The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  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 impo
sed 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’êtreremains 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.”

  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

  ALLEN 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 10th, 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.

  HE 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.”