The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  “Ah, yes, Housman. A Shropshire Lad.” She beamed. “I have visited London, of course, but never even left the capital. Is that a disgrace, Mr Allen?”

  He murmured, “Of course not,” and asked her what she was doing here.

  “I am on an official visit to the arboreal city as I work in one of the wilderness cities. Mine is in India, and I supervise the city’s food production. I am here to see how things are done on a much larger scale, and maybe pick up some useful tips. Also, I am looking into the feasibility of growing the alien spores at our commune, too.”

  “A remarkable foodstuff,” he said.

  She laughed. “I think it would go very well in curries, Mr Allen!”

  They chatted for a further five minutes and, when Ana was talking to Nina about her life back in India, Allen excused himself and slipped away.

  He left the cafeteria and strolled between a long row of fruit canes. In the distance, reduced by the perspective, a Japanese worker plucked raspberries from the canes with incredible speed and dexterity. He took a dozen shots, one of her blurred hands, high up in the cane, against a backdrop of a distant arboreal tower.

  He thanked her, finding himself mirroring her repeated bows, and moved on.

  He left the quadrant of soft fruit and came to an area where melons grew on abundant vines. Here, silver robots danced at speed, plucking full, ripe melons from the bushes and loading them into buggies affixed to their torsos.

  They skipped around him while he took dozens of photographs. Later, in the peace and quiet of his study, he would take his time and crop the images, selecting the best to send to London.

  He came to the end of a row and turned, brought up short by what he saw there.

  A tall golden figure, intimidating in its immobility, stood upright with its arms at its sides, staring straight ahead. Allen stopped in his tracks, took an involuntary breath, and stared at the figure.

  It was the first one he’d seen, at close quarters, for many years, and he was struck anew by the sense of peace that emanated from its swirling, lambent depths. He wanted to ask it what it was doing here, but the question for some reason seemed ridiculous, and he held his silence and just stared in fascination.

  It remained unmoving, pulsing with an inner illumination that held Allen’s attention as if he were hypnotised. At last, smiling at the figure, he backed off and returned to the cafeteria. He felt oddly refreshed, even renewed, by the unexpected encounter.

  AFTER LUNCH ALLEN, Nina and the others took the buggy back to the arboreal city and commenced a tour of the soaring alien tree.

  “The city trees,” said the guide, “are living entities with a cellulose basal structure. They achieve great material density through having evolved on a high gravity planet, Antares II, and such height because Antares II is covered by low level cloud, necessitating the growth of the trees above the cloud level. This tree is of average size, being a third of a kilometre in diameter at its base, and a little short of five kilometres high.”

  They were on the ground floor of the city tree, in a vast cavity like a concert hall. The guide explained that the length of the tree was filled with air pockets — like cinder toffee, Allen thought — which provided living space for families. Elevators, using thermal energy, carried citizens to the higher levels.

  “We will ascend to the mid-point of the city tree,” their guide said, “and examine a spore garden.”

  They crossed the echoing atrium and entered an elevator. Ana Devi had joined their group on Nina’s invitation, and she marvelled at the cell structure of the walls as they rose smoothly on the elevator platform. The material of the trees, on closer inspection, reminded Allen of the cross section of a sponge.

  They emerged in another, though slightly smaller, chamber, this one given over to various sports. Allen saw people playing tennis and baseball on purpose-built courts and diamonds, and reckoned that this cavity was perhaps two or three hundred metres in diameter.

  Their guide led them across the cavity towards a great arched window, into which was set a series of doors. She stood aside and invited them to pass through.

  From the ground it had been hard to assess the size of the spore gardens, and Allen’s fear had been that when he stepped out onto the platform he would be overcome by crippling vertigo. They were, after all, now almost three kilometres above the surface of the world, level with an armada of cirro-cumulus clouds.

  As he followed Nina Ricci through the archway, he realised that he had no reason to fear the elevation. The platform was vast — not the narrow, flimsy structure he had thought it might be from the ground — and gave the impression of solidity. He could easily believe that he was on terra firma, strolling across a patio given over to the cultivation of some exotic alien fungus.

