by Eric Brown
“We are in the employ of the S’rene, or the Serene, as you will come to call them.”
“But… but you’re not one of the S’rene yourself?”
The figure inclined its featureless domed head. “I am a self-aware entity in the employ of the S’rene,” it said.
“And the S’rene? Who are they? What are they?”
“The S’rene are a race that hails from a star known as Delta Pavonis. They are peaceable, and benign.”
“And the reason you, they… are here?”
A pause. Then, “To help you,” it said.
“To help us?” he echoed, with the first stirrings of excitement.
“To help you, before you destroy yourselves,” said the golden figure.
“That would be inevitable?”
The figure, the self-aware entity as it called itself, inclined its head again. “That would be inevitable. The S’rene have seen it happen before, to other races, before they were in any position to help.”
“Other races…?” Allen said, his mind spinning.
“Hundreds…” It paused, then went on, “The galaxy teems with life, with civilisations, a concordance rich beyond your imagining.”
His cheeks felt suddenly wet. He realised he was weeping.
“And how will you help us?”
“We have started already,” it said. “But that is only the start. Much work lies ahead, much change. The world, life as you know it, will alter for you out of all recognition.”
Allen nodded. “And how can I help?”
The figure stood suddenly. When seated, it had given no indication of its true dimensions. Standing, it appeared at least seven feet tall, as proportionally broad, and it reached out a hand to him now.
“Your softscreen…”
He fumbled with it, standing before this towering giant, and held out the softscreen. The golden figure touched it, then dropped its hand to its side.
“That is all?” Allen asked.
“You will go to Entebbe at eleven in the morning. Present your ’screen at the information desk in terminal two. A vessel will be waiting to take you to the Nexus.”
“The Nexus?”
The figure gestured to the screen in Allen’s hand. It flared, startling him. Upon the screen, he saw, was an image of the conjoined starships above the greened Sahara.
“The Nexus,” said the figure.
“And there?”
“There, you will learn how you and others like you will help to bring about the change.”
Allen sat back down again, or rather slumped, and when he looked up he saw that the figure that had stood before him, so imposing and dominant, had vanished.
He was aware of another figure on the edge of his vision.
Sally stood, naked, in the doorway to the bedroom.
“Geoff… I heard you talking, and when I…” She came to him. He stood quickly and hugged her to him, needing her reassurance.
“Christ, Sally…”
“What happened?”
“You didn’t see…?” He gestured to the opposite chair.
“I saw you talking to yourself. You seemed agitated, overcome with emotion. I saw you stand, and then you held out the ’screen, and moments later it suddenly flared, and you gasped.”
He stared into her eyes in the semi-darkness of the room. “Sally,” he said, “they are the Serene, and they have come to help us.”
She took his hand and led him gently back into the bedroom.
“Come to bed,” she said, “and tell me all about it.”
THEY LEFT THE park at first light and drove south-east to Entebbe.
“Apprehensive?”
He thought about it for all of three seconds. “Oddly, no. Like last night, that figure… had someone said beforehand that I’d be confronted by an extraterrestrial… self-aware entity, as it called itself, I would have thought I’d’ve been scared to death. As it was…” He shook his head. “They instil reassurance in us, Sally. We have nothing to be apprehensive about.”
“It’s a lot to take on trust.”
He agreed. “It is.” But how to explain the sensation of benignity that the representative of the Serene had emanated last night?
They arrived at Entebbe fifteen minutes before eleven and parked in the shadow of terminal two. Allen had no idea what to expect as he entered the airport and approached the information desk, Sally at his side.
A smiling Ugandan woman took his ’screen, scanned it and passed it back. “If you would like to make your way to departure lounge three, there will be a representative waiting.”
They crossed the busy concourse and hesitated before the check-in.
“So much for a week’s quiet holiday together,” she said.
They stood facing each other, Geoff began to speak, then fell silent.
“What?” Sally asked.
He laughed. “Oddly, I don’t want to go, Sal. I don’t want to leave you.”
She pushed him playfully. “Don’t be silly. You’ve got to go.”
“I know. It’s just…”
They kissed.
“I’ll be in touch just as soon as…” he shrugged, “as it’s all over.”
“I’ll go back to Kallani,” Sally said, “settle a few things there, then take the first available flight to London.”
“I’ll tell Catherine you’re on your way. She’ll give you the spare pass key to my place. And then…” He smiled and drew her to him. “Why do we always have less time together than we want? If it’s not work, it’s blessed extraterrestrials!”
They laughed, then kissed farewell.
He presented his softscreen at the check-in, turned to wave at Sally, and passed through.
He was alone in a vast lounge. A sliding door at the far end, giving onto the tarmac, opened and a figure stepped through. A tall, dark European woman, in her thirties, strode through and fixed him with a professional smile. “Mr Allen, if you would care to follow me.”
They left the lounge and stepped into the blistering sunlight, and crossed the tarmac.
“Are you…?”
“I was hired by an agency to meet you and your colleagues.”
“My colleagues…?”
