In time. First, I must tell you about the subject.”

Morwell assented, and wondered who they might use in order to gain access to the takrea. One of the human representatives, no doubt.

“Who?” he asked.

The figure said, “You knew her as Kat Kemp.”

He stared, rocked. He mouthed the name, “Kat? But… but why Kat?”

“Because, James Morwell, she has constant access to the takrea–”

“But why should I kill…?”

“Because she used you.”

Morwell shook his head, confused. “Used? We… for a year we were lovers. She helped me, not used.”

The creature stared at him in silence. He received, then, the distinct impression that the being pitied him. It said, “Just after our abortive attempt to plant certain representatives with the transmission devices, the Serene deemed that certain people should be… monitored in order to assess the level of their threat in future.”

He shook his head. “Kat? The Serene used Kat…?”

“James Morwell,” said the blue being, “Kat Kemp was… is… a Serene self-aware entity.”

He felt as if he had been hit an invisible blow in the solar plexus, an impact both physical and mental.

“She was charged with monitoring you, of assessing your threat, of being with you during the period that the Serene thought we might contact you again. After a year, she was discharged of this duty, and she brought about the end of your affair.”

He felt a sudden surge of anger at the idea of her betrayal… No, not her betrayal: its betrayal…

“She used me…” he said.

“As the Serene are using the human race to infect you with their own unnatural edicts, their own perverted ideals.”

He leaned forward. “And when you inhabit me, and then inhabit Kat Kemp… and we walk into the takrea?”

“Then I, we, will detonate, and Kat Kemp will die, and the takrea disintegrate, and the charea in the solar system break down… Then the Obterek will be able to supplant the Serene.”

He would be dead, then — he would have achieved that which, for ten years, he had sought relentlessly. It was only a small regret that he would not then be around to witness the liberation of humankind, the return to the old laws of the universe, the true way…

He was taken then with the urge to lash out, to commit violence, to kill.

An idea grew in his head, and he smiled as he said, “I agree to help you, but first… There is someone I wish to kill. You can allow me that one last wish? I will not be around to see my people returned to the old ways, so let my last voluntary action on Earth be to kill.”

The very idea excited him more than he had ever imagined.

The blue figure bowed its head. “First, I must consult with my peers. The execution might serve as a… test-run, as you would say… before the real thing.”

It felt silent, and very still, as it communed with its kind.

Seconds later it looked up, and said, “It is granted. For the briefest period, for a matter of seconds only, you will have the opportunity to contravene the Serene charea and kill.” The Obterek paused, then said, “And who will be your victim?”

Morwell smiled to himself. “Lal Devi,” he said.

“PLEASE,” SAID THE blue figure, “stand up.”

With difficulty, James Morwell pushed himself to his feet and stood facing the Obterek, swaying.

The blue being rose and faced Morwell, exuding power. It stepped forward, moving faster than he had expected, and slammed into him. He gasped; it was as if an electric charge had passed through his body, galvanising him, filling him with energy.

He closed his eyes and felt the essence of the being inhabit his body, his senses. He had never felt as alive as he did now.

He heard a voice in his head. Open your eyes, James Morwell.

He did so, and found that he was no longer aboard his boat on the ocean. He was standing in a hotel bedroom. He stared across the room, saw a neatly dressed young man staring at him — and only then realised that it was a reflection of himself in a mirror.

He raised a hand and stared at the flawless skin.

You, said the voice in his head, but a younger, more vital version…

He smiled to himself. He felt powerful; for the first time in twenty years, he had power and the ability to use it.

He stared through the window at the city of Kolkata sprawling far below.

Somewhere out there was the man who had betrayed him, Lal Devi, and he was about to die.

Smiling to himself, James Morwell left the hotel and crossed the teeming city.

CHAPTER FIVE

TO GET FROM the Serene obelisk in the centre of the city to the address which Ben Aronica had given her, Ana had to pass the railway station and the warren of alleyways where Sanjeev Varnaputtram had made his home all those years ago. As she negotiated the potholes and roaming, khaki-coloured cows, she thought back to her last encounter with him. He had been a sad, fat, pathetic figure, deserted by his followers, self-righteous and self-piteous. She wondered if she would find him alive still. If so he would be in his late seventies now — but she doubted he had survived for long after their last meeting.

She came to the pale green timber door in the crumbling wall. It stood ajar, and the riot of vegetation behind it formed a resistant pressure against the gate as she pushed it open.

She battled her way through the jungle and came to the house. The door stood ajar, its timbers rotten. An aqueous half light prevailed within, and Ana stepped cautiously over the mossy tiles of the hallway and approached the double doors to Sanjeev’s bedroom.

She reached out a tremulous hand and pushed open the door.

She had expected to find an empty room, stripped of all possessions, with little evidence of its former occupant and little to remind her of the crimes committed within.

She gasped as her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she took in the contents of the room.

Garish movie posters adorned the walls, moulded and ripped, and a table stood beside the charpoy where, when Ana was ten, Sanjeev Varnaputtram had…

She shut out the thought.

Lying on the bed was a skeleton.

Ana took a step forward, and then another, and stared with disbelief at all that remained of the monster, Sanjeev Varnaputtram.

She recalled him as vast — larger than life — with an attendant malignity that had seemed, to the child she had been, to make him all the bigger. Now, astoundingly, he had been reduced to a skeleton, and Ana found it hard to believe that his bones were no larger than any others.

His skull had slipped sideways, its orbits regarding her lop-sidedly. Its lower mandible hung comically open. He had been dead for so long, she thought, that there was no longer any smell or any sign of the putrescence that must have attended his death.

She considered his death — and the fact that he had lain like this ever since, his remains forgotten and unmourned, a fitting end to a life spent persecuting those less powerful than himself.

She was about to turn away when she saw, pinned to the flaking plaster of the wall beside the charpoy, the photograph of a young girl.

Her breath caught and she gave a small sob of shock.

The image of herself as a girl of fifteen or sixteen smiled out at her — the photograph of her on the station platform all those years ago. To think that he’d had it with him to the very end… The idea almost made her sick, as if the evil man had possessed some small part of her down all the years.

Now she reached out and pulled the picture from the wall, and stared at the girl she had been.

She raised the photograph to her lips and kissed the faded image.

SHE LEFT THE house for the very last time and made her way through the tangle of creepers and vines that choked the pathway. She was about to reach out and pull open the gate when someone on the other side pushed it towards her.

She stood back quickly, expecting to see an aging Sikh or another of Sanjeev’s erstwhile minions.

A Buddhist monk in a bright orange robe stood smiling before her.

“Oh,” she exclaimed in surprise.

The beaming, bald-headed man — a diminutive figure she guessed to be in his eighties — gestured with palms pressed together at his chest and said, “Namaste, child.”

“Namaste,” Ana responded, raising her hands in a shadow gesture.

“May I ask what brings you here?”

In response, before she realised what she was doing, she raised the photograph of her younger self and showed it to the monk. She murmured, “When I was a child, one day the owner of this house…”

The monk raised a hand. “I have been told about what Mr Varnaputtram did here.”

She smiled and, emboldened, asked, “And what brings you here, sir?”

“You have heard of the Buddhist concept of contemplation, the practice of beholding the act of bodily decay?”

She nodded. At least, in death, the corpse of Sanjeev Varnaputtram had served some use.

“Sanjeev Varnaputtram died eight years ago, and since that time I come here every month and look upon his remains… There is a chai stall along the alley. Would you care to join me?”

“That would be lovely,” she said.

They sat on rickety wooden chairs in the alley, while children and rats played around them, and Ana said, “My name is Ana Devi, and now I live on Mars.”

“Mars!” exclaimed the old man, as if the fact of her residence so far away was a miracle. “Mars… but as a child you lived here, in this city.”

And she found herself telling the old monk all about her life on the station, her beatings at the hands of Mr Jangar, the station master, and Sanjeev Varnaputtram’s abuse of her and her friends.

“I last came here ten years ago, sir, and confronted Varnaputtram, and told him what I and the other children had achieved in life, and I thought that was the end of the affair.”

“And you were mistaken.”

“I think so. I realise now that this is the end, to have seen his bones, to have reclaimed this from his possessions.” She showed the monk her photograph again, and he took it in fingers as brown as cassia bark.

“I can see that you were a kind child, and strong, and you have grown into the woman this child promised to be. Tell me, what do you do on Mars?”

“I work in administration for the Martian legislature, and also… I am a representative of the Serene.”

“Ah, the Serene…”

Ana hesitated, then asked, “I would like to know what you think of the Serene, sir.”

He smiled, and nodded for so long that Ana thought he might never stop. At last he said, “I think the Serene were at one time like ourselves, child — that is, they were Buddhist.”

“And now?”

“Now, they have achieved satori and they have brought their ways to our world.”

They sat in silence for a time, drinking their sweet, milky chai, and Ana asked at last, “And Sanjeev Varnaputtram, sir? What of him?”

“Mr Varnaputtram was not enlightened, child. He was driven by ignorance, and a lack of empathy. He was also a very unhappy man.”

“I hated him for many years.”

“But no longer?”

She looked into her heart, and said truthfully, “No longer.”

“That is good.” He reached out and clasped her hand. “I am so happy for you, for hatred is corrosive; it sours the heart; it achieves nothing. You are wise beyond your years, child.”

Ana smiled, and wanted to tell him that she was thirty-six years old, but the truth was that, sitting here in the presence of the ancient monk, she did indeed feel like the child she had been.

“And now?” he asked.

