“Ten years ago I found out… from Sanjeev Varnaputtram, of all people, that he had been taken up by a philanthropist, and educated, and then selected to work for a big American corporation.”
“But he never contacted you?” Kapil asked.
She shook her head. “Never. Nothing. Not even a letter… For a long time I thought he must be dead, and I sometimes wished that it were so. Then I wouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that he deserted me and never thought to get in touch.”
He gripped her hand. “And you’ve never thought to try and contact him?”
She shook her head. “And the thing is, I don’t know why. Fear, perhaps. A part of me so much wants to see him again. But… but what if he spurns me, doesn’t want anything to do with me?” She shrugged. “How would I cope with that?”
He walked her home, murmuring that she had him now, and back in their room he undressed her slowly and they made love.
Afterwards, as always, she pressed her lips against his chest and wept.
He stroked her hair and whispered, “Why, Ana? Why do you always cry?”
She laughed through her tears, reached up and caressed his cheek. She wanted to say, “Is it not little wonder? But you would never understand…”
He left for the airport at seven the following morning, and they parted before the hotel with kisses and promises to see each other in one month.
Later, back in her room as she was preparing to leave and catch the train to Andhra Pradesh, a familiar soothing voice sounded in her head.
“Ana, a flight to Tokyo at eleven, and then tomorrow a fact-finding tour of the Fujiyama arboreal city…”
She smiled to herself. She had not visited Tokyo for years, and she had read a lot about the arboreal cities.
She contacted her manager at the wilderness city and arranged for her deputy to cover her shifts, then packed her holdall and took a taxi to the airport.
CHAPTER THREE
JAMES MORWELL SAT in the penthouse office of Morwell Towers and stared down the length of Manhattan. Not that the tower was strictly speaking Morwell Towers any more; the lower stories had been taken over by other concerns, and only the top two floors remained in the control of the organisation. The tower resembled a block graph, with the gradual leasing out of floor after floor to other companies representing the diminution of the once great empire of the Morwell Corporation. Within days of the arrival of the Serene, shares in the arms and energy branches of the corporation had plummeted, while across the board his other enterprises had suffered almost as much. The only section of his business empire to have survived, after a fashion, was his various media outlets.
Now James Morwell was effectively little more than a manager overseeing the smooth running of his news networks, with control but little power. He likened what had happened to the emasculation that might have taken place in the old days, if some communist dictator had assumed control and put an immediate end to all forms of free enterprise. Everything, now, was in effect under state control — that state being the hegemony of the alien Serene.
He was little more than a party functionary giving orders to others who did the real work. Gone were the days when his decisions, along with that of his board, could add millions to the price of Morwell shares, bankrupt a country or bankroll the rise to power of friendly politicians in far-flung corners of the world.
Not that he was accepting what had happened without a fight. Ten years had elapsed, and he might be the powerless puppet figurehead of a once proud business empire, but Morwell still harboured dreams of returning the planet to its pre-Serene days.
It might have been no more than a futile gesture of resistance, but not long after the coming of the Serene he had started a website devoted to the promulgation of ideas opposing the pacifist regime of the extraterrestrials. He had expected the website to be closed down summarily, but that had never happened. A decade later the website — rousingly entitled The Free Earth Confederation — boasted more than ten million subscribers worldwide. They ranged from disgruntled individuals whose lives and livelihoods had been affected by the changes — boxers and self-defence experts, anglers and hunters and many more — to former dictators and high-up military personnel, as well as free-thinkers and scientists from various fields. He had realised, early on in the campaign, that it was important to get big-name thinkers and philosophers on his side. He had contacted those with known Republican sympathies, the so-called climate change sceptics and the libertarian mavericks who, years ago, had opposed the liberals on ecological issues, and sorted out those who had done so through genuine belief from opportunists who had been bought by government research grants and funding. He had organised forums, seminars, and gathered every dissenting voice together on his website.
He genuinely believed that there was a groundswell of public opinion growing for the restitution of the old way of life.
He genuinely believed that when the Serene had imposed — without consent — their charea on the people of Earth, humanity had been robbed of something fundamental. Not for nothing had mankind evolved, by tooth and claw, over hundreds of thousands of years. We became, he reasoned, the pre-eminent species on the planet through the very means that the Serene were now denying us. It was his opinion, and that of many eminent social thinkers and philosophers, that the human race had reached the peak of its evolution and was now on an effete downward slope, little more than the pack-animals of arrogant alien masters.
Violence was a natural state. Violence was good. Violence winnowed the fittest, the strongest, from the weak. The only way forward was through the overthrow of the Serene and the subversion of the unnatural state of charea.
Of course, these were fine words. The reality was that the Serene were so far in advance of humanity in terms of science and technology that it was analogous to a band of Cro-Magnon spear-carriers taking on the might of an elite Delta Force.
With the added complication being that the Serene were an enemy which did not show itself. And its minions, the golden figures, were as elusive as they were enigmatic. Not one of his sympathisers had ever been able to open communications with the so-called self-aware entities.
His softscreen chimed, pulling him back to the real world, and Lal’s face flared on the screen. “A little more information regarding the representatives, sir.”
“Fine. Come on up.”
He had first set Lal the task of tracking down these ‘representatives’ ten years ago. In the early days he had not even been certain of their existence — from time to time, as Lal’s searches got nowhere, he thought the notion of humans in the employ of the aliens was no more than a rumour — but Lal through persistence and ingenuity had come up with occasional pay dirt. He had identified individuals who did move around the globe with erratic and seemingly motiveless purpose, individuals from all walks of life in whom the Serene should have no interest. But just as soon as Morwell hired people to apprehend and question these people, they vanished as if spirited away.
A knock sounded on the door and his facilitator Lal Devi, who’d stood by him through thick and thin since the coming of the Serene, slipped into the room, as sharp as ever with his silk suit, ponytail and air of optimistic efficiency.
He set his own softscreen on the desk top and tapped it into life.
“Two suspects, sir. The first…”
A face appeared on the screen, an African women in her fifties. “Chetti Bukhansi, 53, from Chad. An engineer. We’ve been tracking her for a month, on a tip-off from one of our sympathisers. I gave the order for a mole to be introduced, and the insertion was successful but came up with nothing substantial. Bukhansi travels a lot with her work, and it might not be the ‘cover’ of a representative.”