The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  All in all, Sally reflected as she stared out through the dome of her surgery across the Mare Erythraeum, it was a good time to be alive.

  She had seen her last patient of the day and had the afternoon to herself. Geoff, on some administrative tour of a farm in the south, wouldn’t be back until later that evening; she’d dine that night with Hannah and her new boyfriend. Before that, she had a lunch date with Kath Kemp.

  Her old friend was a frequent visitor to Mars, and particularly to Escarpment City. The obelisks made interplanetary travel no more difficult than stepping from one room to the next — once the traveller had reached the embarkation obelisk, of course, which often took hours by conventional transport. Sally saw Kath perhaps once a month, when they caught up with each other’s work and reminisced about old times. She had gone through a period — on learning what Kath Kemp was, ten years ago — of not exactly mistrusting Kath but questioning everything about their relationship. She had wondered if she had been manipulated, if Kath had had ulterior motives for fostering their friendship — but for the life of her Sally could discern no such motivation on the part of the Serene self-aware entity. They were, she genuinely felt, two like-minded woman with a shared past in common, and even similar temperaments — even if one of them just happened to be an alien construct.

  Trust, Sally thought as she switched off her com and left her surgery — that was what it boiled down to. She trusted Kath Kemp and the Serene, despite Nina Ricci’s increasing frustration at what she saw as the Serene withholding information from their human representatives.

  She caught an electric buggy from the business core of the city to the Lip. It was a warm autumn day on the red planet and the plain was basking in hazy sunlight. Her favourite café was almost full, but she’d taken the precaution of reserving a table by the rail.

  She was early, and admired the view across the flat, patchwork farmland as she waited for Kath to arrive.

  A minute later the small, dumpy woman — she had thickened in old age, Sally thought — crossed the patio towards her table. Sally stood and they embraced, and then ordered coffee and salad.

  Kath asked about Sally’s recent work, enquiring about the efficiency of new anti-cancer drugs trialled on a group of her patients — and for the next fifteen minutes they chatted about this and other aspects of Sally’s practice.

  Sally had no doubt that the enquiry was part of a gathering of information which the Serene would collate and use to refine and direct future policy — but at the same time, she thought, Kath was genuinely interested in her work on a more personal level.

  As they ate, Sally’s thoughts turned to Geoff’s forthcoming trip to Titan, and what he hoped Kath Kemp might reveal to him, Nina Ricci and Ana Devi, there.

  “You do realise,” she said at one point, “that your promise to Nina has made Geoff uncharacteristically restless? He’s talked about nothing else for days.”

  Kath laughed, wrinkles creasing around her kind eyes. “Nina is one inquisitive and perceptive woman. One in a million. She keeps us on our toes.”

  “Every class needs an enfant terrible,” Sally said. “I suppose what you’ll tell them is confidential?” She was fishing, and smiled at Kath’s mischievous expression.

  “It is, but won’t be in a couple of days.” Kath regarded her coffee, then looked up. “As we’ll be making it public anyway in a week or two, why don’t you come with Geoff to Titan? Make a holiday of it. Can you get time off?”

  Sally felt a rising excitement. “I’m due a little leave, and I’ve only seen Titan on film. From what Geoff tells me, it’s beautiful.”

  “One of the wonders of the solar system. Prepare to be amazed. We’ll also be going onward, outward, from Titan.”

  “We will? But I thought…” Sally faltered. As far as she knew, Titan was the outer extent of human habitation in the solar system. Then she recalled what Nina Ricci had said about Serene work on the very perimeter of the system.

  “You don’t mean…?”

  “I can’t say, especially now, with security tightening as it is.”

  “It is? I thought everything was going well on that front, what with the Obterek…”

  Ten years ago, for a few weeks after their evacuation from Earth to Mars, Geoff and Sally, Ana and Kapil, had lived in fear of what course the Obterek opposition to the Serene might take. Despite constant Serene reassurances that they had nothing to fear, they had indeed feared: Sally and Geoff had discussed the situation, and Geoff had summed it up well when he described feeling that the human race was a tiny, insignificant and ignorant life-form caught in a battle between two vast and incomprehensible armies.

