by Eric Brown
Ana recalled what the golden figure aboard the starships had told her.
She looked back at her gaggle of rag-tag street kids, clad in torn shirts and shorts, most barefoot, some with flip-flops. “Now everyone hold hands so that we’re all linked together,” she instructed.
Like this they moved around the circumference of the light, Ana attempting to find an area where the crowd was not so thick. Their passage aroused much comment and the occasional insult. “What are these little animals doing here?” one fat Brahmin called out. “Cannot the police do their job for once?”
“Get back to the slums, harijans. There is nothing out here for you.”
Ana ignored the shouts, heartened that the name-callers were often shouted down by their fellows: “Show the children some respect, ah-cha? We are living in a time of peace.”
At last the crowd thinned before the wall of light, and Ana led her children towards an area where a line of citizens only three deep stood gazing through the light.
She stopped, turned and addressed her friends. “Make sure that we are all together and holding hands. Follow me, and do not stop walking as we approach the light…”
Prakesh stared at her. “We’re going through the light, Ana?”
She grinned. “Wait and see.”
“But someone said that the light was solid!”
“Just trust me, ah-cha?”
She stepped forward and tried to ease her way past the cordon of curious individuals. “Excuse me, please. Can we come through…?”
The crowd parted with reluctance, one or two people muttering at the kids.
Ana paused before the wall of light and looked up. It rose high into the sky, and to the left and right. She stared through the light and made out a rising stretch of green, like the brightest lawn she had seen on the softscreens in the restaurants along Station Road.
She turned to her children and said. “Remember, hold hands, and do not let go. Now follow me!”
People laughed. “And where do you think you’re going, slum-girl? Do you think you and your kind will be allowed into paradise?”
Hardly daring to hope that the next few seconds might make these people eat their words, she closed her eyes and stepped forward, into the light.
She heard gasps from behind her, then startled cries. She walked through the light and felt the ground beneath her feet change from sandy soil to soft, springy grass.
She opened her eyes and stared around her. The rest of the children had passed through the light with her, hand in hand, and stood about in mute startlement. Ana looked back through the light and made out faces pressed up against the barrier, staring at the street kids with envy and incredulity.
Before them, a great town spread out to the horizon, bright green grass and silver domes, tubular silver towers and other, similar-shaped buildings, but these ones laid out flat along the land.
She looked up and gasped. High above was the great conjoined disc, like a shield in the sky, of the Serene starships.
Ana led her children up the gentle incline towards the nearest dome.
THEY WERE MET by a tall Westerner who called himself Greg and led them further into the town to a building which, he said, they could call home. The low, brick-built dwelling was divided into several rooms, with a communal dining room, a lounge overlooking a vast garden, and bedrooms to the rear.
Greg introduced Ana and the children to an Indian woman called Varma, who called herself a supervisor and said that over the next few days she would instruct the children on life in the new town. First, they were to rest in their rooms, and in three hours meet in the dining room for a communal meal.
Ana selected a room, between Gopal’s and Prakesh’s, stepped over the threshold and moved to close the door behind her. She found that she was unable to complete the action, and something caught in her throat. She had lived for years with no idea of privacy, had slept every night packed tight with the other street kids — and now she could not bring herself to shut out her friends and family.
There was a narrow bed in the room, and a bedside table and a chair, and a window that looked out over the rolling green land.
She moved to the bed and sat down, bouncing a little to test its springiness.
She had shared a bed with her brother many years ago, at the age of five, when she had lived with her aunt and uncle, but she had forgotten quite how soft they were.
For the first time in sixteen years she had a room and a bed of her own.
The comfort would take some getting used to.
She lay down on the bed, rested her head on the pillow, and tried to relax. She opened her eyes and sat up. There was something wrong. She felt alone. She moved to the open door, stepped out and almost collided with Prakesh, who laughed and jumped back.
They grinned at each other.
“What do you think, Ana?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She took his hand on impulse and drew him into the room.
Lying on the bed, side by side, they began giggling uncontrollably and suddenly she no longer felt alone.
They ate at a big communal table at five o’clock, a simple meal of dal and chapatis, followed by bananas.
It was the best meal Ana had eaten in years.
Later, as the sun went down, Varma took the children on a tour of the garden, and explained, “We are self sufficient here at Fandrabad, or soon will be. You will be given a plot of land on which to grow the food you will consume, and every morning you will attend school classes.”
A buzz passed around the group.
Varma said, “How many of you can read?”
Of the twenty-four children, only Ana and Gopal raised their hands.
Varma smiled. “In a year from now, all of you will be able to read and write.”
Later the children sat around a patio area before the garden, staring up at the starships directly overhead. A circle of blue light marked the centre of the eightfold arrangement where the starship’s nose-cones came together. From the centre of the light, a broad, blue beam fell to Earth, connecting the land on the horizon with the joined starships.
Ana saw Varma in the garden, picking beans, and stepped from the patio to join her.
