by Eric Brown
Allen smiled his assent and groaned inwardly.
“We were on the same back-bench committee many years ago, investigating police corruption. I have never worked with a finer mind…”
Cleveland continued in this vein, and Allen responded with nods and the occasional monosyllabic agreement.
The fact was that his father had been a great man, and that rare animal: a politician loved by the people, a reformer who worked tirelessly for his constituents. That he had rarely shown himself at home was a side-issue that few knew or cared about, outside of the immediate family, Allen himself and his younger sister Catherine. Perhaps it might not have been so bad if their mother had not also been a parliamentary politician, if not of his father’s eminence, then certainly as hard-working. Allen was raised by a series of European nannies with, in the background, two distant figures called mother and father who he knew he should feel something for — as he had read about in books — but for whom he felt almost nothing other than resentment.
His parents worked hard for years, tirelessly for the people they represented… and where did it get them, he thought?
Now Cleveland said, “And I was so sorry to read about…”
“Yes,” Allen interrupted, fearing what the politician emeritus might say next, “yes, it was a… terrible shock for all of us.”
Tactfully, Cleveland changed the subject. “Well, I’m visiting my grand-daughter in Durban. She’s just given birth.”
“Congratulations.”
“And you? Work, no doubt?”
“Actually, a working holiday. I’m visiting my fiancée.”
“In South Africa?”
“Uganda. She’s a doctor working with the emergency services in Karamoja.”
Cleveland’s rheumy eyes widened. “Not the most… stable, shall we say, area in the world. Your fiancée must be a remarkable person, Geoffrey.”
Allen smiled. “She is,” he said.
The old man patted Allen’s hand like a beneficent grandfather. “Well, it has been wonderful talking to you. I hope you have a pleasant time in Uganda. Take my advice and visit Lake Edward in the south. Just the place for young lovers.” With a smile he lifted himself from the seat and limped back along the aisle.
Allen glanced through the window and stared down at the brilliant blue, beaten expanse of the ocean, feeling obscurely troubled. It was always the same when he was forced to consider his parents, and their deaths.
He tipped back his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to fill his mind with other things.
HE WAS AWOKEN a little later by the sound of activity around him. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Passengers were releasing their folding trays, preparatory for whatever culinary delights Air Europe had prepared for dinner.
He ate a bland curry, overcooked dal and undercooked rice, followed oddly by a slice of polystyrene Victoria sponge, then glanced at the time on his softscreen, which he’d fastened round his forearm. It was five o’clock British Summer Time. Estimated time of arrival in Entebbe was a little after midnight, Ugandan time. He’d booked a hire car and would drive up to Kallani overnight. Time with Sally was precious and he didn’t want to waste a second.
They were flying over the coastline of Northern Africa. The scalloped littoral of Morocco showed as a series of golden scimitars, the destination — before the revolution — of hordes of sun-starved northern Europeans and Chinese.
The plane thrummed inland, and an hour later the first of the Chinese mega-cities came into view.
It looked, he thought, like some kind of computer circuit board, a grid-pattern of prefabricated buildings and domes extending for tens of miles across the parched land. Monorails connected outlying towns which were rapidly being absorbed into the sprawling Cathay conurbation, eating up the terrain towards the Atlas mountains.
At first Allen had viewed with indifference the wholesale economic invasion of northern Africa. It struck him as the inevitable process of colonisation that the communist party of China had so vilified the West for in the past — the inevitable, rapacious rampaging of a regime turning from communism to capitalism.
Sally had set him right on that, listing a catalogue of abuses, both humanitarian and ecological, being committed by the fascist mafia, as she called them, of Beijing. She’d spent an hour telling him about specific instances of Chinese abuse, before relenting and changing the subject.
Afterwards, Allen had thought twice about suggesting ordering a Mandarin take-away.
He unrolled his softscreen and accessed the file containing the images he’d taken on his last trip to Uganda. He scrolled through shots of Sally beside Lake Kwania, looking tired and drawn after a shift at the medical centre lasting for three days with precious little sleep.
The pictures showed a thin-faced woman, not in the least photogenic, with a pinched expression and straggly hair. She was thin, pared down by a combination of a bad diet and overwork, constantly edgy and nervous and burning with the conviction of her political and humanitarian passions.
Allen loved her. For the first time in his life he had found someone he could trust, who he could talk to about his past, who listened to him and understood. As he gazed down at her thinly-smiling face, he realised that she was beautiful, and he felt a little drunk with the thought that in a few hours they’d be together again.
He noticed the first of the domes ten minutes later. He was staring out of the window, watching the rilled foothills of the Atlas mountains drift serenely by far below. They were flying over the southern slopes of the range now, and ahead was the vast stretch of the Sahara. He made out a flash of silver to the west, tucked into the foothills, and assumed it to be the glint of a river. Then he saw another, and another, and was surprised to note that they were domes, great silver hemispheres straddling towns and villages — perhaps a dozen in all, of various sizes, covering the centres of occupation along a winding road that snaked through the foothills.
Ahead to the right was a sizable town, and as the plane overflew it he had a closer view of the dome that arched over its entirety, encompassing its sprawling suburbs and two-storey central buildings like a vast snow globe.