  Then, as the weeks lapsed and turned to months, and the threat of Obterek action never materialised, their fears eventually receded. It must have been years, now, since Sally had last considered the Serene’s galactic opponents.

  Kath was regarding her empty plate as if wondering whether to tell Sally something. At last she said, “There have been worrying developments lately.”

  “The Obterek ?”

  Kath nodded. “We wondered when they might next make a move. It was too good to be true that this period of quiescence, which had lasted for almost a decade, would continue indefinitely.”

  “What happened?”

  “An incident on Earth just yesterday. You’ll hear about it soon enough. A breach in the charea. A tiny breach, but nevertheless very worrying, as even the tiniest, briefest breakdown in our systems is a reason for the alarm bells to start ringing…” She laughed and said: “Listen to me, spouting platitudes like some jaded news hack.”

  “You think it might just be the start of…” Sally let the question hang.

  Kath sighed. “That’s our fear, but you can never tell with the Obterek. We’re monitoring the situation, stepping up security…”

  At that moment Sally’s softscreen chimed. She moved to cut the call, but Kath leaned forward and said, “No. I think you had better accept it.”

  Nodding, a sick feeling in her chest, Sally rolled up her sleeve and tapped her forearm. Instantly Ana Devi’s face stared up at her, unusual in that the woman was not smiling. “Ana?”

  “Sal. Can I see you?”

  “Of course. Are you… is everything okay?”

  “Yes. No. No, it isn’t. Can I see you? I just want to talk…” The Indian woman smiled up at her, but Sally could tell that she was close to tears. “I’m back on Mars. Will you be at home this afternoon?”

  “All afternoon. I’ll be back in… say an hour. Drop by at any time, Ana.”

  Ana nodded, thanked Sally, and cut the connection.

  Sally looked up and stared at Kath. “That was Ana. She seemed…” She shook her head.

  Kath said, “You’d better be getting home, Sally. Be there for Ana, and give her my condolences.”

  Kath stood and made to leave.

  “Kath?” Sally said.

  “Ana will tell you all about it. I really must be going.”

  They kissed cheeks, and Kath said, “I’ll see you in two days, Sally, on Titan.”

  She watched her friend hurry from the café, then made her way home with a feeling of dire expectation in her chest.

  SHE SAT BENEATH the cherry tree in her garden and waited.

  The sun was going down and birdsong filled the warm air. If she closed her eyes she could imagine herself back in Shropshire. When she opened her eyes, however, the quality of the light — somehow hazier and less intense — told her that she was no longer on Earth, and the tumbling shape of Deimos gave the game away.

  But the back garden and the cottage were as restful as ever, a piece of England transplanted, which Sally found a refuge from the pressure of work. She knew that Ana loved the cottage and the garden, and thoughts of Ana brought back what Kath had said. “Give her my condolences.”

  Had something happened to Kapil or to Shantidev?

  She started as she heard the squeak of the gate at the side of the house, and a second
later Ana came into view along the path.

  Sally stood and faced Ana down the length of the garden, and something in the Indian woman’s posture made Sally run to Ana and hold her as she sobbed on her shoulder. She inhaled the woman’s scent — rosewater and shampoo.

  She led Ana back to the cherry tree and sat her down on the bench, then sat beside her and held her hand. “Ana? Tell me…”

  “I hadn’t seen him for ten years… and I expected to find the man I had last seen. Brash. Arrogant… If I succeeded in finding him at all… But I found him. Against all the odds. Found him… I didn’t really expect to. But I did!”

  “Ana. Take it easy. Slow down. Does Kapil know you’re back?”

  “He’s… he’s on Venus. I contacted him. He’s on his way back. But… but he won’t get home until later tonight. And I just had to talk to someone…”

  “Of course, of course.” She gripped her friend’s hand. “Tell me.”

