by Eric Brown
He thought about it. “I suppose the resulting increase in population will be sustained by the limitless supply of energy and the vast new cities… But even so, the planet is finite.”
She was smiling at him.
“What?” he asked.
“Would you like to hear another of my hunches?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No,” she said. “My hunch is this: I think soon the Serene will take us off-planet, away from Earth, to colonies in the solar system…”
“Nice idea,” he said. “Imagine living on a moon beneath the rings of Saturn…”
“You mock me, but I am deadly serious. As you say, the planet is a finite system, and the population is increasing dramatically. So where will we go, but off-planet?”
He shrugged. “You might be right,” he said. “If the Serene can bring other forms of life here, then I see no reason why they can’t take us… elsewhere.”
“‘Other forms of life’? Oh, you mean the arboreal cities?”
He nodded. “I’m looking forward to seeing them. I’m told they’re the eighth wonder of the world.”
“But shouldn’t that be eleventh, coming after the eight joined starships, the greening cities, and…” — she pointed a crimson lacquered nail at the towers across the plaza — “the obelisks?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve lost count.”
He’d read online accounts of the arboreal cities, and the mammoth trees from Antares II which made terrestrial giant redwoods seem like saplings in comparison, and when his editor had suggested he do a photo-shoot of the Fujiyama arboreal city — as he would be visiting Japan anyway — he had jumped at the chance.
He checked his watch. “But speaking of arboreal cities… our train leaves in ten minutes.”
They finished their drinks and crossed the plaza to the station, had their softscreen reservations scanned, and strolled the length of the platform to the second carriage. Allen relaxed in a luxurious window seat and minutes later the torpedo-train slipped from the station.
Nina Ricci sat opposite him, silent as she regarded the reforestation projects north of Tokyo.
Allen stared through the window, noting the new sea defences that had been erected along the coast after the tsunami of 2018. They slid past a vast energy distribution station just as a beam of concentrated light fell to Earth like a meteor, dazzling him and the hundred other passengers who ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ like school children.
As the train sped around the bend of a bay he closed his eyes, feigning sleep, and considered Sally and her distraught message.
CHAPTER FIVE
SALLY FOUND A post-it note and wrote: I’m in the back garden. Take the side path to the left and I’ll see you there. She tore off the yellow rectangle, stuck the note to the front door beside the big brass knocker and retreated to the back garden.
For some reason she didn’t want to open the front door and confront Kath — or whatever it was that Kath had become. She did not, she thought, want to be confined in the house with her. It was not a thought she could rationalise, and part of her felt guilty for having it. But it came to her that she needed to meet this new, resurrected Kath in the open, in the sunlight, so that she could run if she needed to.
She was still in a state of shock. She recalled the dazed disbelief she had experienced just after the coming of the Serene. This was similar, only intensified a hundredfold. She felt abstracted from reality, as if she were moving in a bubble secluded from everything, her every sense retarded.
She crossed the garden and sat on the wooden bench beneath the flowering cherry tree. From here she could look back at the house, and the wicket gate to the side path through which, in a matter of minutes, Kath would walk. Kath Kemp, whom Sally had watched die yesterday…
It was an idyllic scene, with the sun shining and the wisteria giving off its heavy scent which wafted to her across the garden. The mullioned windows winked in the sunlight, and the borders were abundant with blooms. It was a scene that might be a hundred years old, so little had changed here in the past century.
The gate beside the house squeaked open and Sally sprang to her feet with a sharp, indrawn breath.
Kath Kemp paused, holding the gate open. She was perhaps twenty metres away from Sally and smiled that familiar smile at her.
Sally took a step forward, and then another. She felt like an invalid, learning to walk again after a terrible accident. She was aware of a pain in her chest and shortness of breath.
Kath too began walking, slowly, and they met in the middle of the lawn, drenched in sunlight, for all the world as if they had never met before.
Sally stared at the woman before her, stared at her broad, smiling face, her swept back hair. Her skin was flushed, alive; she exuded, as she had yesterday, a radiant compassion that Sally found impossible to describe or to quantify: it was who Kathryn Kemp was, an identifying signature, which filled Sally whenever she thought about her friend in absentia.
Kath reached out a small, broad hand, tentatively, as if unsure how she might be greeted.
After a second, Sally took it, almost gasped at its warmth, its… humanity.
She knew, then, suddenly, what had happened.
The Serene had somehow, with the superior technology they possessed, brought Kathryn Kemp back to life. They had deemed her too valuable a person in their schema to allow to die. This was essentially the same Kath as before, but new, remade.
Kath squeezed her hand and said, “Shall we sit down?” She indicated the bench beneath the cherry tree. They crossed the lawn and sat side by side in the dappled shade.
Sally turned and stared at her friend. “I saw it happen, Kath. You quoted Housman, and then… then the truck came around the corner and…”
“I’m sorry,” Kath said. “I can’t imagine what you must have gone through.”