“Now I must search for my brother.” And she told the monk all about Bilal and what had happened ten years ago.

“I feel that you will find him,” he said. “And then?”

“I don’t know. I… I would like to tell him that I forgive him what he did to me, but to do that I think I must first try to understand why he did what he did.”

“Understanding, empathy, is always enlightening. Only he who understands can forgive.”

She finished her tea and smiled at the monk. “I must be going…”

“I have enjoyed our conversation, and have learned something.”

She stared at the man, and wanted to ask what he might have learned, but felt that it might be impolite, or immodest, to ask. She pressed her palms together and murmured, “Namaste.”

“Namaste,” said the old man, and then. “But one more thing. If I may ask… in what do you believe, child?”

Ana thought about it for long seconds, then said, “I believe in the Serene, sir,” and turned and walked away down the alley.

SHE TURNED ON to the main street and walked towards the station. She would take a short-cut over the footbridge across the multiple tracks, where as a child she had perched on the girders like a station monkey.

The station was not so crowded as it had been in her childhood; more people owned electric cars now, and scooters, and consequently the platforms were almost deserted. She crossed the footbridge, noting that the nimble grey monkeys still cavorted through the girders on the lookout for unwary children with bananas.

She left the station and strolled down the busy streets, passing Bhatnagar’s restaurant. She had half a mind to stop and eat a masala dosa, but the desire to find Bilal’s address drove her on. Maybe later, and maybe accompanied by Bilal, she could stop and eat… or was she being too hopeful? Who was to say that her brother would still be at the same address? And even if he were, would he anything other than angry and resentful at her sudden reappearance after all these years?

She came to a residential area that in her childhood had been a slum but which was now an affluent district of poly-carbon apartments on wide, leafy streets.

Heart hammering, she consulted her softscreen implant and read the address she had entered there. 1025 Nanda Chowk… She summoned a map of the area, which showed her present position in relation to her destination. She was fifty metres from the turning, and her chest felt fit to burst as she hurried to the corner and turned down Nanda Chowk.

1025 was a small, neat weatherboard building with a lawn and a flower-embroidered border — not the type of house where she had imagined her brother might live.

She pushed open the gate and walked up the path. She stood before the white-painted door for a minute, working to control her breathing and marshal her thoughts. She recalled the time she had confronted Bilal in his office ten years ago, when despite all her determination not to accuse him she had done just that, and regretted it.

This time, no accusations.

She touched the sensor beside the door, stood back and waited.

She heard a sound from within, footsteps approaching the door. She was sweating. She fixed a smile in place and stared at the door where she expected Bilal’s face to appear.

The door opened and a portly Sikh in his fifties smiled down at her. “How can I help you?” he asked, suspiciously.

She began to speak, her words tripping up over themselves, then took a breath and began again, “I am trying to find my brother, Bilal Devi. I was given this address…”

“Ah, Bilal. Yes, yes. But I am afraid that Bilal moved out just last year.”

“Moved out?” Ana repeated as if she failed to comprehend the meaning of the words.

“Yes, yes,” said the Sikh. “He took up residence in his place of work.”

“And where might that be?”

“Bilal worked in the new Gandhi State Orphanage on Victoria Road, beside the river. Your brother is a fine man and does good work there.” Smiling, he reached out and took Ana’s hand in a prolonged shake. “It is a privilege to meet Bilal’s sister. When you find him, please convey my compliments, ah-cha? I am Mr Singh-Gupta, and for many years my wife and I had the honour of having Bilal lodge in our family home.”

Ana smiled and promised to convey these sentiments to her brother when she found him. Thanking Mr Singh-Gupta, Ana took her leave and hurried across the city towards the river.

Bilal worked in an orphanage? Her brother, the trendy, materialistic, Serene-hating businessman… he now worked in a state-run orphanage, doing good work with needy children?

As she hurried along the busy street, Ana wondered if the person in question was indeed her brother, or someone else entirely — then chastised herself for the thought.

Was it too much to hope that Bilal had indeed seen the error of his ways?

The Gandhi State Orphanage was an ultra-modern poly-carbon building more like a rearing ocean liner than a government building, all curving sleek lines and convex silver planes.

Taking a deep breath Ana paused before the sliding doors, counted to ten, then plunged inside.

She asked a young man at reception where she might find Bilal Devi.

“And why do you wish to see Mr Devi?” he asked.

Over her surprise that he was indeed here, she said, “I am his sister, and I have not seen my brother for many years…”

The receptionist regarded her with wide eyes. “Mr Bilal never said anything about a sister. Ah-cha. He is off duty at the moment, and you will find him through there.” He pointed to a door at the far end of the foyer, and Ana thanked him and made her way across the carpeted floor.

She pushed open the door and blinked as she found herself dazzled by sunlight. She had expected another plush room, but was standing before a big courtyard surrounded by flimsy timber shacks with swing doors like bathing cubicles. She counted twenty such cubicles and wondered which one might be Bilal’s.

She was about to return to the foyer, and ask the receptionist where precisely she might find her brother, when she heard someone speaking.

She recognised the voice, and it was coming from a shack to her right. She moved into the shadow, stood by the open window, and listened.

Bilal was saying, “… and then Mahatma, with his followers, left Sabarmati Ashram and walked to the coast…”

Through the window Ana saw six boys and girls sitting on the floor in a semi-circle, staring with rapt expressions at the man who sat on the bed, an open book on his lap.

She stared, hardly able to credit that this was indeed her brother. He seemed to have aged more than just ten years since the last time she had seen him; gone was the suit, the long hair, and the ear-ring. His hair was cropped short, and he wore a faded pair of jeans and a bleached green t-shirt.

His voice was gentle as he told the children the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s trek across Gujarat in 1930.

He paused, perhaps sensing that he was being watched, and looked up.

Ana did not pull back, but stared in through the window at her brother sitting cross-legged on the bed. He appeared thinner in middle-age, almost starved, and his expression was dumbfounded.

His lips moved, shaping her name. He spoke in rapid Hindi to the children, telling them to remain where they were; then he unfolded himself from the narrow bunk, crossed the room to the door, stepped out and confronted her.

They stared at each other in silence for what seemed like a long time before he spoke. “What do you want, Ana?”

His tone was neutral, gentle.

She said, “Just to talk, Bilal.”

He uttered a sound, a low moan, pushed himself from the doorway and to her surprise hurried across the compound. He slipped between two shacks on the far side, and it was a second or two before Ana moved herself to give chase. “Bilal!” she called after him.

She turned sideways and inserted herself between the timber lean-tos. Ahead she saw Bilal turn right. She followed him and found herself on the eastern bank of the Hoogli, its vast expanse surprising her after the confines of the compound.

The bank sloped steeply at her feet, comprised of concrete walkways, piers and timber moorings.

Bilal was sitting at the very end of a timber jetty, regarding the muddy waters far below, his legs dangling. He could run no further, and Ana took her time before approaching. Her sudden appearance after so long, she realised, must have come as something of a shock. He needed time to adjust to the idea of seeing her again… She stared at him, and was reminded, in his almost abject, little-boy-lost posture, sitting there swinging his legs, of the fifteen-year-old she recalled from so long ago.

She moved from the shadows, into the blistering heat of the sun, and walked along the jetty towards him. Further down the river a dozen young boys, as naked as monkeys, were hurling themselves from a pier and crashing into the water with delighted cries and shrieks.

She sat down, a metre away from her brother, and said, “Remember when we came here to jump in and swim? And sometimes we came to fish, though I can’t recall ever catching anything.”

“Back then the river was polluted, Ana. Nothing lived in it. Now, the river is full of life.”

She murmured, “The Ganges is like the world, come to life again.”

A companionable silence came between them, but there was so much that Ana wanted to say.

Bilal showed no inclination to say anything more, so she said, “I did not expect, when I went to New York in search of you, to find you in Kolkata, working in an orphanage.”

He hugged his right knee and stared into the river. His crew-cut hair was greying. Lines radiated from his eyes. She wondered where the slick businessman had fled to. He said, “Why did you come here, Ana? To accuse me again, to point the finger and blame me?”

“No, not this time, Bilal. I came… to see you. To talk about how it was when we were young. I just wanted to say that what happened ten years ago…”

“Stop, please. I don’t want to be reminded of…” His face was twisted bitterly at the recollection.

“Then let’s not talk of that, Bilal.” She paused, then went on, “The children back there were entranced by your story-telling.”

“They are young, and love stories. For many of them, it is the first time that anyone has read to them. Would you believe, Ana, that many of them had never even heard of Mahatma Gandhi?”

“Had we, at their age? I don’t know what is more surprising, Bilal; to find you here at the orphanage, or to hear you reading stories about Gandhi-ji. He was a man of peace, after all. The Serene would have loved him.”

For the first time her brother turned and looked at her.

“I am not the person I was, Ana. I have changed.”

“What happened?”

He gave a long sigh, staring out across the wide river to the far, crowded bank, and it was a while before he replied.

“I lied when I saw you ten years ago, Ana. I lied about the time I left you when you were six. I… never had any intention of coming back to find you. I was thinking only of myself, of my survival. I’ll be honest, though it pains me to say this… I thought then that you were a burden. I wanted nothing more than to get away, to better myself, but how could I do this when I had a sister hanging onto me, dragging me down?” He stared at her. “I’m sorry if these words hurt, but they are the truth.”

“I guessed as much, Bilal.” Though that did not make the truth any less painful.

