The Serene Invasion (36 page)

The lift doors swished open and she found herself in a plush carpeted corridor with a pulsing softscreen on the opposite wall. A name appeared on the screen, Lal Devi, underlined by a flashing arrow indicating that she should turn right. Hesitantly she stepped out and walked down the corridor, reading the nameplates on the doors to right and left as she went.

She came to the door bearing the name Lal Devi and stopped, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She took a deep breath and checked her watch. She was a couple of minutes late.

She knocked, and when she heard a voice call, “Enter,” opened the door and stepped inside.

The first thing she noticed was the opulence of the office. It occupied a corner site, with two great plate-glass windows looking down the length of Manhattan. Behind a big silver desk, shaped like an arrow-head with its point directed at the door, was a slim man with a thin, handsome face. He wore his hair long in a ponytail and sported an amethyst stud in his right ear.

She stared, comparing this slick, besuited businessman with the malnourished urchin she had last seen twenty years ago.

He hardly glanced away from his softscreen as he gestured her to take a seat at the point of his desk. “Ah, Miss... Ashok. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet your superior, Kapil Gavaskar, but illness knows no social boundaries.”

She forced herself not to dislike her brother for his opening words, as he rose and took her hand in a limp, perfunctory shake.

“I’m Lal Devi, James Morwell’s right hand man, as you no doubt know.” He gestured to the screen. “And we’re interested in what you have to offer as regards your Chinese links.”

She said, “Bilal...”

He looked up and frowned. “Now, no one has called me that for a long time.”

She stared at him, this slick, fast-talking, high-flying aide to a one-time billionaire tycoon. How did you come to this, she thought?

She found her voice and said, “Do you know who I am?”

He glanced at his screen, his face quirking with a quick frown. “Miss... Ashok. I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

“You don’t recognise me?”

He looked mystified, then a little annoyed. But was it any wonder that he didn’t recognise her? She had changed so much in appearance from the ragged street kid she had been.

Her heart laboured as if pumping treacle. She felt a hot flush rise up her face as she said, “We last saw each other, Bilal, many years ago. On Howrah station, the day before you disappeared.”

He stared at her and shook his head, and Ana wasn’t sure if he was totally confused or had realised who she was and was denying the fact.

Then he whispered, “Ana?”

She held his startled gaze. Despite her earlier resolutions not to intimidate him with accusations, she found herself saying, “Bilal, why didn’t you say goodbye? Why did you just leave like that? There one day, gone the next...”

He shook his head. “I...” he began, lost for words.

He reached out, tapped his softscreen, and said, “Amanda, cancel my appointment at 11.30. I’ll be free again at midday.”

He sat back in his swivel seat, the cushion squeaking, laid back his head and closed his eyes.

She had hoped his reaction would be one of joy at their reunion. She had foreseen tears, maybe, and apologies, and had expected him to move around his desk and embrace her.

He did none of these things, just lay back with his eyes closed, the expression on his aquiline face unreadable.

“Bilal, I have come a long way to see you. All the way from India.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Ana... This is something of a shock, to say the least.”

“A pleasant shock?” she asked. “Or...?”

“An unexpected shock.”

They stared at each other, Ana trying to hide her pain at his response. She said, “I just... I just wanted to know why you didn’t contact me before you left, why you didn’t say goodbye. You can’t imagine how I felt.” She reached into her handbag, pulled something out, and slid it across the desk to him.

He picked it up and turned the flattened enamel cup.

“I found this... on the tracks. For a long time I thought you might be dead, only no one had reported a street kid’s body on the tracks, so I hoped... Oh, how I hoped! But the years went by and there was no word from you.” She stopped, took a breath, and asked, “So, I would just like to know why you never said goodbye.”

He turned the flattened cup over and over, and said as if to himself, “I left it on the track, to be destroyed... A symbol, if you like, of my leaving.”

She repeated, “Bilal – why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

“Ana... it was a long time ago,” he said, as if this somehow excused his actions.

“What do you mean by that?” she snapped.

He gestured, spread his hands, and smiled disarmingly. “Twenty years, Ana... I hardly recall?”

“What happened?” she almost cried.

He shook his head.

She went on, “It was the day after Holi. We’d had so much fun throwing paint powder at commuters... How we laughed! We went to the sleeping van late that night, and in the morning when I woke up you were no longer beside me. That wasn’t unusual. Remember, you often got up at dawn and went out looking for food... But this time it was different. You never came back. And the following day I found your cup, squashed flat on the tracks... So what
happened
, Bilal?”

He nodded, as if in acknowledgment of all she said, and reassurance that he would come up with an adequate response. “Ana... a few weeks before Holi I met a man. A Westerner.” He waved a hand. “No, it was nothing like that. He wasn’t like Sanjeev Varnaputtram. Remember him?”

She felt a flare of anger. How could she forget Varnaputtram?

He went on, “This Westerner worked for a corporation in the States which ran schools and colleges in India. He wasn’t out scouting for pupils – our meeting was quite by chance. You know how I always loved reading the
Hindustan Times
, the
Times of India
– anything I could get my hands on, left by commuters on the trains. One day I was riding between stations, begging, when I picked up a paper and began reading. I was sitting across from a tall, pale American. We got talking. We discussed politics, and I think I – I don’t mean to sound arrogant here, Ana – but I think I impressed him. He was working in the city and would be there for a couple of weeks. He invited me to his apartment, where we talked and talked, and it was as if I’d found a teacher, someone who filled me with knowledge and respected me, a street kid.”

