Saskia could hear the disbelief in Maurice’s voice. “You can’t mean that we’re taking her, too?”
“Of course we are,” Edward said. “Miss Rose has something important to do. Where else would her important work be but here on Earth?”
“This is ridiculous,” Maurice said, pulling the green hood of his active suit over his head.
“So you said,” Saskia said.
Maurice hadn’t wanted to drop the rear ramp. Instead he had had them all crowd into the narrow lift and then set it descending, lowering them to the ground, taking them down to stand on Earth, taking them back to their home, the place where humankind had evolved.
“No one leaves Earth anymore,” Maurice said darkly.
“Do we know that for sure?” asked Saskia.
All things come full circle: from a replicating molecule to single cells, to plants to animals. Humankind had arisen, built cities, built civilizations, and exploded out into the stars. Driven by intelligence, they had almost made it to the next galaxy, but then the Dark Seeds had appeared, and now the Earth had called its children home. Saskia was shivering. Maurice remained businesslike.
“Listen, keep your active suits on at all times. Don’t breathe the air, don’t drink or eat anything while you’re out there. The Watcher controls everything. Don’t give it a way into your soul.”
“Your soul, Maurice?” said Judy, giving him a faint smile, but she too reached up and pulled the black hood of her active suit over her head. Saskia and Edward did the same. Constantine was becoming fuzzy; his skin seemed to be losing focus.
The indicator bar on the lift wall glowed blue.
“Okay,” said Maurice, “we’re down. I’ll open the door now….”
Saskia squeezed Miss Rose’s arm. For a moment, for a long moment, she wanted to call out NO!, to have the lift return them to the safety of the Eva Rye. But the door was already sliding open. The temperature senses on her active suit relayed to her skin the icy coldness waiting beyond.
“Here we go,” she said.
They stepped through the doorway and out onto the surface of the planet Earth.
Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view. Saskia looked onto a winter world of burning ice. The pale morning sun shone down through an avenue of frosted poplars; it set the icicles clinging to the lampposts on fire with yellow light. It lit up the gravel squares and the little gardens of the parkland in which they had landed.
Saskia breathed in the fresh cold draft of air that her active suit replicated from the morning outside. She looked this way and that, drinking in the scene around her. There were people everywhere: running children in brightly colored hats and thick mittens, scraping snow off the seats of benches to make snowballs; there were adults walking or standing in groups amongst them laughing and chatting. A young woman in a thick pink coat smiled as she passed a tall young man in a blue-and-white bobble hat. She tucked her hands into the black fur-trimmed pockets of her coat and walked on, looking demurely at the ground as her suitor came loping up behind her.
“It’s beautiful,” said Saskia. “Can you hear music?”
“Don’t listen to it,” Maurice said. “Tune it out. The Watcher is insidious. It can use music to reprogram you…”
Saskia ignored him. The tinkling tune was so pretty, so suitable to the winter’s scene. The way it seemed to slip back and forth between time signatures…
“Hey!” she said as the music clicked off. “That was you, wasn’t it, Maurice?”
“Yes, it was,” Maurice snapped. “I told you to tune it out. Don’t be so silly.”
Judy and Constantine were speaking to a group of men in the thick black coats and the fur-lined hats that seemed to be the fashion in this place. The men had seen them come out of the lift; they resumed their gazing up at the great curved underside of the Eva Rye as they spoke, drinking in the details of this strange intruder. Saskia walked up to them, supporting Miss Rose, and caught the end of a question.
“…never seen a ship like it. You say it’s a trading ship?”
“Yes, they are quite common out in the Enemy Domain,” Judy replied.
“Really? I worked there myself some years ago. I don’t recall seeing that type….”
There was a slight accent to their speech, Saskia noted, but nothing more than that. English was now the common language of the Earth Domain. After the arrival of the Dark Seeds, the Watcher had finally succeeded in eradicating the stubborn nationalism that had persisted for so long.