“I wanted to get away from the poverty, the beatings. I was sick of being hungry, of being treated like a rat, of being a nobody. And then I had my chance, and no one and nothing was going to hold me back. Ana… I want you to understand this, to understand the boy I was then. I wasn’t a good person, but there were reasons why I wasn’t.”

She said, “I’m not blaming you.”

“Our uncle beat me daily, which is why we left his house and fled to the station. Not because he threw us out, but because he beat me for not bringing in enough rupees to pay our way.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know. You never told me.”

He shrugged.

She said, “But you did come back to find me, like you said, five years after you left? You told me that you came back to the station, but I was not there. I knew you were telling the truth because then I was in Delhi… so I knew you had come back for me.”

She stopped as she saw him shaking his head. “I was lying, Ana. I never came back. That you were in Delhi then was just a coincidence.”

She nodded, taking this in, dismantling the memories that she had erected over the years of Bilal caring enough, once, to come in search of her.

She smiled to herself, and was not surprised that she felt no anger. His admission fitted with who he had been, back then, and who he might have become now.

“So the Bilal I met ten years ago, the champion of the Morwell Organisation, the hater of the Serene…”

“Was the person I had become because of the person I had been, the boy who had nothing one day, and then was suddenly offered the world. Please understand how that kind of promise can make a person… inhuman.”

“And now?”

“As I said, I am a different person now.”

“And I asked, ‘What happened?’”

He lodged his chin on his knees and regarded the water. He said at last, “Shortly after I… did what I did, tried to infect you with the Obterek implants… I expected retribution from the Serene. I expected some form of punishment. I don’t know what, but I lived in constant fear. James Morwell too, I know. But the strange thing was that nothing happened. We were not punished, or even admonished.”

“The Obterek never contacted Morwell again?”

“Not to my knowledge. Perhaps six months passed, and then I met a woman, an incredible woman who changed my life, little by little. I… until that point I had never been in love. I’d… I suppose, looking back, I’d used women for my own ends. But with her… things were different. She opened my eyes, made me confront my mistakes, look upon what I had done wrong, face my shortcomings and my humanity, or lack of…” He stopped, then said, “She also made me understand all that the Serene had done for us.”

“She sounds wonderful. Are you still…?”

He shook his head. “We were together for two years, and then…”

To her surprise, Ana saw that he was crying.

She reached out, found his hand and squeezed.

He said, “She died in a car crash back in ’38, a head-on collision with a tanker.”

She let the silence stretch, before saying, “So you left Morwell, started work at the orphanage?”

“Oh, I’d left Morwell long before that, perhaps a year earlier. How could I go on working for a man I knew to be insane, as well as immoral? I handed in my resignation to him personally, told him what I thought of him and his organisation. We parted, you might say, on bad terms. And I’ve worked here ever since, paying for my sins.”

She smiled. “Not sins,” she said. “You’ve become a good man, Bilal.”

He asked in almost a whisper, “Can you see your way to forgive me?”

“Who said that to understand is to forgive?”

He laughed. “It might have been Gandhi,” he said. Along the bank a small boy whooped, cartwheeled through the air and landed with a smack in the river.

“And you, Ana? What are you doing now?”

So she told him about her husband and son, and her life on Mars, and her work there and even her work as a representative of the Serene, and for a while as they sat on the banks of the river, with the cries of the children playing in their ears, it was as if she were five again, chatting to her brother about life and the strange world around them.

At one point she said, “You should come and live on Mars, Bilal. I would be able to find you work.”

“And leave the orphanage? I like to think I’m needed here. At least, I need the orphanage. But I will visit you one day, I promise.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” she said.

He rose to his feet, reached out and pulled her upright. “How long before you go back?”

“I’m here for a few days.”

“Then let’s meet again. Tonight? I know a wonderful restaurant by the park. If you drop by here at eight…”

“I’ll do that.” They came together in an embrace, and Ana thought that her heart was about to burst.

“I suppose I must get back to work,” he laughed. “There’s a story to finish…”

They made their way back to the compound, and Ana remembered to convey Mr Singh-Gupta’s best wishes.

They said goodbye outside his cubicle, and when he passed inside she lingered within earshot and smiled as she heard him say, “Ah-cha. Now, where did we get to…?”

She passed into the orphanage and crossed the foyer, emerging with a light step and an even lighter heart into the afternoon sunlight. She recalled the words of the old monk she had met in the alleyway earlier, and she felt like finding him and telling him all about her meeting with Bilal.

As she was crossing the car park a young man in a sharp blue suit passed her, heading for the entrance of the orphanage. For as second she thought that the man was familiar, but she could not place the face.

She made her way to Maidan Park, sat in the shade with a sweet lassi and contemplated her good fortune.

THAT EVENING, A little before eight, Ana caught a taxi from her hotel to the orphanage. As the car carried her through the crowded streets of the city, she sat back and contemplated the meeting with her brother and how their relationship might develop. One thing was certain from that afternoon’s meeting: Bilal had changed, become a better person, and Ana looked forward to getting to know this new, reborn Bilal. They had a lot to catch up on, a lot of memories to share, and many years ahead of them in which to do so.

The taxi pulled up outside the orphanage and Ana climbed out as the sun was setting over the Hoogli.

A police car was drawn up ahead of the taxi in the parking lot, and before it an ambulance.

Ana crossed to the sliding doors and passed inside, to find the foyer a mayhem of activity. Police officers, paramedics and suited officials milled back and forth, and through the rear door Ana made out a crowd of children assembled in the courtyard.

She pushed her way to the reception desk and smiled at the same young man she had spoken to earlier. His expression, on seeing her, was odd: he appeared at first shocked, and then uncertain, and he turned quickly and spoke to a woman in a smart navy blue suit.

The woman looked up, at Ana, and it was then that she knew that whatever was going on here concerned her: the woman’s expression slipped into a mask of compassion.

“Ms Devi, if you would care to accompany me…”

She ushered Ana around the desk and into a small side room, an office equipped with a single desk and two chairs.

The woman sat down behind the desk and Ana remained standing, facing the woman. “What is happening here?” Ana asked.

“I understand that earlier today you saw your brother, Bilal Devi?”

Ana found herself slumping into the chair opposite the woman. “What is happening? Is Bilal…?”

“Can I ask you why you were visiting your brother, Ms Devi?”

Ana laughed, despite the fear building within her. “Why do you think? He was my brother, and we hadn’t seen each other for a long time.”

“And how did your brother seem when you met him?”

“Seem? Look, just what is going on here? Will you please tell me?”

The woman said, “I am Director Zara Mohammed. I run the orphanage. Your brother worked here for nine years, and we became very close…”

Panic seized Ana; she was having difficulty getting her breath. “It’s Bilal, isn’t it?” she almost shouted. “What’s happened to Bilal?”

The woman surprised her by standing and coming around the desk, kneeling before Ana and taking her hand.

“I’m sorry, Ms Devi. Your brother, my respected colleague Bilal Devi, passed away earlier today.”

Even though she knew it was coming, the fact rocked her. Her heart thumped and she felt its pulse in her ears, deafening, drowning out whatever the woman was saying. Director Mohammed’s lips moved, but Ana heard nothing.

“How?” she heard herself asking.

The Director squeezed her hand, her eyes slipping away from Ana’s.

“I want to see him!” Ana cried. “I want to see my brother!”

Then she was on her feet and rushing out of the office. She crossed the foyer to the rear door and burst through into the courtyard. She was aware of the faces of surprised policemen, and the tear-stained faces of a hundred boys and girls, as she pushed through the crowd and made her way towards Bilal’s timber shack.

Three policemen, as many paramedics, and half a dozen men and women in suits crowded the entrance to the rude dwelling. They turned, startled, as Ana attempted to push through them to the door.

Director Mohammed had caught up with her. “Ms Devi! Please, I would not advise…”

“I am Bilal Devi’s sister!” she cried into the face of a policeman who barred her way, “and I want to see my brother!”

Shocked, the man stepped aside and before anyone could move to prevent her she pushed open the flimsy wooden door and crossed the threshold.

She stopped dead in her tracks, a cry stilled on her lips.

The sight of her brother hit her like a physical blow to the sternum. She gasped for breath, mouthing, “No, no…” over and over again.

Bilal sat on the narrow bunk where, earlier that day, he had told a story to the orphans in his charge. He had been thrown back against the wall, his head hanging forward, the very book he had been reading that afternoon cradled in his lap.

It was open to a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and Bilal’s fingers lay upon the great man’s face as if in benediction.

Ana stared at her brother, at the massive gunshot wound in the centre of his chest, and cried in disbelief.

“No!” she cried, and Director Mohammed slipped into the room and held Ana as she wept.

CHAPTER SIX

IT SEEMED TO Sally that, in her sixties, her life had entered a period of calm and quiescence that had its analogue in the collective demeanour of the human race in the middle period of the twenty-first century.

She was no longer ambitious as she had been when young; she was no longer as concerned about what people thought of her. She was happier in herself and in her dealings with others, had fewer worries, and if she thought of the future at all it was with positivity and confidence.

It seemed, likewise, that humankind since spreading from Earth and inhabiting the solar system had entered a period of maturity, of co-operation and tolerance. The human race teemed across terraformed planets and moons, inhabited vast spaceborn dwellings hollowed from asteroids. They worked together increasingly without the boundaries of nations to impede progress with concerns of petty national interest, freed from the malign influence of multinational business corporations. Religions had mellowed, even the more radical sects of Christianity and Islam which in the past had threatened head-to-head conflict; millions still believed, but without the self-righteous fervour of old. New cults had sprung up, many with the Serene at their core. Of the old faiths, Buddhism was increasing in popularity, as citizens drew parallels between the ways of the Serene and the philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama.

