The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  Allen smiled as she said this, and thought of the street kid Ana had been.

  Nina said, “Do you ever consider what the Serene might want with us, their ‘representatives’?”

  He shifted uneasily, wondering why her question unsettled him. Ana said, “I no longer question the Serene, Nina. They have brought unlimited good to humankind. Who am I to question what they want with me?”

  “Or what they do to you, in that mysterious obelisk on Titan?”

  Allen said, “Do to us?”

  Nina shrugged. “We go there every two weeks now, we and thousands upon thousands of other human representatives… and we walk out a day or two later with no memory of what occurred in there. And don’t you think it strange?”

  Sally spoke up. “The whole thing about the Serene is ‘strange’, if you’re inclined to phrase it like that.”

  The Italian smiled. “We no longer travel to the obelisks on Earth or elsewhere. Almost everyone goes exclusively to the obelisk on Titan, the vastest manufactured object in the solar system. I wondered at first if it served as a device like the other obelisks–”

  “A matter-transmitter,” Sally said.

  Nina inclined her head. “That’s what I wondered. But why have one of that size situated so far out? For what purpose? And why have every representative go there every two weeks?”

  Ana was doing her best to hide her smile. “And you have a theory, Nina?”

  Nina Ricci allowed a silence to develop. Instead of assenting, which was what Allen had expected, she said, “I have one more question, Ana. And it is this: what are the Serene doing to our solar system?”

  This was met with blank looks all round. “What do you mean?” Ana asked.

  Ricci tapped her forearm, then typed in a command. From the olive skin of her arm was projected into the air before them a cuboid, three-dimensional screen.

  Allen made out a representation of the outer solar system, with Saturn and Jupiter in the foreground, and the outer planets tiny dots behind them. Beyond, far stars twinkled.

  Ricci said, “This has been suppressed by the various newsfeeds. I suspect SAEs in high places don’t want us to know, quite yet.”

  Allen said, “Know what?”

  “I was talking to the scientists from the university, among them a couple of astronomers — and even they are not aware of what is happening.”

  “Which is?” Ana asked.

  “Observe.” Ricci tapped her screen again and the scene hanging before them shifted. Gone were Jupiter and Saturn, to be replaced with the tiny, ice-bound orb of Pluto. “Do you see the stars immediately behind Pluto?” she asked.

  Sally said, “Yes, but faintly.”

  “Yes!” declared Ricci. “Exactly. Look, the stars in a quadrant — imagine an elliptical section of orange peel, if you will — appear faint, compared with those to either side.”

  Allen peered more closely, and saw that she was correct. So…” he said.

  “This appeared three weeks ago, for no more than an hour. A colleague — an amateur astronomer — brought it to my attention. When he checked again, the quadrant of faint stars was back to normal. When I saw Kathryn Kemp a week later, I asked her about the diminution of stellar luminosity.”

  “And she said that you were imagining it,” Ana smiled.

  Ricci stared at her. “On the contrary, Ana,” the Italian said, “Kathryn told me that on my next visit to Titan, she would be able to answer some of my questions, and specifically she would be in a position to tell me what the Serene were doing on the outer edges of the solar system.”

  Allen stared at her. “So they are doing something?” he murmured.

  Sally said, “Knowing you, Nina, you have an idea, yes?”

  Nina smiled. “Would you believe me if I told you that I had no idea at all?”

  They laughed, and Nina tapped her forearm. The three-dimensional screen in the air before them vanished in a blink.

  She looked around the staring group. “In ten days,” she said, “we’ll meet up, as usual, following whatever it is that we do in the Titan obelisk. I have arranged for Kathryn Kemp to join us then. We might at last, my friends, find out what truly motivates the Serene.”

  Allen sipped his wine, and stared up at the sector of stars way beyond the icy orbit of Pluto. Beside him, Sally took his arm and shivered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN THE EIGHT years since James Morwell stepped down as nominal head of the Morwell Organisation — ‘nominal’ because over the course of the previous two years he had been nothing more than a powerless figurehead — he had set himself on a course of merciless self-destruction.

