"I was going to fix up some electric lights out here. But the power's been off for days."

"The rushes are better, anyway. I would have been here earlier. There was a jam by the church.

All the churches are packed, I imagine. And then I ran out of petrol a couple of miles back. We haven't been able to fill up for weeks."

"It's all right. I'm glad to see you. I didn't expect you at all. I couldn't ring." Even the phone networks had been down for days. In the end everything had slowly broken down, as people simply gave up their jobs and went home. Maureen asked carefully, "So how's Bill and the kids?"

"We had an early Christmas," Caitlin said. "They'll both miss their birthdays, but we didn't think they should be cheated out of Christmas too. We did it all this morning. Stockings, a tree, the decorations and the lights down from the loft, presents, the lot. And then we had a big lunch. I couldn't find a turkey but I'd been saving a chicken. After lunch the kids went for their nap. Bill put their pills in their lemonade."

Maureen knew she meant the little blue pills the NHS had given out to every household.

"Bill lay down with them. He said he was going to wait with them until he was sure-you know. That they wouldn't wake up, and be distressed. Then he was going to take his own pill."

Maureen took her hand. "You didn't stay with them?"

"I didn't want to take the pill." There was some bitterness in her voice. "I always wanted to see it through to the end. I suppose it's the scientist in me. We argued about it. We fought, I suppose. In the end we decided this way was the best."

Maureen thought that on some level Caitlin couldn't really believe her children were gone, or she couldn't keep functioning like this. "Well, I'm glad you're here with me. And I never fancied those pills either. Although-will it hurt?"

"Only briefly. When the Earth's crust gives way. It will be like sitting on top of an erupting volcano."

"You had an early Christmas. Now we're going to have an early Bonfire Night."

"It looks like it. I wanted to see it through," Caitlin said again. "After all I was in at the start-those supernova studies."

"You mustn't think it's somehow your fault."

"I do, a bit," Caitlin confessed. "Stupid, isn't it?"

"But you decided not to go to the shelter in Oxford with the others?"

"I'd rather be here. With you. Oh, but I brought this." She dug into her coat pocket and produced a sphere, about the size of a tennis ball.

Maureen took it. It was heavy, with a smooth black surface.

Caitlin said, "It's the stuff they make s.p.a.ce shuttle heatshield tiles out of. It can soak up a lot of heat."

"So it will survive the Earth breaking up."

"That's the idea."

"Are there instruments inside?"

"Yes. It should keep working, keep recording until the expansion gets down to the centimeter scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Then it will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It's nanotechnology, Mum, machines the size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales."

"How long will that take after the big sphere breaks up?"

"Oh, a microsecond or so. There's nothing we could come up with that could keep data-gathering after that."

Maureen hefted the little device. "What a wonderful little gadget. It's a shame n.o.body will be able to use its data."

"Well, you never know," Caitlin said. "Some of the cosmologists say this is just a transition, rather than an end. The universe has pa.s.sed through transitions before, for instance from an age dominated by radiation to one dominated by matter-our age. Maybe there will be life of some kind in a new era dominated by the dark energy."

"But nothing like us."

"I'm afraid not."

Maureen stood and put the sphere down in the middle of the lawn. The gra.s.s was just faintly moist, with dew, as the air cooled. "Will it be all right here?"

"I should think so."

The ground shuddered, and there was a sound like a door slamming, deep in the ground. Alarms went off, from cars and houses, distant wails. Maureen hurried back to the pergola. She sat with Caitlin, and they wrapped their arms around each other.

Caitlin raised her wrist to peer at her watch, then gave it up. "I don't suppose we need a countdown."

The ground shook more violently, and there was an odd sound, like waves rushing over pebbles on a beach. Maureen peered out of the pergola. Remarkably, one wall of her house had given way, just like that, and the bricks had tumbled into a heap.

"You'll never get a builder out now," Caitlin said, but her voice was edgy.

"We'd better get out of here."

"All right."

They got out of the pergola and stood side by side on the lawn, over the little sphere of instruments, holding onto each other. There was another tremor, and Maureen's roof tiles slid to the ground, smashing and tinkling.

"Mum, there's one thing."

"Yes, love."

"You said you didn't think all those alien signals needed to be decoded."

"Why, no. I always thought it was obvious what all the signals were saying."

"What?"

Maureen tried to reply.

The ground burst open. The sc.r.a.p of dewy lawn flung itself into the air, and Maureen was thrown down, her face pressed against the gra.s.s. She glimpsed houses and trees and people, all flying in the air, underlit by a furnace-red glow from beneath.