All in all, Sally reflected as she stared out through the dome of her surgery across the Mare Erythraeum, it was a good time to be alive.

She had seen her last patient of the day and had the afternoon to herself. Geoff, on some administrative tour of a farm in the south, wouldn’t be back until later that evening; she’d dine that night with Hannah and her new boyfriend. Before that, she had a lunch date with Kath Kemp.

Her old friend was a frequent visitor to Mars, and particularly to Escarpment City. The obelisks made interplanetary travel no more difficult than stepping from one room to the next — once the traveller had reached the embarkation obelisk, of course, which often took hours by conventional transport. Sally saw Kath perhaps once a month, when they caught up with each other’s work and reminisced about old times. She had gone through a period — on learning what Kath Kemp was, ten years ago — of not exactly mistrusting Kath but questioning everything about their relationship. She had wondered if she had been manipulated, if Kath had had ulterior motives for fostering their friendship — but for the life of her Sally could discern no such motivation on the part of the Serene self-aware entity. They were, she genuinely felt, two like-minded woman with a shared past in common, and even similar temperaments — even if one of them just happened to be an alien construct.

Trust, Sally thought as she switched off her com and left her surgery — that was what it boiled down to. She trusted Kath Kemp and the Serene, despite Nina Ricci’s increasing frustration at what she saw as the Serene withholding information from their human representatives.

She caught an electric buggy from the business core of the city to the Lip. It was a warm autumn day on the red planet and the plain was basking in hazy sunlight. Her favourite café was almost full, but she’d taken the precaution of reserving a table by the rail.

She was early, and admired the view across the flat, patchwork farmland as she waited for Kath to arrive.

A minute later the small, dumpy woman — she had thickened in old age, Sally thought — crossed the patio towards her table. Sally stood and they embraced, and then ordered coffee and salad.

Kath asked about Sally’s recent work, enquiring about the efficiency of new anti-cancer drugs trialled on a group of her patients — and for the next fifteen minutes they chatted about this and other aspects of Sally’s practice.

Sally had no doubt that the enquiry was part of a gathering of information which the Serene would collate and use to refine and direct future policy — but at the same time, she thought, Kath was genuinely interested in her work on a more personal level.

As they ate, Sally’s thoughts turned to Geoff’s forthcoming trip to Titan, and what he hoped Kath Kemp might reveal to him, Nina Ricci and Ana Devi, there.

“You do realise,” she said at one point, “that your promise to Nina has made Geoff uncharacteristically restless? He’s talked about nothing else for days.”

Kath laughed, wrinkles creasing around her kind eyes. “Nina is one inquisitive and perceptive woman. One in a million. She keeps us on our toes.”

“Every class needs an enfant terrible,” Sally said. “I suppose what you’ll tell them is confidential?” She was fishing, and smiled at Kath’s mischievous expression.

“It is, but won’t be in a couple of days.” Kath regarded her coffee, then looked up. “As we’ll be making it public anyway in a week or two, why don’t you come with Geoff to Titan? Make a holiday of it. Can you get time off?”

Sally felt a rising excitement. “I’m due a little leave, and I’ve only seen Titan on film. From what Geoff tells me, it’s beautiful.”

“One of the wonders of the solar system. Prepare to be amazed. We’ll also be going onward, outward, from Titan.”

“We will? But I thought…” Sally faltered. As far as she knew, Titan was the outer extent of human habitation in the solar system. Then she recalled what Nina Ricci had said about Serene work on the very perimeter of the system.

“You don’t mean…?”

“I can’t say, especially now, with security tightening as it is.”

“It is? I thought everything was going well on that front, what with the Obterek…”

Ten years ago, for a few weeks after their evacuation from Earth to Mars, Geoff and Sally, Ana and Kapil, had lived in fear of what course the Obterek opposition to the Serene might take. Despite constant Serene reassurances that they had nothing to fear, they had indeed feared: Sally and Geoff had discussed the situation, and Geoff had summed it up well when he described feeling that the human race was a tiny, insignificant and ignorant life-form caught in a battle between two vast and incomprehensible armies.

Then, as the weeks lapsed and turned to months, and the threat of Obterek action never materialised, their fears eventually receded. It must have been years, now, since Sally had last considered the Serene’s galactic opponents.

Kath was regarding her empty plate as if wondering whether to tell Sally something. At last she said, “There have been worrying developments lately.”

“The Obterek ?”

Kath nodded. “We wondered when they might next make a move. It was too good to be true that this period of quiescence, which had lasted for almost a decade, would continue indefinitely.”

“What happened?”

“An incident on Earth just yesterday. You’ll hear about it soon enough. A breach in the charea. A tiny breach, but nevertheless very worrying, as even the tiniest, briefest breakdown in our systems is a reason for the alarm bells to start ringing…” She laughed and said: “Listen to me, spouting platitudes like some jaded news hack.”

“You think it might just be the start of…” Sally let the question hang.

Kath sighed. “That’s our fear, but you can never tell with the Obterek. We’re monitoring the situation, stepping up security…”

At that moment Sally’s softscreen chimed. She moved to cut the call, but Kath leaned forward and said, “No. I think you had better accept it.”

Nodding, a sick feeling in her chest, Sally rolled up her sleeve and tapped her forearm. Instantly Ana Devi’s face stared up at her, unusual in that the woman was not smiling. “Ana?”

“Sal. Can I see you?”

“Of course. Are you… is everything okay?”

“Yes. No. No, it isn’t. Can I see you? I just want to talk…” The Indian woman smiled up at her, but Sally could tell that she was close to tears. “I’m back on Mars. Will you be at home this afternoon?”

“All afternoon. I’ll be back in… say an hour. Drop by at any time, Ana.”

Ana nodded, thanked Sally, and cut the connection.

Sally looked up and stared at Kath. “That was Ana. She seemed…” She shook her head.

Kath said, “You’d better be getting home, Sally. Be there for Ana, and give her my condolences.”

Kath stood and made to leave.

“Kath?” Sally said.

“Ana will tell you all about it. I really must be going.”

They kissed cheeks, and Kath said, “I’ll see you in two days, Sally, on Titan.”

She watched her friend hurry from the café, then made her way home with a feeling of dire expectation in her chest.

SHE SAT BENEATH the cherry tree in her garden and waited.

The sun was going down and birdsong filled the warm air. If she closed her eyes she could imagine herself back in Shropshire. When she opened her eyes, however, the quality of the light — somehow hazier and less intense — told her that she was no longer on Earth, and the tumbling shape of Deimos gave the game away.

But the back garden and the cottage were as restful as ever, a piece of England transplanted, which Sally found a refuge from the pressure of work. She knew that Ana loved the cottage and the garden, and thoughts of Ana brought back what Kath had said. “Give her my condolences.”

Had something happened to Kapil or to Shantidev?

She started as she heard the squeak of the gate at the side of the house, and a second later Ana came into view along the path.

Sally stood and faced Ana down the length of the garden, and something in the Indian woman’s posture made Sally run to Ana and hold her as she sobbed on her shoulder. She inhaled the woman’s scent — rosewater and shampoo.

She led Ana back to the cherry tree and sat her down on the bench, then sat beside her and held her hand. “Ana? Tell me…”

“I hadn’t seen him for ten years… and I expected to find the man I had last seen. Brash. Arrogant… If I succeeded in finding him at all… But I found him. Against all the odds. Found him… I didn’t really expect to. But I did!”

“Ana. Take it easy. Slow down. Does Kapil know you’re back?”

“He’s… he’s on Venus. I contacted him. He’s on his way back. But… but he won’t get home until later tonight. And I just had to talk to someone…”

“Of course, of course.” She gripped her friend’s hand. “Tell me.”

“I went to Earth especially to find him.”

She recalled Geoff telling her last week that Ana was going to New York to try to find her brother, Bilal.

“Ana, what happened?”

The Indian woman stared at her, stricken. “Someone murdered my brother,” she said.

Sally wanted to say that that was impossible, that people were not murdered anymore. The coming of the Serene had seen to that…

“But who…?”

“I know who, Sally. I saw him. You see, when I was leaving the orphanage that afternoon, I saw someone. I didn’t know who it was at the time, only later… It was Bilal’s old boss, the businessman James Morwell. Only… only this was a different, younger version of James Morwell.”

“But why would he want to murder Bilal?”

Ana shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine. But… later I was questioned by a Serene self-aware entity. It… it entered me, just as ten years ago it saved me from the Obterek at Fujiyama, and when it came out it told me that I had been correct. I had seen James Morwell, and he was working for the Obterek.” She looked up, into the sky, and said, “And the self-aware entity told me, Sally, that they feared this was merely the start of a new, concerted Obterek onslaught.”

Sally held her friend as the day darkened towards evening and a chill crept over the garden.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TO ALLEN, THE process of stepping into the obelisk on Mars and stepping out again on Titan seemed instantaneous.

He knew intellectually that a day, perhaps two, had elapsed, but always as he completed his stride through the black wall and stepped out on the other side, he found it hard to believe. He always had to check the calendar on his softscreen to confirm how much time had passed, and always he felt renewed respect for Serene science. This time, thanks to Nina Ricci, he also experienced curiosity at what the Serene might be doing with the human representatives in the Titan obelisk.