“And why are you here on Earth?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Judy said. “I need to get to somewhere: a place called DIANA. Have you heard of it?”
The men shook their heads. “No, but try the Lite train station. Here, Vanya and I will show you the way.”
“That’s very kind of you, but—”
“I insist, we will take you! But first, it is cold out here! So you will come and drink tea with us? Look, over there, Nadyezhda has a stand with a samovar. You have come so far, you will sit with us? And you too, my metal friend?”
The big man slapped Constantine on the shoulder, his hand making an odd thud as it encountered the robot’s fractal skin.
“I do not need to drink, but thank you for the offer.”
“And sadly we are in a hurry,” Maurice interrupted, “but I thank you anyway. Now, if you could show our friend here the way to the Lite station, we can be off.”
“No,” said Edward, “we are going with Judy. You can stay here if you want to, Maurice.”
Maurice’s active suit was a deep green, and its hood made it difficult to make out his expression, but Saskia could tell by the way that he slumped his shoulders that he would give in and accompany them.
The man introduced as Vanya led them away from under the great white curve of the Eva Rye and out across the neat parkland towards the brightly colored buildings with onion domes that lay beyond. Children wove in and out of the chattering adults who thronged the scene: making snowmen, ice-skating on ponds, chasing each other between ornamental holly and bay trees decorated with gold and silver ribbons.
They passed stand after stand selling varieties of food and drink. Through her active suit senses, Saskia could smell tea, fresh and bubbling in the samovar, the rich aroma of chocolate, and the spiciness of mulled wine. As they walked by stalls selling fruit dipped in chocolate, she saw a woman in a head scarf sliding ripe strawberries fixed on a skewer into a pool of bubbling chocolate, then pulling them out in a rich cloud of steam. She hung the dipped fruit from a shelf to cool and harden, then took down another to give to a pretty blond-haired girl who smiled her thanks. Saskia watched as the girl accepted the skewer and took a bite; Saskia could almost taste the warm chocolate and the sweet juiciness of strawberries exploding in her own mouth.
She wanted something to eat so much.
Then came the smell of frying onions and griddled meat, sharp and savory in the cold air.
“Would you like a hot dog, dear?”
A man with a salt-and-pepper mustache held it out to her, thick and fat and glistening, yellow mustard dripping onto his sleeve.
“No, thank you,” said Maurice firmly, as he guided Saskia and Miss Rose onwards. Saskia felt her stomach rumbling.
“MTPH everywhere,” explained Maurice. “I can read it on my console: it’s in the air, in the food, in the water. It sparkles like fairy dust! This whole world is dipped in MTPH, and the Watcher has plugged its senses into everyone here, so that it can feel what they can feel.” He waved his hands around the busy crowd. “Do you really want to be part of that?”
He pushed his green hood right up close to her face and Saskia was transfixed by his eyes, half seen in the dark, gazing into hers.
“Do you want that, Saskia? Do you want the Watcher feeling you, knowing you? Do you?”
“No, I don’t, Maurice.”
He made a grunting noise and pulled away from her and they strode onwards, heading towards a fairy-tale ca
stle situated at the end of the parkland: a white building decorated in blue stripes, golden domes flashing boldly in the sunlight.
Miss Rose gave a cough; she was trying to speak. She coughed again, clearing her throat. “This is not what I was expecting, dear,” she managed to say.
“Nor I, Miss Rose, nor I.”
Saskia felt so happy, and yet she wasn’t sure why. She was on Earth, the most dangerous place in the galaxy. Everyone said so. And yet, it felt such a comfortable place to be. It was home. This was where she had come from; this was the cradle of the whole human race. Of course it felt right. It had been shaped and molded and sanded and polished by the Watcher to become the perfect place for a human to live. Suddenly she felt rather churlish for having stayed away for so long.
Edward felt it too. “It’s so pretty,” he sighed. “I always thought Earth was meant to be a bad place.”