But she was still holding Caitlin. Caitlin's eyes were squeezed tight shut. "Goodbye," Maureen yelled. "They were just saying goodbye." But she couldn't tell if Caitlin could hear.

Cages.

Ian Watson.

"Miss ADAMSON, I'M Svelte," says the tall, skinny forty-something woman who enters my office.

Svelte by name, and likewise in body, which is long and slim. Elasticized black leggings and a black T-shirt under a crimson shirt that sports several zipped pockets. Not quite the usual ladies' attire for Combined Intelligence. In my own more chunky forties, I'm in a cream blouse and gray jacket. A long gray skirt conceals my knee-cage.

Svelte's hair cascades blackly and the collar of her crimson shirt gapes wide to accommodate a hexagonal neck-curse of bra.s.s, which holds her chin high. Her impediment looks the height of funky fashion, something chosen deliberately rather than inflicted upon her.

I indicate the brown leather chair facing my desk, and she lounges in it.

"So what exactly is Kore?" I ask her.

According to the file still on screen, Svelte is half-Serbian, half-Romanian. Her birth name was Svetlana but she uses the name Svelte from her time as a... turbo-folk singer. Her job description at Combi-Intel is a.n.a.lysis Eastern Europe-she graduated in Politics and Economics from the University of Belgrade. Most economies in Eastern Europe are in a mess because of the hoops coming so soon after the upheavals of uniting with the West.

Outside my tinted window, the Thames is as gray as my clothing. At rooftop level above Kensington and Chelsea, hoops hang leadenly in their dozens. If the sun were shining on this June morning, how the hoops would glitter, like huge bangles from boutiques.

"Kore is tekky that samples and remixes the sounds of love-making," says Svelte.

"Hang on. Tekky. Samples. Remixes." This Serbian-Romanian seems to have a bigger English vocabulary than I do.

"Tekky is neo-techno music," she explains. "You sample other bits of music or noise, using a synthesizer to distort. Take a source sound and make it something it never was. Kore uses f.u.c.king and coming as the source sounds." Helpfully she spells source. Not sauce, no.

From a crimson breast pocket emerges a memory stick, which I plug into the computer. An alb.u.m cover comes on screen, depicting a dancing woman surrounded by flames. A fox mask hides the woman's face. Groping, caressing hands of a mult.i.tude of hues, detached from their owners, cover most of the woman's body. A patch of pubic hair and a nipple are exposed.

"Oh, I see," say I. "Kore as in hard-core."

"Isn't digitized-hands are all painted on her."

"So it's art. Patient woman. Must have taken ages."

The t.i.tle of the alb.u.m is Sighs and Cries. From Quantum Entanglement, the very group! Svelte is extremely well organized, and at only a half-hour's notice. Her slimness, her extra height, her dark hair, just as Miriam was, till she left my life. Not that Miriam died, merely our relationship.

THE MUSIC IS slick and smooth as sweaty skin but with a pulsing ba.s.s line, climax a long time coming, wailings looping around and around, wave after wave, sighs like choirs of angels in ecstasy: Ev-ery-thing you Ev-ery-thing you do You do, you do, you do Everything you say To me, to me, to me Everything you do to me Say to me do to me Is perfect perfect perfect Do to me say to me Perfect perfect perfect...

"Sounds like a steal from Marlene Dietrich," is my opinion. "'You Do Something To Me.'"

"No, someone really said those words while making love. The voice is like filtered, disguised, high-pitched. Sometimes gets overdone. Voice winds up six octaves like breathing pure helium, like almost ultrasonic, like something to get bats off on."

Could I even dream of phrasing anything of the sort in Serbo-Croatian or Romanian? Not even in English!

Minimize the alb.u.m cover away, resume CV. In her youth, Svelte was a favorite of the Milosevic regime. Turbo-folk was mystical nationalist music originally supportive of Milosevic and his gangsters, a primitivist blend of pop and folk and oriental sounds. Strong allegations of crime and drug trafficking-Svelte must have been obliged to get out of Serbia. She tidied up her act and dusted off her university degree and became one of our experts on Eastern European. Not to mention our expert on the music scene.

"Do you know why I'm asking about Kore?"

"Web chat says Quantum Entanglement gonna do a big Exprisonment gig. They'll sample the noise the alien bees make, f.u.c.k about with the big bees' hum and blast the mix at hoops or at the bees. Like, the Varroa f.u.c.ked with us, so let's f.u.c.k 'em with music. That's the idea."

