The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  The receptionist regarded her with wide eyes. “Mr Bilal never said anything about a sister. Ah-cha. He is off duty at the moment, and you will find him through there.” He pointed to a door at the far end of the foyer, and Ana thanked him and made her way across the carpeted floor.

  She pushed open the door and blinked as she found herself dazzled by sunlight. She had expected another plush room, but was standing before a big courtyard surrounded by flimsy timber shacks with swing doors like bathing cubicles. She counted twenty such cubicles and wondered which one might be Bilal’s.

  She was about to return to the foyer, and ask the receptionist where precisely she might find her brother, when she heard someone speaking.

  She recognised the voice, and it was coming from a shack to her right. She moved into the shadow, stood by the open window, and listened.

  Bilal was saying, “… and then Mahatma, with his followers, left Sabarmati Ashram and walked to the coast…”

  Through the window Ana saw six boys and girls sitting on the floor in a semi-circle, staring with rapt expressions at the man who sat on the bed, an open book on his lap.

  She stared, hardly able to credit that this was indeed her brother. He seemed to have aged more than just ten years since the last time she had seen him; gone was the suit, the long hair, and the ear-ring. His hair was cropped short, and he wore a faded pair of jeans and a bleached green t-shirt.

  His voice was gentle as he told the children the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s trek across Gujarat in 1930.

  He paused, perhaps sensing that he was being watched, and looked up.

  Ana did not pull back, but stared in through the window at her brother sitting cross-legged on the bed. He appeared thinner in middle-age, almost starved, and his expression was dumbfounded.

  His lips moved, shaping her name. He spoke in rapid Hindi to the children, telling them to remain where they were; then he unfolded himself from the narrow bunk, crossed the room to the door, stepped out and confronted her.

  They stared at each other in silence for what seemed like a long time before he spoke. “What do you want, Ana?”

  His tone was neutral, gentle.

  She said, “Just to talk, Bilal.”

  He uttered a sound, a low moan, pushed himself from the doorway and to her surprise hurried across the compound. He slipped between two shacks on the far side, and it was a second or two before Ana moved herself to give chase. “Bilal!” she called after him.

  She turned sideways and inserted herself between the timber lean-tos. Ahead she saw Bilal turn right. She followed him and found herself on the eastern bank of the Hoogli, its vast expanse surprising her after the confines of the compound.

  The bank sloped steeply at her feet, comprised of concrete walkways, piers and timber moorings.

  Bilal was sitting at the very end of a timber jetty, regarding the muddy waters far below, his legs dangling. He could run no further, and Ana took her time before approaching. Her sudden appearance after so long, she realised, must have come as something of a shock. He needed time to adjust to the idea of seeing her again… She stared at him, and was reminded, in his almost abject, little-boy-lost posture, sitting there swinging his legs, of the fifteen-year-old she recalled from so long ago.

  She moved from the shadows, into the blistering heat of the sun, and walked along the jetty towards him. Further down the river a dozen young boys, as naked as monkeys, were hurling themselves from a pier and crashing into the water with delighted cries and shrieks.

  She sat down, a metre away from her brother, and said, “Remember when we came here to jump in and swim? And sometimes we came to fish, though I can’t recall ever catching anything.”

  “Back then the river was polluted, Ana. Nothing lived in it. Now, the river is full of life.”

  She murmured, “The Ganges is like the world, come to life again.”

  A companionable silence came between them, but there was so much that Ana wanted to say.

  Bilal showed no inclination to say anything more, so she said, “I did not expect, when I went to New York in search of you, to find you in Kolkata, working in an orphanage.”

  He hugged his right knee and stared into the river. His crew-cut hair was greying. Lines radiated from his eyes. She wondered where the slick businessman had fled to. He said, “Why did you come here, Ana? To accuse me again, to point the finger and blame me?”

  “No, not this time, Bilal. I came… to see you. To talk about how it was when we were young. I just wanted to say that what happened ten years ago…”

  “Stop, please. I don’t want to be reminded of…” His face was twisted bitterly at the recollection.

  “Then let’s not talk of that, Bilal.” She paused, then went on, “The children back there were entranced by your story-telling.”

  “They are young, and love stories. For many of them, it is the first time that anyone has read to them. Would you believe, Ana, that many of them had never even heard of Mahatma Gandhi?”

  “Had we, at their age? I don’t know what is more surprising, Bilal; to find you here at the orphanage, or to hear you reading stories about Gandhi-ji. He was a man of peace, after all. The Serene would have loved him.”

  For the first time her brother turned and looked at her.

  “I am not the person I was, Ana. I have changed.”

  “What happened?”

  He gave a long sigh, staring out across the wide river to the far, crowded bank, and it was a while before he replied.

  “I lied when I saw you ten years ago, Ana. I lied about the time I left you when you were six. I… never had any intention of coming back to find you. I was thinking only of myself, of my survival. I’ll be honest, though it pains me to say this… I thought then that you were a burden. I wanted nothing more than to get away, to better myself, but how could I do this when I had a sister hanging onto me, dragging me down?” He stared at her. “I’m sorry if these words hurt, but they are the truth.”

