The Serene Invasion (41 page)

She smiled. “I was thinking... it would be lovely if you could come to visit me in India soon.”

He nodded but did not look her in the eye. “I’d like that.”

“You haven’t been back for fifteen years?”

“I don’t cover India now, just the US. I’ve had no reason to go back.”

She sipped her coffee and asked, “So... what’s it like working for the Morwell Organisation?”

“It pays well, and sometimes the work is interesting.”

“And your boss... What’s his name, James Morwell?”

“I think we understand each other. We share the same views, the same philosophy...”

She winced inwardly, and said, “He indoctrinated you, Bilal?”

“Now, isn’t that a big word, sister?”

“Don’t patronise me.”

“And don’t call me Bilal, please. I left that name behind when I got away from Kolkata. I’m Lal now.”

She stared at him. The café was filling up, people queuing at the counter, others standing and eyeing their table as if suggesting they drink up and leave.

Ana felt an uneasy tension in the air, but knew it was all in her head. This meeting with her brother wasn’t going well.

He said, “I prefer to think that I was ‘educated’, Ana. The Serene are... wrong. I was educated –”

“Please, let’s not argue...”

“Just,” he said, taking his hand from his pocket, “as you one day will be educated.”

For some reason his fingers were glowing blue. She looked up, into his eyes, and tried to fathom what she saw in them.

Someone was moving towards her table, and a light had been switched on nearby, a dazzling golden light which intensified...

Bilal reached out for her hand, but before he made contact the golden light resolved itself into the shape of a self-aware entity and slammed into her brother. He vanished, absorbed into the form of the golden figure, which rolled with the impact of slamming into Bilal, stood and moved from the café in a blur of light.

Ana screamed.

She looked up at another approaching light and, for the second time that week, felt the life-force of a self-aware entity hit her.

S
HE CAME TO
her senses and found that she was surrounded by darkness. She felt the energy of the self-aware entity cocooning her.

“What happened?” she asked.

A voice sounded in her head, telling her everything.

She sobbed as she recalled the look in Bilal’s eyes as he reached out to her, the light of the betrayal he knew he was committing.

“What happened to him?” she asked – but the voice in her head chose not to reply.

Ana stepped forward, from darkness into dazzling light.

She was standing before her apartment in India... but something was wrong with the light. She looked up, into a bright blue sky streaked with impossibly high clouds. And overhead, tumbling end over end, was what looked like a huge, yam-shaped moon.

She turned suddenly and gasped at what she saw.

Her apartment was on the edge of a long ridge which overlooked a rolling green plane, at once exotic and idyllic. Other dwellings occupied the margin of the ridge; next to her apartment was an A-frame, and beyond that an ivy-covered, typically English house.

A small group of people were gathered before the English house, two of whom Ana recognised.

A golden figure stood before her, and Ana asked, “Where am I?”

“For your own safety, you are on Mars. Do not worry. We have contacted Kapil Gavaskar and he will soon be joining you.”

Before the English house, Nina Ricci said something to the Englishman, Geoff Allen, and a tall woman Ana did not know. Nina looked across at Ana and waved.

Smiling to herself, pushing the thought of Bilal’s betrayal to the back of her mind, Ana stepped from the shadow of her apartment and joined them.

THREE

2045

CHAPTER ONE

A
LLEN 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...”