Cleveland, making another trip to the loo, stopped in the aisle. “I suspect it’s the Chinese again,” he said, indicating the dome.
Allen frowned. “But why on Earth would they cover entire towns and villages?” he asked.
The old man shook his head. “They’ll have their reasons,” he said. “They always do, the Chinese — and you’ll find that it will make absolute sense in the long term.”
Cleveland shuffled on and Allen returned his attention to the silvery dome far below. The minute shapes of cars and trucks had halted on the road that appeared to run right into the sheer wall, and he made out what might have been tiny, ant-like crowds of people down there.
He unrolled his softscreen, accessed the net and was about to tap in Africa + Domes + Chinese, when the screen flashed a systems error and closed down. He strapped the screen round his forearm again, eased back his seat and stared out at the passing land far below.
THEY WERE FLYING over the Sahara an hour later when the plane stopped.
The first thing he noticed was the sudden, utter silence — startling after the constant thrumming of the engines. He looked out of the window. Five metres ahead of where he sat, the silver wing — which should have been vibrating ever so slightly — was absolutely still… and, more worryingly, the line of the aileron was unshifting against the arabesque of sand dunes of the distant desert. Startled, he peered directly down. They were passing over a road that cut from right to left through the sand, with a tiny truck on its tarmac’d surface. As he stared, the vehicle remained exactly where it was, unmoving in relation to the line of the wing.
Only then did he look up, across the aisle, and realise that his fellow passengers were likewise frozen. The woman across from him was lifting a sweet to her mouth, her fingers stilled an inch from her lips. Beyond her, a man was in the process of turning a pag
e of the in-flight magazine. In the aisle, a smiling hostess was as immobile as a shop window mannequin.
Allen was about to stand up in alarm, attempt to see if everyone was similarly stricken with this paralysis, when an incredible rush of heat passed through his head and he was no longer aboard the plane.
He was flat on his back, seemingly floating in mid-air. He could feel no support beneath him. All was grey above. He tried to move his head, to look to either side, but was unable to do so. He wanted to cry out, but he could not move his mouth to articulate the words. He felt naked, though he was unable to look down the length of his body to see if this were so.
Later, he would wonder why he did not panic. It would have been a very reasonable reaction, given the circumstances. The fact was that he felt very calm, not in the least frightened. He felt a certain odd distance, a sense of remove he had once experienced when being sedated for a minor operation.
He recalled articulating the thought, What is happening to me? — and receiving a reply, as if in his head: Do not be afraid.
He wanted to laugh out loud but was unable to do so.
Seconds later he saw a bright light directly above him, dazzling. Silhouetted in the light was the outline of a human form, leaning over him. He felt only peace, as if he were in the presence of someone who, he knew, wanted only the best for him. The head-and-shoulders shape was dark, shadowy, there for a second and then gone.
He felt something ice cold on his chest, frozen pin-pricks dancing up his sternum towards his head. His instinct to cry out in alarm was stilled by the strange conviction that all was well, that he had no cause to panic.
Even when he saw what was dancing up the length of his body, climbing over his chin, then his lips and nose, and progressing to his forehead, he did not attempt to cry out. He felt no dread or horror, even though what might have been a flashing, silver-limbed mechanical spider was squatting above his forehead and lowering an ovipositor towards his skin.
Later he would describe what followed as being like the sensation of a dentist’s drill, accompanied by a high-pitched sound, felt rather than heard, a droning conducted through the bone which the ovipositor was presumably boring. Oddly he felt no pain.
A second later he experienced a blinding mental flash — which he could only describe, later, as feeling as if all his synapses had fired at once.
Then the spider, its job done, was dancing back down his face and body. He saw the human shape again, dark but benign, lean over him as if in inspection.
He was washed with a sensation of ineffable peace.
He blacked out, and an instant later was back in his seat on the plane.
He sat very still, sweating, and gripped the arm-rests. The engine was droning, the plane vibrating slightly. A glance through the window assured him they were in motion once again, the wing shaking, the desert passing by below. He glanced across the aisle: the woman was chewing the sweet that just seconds ago she had conveyed towards her mouth, and her neighbour was flipping through the magazine. The smiling air hostess approached, eyes flicking professionally over her charges.
She registered something in his expression and leaned towards him, her smile expanding in query. “Can I help?”
Before he could stop himself, he said, “Is everything okay? I mean… the plane…?”
She must have dealt with a thousand air-phobics in her time. She said reassuringly, “Everything is fine; no need to worry. We’ve lost on-line capability, but it should be up and running shortly. We will be arriving at Entebbe in a little over three hours.”
“I thought…” He shook his head. “No, I must have been dreaming.”
She smiled again. “If I can get you anything?”
“No. No, I’m fine. I’m sorry.”
“Not at all,” she said, laid a perfectly manicured set of crimson-glossed nails on his hand, then moved off down the aisle.
The aftermath left him feeling both embarrassed and frightened. What he had experienced was as real as everything else that had happened over the course of the past few hours: the plastic meals he’d consumed, his chat with Cleveland…
The plane had stopped dead in its flight, along with everyone aboard… except him. Then he’d found himself floating naked in a grey space, with a spider drilling into…
He gave a small involuntary gasp and reached up to touch his brow, expecting to feel the messy evidence of an incision there.
