Julia looked at them pensively. "I really ought to have remembered this was the main fruit season."
"No reason why you should. Fruit picking isn't something Event Horizon has cybernated."
"Oh, you!" She poked him in mock exasperation as Victor Tyo laughed.
It was cooler inside the house, conditioners filling the air with a slightly clammy refrigerated chill. Greg led Julia and Victor Tyo into the sun lounge, checking quickly to see if any of the children's toys were lying about underfoot. The room had a white-tile floor, furnished with a pair of twisted-cane frame chairs and a three-seater settee. Benji, the family parrot, was climbing delicately over the outside of his cage.
A broad bay window looked out over the huge southern prong of Rutland Water. White wooden hireboats from the fishing lodge at Normanton bobbed about on the blue water, windsurfers and sailing yachts zipped round them. Red-faced cyclists pedalled along a narrow track just above the far shoreline, sweltering in the tropical heat of the English summer.
Greg relished the view, he had grown up in the small arabic county, lived on the shore of the reservoir for over twenty-five years. The Berrybut time-share estate was almost directly opposite the farm; in the evening he and Eleanor would watch the nightly bonfire blaze in the centre of the horseshoe of chalets, remembering earlier, simpler times.
Eleanor came into the sun lounge, walking carefully, stiffbacked from her seven-month pregnancy.
Greg caught Victor Tyo throwing him a startled glance as Eleanor and Julia embraced. It added to his growing sense of unease.
"Victor." Eleanor was smiling as she kissed the security chief. "Never see enough of you. Found a girl you can settle down with yet?"
"Eleanor," Greg protested.
"There is someone," Victor agreed defensively.
"Good, you can bring her round to dinner. We'd love to meet her."
"You never mentioned her to me," Julia said.
Victor Tyo sent a silent dismayed appeal to Greg.
"Sit down," Greg said. "And you two, behave; stop trying to embarrass Victor." He snagged Eleanor round her waist and urged her over to the settee.
"Oliver, Anita and Richy are out in the stables," Eleanor said. "I sent Matthew and Daniella out to find them. One of the mares has just foaled."
Julia groaned. "They'll only want to bring it back to Wilholm with them."
Greg put his arm around Eleanor, enjoying the feel of her as she leant in against him. "So what did you come for?" he asked.
Julia had the grace to look mildly guilty. "Royan."
"You've heard from him?" Eleanor asked.
"Sort of."
She handed Greg a slim white box, explaining about the unknown girl at the Newfields ball.
The trumpet flower inside was drooping, its light fuzz of hairs curling up. Greg's intuition strummed a quiet string of warning. Something about the flower was desperately wrong. He couldn't begin to guess what.
"And there was just the one card with it?" he asked.
"Yes."
He gave the box to Eleanor.
"I don't recognize it," Eleanor said. "What sort is it?"
Julia shot Victor Tyo a nervous questioning glance. The security chief shrugged.
"That's where the real problem begins," Julia said. "My NN cores ran a search through every botanical memory core they could access. Nothing. They drew a complete blank. No big deal about that, there are a lot of new gene-tailored varieties on the market; can't keep track of everything. Still, I sent it down to the lab for genetic sampling, see if we could find what it was derived from, the parent species." She drew a breath, pressing her palms together. "It's extraterrestrial."
"Alien?" Greg felt a fast twist of cold fear. Gone. With his sensitivity, no wonder the flower had triggered a mild wave of xenophobia. He stared at the flower; intuition shouting loud and clear what Julia was going to ask him to do next.
Eleanor's weight pressed against him, she was giving Julia a doleful accusing look.
"It can't be," Eleanor said. "It's no different to any other flower."
Greg could sense a stiff form of revulsion growing in her mind; she wanted to reject the whole notion.
"A flower is a very simple organism," Julia said, the slightest quaver in her voice betraying the severe fright Greg was observing in her thoughts. "It attracts insects to assist in pollination, nothing more. Naturally an alien flower will look similar to our own."
"So this planet it came from has bees as well, does it?"
"The individual species of plants and animals won't resemble ours, but given a planet with anything remotely approaching Earth's climate they will certainly be analogous. Evolutionary factors will remain pretty constant throughout the universe, the simplest solution always applies. Think how many plants have developed since life began on Earth, all of them variants on a central theme."
"What rubbish."
"Please, Eleanor," Julia said painfully. "I wish you were right, I really do. I wanted the geneticists to be completely wrong. But the flower has nothing like our DNA. The chromosome-equivalents are toroidal, arranged in concentric shells. My geneticists say the sphere they form is unholy complex, and definitely not from this solar system."
"For complex, read 'advanced'," Victor Tyo said. "The geneticists estimate the source planet could be anything up to a couple of billion years further up the evolutionary ladder than Earth. The gene sphere is much larger than terrestrial DNA strands."
It didn't really register with Greg, nonsense numbers. He ordered a gland secretion, concentrating inwards. There was no truth to be gained from intuition, only a sense of what might be, hints. He scrambled round for a sign of fear, that the flower was dangerous. But there was only the original tremendous unease, amplified to a cloying presence. He imagined this was what being haunted must be like.
He rose from the near-trance state.
"The flower," Greg said. "It's not lethal, but I get a sense of weight behind it, a pressure building up."
"The aliens?" Victor Tyo asked.
"No," Greg gave him a wry smile. "No spaceships, no Martian invasion fleet. But there's something… biding time."
"There is a ship, something had to bring it here," Victor said. "They're close, watching us, hell they're probably even down here among us. How would we know? We've no idea what they look like, what they're capable of. God Almighty, entities from another planet." Perhaps it was just the emphasis his boyish face gave to any deeply felt emotion, but Victor's dismay seemed to be on the point of crushing him.
"Aliens might have the technological advantage over us," Greg said. "But I'd be very surprised if they could land on Earth without the strategic defence networks picking them up. Am I right, Julia?"
She gave a subdued nod. "Yes. The sensor coverage is good, it has to be given the potential for kinetic assaults. You could orbit a ship two hundred thousand kilometres out without being spotted, fair enough, but the chances of detection increase with every kilometre you travel closer to Earth. Once you're within fifteen thousand kilometres of the surface you're visible. It doesn't matter how good your stealth technology is, any physical body passing through the planetary magnetosphere generates a flux that the sensors will pick up. We're tracking hundreds of thousands of objects up there, anything from discarded solar panels to composite bolts."
"So where did the flower come from?" Eleanor asked.
Julia shook her head slowly. "I don't know. And that's what really worries me. I can't believe even aliens have the ability to circumvent our technology to that extent."
"You said you could feel a pressure," Victor said. "What kind of pressure?"