Eric Brown - The Serene Invasion

“Actually, a working holiday. I’m visiting my fiancée.”

“In South Africa?”

“Uganda. She’s a doctor working with the emergency services in Karamoja.”

Cleveland’s rheumy eyes widened. “Not the most… stable, shall we say, area in the world. Your fiancée must be a remarkable person, Geoffrey.”

Allen smiled. “She is,” he said.

The old man patted Allen’s hand like a beneficent grandfather. “Well, it has been wonderful talking to you. I hope you have a pleasant time in Uganda. Take my advice and visit Lake Edward in the south. Just the place for young lovers.” With a smile he lifted himself from the seat and limped back along the aisle.

Allen glanced through the window and stared down at the brilliant blue, beaten expanse of the ocean, feeling obscurely troubled. It was always the same when he was forced to consider his parents, and their deaths.

He tipped back his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to fill his mind with other things.

HE WAS AWOKEN a little later by the sound of activity around him. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Passengers were releasing their folding trays, preparatory for whatever culinary delights Air Europe had prepared for dinner.

He ate a bland curry, overcooked dal and undercooked rice, followed oddly by a slice of polystyrene Victoria sponge, then glanced at the time on his softscreen, which he’d fastened round his forearm. It was five o’clock British Summer Time. Estimated time of arrival in Entebbe was a little after midnight, Ugandan time. He’d booked a hire car and would drive up to Kallani overnight. Time with Sally was precious and he didn’t want to waste a second.

They were flying over the coastline of Northern Africa. The scalloped littoral of Morocco showed as a series of golden scimitars, the destination — before the revolution — of hordes of sun-starved northern Europeans and Chinese.

The plane thrummed inland, and an hour later the first of the Chinese mega-cities came into view.

It looked, he thought, like some kind of computer circuit board, a grid-pattern of prefabricated buildings and domes extending for tens of miles across the parched land. Monorails connected outlying towns which were rapidly being absorbed into the sprawling Cathay conurbation, eating up the terrain towards the Atlas mountains.

At first Allen had viewed with indifference the wholesale economic invasion of northern Africa. It struck him as the inevitable process of colonisation that the communist party of China had so vilified the West for in the past — the inevitable, rapacious rampaging of a regime turning from communism to capitalism.

Sally had set him right on that, listing a catalogue of abuses, both humanitarian and ecological, being committed by the fascist mafia, as she called them, of Beijing. She’d spent an hour telling him about specific instances of Chinese abuse, before relenting and changing the subject.

Afterwards, Allen had thought twice about suggesting ordering a Mandarin take-away.

He unrolled his softscreen and accessed the file containing the images he’d taken on his last trip to Uganda. He scrolled through shots of Sally beside Lake Kwania, looking tired and drawn after a shift at the medical centre lasting for three days with precious little sleep.

The pictures showed a thin-faced woman, not in the least photogenic, with a pinched expression and straggly hair. She was thin, pared down by a combination of a bad diet and overwork, constantly edgy and nervous and burning with the conviction of her political and humanitarian passions.

Allen loved her. For the first time in his life he had found someone he could trust, who he could talk to about his past, who listened to him and understood. As he gazed down at her thinly-smiling face, he realised that she was beautiful, and he felt a little drunk with the thought that in a few hours they’d be together again.

He noticed the first of the domes ten minutes later. He was staring out of the window, watching the rilled foothills of the Atlas mountains drift serenely by far below. They were flying over the southern slopes of the range now, and ahead was the vast stretch of the Sahara. He made out a flash of silver to the west, tucked into the foothills, and assumed it to be the glint of a river. Then he saw another, and another, and was surprised to note that they were domes, great silver hemispheres straddling towns and villages — perhaps a dozen in all, of various sizes, covering the centres of occupation along a winding road that snaked through the foothills.

Ahead to the right was a sizable town, and as the plane overflew it he had a closer view of the dome that arched over its entirety, encompassing its sprawling suburbs and two-storey central buildings like a vast snow globe.

Cleveland, making another trip to the loo, stopped in the aisle. “I suspect it’s the Chinese again,” he said, indicating the dome.

Allen frowned. “But why on Earth would they cover entire towns and villages?” he asked.

The old man shook his head. “They’ll have their reasons,” he said. “They always do, the Chinese — and you’ll find that it will make absolute sense in the long term.”

Cleveland shuffled on and Allen returned his attention to the silvery dome far below. The minute shapes of cars and trucks had halted on the road that appeared to run right into the sheer wall, and he made out what might have been tiny, ant-like crowds of people down there.

He unrolled his softscreen, accessed the net and was about to tap in Africa + Domes + Chinese, when the screen flashed a systems error and closed down. He strapped the screen round his forearm again, eased back his seat and stared out at the passing land far below.

THEY WERE FLYING over the Sahara an hour later when the plane stopped.

The first thing he noticed was the sudden, utter silence — startling after the constant thrumming of the engines. He looked out of the window. Five metres ahead of where he sat, the silver wing — which should have been vibrating ever so slightly — was absolutely still… and, more worryingly, the line of the aileron was unshifting against the arabesque of sand dunes of the distant desert. Startled, he peered directly down. They were passing over a road that cut from right to left through the sand, with a tiny truck on its tarmac’d surface. As he stared, the vehicle remained exactly where it was, unmoving in relation to the line of the wing.

Only then did he look up, across the aisle, and realise that his fellow passengers were likewise frozen. The woman across from him was lifting a sweet to her mouth, her fingers stilled an inch from her lips. Beyond her, a man was in the process of turning a page of the in-flight magazine. In the aisle, a smiling hostess was as immobile as a shop window mannequin.

Allen was about to stand up in alarm, attempt to see if everyone was similarly stricken with this paralysis, when an incredible rush of heat passed through his head and he was no longer aboard the plane.

He was flat on his back, seemingly floating in mid-air. He could feel no support beneath him. All was grey above. He tried to move his head, to look to either side, but was unable to do so. He wanted to cry out, but he could not move his mouth to articulate the words. He felt naked, though he was unable to look down the length of his body to see if this were so.

Later, he would wonder why he did not panic. It would have been a very reasonable reaction, given the circumstances. The fact was that he felt very calm, not in the least frightened. He felt a certain odd distance, a sense of remove he had once experienced when being sedated for a minor operation.

He recalled articulating the thought, What is happening to me? — and receiving a reply, as if in his head: Do not be afraid.