Succinctly put. Pretty much what I was alerted to, fresh out of a meeting about the nuke the Chinese had set off. So far as satellite imaging can tell, the solitary alien hoop, which the Chinese nuked in the Gobi, was merely hurled several kilometers upward. Maybe some blast got through to the other side of the hoop.

First shot in an interstellar war? Considering the size of a hoop, about a thousandth of a megaton may have got through, if any blast at all. No repercussions from the aliens, at least not as yet. We needed to do more than nuke a hoop? d.a.m.n the Chinese-they might have provoked anything.

Svelte shrugs. "Only just found out. Can't follow everything."

"You're fast."

WHEN WE SPEAK of the aliens, precisely what do we mean? Precision is vital in intelligence. It's important to regularly re-a.n.a.lyze what we think we know in case of some new interpretation. It can be fatal to make a.s.sumptions then stick to them.

First of all, from nowhere, came the hoops. They appeared worldwide during a single day, tens of millions of them. Next came the Varroa, who-or which-used the hoops to arrive and exit. Is anyone-or anything-else involved about whom we know sod all?

It only took a week for the myriads of hoops to bestow impediments upon the world's population. A hoop would swoop. Of a sudden the targeted person found a cage around some part of their body. I need to keep my own left leg stretched out beneath my desk on account of my knee-cage.

A transfixing bar holds an imped in place. In itself this doesn't hurt, but woe betide anyone who has an imped removed by surgery or by DIY sawing. They'll experience agony until a hoop gets round to renewing the affliction, maybe next day, maybe a week later.

Hoops don't swoop upon someone who's up a ladder, say-they wait for a more suitable moment. Smart hoops. If you shut yourself up tight in your home, a hoop will appear as if by magic. Hoops are about a meter in diameter.

Nothing we do affects them. Exotic substance, say scientists. Might be made of strings.

Ah, I have just cottoned on: Exprisonment, the t.i.tle of Quantum Entanglement's proposed gig, is the opposite of imprisonment. We're all confined by our impeds, all constrained, but at the same time we're free to walk about. We're exprisoned.

"So," I say to Svelte, "do we b.u.t.t in on Quantum Entanglement and take charge of this hum-mix event? All sorts of measuring equipment on site? Or do we limit ourselves to observing? In which case," as I appraise her clothing, "just how do we dress?"

"Or undress."

"You mean literally?"

"Some kids'll go nude or scanty. Not most."

"Glad to hear it. Is this only for young people?"

She shakes her head. "You get worked up by Kore with a friend of any age, or even on your own. It's non-discriminatory, like s.e.x for the disabled. Impeds looked like f.u.c.king the club and dance scene, like how do you dance with a box on your foot? Kore says f.u.c.k off to impeds."

"You mean there'll be some sort of orgy?"

"Some micro-orgies maybe, not ma.s.s writhing. There's like a spiritual dimension, like an o.r.g.a.s.m reaching heaven. Transcending the body, flying free."

"And Sighs and Cries was a response to impeds?"

"No, Sighs and Cries came out a few months before the hoops. What QE are planning right now is their response to the hoops. They must've been sampling and mixing for months."

"High time to stick our noses in."

"Party time? Dude!"

So THE VARROA come through the hoops. They look like giant bees, size of an electric toaster. Varrr-oh-aah, varrr-oh-aah-that's the sound they make. A bit loud for wing beats. The noise suggests some kind of protective energy field, whatever that might be. Bee-ing as how we can't catch a Varroa nor harm them in any way.

There's a terrestrial parasite named Varroa, which sucks the blood of our terrestrial bees. This enfeebles the bees. So they collect less pollen. So less honey gets made. After a few months, bye-bye hive. The Varroa and their hoops certainly impair human beings, so the name sticks.

The Varroa could be robots made by aliens (hitherto unseen), sent through the hoops to impair us and a.s.sess the effects.

Those hypothetical aliens might be: softening us up for the real invasion-however, some ethics committee of alien races disapproves of brutal methods and awards Brownie points for ingenuity; making s.e.x difficult so we'll slowly go extinct; the birth rate is scarily down, vacant planet in another couple of centuries at the present rate (see invasion scenario, above); hampering us so that we don't get above ourselves by suddenly making some scientific breakthrough such as developing interstellar travel and causing mayhem; practicing an art form; fill in your own guess.