The Serene Invasion (29 page)

The figure said, “The fact is that you do not know, for certain. You must merely trust. And hope, James Morwell. And hope is a commodity of which you have had little over the course of the past ten years.” The figure paused, pulsing beautifully, and went on, “We have read your manifesto. We have studied your online pronouncements. The Serene, too, are aware of you, but in their complacency they allow you to conduct your opposition, such as it is. But that is the difference between the Obterek and the Serene: if you were opposed to the Obterek, we would have no compunction in carrying out your summary extermination.”

Morwell almost smiled with the thrill of hearing such threats. He was thirteen again, and his father was approaching him with a baseball bat...

He leaned forward and said, “And after the Serene have been vanquished, and the Obterek rule, what then?”

The figure standing before his desk began to fade. Its last words sounded in his head: “Then you, the human race, will be alone again, such is the Natural Law...”

“But –” he began, meaning to ask what the Obterek would gain from a return to the old ways.

A second later the blue figure vanished.

Morwell leaned forward and touched the closest disc. It was warm, and pulsed against his fingertips. Smiling, he reached out and trawled the rest towards him like a gambler scooping his winnings.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
LLEN HAD TWO
hours to wait before the monotrain was due to leave Tokyo and head north to the Fujiyama arboreal city, so he sat in the plaza outside the station and sipped a coffee.

The city skyline was dominated by a thousand-metre-tall obelisk, jet black and slightly tapering towards its summit. It was one of a dozen identical buildings gifted by the Serene, along with the eight ‘wilderness towns’, the hundred-plus littoral domed cities, and the arboreal cities, numbering in their thousands, that were springing up all around the world. The difference with the black obelisks was that they were the only Serene buildings placed within already existing cities, and they were the only constructions not purposefully created for human habitation. In fact, no one knew why the obelisks had appeared simultaneously five years ago in the centres of twelve of the largest cities on Earth.

Since their arrival Allen’s monthly missions, as he thought of them, were always to the cities occupied by the obelisks. The routine was always the same. He would be alerted by a golden figure’s calm voice in his head telling him to make his way to London Airport, where he would board a Serene plane and instantly lose consciousness.

The next thing he knew it would be one or two days later and he’d be sitting on a bench near one of the obelisks. In the early days the same routine would transpire, and he would come to his senses in various far-flung cities around the world. He would check his softscreen and more often than not find he had a photo-shoot appointment the very same day somewhere not far away. For the past five years, however, every time he regained consciousness he was close to an obelisk – leading him to assume that his ‘missions’ and the obelisks were in some way linked.

A few months ago he’d taken the monorail into London with Sally, and after a morning spent in the National Gallery Allen had suggested a stroll to Marble Arch. There they, along with thousands of other curious sightseers, walked around the base of the obelisk, marvelling at its seamlessness, its lack of features, the faint pulsing warmth it gave off.

The media had not been slow in suggesting what the towers might be: they were, opined a respected international newsfeed, where the Serene themselves dwelled, looking out with sophisticated surveillance apparatus at the doings of the human race. More bizarre suggestions included the idea that they were the very engines that maintained the Serene’s regime of non-violence across the face of the Earth, that they were the physical essence of the extraterrestrials themselves, or that they were alien prisons where malcontents from across the galaxy were suspended and stored.

Allen subscribed to none of these theories. The obelisks were, he surmised, meeting places where summits between fellow representatives like himself gathered to conduct Serene business – fulfilling much the same role as did the amphitheatre in the conjoined starships a decade ago.

Of course, quite what business he and the other representatives were conducting was another mystery.

He sat back and watched the crowds of Japanese workers and shoppers pass back and forth across the plaza. Visually not much had changed in the populated centres of the world. The scene here ten years ago, before the coming of the Serene, would be much the same as this one, other than the minor changes of fashion, advertisements and some architecture. The changes were on a more substantial, psychological level, he thought – which had an effect on the people of the plaza. There seemed to be a more carefree atmosphere wherever crowds gathered now, a realisation that the threat of violence, however remote, was no more, so that individuals were no longer burdened with the subconscious fear of their fellow man. It was the same wherever he went, a joyful absence of fear which promoted, in turn, a definite altruism: he was sure he’d seen, over the course of the last few years, acts of kindness, generosity and selflessness in a larger measure than before the arrival of the aliens.

He considered his own life over the past ten years, and smiled to himself as he realised that perhaps the greater difference made to it had not been the coming of the Serene, but the arrival of Sally Walsh and his daughter, Hannah.

He often experienced a retrospective shiver of dread at the thought that he might never have met Sally Walsh. He had been in the right place at the right time: a photo-shoot in the drought-stricken region of Karamoja where, just an hour before he was due to pack up and leave, Sally had arrived in a battered Land Rover to treat seriously malnourished tribespeople.

He’d liked the look of the thin, washed-out doctor instantly, and had made an excuse to extend his photographic session.

Their life together in England since then had been little short of idyllic.

He missed Sally and Hannah on his days away, and when he worked in locations around Britain between missions for the Serene, but he counted himself fortunate that he had the majority of every month – perhaps twenty days – to get under their feet while he ostensibly did the housework.

Thoughts of Sally made him reach for his softscreen. It would be the middle of the night in England, but she might have left a message.