“So did I, Edward,” Saskia replied sadly.
“Nearly there,” Vanya said to Judy. She was strolling along with Constantine by her side, staring fixedly at the ground. Vanya had noticed this; it seemed to hurt his pride in some way. There was quiet satisfaction in his voice as he continued speaking. “Look to the left and you will see the avenue to the stars.”
Saskia looked up then, and she found herself unable to move farther. It was so beautiful. It was beyond beautiful. It gripped the heart in wonder, and made it swell larger and larger just to encompass the scene. She put her hand to her hood, meaning to pull it back in order to get a better view, but she remembered herself just in time. She wanted to curse Maurice for his silliness, but this was soon forgotten as she gazed in awe along the avenue in front of them. She began then to grasp the size of the Watcher’s mind.
The avenue began, here in the park, with a broad path paved in white stone and surrounded by low hedges. After that…Saskia could only guess that its course sloped upwards ever so gently. There was no other way to explain how she could see so far, seemingly beyond the horizon itself. After the hedge came two lines of poplars, and then the colorful walls of the city. Then the taller buildings, the silver spires and the skyscrapers. The avenue must widen the farther away it got. Out there, kilometers away, could she walk across an expanse of white stone and look at the towering buildings on either side, their tops wider apart, separated by the curvature of the Earth?
But her mind was lost in that vast space, lost in the arrow-straight path that led to the stars, lost in the line of hedge and tree and stone that led to the heavens. And there, hanging above the end of the path, framed by the farthermost buildings of all, she could make out the shadow of the Shawl.
“Come at night,” said Vanya. “Come on the twenty-third of September when the moon is framed below the Shawl. Hah, come anytime you like and it is just as good. Is it not beautiful?”
“It is beautiful,” Saskia whispered. Then something caught her attention, something black and baleful at the edge of her vision, tucked away just beyond a row of trees. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
Vanya smiled tightly and his eyes became hollow. “Oh that, it is nothing. Now come on, the Lite station is just down here.”
“What can you see, dear?” Miss Rose asked.
“I don’t know,” said Saskia, turning up the vision on her active suit. It was hard to make out the shape, lurking as it was behind the trees. It seemed to be a fat, rounded pillar, banded in black and white, five or six stories high.
“Maurice,” Saskia said, “maybe you should take a look at this?”
“If you want to know what it is, find out for yourself,” Maurice replied petulantly.
“Judy?” Saskia persisted.
But Judy had already gone on ahead with Constantine.
“Be like that then,” Saskia muttered. She reached out with one hand, using the active suit’s senses to try and feel the sinister object, but it was too far away.
“Come on,” urged Vanya. “Come on!”
The people of Earth moved about with courtesy and consideration for others, Saskia noted. Approaching the Lite station, they saw the pedestrians striding past in well-ordered groups, pausing at junctions to allow others to pass, streams of happy people separating into tributaries that flowed this way and that, politely taking it in turns to enter doorways and narrow entrances. They moved with tremendous grace, like people in a dance. But there was something else there, too…. What was the word?
“What do these people make you think of, Miss Rose?” whispered Saskia.
“Robots.”
Robots, no. What was the word? Then Saskia had it: they moved with maximum efficiency. They weren’t like robots because they all looked so happy and healthy. Look at this young boy eating a wedge of pizza, loaded with cheese and bright happy pieces of pepper. Holding it out to me, offering me a bite. And it looks so good.
“No, thank you,” said Saskia. She could smell it through the hood of the active suit: hot and greasy and salty and good. “Suit, cut aromas, please,” she instructed.
Miss Rose was getting tired now. Her bony arm was cutting into Saskia. She could feel the effort the old woman put into making each step, transmitted in the dead weight that settled upon Saskia as she moved.
Judy and Constantine were conversing in low tones. Does she look afraid? Saskia wondered. Not nearly enough. Yet here she is on Earth. Does she know why? Can she guess why? Why has she been brought here?