Sally smiled to herself. That was Kath, the compassionate: she had died, and been brought back to life, and she apologised for the hurt that this had occasioned.
“I have a lot to tell you,” Kath said in a soft voice, “to explain.”
“I… I think I know what happened. You are important to the Serene, Kath. And they’re so powerful. I mean, look how they’ve banished human violence. What is it to bring the dead back to life?”
Kath stared at her with wide eyes.
Sally said, “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Kath shook her head. “No,” she said gently.
“I don’t understand. You’re the same Kath I’ve always known. I saw you die, and here you are, alive… The Serene must have brought you back to life. You were dead, Kath!”
“I was dead, and the Serene did resurrect me — I am the same Kath Kemp you have always known, but the truth of it is that I am not, and never was, human.”
Sally felt dizzy. Had she not been sitting down she would have slumped into the seat. A hot flush cascaded across her face.
“Then what?”
“I am what you call a self-aware entity.”
Sally shook her head in a mute negative, unable to find her voice. At last she said, “No. No, that can’t be right, can it? I mean… I knew you before the Serene arrived. I knew you at college. We were twenty. That first meeting, in the canteen and we both reached for the last…”
“Vanilla slice.”
“And we were friends from the start, best friends, and that was years and years before the Serene arrived… And I remember you saying — I remember it clearly! You said you didn’t believe in UFOs and little green men. You called it all…”
“A wish-fulfilling delusion…” She nodded, smiled. “Yes, I did.”
Sally took a deep breath. She felt as if she were about to faint. She fought to remain conscious. “Then… in that case…”
“I am and always have been a self-aware entity,” Kath said.
Sally sprang to her feet and ran off down the garden, hugging herself tightly, her thoughts in turmoil.
She st
opped before the swing, brought up short by its ridiculous, meretricious essence. The swing made her think of Hannah, and what she might be doing now. Break time — so she would be chomping on her health bar, sipping apple juice.
Sally knew that when she turned around and looked at the bench beneath the cherry tree, it would be empty. She had hallucinated the meeting with Kath, was suffering hysteric delusions brought about by the shock of her friend’s death last night.
She turned around.
Kath Kemp sat on the bench in the shifting, dappled sunlight, gazing across the lawn at her.
Sally hugged herself, as if protectively, and stared across at Kath Kemp, or at whatever Kath Kemp was.
A self-aware entity?
The idea was impossible.
Slowly, hesitantly, she retraced her steps and paused before the bench, staring down at her friend. Kath looked up, squinting against the sunlight.
She found her voice at last. “But you look so human, Kath.” You are so human, Kath…
“Of course.” Kath smiled. “I had to pass for human.” She patted the bench. “Please, sit down.”
Sally obeyed, then said, “But everything we shared, the friendship. You were… my best friend, Kath. We shared everything. I told you…” She stopped, staring at Kath. She had told Kath everything, had opened her heart to the woman… and Kath had listened, taken it all in, and for her own part had reciprocated… nothing about herself.
Had that been, Sally thought, because she had nothing human to say about herself?
“But I am still your best friend, Sally. I might not be human, but that doesn’t mean that everything we shared is invalidated. I am an empathetic, thinking, feeling, being. I have emotions, emotions that over the years of interacting with your kind have flourished, become almost human. Your friendship means everything to me. This… my death, your learning of my true nature, should not come between us.”
Sally sat in silence, trying to order her thoughts. At last she said, “A self-aware entity…” She shrugged. “It means nothing really, does it? Surely everything sentient in existence is a self-aware entity?” She stopped, staring at her friend, and asked softly, “Just what are you?”
Kath took a deep breath, as Sally had seen her do on a thousand previous occasions when preparing to answer a complex question. “I will give you my history, Sally, and see what you make of it.”
Sally had the ridiculous impulse, then, to ask Kath, to ask this self-aware entity, if she would care for a cup of tea. She restrained herself.
Kath said, “I am an organic somatic structure grown around a programmable sentient-core nurtured to term in a vat on the planet of Delta Pavonis V, twenty light years from Earth.” She paused, then went on, “I am partly organic, partly artificial. I am what you humans describe, crudely, as a cybernetic organism. In the Serene system, I am accorded full citizen’s rights; I am beholden to no one. I have what you call free will.”
“But you said you were programmable.”
“My sentient core, in infancy, was programmable — but then you could say the same of a human baby’s brain. It is programmable, and is programmed, by its environment, by its parents and peers. It is a question, I suppose, of defining one’s terms. Because I was programmable does not de facto make me some soulless machine in the employ of the Serene.”
“But you work for them?”
“Through choice, yes. Because I perceive what the Serene are doing, here and elsewhere, as a wholly beneficial and good endeavour.”
“But… you were programmable. Therefore, you were programmed.”
“In my early years, yes. I was programmed with the knowledge of what the Serene were doing. But, later, I was given the choice of whether to serve them, or not.”
