The Serene Invasion

Chapter SEVEN





ANA FINISHED HER shift in the administration dome early and, on her way back to her rooms, dropped in to see how Prakesh was getting on in the labs.

Prakesh was supervising his team of biologists who were researching the genetics of a form of wheat seed donated by the Serene. The idea was that the extraterrestrial wheat might, when crossed with a Terran variety, produce a hybrid with a higher yield than anything grown on Earth to date.

She passed through the airlock and peered through the window at the clean area. Half a dozen white-suited scientists worked at long benches, while to the right Prakesh was bent over a softscreen.

He saw her and waved, then crossed to the window and switched on the intercom.

“Any progress?” she asked.

He lowered his face-mask and smiled. “It’s slow. We’re only just putting the markers down. It might be another day or two yet before we have results.”

She nodded. “Fine. Keep me posted, would you?”

She made to leave.

Prakesh said, “Ana, would you be free later? Since getting back from Japan, you’ve been...” He hesitated. “I was wondering if everything’s okay?” He looked, in his concern, like the young boy she’d known all those years ago.

She smiled. “I’m fine. Just very, very tired. I’m having an early night. And then... Look, I’ll be away for a few days, taking a break. But I promise we’ll have time to catch up when I get back, ah-cha?”

He nodded, but looked unconvinced. “Have a pleasant break, Ana.”

“I’ll be in touch.” She switched off the intercom and stepped from the dome.

The sun was going down slowly, but in the east, dropping like an accelerated sun, was the golden glow of the evening energy beam falling towards the distribution station a hundred kilometres north of Madras.

The sight of it never failed to fill Ana with reassurance.

She made her way to the residential block where she had a comfortable second floor apartment overlooking the fields which stretched, without interruption, to the horizon.

She sat on her bed, activated her softscreen, and summoned the library of images.

She scrolled through various media shots of her brother, Lal Devi as he was known now, which she had downloaded and stored over the course of the past few days since arriving back from Japan.

What had happened at Fujiyama had changed things.

She unbuttoned the front of her blouse and stared down at the smooth coffee-coloured skin of her chest. She touched the place where the laser had impacted and tried to recall the intense, shocking pain. She relived the mental anguish of knowing that she was about to die, and recalled her exact thoughts: Twenty-six years, and this is how it ends...

And then the breathtaking impact of something vital and strong slamming into her body and taking her over, raising her to her feet and carrying her at speed from the carnage...

And then she had awoken to find herself on the train heading south to the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city.

Not long after arriving home her thoughts had turned to her brother, and what she had told Kapil about not wanting to find him.

Well, the events at Fujiyama had changed her mind on that score.

She had been so close to death – had perhaps even died for a second – and the thought that she was mortal had hit her, later, along with the thought that had she died at Fujiyama then she would have left so much undone.

Earlier in Kolkata, before taking the Serene jet to Japan, she had faced her fears and approached both Station Master Jangar and Sanjeev Varnaputtram. She had confronted both men and in doing so had realised that the reality had not been as terrible as she had expected it to be.

She had learned a lesson from that and, with the knowledge that she was mortal and must do now what she would not always be around to do, had resolved to track down her brother and, eventually, confront him too.

In her free time over the past few days she had googled the company he worked for and the address of their head office in Manhattan. Yesterday she had booked a berth aboard the sub-orbital leaving Delhi for New York and arranged to meet Kapil on the evening of her arrival.

She slept badly that night, her dreams full of rampaging blue figures lasering down innocent humans; she relived her own death, and woke suddenly in the early hours drenched in sweat.

She rose, showered, then packed her holdall and took an electric cab to the train station.

The journey north to Delhi, through the flatlands of the Deccan changed now out of all recognition from the parched farmland of just ten years ago, gave her time to look ahead to her meeting with Bilal. He would be shocked, of course, when she turned up – a ghost from a past he thought he had left behind. But she would not accuse him, would not ask why he did not contact her – or at least say goodbye. To accuse him would be to risk alienating and angering him, and she feared that, after having waited for so long to be reunited, he would walk out on her and refuse to see her again.

They would talk, catch up on the lost years. She would tell him about growing up without him – though without censure – and recount what had happened to her since the coming of the Serene. Only if he was willing to talk about his past would she probe and ask what had happened to make him leave her without saying goodbye.

As field after field of alternating rice and corn sped past, she stared through the window and smiled to herself.