  It had become an obsession, a desire that filled his waking hours and often carried over into his sleep: he dreamed of oblivion, of finding a means to end his life in some spectacular and Serene-defying manner. Always he awoke with a new method of killing himself flittering elusively on the edge of his consciousness, and when he did recall the means bequeathed by his dream he often found that he’d tried it before, or that it was patently impossible. He dreamed of throwing himself off a tall building, of stepping out in front of a speeding truck; he dreamed of manufacturing a purposeful ‘accident’…

  He’d lost count of the number of times he had tried to take his life. He was determined to show the Serene that there was at least one human being on the planet who did not intend to kow-tow to their imposition of charea, who would attempt to defy their edict on self-annihilation. Even if he failed to carry through his suicide, the very fact that he was constantly trying and would go on doing so was an act of defiance satisfying in itself.

  Satisfying, but not wholly so. Only in oblivion, he told himself, would he find true peace of mind.

  In 2040 he took up downhill skiing, and off piste in Switzerland swerved towards a stand of pine trees at a speed, he calculated, a little over seventy miles an hour. In the seconds before impact he knew the elation of imminent self-annihilation… Except he never hit the tree. Instead he impacted with something soft, something which cushioned him in slow motion and sent him skidding sideways harmlessly into a bank of snow.

  A year later he tampered with the brake lining of his Ferrari, and set off on a jaunt into the Appalachians. On a downhill stretch of road he allowed his speed to mount until he was screaming along at ninety miles per hour with a tight bend looming, and he laughed like a maniac and cursed the Serene…

  Until his car mysteriously slowed, seemingly of its own accord, and eased itself to a halt beside the curving crash-barrier. He’d set off again, more than once attempting to spin the wheel and send himself over the edge… he spasmed, and could not complete the manoeuvre — and this gave him an inspired idea. He would incorporate the very act of spasming into a series of actions which in themselves would bring about his death.

  If he spasmed in the course of attempting to shoot himself in the head while climbing a sheer rock-face… then surely he would achieve his aim and fall to his death?

  Three days later he drove into the Catskills and found a likely looking cliff. Armed with a pistol, he climbed for fifteen minutes, a frantic, suited businessman wholly out of place clinging to the side of the cliff. He laughed at the thought, then raised the gun to his temple and tried to pull the trigger. He spasmed and lost his grip on the rock, and fell, thinking in the brief seconds of his descent that surely now he had succeeded in killing himself.

  He should have known. As with the attempt on the ski-slope, he found himself mysteriously cushioned, his fall decelerating as if he’d impacted with a mattress… And he lay uninjured on his back, staring up at the wispy cirrus high in the blue sky, weeping in rage and frustration.

  That same year he had become a drug addict. He tried heroin at first, injecting prescribed doses enough to get him high, and found the resultant euphoria a balm. Over the weeks he increased the dosage, and sourced pure heroin which should, by rights, have killed him outright. Every time he injected himself he slipped into welcome oblivion, pray
ing on the way that maybe this time he had succeeded.

  And every time he came to his senses, alive and unharmed. He persevered, thinking that surely his addiction must have some long-term cumulative effect. But the fact was that it was as if his metabolism became inured to the effects of the drug. The more he injected, the less effect it had. He talked with other one-time addicts and found that the drug now had no effect on them, and so they had ceased taking it; the work of the Serene, they said, and gave thanks.

  And then, just two weeks ago, while drinking himself senseless in front of a wildlife documentary — a binge which had lasted the better part of a week to little deleterious effect — he had an epiphany.

  He watched in amazement as a cobra leapt towards a wild boar, struck and killed its prey.

  The following day he booked a flight to Venezuela.