The sight that confronted him on emerging from the obelisk never failed to halt him in his tracks. He had seen many an artist’s representation of the rings of Saturn as seen from the moon of Titan, spectacular landscapes of methane plains with the mighty ringed planet canted at varying angles above the horizon, but the reality stunned him. It was the colours, he thought. Saturn itself was a vast pastel swirl and the rings, tipped so that they presented a great multi-stranded girdle encompassing the planet, ranged the spectrum. In the foreground the moon’s electric-blue plains provided a vivid contrast.

The city itself was situated on a plateau on the moon’s southern pole, a collection of what looked like blown-glass habitats occupied by scientific teams huddled around the rearing tower of the obelisk, and all protected from the moon’s hostile hydrocarbon atmosphere by a bell-jar dome.

For the past five years or so the routine had always been the same. Allen, Ana Devi and Nina Ricci, sometimes accompanied by other representatives, would meet at a café bar across the plaza from the obelisk. There, while admiring the views across the plain far below, they would chat for an hour or two before entering the obelisk again and finding themselves back on Mars. It was a time to catch up — if they hadn’t seen each other on Mars for a while — though oddly they never speculated about what they might have undergone in the day or two that had elapsed within the obelisk.

Allen crossed the plaza and made his way to the table beside the far rail, where Sally, Ana and Kapil were seated. Ana was subdued, far from her usual voluble, talkative self. Kapil was gripping her hand beneath the table, murmuring something to her. Ana stared out across the jagged, frozen plain, but looked up and smiled briefly as Allen sat down next to Sally.

He ordered coffee and, to break the ice, commented that the sight of the southern polar plain never failed to excite him.

Sally said, “I didn’t think it would be so… vivid. The pictures I’ve seen failed to do it justice.”

“Vivid and inimical,” Kapil put in, ever the scientist. “It might look beautiful, but it’s one of the most hostile environments known to man.”

Ana said in a small voice, “I wonder why the obelisk is this far out — I mean this obelisk, the biggest in the system, the one every representative now goes to? Why couldn’t it be situated on Earth?”

Kapil shrugged. “Security?”

Sally said, “But secure from whom? The Obterek, presumably? Surely they can access anywhere in the system, always assuming they can breach Serene defences in the first place?”

“Perhaps the defences are harder to breach this far out?” Ana suggested.

“Or maybe,” Allen said lightly, “the Serene just like the view.”

Sally looked up and said. “Here are Nina and Natascha.”

They rearranged themselves around the table and pulled up a couple of chairs. Natascha was tiny, blonde, quiet and undemonstrative — a complete contrast in every respect to her Italian lover. She worked as an engineer on the Martian atmosphere plants, and had been a regular at the Allens’ monthly soirées, gracing the gatherings with her quiet, deadpan wit. She and Nina had been together for almost ten years, as unlikely a pairing intellectually as they were physically.

They sat and ordered white wine and Allen said, “We were just wondering why the obelisk was situated this far out from Earth, Nina. I was about to say that no doubt you’d have a theory.”

Natascha smiled into her glass. “Nina has a theory for everything, believe me.”

Nina listened to what Kapil had suggested about security, then dismissed the idea with a wave. “The entire question as to why the obelisk is here is redundant, my friends. It could be here or anywhere — it would be equally as vulnerable on Earth as it would be here, or on Mars or Venus. The concept of distance, to Serene minds habituated to the idea of teleportation, is irrelevant. More important,” she went on, “is its function. It’s in some way more important to the Serene, because of its size and the fact that the human representatives come here now solely and far more often than we ever visited the other obelisks.”

Natascha said, “But do you have a theory for that, my darling?”

“For once, you’ll be surprised to learn, I do not. That’s what I hope we’ll find out from Kathryn, when she deigns to turn up.”

Nina turned to Ana and murmured her condolences, touching the Indian woman’s hand.

Ana smiled and said, “I have had time to think about it, Nina, and perhaps it was meant to be. Bilal had come to a peaceful period in his life, a period of contentment, I think. He had left behind the person he was, and was helping others. It was better that he die now than before, when he had not realised his… his potential.”

Allen looked at her, wondering how much this was Ana rationalising the tragedy for the sake of her grief — or perhaps, in some way known only to the Hindu mind, she really believed this. To Allen, Bilal’s death was an unmitigated tragedy, a murder made all the more horrible because of the fact that no one, these days, met intentionally violent ends.

Ana went on, “What frightens me is that it might be the start of more violence from the Obterek. It’s bad enough that Bilal is dead, but let it be the last.”

Natascha said, “And you are certain that you saw Bilal’s old boss, Morwell, enter the orphanage as you left?”

Ana smiled. “His old boss, yes — but he was in some way younger. As if the Obterek had made him so.”

“You said that a self-aware entity told you that Morwell was working for the Obterek?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“But it didn’t say why Morwell was doing this?” Nina Ricci asked. “Why, in other words, the Obterek might want your brother dead?”

Ana shook her head. “It said nothing about this, and I was too shocked to ask.”

Into the following silence, Sally asked quietly, “But why would the Obterek want Bilal dead?”

Nina Ricci cleared her throat, and heads turned to her. “In my opinion,” she said, “they didn’t specifically want Bilal dead. I know this might be hard to accept, Ana, but I think that anyone would have sufficed.”

Natascha looked at her lover. “I don’t follow…”

Nina went on, “The Obterek used Morwell as a tool to see if they could succeed in breaching the Serene’s charea, however briefly. To see if it could be done again.”

They sat in silence for a time, digesting the corollary of this idea.

At last Ana said, “You are right, I do find it hard to accept, even though it might be the truth. Bilal told me, when we met three days ago, that he and Morwell had parted on bad terms. Perhaps it was Morwell who suggested to the Obterek that it might be Bilal who… who should serve as the… the test case.” She stopped, Kapil gripping her hand, then looked up bravely and said, “He was reading a book about Gandhi when he died, which would have been hard to imagine him doing ten years ago.”

Allen ventured, “Perhaps, if his death served to warn the Serene that the Obterek have returned to the fray, then it might not have been in vain?”

Ana nodded. “Yes, that would be a nice thought, wouldn’t it?”

Nina Ricci sat up and said, “I think this is Kathryn, if I’m not mistaken.”

Allen turned and watched Kath Kemp approach from the obelisk across the plaza.

Nina was in the process of pulling up a chair for her, but Kath said, “That won’t be necessary, but thank you. We won’t be stopping here. I have a more… secure venue for our meeting. Please, if you would care to follow me.”

Exchanging glances, they rose and trooped from the café area.

KATH LED THEM across the plaza to a section of the flooring marked with black and white squares like a chess board. When they were all standing upon the ‘board’, Allen felt the ground give beneath his feet.

Ana let out a small gasp of surprise and reached out for Kapil. Kath smiled and said, “An elevator. We will be travelling only a short way.”

“Where to?” Nina Ricci asked.

“Beneath the surface of the moon,” Kath replied, “and then out again.”

Her answer provoked a murmur of surprise amongst the group, and Sally caught Allen’s eye and smiled tentatively. He slipped an arm around her shoulders as they dropped.

Seconds later the elevator halted, and Kath Kemp stepped from it and led the way along a lighted corridor. They arrived at a black door, not dissimilar to the surface of the obelisk. For a second Allen thought that it might indeed be a subterranean extension of the obelisk, then had second thoughts: if his orientation was correct, then when they stepped off the elevator they had been heading away from the obelisk, towards the face of the cliff overlooking the plain. This was confirmed a second later as Kath palmed a sensor and the black door slid aside to reveal the frozen methane plain stretching ahead to the horizon.

For a shocking second Allen thought that they were stepping onto the very surface of the moon. Then he made out, perhaps thirty metres away, an arrangement of loungers and foam-forms, surrounded by what looked like the inner membrane of a dome. Clutching Sally’s hand, he followed Kath through the entrance and found himself in a long bolus of what appeared to be glass extruded from the wall of the cliff.

They came to the loungers and Kath invited them to be seated.

Allen sat down and looked up through the ceiling at the stars twinkling high overhead. If he looked back, he could see the domed city arcing above the lip of the cliff-face, and the summit of the obelisk. Ahead, high above the horizon, Saturn cast its light across the methane ice plain.

“Very spectacular,” Ricci commented, “but I’d like to know just why we have been brought down here?”

Kath Kemp stood before them, silhouetted against Saturn’s light. She inclined her head. “Despite its appearance of insubstantiality, this is a secure area. We cannot be overheard or observed.”

“This gets better and better,” Ricci smiled. “So you’re really going to divulge…”

Kath held up a hand. “It has never been the policy to keep from you the information you needed to know. We had, and have, and will continue to have, the best interests of the human race at heart.”

Ricci interrupted. “But it is you, or rather the Serene, who decide what we ‘need’ to know — which begs the question…”

It was Kath’s turn to interject. “We told you everything which was necessary for your understanding relevant to an ongoing and unfolding situation.”

Allen smiled to himself at Kath’s convoluted politician’s spiel. She went on, “However, due to recent developments in the Serene’s management of the situation, it has been deemed necessary to inform, little by little, the human representatives, and their loved ones, of their larger role in the scheme of things.”

She fell silent and looked around the group, and Allen was aware of the increasing tension in the room. Sally squeezed his hand as she stared at her friend.

Ana said quietly, “Does this have something to do with what happened to Bilal?”

Kath shook her head. “Not directly, no. But indirectly, yes, everything is linked.”

“Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?” Ricci asked.

Kath paused, staring down at her feet, then raised her head and looked around the group. She said, “Twenty years ago the Serene came to Earth and changed everything. The Serene stopped you harming each other — in effect, we saved you from inevitable self-destruction, just as we’d saved many other races across the millennia. In order to do this, and to facilitate the changes that would inevitably eventuate, we required the help of the human race itself to work as our representatives, on Earth to begin with, and then across the solar system.”