“Oh, I’m tired, dear.”
“Not much farther, Miss Rose.”
“I think I’ll take off the hood of this suit. I can’t breathe properly in here.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“I don’t know why. Everyone here looks so polite. They always were, of course, but this is more so than I remember.”
“When was the last time you were here, Miss Rose?”
“I don’t know. Twenty years ago? Thirty?”
“That’s the Watcher, Miss Rose. Since the first of the Dark Seeds fell to Earth, the Watcher stopped hiding. It openly took control. This is what it has been working towards for so long. This is the Watcher’s Utopia.”
Miss Rose cackled. “It’s a very nice Utopia.”
Saskia laughed, too.
They felt so safe. And that was the problem. Saskia knew she should be frightened, but all she felt was a calm serenity. That was also the Watcher’s doing, she guessed. What worried her was the sense that she was forgetting this last thought as she was slowly being reprogrammed by her environment. I’m frightened, she said to herself. I’m frightened. But she wasn’t, not with her attention being distracted all the time.
The Lite station stood on stilts right at the center of an intersection of eight bright bridges. Beautiful bridges formed of low graceful arches, white dressed-stone pillars stepping daintily through the snow-covered grass and lakes and canals lying below. White lamps were arranged along the parapet walls.
“You know what it makes me think of?” Miss Rose whispered. “It’s like someone threw a stone and made it skip across the lakes and canals, and the path that it took has been written by the bridge. Look at how it goes: skip into the lake, skip into the street, then skip into the canal.”
“Ah, it’s getting to you!” Vanya said, coming up beside them. “This is the Watcher’s world. We discover new beauty here every day. It is part of the world, written into the very fabric. Come, take off your hood and breathe the air!”
“No, thank you,” Saskia said firmly.
As they rode an escalator up to the Lite station itself, the view of the city expanded: a landscape of snow and ice. The parkland lay behind them in a bowl of buildings that ran to the horizon, the silver spires of city blocks climbing higher and higher the farther they were distant from the center, all cut through by the avenue to the stars, lit up in blue rime. And all around were those happy people who seemed to walk back and forth to the beat of a metronome. There too was the Eva Rye, the swell of its teardrop shape rising high above the bare trees of the park.
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And over there was another strange squat tower. And another one.
“Look,” Saskia called. “Maurice, can you see them? Those black-and-white towers set in a grid? They cover the whole city.”
“I can see them.” His voice was sullen.
“Maurice, what is the matter with you? Listen to me, look at those towers. What do you think they are for?”
“I…I…” Maurice was now looking at the towers. Saskia could see his green hood turning this way and that. “I…I don’t know.”
“Saskia, can you see them, too?” Edward shuffled closer to her, a hunched giant in fluorescent yellow.
Where were Judy and Constantine? Over there, looking at the map that covered one entire wall of the station. Red lines and blue lines were moving on it as Vanya pointed out the different places on the rail network. Hadn’t they noticed the towers? Like lighthouses, banded in black and white? A yellow band, the color of honey, ran around the top of each. Something seemed to be moving within that band, darker clouds of honey flowing inside the tower itself. Honey moved by convection currents that rose from the warm heart of the building.
“They’re watching me,” Edward said. “The towers are watching me.”
“Of course they are,” said a passerby. He smiled brightly at Edward. “That’s the Watcher.”
And Saskia felt as if a little chink had opened up in her body and an icicle had been inserted, lit up from inside with a honey-yellow glow.
The Watcher? Of course, it was the Watcher. She had known that he was here waiting for them. But now, as she studied the black-and-white towers that spread out to the horizon, she suddenly felt so cold.
You could see the whole world on that map, a representation of the continents, you could zoom in on anyplace you wished to go.
Maurice was still sulking and refused to interface his console to it, so Constantine had taken control.
“Where do you want to go to, Judy?” the robot asked.
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