A silence came between them, and at last Sally asked, “And you are… immortal?”
Kath smiled and shook her head. “I will live for a long time, perhaps a thousand years, before my mind and body… degrades, and I die.”
Sally stared at the entity she had thought of, over the years, as her best friend, and something struck her. She asked in almost a whisper, as if afraid of the answer, “And how old are you?”
Kath tipped her head, closed one eye, and looked at Sally. How familiar that semi-amused expression was! How many times had Sally seen it in the past? A hundred, a thousand?
Kath said, with a twinkle in her eye, “I am a little over two hundred years old.”
Sally nodded, as if it were perfectly acceptable to have one’s best friend inform you that she was over two centuries old.
“And before you came to Earth… you lived on Delta Pavonis V?”
“For a hundred years,” Kath said, “while in training for my assignment on Earth.”
“So… so you have been on Earth for more than a hundred years?”
“A little over one hundred, in various guises.”
Sally took a breath, her heart racing. She felt as if she were hyperventilating, and tried to assess what she was thinking, feeling.
She had always assumed that she had been Kath’s best friend — as they had shared so much in the past — and to find out now that Kath had had a previous incarnation, or many incarnations on Earth, gave her an obscure sense of being let down, of not being unique in Kath’s estimation.
Ridiculous, she knew.
She said, “A hundred years? So the Serene have known for that long that one day they would come to Earth and… change things?”
“For much longer than that,” Kath said.
“And they sent you here to…?”
“Initially I was sent here on a fact-finding mission, to gather and collate information and send it back to our home planet.”
“And then?”
“And then, along with other self-aware entities, I helped to smooth the way, to create benevolent institutions, create an intellectual atmosphere wherein the very notion of the other, the alien, could be discussed, accepted.”
“You had a different guise? You were not always Kathryn Kemp, of course?”
“Of course. I was a male for many years, then female, and then a male again.”
“And… how many of your fellow self-aware entities were there, and still are?”
“We numbered, in the early years, in our hundreds, and then fifty years ago in our thousands. Now… there are perhaps a million of us on the planet.”
A million, Sally thought.
“And you were never found out? There were never accidents like last night, when you might have been hospitalised, examined and discovered?”
“We are similar, physiologically, to yourselves. A surgical examination of our bodies would reveal nothing — only a neurological scan, or neurosurgery might give away the lie, but we had means of ensuring we never compromised our identities.”
She smiled at Sally, then surprised her by saying, “I don’t know about you, Sally, but I would love a cup of tea…” She gestured to the house. “Let me go and potter about in the kitchen, while you sit here and think about what I’ve said. Earl Grey?”
“My favourite.”
“I know…”
Impulsively, both Sally and Kath, human and Serene self-aware entity, came together in a hug. Sally held on and closed her eyes, and told herself that it really didn’t matter that her friend was not human.
Kath moved into the house and Sally sat in the shade, watching her as she moved back and forth behind the kitchen window.
Kath was Kath, she told herself — the friend she had had for more than thirty years. Did it matter, really matter, that she was alien? Perhaps if Kath had befriended Sally back in their college days with some ulterior motive in mind, then Sally would have cause for unease. But as far as she could tell they had come together spontaneously, drawn to each other by that inexplicable personal chemistry that attracted human beings to each other… or in this case humans and self-aware entities.
Unless…
A thought struck Sally as she watched Kath ease herself side
ways through the back door bearing a tray.
Sally drew up a small table and Kath poured two cups of Earl Grey.
They sat side by side and Kath said, “I hope this doesn’t change things between us, Sally. I value our friendship.”
“So do I, of course. But there is something I’d like to know.”
“Go on.”
“Our friendship… Why? I mean, when we met, I was instantly attracted to you. It was spontaneous.” She looked at her friend, then away across the garden. “What I’d like to know is… was it planned on the part of the Serene, for some ultimate purpose?” She took a breath, and voiced her fear: “Were you aware of what would happen, with Geoff being a representative…?”
“Do you mean,” Kath asked, “can we see into the future?”
“I suppose I do mean that, yes.”
“Well, of course not. The Serene are powerful, that I will admit, and much of our science might seem to you like magic, but there are some things that are even beyond the remit of the Serene.”
“So our friendship?”
“Is nothing more than friendship, and nothing less. A coming together of like souls, if you will. We… are encouraged by our overseers to inhabit our lives as humans, to live and think and feel as you do. Part of that is to experience what makes being human so often rewarding, to share friendships and…”
“And love?”
Kath nodded. “That too, occasionally.”
Sally asked, “And you have known love?”
“Not this time, Sally. For the past thirty years I have been so busy with… with laying the groundwork, that I have had little time left for affairs of the heart. But in a previous life…yes, I loved a woman.”
Sally sipped her tea and regarded her friend. “That must have been hard.”