  The platform was the size of two football fields laid side by side, but red rather than green, and comprised of hundreds of metre-square trays bearing the alien spores. On closer examination the crimson growth resembled bloody lichen and gave off a pungent, peppery aroma.

  Their guide knelt, plucked a small wad of the stuff, and popped it into her mouth.

  “Please help yourself,” she said. “I think you will find it rather delicious.”

  Allen watched Ana Devi sample a mouthful, and nod in agreement. “It reminds me in texture of paneer, Mr Allen, perhaps flavoured by turmeric. I think it would go down well in India.”

  He tried some, agreeing that the spongy, spicy food was not at all unpleasant.

  “One of the marvellous things about the spores,” their guide went on, “is that, quite apart from their protein content and adaptability to human cuisine, they grow from mycelia to maturity in a matter of days.”

  The group broke up and strolled across the platform.

  A guard rail ran around the circumference of the perimeter. Determined not to let his fear of heights spoil his appreciation of the view, Allen strode down the aisle between the spore cells and came, hesitantly, to the rail. He reached out, gripped its upper spar and, only when he was satisfied that his hold was secure, leaned forward and peered down.

  He stepped back, dizzied by the view.

  He gripped the rail with greater force and laughed at his cowardice. Not, he told himself, that he had any conscious control over it. A wave of nausea swept through him at the sight of the vertiginous drop… but even so he stepped forward again and stared down at the ground almost three kilometres below.

  There were even, he saw, strings and scraps of cloud floating by below where he stood. He made out the much reduced radial gardens, the toy-like cafeteria and, off to the right, the thin thread of the monorail line.

  It was almost like looking at the world in a satellite photograph, he thought, then remembered himself and took a series of shots he hoped would convey the sense of immense, god-like elevation.

  “You look like a seasick cruise passenger, Geoff,” Nina Ricci said as she joined him, Ana Devi at her side.

  He smiled queasily. “I feel like one. Have you looked over?” He stepped back from the rail and gestured.

  Nina smiled and leaned over daringly, peering down and laughing out loud. “Why, it’s wonderful! Look at the view! I’ve never seen anything like it! Come and see, Ana.”

  The Indian smiled at Allen with complicity. “I think I will not get too near the edge,” she said. “As a child I climbed the footbridges of Howrah station like a monkey, but I am no longer so daring.”

  “Glad I’m not alone,” he muttered. He glanced at Nina and wished she’d move away from the edge. He almost reached out and dragged her back, but resisted the impulse.

  As he stepped back towards the centre of the platform, meaning to investigate and maybe even taste a section of the spores coloured a shade deeper than the rest, he felt a tremor beneath his feet. He put it down to the vertigo affecting his balance, and paused to steady himself.

  The tremor continued and behind him Ana Devi gave a sudden, small cry of alarm.

  He felt a strong ha
nd grip his upper arm, and looked around to see Nina dragging both himself and Ana across the platform towards the arched entrance. The guide was ushering the others back inside too. Something plummeted in Allen’s gut as another tremor shook the platform. He staggered and almost fell.

  As they passed into the tower, relief flooding through him, Allen glanced over his shoulder. He could not make sense of what he saw. The platform, far from shaking as he’d expected, was undergoing a strange visual transformation. He wondered, fleetingly and absurdly, if this were some form of Serene safety mechanism.

  The guard rail where he’d stood was no longer the barred silver barrier; it had taken on a grey and pitted aspect, almost as if its atomic structure were decaying and crumbling before his eyes. The decay crept little by little across the platform, eating up the spore trays and approaching the tower itself.

  Someone screamed. In the panic that ensued, Nina Ricci, still gripping Allen and Ana, pushed them across the chamber towards the lift entrances set into the far wall. They ran.