How wonderful for you, Ana thought.

“He told me who he was, what he represented, and asked if I would care to sit an entrance exam–”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Ana asked, fighting back the tears.

Bilal shrugged. “I... I honestly don’t know, Ana. I was so excited. The college was in Madras, and graduates were promised places in a business college here in New York.”

“But you could have told me! You could have said what was happening, told me where you were going, said goodbye!”

He shook his head. “It all happened so quickly. I sat the exam and a couple of days later the Westerner, Paul, he told me I had passed, and that the following day I should accompany him south to Madras.”

She stared at him. “Why didn’t you come and say goodbye?”

He looked down at his desk and said, “Because I didn’t want to hurt you, Ana. Also... you would have begged me not to leave, pleaded with me. I loved you... I didn’t want to see you hurt, upset. Because, don’t you see, I had to go. I had to get out of there. The opportunity was too great to pass up.”

“But you left me there, left me to scratch a living on the station, begging, stealing...”

Was she being unreasonable, she wondered? She tried to see the situation from his point of view. He was right in that she would have been devastated, and pleaded with him not to go, but even so she could not help but feel a sense of betrayal.

“I know, I know...” He shook his head. “Don’t you think it pained me? I was plagued with guilt for years and years. I thought of you every day...”

“But you never tried to get in contact with me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course I did...”

“But?” she pressed, leaning forward in her seat.

“One day, perhaps five years later, I was in India on business. I went to the station, looked for you. I asked around, asked Mr Jangar, a couple of porters. They said they hadn’t seen you for weeks and weeks... So I gave up and the following day came back to New York.”

She took a little hope from this. Five years after Bilal vanished, she would have been eleven. For a couple of months she and Prakesh and Gopal had ridden a night train to New Delhi to see what the living was like at the railway station there. But the street kids had been feral, hostile, and had repelled the invaders with stones and broken glass bottles. They had tried other stations along the line to Kolkata, but had found nowhere like Howrah, and had eventually returned.

She told him this, and said, “You tried
once
. Once in twenty years. If only you’d gone back, tried again...”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Ana. You’re right. I should have done. But... but after that time, I feared the worst, feared that you were dead, and I threw myself into my work. Try to see this from my point of view.”

She gave a long sigh, at once despairing and conciliatory. Of course, how much of what he said was true? He’d changed a lot over the years; he was a businessman, adept with words, with twisting meanings. He could easily be – what was the phrase? – spinning her a line so that he came out of the encounter with his pride intact and his actions justified.

She looked around the office and said, “You’ve done very well for yourself, Bilal. I bet you have a wonderful apartment, expensive things...” She almost broke down then, for some reason she could not fathom.

He smiled. “I do okay. Mr Morwell is very generous. Though I must say I do work hard for the Corporation. And things have changed a lot since the arrival of the Serene. Ten years ago the Morwell Corporation was worth billions. Our annual turnover was greater than the GDP of many sizable countries. We had real power; we were powerful movers, not just the effete, emasculated facilitators we are today.”

She stared at him and said, “You sound as if you resent what the Serene have done for us?”

He rocked his head from side to side. “I can see that in some ways, some people might think that we are better off for the apparent largesse of the Serene. But the fact is that the Serene have taken something away from us that was very important.”

She stared at him. “You mean,” she said with heavy sarcasm, “the ability to kill and torture and maim each other?

“That is only a part of it, a symbolic part, if you like. The Serene have taken away our evolutionary future and imposed upon us their own regime – their own, if you like, evolutionary game plan. And,” he went on, as if warming to his theme, “has it ever occurred to you that for all their largesse, the Serene have never made manifest why they are doing this for us, what their larger, grand plan might be?”

She interrupted, “I would have thought that that is obvious – that preventing the human race from destroying itself is reason enough.”

He smiled, somewhat smugly, and shrugged. “We have only the word of the Serene that we were heading for extinction. The point is debatable.”

She would not let him have the last word. “Even if it is debatable, what is not in contention is that millions of innocent lives have been saved by the Serene intervention. So much misery has been avoided...”

He shrugged again, a smug gesture she found insufferable. “The history of humanity, the history of the world, is one of mutual violence – the law of the jungle. It got us to where we were ten years ago – the pre-eminent species on the planet. It made us what we were, an independent, intelligent race questing ahead in the field of science and technology, forging our
own
way forward. Now...” He smiled sadly. “Now we are nothing more than the puppets of the Serene, jerking on the strings of unknown and unseen masters whose motives are opaque to us.”

She allowed a silence to develop, and then said quietly, “I see that our opinions are diametrically opposed, Bilal, as I have wholeheartedly embraced the coming of the Serene.”

That patronising smile again as he said, “You always were ruled by your heart, not your head, little sister. But tell me, what makes you think that the way of the Serene is the right way for the human race?”

“They have eliminated violence from the world,” she said, “and in so doing have banished fear. The powerful, the hostile powerful, no longer hold sway. The world is fair, equitable. There is no more poverty. Everyone has food, and a roof over their heads.”

“And we are in thrall to aliens whose
raison d’être
remains unknown.”

“The Serene,” she found herself saying, “are wholly good.”

He raised a supercilious eyebrow at this. “Oh, and you would know that personally, would you?”

She took a breath and said, “A week ago I was in Fujiyama when there was... a breach in the
charea
. The Obterek – other aliens, enemies of the Serene – attacked.”