by Eric Brown
Now she felt suddenly panicky. “Geoff, let’s get out of here, okay?”
“Sal?” His expression was a strange mix of concern and amusement.
“No, I mean it. Something’s not right.”
At the nearby table, the woman who’d caught her eye briefly stood and moved towards their table. Sally watched her. The woman was heading for Geoff. She seemed to be moving in slow motion, or Sally’s perception had been somehow retarded. Later she recalled thinking what a beautiful blue ring the woman was wearing…
A dozen figures appeared on the periphery of the garden. One second they were there, a golden enfilade of self-aware entities surrounding the startled drinkers, and then they were rushing inwards towards the woman who was approaching Geoff.
He looked up, startled, as a golden figure flashed by him, and Sally watched it collide with the woman who was reaching out with her right hand towards Geoff, her blue ring resplendent.
The golden figure slammed into the woman, seemed to absorb her. She noticed a man run towards Geoff, only he too was intercepted by a self-aware entity.
Screams filled the garden and innocent drinkers caught up in whatever was happening cowered behind tables or ran towards the pub. Geoff was on his feet, tugging at Sally’s arm.
He turned as someone said his name, a bearded man who smiled and reached out. He carried a small blue disc — which was inches from Geoff’s chest when a golden figure slammed into the man. One second he was standing there, reaching out, and the next second it was as if he had been replaced by the self-aware entity who spun in search of other attackers.
Calmly, two golden figures walked towards Sally and Geoff, and she was startled to hear a voice in her head. “Do not be alarmed…”
The golden figures approached and did not stop, and Sally cried out as one of the self-aware entities came face to face with her and enveloped her in its warmth. She felt a sudden jolt of energy, a heart-stopping surge of power that made her gasp and cry out again.
Then she was moving, and before she knew it she had left the garden and was travelling at speed; trees and bushes passed in a blur. She tried to cry out for Geoff, and was aware of another figure at her side.
She had the impression of covering vast distances in an instant, and seconds later she passed out.
SHE CAME TO her senses and she was enveloped in blackness. She no longer felt the energy of the golden figure surrounding her. She was alone again, or rather not alone… She felt someone nearby in the darkness, reached out and with a thrilling sense of relief found a hand she knew to be her husband’s.
“Geoff!”
“Sal. We’re okay. As the golden figure said, don’t be afraid.”
“But where are we?”
It was a blackness she had never known before, total and unrelieved, and she felt nothing beneath her feet. She had the sensation of floating.
She repeated her question, and Geoff responded.
“I think I know…”
“But where?”
“Just walk.”
“How?” she almost wept.
“Move your feet. Lean against me and just move your feet.”
As she did so she had the strangest sensation of something gaining solidity beneath her shoes, as if the very action of walking had brought the ground into existence.
Light appeared ahead, an undefined brightness that suddenly exploded dazzlingly in her vision. She exclaimed and threw an arm across her face to protect herself, and she stumbled as solid ground came up to hit her feet.
Geoff steadied her and laughed aloud.
She lowered her arm and, when her vision adjusted to the sunlight, stared around her.
They were in the back garden of their cottage, beside the gate. Before them was the cherry tree and the bench. At the end of the garden the old rectory stood, mellow in the sunlight; Sally thought it had never looked so beautiful.
She stared at Geoff and whispered, “What happened?”
He shook his head in wonder. “We were saved. The golden figures saved us.”
She recalled the men and women bearing blue discs. “From what?”
“I don’t know, Sal. I honestly don’t know. All I know is that they saved us, brought us here — home… but not home.”
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
In reply he pointed to the sky, and Sally looked up.
Only then did she see the gourd-shape of a silvery moon tumbling erratically through a sky that was a deeper blue than any she had ever seen on Earth.
Geoff took her hand and almost pulled her towards the house. They hurried down the side path, then down the garden path to the front gate.
There they came to a halt, and stared.
Their house, their one hundred and fifty-year-old rectory, was perched on an escarpment overlooking a vast rolling green plain, at once alien and yet oddly familiar. Gone was Wem; gone was the rest of Shropshire.
She turned and saw that their house was one of a dozen lining the very lip of the escarpment, each one of a different design. She made out domes and poly-carbon villas, A-frames and things that looked very much like giant snail shells.
No sooner had she cried out, “Hannah!” than a golden figure appeared on the path from the back garden, a sleeping child in its arms.
The figure approached, halted, and held out the small girl. Sobbing, Sally reached out and embraced her daughter.
The golden figure stood before them, silent, and slowly its swirling depths took on the appearance of a human being.
Kath Kemp smiled. “Welcome to Mars,” she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ANA ARRIVED AT the coffee shop on 34th Street fifteen minutes early.
