by Eric Brown
“Thank you, Dan.” A trim blonde woman in a stylish raincoat was standing before the Eiffel Tower, clutching a microphone to her chest and staring wide-eyed into the sky. “Just twenty minutes ago, twelve-thirty-one European time, a vessel identical to the ones that have been reported appearing in Australia, China, Argentina and elsewhere, manifested itself in the sky just north of Paris. Eye-witnesses, I’m told, say that it simply appeared as if from thin air. And then moved south slowly, as you see now…” The camera swung, and it was as if they were watching a re-run of the Australian ship’s progress, only this time the backdrop was grey with rainclouds.
The beautiful, colossal ship was identical in every respect.
Jenny and the houseboy were shrieking with delight before the TV.
“I can confirm that, as in Australia, the air force scrambled jets to intercept, but that those jets could not, I repeat, could not, take off.”
The shot lingered on the slowly moving vessel, occasionally swooping in for close-ups as if attempting to establish fine detail, decals or some other feature on the silver-blue tegument of the craft.
The superstructure, however, appeared featureless, as seamless as the surface of an egg.
It hovered over the Eiffel Tower, reducing the landmark to the size of a needle.
“…the strange thing is,” Amelia Thirkell was reporting, “that the crowds massed here and on the banks of the Seine don’t seem in the least phased by… by what we have here. And I can report myself that there is no sense of… of threat emanating from the ship.”
“Angela,” the anchorman back in London said, “sorry to have to interrupt there. We’ll be back, but we have interesting developments here in London. With me in the studio are the physicists Dr Ed Danbridge and Dr James Chamberlain. Gentlemen, many thanks for coming here at such short notice. Now, you’ve both been doing calculations based on the vessels’ trajectories…”
“That’s right, Rob,” Chamberlain said. “To remind viewers, the starships –”
The anchorman interrupted. “Now that’s the first time we’ve used the s-word, but you think…?”
“The assumption is, Rob, that only an extraterrestrial intelligence could be behind the various odd phenomena reported over the past twenty-four hours. Anyway, the vessels appeared in the skies of Earth at precisely the same time all around the world, 11.31 Greenwich mean time. Interestingly, each ship is heading on a trajectory that we’ve plotted, Jim and myself, which will meet at some time in the near future, at a point a hundred kilometres north-west of the Malian city of Timbuktu in the Saharan Desert.”
“Can anything be made of that, at this early stage?” the anchorman asked.
“I think it’s too early to say yet. All we can do is watch and wait…”
“And speaking of watching, we can switch to David Runciman in Tanzania with reports of another starship…”
“Thanks, Rob. David Runciman here, in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, where as your studio guests reported, at 11.31 Greenwich mean time a vessel appeared in the sky above the park, heading slowly north-west…”
Geoff unrolled his softscreen from his arm, spread it on his lap and tapped the control bar.
Sally tore her gaze from the TV screen. “Geoff?”
“Just checking something…”
He brought up a map of Africa on the softscreen, zoomed in on Namibia, pushed the map north-west through Tanzania and Uganda, until arriving at the city of Timbuktu.
He said, “The ships are pretty amazing even on TV, Sally. Imagine seeing them in the flesh.”
Her heart did a quick somersault. “You mean…?”
“If we get to the park before six,” he said, “we’ll be able to witness the ship’s fly-by.”
“Even if it is an invading ship?”
He squeezed her hand. “I can’t miss an opportunity like this, Sal.”
CHAPTER SIX
ALLEN SLAPPED HIS softscreen to the dashboard and kept half an eye on events unfolding around the world.
They left Kallani and headed west, in a couple of hours leaving the drought-stricken area of Karamajo far behind them. The terrain changed, became rolling and relatively green — not as sodden and fecund as the English countryside he’d left, but nothing like the dead, parched land of Karamoja.
“…and the outbreak of non-violence continues,” said the London-based BBC anchorman. “LA is reporting its first day in living memory when there have been no reports of murders or muggings. The same is true around the world. Some governments have welcomed the phenomenon, while others have counselled caution. Meanwhile, world religions…”
He glanced across at Sally. She had drawn her hair back and tied it in a ponytail. She turned her head on the head-rest and smiled at him.
“Can you tell me, Geoff, why I don’t feel… threatened?”
He’d been thinking the very same thing. Since his earlier suggestion that the ‘outbreak of non-violence,’ as the BBC had it, might be a prelude to alien invasion, he’d had time to reconsider.
“What happened to me aboard the plane,” he said. “I know I wasn’t hallucinating. It happened. It was real. And I know it was linked…” He gestured to the softscreen. “There was something I forgot to tell you earlier — about the experience. While I was flat out in the grey fog… before and after the silver spider did whatever it did to me… I saw a figure, a shape. Just the head and shoulders of someone. And I felt… I don’t really know how to explain it… I felt reassurance in my head, and the words, Do not be afraid.” He shook his head. “And I wasn’t. I was suffused by peace.”
“I thought you said, earlier, that the non-violence suggested invasion?”