  HE STAYED A few days in an Indian village on the edge of the Amazonian jungle, a thousand miles south of the capital of Caracas, and then bought from the tribal headman a dugout canoe and paddled it upstream. He set out without provisions or even water, much to the alarm of the tribespeople. Half a day later, when he judged that he was far enough away from the village, and from civilisation in general, that his corpse would not be stumbled upon and brought back to New York for burial — he loathed the idea of his funeral attended by colleagues crying crocodile tears and later laughing amongst themselves about what a bastard he had been — he paddled to the bank, climbed out and pushed the dugout back into the current. He watched it drift away, spinning lazily, and smiled to himself.

  Then he set off into the jungle, towards the oblivion which awaited him.

  There were, he had read before setting off, at least a dozen types of poisonous snake in the Venezuelan jungle, as well as half a dozen varieties of toxic spider and many other wild animals eager, he was sure, to carry out their biological mandate to protect their territory or attack him as nourishing prey.

  He walked into the sweltering jungle, falling again and again, laughing like a maniac, swearing at the Serene and at his father and frequently weeping at the mess his life had become.

  He fell and slipped into unconsciousness, and woke hours later to find that he’d spent a night propped against the bole of a tree overlooking a narrow gulch sparkling with a twisting, silver stream. The water looked so fresh, inviting, but he ignored his raging thirst and willed himself to die.

  He passed in and out of consciousness in the hours that followed, and was visited by a series of hallucinations.

  At one point Kat came to him and knelt, reached out a solicitous hand and mopped his feverish brow.

  He stretched out a hand, eager to touch her pale skin. She smiled at him. “I want to help you,” she said now, as she had said many times in the past.

  He had met Kat ten years ago, just after the abortive attempt to ‘mark’ the Serene representatives. He had been at his lowest ebb, reconciled to humanity under the yoke of the alien invaders and powerless to do anything about it. He had begun to dabble with suicide, although it had not yet become the preoccupation it now was. In retrospect he thought that the arrival of Kat into his life had slowed his downward spiral, and invested his life, for a year, with some semblance of happiness… though he had hardly realised that at the time.

  She had been working as a psychologist for a government run scheme helping recovering drug addicts — this was before his attempts at pharmaceutical oblivion — and he had met her at an uptown party which, he recalled, he had been loath to attend. It was only on the insistence of Lal — that greasy, betraying bastard — that he had shrugged off his apathy and gone along.

  Kat had homed in on him, talked to him with warmth and understanding, and a day later they had met for dinner and something within him had succumbed and allowed this dumpy, homely woman — ten years his senior and with a penchant to mother him — into his life.

  For a year he had enjoyed an easy, affectionate relationship with this calm, meditative English woman; he would never have admitted that he loved her, and she never vouchsafed the same to him, but they were close, and she helped him confront his past, his relationship with his abusive father, and helped him overcome his desire to be dominated and demeaned… But he had never, for all their intimacy, both physical and psychological, told her of his deep-seated distrust of the Serene, nor of his occasional desire to kill himself. For all he held her in respect intellectually, he could not reconcile this with her avowal that the coming of the Serene had been beneficial for the human species. He had ventured once, when drunk, that perhaps their charea edict had robbed humankind of its primal urge, its genetic manifest destiny to conquer and rule — but playfully she had laughed and called him a caveman… and had never mentioned his outburst again.

  They had drifted apart after a year, seen each other less and less. They remained friends for a time, and then lost contact altogether. Kat had called James her ‘reclamation project’, helping him to find his feet so that, from then on, he could make his own way in the world… Or perhaps he was being unfair.

  Now she came to him in his fever dreams, bending over him and saying, “Let me help you, James.”

  He awoke with a start and stared about him. The sun was coming up, sending slatted glints of gold through the jungle foliage. He wondered how long he had been here, propped against the tree, and wondered how long it might be before he died.

  He saw a snake slither by a foot away, and lashed out with his foot to kick it, provoke it into striking him. But the snake ignored his boot and slithered on, vanishing into the undergrowth.