She ordered a mocha and sat in the window seat, staring out at the passing pedestrians. She had the feeling that she had closed a door on the old part of her life, and a new door was opening. She had found Bilal at last, and in that she felt a sense of accomplishment. She believed what he’d told her about not wanting to hurt the little girl she had been, and accepted that he’d had to take the opportunity of an education when it had been offered to him. What still rankled a little was that in the intervening years he had never really attempted to seek her out. She understood that, in a way; he had his new, exciting life, and as the years passed he must have looked back on his old life, and his sister, and thought them perhaps too painful to resurrect.
Whatever, now she had found him.
A big disappointment to her was finding what kind of person he had become. While most of the human race saw the great benefits of the Serene, a tiny minority still held out. And it was just her luck that her brother belonged to this defiant minority.
It was an aspect of his character she was determined to come to understand; only when she fully comprehended his mindset, and how it had got that way, could she even begin to work out how to show him that he was wrong. He would need educating, and Ana had resolved that her long-term project would be to show her brother how right the Serene were. She would invite him to India; they would revisit their childhood haunts together, and she would show him the wonders of the wilderness city.
It would take time, but she had plenty of that.
“Ana…” Bilal smiled down at her.
She stood and they kissed cheeks a little awkwardly, like strangers. While he was at the counter, she took in his sharp black suit, his white shirt and long ponytail. She knew she shouldn’t criticise his style of dress — especially as she was wearing Western jeans and a blouse — but in these less formal times she saw his business attire as a uniform harking back to former, pre-Serene days.
He sat at her table and smiled at her. He appeared today, unlike at their first couple of meetings, a little nervous. He gestured to his coffee. “Old habits die hard. I always liked my coffee milky and sweet in India.”
“You had coffee in India?” It was a luxury she had never tasted until ten years ago.
He shrugged. “In college,” he said.
&n
bsp; “They must have looked after you well. Quite apart from giving you a good education.”
He shrugged again. She noticed that his hands, as he stirred his coffee, were shaking. He saw that she was looking at his hand, and self-consciously slipped it into his jacket pocket.
She smiled. “I was thinking… it would be lovely if you could come to visit me in India soon.”
He nodded but did not look her in the eye. “I’d like that.”
“You haven’t been back for fifteen years?”
“I don’t cover India now, just the US. I’ve had no reason to go back.”
She sipped her coffee and asked, “So… what’s it like working for the Morwell Organisation?”
“It pays well, and sometimes the work is interesting.”
“And your boss… What’s his name, James Morwell?”
“I think we understand each other. We share the same views, the same philosophy…”
She winced inwardly, and said, “He indoctrinated you, Bilal?”
“Now, isn’t that a big word, sister?”
“Don’t patronise me.”
“And don’t call me Bilal, please. I left that name behind when I got away from Kolkata. I’m Lal now.”
She stared at him. The café was filling up, people queuing at the counter, others standing and eyeing their table as if suggesting they drink up and leave.
Ana felt an uneasy tension in the air, but knew it was all in her head. This meeting with her brother wasn’t going well.
He said, “I prefer to think that I was ‘educated’, Ana. The Serene are… wrong. I was educated –”
“Please, let’s not argue…”
“Just,” he said, taking his hand from his pocket, “as you one day will be educated.”
For some reason his fingers were glowing blue. She looked up, into his eyes, and tried to fathom what she saw in them.
Someone was moving towards her table, and a light had been switched on nearby, a dazzling golden light which intensified…
Bilal reached out for her hand, but before he made contact the golden light resolved itself into the shape of a self-aware entity and slammed into her brother. He vanished, absorbed into the form of the golden figure, which rolled with the impact of slamming into Bilal, stood and moved from the café in a blur of light.
Ana screamed.
She looked up at another approaching light and, for the second time that week, felt the life-force of a self-aware entity hit her.
SHE CAME TO her senses and found that she was surrounded by darkness. She felt the energy of the self-aware entity cocooning her.
“What happened?” she asked.
A voice sounded in her head, telling her everything.
She sobbed as she recalled the look in Bilal’s eyes as he reached out to her, the light of the betrayal he knew he was committing.
“What happened to him?” she asked — but the voice in her head chose not to reply.
Ana stepped forward, from darkness into dazzling light.
She was standing before her apartment in India… but something was wrong with the light. She looked up, into a bright blue sky streaked with impossibly high clouds. And overhead, tumbling end over end, was what looked like a huge, yam-shaped moon.
She turned suddenly and gasped at what she saw.
Her apartment was on the edge of a long ridge which overlooked a rolling green plane, at once exotic and idyllic. Other dwellings occupied the margin of the ridge; next to her apartment was an A-frame, and beyond that an ivy-covered, typically English house.
A small group of people were gathered before the English house, two of whom Ana recognised.
A golden figure stood before her, and Ana asked, “Where am I?”
“For your own safety, you are on Mars. Do not worry. We have contacted Kapil Gavaskar and he will soon be joining you.”
Before the English house, Nina Ricci said something to the Englishman, Geoff Allen, and a tall woman Ana did not know. Nina looked across at Ana and waved.
Smiling to herself, pushing the thought of Bilal’s betrayal to the back of her mind, Ana stepped from the shadow of her apartment and joined them.
