“They’re well. Kapil seems happy down at the farm and Shantidev has decided he wants to drive a tractor for a living when he grows up.”
Allen laughed. “You make Kapil sound like a gentleman farmer.”
She regarded him over her glass. “I often admire Kapil for his… centredness,” she said, and shrugged, “his contentment. He keeps my feet on the ground.”
Kapil managed the production output at the vast Ibrium farm, a logistical nightmare of a job which Allen knew just enough about to realise that it was demanding and high-powered.
“There’s nothing like having children to make you realise how old you’re getting,” Ana said now.
“You don’t need to tell me that. I’m sixty-two. Hannah’s fifteen, going on thirty. The last ten years have gone by like that…” He snapped his fingers.
“It seems like just a few weeks ago that I was working on Earth.”
“And speaking about the last ten years…”
“Yes?”
He shrugged, wondering how to broach the subject. Ana, practical, down-to-Earth Ana Devi, would tell him he was imagining things. “We both left our old jobs and moved into admin around the same time.”
She sipped her iced coffee. “Mmm…”
“Well… have you wondered how much that was, on your part, a conscious choice?”
She pulled a face and stared at him. “Of course it was a conscious choice,” she said. “You don’t think I was ordered by my subconscious one day to pack it all in at the farm and apply for the government post?”
“Of course not. I mean… I was thinking back to when I left the agency, and it came to me that it was a combination of factors out of my controclass="underline" dissatisfaction with shooting the same old things, the opening that just happened to be there in admin.”
“Just what are you trying to say, Geoff?”
He shrugged, suddenly unsure of his footing. “I sometimes wonder how much we’re being… propelled — I nearly said manipulated — by the Serene.”
Ana twisted her lips into a frown. “I think that’s something we’ll probably never know.”
“But you admit that it’s a possibility?”
“I… Maybe, I don’t know. But to what end?”
He considered her question. “Not long after we joined the admin team,” he said, “our work for the Serene increased.”
From doing the bidding of the Serene on a monthly basis, he, Ana and all the other ‘representatives’ of their acquaintance were informed that they would now be required to travel around the system for two days every fortnight — and most of their work would be centred on the giant obelisk situated on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
Ana nodded. “That’s right. So…?”
“So… it occurred to me that it was a bit of a coincidence.”
She pointed at him. “And that’s all it was, Geoff. A coincidence. Nothing more.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I’d still like to know what it is we actually do for the Serene in the obelisk every two weeks.”
“I think that, Geoff, might remain a mystery for ever.”
They sipped their drinks in companionable silence for a while, and then Ana said, “I’ve been thinking recently about the past twenty years, the arrival of the Serene and how things have changed. You?”
“Just a bit,” he said.
“You don’t see much spasming these days, do you?”
“Sally said the same thing just last week, and I hadn’t realised — but you’re right. You don’t.”
“Have you wondered why not?”
“Sally suggested that it’s a conditional thing. Collectively, on some psychological level, we know that violence is futile so the brain is inured not to initiate the impulse.”
She nodded. “She’s been reading the psychology reports. That’s roughly the thinking. In the early days you saw instances of spamsing all over… remember all the comedians telling jokes about politicians dancing like marionettes?” She smiled. “Then… over the years… the instances of people spamsing grew less and less.”
He looked at her. “Did you spasm in the early days?”
Her expression clouded as she recalled something, he guessed, from her childhood. She was sixteen when the Serene arrived, though she had not spoken much about her life as a street kid in Kolkata. Now she nodded. “Once or twice, just after they came… It was a strange sensation, a kind of powerlessness, and yet a great urge to carry out the act.”
“Do you recall,” he went on, “how some psychologists were predicting terrible consequences of the human race being unable to fulfil what they saw as an elemental desire, the desire to commit violence? They said there would be unforeseen repercussions of the sublimation…”
“They got it wrong, which I suppose isn’t that surprising when you think about it. I mean, the way some people were going on it was as if violence and the need to commit it was something that the majority of us felt and did on a daily basis. But how many times have you spasmed in the past twenty years?”
He thought about it. “I think just once, a year after the Serene arrived. I was debating with a colleague about the politics of their arrival, and he was against it. For a second, the briefest second, as he goaded me…” He shrugged. “I don’t even know if I really spasmed — he certainly didn’t notice anything, thankfully. I just felt a tremor, a sense of impotence.”
“And I think that goes for the majority of the human race,” Ana said. “So how would the inability to do violence have any long-term, or short-term, come to that, consequences for most of us?”
“And for the tiny minority, the psychopaths amongst us?”
“I rather think that they were… healed by the Serene self-aware entities among us,” she said.
People like Kath Kemp, he thought; yes, that would make sense.
She sipped her iced coffee, staring over the escarpment at the pacific vista. Phobos tumbled, end over end, across the far horizon — and its rapid transit contrasted with and pointed up the serenity of the land beneath.
She said, “Do you know what the most shocking thing was, ten years ago?”
“You mean, when the Serene fought off the attack and brought us here?” He shook his head. “I don’t know… The fact that the Serene were not… invincible, that they had enemies?”
She nodded. “Yes, all that. You’re right. I was being selfish when I asked the question. That was shocking, too. But for me, on a personal level… I told you about my brother, didn’t I?”
“Bilal?”
“Bilal. Right.”
“You said he worked for the Morwell Corporation, and that he was opposed to the Serene.”
“And how,” she said, her expression hardening. “But what I’ve never told you… never told anyone other than Kapil… was that it was my brother, my big brother, who tried to attack me that day on behalf of the Obterek. He set me up, was willing to use me as a pawn to undermine the Serene.” She stopped, her lips compressed as she fought with the notion. “He felt nothing for me.”
Allen said, “I’m sorry.”
“At the time it hurt more than I cared to admit. You see, until the age of six he and me were…” She shrugged. “We lived rough on Howrah Station, and Bilal looked after me. Then one day he just vanished, and I thought for a long time that he’d died. Years later, after the Serene came, I found out he was still alive and I tracked him down. And I found that he’d changed. He was shallow and mercenary… someone I should have despised. But he was my brother, after all… and I wanted to get to know him again. I suppose I wanted… I know this sounds silly… but I think I wanted him to love me.”
She fell silent again, and Allen said nothing, but let her wrestle with her emotions. At last she said, “After his betrayal, in the years that followed, I often wondered how — or even if — the Serene had punished him.”