She caught the midnight sub-orbital shuttle from New Delhi airport and slept peacefully, untroubled by nightmares. She awoke to dazzling daylight outside the circular window, with a startling view of the New York coastline and the glittering length of Manhattan far below. Minutes later they were decelerating towards the airport on Staten Island, and thirty minutes later she passed through customs and was riding the monotrain across the bay to Manhattan.

Kapil met her at TriBeCa station and whisked her back to his apartment in Little Italy, where she showered, changed, and enjoyed a long, leisurely meal of strong coffee and croissants.

At one point Kapil asked, “But what made you change your mind?”

She had refrained from telling him about the events of Fujiyama. When she’d spoken to him briefly the other day, she had still not come to terms with what had happened there. She had trawled the newsfeeds for mention of the attack, but found nothing. Obviously the Serene were imposing a news blackout on the event.

Now, little by little, she described the afternoon, the wonder of the arboreal city, the other representatives she had met... and then the attack. As she spoke, she recalled new details she had either forgotten or repressed: seeing Nina Ricci lasered almost in half before her very eyes; a mother and child mown down mercilessly by a dispassionate blue figure... And then her salvation thanks to a Serene self-aware entity.

They held hands across the table, Kapil too shocked to speak for long minutes, until, “Well, all I have to complain about is a razor cut yesterday morning...”

She laughed and swiped his head.

“And after that...” She frowned. “I knew I had to contact Bilal.” She smiled at him. “None of us live for ever, Kapil, and I knew I had to act sooner rather than later. Did you...?”

He nodded. “I contacted his PA and explained that we had business interests in common, and my recent links with China which might prove beneficial to the Morwell Corporation.”

Ana bit her lip. “And?”

“Your brother is a very busy man, but I arranged an appointment for eleven this morning, but I could only get fifteen minutes.”

“That will be fine, to start with.”

“Then, as you instructed, at nine this morning I had my secretary contact his PA and tell her that, due to illness, I wouldn’t be able to make the meeting but would be deputised by my assistant. You’re going under the name of Sara Ashok, so remember that.”

She leaned across the table and kissed him. “Thank you so much, Kapil. This means a lot to me.”

“I’ll come with you as far as Morwell Towers. After that you’ll be on your own.” He gave her one of his lovely smiles. “I’ll wait for you, then we’ll go for a coffee and you can tell me all about it.”

She looked at her watch. Ten-thirty. “We’d better be setting off.”

As they left the apartment, Ana tried to quash her sudden apprehension at the thought of meeting her brother. She told herself not to be so stupid. She had faced down Sanjeev Varnaputtram after all, so what did she have to fear from Bilal?





SHE RODE THE elevator to the fortieth floor of Morwell Towers, her anxieties mounting in proportion to the rate of her ascent. Kapil had left her outside the building with a kiss and the assurance that he would be waiting for her – and that she had nothing to fear. Nevertheless she did feel fear: fear of an outright rejection from her brother, or an inadequate reason for his not saying goodbye all those years ago.

The lift doors swished open and she found herself in a plush carpeted corridor with a pulsing softscreen on the opposite wall. A name appeared on the screen, Lal Devi, underlined by a flashing arrow indicating that she should turn right. Hesitantly she stepped out and walked down the corridor, reading the nameplates on the doors to right and left as she went.

She came to the door bearing the name Lal Devi and stopped, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She took a deep breath and checked her watch. She was a couple of minutes late.

She knocked, and when she heard a voice call, “Enter,” opened the door and stepped inside.

The first thing she noticed was the opulence of the office. It occupied a corner site, with two great plate-glass windows looking down the length of Manhattan. Behind a big silver desk, shaped like an arrow-head with its point directed at the door, was a slim man with a thin, handsome face. He wore his hair long in a ponytail and sported an amethyst stud in his right ear.

She stared, comparing this slick, besuited businessman with the malnourished urchin she had last seen twenty years ago.

He hardly glanced away from his softscreen as he gestured her to take a seat at the point of his desk. “Ah, Miss... Ashok. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet your superior, Kapil Gavaskar, but illness knows no social boundaries.”

She forced herself not to dislike her brother for his opening words, as he rose and took her hand in a limp, perfunctory shake.

“I’m Lal Devi, James Morwell’s right hand man, as you no doubt know.” He gestured to the screen. “And we’re interested in what you have to offer as regards your Chinese links.”

She said, “Bilal...”

He looked up and frowned. “Now, no one has called me that for a long time.”