He smiled as he saw her name at the top of the list, and accessed her call. A second later he sat up with alarm as his wife’s distraught face filled the screen. “
Geoff. Something awful...
”

His heart jumped sickeningly, but her next words reassured him on that score: “
Hannah’s fine and so am I. It’s Kath. There was an accident. I saw it.”
Her face crumpled, and Allen wanted nothing more than to hold her.
“Oh, Geoff, it was awful, awful... Please ring me back as soon as you can. I love you.
”

He checked the time of the message: she had left it over three hours ago.

He called back immediately, realising that Sally was likely to be sound asleep. There was no reply, so he left a message, whispering urgently into the screen, “
Sally... I got your call. I’ll be home in around ten, twelve hours. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. I’m thinking of you. I love you
.”

He signed off, aware of the inadequacy of his words, and stared unseeingly across the plaza.

A
TALL, TANNED,
dark-haired woman in a short yellow sun dress had turned on her seat a couple of tables away and was watching him. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties, with the poised elegance of a film star or ballerina. Her face was hauntingly familiar, and he wondered if that was where he’d seen her at some point, on screen or stage.

Her gaze persisted and she smiled, and Allen, being English and unused to the attention of glamorous women, looked away and felt himself colour maddeningly.

He was aware, peripherally, of her uncrossing her long legs, standing and striding across the plaza towards his table.

Only when her shadow fell across him did he look up. His smile faltered.

She said, in Mediterranean-accented English, “I never forget a face.”

“Then you have the advantage of me,” he said, “because I do. Forgive me, but have we met?”

She touched the back of an empty chair with long fingers. “Would you mind...?”

“No, please.”

She sat down, signalled to a waiter with the air of one accustomed to attracting instant attention, and ordered an espresso.

She offered her hand. “Nina Ricci, and we have not met. But, ten years ago, we did attend the same gathering, and I have seen you once or twice since.”

“I’m Geoff,” he said, and only then did the belated penny drop. “Ah,” he said, relieved. “The Serene starships...” The tall, Italian-sounding woman who had been the first person to ask the Serene a question.

“That’s right. We were among the few who asked questions back then. I think most people were petrified by fear, but not we...”

He wondered why she had come to speak to him. He said, “For the ten years I’ve been a representative, I’ve never met another one.”

She sipped her coffee and smiled dazzlingly. “Ah, but I think that is because you have not been looking, Geoff.”

“And you have?”

“I am by nature a curious person. I want always to know how, what, why, when, who...”

“You’d make a fine journalist.”

“That is what I am, Geoff. A feature writer for the
Corriere della Sera,
Roma. I’m here to cover the opening of the arboreal city in Fujiyama.”

“Snap. That’s where I’m going.” He patted his bag hanging from the back of his chair. “Photographer.”

“But of course” – she pierced him with her olive-dark eyes – “that was not the principal reason we were brought here.”

He smiled. “Of course not. And your journalist’s curiosity would like to know why?”

In reply, she turned in her seat – the graceful torque of her back suggestive again of a ballerina – and pointed a long finger at the sable obelisk towering over the plaza.

She said, “Have you made the connection, Geoff?”

“That for the past few years we always wake up close to an obelisk? Yes, it had occurred to me.”

“And do you wonder what we do in there?”

“So... you think that we actually enter the obelisks?”

“I do, and so do the other three or four representatives I’ve met over the years.”

He shook his head. “Anyway, as to your question: pass. I’ve no idea.”

She pulled a mock-shocked expression. “No? Surely you must have? An intelligent Englishman like yourself?” She was baiting him.

“My wife would disagree about the intelligent bit,” he said, pleased for some reason that he’d mentioned Sally. He shrugged. “I don’t know... We’re conducting Serene business. So... I assumed in the early days we were meeting business people, heads of state, the powerful movers and shakers of the world. I see no reason why we’re not still doing that. Maybe... maybe we’re passing down the wisdom of the Serene.”

She was looking at him askance. She had a repertory of practised facial expressions, like an actress forever anticipating the close-up shot. “Do you really think this, when the Serene have in their service a legion of the so-called ‘golden figures’?”

He thought about it. “I might be wrong, but I always thought the self-aware entities manifested themselves only to us, the representatives – and in the early days stationed themselves on high rooftops and mountain summits, of course.”

She considered him for a few seconds, then said, “Reality check, Geoff. The golden figures are amongst us.”

He stared at her. “They are?” He made a show of looking around the plaza and finding none. “Strange, but I don’t see a single one.”

She leaned forward, elbows on table, pointed chin lodged in her cupped palm. “That is because, unobservant Englishman, they are in disguise.”

“Ah...” he said, and pointed at her. “But if they are disguised, then how could I be observant enough to spot them?”

She nodded. “Point taken. Perhaps I am lucky, because once I observed an accident.”

He finished his coffee. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” He smiled, intrigued by this beautiful, inquisitive Italian.

“I one day was walking down the avenue in Barcelona when I saw a man run over by an automobile. Splat! Dead and no doubting the fact. Only, a day later I saw the
same
man walking as large as life down the street a mile or so away... I never forget a face, as I said. So, being the curious type of girl, I accosted the man and asked him how, since I saw him die pretty messily the other day, he was now as fit as fit can be and showing no signs of his injuries.”

“And he told you?”

“He smiled and said my name, and took me to a quiet park nearby–”

“You should be wary of men who suggest quiet parks.”

She smiled. “But you see, I knew then that he was not a man, I mean a real man.” She waved a hand. “And then, when we are quite alone in the park, he becomes a golden figure and tells me that there are hundreds of thousands of his kind passing as human – and, moreover, have been for many, many decades.”