  “I guessed as much, Bilal.” Though that did not make the truth any less painful.

  “I wanted to get away from the poverty, the beatings. I was sick of being hungry, of being treated like a rat, of being a nobody. And then I had my chance, and no one and nothing was going to hold me back. Ana… I want you to understand this, to understand the boy I was then. I wasn’t a good person, but there were reasons why I wasn’t.”

  She said, “I’m not blaming you.”

  “Our uncle beat me daily, which is why we left his house and fled to the station. Not because he threw us out, but because he beat me for not bringing in enough rupees to pay our way.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know. You never told me.”

  He shrugged.

  She said, “But you did come back to find me, like you said, five years after you left? You told me that you came back to the station, but I was not there. I knew you were telling the truth because then I was in Delhi… so I knew you had come back for me.”

  She stopped as she saw him shaking his head. “I was lying, Ana. I never came back. That you were in Delhi then was just a coincidence.”

  She nodded, taking this in, dismantling the memories that she had erected over the years of Bilal caring enough, once, to come in search of her.

  She smiled to herself, and was not surprised that she felt no anger. His admission fitted with who he had been, back then, and who he might have become now.

  “So the Bilal I met ten years ago, the champion of the Morwell Organisation, the hater of the Serene…”

  “Was the person I had become because of the person I had been, the boy who had nothing one day, and then was suddenly offered the world. Please understand how that kind of promise can make a person… inhuman.”

  “And now?”

  “As I said, I am a different person now.”

  “And I asked, ‘What happened?’”

  He lodged his chin on his knees and regarded the water. He said at last, “Shortly after I… did what I
did, tried to infect you with the Obterek implants… I expected retribution from the Serene. I expected some form of punishment. I don’t know what, but I lived in constant fear. James Morwell too, I know. But the strange thing was that nothing happened. We were not punished, or even admonished.”

  “The Obterek never contacted Morwell again?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Perhaps six months passed, and then I met a woman, an incredible woman who changed my life, little by little. I… until that point I had never been in love. I’d… I suppose, looking back, I’d used women for my own ends. But with her… things were different. She opened my eyes, made me confront my mistakes, look upon what I had done wrong, face my shortcomings and my humanity, or lack of…” He stopped, then said, “She also made me understand all that the Serene had done for us.”

  “She sounds wonderful. Are you still…?”

  He shook his head. “We were together for two years, and then…”

  To her surprise, Ana saw that he was crying.

  She reached out, found his hand and squeezed.

  He said, “She died in a car crash back in ’38, a head-on collision with a tanker.”

  She let the silence stretch, before saying, “So you left Morwell, started work at the orphanage?”

  “Oh, I’d left Morwell long before that, perhaps a year earlier. How could I go on working for a man I knew to be insane, as well as immoral? I handed in my resignation to him personally, told him what I thought of him and his organisation. We parted, you might say, on bad terms. And I’ve worked here ever since, paying for my sins.”

  She smiled. “Not sins,” she said. “You’ve become a good man, Bilal.”

  He asked in almost a whisper, “Can you see your way to forgive me?”

  “Who said that to understand is to forgive?”

  He laughed. “It might have been Gandhi,” he said. Along the bank a small boy whooped, cartwheeled through the air and landed with a smack in the river.

  “And you, Ana? What are you doing now?”

  So she told him about her husband and son, and her life on Mars, and her work there and even her work as a representative of the Serene, and for a while as they sat on the banks of the river, with the cries of the children playing in their ears, it was as if she were five again, chatting to her brother about life and the strange world around them.

  At one point she said, “You should come and live on Mars, Bilal. I would be able to find you work.”

  “And leave the orphanage? I like to think I’m needed here. At least, I need the orphanage. But I will visit you one day, I promise.”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” she said.

  He rose to his feet, reached out and pulled her upright. “How long before you go back?”

  “I’m here for a few days.”

  “Then let’s meet again. Tonight? I know a wonderful restaurant by the park. If you drop by here at eight…”

  “I’ll do that.” They came together in an embrace, and Ana thought that her heart was about to burst.

  “I suppose I must get back to work,” he laughed. “There’s a story to finish…”

  They made their way back to the compound, and Ana remembered to convey Mr Singh-Gupta’s best wishes.

  They said goodbye outside his cubicle, and when he passed inside she lingered within earshot and smiled as she heard him say, “Ah-cha. Now, where did we get to…?”

  She passed into the orphanage and crossed the foyer, emerging with a light step and an even lighter heart into the afternoon sunlight. She recalled the words of the old monk she had met in the alleyway earlier, and she felt like finding him and telling him all about her meeting with Bilal.

  As she was crossing the car park a young man in a sharp blue suit passed her, heading for the entrance of the orphanage. For as second she thought that the man was familiar, but she could not place the face.

  She made her way to Maidan Park, sat in the shade with a sweet lassi and contemplated her good fortune.