If she heard him, the woman gave no sign.
They paused before a silver, corrugated hangar, and the woman indicated a sliding glass door.
Allen stepped through. When his vision adjusted to the shadows within, he saw a sleek, jet black delta-winged plane in the centre of the hangar.
He looked behind him. The woman was nowhere to be seen.
He crossed to the plane. At his approach, a ramp extruded. He hesitated at its foot, peering up into the vessel’s darkened interior.
He climbed.
Again his vision took time to adjust as he ducked through the plane’s entrance. The interior was furnished with four seats, two to a side, facing each other. Three of the seats were occupied. He made out a tall African woman, a young man of Asian origin, and a middle-aged woman who might have been Arabic.
As he stared at each of them in turn, he realised that they were unconscious.
The fourth seat was empty.
He moved forward, hesitated, then sat down.
Instantly a luxurious lassitude engulfed him. He wanted to laugh out loud at the wondrous sensation as he descended towards oblivion.
He felt a subtle vibration — the plane, moving? — and then lost consciousness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SALLY HAD AN aversion to using bribery to get what she wanted — aiding and abetting a system that was responsible for much that was at fault in the continent of Africa — but in this instance it was the only way to achieve her goal.
It cost her one hundred US dollars, slipped into the cold palm of the desk sergeant, to be allowed into the holding cell at the Kallani police headquarters.
She was taken to a tiny concrete room, divided by floor-to-ceiling bars, with a plastic bucket seat positioned on either side of the bars.
She sat down. A minute later the door in the other half of the cell opened and Josef Makumbi, shackled hand and foot, shuffled through.
He looked sullen, and his eyes widened fractionally when he saw her.
He slumped into the seat and stared at her.
“Hello, Josef.”
He stared at his lap, then looked up at her. “What do you want, Dr Walsh?”
She looked at the man who had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of at least four of his colleagues. She was tempted to ask him why, but restricted herself to the reason for her visit.
She said, “Three days ago I was taken, along with Dr Ben Odinga, by three men who drove us north and held us prisoner. One of the men was named Ali.” She hesitated. “Who was he, Josef?”
He stared at her with bloodshot eyes, and surprised her by asking, “Why haven’t they beaten me, Dr Walsh? They brought me here, locked me up, and then one man, a big sergeant, he comes in with a baseball bat… I could see the look in his eyes. He wanted to kill me, Dr Walsh. He wanted to punish me for what I did.” He shook his head. “And he tried to. He lifted the bat, tried to hit me, but something stopped him.”
She said, “I want you to tell me the full name of your accomplice, Ali, and where I might find him.”
“Will they kill me, Dr Walsh? I know they want to, for what I did.”
She shook her head and ran a tired hand over her face. She felt the sweat and grime of her long drive north. She said, “Please, tell me Ali’s full name and where I might find him.”
He stared at her.
She returned his gaze, looking into the eyes of one of the last men on Earth, she realised, to commit the act of murder. At any other time she would have been curious to know what had motivated the man to turn on his colleagues — but all she wanted now was to confront the man who had tormented herself and Ben, to hear his side of the story.
“Well?” she said.
“If I tell you, they will not beat me to death?”
She inclined her head. “I promise.”
He nodded, licked his lips. “His name is Ali al-Hawati, and he is from the village of Benali. He has a wife there, but no children. He works as a fisherman on the river.”
The village was a hundred kilometres east of Kallani, on the border with Kenya. It would be a long, hot drive, with no guarantee at the end of it that she would be able to find and confront the man who would have willingly taken her life and filmed the process for all the world to see.
She would never have had the courage to attempt to track down her tormentor, normally. But, with the coming of the Serene, things were very different.
She stood. “Thank you, Josef.”
“You will make sure they will not beat me to death, Dr Walsh?”
She stared down at him. “You have nothing to worry about on that score,” she told him, and left the cell.
EARLIER THAT DAY, after arriving at Kallani from Entebbe, she had met Yan Krasnic and told him of her decision to leave Kallani and return to England. She offered to work until the end of the month, but Krasnic smiled and said, “No, you can go now. The relief team arrived yesterday, and since the coming of the starships… well, we can concentrate on treating victims of the drought, of famine. No more do we have to contend with the casualties of war and bush skirmishes, though for how long that might last…”
“And you?” she asked.
He looked through the window of his surgery. Krasnic was in his early fifties. He looked about seventy. “I’m okay… After what happened the other day, I too have decided to return home, to Croatia. It’s a beautiful country, Sally. I miss it. I think I will retire.”
She hugged him before leaving, then found Ben Odinga and said goodbye.
“God is great,” he said, smiling at her. “I will miss you.”
She returned to Mama Oola’s, packed her scant belongings, and said a tearful goodbye to the matriarch, promising to return one day.
Then she had made her way to the police headquarters and bribed the grinning desk sergeant.
She left Kallani at one o’clock and drove east. While at Entebbe that morning she had booked a flight to London on a plane leaving Uganda at noon the following day. That would leave her with enough time to do what she had to do, for her peace of mind, and return to Kampala in the morning.
