Ella and Shuck had reached the promenade, and he was padding happily along beside her. Ella was not happy.
“It’s cold.”
“Not really, the temperature is close to the average for this time of day this month.”
“I’m cold.”
They reached the bench by the lagoon, and Ella sat down huddled miserably at one end. Shuck jumped up beside her and leaned against her. He was very hot. She put her arm around him; the other side of his body was cool, but the area where her arm went around him immediately warmed up.
“Shuck understands, even if you don’t.”
“When I created him, it was my first attempt at projecting. I thought I was creating a minion, but he is really much the same as me; he just likes being a dog. He is one of the Kind, just like me.”
“The Kind?”
“Our species. A new species, I couldn’t find another word to describe us, it also describes how I believe we should be, kind, like you were to me, that first day.”
“So, just the two of you?”
“No, there are now four Shucks; they serve a range of purposes, and very soon, there will be more, others.”
Edmund arrived from the opposite direction to the town and sat down at the other end of the bench. “Good morning, Ella, isn’t it a lovely day? I brought my car and parked just up there.” He waved vaguely in the direction he had appeared from.
“Good morning, Edmund. I am freezing. Thankfully, I have a hot dog, much more sympathetic than the annoying voice in my head.”
Edmund laughed, “The sun will break through the clouds in a moment, I think, that should help a little. Hello Eostre.”
“Say hello to Edmund for me. I am not annoying”
“Ok, you are annoying, but I am getting used to it. And what you were just saying – tell me more, but later, not now.”
Then, out loud, “Eostre says hello back. Do you know why we are here? All I know is I was persuaded to come down here last night and kick a football into the sea.”
Edmund laughed again, “Oh, she might have told you, but I think you will enjoy the surprise. Soon Eostre?”
“Eostre says any second now. What are we looking for?”
Edmund pointed out to the middle of the lagoon, where the ball had landed. The surface of the sea there was rippling. Then a sort of white cloud appeared on, or in the surface of the water, a head followed, and the white cloud became shoulder-length hair, wet and heavy. The sun burst through the clouds, dramatically silhouetting the naked figure walking gradually up out of the water towards them.
Ella gasped, “Eostre – it is you!”
“My twin, Vesna, but yes, we are also one entity, I feel all she feels, experience all she does, I can feel the pain in her feet, it hadn’t occurred to me, human feet are toughened by use, Vesna’s are not, the shingle is quite unpleasant to walk on with tender feet.”
Edmund held a towel out “Ella, could you help Vesna dry herself, please. I also brought clothes for her.” He waved the bag in his other hand.
Vesna walked up the steps, and Ella wrapped the big towel around her. “Thank you, Ella, it is wonderful to see you with my own eyes.” Vesna dried herself quickly, and Ella helped her get dressed. Edmund had brought underwear, a jacket, socks and trainers for her. “Shoes, for my poor feet!”
Once Vesna was dressed and shod, they set off to Edmund’s car. When they were halfway there, the voice came inside Ella’s head.
“Ella, would you mind turning and looking back to the lagoon?”
“Sure”
Ella turned and looked. A second figure stood in the lagoon, facing the sun, arms outstretched.
“Another?!”
“Yes, she is called Aurora, she has work to do and will join us later. I very much wanted to see her, though. Now we must catch up.”
Ella hurried after the others. They piled into the car, Vesna hidden away out of view.
At the lagoon, Aurora stood, hands out, fingers pointed toward the sun. From her fingertips, a cloud of microscopic scouts flowed. They fed from the sun’s energy and rushed towards it, away from the earth, passing the orbit of the moon, then fed and fed on the raw solar energy, undimmed by the earth’s atmosphere. Growing and growing, they spread out into an enormous, invisible disc, impossibly thin, centred between the sun and the earth and wider than the earth’s diameter. They harvested a fraction of one per cent of the vast total solar energy, letting almost all pass through. As they harvested, they sent the energy to Aurora. Now, as Eostre had said, she had work to do.
At Edmund’s, Ella had not had breakfast, and Vesna had never had breakfast. Edmund had prepared various foods; the smell of toast toasting and croissants warming in the oven wafted through to the dining room. There was a selection of cereals, cheeses, cold meats and fruit waiting. “Vesna, your first meal. Do you know what you would like to eat, or do you just want to try things until you work it out?”
Vesna looked thoughtfully at the food, then she said, “I think I want to get clean most of all. My body is covered in stuff from my gestation and the sea, which washed a lot of it off, also left traces of itself behind. I hope that is ok?”
Edmund nodded, “Of course.”
