“The traditional religions. Do you know how many religions have sprung up over the past few years, inspired by the Serene?”
He’d heard of the phenomenon, and said, “Half a dozen, or even fewer?”
She shook her head, smiling. “Would you believe over five thousand?”
“No. Five thousand? Where did you read that?”
“I actually wrote a feature for my paper on the new religions. For some deep-seated reason, the human race needs to believe in a god-like figure, a deity, and in the eyes of many the Serene amply fill that god-shaped hole.”
“But five thousand?”
She shrugged. “And these new religions span the globe, from east to west, north to south, supplanting the old religions and gaining strength.”
“I wonder how the Serene regard them?”
She made a rosebud of her lips, then said, “My guess is that they despair.” She smiled. “The Serene strike me as supremely rationalist.”
“Another of your hunches?” he asked.
She laughed. “Maybe so.”
“Well, I suppose if the Serene come here and perform miracles, they can’t be surprised at the reaction of some of our more credulous cousins.” He tipped his head back and forth. “They certainly fit the bill. Our saviours, who set us on a new moral course…”
She squinted at him. “I never had you down as a religious type, Geoff Allen.”
He smiled at her. Her familiarity, her assumed knowledge of him, he might have found discomfiting in one less affable than Nina Ricci, but she made her personal pronouncements with an easy, almost mocking candour that he found at once charming and disarming.
Only then did he wonder how she knew his surname, for he was sure he had introduced himself only as ‘Geoff’.
He asked, “What other Serene-related stories have you worked on recently?”
“The big one was an investigation into how the Serene have been ‘assisting’ some of our biggest drugs companies.”
He smiled. “Before their coming, I would have said that the drugs companies certainly needed ‘assisting’,” he said with sarcasm.
“Of course, the Serene have changed everything to do with the business model of the pharmaceuticals,” she said. “Now instead of working for their share-holders, like every other company before them, they are working for the people. My investigations uncovered the fact that many of the newly released drugs of recent years have their origins off-planet. I spoke to experts who assured me that they were derived from chemical bases that did not exist on Earth.” She shrugged. “Which would go to support the fact that in the last decade human life-expectancy, worldwide, has increased by an average of a little over twelve years.”
He thought about it. “I suppose the resulting increase in population will be sustained by the limitless supply of energy and the vast new cities… But even so, the planet is finite.”
She was smiling at him.
“What?” he asked.
“Would you like to hear another of my hunches?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No,” she said. “My hunch is this: I think soon the Serene will take us off-planet, away from Earth, to colonies in the solar system…”
“Nice idea,” he said. “Imagine living on a moon beneath the rings of Saturn…”
“You mock me, but I am deadly serious. As you say, the planet is a finite system, and the population is increasing dramatically. So where will we go, but off-planet?”
He shrugged. “You might be right,” he said. “If the Serene can bring other forms of life here, then I see no reason why they can’t take us… elsewhere.”
“‘Other forms of life’? Oh, you mean the arboreal cities?”
He nodded. “I’m looking forward to seeing them. I’m told they’re the eighth wonder of the world.”
“But shouldn’t that be eleventh, coming after the eight joined starships, the greening cities, and…” — she pointed a crimson lacquered nail at the towers across the plaza — “the obelisks?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve lost count.”
He’d read online accounts of the arboreal cities, and the mammoth trees from Antares II which made terrestrial giant redwoods seem like saplings in comparison, and when his editor had suggested he do a photo-shoot of the Fujiyama arboreal city — as he would be visiting Japan anyway — he had jumped at the chance.
He checked his watch. “But speaking of arboreal cities… our train leaves in ten minutes.”
They finished their drinks and crossed the plaza to the station, had their softscreen reservations scanned, and strolled the length of the platform to the second carriage. Allen relaxed in a luxurious window seat and minutes later the torpedo-train slipped from the station.
Nina Ricci sat opposite him, silent as she regarded the reforestation projects north of Tokyo.
Allen stared through the window, noting the new sea defences that had been erected along the coast after the tsunami of 2018. They slid past a vast energy distribution station just as a beam of concentrated light fell to Earth like a meteor, dazzling him and the hundred other passengers who ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ like school children.
As the train sped around the bend of a bay he closed his eyes, feigning sleep, and considered Sally and her distraught message.
CHAPTER FIVE
SALLY FOUND A post-it note and wrote: I’m in the back garden. Take the side path to the left and I’ll see you there. She tore off the yellow rectangle, stuck the note to the front door beside the big brass knocker and retreated to the back garden.
For some reason she didn’t want to open the front door and confront Kath — or whatever it was that Kath had become. She did not, she thought, want to be confined in the house with her. It was not a thought she could rationalise, and part of her felt guilty for having it. But it came to her that she needed to meet this new, resurrected Kath in the open, in the sunlight, so that she could run if she needed to.
She was still in a state of shock. She recalled the dazed disbelief she had experienced just after the coming of the Serene. This was similar, only intensified a hundredfold. She felt abstracted from reality, as if she were moving in a bubble secluded from everything, her every sense retarded.
She crossed the garden and sat on the wooden bench beneath the flowering cherry tree. From here she could look back at the house, and the wicket gate to the side path through which, in a matter of minutes, Kath would walk. Kath Kemp, whom Sally had watched die yesterday…
It was an idyllic scene, with the sun shining and the wisteria giving off its heavy scent which wafted to her across the garden. The mullioned windows winked in the sunlight, and the borders were abundant with blooms. It was a scene that might be a hundred years old, so little had changed here in the past century.
The gate beside the house squeaked open and Sally sprang to her feet with a sharp, indrawn breath.
Kath Kemp paused, holding the gate open. She was perhaps twenty metres away from Sally and smiled that familiar smile at her.
Sally took a step forward, and then another. She felt like an invalid, learning to walk again after a terrible accident. She was aware of a pain in her chest and shortness of breath.
Kath too began walking, slowly, and they met in the middle of the lawn, drenched in sunlight, for all the world as if they had never met before.
Sally stared at the woman before her, stared at her broad, smiling face, her swept back hair. Her skin was flushed, alive; she exuded, as she had yesterday, a radiant compassion that Sally found impossible to describe or to quantify: it was who Kathryn Kemp was, an identifying signature, which filled Sally whenever she thought about her friend in absentia.