“Yes,” Ricci said, “but what actually did we do — or rather, what did you do to us? Just what went on — goes on — in the obelisks?”

Kath paused, looking from one to the other of the six humans seated before her, then said, “You must consider that the Serene’s concern is the long-term welfare of the human race. Not only did we wish to save you from yourself, but from the attention of our opponents, the Obterek. To this end we deemed it necessary to take a sample of the finest human beings your race had to offer and… study you.”

Natascha sat forward. “Study us?”

“It was a long and laborious process. Within the obelisks, every month, we…” She paused, then said, “I will resort here to brutal terminology, but there is no other way of explaining what we did. Very well, in order to study you we had to take you apart, strip you down, and then build you back up. But in doing so we… we incorporated several fundamental changes in your molecular and genetic make-up.”

Allen sat back, heart racing. He said, “Changes…?”

“We made alterations in order to improve you, to give you capabilities that will serve you, the human race, in the decades and centuries to come.”

Ricci sprang to her feet and paced to the curving glass wall and back. She stopped and looked at Kath Kemp, and Allen was unable to work out if her expression was one of anger, resentment, or excitement. It seemed that all three reactions passed across her face in the seconds that followed, before she said, “You’ve changed us? Changed me? But into what?”

“To someone who will be better able to serve your race in the years to come,” Kath said.

Kapil glanced at Ana, then said, “And how will that be?”

Kath Kemp smiled. “To answer that, I must first answer a question that Nina asked me a month ago, about the diminution in the stars.”

Sally laughed. “But how can that be related…?”

“Please believe me, Sal — it is,” Kath said. “You see, it is all tied in to the need to protect you from the Obterek, and to do that we need to protect your habitat — the solar system.”

Nina Ricci cried, “You’re talking in riddles!”

Kath stared around the group, and seemed to be considering what she said next. “Very well, I think a practical demonstration is required. What we are about to do you might find shocking, unbelievable, but let me reassure you that you are at no risk whatsoever during the process.”

Several of them began to speak at once, but Kath held up a hand and said, “Please follow my instructions. Now, Ana, Nina and Geoff… If you would kindly stand and move into the centre of the room.”

Allen glanced at Sally, shrugged, and did as instructed, curiosity intermingled with a slight sense of foolishness; he was a schoolboy again, manipulated by the teacher in order to demonstrate some scientific principle.

He stood between Ana and Nina, and looked to Kath for further instructions.

She said, “Stand a little further apart, so that you are separated by about one metre.”

Ricci protested, “Just what is all this about?”

Kath ignored her. “Now, Sally, Kapil and Natascha, please join your partners and hold hands.”

Sally climbed from the lounger and joined him. Her hand found his and squeezed.

“Ana, Nina and Geoff, your softscreens are activated. I have initiated a program that will allow you to hear my instructions mentally.”

“But how the hell did you do that?” Nina murmured.

Kath said, “In five seconds, you will hear me ‘think’ a set of co-ordinates. You will repeat them to yourself, mentally. And that will initiate the procedure…”

Allen watched as Kath stepped forward and took Nina Ricci’s hand.

Before he could even begin to wonder what was going on, he heard Kath’s voice in his head. “75-438-779… Now repeat.”

Allen did so. He felt a split-second of disorientation, and then something flashed in his vision and he was forced to close his eyes.

He staggered, as if the ground beneath his feet had shifted, and then opened his eyes.

And he saw that he was no longer on Titan.

HE WAS STANDING in a sunlit vale or meadow, a warm breeze lapping over him. He was still gripping Sally’s hand, and turned to her.

Her face wore an expression of enraptured wonder that was beautiful to behold.

Then he saw that the others were alongside Sally and himself. All of them were staring around in awe, open-mouthed; they looked at each other and could not help but laugh.

Allen turned to Kath, who was watching them with amusement

“What the hell,” Nina Ricci said, “is going on?”

“Where are we?” asked Ana.

“This simple demonstration,” Kath Kemp said, “should answer your first and fundamental question: what was it that the Serene were doing with you representatives for twenty years, every month initially, and then every two weeks. We were, little by little, installing you with the ability to shift, as we call it — or perhaps you would prefer the term teleport.”

Allen felt dizzy and sat down on the grass. Sally flopped beside him and found his hand. Ana and Kapil were embracing. Nina and Natascha stared at each other and laughed.

“You’re kidding, right?” Nina said.

“I think,” Allen said, “that what we just did proves to us that this is no joke.”

“Let me explain,” said Kath. “We have invested in over ten thousand individuals — you human representatives — the ability to shift to any point within your solar system instantaneously. The science, the mechanics, of this we need not go into now; suffice to say that we have employed the same laws of quantum mechanics to effect this ability as we did to enable the charea edict. Programmed into your softscreens is an almost limitless cache of co-ordinates that will enable you, at the speed of thought, to select a destination and shift yourselves there. To access this cache you merely have to ‘think’ of your destination; for example a certain street in a certain city. Instantly the program will decode your thought and supply a destination code, which you will repeat. A nano-second later, you will find yourself there.”

Sally was shaking her head. “But how did I… and Kapil and Natascha…?”

“The shifter will have the ability to take with them a maximum of three other people, and will do so by the simple expedient of ensuring that all three are physically connected.”

“Right,” said Nina with determination. She was staring ahead, at a stand of trees some five hundred metres away.

Allen then had the disconcerting experience of seeing a human being vanish from before his eyes. Nina appeared, instantly, beside the trees half a kilometre away. She lifted a hand and waved.

A second later she was back beside Natascha, shaking her head in wonder at what she had just done.

Allen heard his heartbeat hammer out his shock and elation. He closed his eyes, and into his head came a vision of a pub garden, millions of miles away; the Three Horseshoes in Wem, Shropshire, where many years ago he and Sally had spent many a pleasant evening.

A string of co-ordinates entered his head. 32-779-043…

He opened his eyes and stared at Sally. “Hold my hand,” he said.

Tentatively, she reached out and took his hand, and Allen repeated the co-ordinates.

He heard Sally gasp, and then he was in the garden of the Three Horseshoes, seated beside the fishpond. It was early morning in England, and the sun was rising over the elms which bordered the garden.

“I’m dreaming this,” Sally said, “Please, Geoff, tell me I’m dreaming…”

“Then so am I,” he said, and reached out and hugged his wife.

“The thing is,” she said, “do you know your way back to the others?”

That was a point. He closed his eyes and recalled the grassy vale, and immediately the program responded with a string of co-ordinates.

Sally said, “Do you realise what this means, Geoff? In the wrong hands…”

“Shall we go back?” he said.

“The silly thing is that I’d like to stay a while, have a stroll around, explore again… But there will be plenty of time for that in future, won’t there?”

He smiled. “We can explore everywhere you’ve ever wanted to explore,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

He repeated the co-ordinates mentally, and a split-second later they were seated on the breast of the meadowed vale, Nina and Natascha staring at them in amazement.

Seconds later Ana and Kapil popped into existence before them, and Ana gasped, “We were in India, revisiting the farm where we first met. Oh, it was…” She turned to her husband and wept on his shoulder.

Nina said to Kath Kemp, “You do realise that if the wrong kind of people…?” she began.

Kath looked at the Italian with all the forbearance of a wise school-teacher. “Nina, we have invested the ability only in you representatives. We know you, on the most fundamental level. You are not the kind of people to abuse the gift bequeathed to you. Look into your hearts, each of you, and ask yourselves if that is not true.”

Allen smiled to himself, overcome by the weight of trust the Serene had granted him. Then again, he asked himself, how could it be trust when the Serene knew him, and the other representatives, intimately? He felt not so much trusted, then, as blessed.

Nina Ricci stared across the greensward at the diminutive Kath, and said, “You have graced us with a power beyond our expectations, an ability none of us could have dreamed of… But — and far be it for me to sound suspicious, or ungrateful — but why have the Serene done this? What exactly do you want from us?”

Kath gestured, raising both her hands candidly. “As I told you, our desires are the continuance of the human race, the protection of your species, initially from yourselves, and then from the threat of the Obterek. With your ability, you can assist the Serene in this.”

Ana said, “In what way? I don’t understand how our ability to… shift… can help protect us.”

“Your ability will not protect you, but it will help towards setting up a system, an environment, in which the human race will be safe.”

“Again,” asked Nina Ricci, “how?”

“To answer that,” Kath said, “I need you to ask a question. And the question is this: where are we now?”

All six humans looked around them. Natascha said, “It looks like a meadow in Georgia where I went on holiday as a child.”

“The hills of Tuscany,” Ricci laughed.

Ana said, “Or the vale of Kashmir.”

“It could easily be somewhere in Shropshire,” Sally said.

Kath smiled. “You are all wrong, but right in that it is a place of surpassing beauty. We are not on Earth; nor are we on any planet or moon in the solar system.”

More to himself, Geoff said, “The dimming of the stars…” And aloud, “Then where?”

“Look into the sky,” Kath said, “and tell me what you see.”

Allen looked up. The sky was cloudless. “The sun,” he said.

“How many?” Kath asked.

Allen laughed. “One…”

“No!” Nina Ricci said. “Two…”

“Three… four!” Kapil exclaimed.

Allen saw that they were right; high above, a series of small, bright yellow suns marched across the heavens.