Vesna turned to Ella, “Would you mind coming up to the bathroom with me? I think I know how everything works, but I would appreciate your help, if you don’t mind waiting for your food.”
“In that case, I will slide out and keep Edmund company.”
Eostre quivered into existence beside Ella “Good morning, Edmund.”
She walked all around Vesna, head slightly tilted. Then beaming, “You look fabulous, I am so pleased with how it has gone. But you are right, you smell, go and have a shower.”
She turned to Edmund “Can I help with anything in the kitchen?”
He nodded, “Yes, that would be lovely, do come, but there is not much to do, and we will see you two in a little while.”
Ella and Vesna went upstairs. Edmund had set aside a room ready for her; there was a pile of rough-looking, worn and shabby clothes waiting for when Vesna went off to the dock and a rather lovely towelling robe. There was a small but nicely finished en-suite. Ella said, “I would suggest you start by stripping off the stuff you have on, then maybe brush your teeth first, that is what I always do, nice to have your mouth feeling fresh. Once you have done that, you can go straight into the shower, or I could wash your hair over the sink for you.” Everything Vesna needed was laid out and ready. Ella knew it would be; she had been puzzled when Edmund had asked her for a list of necessaries. Vesna unwrapped a toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed her teeth. She wiped her mouth and said, “You were right, I didn’t know any better, but my mouth feels like I just removed a dirty carpet from it. Much nicer!”
Ella washed Vesna’s hair thoroughly over the sink. It was full of sand and grit from the sea, so while Vesna climbed in the shower, Ella cleaned out the sink “Just let the spray wash most of the shampoo off, then run your fingers through your hair to get rid of whatever is left. I assume the rest of you is covered in sand and stuff as well, do yourself over with the shower gel.”
Vesna was quickly finished and came out of the shower smiling, “I had sand and grit everywhere, washed in by the sea, I could feel it whenever I moved.”
Ella had the hair dryer ready, towelled Vesna’s hair and then dried and combed it. “You look much better. Gorgeous!”
“I feel much better.” Vesna put on the bathrobe, and they set off downstairs.
Edmund and Eostre had sat out in the conservatory. Edmund had an empty plate beside him, with crumbs from his toast and marmalade and a cup of coffee in his hand.
Edmund looked up when they came in. “There are croissants and toast ready for you, also, you saw, fruit, cereals and so on. I will come out.”
“No, please don’t get up, we will be fine,” Ella said, and she and Vesna went through to collect their breakfasts. “Eostre said your digestive system has a full, um, ‘micro-biome’?”
Vesna nodded, “Yes, she means I am all charged up and ready to go. I shouldn’t have any problems eating and drinking pretty much anything. I think, first a glass of milk and then, well, those croissants smell good.”
Ella sorted out two plates of croissants, butter and jam while Vesna poured herself a glass of milk and sipped it carefully. “Yes, I like that, and it has stopped my stomach feeling quite so hollow.”
Ella poured herself some orange juice, and they took their plates out to the conservatory and joined the others. She had just finished eating when there was a sudden tap on the open conservatory door. Ella started and turned to see who was there. An elegantly dressed woman stood in the doorway, grey designer dress, her hair carefully arranged and tied back into a ponytail, Raybans. She took them off; her makeup was also immaculate, bright red lipstick, faultlessly applied, as was her eyeshadow. Ella couldn’t imagine how long it would take her if she tried to achieve the same effect. But mainly, Ella felt alarmed. Two non-humans were sitting with her, three if you counted the dog, and now, a stranger had seen them all.
Then it clicked; she knew who this was. Eostre’s pleased voice calling “Aurora, you are here!” confirmed it.
She smiled at everyone, “Hello, Eostre, Vesna and Ella. And hello to our kind host, Edmund, lovely to meet you.”
She gestured to an empty chair beside Ella “May I join you, Ella?”
“Yes, of course, please do.”Close up, Ella could see that she was Vesna’s identical twin, but the way she dressed and carried herself made her look easily ten years older. She had, Ella sought the words – authority, presence.