  Allen heard a sound at his back, like the crepitation of encroaching fire. He looked back and saw not the expected flames but the entire far wall transform from a curving, mural-covered surface to a grey decaying concavity which threatened at any second to crumble into nothingness.

  Then, in the blink of an eye before Nina pushed him into the lift, he saw the first of the electric-blue figures.

  He gave a strangled cry as the lift-door whisked shut and the elevator plummeted. As horrific as the grey-decay had been, the sight of the electric-blue men filled him with dread. They suggested an intentional agency in whatever was happening here, not just some accidental dysfunction of the fabric of the tower.

  He was packed tight into the elevator with Nina, Ana, and a dozen others. He stared at Nina and asked. “What was that? I saw…”

  Ana said, “Blue figures? I saw them too. A glimpse. They appeared out of nowhere.” Her brown eyes rounded on Nina. “What were they? What is happening?”

  The Italian shook her head, unable to mask her fearful expression.

  Allen looked up, almost expecting to see the ceiling of the lift turn grey, a blue man peering through vindictively…

  The electric-blue figures, he thought, were identical in every respect but one to the Serene’s golden self-aware entities.

  The lift dropped at speed. Allen closed his eyes, willing the elevator to reach the ground. He would feel immeasurably safer, then.

  He thought of Sally, and his one wish was to be back home with her.

  Someone said, “The platform was eaten up from the outer edge. I saw a couple of people fall…”

  Allen felt sick. He recalled old footage of the jumpers from the World Trade Centre, and felt the same gut-wrenching shock at the thought of what those victims must have experienced.

  Three kilometres, he thought. With luck, they would be unconscious through oxygen deprivation, caused by the speed of their descent, long before impact.

  He tried to clear his head of the images.

  But what if the decay reached across the chamber back there and ate into the mechanism of the elevator? They still had a long way to fall…

  The elevator gave a sudden lurch. He closed his eyes. This is it, he thought, futilely gripping a handrail.

  But Nina was urging him forward with a shouted command, and he opened his eyes to see that the elevator door was open and the people before him were rushing out. He followed Ana Devi, Nina’s hand still painfully gripping his upper arm, and all three ran across the ground-floor cavity towards the yawning exit, along with hundreds of other alarmed citizens.

  He felt another wave of relief — a sense of having achieved some small degree of sanctuary — when they emerged from the tower into the dazzling afternoon sunlight.

  Something other than Nina’s grip on his arm, and her urgent shouts, kept him running, and he was assailed by a new fear.

  What if the tower fell while they were still running, crumpled vertically so that its debris spread in an even, radiating shock wave, felling everything in its path?

  He sprinted. At one point he found Ana Devi’s hand in his as they ran side by side, and all three now left the flower garden surrounding the tower and ran down an aisle between rows of low-lying vegetables. Courgettes — he realised with dreamlike inconsequence — Sally’s favourite.

  Ahead, a crowd of people had come to a halt, turned to face the tower, and were pointing.

  Nina turned, forcing Allen to do the same. He looked back at the tower and saw what had arrested the attention of the crowd.

  The city tree was not falling — neither crumpling vertically nor toppling like the tree it was — but gradually vanishing. From its distant, cloud-wreathed summit down, it turned deathly grey, pitted and atomised — a creeping decay which ate down the length of the tower until it reached its midpoint. Allen looked up, towards the summit… or rather towards where the summit should have been. It was no longer there, and as he stared, disbelieving, the rest of the structure, from its mid-section down, turned grey and gradually vanished from sight.

  Nina Ricci stared with massive eyes and said, “Oh, no…”

  Allen looked at her. There was something about the doom-laden timbre of her words which suggested more than just the horror of the tower’s disappearance.

  “Nina?”

  She shook her head as if in disbelief. “They’ve compromised the reality-structure paradigm,” she whispered, and Allen suddenly wanted to shake her and ask what the hell she was talking about.

  At that second Ana Devi gave a startled cry and squeezed his hand. “Look!”