THREE
2045
CHAPTER ONE
ALLEN LEFT HIS office, took the elevator down to the busy atrium, then strolled out into the sprawling gardens that surrounded the Mare Erythraeum administrative centre.
He bought a coffee at an open-air café overlooking the plain, selected a table and admired the view. He wondered if this was the finest panorama in the solar system. Once he would have said that the countryside of Shropshire provided the finest unspoilt rural views in the world, but that was before he had travelled to Mars, and beyond. Now he knew that the Mare Erythraeum, the methane plains of Titan, and the equatorial jungle zones of Venus all vied for contention.
The administrative centre was situated five kilometres along the escarpment from where, ten years ago, he had first fetched up on the planet. From the café on the lip of the drop he had an uninterrupted view for a couple for hundred kilometres across rolling farmland, shimmering canals — a conceit that proved the Serene possessed a sense of humour — to the mountains on the horizon. It was a combination of the dozen pastel shades, he decided, and the hazy quality of the air which gave the panorama such an idyllic atmosphere. There was little noise, too; the quiet trilling of parakeets high in the elms which lined the escarpment, and the distant buzz of the electric carts that beetled across the farmland far below.
He glanced at his watch. Ana was late, which was unusual for her. He drained his coffee and decided, as he was finished early for the day and the temperature was climbing, to order a cold beer.
Sipping it, he sat back and considered his situation. He was sixty-two, and he had been on Mars now for ten years; he had often wondered of late which was the more remarkable: the fact of his age or his residency for a decade on the red planet. He felt well for his age, though his hairline was receding and he’d put on a few pounds.
In the early days he, Sally and Hannah had returned to Earth every few months to see friends and renew their connection with all that was familiar about their home planet. Then, after a few years, their visits had become less frequent; it was as if they did not need to quench the nostalgic urge, as if Mars provided everything they required. Certainly most of their friends had now relocated here, and the landscape of the planet was becoming familiar and sustaining. They had found themselves spending more and more holiday time on far-flung outposts of the solar system — Venus, the asteroid resorts, and Ganymede.
And three years ago Allen had finished his last commission for the photo-agency he had worked for for over twenty years and begun work as a ‘social administrator’ of the Mare Erythraeum region of Mars. He was, in effect, a glorified civil servant, sitting on government committees that oversaw the smooth functioning of all aspects of life on Mars. A few years ago he’d found himself increasingly interested in the political set-up in the area, and it had seemed the natural thing to do, little by little, to move from the photo-agency and into local administration, first on a part-time voluntary basis and then, as he gained experience, on a more permanent footing.
Now he was not so sure that the decision had been wholly his own. He had fallen in with a set of people working in local admin, and they had suggested that he was just the type, with his broad knowledge of politics and people — they were flattering him, he thought — to work as a social administrator. He often wondered if he detected in his vocational shift the discreet, manipulative machinations of the Serene. But, he often wondered, to what end?
“Sorry I’m late!”
Ana Devi beamed down at him, stroking a long strand of hair from her face and bending down to kiss his cheek. He half-rose to facilitate the greeting, then sat back and watched her as she ordered an iced coffee.
Ana was thirty-six, tall and self-possessed, and had been one of Allen and Sally’s best friends for the past seven or eight years. Th
e flesh of her forearm pulsed with an incoming call, which she killed and turned the flesh-screen to the shade of her dark, Indian skin. Discreetly, not wanting their time together to be interrupted by business calls or any others, Allen tapped his own forearm-screen into quiescence.
“Kapil and Shantidev?” he asked. It was a couple of months since he and Sally had last invited Ana and her family round to their cottage on the escarpment, and a fortnight since Allen had last seen Ana.
“They’re well. Kapil seems happy down at the farm and Shantidev has decided he wants to drive a tractor for a living when he grows up.”
Allen laughed. “You make Kapil sound like a gentleman farmer.”
She regarded him over her glass. “I often admire Kapil for his… centredness,” she said, and shrugged, “his contentment. He keeps my feet on the ground.”
Kapil managed the production output at the vast Ibrium farm, a logistical nightmare of a job which Allen knew just enough about to realise that it was demanding and high-powered.
“There’s nothing like having children to make you realise how old you’re getting,” Ana said now.
“You don’t need to tell me that. I’m sixty-two. Hannah’s fifteen, going on thirty. The last ten years have gone by like that…” He snapped his fingers.
“It seems like just a few weeks ago that I was working on Earth.”
“And speaking about the last ten years…”
“Yes?”
He shrugged, wondering how to broach the subject. Ana, practical, down-to-Earth Ana Devi, would tell him he was imagining things. “We both left our old jobs and moved into admin around the same time.”
She sipped her iced coffee. “Mmm…”
“Well… have you wondered how much that was, on your part, a conscious choice?”
She pulled a face and stared at him. “Of course it was a conscious choice,” she said. “You don’t think I was ordered by my subconscious one day to pack it all in at the farm and apply for the government post?”