by Eric Brown
They stood in the late afternoon sunlight, facing each other, and Sally felt as if they were the only people in the world.
“I came to tell you,” she began, “that what you did the other day, when you attacked the medical centre and kidnapped me and my colleague, made me more fearful than I had ever been in my life. I feared what you were going to do to me. And at the same time I was angered by my powerlessness to do anything to prevent what you were doing. To you, I was nothing — I, who had for years helped Ugandans and Yemenis, was less than nothing in your eyes. You would kill me and film my death, and show it to the world… and that filled me with anger and hatred and fear.”
He spat, “You are all the same, Westerners, men and women, you bring your ideas here and we do not want them!”
Sally smiled. “And that’s where you’re very wrong, Ali. You see, we are not the same at all. It’s convenient and easy for you to think that we are all the same, but unlike you and people who think like you, we, my colleagues at the centre, are all very different in our opinions and politics, our beliefs or non-beliefs. I work with Muslims and Christians and atheists, with many nationalities… We are all very different, but we work together for the common good.” She shook her head. “But I could talk to you for a million years, and I would never make you understand the values by which I live.”
“I despise your values!”
She smiled at him, and said softly, “But you do not know my values, Ali. You do not know who I am, or what I believe.” She waved, as if to dismiss all this, and went on, “But the reason I came here is to tell you, Ali, that I no longer fear you. Everything is different now, with the coming of the aliens. They have brought a truth to our planet which you, in your ignorance, will have to come to terms with. Perhaps, in time, you will learn peace, and look back and see the wrong you did. I hope so. But…” she smiled at him, radiantly, suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of liberation, “I want to tell you that I no longer fear you, and nor do I hate you.”
She reached into the breast pocket of her shirt. “I have brought you something, Ali.”
She held it out.
He stared at the small tube of antiseptic in her hand.
“For your infection. It needs treatment.”
With great deliberation, he filled his mouth with phlegm and spat in the sand at her feet. “I do not need your Western medicine!”
She shrugged, returned the tube to her pocket, and turned to leave. This was the moment she would turn her back on him, fearing nothing, and walk away.
He said, “What now?”
She hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“You have told the police about me, where I am?”
“I’ve told them nothing,” she said. “But I think Josef Makumbi might. He is in jail now, and in time he will be questioned by the police, and in fear I think he will tell them everything.”
She smiled at the sudden flare of alarm in his eyes, and it filled her with satisfaction.
He stepped towards her, his intent obvious. She held her ground, did not flinch as he came within half a metre of her and tried to raise his arm.
His inability to carry through the action that his will dictated, the thwarted expression on his face, was almost comical to behold. He began to shake.
She peered at him. “Go on, Ali. Try it. Hit me. That’s what you would like to do, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “The days when you could dominate with violence are gone, Ali. Goodbye.”
She turned, a feeling like jubilation swelling within her, and walked away.
She was halted by another cry, but this one was not from Ali.
His wife had emerged from the hut, a plastic carrier bag clutched in her right hand.
She surprised Sally by saying in English, “You are leaving Benali?”
Sally nodded. “I’m going to Kampala.”
The woman hesitated. Ali stared at her, a look of terrible realisation dawning in his eyes.
At last his wife said, “Please, take me with you. I wish to leave.”
Ali shouted something in Arabic, took a step towards his wife. She flinched, cowering and bringing her arm up to protect her face. Ali stood over her, frozen, and tears tracked down his face, trickling into the runnel of his scar.
Slowly, Sally stepped forward and took the woman’s arm. “Come with me,” she said softly.
Silent, eyes fixed in fright on her husband, the woman nodded. Sally drew her away, along the track from the river towards the road and the hill where her car was parked.
Behind them, Ali cried out. He was giving chase, calling out almost incoherently. His cries drew an audience of faces which emerged from the huts on either side and stared at him, which enraged him further.
They reached the car and Sally opened the passenger door and the woman, clutching her scant possessions to her chest, slipped inside.
Ali stood beside the car, ranting now, attempting to reach out but each time finding his movement restricted like a puppet whose controller was suffering a fit.
Sally climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. Beside her, the woman pulled down her veil and spoke quietly to her husband through the open window. Ali opened his mouth to reply but, this time, no words came.
Sally looked at Ali, and their eyes met. He spat, “You will not win!”
“This is not about winning or losing,” she said. “It is not a contest.”
They left the village of Benali and headed south.
They were silent for a time, and then Sally asked, “What did you say to him?”
The woman stared ahead. “I simply told him that I have never loved him, and that every day with him I dreamed of escaping,” she said, then went on in almost a whisper, “Four days ago he told me what he was going to do to the people he took from the medical centre — to two doctors. He was proud and boastful, but when he came back here yesterday he was quiet, and he said nothing about what had happened.”
“We escaped, my colleague and I.”