  She was pointing to her right. In the distance Allen saw another city tower deliquesce from the top down. From this one, too, crowds of citizens were flooding out, fanning from the entrance in panic and taking refuge in the fields.

  “And look,” Ana almost whispered, staring across at where the tower they had just left once stood.

  A dozen electric-blue figures were spreading out from the tower’s footprint with malign purpose.

  They had weapons, what looked like rifles, and they were using them. From time to time they stopped walking, raised their rifles, took aim and fired. They never missed. Blue lances of laser light vectored across the fields, cutting down men and women as they ran. Allen looked away, repulsed, unable to move for several seconds until Ana tugged at his hand and yelled, “Run!”

  “This way,” Nina said, leading them through the vegetable fields towards the more substantial cover of the fruit sector. He sprinted with Ana and felt a measure of safety when they were hidden from sight by the melon vines, though he knew the idea was absurd. He had no doubt that he, Nina and Ana could be seen through the foliage, and all it would take was for one blue figure to take aim and fire.

  He heard the crackle of the laser blasts, the cries of the fleeing citizens, along with the sound of a stampede as others beside himself attempted to escape the slaughter.

  They must have put a couple of hundred metres between themselves and the blue figures when a pain in his side brought him up short. He wondered, for a second, if he’d been hit — then knew that the sharp pain was no more than a stitch. He gasped and kept running. Nina had raced ahead, and Ana had released her grip on his hand and joined her. Allen, giving them both several years and at least thirty kilos, struggled in their wake.

  Ana turned and exhorted him to keep up. He would have gladly replied with some sardonic quip, had he the breath to do so.

  Ahead was a poly-carbon shack. The women darted behind it, and when Allen turned the corner he saw that they’d ducked inside. He staggered after them and pulled the door shut behind him.

  The women were crouching at the far end of the hut, peering through a horizontal slit window. He joined them, glad of the respite, fell to his knees and stared out.

  “What the hell,” he gasped, “is happening?” He stared at Nina as if she should know the answer.

  “They’ve compromised the nexu
s the Serene had in place,” she replied.

  Allen nodded. “Fine. Now, first of all, who are ‘they’? And second, what the hell is the nexus?”

  Before answering she paused to look through the window. There was no sign of the advancing blue figures, though the sound of their handiwork carried through the humid air. Allen heard the regular sizzle of lasers, followed almost instantly by the abbreviated cries of the slaughtered.

  “‘They’ are the enemy of the Serene, the Obterek. And the nexus is the charea paradigm the Serene set in place around the planet. I’m pretty sure the Obterek couldn’t have compromised the charea worldwide, just locally. At least I hope so.”

  Allen stared at her. “How do you know all this?”

  She shook her head, as if to say that here and now was neither the time nor the place to tell him.

  “Do you think we are safe here?” Ana asked, staring at the Italian with big, frightened eyes.

  Nina bit her lip. “As safe as anywhere,” she said. “I’m pretty sure the Serene will be working to seal the compromise. It can only last for a matter of minutes.”

  But, to Allen’s ears, she didn’t sound so sure.

  Through the slit window he saw movement beyond a row of shrubbery. Seconds later a striding blue shape crashed through the foliage, shouldering its laser and firing. Ten metres to the figure’s right, a second figure emerged, and beyond that another one.

  They ducked beneath the level of the window and Nina hissed, “When they pass the hut, we get out of here.”

  Allen’s heart was pounding in fear. “Where?” he asked, not sure if her plan to leave their hiding place was a good one.

  She thought about it, but before she could reply the hut disintegrated around them. Allen yelled and rolled with the impact of something hitting him from the right. He fetched up on his back metres from the wreckage of the hut.

  He saw Nina scramble from the shattered poly-carbon rubble and take off, heading for the cover of the melon vines. She never made it.

  Beyond the collapsed hut, a blue figure turned and took aim at her. Allen, watching, had the urge to cry out in warning — but self-preservation stopped him. He played dead and stared at the blue figure as it fired.