He shook his head. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Where are we?” He had a sudden, explosive thought, and said, “On the home planet of the Serene?”

Kath shook her head. “We are still within the confines of your solar system, but only just.”

Nina Ricci pointed to the sky. “But the suns?”

“The dimming of the stars,” Allen said, but aloud this time. He had the inkling of an idea. “On the edge of our system, Kath? On some kind of… of artificial platform?”

She smiled. “Almost. We are on the edge of the solar system, but the structure is somewhat more impressive than a mere platform. Imagine the skin of an orange, or rather a more oblate satsuma, cut into sections. Imagine the sections reformed into an oblate whole.”

The idea was dizzying. Allen laughed. “And this… this is one of those sections?”

Kath Kemp nodded. “It is. From point to point it measures one astronomical unit, and the same across at its widest point.”

Nina Ricci was shaking her head. “But it’s… vast.”

Kapil said, “That’s the distance from the sun to the Earth!”

“In surface area,” Kath said, “it equates to forty million Earths.”

“And you say that this is just one section?” Kapil asked.

“The first,” Kath said. “Soon, others will join it, and in five of your years, the entire solar system will be enclosed.”

Kapil was shaking his head in wonder. “And the number of sections it will take to do this?” he asked.

“The Serene estimate approximately two million,” Kath said.

Allen laughed. “My maths isn’t up to it…”

Kapil said in awed tones, “So there will be the equivalent of eighty trillion planet Earths on the inner surface of the shell, give or take a handful.”

“How?” Sally asked. “The energy required, the material…”

Kath said, “We beam the energy from the far stars of the core, and utilise takrea technology to transport the rock and iron of distant planets. Surrounding the solar system are thousands of vast quantum engines, fabricators, which take the energy and reconstruct it.” She gestured about her. “Forming the shell, which is in the region of fifteen thousand kilometres thick.”

Natascha asked, “But why, Kath? Why are the Serene doing this?”

Kath nodded, as if the question were entirely reasonable. “Think about it,” she said. “Think about what is happening to the human race. There are no more wars, no more crimes of violence, no more murders. Also, with the coming of the Serene and the advance of pharmaceutical sciences, many deadly diseases are no more. The human race is expanding, hence the outward push from Earth, the establishment of colonies on Venus, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.”

Kapil finished for her. “And we need space into which to expand,” he said.

Kath looked around the astonished faces of the humans before her. “This is not the first time the Serene have built a habitat shell around a solar system,” she said. “It is one of the corollaries of saving a race from itself.”

“But will there come a time, in the far, far future,” Nina Ricci wanted to know, “when the human race will expand to fill all the available land within the shell?”

“That is very doubtful,” Kath said. “It has not happened so far with any of the other races the Serene have assisted; they have instituted measures to curb their populations.”

Beside Allen, Sally opened her mouth with an exclamation of understanding. “Ah, I see now…” she said.

The others looked at her.

“I understand why the representatives have been granted the ability to… shift,” she said.

Kath Kemp was nodding. “When the shell is complete, the distances between areas of population across the inner surface will be so vast that we will need people, individuals, to travel back and forth, as envoys, messengers — couriers, if you like. To create and sustain a system of obelisks to perform this function would be an energy drain beyond even the resources of the Serene, hence the creation of a cadre of shifters, as you will come to be known.”

Allen slipped an arm around his wife’s shoulder and smiled at her.

“Of course,” Kath went on, “as twenty years ago when the Serene recruited the representatives, we gave you the option of withdrawing, without fear of prejudice. We offer you the same option now; if any of you do not wish to enjoy the facility of shifting, or do not wish to carry through the work of the Serene, please say so and you will be returned to Mars with no memory of what has taken place here.”

Allen laughed. “You are,” he said, “joking, right? As if I could turn my back on the ability to…” He shook his head, suddenly speechless at the thought of what the Serene had granted him.

Kath turned to Ana Devi. “Ana?”

She smiled and clutched Kapil’s hand. “I agree with Geoff,” she said.

“And you, Nina?” Kath asked.

“I would not turn my back on the ability to shift for all the world,” she said.

Kath Kemp smiled. “Thank you all,” she said. “You have made me very happy.”

Allen asked, “And the other representatives? Have the Serene told all ten thousand of us?”

She smiled. “We are in the process of doing so,” she said. She gestured around her at the meadow. “As we speak there are groups of representatives, with their attendant self-aware entities, being told just what I have just told you.”

She paused, then went on, “In celebration, I suggest we return to the plaza at Titan. I’ve had the presumption to order a magnum of champagne in readiness for our return.”

Nina Ricci said, “But won’t our sudden arrival, out of the blue, cause a little consternation?”

“Until a formal announcement is made regarding the shifters,” Kath said, “the Serene have ensured that your arrival, anywhere, will go unnoticed by those in the vicinity.”

Allen smiled to himself; the Serene had thought of everything.

She stepped forward and held out her hand to Allen, and he understood then why she had taken Nina Ricci’s hand on Titan.

“You can’t shift?” he said.

She smiled. “We can do many things, Geoff, but the Serene have not endowed us with that ability.”

She looked around the group as the representatives linked hands with their partners. “If you visualise the plaza…”

Allen did so, and the co-ordinates entered his consciousness.

Gripping Sally’s hand, he closed his eyes and repeated them.

And when he opened his eyes again he was on the plaza beneath the dome on Titan, and the others were already making their way to the café bar.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JAMES MORWELL LOOKED at his reflection in the mirror of his hotel bedroom and liked what he saw.

It was entirely appropriate, he thought, that as in a matter of hours he was due to annihilate himself he should take on a new visual identity. Gone was the Morwell of old, the pale, weak-chinned failure, to be replaced with this young, tall, blond vision.

It is necessary, said the voice in his head, to disguise you…

“I understand,” he said aloud, then laughed at himself.

In one hour you will leave your planet forever. Are you ready?

“I am ready… though I can hardly bring myself to believe that soon I’ll be…” He did not say the word, as if by doing so he might curse himself. He had tried for so long now, for so many years, to end his life that the idea that soon he might achieve his goal — with some help, admittedly — seemed impossible to imagine.

A blessed cessation of the anger that haunted him; oblivion. Nothingness.

And in bringing about his own end, he would be helping to end the tyranny of the Serene in the solar system. The old ways would be restored. Humanity would be handed back its true destiny, no longer yoked to the pacifist ideals of a faceless alien race.

Thanks to me, he thought, the human race will be free.

He wondered if his sacrifice would be remembered, and exalted.

We will ensure that your name lives on, said the voice in his head.

In time he would be even more famous than his father had been. He laughed at the idea. His father was little remembered now, the long-dead tycoon of long-dead business concerns. He closed his eyes and saw his father advancing on him with a baseball bat, and cursed his memory.

Look at me now, you bastard…

Are you ready? said the voice.

“I’m ready,” he replied.

He left the hotel and took a taxi to the Kolkata obelisk, where he had transit booked for Titan.

He sat back and stared out at the crowded streets as the taxi carried him towards his destiny. They passed within half a mile of the state orphanage where, three days ago, he had taken the life of Lal Devi.

The killing had not proved as satisfactory as he had hoped. He had imagined that Lal would grovel, would plead for his life, would apologise for betraying Morwell all those years ago. But when Morwell had walked in on Lal in his crude timber shack, he found a man changed from the slick businessman he had been. Lal seemed calmer, more reflective, centred.

He had smiled up at Morwell from where he sat cross-legged on his bunk, and said, “I did wonder if I would see you again, one day.”

Even the sight of the automatic pistol in Morwell’s right hand had failed to faze him.

“I want an apology,” Morwell had said.

Lal had merely smiled and said, “Go to hell, Morwell…”

“You’ll regret that, Lal.”

“I regret nothing, least of all leaving you, the Organisation. It was the finest thing I ever did.”

Morwell shook with suppressed rage. “I gave you everything, Lal. I saved you from a life of squalor. I educated you, gave you opportunities beyond your wildest dreams.”

“You inculcated me with the same corrupt ethos that you yourself had been infected with from your father.”

“No!”

“You filled my head with greed and gain, with concepts of power at the expense of others. Your ideals were against everything that is good and right, Morwell. But then how could they be anything else, handed down as they were from a father as monstrous as yours…?”

“Take that back!” Morwell cried.

“I take nothing back,” Lal said gently. “I pity you, I really do.”

And Lal was still smiling when Morwell pulled the trigger and shot him in the chest.

He pushed the incident to the back of his mind as the taxi pulled up in the shadow of the obelisk. He climbed out and paid the driver, then approached the sable, unreflective surface. He paused and looked around him at the teeming streets of Earth.

Proceed, said the voice in his head.

He stepped into the obelisk.

AND STEPPED OUT onto the plaza beneath the sloping rings of Saturn.

Cross the plaza and take a seat in the café bar by the edge, said the voice. There you will see a group of seven people, among whom is your target, Kat Kemp.

Heart thumping, Morwell stepped from the shadow of the obelisk and moved to the café bar. He sat down a few metres from the group, ordered a beer from the waiter, and stared across at Kat Kemp.

The years had been kind to her, he thought. She must be in her sixties now, but she had changed little from the woman he’d known nine years ago. A few fleeting memories of their time together came to him, but they were few, and they provoked no sadness or regret.

The only emotion the sight of her did provoke was the bitterness of betrayal. She was a self-aware entity, who had targeted him on behalf of the Serene. She was not a human, who had felt affection for the person he had been, but a mere robot fulfilling its programming.