She gestured to the starships and they both stared upwards. “The light,” Ana asked. “What is it?”
Varma smiled. “Energy,” she said. “The concentrated energy from other stars. It is being beamed to Earth to supply the planet’s needs in the years to come.”
Ana smiled, not sure that she fully understood Varma’s words.
She reached out and found herself hugging the woman. She pulled away, hesitated, then looked into Varma’s deep brown eyes. “Are you human,” she murmured at last, “or are you really a golden figure?”
The women smiled, then reached out to stroke Ana’s hair. “What makes you think that, little wise one?” she said, but would say no more.
Ana had one more surprise in store for her that evening.
There was a wall-mounted softscreen in the lounge, which the children could watch if they wished. When she stepped inside on her way to bed, she saw that Gopal and Prakesh were watching a news programme.
She stopped and stared at the bright images. The screen showed crowds in America and Europe, protesting against the arrival of the Serene. Ana listened to the voiceover in English, but did not understand much of what was said.
Then the scene changed and a reporter said, “And from New York a spokesman for Morwell Enterprises had this to say…”
A handsome Indian man with a thin face, a ponytail and trendy ear-stud faced the camera. “That is correct. I can confirm that James Morwell is in negotiations with other businessmen and heads of state around the world in an attempt to formulate a united opposition to the regime imposed upon us, without our consent I might add, by the Serene…”
The scene switched, showing a meeting of politicians in Europe. Gopal called out to her to join them, but Ana just shook her head
and hurried to her bedroom, stunned.
She lay down in the semi-darkness and stared at the ceiling, unable to believe what she had seen.
She was in no doubt. Ten years might have passed, and he had changed a lot, but she recognised the young Indian man on the softscreen, the spokesman for Morwell Enterprises.
It was her brother, Bilal.
TWO
2035
CHAPTER ONE
SALLY SAW HER last patient of the day, finished writing up her notes, then turned off the softscreen and pushed her chair away from the desk. She turned to face the picture window and stared out on a scene that never failed to fill her with delight.
The mellow Shropshire countryside rolled away to the south in a series of hills and vales, softened by the late afternoon sunlight. Here and there she made out villages and small towns — revitalised since the coming of the Serene — and the manufactories that were run almost exclusively by robots, the factories’ aesthetically pleasing silver domes concealing the ugly subterranean industry which plumbed the countryside in places to the depth of a kilometre. To the south was the Malvern Energy Distribution Station, an array of silver panels as wide as a couple of football pitches. Twice a day a great pulse of energy was beamed to the EDS from an orbital relay station, the last leg of a journey that had seen the energy transmitted light years through space from stellar supergiants around the galaxy. On grey winter days the bright golden pulses lit the land like falling suns in a display that always cheered Sally.
Between the EDS and the small town of Wem where Sally lived and worked was a network of farms producing the food which fed the nation. She had read somewhere that since the changes wrought by the Serene, forty per cent of Britain’s landmass was given over to food production — which was low in comparison to some countries. Uganda, for instance, was almost seventy per cent cultivated, and many other African countries even more so.
Frequently over the past few days — the tenth anniversary of the Serene’s arrival — she had thought back to her time in Uganda, contrasting her life then to what she had now. It was only in retrospect that she realised that, for much of her time while in Africa, she had been desperately unhappy. She would never have admitted as much at the time, convincing herself that in working in a country sorely deprived of medical aid she was not only helping others but fulfilling some deep-seated psychological need of her own, but now she could see that she had been sublimating her own desires and needs by losing herself in good deeds. It was a time in her life she was pleased to have experienced, perhaps had had to go through in order to grow, but she was glad that it was over.
First Geoff Allen had come into her life, and then the Serene… She often wondered if she would have turned her back on Uganda if the aliens had not arrived and promised to make things better — and was honest with herself and realised that she would have done. She had planned to get out before the coming of the Serene, anyway — and her kidnap at the hands of terrorists had been the final straw. Strung-out, a nervous wreck and jaded with the stultifying routine of treating preventable diseases month after month, she had had to leave for the sake of her sanity. She sometimes felt pangs of guilt — which Geoff, with his easy-going approach to life, often jibed her about — when she realised that the Serene had made her decision that much easier.
She had so much to thank the extraterrestrials for.
She activated her softscreen on impulse, tapped into her favourites, and seconds later routed the image to the wallscreen.
She sat back, smiling, and stared at the scene showing the main street in Kallani — though a street vastly changed since Sally had last been there. Then it had been an unmade, dusty road flanked by crumbling concrete buildings and stunted trees, thronged by impoverished locals on the verge of malnutrition.
