The Serene Invasion (19 page)

“And have you yourself ever met a member of the Serene?”

The figure gazed at him. “That honour has never befallen me, but several of my contemporaries have had the privilege.”

“And what are the chances that I might one day meet a Serene?”

He sensed the being smile. “As a selected representative of an uplifted race,” it said, “the chances I would assess as...
good
.”

Allen smiled, then laughed. “If I’d been told about any of this a few days ago...” he began.

The golden figure said, “And now, if you have no more questions...”

“I have about a million, but it’d take a year to think of how to phrase them.”

“There will be time enough in the years ahead, my friend. Now, you wish to be transported to London?”

He stared. “How could you possibly know that?”

The figure inclined its domed and pulsing head. “The Serene know so much,” it said, and faded from view.

The padding around Allen flowed, returned him to an upright position. He followed the golden strip-light on the ground, and minutes later found himself aboard the alien plane. He was the first human of four to take his seat, and the second he did so he slipped into unconsciousness.

S
PRING HAD COME
to London, sunlight replacing the grey drizzle he had left just days before – but that was not the only change. The ad-screens plastered across the walls of buildings as he came into Victoria monorail station no longer flashed with tawdry advertisements. Every one of them showed the eightfold coming together of the alien starships over rural China, and the growth, on the parched land far below, of a second green city.

He noticed a change among his fellow Londoners, too. There was a collective air of excitement about the place, a buzz he had experienced only in times of momentous events – the outbreak of war, or Great Britain’s victory in the 2022 World Cup. Everyone was discussing the arrival of the aliens – the fact that they were called the ‘Serene’ was not public knowledge yet – and it appeared that even now, in the early days of the
charea
, some subtle change had come over the citizens of the capital. Was he imagining it, or were people more polite to each other, more respectful? As if, concomitant to the blanket ban on violence, individuals were wary of showing even such nascent signs of violence as bad temper or irritability with their fellow man.

He wondered how long it might be before a more unconscious psychological response manifested itself? Denied the cathartic release of violence might some individuals, the psychotic and unstable, suffer increased mental conflict? And what about citizens who never thought of resorting to violence? Would the very fact of violence being denied have some effect on society as a whole? No doubt, over the days and weeks ahead, the newsfeeds and TV channels would be bursting with pundits expounding their views at length.

On the way from Heathrow he read on his softscreen that the very first official communiqué from the alien ships had been received at the UN headquarters. The Visitors – as the news media had dubbed them – had announced that they would broadcast their intentions to the world at three that afternoon, Greenwich mean time.

Just as he was about to alight at Victoria, and take the underground to Notting Hill – where Sally would be awaiting him – he heard a couple of businessmen discussing in anxious tones what the aliens might have planned. One invoked the old film
Independence Day
, another
The War of the Worlds
, and both agreed that the end was nigh... Nursing his knowledge like a privilege, Allen felt like telling them that they were foolish and that there was nothing to worry about.

He left the carriage and took the packed escalator down to the Tube, and as he made his rattling journey west to his apartment and Sally, he saw his first case of ‘spasming,’ as it came to be known.

A dozen school kids were arguing in the aisle. In the general verbal to and fro, one particular insult was taken badly and a youth moved towards another, anger on his thin face. He pulled a knife, drawing gasps from nearby passengers, then stopped suddenly, his face twitching, his entire body convulsing as if in the grip of some autonomic malaise.

“He’s spasming! Spasming!” the others taunted, dancing around the stricken youth.

Allen stepped from the train at Notting Hill, thinking that the display of spasming and the resulting taunts were eminently preferable to the violence that had been circumvented.

H
E UNLOCKED THE
door to his flat and stepped into the hall, the pleasurably tight pressure of anticipation within his chest. He heard a sound from the lounge, dropped his holdall and waited for Sally to emerge. She appeared in the doorway in faded blue jeans and a white cheese-cloth blouse. She stopped there, her breath caught, then rushed at him. He lifted her off the floor and it came to him that the heft of her in his arms, her reality, was far more meaningful, far more emotionally resonant, than his recent encounter with the extraterrestrials.

He carried her into the lounge and collapsed on the settee; they kissed and hugged, pulling away frequently to look at each other.

She appeared far more beautiful than he recalled her ever being in Africa; her face was fuller now, no longer taut and stressed, and she’d had her hair cut and styled, shortened to shoulder-length.

“You look... incredible.”

She laughed. “It’s great to be back. I can’t believe the range of food. I forgot what London was like... I’m eating well. I’ve put on pounds!” She patted her perfectly flat stomach and laughed.

“All the more to love,” he said.

She tugged at his shirt, and they undressed and moved to the bedroom.

Later, lying face to face in the sun that slanted in through the bay window, she stroked his arm and murmured, “Tell me all about what happened on the alien ship.”

“The Serene,” he said, “hail from a star twenty-odd light years from Earth, a star we call Delta Pavonis.”

He told her about his experience aboard the nexus of alien ships, the amphitheatre containing ten thousand fellow human representatives, and what the ‘self-aware entities’ had said.

He seemed to talk for a long time, recounting his impressions, his feelings.

“And they chose you,” she said, as if in awe.

He laughed. “For my humanity, my empathy.”

She whispered, “Which is the reason I fell in love with you, Geoff Allen.”

“Thank you. But enough of me. What have you been up to?”

