“They have eliminated violence from the world,” she said, “and in so doing have banished fear. The powerful, the hostile powerful, no longer hold sway. The world is fair, equitable. There is no more poverty. Everyone has food, and a roof over their heads.”
“And we are in thrall to aliens whose raison d’êtreremains unknown.”
“The Serene,” she found herself saying, “are wholly good.”
He raised a supercilious eyebrow at this. “Oh, and you would know that personally, would you?”
She took a breath and said, “A week ago I was in Fujiyama when there was… a breach in the charea. The Obterek — other aliens, enemies of the Serene — attacked.”
He leaned forward. “I heard nothing of this.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have. The Serene imposed a news blackout.”
He said, “Typical of our oppressors…”
She went on, “I saw killing on a mass scale. I was killed myself, lasered here.” She smote the area between her breasts. “Only… a self-aware entity absorbed me, is the only way I can describe it, took me away from the slaughter and healed me.”
He stared at her, evidently wondering whether to believe her. He said, “And this makes the Serene wholly good? They save your life, so therefore…”
Exasperated, she interrupted. “I know the Serene are good. I have worked for them for ten years, and though the nature of the work is not known to me… something has… filtered into my consciousness, and I know the Serene are working for the good of humanity.”
He leaned back in his chair. “That’s a grand claim to make, isn’t it? Working for the Serene?”
She said proudly, and despised herself for it seconds later, “I am a representative of the Serene. Myself and thousands like me, selected ten years ago on the day the Serene came to Earth…”
It was a boast that, she was pleased to see, had silenced this arrogant man who was her brother.
At last he said, “So… I see that we obviously have our differences. But I can’t see why this should mean that we can’t get along in future like brother and sister…”
Despite herself, despite some deep dislike of the person Bilal had become, Ana found herself smiling. He was after all her big brother, who for many years had protected her, and maybe even loved her.
He got through to his secretary and had her fetch them coffee, then sat back in his chair and said, “Enough of the Serene, Ana. Do you recall the day I saved you from a beating by Mr Jangar?”
Ana looked past the slick businessman he had become, saw the scruffy street urchin with tousled hair and food around his mouth, who had caused a diversion in Mr Jangar’s office, allowing Ana to slip past the station master’s bulk and escape onto the crowded platform.
For the next hour they chatted about their old life on Howrah station.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALLEN AWOKE AND found himself on a train in the middle of the English countryside.
To his fellow passengers it must have appeared that Allen had surfaced from a troubled sleep, but all he could recall was the jet façade of the obelisk rushing to meet him. He wondered how long had elapsed. He looked at his watch. It was eleven in the morning on a beautiful sunny summer’s day, and the train was pulling into the stop before Wem. His watch also told him that it was the 10th, the same day he had visited the Fujiyama arboreal city — so given the time difference he had made the journey from Tokyo to where he was now in a matter of an hour… Obviously his calculations were way out, but he felt no urge to work through them again. What mattered, after the nightmare of slaughter at Fujiyama, was that soon he would be home.
He sat up, recalling the events in the fields around the vanished city tower, and touched the place just above his right kidney where the laser had skewered him. There was no pain, no sensation at all. He recalled that a golden figure had seemingly absorbed Nina Ricci. And he too had been taken, saved, by the self-aware entity.
He wondered then if the black obelisk in Tokyo was some kind of medical centre, where he had been taken for surgery. But the surgery must have been swift if that were so, and he recalled the cessation of pain on the way from Fujiyama and reasoned that the golden figure had effected physical repairs then.
On the luggage rack above his head was his hold-all, and wrapped around his right forearm was his softscreen. The Serene, or their minions, had thought of everything.
He considered contacting Sally and telling her that he would soon be home — hours earlier than expected — but decided to surprise her. He imagined her in her study, or perhaps sitting beneath the cherry tree in the garden, catching up on the latest medical advances on the various softscreen feeds she subscribed to. The thought warmed him.
He considered her message of the day before; the accident in which her friend Kath had died. He would do what little he could to comfort her when he got back, rather than launching into an account of the horrors he had experienced.
Ten minutes later the monotrain pulled into Wem and Allen alighted. He left the station and walked along the high street, and after the impersonality of Tokyo he was cheered by the familiar faces of the locals who were out and about. He realised that it was a scene that had changed little over the years — apart from the absence now of once-familiar company names that had made every town and city the same. Gone were the chains, Macdonald’s and KFC and their like, which had force-fed a willing populace a diet of low quality food laced with addictive fats, salts and sugars. He wondered if this was not merely an obvious consequence of the Serene’s restructuring of the world’s economy, but a follow-on from their charea injunction. Did the Serene, in their wisdom, consider what the food industry had perpetrated on their customers a form of protracted and insidious violence?
Gone too were the butcher’s shops, of course. Only the occasional tiled frontage remained, showing euphemistic scenes of contented cows grazing bucolic meadows. Healthfood outlets, fruit and veg shops, proliferated, along with privately run family concerns prospering under the fiscal aegis of the alien arrival.
A few weeks ago Sally had mentioned the health benefits that had accrued from the changes. In her line of work, as a country GP, she saw fewer cases of obesity and heart disease, fewer cancers and stress-related maladies. All, she said, attributable to the Serene in one way or another.
He wondered at the die-hard few who opposed what the Serene were doing, and that led him to reflect on the attack at Fujiyama, and the motives of the Obterek.
HE CROSSED TOWN and took the canal path to the outskirts, and five minutes later came to the back gate that led into the long garden.
He paused for a second and stared at the idyllic scene, the lawn and the trees and the mellow, golden stone of the house. Sally was not sitting beneath the cherry tree, but she must have been in the kitchen because, as he pushed through the gate and walked down the lawn, she emerged from the back door and dashed to meet him.
They hugged for a long time, and when she pulled away she was beaming.
“I got your message,” he said. “I’m sorry–”
She shook her head. “It’s okay… Look, it’s hard to explain. I know I said I saw Kath… there was an accident, as I said. I saw her die.” She shook her head and laughed, and Allen stared at her.
“Sally?”
She tugged his hand. “Come. We’ll talk over a cup of tea. There’s a lot to tell you about.”
Bemused, he followed her into the house and sat at the kitchen table.
She made two mugs of Earl Grey and sat next to him. She took a deep breath, shook her head, and laughed again. “I honestly don’t know where to begin.” She reached out and stroked his cheek. “Geoff, you look so young when you pull that mystified expression.”