“I know you’re probably sick and tired of me telling you this, but you’re very beautiful.”
“Give over, you.”
He crossed the room and took her in his arms, thrilled by the feel of her. He pressed her to him and kissed her lips. “I came in to see if you needed any help.”
“Typical. Just as I’ve nearly done in here.”
“Sorry.”
Someone ran into the kitchen with a clatter of shoes, stopping short. “Ugh! Do you have to, at your age?” Hannah stared at them. “Anyway, the beer’s running low and Professor Hendrix sent me in for more.”
Sally said, “You’ll find it in the cooler.”
Their daughter hauled open the door and dragged out the beer. As she left the kitchen, she called back over her shoulder, “And when you’ve quite finished in here, you should be sociable and circulate.”
Allen said, “Maybe she’s right.”
“Help me out with these and then get me a drink, would you?”
They carried out the trifles to applause, and Allen opened a bottle of Sally’s favourite white wine — a locally grown Chardonnay — and later they sat under the cherry tree with Ana, Kapil and a few other friends and drank and chatted as an indigo twilight rapidly descended.
He stared across the lawn at Nina Ricci, watching her holding forth to a group of scientists from the nearby research lab.
Sally leaned against him and murmured, “I wonder why Nina invited herself, Geoff?”
He smiled. “No doubt she has some wild theory to regale us with. You know Nina.”
She looked at him. “The strange thing is, I don’t think I do. I’ve known her for… what, ten years now, and I don’t really think I know the real woman, what she feels or thinks on a personal level. Oh, I know what she thinks intellectually — she never tires of telling me that! But emotionally…” She shook her head. “She gives nothing away.”
“That’s Nina. I’m not sure she has an emotional life.”
“If I didn’t know better, if I didn’t know Kath — to prove to me that self-aware entities can be imbued with just the same emotions as we humans… I would have said that Nina was an SAE.”
He shook his head. “I know what you mean, but I think not. She’s too critical of the Serene to be of them. And I don’t mean critical in her being opposed to their regime… I mean critical of their methods, their lack of — as she sees it — openness.”
“She still not married?”
“No. But rumour has it that she has a long-term lover, a woman twenty years her junior.”
“You should ask Nina to bring her along to one of our soirées.”
Nina disengaged herself from the knot of scientists and strolled past the cherry tree. She stepped onto the terrace which the Serene, when they had thoughtfully turned around the house, had cantilevered over the drop. She walked to the far rail and leaned against it, a study in isolated elegance.
Seconds later Allen’s forearm tingled, and he accepted the call. He glanced across at Ricci. She was staring at her own forearm.
She looked up at him from the screen. “Geoff, why not join me? Bring Ana.”
He said, “I’d like Sal to come too.”
A hesitation, then Nina Ricci nodded minimally. “Very well, but bring only four chairs so that people know that we are not to be interrupted.”
He cut the connection and said to Sally, “We have our orders.”
Sally spoke to Ana, and between them they carried four wicker chairs across the lawn and over to the rail. Allen ventured out onto the cantilever as little as possible — he found the vertiginous drop to the plain below too reminiscent of the view from the Fujiyama city tree, all those years ago.
He recharged their glasses and proposed a toast. “To life on Mars,” he said, “almost exactly ten years on.”
Nina Ricci looked around the small group and said, “And have you settled down, all of you? Are you liking life on Mars?”
They nodded, to a person. Allen said, “It couldn’t be better. We were a little homesick at first, weren’t we?” He looked across at Sally, who smiled. “But that soon passed.”
“And you, Ana? Do you miss India?”
“I don’t. I have… outgrown the country of my birth. I like to think of myself as a citizen of the solar system.”
Allen smiled as she said this, and thought of the street kid Ana had been.
Nina said, “Do you ever consider what the Serene might want with us, their ‘representatives’?”
He shifted uneasily, wondering why her question unsettled him. Ana said, “I no longer question the Serene, Nina. They have brought unlimited good to humankind. Who am I to question what they want with me?”
“Or what they do to you, in that mysterious obelisk on Titan?”
Allen said, “Do to us?”
Nina shrugged. “We go there every two weeks now, we and thousands upon thousands of other human representatives… and we walk out a day or two later with no memory of what occurred in there. And don’t you think it strange?”
Sally spoke up. “The whole thing about the Serene is ‘strange’, if you’re inclined to phrase it like that.”
The Italian smiled. “We no longer travel to the obelisks on Earth or elsewhere. Almost everyone goes exclusively to the obelisk on Titan, the vastest manufactured object in the solar system. I wondered at first if it served as a device like the other obelisks–”
“A matter-transmitter,” Sally said.
Nina inclined her head. “That’s what I wondered. But why have one of that size situated so far out? For what purpose? And why have every representative go there every two weeks?”
Ana was doing her best to hide her smile. “And you have a theory, Nina?”
Nina Ricci allowed a silence to develop. Instead of assenting, which was what Allen had expected, she said, “I have one more question, Ana. And it is this: what are the Serene doing to our solar system?”
This was met with blank looks all round. “What do you mean?” Ana asked.
Ricci tapped her forearm, then typed in a command. From the olive skin of her arm was projected into the air before them a cuboid, three-dimensional screen.
Allen made out a representation of the outer solar system, with Saturn and Jupiter in the foreground, and the outer planets tiny dots behind them. Beyond, far stars twinkled.
Ricci said, “This has been suppressed by the various newsfeeds. I suspect SAEs in high places don’t want us to know, quite yet.”
Allen said, “Know what?”
“I was talking to the scientists from the university, among them a couple of astronomers — and even they are not aware of what is happening.”
“Which is?” Ana asked.
“Observe.” Ricci tapped her screen again and the scene hanging before them shifted. Gone were Jupiter and Saturn, to be replaced with the tiny, ice-bound orb of Pluto. “Do you see the stars immediately behind Pluto?” she asked.
Sally said, “Yes, but faintly.”
“Yes!” declared Ricci. “Exactly. Look, the stars in a quadrant — imagine an elliptical section of orange peel, if you will — appear faint, compared with those to either side.”
Allen peered more closely, and saw that she was correct. So…” he said.
“This appeared three weeks ago, for no more than an hour. A colleague — an amateur astronomer — brought it to my attention. When he checked again, the quadrant of faint stars was back to normal. When I saw Kathryn Kemp a week later, I asked her about the diminution of stellar luminosity.”
“And she said that you were imagining it,” Ana smiled.
Ricci stared at her. “On the contrary, Ana,” the Italian said, “Kathryn told me that on my next visit to Titan, she would be able to answer some of my questions, and specifically she would be in a position to tell me what the Serene were doing on the outer edges of the solar system.”