“I know I did. And it does. Rationally, what has happened — our inability to fight, the arrival of the ships… it all points to an invasion. And yet the overwhelming sensation I received while they were doing whatever they were doing to me was one of peace.”
She reached out and stroked his thigh. “Don’t. That frightens me, the thought of their doing something to you.”
He shook his head. “The odd thing is, Sally, that it doesn’t frighten me in the slightest.”
He felt her gaze on him, and when he looked at her she was frowning. “You said it was a human head and shoulders..?” she said.
“That’s how it appeared to me, and yet at the same time it felt… alien.” He stopped himself there. “Or did it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s only in retrospect, after the arrival of the ships, that it occurred to me that the figure was alien.”
They fell silent. On the softscreen, studio guests were debating the starships’ arrival.
“Of course,” a uniformed General was saying, “everything suggests that we should proceed with utmost suspicion. The fact that our military capability, worldwide, seems to have been compromised is an indication that the vessels’ arrival is hostile in intent–”
“On the other hand,” a scientist interrupted, “their preventing our ability to commit violence might be seen as a blessing, an endowment, and not necessarily as a precursor to hostilities.”
“I am merely stating the need for caution,” the General said.
The anchorman stepped in, “That’s an interesting point Jim Broadbent makes there, General; we’ve been assessing what has happened in terms of potential threat. Perhaps we should take time to look at other possibilities…”
“Of course,” Broadstairs said. “As a scientist I like to run a number of thought experiments, initially giving equal validity to all possibilities before dismissing them. One thing that has occurred to me is the nature of the starships’ arrival here. They in no way seem to me the harbingers of invasion. Look at the facts. They appeared simultaneously at eight locations around the world, and they seem to be making their way — if our calculations prove correct — to one of the most uninhabited regions on the planet. This, to me, is not the manoeuvring of an invading army.”
The General said, “I merely counsel caution. If we are dealing here with�
� with extraterrestrials… then it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to second-guess their motivations.”
The scientist was about to step in with a rejoinder to that when the anchorman said, “Gentlemen, I’m afraid we must leave it there for the time being, though undoubtedly we’ll return to the debate as events unfold worldwide. In our Cambridge studio we have Xian Chen Li and Peter Walken, professors respectively in neuroscience and sociology… If I might begin with you, Professor Walken, and ask you what the long term consequences of this so-called outbreak of non-violence might be?”
“If, that is, the outbreak is indeed long term,” Walken stipulated, “and not a temporary effect…”
Allen was listening to the broadcast while concentrating on the track ahead. They had left the metalled highway an hour ago and proceeded along a sandy track winding through hilly terrain. He calculated they were an hour from the park, with another couple of hours to go before sunset. The starship, if it kept to its current speed, was due to overfly the park at approximately six o’clock.
A while later, Sally said, “Geoff… You okay?”
He smiled reassuringly. “Fine.”
“It’s just…” She gestured at the screen, where the professors had given way to a reporter already in the Saharan desert north-west of Timbuktu. “What they were saying about our inability to commit violence…”
He knew what she was driving at, and he nodded. “Of course it… hurts,” he admitted.
“I’m sorry.”
“I mean, it’s so bloody arbitrary.” He glanced at her. “Take what happened yesterday, at the medical centre. The terrorists attacked, killed half a dozen soldiers, and took you and Ben…” He stopped, gripping the wheel at its apex. “It frightens me to think that if the attack had happened an hour earlier…”
He stared out at the rolling bush. Ahead and to their right a vortex of vultures swirled on a thermal. He went on, “And if the ships had arrived a couple of days ago, then the soldiers guarding the centre would still be alive. Like I said, so arbitrary.”
She murmured, “And if they had arrived here three years ago…”
He smiled at her. “You’re probably thinking me selfish that I’m viewing this, probably the most momentous event in human history, so personally.”
“Of course not! It’s entirely understandable, Geoff. I’d be looking at it in the same way.”
He’d never spoken to anyone other than Sally and his sister about what had happened to his parents. He’d given her a sketched outline of the incident, and left it at that, not caring to describe his feelings at the time.
For some reason, now, he felt the need to unburden himself.
“The thing is that I almost understood why they did what they did. They were old and very, very ill. My father was eighty-nine, my mother a couple of years younger. My father’s heart was rapidly failing, and my mother had terminal leukaemia. Their quality of life…”
“I understand. There were other ways of going about… ending it.”
“The odd thing is that both my parents for all their lives had campaigned and fought — what a word to use! — for non-violence. So to end it like that was… shocking, somehow not right. What hurt me, and hurts me still, is that they didn’t tell me or my sister about how they were feeling. I understand why — they didn’t want to upset us. But they could have said something; we could have talked about euthanasia. It was a measure of their desperation, their extreme unhappiness, that they were driven to end it as they did. It was obviously a sudden thing, done on the spur of absolute despair. And thinking about their last few hours… that’s what hurts so much.”
Fortunately it was he who had found their bodies, not his sister Catherine.
He had taken to crossing London every other day, from his flat in Battersea to his parents’ three story townhouse overlooking Hampstead Heath, to check on them, cook them a meal and chat about what he was working on at the moment. While they were slowly crumbling physically, mentally they were as alert as they’d ever been.