  THAT EVENING, A little before eight, Ana caught a taxi from her hotel to the orphanage. As the car carried her through the crowded streets of the city, she sat back and contemplated the meeting with her brother and how their relationship might develop. One thing was certain from that afternoon’s meeting: Bilal had changed, become a better person, and Ana looked forward to getting to know this new, reborn Bilal. They had a lot to catch up on, a lot of memories to share, and many years ahead of them in which to do so.

  The taxi pulled up outside the orphanage and Ana climbed out as the sun was setting over the Hoogli.

  A police car was drawn up ahead of the taxi in the parking lot, and before it an ambulance.

  Ana crossed to the sliding doors and passed inside, to find the foyer a mayhem of activity. Police officers, paramedics and suited officials milled back and forth, and through the rear door Ana made out a crowd of children assembled in the courtyard.

  She pushed her way to the reception desk and smiled at the same young man she had spoken to earlier. His expression, on seeing her, was odd: he appeared at first shocked, and then uncertain, and he turned quickly and spoke to a woman in a smart navy blue suit.

  The woman looked up, at Ana, and it was then that she knew that whatever was going on here concerned her: the woman’s expression slipped into a mask of compassion.

  “Ms Devi, if you would care to accompany me…”

  She ushered Ana around the desk and into a small side room, an office equipped with a single desk and two chairs.

  The woman sat down behind the desk and Ana remained standing, facing the woman. “What is happening here?” Ana asked.

  “I understand that earlier today you saw your brother, Bilal Devi?”

  Ana found herself slumping into the chair opposite the woman. “What is happening? Is Bilal…?”

  “Can I ask you why you were visiting your brother, Ms Devi?”

  Ana laughed, despite the fear building within her. “Why do you think? He was my brother, and we hadn’t seen each other for a long time.”

  “And how did your brother seem when you met him?”

  “Seem? Look, just what is going on here? Will you please tell me?”

  The woman said, “I am Director Zara Mohammed. I run the orphanage. Your brother worked here for nine years, and we became very close…”

  Panic seized Ana; she was having difficulty getting her breath. “It’s Bilal, isn’t it?” she almost shouted. “What’s happened to Bilal?”

  The woman surprised her by standing and coming around the desk, kneeling before Ana and taking her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Ms Devi. Your brother, my respected colleague Bilal Devi, passed away earlier today.”

  Even though she knew it was coming, the fact rocked her. Her heart thumped and she felt its pulse in her ears, deafening, drowning out whatever the woman was saying. Director Mohammed’s lips moved, but Ana heard nothing.

  “How?” she heard herself asking.

  The Director squeezed her hand, her eyes slipping away from Ana’s.

  “I want to see him!” Ana cried. “I want to see my brother!”

  Then she was on her feet and rushing out of the office. She crossed the foyer to the rear door and burst through into the courtyard. She was aware of the faces of surprised policemen, and the tear-stained faces of a hundred boys and girls, as she pushed through the crowd and made her way towards Bilal’s timber shack.

  Three policemen, as many paramedics, and half a dozen men and women in suits crowded the entrance to the rude dwelling. They turned, startled, as Ana attempted to push through them to the door.

  Director Mohammed had caught up with her. “Ms Devi! Please, I would not advise…”

  “I am Bilal Devi’s sister!” she cried into the face of a policeman who barred her way, “and I want to see my brother!”

  Shocked, the man stepped aside and before anyone could move to prevent her she pushed open the flimsy wooden door and crossed the threshold.

 
She stopped dead in her tracks, a cry stilled on her lips.

  The sight of her brother hit her like a physical blow to the sternum. She gasped for breath, mouthing, “No, no…” over and over again.

  Bilal sat on the narrow bunk where, earlier that day, he had told a story to the orphans in his charge. He had been thrown back against the wall, his head hanging forward, the very book he had been reading that afternoon cradled in his lap.

  It was open to a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and Bilal’s fingers lay upon the great man’s face as if in benediction.

  Ana stared at her brother, at the massive gunshot wound in the centre of his chest, and cried in disbelief.

  “No!” she cried, and Director Mohammed slipped into the room and held Ana as she wept.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT SEEMED TO Sally that, in her sixties, her life had entered a period of calm and quiescence that had its analogue in the collective demeanour of the human race in the middle period of the twenty-first century.

  She was no longer ambitious as she had been when young; she was no longer as concerned about what people thought of her. She was happier in herself and in her dealings with others, had fewer worries, and if she thought of the future at all it was with positivity and confidence.

  It seemed, likewise, that humankind since spreading from Earth and inhabiting the solar system had entered a period of maturity, of co-operation and tolerance. The human race teemed across terraformed planets and moons, inhabited vast spaceborn dwellings hollowed from asteroids. They worked together increasingly without the boundaries of nations to impede progress with concerns of petty national interest, freed from the malign influence of multinational business corporations. Religions had mellowed, even the more radical sects of Christianity and Islam which in the past had threatened head-to-head conflict; millions still believed, but without the self-righteous fervour of old. New cults had sprung up, many with the Serene at their core. Of the old faiths, Buddhism was increasing in popularity, as citizens drew parallels between the ways of the Serene and the philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama.