Eric Brown - The Serene Invasion

Ana shook her head. “It said nothing about this, and I was too shocked to ask.”

Into the following silence, Sally asked quietly, “But why would the Obterek want Bilal dead?”

Nina Ricci cleared her throat, and heads turned to her. “In my opinion,” she said, “they didn’t specifically want Bilal dead. I know this might be hard to accept, Ana, but I think that anyone would have sufficed.”

Natascha looked at her lover. “I don’t follow…”

Nina went on, “The Obterek used Morwell as a tool to see if they could succeed in breaching the Serene’s charea , however briefly. To see if it could be done again.”

They sat in silence for a time, digesting the corollary of this idea.

At last Ana said, “You are right, I do find it hard to accept, even though it might be the truth. Bilal told me, when we met three days ago, that he and Morwell had parted on bad terms. Perhaps it was Morwell who suggested to the Obterek that it might be Bilal who… who should serve as the… the test case.” She stopped, Kapil gripping her hand, then looked up bravely and said, “He was reading a book about Gandhi when he died, which would have been hard to imagine him doing ten years ago.”

Allen ventured, “Perhaps, if his death served to warn the Serene that the Obterek have returned to the fray, then it might not have been in vain?”

Ana nodded. “Yes, that would be a nice thought, wouldn’t it?”

Nina Ricci sat up and said, “I think this is Kathryn, if I’m not mistaken.”

Allen turned and watched Kath Kemp approach from the obelisk across the plaza.

Nina was in the process of pulling up a chair for her, but Kath said, “That won’t be necessary, but thank you. We won’t be stopping here. I have a more… secure venue for our meeting. Please, if you would care to follow me.”

Exchanging glances, they rose and trooped from the café area.

KATH LED THEM across the plaza to a section of the flooring marked with black and white squares like a chess board. When they were all standing upon the ‘board’, Allen felt the ground give beneath his feet.

Ana let out a small gasp of surprise and reached out for Kapil. Kath smiled and said, “An elevator. We will be travelling only a short way.”

“Where to?” Nina Ricci asked.

“Beneath the surface of the moon,” Kath replied, “and then out again.”

Her answer provoked a murmur of surprise amongst the group, and Sally caught Allen’s eye and smiled tentatively. He slipped an arm around her shoulders as they dropped.

Seconds later the elevator halted, and Kath Kemp stepped from it and led the way along a lighted corridor. They arrived at a black door, not dissimilar to the surface of the obelisk. For a second Allen thought that it might indeed be a subterranean extension of the obelisk, then had second thoughts: if his orientation was correct, then when they stepped off the elevator they had been heading away from the obelisk, towards the face of the cliff overlooking the plain. This was confirmed a second later as Kath palmed a sensor and the black door slid aside to reveal the frozen methane plain stretching ahead to the horizon.

For a shocking second Allen thought that they were stepping onto the very surface of the moon. Then he made out, perhaps thirty metres away, an arrangement of loungers and foam-forms, surrounded by what looked like the inner membrane of a dome. Clutching Sally’s hand, he followed Kath through the entrance and found himself in a long bolus of what appeared to be glass extruded from the wall of the cliff.

They came to the loungers and Kath invited them to be seated.

Allen sat down and looked up through the ceiling at the stars twinkling high overhead. If he looked back, he could see the domed city arcing above the lip of the cliff-face, and the summit of the obelisk. Ahead, high above the horizon, Saturn cast its light across the methane ice plain.

“Very spectacular,” Ricci commented, “but I’d like to know just why we have been brought down here?”

Kath Kemp stood before them, silhouetted against Saturn’s light. She inclined her head. “Despite its appearance of insubstantiality, this is a secure area. We cannot be overheard or observed.”

“This gets better and better,” Ricci smiled. “So you’re really going to divulge…”

Kath held up a hand. “It has never been the policy to keep from you the information you needed to know. We had, and have, and will continue to have, the best interests of the human race at heart.”

Ricci interrupted. “But it is you, or rather the Serene, who decide what we ‘need’ to know — which begs the question…”

It was Kath’s turn to interject. “We told you everything which was necessary for your understanding relevant to an ongoing and unfolding situation.”

Allen smiled to himself at Kath’s convoluted politician’s spiel. She went on, “However, due to recent developments in the Serene’s management of the situation, it has been deemed necessary to inform, little by little, the human representatives, and their loved ones, of their larger role in the scheme of things.”

She fell silent and looked around the group, and Allen was aware of the increasing tension in the room. Sally squeezed his hand as she stared at her friend.

Ana said quietly, “Does this have something to do with what happened to Bilal?”

Kath shook her head. “Not directly, no. But indirectly, yes, everything is linked.”

“Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?” Ricci asked.

Kath paused, staring down at her feet, then raised her head and looked around the group. She said, “Twenty years ago the Serene came to Earth and changed everything. The Serene stopped you harming each other — in effect, we saved you from inevitable self-destruction, just as we’d saved many other races across the millennia. In order to do this, and to facilitate the changes that would inevitably eventuate, we required the help of the human race itself to work as our representatives, on Earth to begin with, and then across the solar system.”

“Yes,” Ricci said, “but what actually did we do — or rather, what did you do to us? Just what went on — goes on — in the obelisks?”

Kath paused, looking from one to the other of the six humans seated before her, then said, “You must consider that the Serene’s concern is the long-term welfare of the human race. Not only did we wish to save you from yourself, but from the attention of our opponents, the Obterek. To this end we deemed it necessary to take a sample of the finest human beings your race had to offer and… study you.”

Natascha sat forward. “Study us?”

“It was a long and laborious process. Within the obelisks, every month, we…” She paused, then said, “I will resort here to brutal terminology, but there is no other way of explaining what we did. Very well, in order to study you we had to take you apart, strip you down, and then build you back up. But in doing so we… we incorporated several fundamental changes in your molecular and genetic make-up.”

Allen sat back, heart racing. He said, “Changes…?”

“We made alterations in order to improve you, to give you capabilities that will serve you, the human race, in the decades and centuries to come.”

Ricci sprang to her feet and paced to the curving glass wall and back. She stopped and looked at Kath Kemp, and Allen was unable to work out if her expression was one of anger, resentment, or excitement. It seemed that all three reactions passed across her face in the seconds that followed, before she said, “You’ve changed us? Changed me ? But into what?”

“To someone who will be better able to serve your race in the years to come,” Kath said.