“Well...” she began, then told him about the encounter with her kidnapper in the village of Benali.

“And... how did he react?”

“With anger, especially when I offered him antiseptic for his face... He came for me and...”

He said, “There’s already a term for it.” He described the youths he’d seen on the Tube earlier. “It’s called spasming.”

“That’s exactly what happened when he tried to attack me. He stopped dead, taut, and...
spasmed
.”

She was silent for a while, thinking back. He said, “It must have been... satisfying.”

She nodded. “Yes. Yes, it was. But then... then something happened, and I don’t know whether I did the right thing, or...”

“What?”

She sighed. “Ali had a wife, Zara. It was obvious from how he spoke to her that... that he treated her like an animal, to be blunt. When I was about to leave, she ran from their hut and asked to come with me. I... I don’t know whether what I did then was a sadistic impulse, done to get another one over on my enemy... or done out of altruism. I said she could come with me, and we made for the car, Ali following in distress and anger, and spasming as he tried to prevent Zara from leaving him.”

She fell silent, shaking her head.

She murmured, “She told me about her life as I drove down to Kampala. You wouldn’t believe it, in the twenty-first century. She was little more than a slave. Ali wanted a son, but Zara fell pregnant twice and both times with a girl, so he forced her to terminate the pregnancies. And he beat her, abused her. She’s an educated woman, not that that makes the slightest bit of difference to the reprehensibility of his attacks. But she was clever enough to know that she deserved more. And then with the coming of the Serene... this gave her the courage to act.”

He thumbed a tear from her cheek. “Sally, you did the right thing. Don’t browbeat yourself trying to scrutinise your motivations.”

“But one’s motivations are important, Geoff. They’re who we are, after all.”

He smiled and shrugged and wondered why some people tortured themselves like this, needlessly examining their actions and reactions and the reasons for them.

“You’re a good person, Sally.”

She looked momentarily unhappy, then said, “Don’t you question yourself, Geoff? Analyse your motivations?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, maybe...”

She smiled, reached out and stroked his cheek. “That’s one of the things I love about you, you know, you’re so...”

“Go on, say it. ‘Simple’.”

She laughed. “Uncomplicated.”

He remembered something, looked across the room at the wall clock and said, “It’s a quarter to three. The Serene are broadcasting an announcement on the hour. We could go down to the King George and watch it there?”

“Let’s do that,” she said, jumping out of bed and dressing hurriedly. “I could kill a G&T.”

On their way to the pub, arm in arm, they discussed the ramifications of the Serene’s
charea
.

“So much will change, Geoff. It’ll take us a long time, and much soul-searching, to adjust ourselves, our psyches, to the consequences. I was reading yesterday about suicides, or potential suicides. They can’t kill themselves, though dozens have blogged about trying to find inventive, non-violent ways to do so... Intentional ‘accidents’, by whatever means – but they all fail.”

“Which will have its own psychological fall-out,” he said. “The shrinks will have a field day.”

“Have you seen the coverage from America? The Republicans are up in arms – well, they would be, if...” She laughed. “They’re demanding action from their government – as if the government could act! It’s nice to see the all-powerful demon rendered impotent for once.” She smiled. “The gun lobby refuse to believe it’s not some temporary thing that will go away so they can go back to the good old days of being able to shoot each other with the slightest provocation.”

“Well, they can still bear arms, as per the Second Amendment... They thankfully just can’t use them.”

“You obviously haven’t heard the latest. I don’t know if it’s any more than a rumour – but I wouldn’t put it past them. Apparently some arms manufacturer is looking into developing something called Random Factor Weaponry. It’s based on the theory of intended or unintended consequences. If you pull a trigger, they say, and the obvious consequence is that it will result in the death or injury of someone, then the act is rendered impossible thanks to
charea
. But if there were some randomised factor built into the pulling of the trigger, or the pressing of the button... so that the action
might not
result in death or injury, then, according to the theorist, this could be a way of getting around the Serene’s proscription on violence.”

Allen shook his head. “I sometimes despair...”

“The delights of capitalism for you.”

For a Saturday afternoon, the streets of London were preternaturally quiet; he put it down to the imminent announcement from the Serene. Everyone was at home in front of their televisions, awaiting the most momentous broadcast in history.

Sally said, “And your golden men, the ‘self aware entities’, have been seen all over the place.”

“They have?”

“Reports have come in from around the world. Citizens have seen them standing on rooftops, on mountainsides, just standing there, absolutely motionless and silent, just watching...”

They pushed through the entrance of the King George, and Allen was surprised to see that the main bar was only half full. A flatscreen TV played in the far corner. He ordered a pint of Fuller’s best bitter and a gin and tonic, and carried them to a table before the flatscreen.

They clinked glasses. “Here’s to the Serene.”

“To the Serene.”

They stared up at the screen, which showed an aerial shot of the eightfold arrangement of starships over China, and the expanding green city far beneath. Seconds later the image switched; the murmuring of fellow drinkers ceased and a sudden silence fell across the bar.

A golden figure, swirling with interior light, stared out of the screen.

It spoke – its tone, Allen realised for the first time, neither male nor female.

Beside him, Sally reached out and gripped his hand.

“We are the Serene,” said the figure, “and we have come to aid the people of planet Earth.”

CHAPTER NINE

J
AMES
M
ORWELL COWERED
in the corner of the bathroom, naked, as the woman – also naked – advanced on him.