She stared at him, this slick, fast-talking, high-flying aide to a one-time billionaire tycoon. How did you come to this, she thought?

She found her voice and said, “Do you know who I am?”

He glanced at his screen, his face quirking with a quick frown. “Miss... Ashok. I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

“You don’t recognise me?”

He looked mystified, then a little annoyed. But was it any wonder that he didn’t recognise her? She had changed so much in appearance from the ragged street kid she had been.

Her heart laboured as if pumping treacle. She felt a hot flush rise up her face as she said, “We last saw each other, Bilal, many years ago. On Howrah station, the day before you disappeared.”

He stared at her and shook his head, and Ana wasn’t sure if he was totally confused or had realised who she was and was denying the fact.

Then he whispered, “Ana?”

She held his startled gaze. Despite her earlier resolutions not to intimidate him with accusations, she found herself saying, “Bilal, why didn’t you say goodbye? Why did you just leave like that? There one day, gone the next...”

He shook his head. “I...” he began, lost for words.

He reached out, tapped his softscreen, and said, “Amanda, cancel my appointment at 11.30. I’ll be free again at midday.”

He sat back in his swivel seat, the cushion squeaking, laid back his head and closed his eyes.

She had hoped his reaction would be one of joy at their reunion. She had foreseen tears, maybe, and apologies, and had expected him to move around his desk and embrace her.

He did none of these things, just lay back with his eyes closed, the expression on his aquiline face unreadable.

“Bilal, I have come a long way to see you. All the way from India.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Ana... This is something of a shock, to say the least.”

“A pleasant shock?” she asked. “Or...?”

“An unexpected shock.”

They stared at each other, Ana trying to hide her pain at his response. She said, “I just... I just wanted to know why you didn’t contact me before you left, why you didn’t say goodbye. You can’t imagine how I felt.” She reached into her handbag, pulled something out, and slid it across the desk to him.

He picked it up and turned the flattened enamel cup.

“I found this... on the tracks. For a long time I thought you might be dead, only no one had reported a street kid’s body on the tracks, so I hoped... Oh, how I hoped! But the years went by and there was no word from you.” She stopped, took a breath, and asked, “So, I would just like to know why you never said goodbye.”

He turned the flattened cup over and over, and said as if to himself, “I left it on the track, to be destroyed... A symbol, if you like, of my leaving.”

She repeated, “Bilal – why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

“Ana... it was a long time ago,” he said, as if this somehow excused his actions.

“What do you mean by that?” she snapped.

He gestured, spread his hands, and smiled disarmingly. “Twenty years, Ana... I hardly recall?”

“What happened?” she almost cried.

He shook his head.

She went on, “It was the day after Holi. We’d had so much fun throwing paint powder at commuters... How we laughed! We went to the sleeping van late that night, and in the morning when I woke up you were no longer beside me. That wasn’t unusual. Remember, you often got up at dawn and went out looking for food... But this time it was different. You never came back. And the following day I found your cup, squashed flat on the tracks... So what happened, Bilal?”

He nodded, as if in acknowledgment of all she said, and reassurance that he would come up with an adequate response. “Ana... a few weeks before Holi I met a man. A Westerner.” He waved a hand. “No, it was nothing like that. He wasn’t like Sanjeev Varnaputtram. Remember him?”

She felt a flare of anger. How could she forget Varnaputtram?

He went on, “This Westerner worked for a corporation in the States which ran schools and colleges in India. He wasn’t out scouting for pupils – our meeting was quite by chance. You know how I always loved reading the Hindustan Times, the Times of India – anything I could get my hands on, left by commuters on the trains. One day I was riding between stations, begging, when I picked up a paper and began reading. I was sitting across from a tall, pale American. We got talking. We discussed politics, and I think I – I don’t mean to sound arrogant here, Ana – but I think I impressed him. He was working in the city and would be there for a couple of weeks. He invited me to his apartment, where we talked and talked, and it was as if I’d found a teacher, someone who filled me with knowledge and respected me, a street kid.”

How wonderful for you, Ana thought.

“He told me who he was, what he represented, and asked if I would care to sit an entrance exam–”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Ana asked, fighting back the tears.

Bilal shrugged. “I... I honestly don’t know, Ana. I was so excited. The college was in Madras, and graduates were promised places in a business college here in New York.”

“But you could have told me! You could have said what was happening, told me where you were going, said goodbye!”