The woman smiled. “Escaped, like I am doing now.”
They drove on in silence, and a little later Sally asked, “You have money? Will you be okay in Kampala?”
“I have saved a little. I will be fine. In Kallani I trained to be a secretary. I can use a computer and many programs, though for many years I have mended fishing nets and suffered my husband’s beatings.”
Sally slowed down and held out her hand. “I’m Sally,” she said.
The woman smiled and took her hand. “I am Zara,” she said, “and I am very happy to be leaving.”
Sally smiled. “I know exactly what you mean, Zara,” she said.
She accelerated, heading south towards Kampala, and smiled as she considered the new life awaiting her in England.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALLEN CAME AWAKE instantly. He knew exactly where he was and experienced no sense of dislocation. He looked across the aisle at the two facing seats, and then at the one beside him. They were empty. He wondered if the others had been awoken one by one so that, for whatever reasons, they could not confer.
A golden strip pulsed on the floor before him, the only light in the darkness. He stood and followed it, stepped from the plane and found himself in an identical darkness, illuminated only by the golden strip that extended for perhaps five metres before him. He followed it, walking steadily. The odd thing was that, as he went, the length of the strip remained the same; he had the peculiar sensation of walking on a treadmill.
Another odd thing was that he was not in the slightest apprehensive or even overawed. He was aboard an alien starship, he told himself, experiencing that which no human being, other than those who had accompanied him aboard the plane from Uganda, had experienced before. Yet he felt only an intense curiosity. He wondered if the Serene were responsible for this state of mind, too; they had the capability of inhibiting the act of violence in human beings, after all. Perhaps they were dictating his feelings now… and what about his thoughts?
T
hat way, he realised with a smile, lay madness.
He must have been walking for five minutes. He stared into the darkness but could make out nothing, and the glow in the floor revealed nothing of his surroundings either. He realised, then, that although he had carried his holdall aboard the alien plane, he had left without it.
A minute later the glow stretching out before him became shorter, then vanished. He came to a halt in the absolute darkness and waited. Again he felt no fear.
Seconds later he felt something touch the back of his legs; some slight force applied pressure behind his knees; quickly, and involuntarily, he fell into a sitting position. He was caught by something soft and accommodating, like the world’s most comfortable armchair. He sat back, his head against softness, his arms outstretched on some kind of rest.
Then the darkness lifted slowly.
He was seated in what might have been some kind of vast amphitheatre created from the soft, black substance which cradled him — cradled him, he saw, and thousands of others. To either side, and above and below, he made out men and women of all races. Like him, they were staring around in awe. His nearest neighbour, a young Indian woman, was perhaps three metres away, a distance sufficient to make casual conversation difficult. She caught his eye and smiled briefly, and Allen smiled and shook his head in complicit wonder.
The amphitheatre swept around in a vast ellipse, dotted with representatives of humanity ensconced in the sable padding.
He felt an immense emotion — joy and privilege — swell in his chest.
Only then did he turn his attention to the well of the amphitheatre. A glow resided there, like a pool of molten gold, and he knew where he had seen it before: emanating from the nose-cones of the conjoined starships. He guessed, then, where he was; the amphitheatre was somehow formed from the front sections of each of the eight Serene starships.
The Nexus?
As he stared down, the glow swelled from a flattened disc to a pulsing globe, and from it strode a number of golden figures identical to the one which had presented itself to Allen back at Murchison Falls.
He counted a dozen figures ranged in a semi-circle and facing the massed representatives of humanity, and he knew that they continued all around the amphitheatre, hidden by the spherical golden glow. The one before Allen’s section seemed to hover in mid-air, staring directly at him.
Behind the figures, the golden glow diminished, sank, became again a disc. Then that too vanished, to be replaced by an aerial view of the verdant paradise created in the Saharan desert. As he watched, the oases appeared to be increasing in size, growing ever outwards.
A voice, issuing from the golden humanoid before him, said, “The new city continues to grow, and will soon cover the entirety of what was once the Saharan Desert.”
Allen heard a collective gasp from those around him.
“The city is the first of many we will grow around the globe,” the figure — or rather all the figures around the amphitheatre — went on. “In two days we will move on, first to central China, then India and Siberia, followed by Alaska, Brazil, Australia and Borneo.”
Further around the amphitheatre, someone stood up, a tall, southern European woman, who said, “If I may ask: why are you doing this?”
“We are creating the cities as the second phase of the programme to assist humanity in its growth towards stability and continuance. An immediate need for much of humanity is a number of sustainable mass living areas, integrated urban units where millions can live and work without fear of poverty, starvation, violence, political subordination or intimidation.”
“And who will govern these cities?” the same woman enquired.
“They will be self-ruled by elected representatives of each city’s population.”
“And the governments in whose countries these cities are situated?”