  “I went to Earth especially to find him.”

  She recalled Geoff telling her last week that Ana was going to New York to try to find her brother, Bilal.

  “Ana, what happened?”

  The Indian woman stared at her, stricken. “Someone murdered my brother,” she said.

  Sally wanted to say that that was impossible, that people were not murdered anymore. The coming of the Serene had seen to that…

  “But who…?”

  “I know who, Sally. I saw him. You see, when I was leaving the orphanage that afternoon, I saw someone. I didn’t know who it was at the time, only later… It was Bilal’s old boss, the businessman James Morwell. Only… only this was a different, younger version of James Morwell.”

  “But why would he want to murder Bilal?”

  Ana shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine. But… later I was questioned by a Serene self-aware entity. It… it entered me, just as ten years ago it saved me from the Obterek at Fujiyama, and when it came out it told me that I had been correct. I had seen James Morwell, and he was working for the Obterek.” She looked up, into the sky, and said, “And the self-aware entity told me, Sally, that they feared this was merely the start of a new, concerted Obterek onslaught.”

  Sally held her friend as the day darkened towards evening and a chill crept over the garden.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TO ALLEN, THE process of stepping into the obelisk on Mars and stepping out again on Titan seemed instantaneous.

  He knew intellectually that a day, perhaps two, had elapsed, but always as he completed his stride through the black wall and stepped out on the other side, he found it hard to believe. He always had to check the calendar on his softscreen to confirm how much time had passed, and always he felt renewed respect for Serene science. This time, thanks to Nina Ricci, he also experienced curiosity at what the Serene might be doing with the human representatives in the Titan obelisk.

  The sight that confronted him on emerging from the obelisk never failed to halt him in his tracks. He had seen many an artist’s representation of the rings of Saturn as seen from the moon of Titan, spectacular landscapes of methane plains with the mighty ringed planet canted at varying angles above the horizon, but the reality stunned him. It was the colours, he thought. Saturn itself was a vast pastel swirl and the rings, tipped so that they presented a great multi-stranded girdle encompassing the planet, ranged the spectrum. In the foreground the moon’s electric-blue plains provided a vivid contrast.

  The city itself was situated on a plateau on the moon’s southern pole, a collection of what looked like blown-glass habitats occupied by scientific teams huddled around the rearing tower of the obelisk, and all protected from the moon’s hostile hydrocarbon atmosphere by a bell-jar dome.

  For the past five years or so the routine had always been the same. Allen, Ana Devi and Nina Ricci, sometimes accompanied by other representatives, would meet at a café bar across the plaza from the obelisk. There, while admiring the views across the plain far below, they would chat for an hour or two before entering the obelisk again and finding themselves back on Mars. It was a time to catch up — if they hadn’t seen each other on Mars for a while — though oddly they never speculated about what they might have undergone in the day or two that had elapsed within the obelisk.

  Allen crossed the plaza and made his way to the table beside the far rail, where Sally, Ana and Kapil were seated. Ana was subdued, far from her usual voluble, talkative self. Kapil was gripping her hand beneath the table, murmuring something to her. Ana stared out across the jagged, frozen plain, but looked up and smiled briefly as Allen sat down next to Sally.

  He ordered coffee and, to break the ice, commented that the sight of the southern polar plain never failed to excite him.

  Sally said, “I didn’t think it would be so… vivid. The pictures I’ve seen failed to do it justice.”

  “Vivid and inimical,” Kapil put in, ever the scientist. “It might look beautiful, but it’s one of the most hostile environments known to man.”

  Ana said in a small voice, “I wonder why the obelisk is this far out — I mean this obelisk, the biggest in the system, the one every representative now goes to? Why couldn’t it be situated on Earth?”

  Kapil shrugged. “Security?”

  Sally said, “But secure from whom? The Obterek, presumably? Surely they can access anywhere in the system, always assuming they can breach Serene defences in the first place?”

  “Perhaps the defences are harder to breach this far out?” Ana suggested.

