The Serene Invasion (37 page)

He leaned forward. “I heard nothing of this.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have. The Serene imposed a news blackout.”

He said, “Typical of our oppressors...”

She went on, “I saw killing on a mass scale. I was killed myself, lasered here.” She smote the area between her breasts. “Only... a self-aware entity absorbed me, is the only way I can describe it, took me away from the slaughter and healed me.”

He stared at her, evidently wondering whether to believe her. He said, “And this makes the Serene wholly good? They save your life, so therefore...”

Exasperated, she interrupted. “I know the Serene are good. I have worked for them for ten years, and though the nature of the work is not known to me... something has...
filtered
into my consciousness, and I know the Serene are working for the good of humanity.”

He leaned back in his chair. “That’s a grand claim to make, isn’t it? Working for the Serene?”

She said proudly, and despised herself for it seconds later, “I am a representative of the Serene. Myself and thousands like me, selected ten years ago on the day the Serene came to Earth...”

It was a boast that, she was pleased to see, had silenced this arrogant man who was her brother.

At last he said, “So... I see that we obviously have our differences. But I can’t see why this should mean that we can’t get along in future like brother and sister...”

Despite herself, despite some deep dislike of the person Bilal had become, Ana found herself smiling. He was after all her big brother, who for many years had protected her, and maybe even loved her.

He got through to his secretary and had her fetch them coffee, then sat back in his chair and said, “Enough of the Serene, Ana. Do you recall the day I saved you from a beating by Mr Jangar?”

Ana looked past the slick businessman he had become, saw the scruffy street urchin with tousled hair and food around his mouth, who had caused a diversion in Mr Jangar’s office, allowing Ana to slip past the station master’s bulk and escape onto the crowded platform.

For the next hour they chatted about their old life on Howrah station.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
LLEN AWOKE AND
found himself on a train in the middle of the English countryside.

To his fellow passengers it must have appeared that Allen had surfaced from a troubled sleep, but all he could recall was the jet façade of the obelisk rushing to meet him. He wondered how long had elapsed. He looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning on a beautiful sunny summer’s day, and the train was pulling into the stop before Wem. His watch also told him that it was the 10
^th
, the same day he had visited the Fujiyama arboreal city – so given the time difference he had made the journey from Tokyo to where he was now in a matter of an hour... Obviously his calculations were way out, but he felt no urge to work through them again. What mattered, after the nightmare of slaughter at Fujiyama, was that soon he would be home.

He sat up, recalling the events in the fields around the vanished city tower, and touched the place just above his right kidney where the laser had skewered him. There was no pain, no sensation at all. He recalled that a golden figure had seemingly absorbed Nina Ricci. And he too had been taken, saved, by the self-aware entity.

He wondered then if the black obelisk in Tokyo was some kind of medical centre, where he had been taken for surgery. But the surgery must have been swift if that were so, and he recalled the cessation of pain on the way from Fujiyama and reasoned that the golden figure had effected physical repairs then.

On the luggage rack above his head was his hold-all, and wrapped around his right forearm was his softscreen. The Serene, or their minions, had thought of everything.

He considered contacting Sally and telling her that he would soon be home – hours earlier than expected – but decided to surprise her. He imagined her in her study, or perhaps sitting beneath the cherry tree in the garden, catching up on the latest medical advances on the various softscreen feeds she subscribed to. The thought warmed him.

He considered her message of the day before; the accident in which her friend Kath had died. He would do what little he could to comfort her when he got back, rather than launching into an account of the horrors he had experienced.

Ten minutes later the monotrain pulled into Wem and Allen alighted. He left the station and walked along the high street, and after the impersonality of Tokyo he was cheered by the familiar faces of the locals who were out and about. He realised that it was a scene that had changed little over the years – apart from the absence now of once-familiar company names that had made every town and city the same. Gone were the chains, Macdonald’s and KFC and their like, which had force-fed a willing populace a diet of low quality food laced with addictive fats, salts and sugars. He wondered if this was not merely an obvious consequence of the Serene’s restructuring of the world’s economy, but a follow-on from their
charea
injunction. Did the Serene, in their wisdom, consider what the food industry had perpetrated on their customers a form of protracted and insidious violence?

Gone too were the butcher’s shops, of course. Only the occasional tiled frontage remained, showing euphemistic scenes of contented cows grazing bucolic meadows. Healthfood outlets, fruit and veg shops, proliferated, along with privately run family concerns prospering under the fiscal aegis of the alien arrival.

A few weeks ago Sally had mentioned the health benefits that had accrued from the changes. In her line of work, as a country GP, she saw fewer cases of obesity and heart disease, fewer cancers and stress-related maladies. All, she said, attributable to the Serene in one way or another.

He wondered at the die-hard few who opposed what the Serene were doing, and that led him to reflect on the attack at Fujiyama, and the motives of the Obterek.

H
E CROSSED TOWN
and took the canal path to the outskirts, and five minutes later came to the back gate that led into the long garden.

He paused for a second and stared at the idyllic scene, the lawn and the trees and the mellow, golden stone of the house. Sally was not sitting beneath the cherry tree, but she must have been in the kitchen because, as he pushed through the gate and walked down the lawn, she emerged from the back door and dashed to meet him.

They hugged for a long time, and when she pulled away she was beaming.

“I got your message,” he said. “I’m sorry–”

She shook her head. “It’s okay... Look, it’s hard to explain. I know I said I saw Kath... there was an accident, as I said. I saw her
die
.” She shook her head and laughed, and Allen stared at her.

