“We have all that here, Sally.”
She nodded. “But even so, the idea of Mars. The experience. A part of me feels we’d be foolish to pass it up, while another…”
“And you accuse me of being a stick-in-the-mud.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m very happy with what I have here, thank you very much.”
“And so am I, but I know what you mean. The thought of Mars…” He slapped his leg with the flat of his hand. “But let’s wait until we hear what your self-aware entity friend has to say, hm?”
“All those years, the times we spent together…”
“How does it make you feel, the knowledge of who — what — she is?”
“I’ve thought about that a lot over the past couple of days. At first, I don’t know… but I felt as if our friendship had been somehow… devalued. As if for all those years Kath had been living a lie. But then I realised that was stupid. She wasn’t out to get anything from me — other than what every human being wants from someone, friendship, loyalty, understanding, being there when it matters… We shared all those things. So the fact that she’s also an alien, a self-aware entity… In a way, it doesn’t really alter anything.”
“And yet.”
She laughed. “And yet it does alter everything. I think now I can never be as… as open with her, I suppose. I’ll always be wondering about her motivations in being here, always wondering if she really understands me, or if it’s just simulating a response.” She waved. “I’m sorry, I’m expressing it badly.”
“I think I understand,” he said. “One of your best friends has turned out to be something other than what she purported to be, so of course you have every right to reassess your relationship with her.”
“And forge a new relationship with her, built on that new knowledge,” she said. She cocked her head, listening. “That’s the side gate. It must be her.”
Seconds later Kath’s head and shoulders passed the kitchen window and she knocked on the slightly open door.
From where he sat at the table, Allen watched the two women come together on the threshold and embrace. He had always been struck by the differences between these two good friends: whereas Sally was tall, elegant and — though he admitted bias in this — beautiful, Kath was small, thick-set and plain. She exuded a matronly bonhomie that he found endearing, and which people warmed to. And it was all, he reminded himself, a construct, a fabrication to humanise what was in fact an alien being.
He rose and crossed the kitchen towards Kath. He always found greeting women a little awkward — a handshake or a chaste peck on the cheek: one too formal and the other too intimate — and he ended up stooping a little to give her a hug.
“Geoff,” she said. “It’s lovely to see you. It’s been more than two years.”
“How about we sit in the garden?” he suggested. “Tea all round?”
While Sally ushered Kath into the garden and arranged a table and a spare chair beneath the cherry tree, Allen made three cups of Earl Grey, opened a packet of locally made shortbread, and carried them outside.
They sipped tea, nibbled biscuits, and traded the usual pleasantries for a few minutes — commenting on the weather, the fine state of the garden — though Allen was aware of the incongruity of the charade.
At last Kath paused and looked up from her tea. “I take it Sally told you all about what happened the night before last?”
“In detail,” he said, “and I filled Sal in on the events at Fujiyama.”
Kath pulled a quick frown at this, murmuring, “Ah, yes…” She looked from Sally to Allen, and said, “That was a breach we could have done without, but you’ll be pleased to know that no lasting damage was done, despite the appearance of initial conditions. Everyone ‘killed’ at Fujiyama was saved by the SAEs.”
“I was shot in the torso,” he began, shaking his head.
“My… colleagues melded with the dead and dying, imbued them with our life-force, and affected such repairs as were needed. On a quantum level, it was a simple procedure.”
“But the other evening? Couldn’t you have saved yourself, then?” Sally asked.
“It was a very different form of attack, Sally. Far more… lethal. I needed help, from my colleagues, in order to effect recovery.”
Allen said, “And the Obterek? Who are they? Why are they attacking you?”
Kath nodded, balancing her tea cup on her knee. “They are our opponents, or enemy, from the sector of the galaxy from where we hail. We are ideologically opposed, I suppose you could say. The history between us is long and complex. Anyway, they compromised the charea program we had in place — only locally, I’m glad to say, and staged a minor offensive.”
“Minor?” Allen queried. “It appeared rather major to me. The destruction of a couple of towers, the slaughtering of dozens, hundreds, of humans…”
“Believe me, Geoff, it was a minor incident. As the Obterek meant it to be — not so much the first stage of a concerted offensive, but a warning shot. It was a breach which told us that they were capable, given the opportunity, of much greater damage. Their attacks have been increasing of late, and although we are confident that we can counter everything they have to throw at us, the incidence of their attacks is nevertheless worrying.”
Sally leaned forward. “But what do the Obterek object to, Kath? Who can possibly oppose what the Serene are doing here?”
“The Obterek can. They are a military race, evolved in conditions far different from any you might be able to imagine. Their rise to eminence in their solar system, and the neighbouring ones, is a bloody catalogue of conflicts won and lost, the brutality and barbarity of which is hard to envisage, or believe. They are responsible for the annihilation of more than a dozen innocent races, and they see what we are doing as against the natural law. That is their great phrase — translated into English, of course — Natural Law, the edict of the universe which no race should contravene.”
“But surely,” Sally said, “a purely subjective idea?”
“Of course,” Kath said, “but try telling the Obterek that.”
“How long have the Serene and the Obterek been at loggerheads?” Allen asked.
“Would you believe over two hundred thousand Terran years?”
He shook his head at the very idea.
Kath went on, “The conflict exemplifies a typical pacifist-aggressor paradigm: what does a peaceful people, who live by rules of non-violence and respect for all life, do when attacked by a force who does not hold to such ideals? In the early years our people were split. There were those who said we should counter like with like, and defend ourselves by attacking. There were others, whose view thankfully prevailed, who maintained that we should abide by the ideals that had made our race what it was: humane, tolerant, compassionate. We inhabited many worlds by this time, and on one we set about working on a means of peaceable defence.”
Sally opened her mouth in a silent, “Ah…” She said, “Charea?”
Kath nodded. “And for forty thousand years, with frequent interruptions, charea has worked.”
A silence developed, each contemplating their own thoughts, until Sally asked, “You said that the incidence of Obterek attacks are increasing, but does this mean that one day they will prevail?”
“We certainly hope not. You must understand that to subvert, or compromise, the quantum structure of the charea requires such energies as you would find hard to conceive. And the Obterek simply do not have the resources to reconfigure more than a fragment of the basal structure of reality at any one time. Granted, they may attempt to take the life of a self-aware entity from time to time, or even stage a more daring attack like that at Fujiyama, but as I stated earlier these are, we think, merely warning shots. We live in preparation of the Obterek upping the stakes, of developing ways of countering the charea that we cannot foresee.”