As she drove through the drought-stricken, sun-pummelled land, a hellish landscape devoid of life, where even the trees stood stark and leafless like charcoal twigs in the parched earth, she considered her motives in confronting Ali al-Hawati.
What did she want? For that matter, what did she expect?
She did not want to know of his motivations, for she could guess them. He was politically driven, or religiously driven — they were one and the same. He wanted his worldview to prevail, and saw her and her fellow aid workers as legitimate targets in the war against decadent Western liberalism.
She had no illusions that she would gain his forgiveness; he would hate her now — if not more so, given her escape — as he had hated her the other day.
No, what she wanted was to look him in the eye and tell him that his chance had come and gone, that, with the coming of the Serene, the opportunity to get what he and his fellow believers wanted was a thing of the past. She wanted to tell him that he had lost the war, and that everything would be very different, now.
She wanted to tell Ali al-Hawati that no longer did she fear him and his kind.
Then she would smile, and turn her back on him, without flinching at the thought of attack, and walk away.
AS SHE DROVE through the punishing afternoon heat, she turned the car radio to Uganda FM and listened to the latest reports from around the world.
She would have liked to have had Geoff’s softscreen with her now, despite her frugality and anti-materialism that had never allowed her to indulge herself. For the past few years she had made do with a cheap wind-up radio to provide her with news of the outside world.
Republicans in America were encamped outside the White House in protest at their government’s inability to confront the extraterrestrials. Shares in arms manufacturers around the world had tumbled, and in the States the gun lobby and pro-hunting groups were vociferous in their complaints about having their rights violated by the aliens. The President had gone on live TV last night to demand a meeting with the leader of the ‘alien invasion.’
Sally smiled to herself and tuned into a music station.
Three hours later she came to the river and the village of Benali, its inhabitants stirring in the cooler hours of late afternoon. Women washed clothes in the river and children played with tyres in the dusty streets. It was a scene, typical of Africa, which had changed little in a hundred years.
She made out a large number of Yemeni men and women among the Ugandans. After the Israeli strikes on Sana in 2019, displaced Yemenis had fled south, settling in Ethiopia, Somalia, and even as far as Uganda. They were largely fisher-folk, drawn to the coastal regions or, in this case, the wide river on the border with Kenya.
She braked on the crest of the road overlooking the village and the river. The shanty town looked impoverished, a series of corrugated metal huts, patched with multi-coloured polythene sheets — where Islamists must have found eager recruits among the poor, displaced Yemenis.
She wondered if al-Hawati had been lured into terrorism by the promise of riches, or the reward of a martyr’s place in paradise. Would she despise him any the less had his motivations been the former?
Her arrival caused a commotion amongst the village children. They flocked around her car, keeping a safe distance, watching her with big eyes, mistrustful yet curious.
She climbed out and smiled at the children, African and Yemeni, and singled out the tallest — a boy clutching a deflated vinyl football — and said, “I am looking for Ali al-Hawati, a fisherman. Do you know where he lives?”
This provoked an intense and noisy debate among the crowd. The boy with the football shouted loudest, then loo
ked at Sally. “He lives beside the river. Come with me.”
She followed the boy, followed, in turn, by the ragged posse of village children, chattering among themselves.
A few days ago, she thought as she hurried down the sandy track after the boy, she would never have dared enter a Yemeni village known to harbour terrorists. Even now she experienced a residual fear at what she was doing, tempered by the knowledge that no one, now, could harm her physically.
Nevertheless, as they turned a corner and came to a line of huts fronting the river, her heart set up a laboured pounding.
A Yemeni woman in a stained shalwar kameez and a half niqab veil sat before the second hut, mending a fishing net. She looked up and stared at Sally, her brown eyes massive above the fabric that covered her mouth and nose.
The young boy said something to the woman, and without a word she stood and hurried into the hut. Behind Sally, the children stopped as one and watched in silence.
Seconds later a man, wearing only shorts and a ripped vest, stepped out.
He stopped dead when he saw Sally, and she was gratified at the expression of shock on his thin face. The jagged scar that ran across his cheek was red raw; he had declined her advice to seek medical help.
In English he said, “What do you want?”
“I came to see you, Ali.”
His eyes narrowed, flicked beyond her to see if she were alone.
“Why?” he snapped. “What do you want with me?”
Behind him, the woman — presumably his wife — ducked from the hut and stood watching them.
Ali turned and, with surprising vitriol, shouted at the woman. Her gaze fell from Sally, as if in shame, and submissively she scurried back inside.
“I came, Ali, simply to talk.”
Her words discomfited him; his sneer faltered. He looked beyond her at the gallery of watching children, and he gestured with anger and yelled at them in Arabic.
When Sally turned, she saw that every last one of them had fled.
She wondered at the power this man had wielded in the village, and if the reason for the anger that manifestly simmered beneath the surface of his superior demeanour was that he realised, with the coming of the Serene, that his ability to command fear, and therefore respect, would in time diminish.