That spring morning he’d not visited his parents for a couple of days. He had phoned the night before, to apologise and say he’d be around in the morning — but had received no reply. He was not unduly worried, as both were half deaf and often missed his calls.
He let himself in with the spare key, called out that it was him, and ran up the stairs to the commodious, sunny lounge on the first floor.
They were seated together on the sofa facing the big bow window. At first he thought they’d fallen asleep while appreciating the spring morning.
His mother’s head was resting on his father’s shoulder.
He rounded the sofa and stopped dead in his tracks, shock pummelling his solar plexus.
The chest of his mother’s white blouse was soaked in a bib of startling bright blood. Similarly, his father’s waistcoat was stained. The pistol lay on his lap, his fingers loose around its butt.
Allen had staggered backwards, fallen into an armchair, and wept.
Later, when the bodies had been removed, Allen drove to Catherine’s in Belsize Park and broke the news. He recalled little of the hour they spent together, other than telling her that at least his father had not shot his mother and himself through the head. It had seemed an important distinction at the time.
SALLY WAS STILL stroking his thigh, a while later, when they came to the road-block.
It occurred to Allen that it was an odd place to mount a road-block, on a flat stretch of land a couple of kilometres before the boundary of the national park. An ugly green military truck was drawn up by the side of the road and a dozen troops had erected a makeshift barrier consisting of two trestles and a length of red and yellow crime-scene tape.
The troops stood around in postures of boredom and negligence — always, Allen thought, a dangerous combination. They had rifles and machine guns at the ready, but oddly enough he wasn’t encouraged by the thought that they wouldn’t be able to use them.
Sally sat up. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. There’s no reason for the road-block, as far as I can make out.”
“How far are we from the park?”
“About two kilometres.”
He slowed down as he approached the fluttering length of tape. Their arrival had galvanised the soldiers who approached the car and stood flanking it, staring in at Allen and Sally with sullen, almost petulant expressions. He glanced at their forefingers, hooked inside the trigger-guards of their respective weapons.
A sudden, alarming thought occurred to him. They were near the border with the Congo. Might these be Congolese troops, taking advantage of the arrival of the starships to cross the border to the relatively affluent Uganda in order to do a little pilfering?
He scanned the uniform of the sergeant, who had disengaged himself from his men and was striding over to the car, but he couldn’t make out the soldier’s insignia.
He murmured, “Keep your hands in sight at all times and don’t make a sudden move.” He smiled across at her. “And don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
He unpeeled the softscreen from the dashboard, set it on his lap, and kept his hands on the apex of the steering wheel. He smiled out at the approaching officer.
The sergeant halted a metre from the car and said, “Will you please climb out, sir, and the lady also.”
He nodded at Sally, opened the door and climbed out. He felt conscious of being separated from her. The late afternoon sun beat down on his face.
The sergeant reached out. “Papers.”
Allen tried not to smile at the anachronism. No one had papers these days. He proffered his softscreen. On the other side of the car, Sally was passing her ID card to another soldier.
The sergeant jacked a monitor into Allen’s screen and, frowning, scanned the read-out on his own.
He said, “And why are you in Uganda, Mr Allen?”
“To cover a story in Murchison Falls park — the elephant breeding programme. I’m a photographe
r.”
The sergeant looked over the top of the car. “And you, madam, why are you in Uganda?”
She told him that she worked for the Red Cross in Kallani.
“So you are based there?”
Sally nodded. “That’s right. Yes.”
“And why are you here?”
“Accompanying Mr Allen. I’m on holiday.”
The sergeant looked from Allen to Sally, his gaze unreadable. “There is a state of emergency in the country now. My government has ordered that all foreign nationals must report to the Ugandan embassy for registration.”
Sally made a sound of disgust. “But that’s back in Kampala!”
“Nevertheless, you must report to the embassy, or you will be in breach of regulations.”
Before Sally could argue, Allen said, “That’s fine. We’ll do that. We’re due in Rangay before sunset, so if you would kindly let us past.”
The sergeant stared at him, unmoving. “I must request that you turn back now, go back to the highway and head south.”
Allen smiled and said patiently, “I have work to do in Rangay, a story to cover. We will head to Kampala first thing in the morning.”
The sergeant stared him down. “Mr Allen, you will turn around now, head back to the highway and continue south. The country is under a state of emergency.”
Allen nodded. “Very well.”
The sergeant passed Allen his softscreen and he climbed back into the car. Sally slipped in beside him and slammed the door.
Allen started the engine. “So… what do we do?” He watched the troops mosey back to their truck.
The sergeant turned and stood watching him.
“What do you mean? I thought you’d agreed to the…”
“I mean, do we drive on, through the tape, ignoring the kind sergeant?”
Sally considered, smiling at him like a kid considering a dare. “Do you think they’d try to shoot if we did disobey them?”
“I very much doubt they’d risk shooting two foreign nationals…”
She nodded. “You’ve stirred the troublemaker in me, Mr Allen. Let’s go.”