Now the road was metalled and the buildings largely replaced by poly-carbon or synthetic timber structures, and the people walking down the street appeared well-fed. North and south of Kallani, all across the Karamoja region which a decade ago had been a drought-stricken wilderness, the land had been revitalised and given over to farms run by locals. This was the pattern that existed across all Africa, in fact across much of the world — deserts reclaimed, wildernesses turned into either sources of food production or sanctuaries for native wildlife. The industries that had threatened vast areas of the world, principally mining and logging, had been wound down, redundant now that abundant stellar energy was online and synthi-timber was such an easily manufactured commodity. The Serene had given humanity the technological wherewithal to venture out into the solar system and mine the asteroids for metals, both relieving a tired Earth from the need to give up these resources and eliminating the resultant pollution.
She instructed the image to pan down the main street and turn left. She swung the view to focus on the building that nestled between two carbon fibre A-frames. Mama Oola’s was one of the few old concrete buildings remaining in the street — Sally could well imagine Mama’s objections to having new premises foisted on her — and little seemed to have changed over the years. The façade was still crumbling and distressed and adorned with bountiful bougainvillea, and occasionally Mama Oola herself could be glimpsed bustling to and from the local market. She’d appeared, the last time Sally had seen her, as ageless as ever.
Now Sally moved the focus along the street and across town to the new medical centre — no longer a tumbledown compound of aging prefabs and corrugated huts. A white carbon fibre complex, all arcs and stylish domes, occupied the old site. And Sally knew that the treatment that went on there was very different to that of her time; gone the cases of malnutrition, preventable maladies and the victims of violence both domestic and political. She suspected that the day to day cases that presented in Kallani would be little different to those she treated here in Wem.
Dr Krasnic, whom she emailed from time to time, had decided to stay on at the centre in Kallani, but Ben Odinga had moved to a practice in Kampala. She smiled to herself, killed the image and not for the first time thought how good it would be, one day, to return.
She was about to leave the office and walk home when her softscreen chimed.
She was tempted to ignore the summons and sneak off, suspecting that her manager wanted to see her before she left. Guilt got the better of her and she accepted the call. The image of a woman in her mid-fifties expanded into the ’screen and it was a few seconds before Sally recognised her.
“Kath?” she said, surprised and delighted. “My word, where are you?”
“Would you believe here in Wem? In fact, about half a kay from where you’re sitting.” Kathryn Kemp raised a glass and Sally saw that she was beside the canal in the garden of the Three Horseshoes.
“Wonderful. Look, I’ve just finished work. I have a couple of hours before I’m due home. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Kathryn laughed. “I’ll get you as a drink. Leffe?”
“As ever.”
“I’ll get them in,” Kath said and cut the connection.
Sally locked the office, took the open staircase to the sun-filled atrium, and stepped out into the warm summer afternoon. She hurried through the surgery’s garden and took the path along the canal.
Kath Kemp was her oldest friend. They’d met nearly thirty years ago as medical students in London, hit it off immediately and stayed close ever since. Kath was grounded and serious, a private person who let very few people into her life; she had never married, never — as far as Sally was aware — had a boyfriend or girlfriend, and as Kath seemed reluctant to broach the matter of intimate relations, Sally never pressed her on the subject.
Despite their closeness, she had to admit that Kath was something of an enigma. They spoke at length, and at great depth, about their work, the world, politics — and Kath was happy to listen as Sally opened her heart and poured out her troubles, or her joys. But Kath never reciprocated; Sally had been piqued in the early days of their relationship, and then come to accept this as m
erely a facet of Kath. Sally loved the woman for her warmth, her empathy; she trusted Kath more than anyone else in the world, except perhaps Geoff, and enjoyed basking in her sheer… there was no other term for it… humanity.
It had been to Sally’s great joy that Geoff, when he’d first met Kath nine years ago, had formed an immediate rapport. “She’s a remarkable person, Sal. She exudes empathy.”
Their careers had diverged after graduation. While Sally had specialised in tropical medicine, Kath had practised psychiatry. She’d worked first in London, and then five years ago moved to New York, specialising in the treatment of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics.
They kept in contact with regular emails and online chats, and caught up in the flesh perhaps once every couple of years when Kath returned to London on business.
The Three Horseshoes dated from the sixteenth century, a former coaching inn with bulging walls, a twee bonnet of thatch, and a magnificent beer garden. She and Geoff had spent many a quiet early evening here in the summers, before their daughter Hannah’s arrival on the scene; Sally liked to watch the seven o’clock pulse of energy drop from the troposphere and plummet beyond the inn’s thatch, marvelling at the contrast of ancient and ultra-modern.
She stepped off the canal path and ducked beneath a strand of wisteria, knocking a bloom and inhaling the wonderful scent.
There were few people in the garden; Kath sat beside the well-stocked fishpond, facing Sally with a welcoming smile on her broad, homely face.
She stood and held out her arm. “And look at you!” Kath said. “Motherhood obviously becomes you.”
They embraced, and as always Sally had the odd sensation of hugging her own mother, dead these past thirty years.
They sat down, toasted each other, and Sally took a long drink of sharp, ice cold Leffe.
Kath Kemp was short, a little stout now in her early fifties, with a cheerful face that exuded good will. Sally had no doubt that she was loved and trusted by her patients.