“Sally?”

She tugged his hand. “Come. We’ll talk over a cup of tea. There’s a lot to tell you about.”

Bemused, he followed her into the house and sat at the kitchen table.

She made two mugs of Earl Grey and sat next to him. She took a deep breath, shook her head, and laughed again. “I honestly don’t know where to begin.” She reached out and stroked his cheek. “Geoff, you look so young when you pull that mystified expression.”

“You’re talking in riddles, Sal.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s been a strange couple of days. Look, Kath, my long-time friend Kath Kemp, is not what she seems. You might find this hard to believe, Geoff, but she’s a self-aware entity.”

He had a flash vision of Nina Ricci telling him about the man she had met in Barcelona...

He nodded. “And when you saw the accident, and you thought she’d died...?”

“Oh, it was horrible, horrible. She
was
dead. No pulse. You can’t imagine what...” She hugged her tea cup, then went on. “An ambulance came, whisked her away. And then... the following morning, she called me and arranged a meeting. She came over and told me she was a self-aware entity and had been here, on Earth, for a little over a hundred years.”

He stared at her. “Small, dumpy, mousey, homely Kath Kemp? A self-aware entity?”

“I know, I know... But somehow, it made sense. And, you know what? I see her still as the same person. Still a friend... My friend, the alien entity.”

“And did she tell you what she was doing here?”

“Not everything. A little. I think the best description would be that she’s a facilitator.”

He interrupted. “Don’t tell me. That accident... it wasn’t an accident, right?”

She was watching him closely. “No. No, it wasn’t, but how...?”

He told her about Fujiyama, the dissolution of the tower and his hairs-breadth escape, then the attack of the blue figures.

“They’re called the Obterek,” he said, “according to a journalist I met. Aliens who oppose the Serene. They... I can’t recall exactly the phrase she used, but the Obterek somehow reconfigured the reality of the arboreal city area and undermined the Serene’s
charea
injunction. Then they set about killing as many humans as possible.”

Sally said, “But there was nothing on any of the news channels...”

“I suspect the Serene imposed a blackout.” He paused. “I said the blue figures began killing humans... and they succeeded, but... I don’t really know how to explain this – but the golden figures, the self-aware entities, brought them back to life. I saw the journalist die. Then she was absorbed by a SAE...” He stopped, pulled the flap of his shirt from his trousers, and twisted to peer down at his midriff.

Sally slipped from the table and knelt beside him. “You? You were hit?”

His fingers traced where the laser had impacted. The skin was smooth, unblemished.

“It hit me here, and the pain...” He shook his head in wonder.

She took his hand and kissed his knuckles. “What happened?”

“I felt the impact, the pain...” As he spoke, tears came to his eyes. He dashed them away and went on, “And I thought I was dead. I... do you know something, I thought of you and Hannah, your grief...”

She sat on his lap and they hugged. “It’s fine now, everything’s okay.”

“Then something else hit me, a physical force, and I was... somehow
inside
... a self-aware entity. It left the area at speed. I passed out, and the last I recall was heading towards the obelisk in Tokyo, and I felt panic at the imminent impact. And then I woke up on the train ten miles south of Wem.” He looked up at her. “What’s happening, Sally? Fujiyama? Here? The Obterek? Did Kath say anything?”

She frowned. “A little, but not much more than I’ve told you. But she’s calling in tomorrow on the way back from Birmingham. She has something she needs to discuss with us.”

“I’m not sure I like the way you said ‘something,’ Sal.”

She looked up at the wall clock. “Three fifteen. Tell you what, let’s take the canal path to the school and pick up Trouble. I have something to tell you on the way.”

She stood up and fetched her handbag.

“That ‘something’ again.” He smiled. “Don’t you think you’ve told me enough already?”

They left the house and Sally locked the back door.

As they strolled hand in hand along the canal path, with insects buzzing in the hedges and water-boatmen skimming the still surface of the water, she said, “How would you like to live on Mars?”

He peered at her. He went for levity. “Well, all things considered, I’m pretty settled in Shropshire, and I’ve heard property prices there are astronomical.”

She feigned pushing him into the canal. “I’m serious.”

“Kath, right? That’s what she wants to talk to us about tomorrow?”

“She told me a little about it. They, the Serene and the SAEs, have terraformed Mars, and they won’t stop there. They’re pushing outwards, through the solar system... and they need colonists.”

“Us? Me and you and Hannah?”

She nodded. “I’m a medic, and in demand. You’re a representative –”

“Whatever that means.”

“Kath was serious. They want colonists to settle Mars first, and after that...”

He thought about it, about a terraformed Mars; it was the stuff of boyhood dreams. He considered strolling in the foothills of Olympus Mons and laughed aloud.

Sally nudged him. “What?”

He told her. “Hannah would miss her friends. But I suppose kids are adaptable...”

“You’re already considering it?”

“No, not really. Let’s wait to see what Kath has to say, okay?”

They collected Hannah from school, tired and rosy-cheeked from a long day. She ran on ahead, skipping and shouting with a couple of friends. On the way back, Geoff suggested they pop into the Three Horseshoes. “I could kill a pint.”

They sat at the table by the fishpond while Hannah lay on her belly and poked a finger into the water. The fish broke the surface, staring up at her. On his way to the bar, Geoff wondered what the koi made of the giant being whose pink finger promised, but did not deliver, food.

He carried two pints of Leffe and a fresh orange juice from the bar, and they sat in the westering sun and watched their daughter play with the fish. Sally said, “Mars...”