  “Or maybe,” Allen said lightly, “the Serene just like the view.”

  Sally looked up and said. “Here are Nina and Natascha.”

  They rearranged themselves around the table and pulled up a couple of chairs. Natascha was tiny, blonde, quiet and undemonstrative — a complete contrast in every respect to her Italian lover. She worked as an engineer on the Martian atmosphere plants, and had been a regular at the Allens’ monthly soirées, gracing the gatherings with her quiet, deadpan wit. She and Nina had been together for almost ten years, as unlikely a pairing intellectually as they were physically.

  They sat and ordered white wine and Allen said, “We were just wondering why the obelisk was situated this far out from Earth, Nina. I was about to say that no doubt you’d have a theory.”

  Natascha smiled into her glass. “Nina has a theory for everything, believe me.”

  Nina listened to what Kapil had suggested about security, then dismissed the idea with a wave. “The entire question as to why the obelisk is here is redundant, my friends. It could be here or anywhere — it would be equally as vulnerable on Earth as it would be here, or on Mars or Venus. The concept of distance, to Serene minds habituated to the idea of teleportation, is irrelevant. More important,” she went on, “is its function. It’s in some way more important to the Serene, because of its size and the fact that the human representatives come here now solely and far more often than we ever visited the other obelisks.”

  Natascha said, “But do you have a theory for that, my darling?”

  “For once, you’ll be surprised to learn, I do not. That’s what I hope we’ll find out from Kathryn, when she deigns to turn up.”

  Nina turned to Ana and murmured her condolences, touching the Indian woman’s hand.

  Ana smiled and said, “I have had time to think about it, Nina, and perhaps it was meant to be. Bilal had come to a peaceful period in his life, a period of contentment, I think. He had left behind the person he was, and was helping others. It was better that he die now than before, when he had not realised his… his potential.”

  Allen looked at her, wondering how much this was Ana rationalising the tragedy for the sake of her grief — or perhaps, in some way known only to the Hindu mind, she really believed this. To Allen, Bilal’s death was an unmitigated tragedy, a murder made all the more horrible because of the fact that no one, these days, met intentionally violent ends.

  Ana went on, “What frightens me is that it might be the s
tart of more violence from the Obterek. It’s bad enough that Bilal is dead, but let it be the last.”

  Natascha said, “And you are certain that you saw Bilal’s old boss, Morwell, enter the orphanage as you left?”

  Ana smiled. “His old boss, yes — but he was in some way younger. As if the Obterek had made him so.”

  “You said that a self-aware entity told you that Morwell was working for the Obterek?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “But it didn’t say why Morwell was doing this?” Nina Ricci asked. “Why, in other words, the Obterek might want your brother dead?”

  Ana shook her head. “It said nothing about this, and I was too shocked to ask.”

  Into the following silence, Sally asked quietly, “But why would the Obterek want Bilal dead?”

  Nina Ricci cleared her throat, and heads turned to her. “In my opinion,” she said, “they didn’t specifically want Bilal dead. I know this might be hard to accept, Ana, but I think that anyone would have sufficed.”

  Natascha looked at her lover. “I don’t follow…”

  Nina went on, “The Obterek used Morwell as a tool to see if they could succeed in breaching the Serene’s charea, however briefly. To see if it could be done again.”

  They sat in silence for a time, digesting the corollary of this idea.

  At last Ana said, “You are right, I do find it hard to accept, even though it might be the truth. Bilal told me, when we met three days ago, that he and Morwell had parted on bad terms. Perhaps it was Morwell who suggested to the Obterek that it might be Bilal who… who should serve as the… the test case.” She stopped, Kapil gripping her hand, then looked up bravely and said, “He was reading a book about Gandhi when he died, which would have been hard to imagine him doing ten years ago.”

  Allen ventured, “Perhaps, if his death served to warn the Serene that the Obterek have returned to the fray, then it might not have been in vain?”

  Ana nodded. “Yes, that would be a nice thought, wouldn’t it?”