  Next to visit him in the cinematic, hallucinogenic rerun of his life, was Lal Devi, and the sight of the slimy Indian bastard brought him upright and lashing out at the slim, sneering figure.

  They had been so close, for so long — over a dozen years — that Lal’s betrayal was all the more devastating. It was after he had drifted away from Kat, and the desire to kill himself had returned. He had tried a couple of times to throw himself, spontaneously, through the window of his office on the hundredth floor, only to go into a ridiculous fit of spasms on every occasion. Then he had climbed onto the roof, and up the Morwell logo, with a bottle of Jack Daniels and the intention of drinking himself into oblivion.

  That time loyal Lal had talked him down, carried him back to his suite and put him to bed.

  It had been the very last thing Lal had done for him, before his betrayal.

  Lal had found a woman, the whore responsible for changing the puppyish, subservient yes-man into an opponent.

  A few months after the logo incident, Lal had strode into his office and handed in his resignation. He told James that he no longer wished to work as his PA, that he found James’s opinions, indeed everything he stood for in his opposition to the Serene, odious in the extreme. James had tried to argue his corner, question this sudden volte face from the man he considered an ally, a loyal servant whose opinions regarding the aliens mirrored his own exactly… But Lal was adamant. He had met someone, he said, who had made him face his past, his present, and look forward to a future filled with hope rather than a corrosive, stultifying resentment of the Serene.

  James had exploded, and the ensuing argument had been bitter in the extreme, with both men at one point spasming in their thwarted desire to do the other physical injury. In the end Lal had turned and strode from the room, with James yelling curses in his wake — and in retrospect James cited the confrontation as the beginning of what he hoped would be the end.

  A week later he had given himself wholly to finding a way to end his life.

  Now he came awake again. Thirst was an acid pain in his throat and hunger clawed at his innards like cancer. He laughed, then wept, and wished for a swift end rather than this eternal, drawn-out suffering.

  He saw something move on the periphery of his vision and swivelled his head painfully.

  A scorpion…

  It regarded him from the vantage point of a tree root beside his head, the question mark of i
ts tail pulsing with intent.

  He smiled and reached towards it, then lashed out — aiming not to kill the creature but to provoke it into attack.

  He should have known… The scorpion danced forward, hesitated, then began to… vibrate… It was, he realised with incredulity, spasming.

  Laughing in despair, Morwell sank back against the tree and closed his eyes.

  HE CAME AWAKE suddenly, knowing that he was still in the jungle, sitting against the tree, and that the scorpion had been no more than another hallucination.

  He stared about him in disbelief.

  He was in a hospital bed in a bright, shining room, and through the window he could see the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan.

  A nurse was leaning over him, and she smiled brightly when he turned to her.

  “Ah, Mr Morwell… You’re back with us at last.”

  He wondered, then, if he had truly taken himself to Venezuela — or had that too been no more than an illusion?

  “How…?” he croaked.

  “You were found by natives and brought down-river to a port. The Morwell Organisation arranged for you to be airlifted back to New York. The odd thing is, Mr Morwell, you were found by a tribe who, but for the coming of the Serene, wouldn’t have had second thoughts about killing you there and then. Now aren’t you,” she went on, rearranging the pillow beneath his head, “a lucky man?”

  Morwell laughed at the very idea and then, as the nurse left from the room, his laughter turned to tears.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS NOON when Ana arrived in New York.

  She stepped from the obelisk into bright summer sunlight, hotter and brighter than the light back on Mars. She should have remembered and brought her sunglasses, but it was almost eight years since she’d last been on Earth in summer.

  She crossed Times Square and made her way to the café where, almost a decade ago to the day, Bilal had attempted to infect her with the Obterek device. She had a ghost to lay: when the idea of coming to New York to track down her brother had first occurred to her, a month ago, she had known that she must return to the coffee house.