He smiled to himself at the thought of the delicious revenge he was about to take, and he wondered if Kat Kemp would have time, before she died, to realise fully what was happening to her.

The group appeared to be celebrating something. They raised champagne glasses and laughed like fools.

To the Obterek in his head, he thought, “And nothing can go wrong, now?”

Nothing. We have everything planned, down to the finest detail.

“And I will die?” The very idea quickened his pulse.

You will die.

“And the destruction of the obelisk, the takrea…?”

The annihilation of the takrea will be a blow from which the Serene will not recover, said the voice. The quantum engine at its core, which maintains the functioning of charea, will be annihilated. The human race will be freed from the shackles of the Unnatural Way.

“And the Serene will be unable to re-establish control?”

Without the quantum engine to maintain charea, the Serene will be unable to defend themselves. We will invade, establish outposts across the solar system. We will re-establish the Natural Way of the universe. Your name, James Morwell, will go down in history.

He sat and drank his beer and smiled at the thought. He stared out through the wall of the dome at the massive beauty of the ringed planet above the horizon. Such magnificence, and his ability to perceive it, to perceive anything, would soon be no more… Soon his singular viewpoint on this universe would cease to be, and he felt nothing but satisfaction at the idea.

Very soon now the seven will leave the café bar and make their way to the obelisk. When they move, you will follow them. I will give the word for you to approach Kat Kemp. You will briefly inhabit her, through my agency, and we will be in control of her. Then we will step into the obelisk.

And then, Morwell thought, oblivion…

He stared across the café at the group, at Kat Kemp who was laughing and smiling at something a tall, grey-haired man was saying… Morwell recalled making love to her, all those years ago, and he felt absolutely nothing at the recollection. You are the enemy, he thought, and felt anger welling at her betrayal. No, not her — he reminded himself — but its.

Five minutes later they made their move. The grey-haired man took the hand of a tall, thin old woman and led the way from the café bar, followed by a younger Indian couple, and then Kat Kemp, a handsome dark woman and a tiny blonde.

Go, said the voice in his head.

Smiling to himself, heart thudding at the thought that everything in his life had led up to this moment, James Morwell stood and followed them from the café.

CHAPTER NINE

GEOFF ALLEN PAUSED in the shadow of the obelisk and turned to Sally. He stroked her cheek. “Strange to think that we’ve no longer any need to be using the obelisks.”

Sally shook her head. “It’s impossible to imagine, Geoff. I still can’t take it all in.”

“To go anywhere, anywhere at all… No, I still can’t get my head around the idea. It’ll certainly make holidays that much easier!”

“Where should we go first?”

“Oh… How about back to the Three Horseshoes at opening time, to celebrate with a bottle of Leffe?”

She made to punch his ribs. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Geoff!”

Kath called to them. “It’s all very well for you people…” she indicated the obelisk, “but I’ve still got to use this old, outmoded form of transportation.”

Nina Ricci asked, “Where are you going?”

Kath looked at her softscreen. “I have a meeting on Venus this afternoon.”

“Give me the co-ordinates,” Nina said, “and I’ll whisk you there.”

Kath smiled. “Very kind of you, Nina. But my transit is already booked, and I have things to do within the takrea. I’d better be getting on my way.”

Things to do… Allen thought in wonder.

He said, “How about a party at our place next week, to celebrate?” He looked around the group. “Everyone can make it?”

Ana and Kapil consulted and nodded; Nina and Natascha too.

Kath Kemp smiled across at him, and he was struck by the sudden fact of how lovely she was. “Try keeping me away,” she said.

Sally said, “That’s a date then. Bye, Kath.”

Kath Kemp waved, then turned and strode towards the sable face of the obelisk.

ALLEN WAS ABOUT to ask Sally where in the solar system she would like to go now when a sudden movement beyond Kath caught his eye. A tall, fair-haired young man was approaching the obelisk as if to pass through its surface, but at the very last second his course veered and he moved towards Kath Kemp.

She stepped backwards, exclaiming in surprise at his proximity, and the smiling young man kept on walking as if intent on knocking Kath from her feet.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the man vanished and in his place was a blue figure — an Obterek — and a split-second after that the Obterek slammed into and merged with Kath Kemp.

Geoff stared at the grotesque amalgam that the blue man and Kath Kemp had become; they flickered — like the visually fleeting images on a spinning coin — as one attempted to gain mastery of the other.

Allen looked around him at his friends, a frozen tableau of shock as they watched the conflict taking place before their eyes.

Then Kath Kemp/Obterek moved like a jerking marionette, step by painful step, towards the surface of the obelisk.

And in his head Allen heard Kath’s tiny, desperate voice, “Help me…”

Sally cried, “What’s happening, Geoff?”

“It’s taking me over…” Kath’s words were desperate within his head. “I… I cannot let it enter the takrea!”

Kath was putting up a terrible fight. The amalgamated figure before them fluctuated between Kath and the Obterek, its forward progress impeded when it became Kath; when the Obterek gained mastery, however, it staggered forward as if leaning into a headwind.

Allen heard screams in his head, a tortured moan from Kath and an even more horrific, bestial cry from the alien creature. He held his head in his hands, mentally deafened by the psychic fallout of the fight talking place before him.

As he watched, horrified, Kath seemed to gain the upper hand. She managed to turn away from the takrea and take laboured steps back towards the café, stopped each time the Obterek gained control of her body but progressing when she gained ascendance.

“What can we do?” Ana yelled at him.

“Just…” he began, not really knowing what he was about to say. Then it came to him. “Ana, Nina… all we can do is put ourselves between… between it and the takrea.”

Nina stared at him. “And then?”

“Then we do our best to stop the Obterek.”

The hybrid figure was perhaps ten metres from the takrea now, a visually discordant, ever-shifting optical illusion — one second the bent, tortured image of Kath Kemp, and the next the straining, far larger figure of the Obterek.

Allen stepped forward. He felt a restraining hand on his arm. “Geoff.”

He turned. Sally stared at him, her features contorted with fright, eyes pleading. “Geoff, please…”

“Sal, I’ve got to…” he began, choking on a sob.

He pulled away, moved hesitantly towards the Kath/Obterek figure. Ana was to his right, perhaps three metres away, Nina to his left.

“It’s… winning,” Kath called out mentally. “It’s much stronger… There’s little I can do, the pain…”

As he watched, the figure flickered and the instances of its appearing as Kath Kemp became less and less frequent. The Obterek was gaining mastery.

He glanced at Ana, reassured by her expression of determination.

“Kath!” he called out the thought, “how can we stop it?”

The Obterek remained for long seconds. Then briefly Kath appeared, and a fraction of a second later vanished. The Obterek seemed to expand, to become visually larger as it dominated, sensing victory.

Slowly, step by step, Allen approached the terrible figure. Beside him, Ana and Nina kept pace.

The Obterek faced them, something almost arrogant in its stance. It was without facial features, so Allen was unable to apprehend the victorious expression he was sure it would have worn. But its body language, its swagger as it drew itself to its full height, convinced him that it was relishing the end game of its conflict with the self-aware entity.

For a fraction of a section a bowed, shrunken Kath Kemp appeared, and in that instant her small voice uttered a string of numbers. Beside him, Nina Ricci repeated them as if in triumph.

“What?” Ana Devi asked.

Allen knew full well what Kath Kemp had given them, knew full well what he might in seconds be called upon to do.

But, he asked himself, would he be equal to the challenge; would he be able to sacrifice himself, and everything he had gained, in order to stop the Obterek?

But what, he asked himself, was the alternative?

On the concourse of the plaza in the shadow of the rearing Serene obelisk, in Saturn’s bright ring-light, three tiny humans confronted the pulsing blue figure.

And the Obterek made its move.

It lowered its head and mighty shoulders and charged like a bull towards the takrea.

The confrontation was over in a matter of seconds, but even so Allen had time to wish that the alien would head towards Nina or Ana rather than towards himself… a treacherous, terrible thought that he banished as soon as it appeared.

Because he was better than that, and anyway the Obterek was heading directly towards him — and he knew exactly what he had to do.

Behind him, as he began running to meet the alien, he heard Sally’s desperate cry — and for all the world he wanted not to go through with this; he wanted to turn to Sally and tell her that he loved her so very much… but he consoled himself, as he came within metres of the alien figure, with the knowledge that Sally already knew this.

The Obterek dodged him, jinked to his right and sprinted for the takrea. Allen dived and managed to trip the creature, which leapt to its feet with amazing agility and sprinted towards the obelisk.

Allen ran and in desperation dived after the figure as it hit the surface of the takrea. He fastened his arms around its muscular midriff and held on. The Obterek screamed, a terrifying war cry which Allen interpreted as acknowledgment of its defeat.

He felt a searing pain, and before it overwhelmed him he repeated the figures Kath had bequeathed him…

And then he was suddenly elsewhere…

And he felt no more.

IT HAPPENED SO fast that Sally was unable to scream — and at the same time it seemed an age between Geoff’s leaving her side and his reaching Kath. Sally stepped forward as he ran towards the figure, wanting to prevent what he was about to do; it was as if she knew, even now, what was about to happen, and while a small part of her wanted to scream aloud in denial, another part of her realised the inevitability of events.

Geoff slammed into the Obterek, seemed to merge with it, and then vanished, taking the Obterek with him.

Sally wept.

Ana came to her side, holding her upright, and Nina joined them and uttered soothing words. She held onto them desperately like the survivor of some terrible shipwreck.

As one they looked up as a blinding white light — like a supernova high above Titan — exploded silently in the dark, star-flecked heavens.