All he felt was a coating of clammy sweat.
He recalled the peace he’d experienced, the reassuring words in his head, exhorting him not to fear. The odd thing was that he had felt no fear then, while undergoing whatever had been happening to him, but now, looking back at the episode, he was overcome by a wave of retrospective dread.
Could some form of dream be held accountable? He thought not. Epilepsy, then? A brain seizure resulting in a hypnagogic hallucination? But the experience had seemed so damned real. He had seen his fellow passengers freeze… and yet they had experienced nothing.
He stood and walked down the aisle, scanning the seats for the ex-MP. He found the old man reading a Kindle. Cleveland looked up and smiled.
Allen said, “This might sound strange…” He paused, licked his lips, and was aware of Cleveland, and the elderly lady beside him, looking up at him expectantly. He went on, “You didn’t happen to notice anything… odd, a few minutes ago?”
“Odd, dear boy?”
He wished he’d never asked the question. “I mean… did the plane seem to… No, I’m sorry… I must have been hallucinating. I must have dropped off… a nightmare.”
Cleveland reached out, solicitous at Allen’s agitated state. “Are you sure you’re okay, Geoffrey?”
Allen smiled. “Absolutely. A dream, that’s all. I’m sorry…”
Cleveland smiled his reassurance that it was no bother at all, and Allen returned to his seat.
He stared down at the distant desert and attempted to regain some measure of the sense of peace he had experienced during the hallucination.
ENTEBBE RUSHED HIM with its usual sensory overload of chaotic, over-populated, frenetic activity he should have been accustomed to by now — from his many visits to cities in Africa and Asia — but which always struck him anew.
The press of importuning humanity and the accompanying noise was a shocking assault. Crowds surged in the streets outside the airport, a morass of brightly coloured humanity seething even now, a little after midnight, under the glare of halogen floodlights. The constant babble of voices, blaring music, and traffic noise only confused the visual chaos — and, as if this were not enough, the stench of Africa, diesel, dung and cooking food, overlay everything. Even the humidity, he thought, was an unwelcome sensory burden.
Clutching his holdall, he pushed his way through the crowd towards the Hertz car rental office. A military convoy raced along the road, a phalanx of black faces staring at him impassively from the back of a troop-carrier. There seemed to be increased military and police activity in the streets around the airport, an atmosphere of tension in the air. There had been an attempted coup here just six months ago, and the situation was still pretty tense.
He made it to the office, presented his softscreen to the harassed woman at reception, and waited a minute for the transaction to be processed.
The women smiled at him and said, “And where are you heading, Mr Allen?”
“North. Karamoja,” he replied, wondering at the question.
She beamed at him. “Travel north is not recommended, Mr Allen.”
He immediately assumed she was referring to terrorist activity and felt a stab of alarm when he thought about Sally. “What’s wrong?”
“The Chinese,” she said.
He pulled a face. “The Chinese?”
She passed him his softscreen and the car key. “They are dropping domes on our cities, Mr Allen. Dropping them from the air. They started in the north and they are heading south. Soon Kampala and Entebbe will be covered.” The pronounceme
nt, imparted with the brazen confidence of the reliably informed, took him aback.
She glanced over his shoulder at the next customer in line, effectively dismissing him before he could question her further.
Bemused, he pushed through the press, exited the office and found his Volvo in the vast parking lot. He bought a bottle of chilled water from a vendor and sat in the driver’s seat, took a drink of water and tried to work out what the woman had meant.
The domes he’d seen in the northern Sahara… He’d assumed them to be the work of the Chinese, but the idea that they were actively dropping them from the air, starting in the north and heading south, was absurd.
She had obviously got hold of a rumour, some anti-Chinese scare-mongering in the area.
He activated his softscreen and attempted to access the web, but connectivity was down. He tried to phone Sally, but the line was dead.
He took another long drink of water, consulted the map he’d pre-loaded on the ’screen, then began the long drive north despite the receptionist’s alarmist warning.
HE WAS SOON out of Entebbe and the sprawling outskirts of Kampala, driving away from the conurbation on a motorway that for the first ten kilometres was well-lit but after that turned into a darkened road barely wide enough to contain two lanes of traffic. The only other vehicles he saw heading north through the sultry darkness was a convoy of military trucks — but the flow in the opposite direction was substantial. Trucks, cars and motorbikes jammed the road for kilometres, cacophonous with blaring horns and shouted curses. He wondered if these people too had heard rumours of the vile Chinese imprisoning towns under dropped domes…
Two hours later he was barrelling through parched grassland at a steady fifty miles an hour, and the flow of traffic heading south had dried to a trickle. There was no sign of any other military vehicles. He tried to find a news station on the car radio, but all he picked up were several music stations playing European rock classics and Baganda music.
A couple of hours later the sun came up with tropical rapidity to his right, revealing a seared landscape of stunted bushes stretching to the flat horizon. He reckoned he had another three hours to go before reaching Kallani and decided to find somewhere to stop for a rest and food.