He shook his head. “It all happened so quickly. I sat the exam and a couple of days later the Westerner, Paul, he told me I had passed, and that the following day I should accompany him south to Madras.”

She stared at him. “Why didn’t you come and say goodbye?”

He looked down at his desk and said, “Because I didn’t want to hurt you, Ana. Also... you would have begged me not to leave, pleaded with me. I loved you... I didn’t want to see you hurt, upset. Because, don’t you see, I had to go. I had to get out of there. The opportunity was too great to pass up.”

“But you left me there, left me to scratch a living on the station, begging, stealing...”

Was she being unreasonable, she wondered? She tried to see the situation from his point of view. He was right in that she would have been devastated, and pleaded with him not to go, but even so she could not help but feel a sense of betrayal.

“I know, I know...” He shook his head. “Don’t you think it pained me? I was plagued with guilt for years and years. I thought of you every day...”

“But you never tried to get in contact with me?” she asked incredulously.

“Of course I did...”

“But?” she pressed, leaning forward in her seat.

“One day, perhaps five years later, I was in India on business. I went to the station, looked for you. I asked around, asked Mr Jangar, a couple of porters. They said they hadn’t seen you for weeks and weeks... So I gave up and the following day came back to New York.”

She took a little hope from this. Five years after Bilal vanished, she would have been eleven. For a couple of months she and Prakesh and Gopal had ridden a night train to New Delhi to see what the living was like at the railway station there. But the street kids had been feral, hostile, and had repelled the invaders with stones and broken glass bottles. They had tried other stations along the line to Kolkata, but had found nowhere like Howrah, and had eventually returned.

She told him this, and said, “You tried once. Once in twenty years. If only you’d gone back, tried again...”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Ana. You’re right. I should have done. But... but after that time, I feared the worst, feared that you were dead, and I threw myself into my work. Try to see this from my point of view.”

She gave a long sigh, at once despairing and conciliatory. Of course, how much of what he said was true? He’d changed a lot over the years; he was a businessman, adept with words, with twisting meanings. He could easily be – what was the phrase? – spinning her a line so that he came out of the encounter with his pride intact and his actions justified.

She looked around the office and said, “You’ve done very well for yourself, Bilal. I bet you have a wonderful apartment, expensive things...” She almost broke down then, for some reason she could not fathom.

He smiled. “I do okay. Mr Morwell is very generous. Though I must say I do work hard for the Corporation. And things have changed a lot since the arrival of the Serene. Ten years ago the Morwell Corporation was worth billions. Our annual turnover was greater than the GDP of many sizable countries. We had real power; we were powerful movers, not just the effete, emasculated facilitators we are today.”

She stared at him and said, “You sound as if you resent what the Serene have done for us?”

He rocked his head from side to side. “I can see that in some ways, some people might think that we are better off for the apparent largesse of the Serene. But the fact is that the Serene have taken something away from us that was very important.”

She stared at him. “You mean,” she said with heavy sarcasm, “the ability to kill and torture and maim each other?

“That is only a part of it, a symbolic part, if you like. The Serene have taken away our evolutionary future and imposed upon us their own regime – their own, if you like, evolutionary game plan. And,” he went on, as if warming to his theme, “has it ever occurred to you that for all their largesse, the Serene have never made manifest why they are doing this for us, what their larger, grand plan might be?”

She interrupted, “I would have thought that that is obvious – that preventing the human race from destroying itself is reason enough.”

He smiled, somewhat smugly, and shrugged. “We have only the word of the Serene that we were heading for extinction. The point is debatable.”

She would not let him have the last word. “Even if it is debatable, what is not in contention is that millions of innocent lives have been saved by the Serene intervention. So much misery has been avoided...”

He shrugged again, a smug gesture she found insufferable. “The history of humanity, the history of the world, is one of mutual violence – the law of the jungle. It got us to where we were ten years ago – the pre-eminent species on the planet. It made us what we were, an independent, intelligent race questing ahead in the field of science and technology, forging our own way forward. Now...” He smiled sadly. “Now we are nothing more than the puppets of the Serene, jerking on the strings of unknown and unseen masters whose motives are opaque to us.”

She allowed a silence to develop, and then said quietly, “I see that our opinions are diametrically opposed, Bilal, as I have wholeheartedly embraced the coming of the Serene.”

That patronising smile again as he said, “You always were ruled by your heart, not your head, little sister. But tell me, what makes you think that the way of the Serene is the right way for the human race?”

“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.