“In time,” came the reply, “the function of national governments will be a thing of the past. Nationalism will fade, along with concepts such as national borders and boundaries.”
A murmur of comment swept around the amphitheatre.
A human voice, belonging to someone on the far side of the vast chamber, said, “You’ve created this… this city in the Sahara, one of the most desolate, inimical regions on Earth… but how will it be sustained? What about things like energy, water…?”
“We are in the process of creating desalination plants to convert sea water,” came the reply, “and as for energy… The Serene possess the technological wherewithal to beam limitless energy to the surface of your planet. We have solar converters, machines which transfer the energy of your sun — and others — to wherever in the galaxy we require it.”
Allen smiled at the very idea, then laughed aloud.
The woman who asked the original question stood again. “If I may say this — my original question has not been answered. Why are you doing this?”
There was a pause, then the figure spoke. “We are intervening here on Earth because your race has, in the past few hundred years since what you term your industrial revolution, grown exponentially, a growth fuelled by a fatal combination of political greed and lack of foresight. What is even more tragic in your situation is that many of you — both on an individual level and on that of institutions — know very well what needs to be done in order to prevent a global catastrophe, but cannot enact change for the better because power and vested interest rest in the hands of the few.”
Allen sat back and closed his eyes, and wished that Sally was here to hear what the Serene were saying; she would be unable to restrain her tears of joy.
The voice went on, “No shame should accrue in light of these facts; no individual is really at fault. The process was vastly complex and incremental, a slow-motion, snowballing suicide impossible to stop. A hundred, a thousand races across the face of the galaxy have perished in this way, before we had the wherewithal to step in and correct the aberrant ways of emerging races.”
A ringing silence greeted the words, before someone asked, “And how many races have you saved from themselves?”
“Approaching one hundred.”
“And did they ask for your intervention?” It was a rhetorical question.
“That was impossible, as you well know, for they did not know of our presence until our arrival, just as you did not know of the Serene until recently.”
“And they welcomed your actions to save them?”
“There are always, among the races we assist, those individuals and organisations who oppose our intervention, for they have much to lose: namely, power and wealth. However, these people in time come to realise the rightness of what we are doing.”
Someone nearby stood up, a small Oriental man who asked, “And what say will the human race have in how these changes will be instituted?”
“That depends on the nature of the changes in question: some, like the creation of the green cities, the institution of solar energy — and the concomitant cessation of the production and use of current, polluting forms of energy — are non-negotiable, for they are fundamentally necessary for the safe continuance of the human race. Other changes, political changes, will be in your hands, though guided by our suggestions and expertise.”
An African woman stood and said tremulously, “You… you have banished violence from the planet. I… I would like to know how long will this last? Did you do it so that we could not oppose you with our armies, or…?”
The golden figure spoke. “We have assisted you to achieve the state of non-violence — which several of your philosophies have been advocating for centuries — not so that you would be unable to oppose us, which would have been impossible, but so that you can live now without fear of violence, either individual or state. This is not a temporary measure, but ever-lasting.”
A gasp raced around the amphitheatre. Someone said, “But… violence is something inherent in the psyche of the human race, an action and reaction hardwired into us on some fundamental, chromosomal level, surely…”
“Violence has been inherent in the evolution of the human race, just as it has been and is in the animal kingdom. But there comes a time when the urge to violence needs to be outgrown, when the consequences of violence threaten the very chances of racial, global survival.”
“But surely there will be… psychological, not to say societal, consequences of our inability to commit violence?”
The golden figure pulsed. It spread its arms in an all-encompassing gesture. Allen saw the other golden figures, arced around the amphitheatre, do likewise. “You are correct, there will be consequences, and some of them will be adverse… But none will be as destructive or damaging as the continuance of your ability to conduct violence upon each other would have been. We will ease you through the transition, be assured of that.”
Someone said, “You said you have intervened with other races? And these have managed to overcome their species’ violence?”
“All races are different, as you might imagine. Some fare better than others in their periods of… readjustment. We know that the human race will thrive and prosper.”
A silence grew, before the next question. The small Indian girl next to Allen stood up and said, “This must have taken a… a long time to set up. How long have you been… watching us?”
Allen had the impression then that the golden figures around the chamber were smiling. “We have been aware of the human race for centuries,” they said. “When the time was right, we applied ourselves to the study of your particular problem. We have been closely monitoring developments for the past two hundred years, and working to intervene for the past one hundred.”
“You saw us develop nuclear weapons,” someone said, “and use them… and yet you did not see fit to step in then?”
“But when,” said the figures reasonably, “would have been the right time to step in? Appalling though nuclear weapons are, they are responsible for fewer deaths than the invention of the simple sword. Should we have intervened then? No, the time was right when two factors concurred: when you became technologically capable of wiping yourselves out, and when you had the intellectual capability to understand your place in the universe and the rightness of our need to intervene.”