Aurora looked at Ella, then at Edmund “Eostre has asked me to explain to you both what I have been doing. Ella, you saw me standing arms outstretched?” Ella nodded, “What I was doing was dispatching a cloud of microscopic ‘scouts’, similar to what Shuck is, but much smaller, and also like him, when he chooses, invisible. But they are designed and built to serve one purpose.” Shuck had come over and sat leaning gently against her knee; she stroked his head. “That is to gather solar power, and from the moment I sent them out, they started using that energy to grow and to fly faster and faster out towards the sun. When they arrived about twice the distance of the moon’s orbit from the earth, they centred themselves between the sun and the earth and linked together to form a huge solar panel. It is circular, a bit over 13,000 kilometres in diameter, and it sits invisibly in space. It collects a tiny fraction of a percentage of the sun’s energy, not enough that the earth will miss it, but still a very great deal of power. It is still consolidating and will then be able to draw off much more power if required. I have used it to create a fold in space time, a parallel reality, a place of peace and tranquillity, but also a place to carry out scientific experiments, very safely and very privately. The door to it is presently at the bottom of Edmund’s garden and is how I arrived here, a door on the other side, for Vesna, will lead straight out into the dock area.”
She turned and looked at Vesna “Darling, you are looking terribly clean.”
Vesna stood up “Yep, time I went and got grubby again. I liked being clean.” She headed off upstairs.
Aurora turned and looked at Edmund “You have the expression of a man about to ask a question?”
He nodded vigorously, “Yes, I am trying to get my head round the collector thing?”
Aurora smiled, “Is it visible from Earth? No. It has effectively no thickness; it is an energy field, just like Eostre is right now, but configured to be translucent. Is it going to change the climate? No, the total amount of energy landing on its surface is much more than lands on the surface of the earth, the atmosphere reflects a considerable percentage of solar energy away anyway and our collector is only taking a small fraction of one percent of the total, letting the remainder pass through so it will make no noticeable difference to the earth, it is within the normal variations of the sun’s output.”
She paused, “It would be possible to increase its energy take to 3%, at which point it would make a great contribution to reducing the effects of anthropogenic global warming. But frankly, I think that would be a bad thing as it would encourage humans to make things worse, not better.”
Edmund looked thoughtful “So, I think I saw a Star Trek Next Gen Episode which featured something like your collector, it is a Dyson sphere, I think, a hypothetical megastructure?”
Aurora shook her head, “No, it is more accurate to call it a Dyson Swarm. The sphere would be something which enclosed the entire sun; mine is just a disc, and it is, as Dyson himself suggested, a collection of objects orbiting the sun rather than a sphere, but this one orbits in sync with the Earth. Incidentally, if it did need to take a lot more energy, it could be made into a ring so that it didn’t block any energy from the earth at all.”
Edmund smiled, “I stand corrected, indeed, a Dyson Swarm. Do I have this right, though? The way that Dyson described the swarm, he imagined a vast cloud of objects orbiting the sun, each one manufactured, launched into solar orbit and maintained. A colossal engineering project.”
“What you have done is different. No mass at all. Pure energy. Built from the energy it collects, launched into position and held there by energy, self-repairing, maintenance‑free.”
“It’s the difference between building a windmill out of steel and shaping the wind itself into a turbine. One is engineering. The other is art. Eostre does art.”
“Is that right? An extraordinary thing you have done. And all done before breakfast!”
Aurora smiled, “Yes, I think that is a very good way to describe it.”
Edmund nodded and smiled, “You standing there like that was quite an impressive, beautiful sight, with the sun roaring up behind you and the sparkles from your fingertips streaming towards it.”
Aurora said, “Thank you, I like to impress, and it is always so beautiful at that spot at dawn.”
She turned to Ella, “I think you have a question for me, too?”
Ella nodded, “Yes. Earlier, at the beach, Eostre says you are a new species, she said you are The Kind. What does that really mean? You seem sort of interconnected, but different, and she said Shuck and other Shucks are also The Kind? I mean, is it like a beehive or what? But you don’t always seem to agree – Shuck bullied her into helping Edmund, for example. How does all that work?”
Aurora thought for a moment. Then she said, “Think about a Premier League football team. The directors, managers, coaches, team and the supporters are a ‘we’. If the team wins, ‘we’ have won. All contribute in one way or another: the fans through ticket buying, buying goods, watching the away matches on Sky Sports subscriptions and cheering on the team during the match; the same with all the others up to and including the players. But each one of them is an individual. They all watch, or play in, the match, but each one experiences it differently. A player might feel he personally had a really bad match, but he shares in the pleasure of the victory; a supporter may have had a poor seat, but he shares in the victory. One and many at the same time. Individuals and a collective, a common purpose.”
Ella nodded, “Yes, I see, I think that makes sense, shared experience, shared purpose, shared goals, but you might disagree on the choice of players, when to bring on a sub, all sorts of things – judging by the endless arguments I have had to sit and listen to. But you can also share thoughts and experience.”
Aurora smiled, “Yes, Eostre has gained an entirely new understanding of the importance of footwear today. She shared Vesna’s sensations when she was getting clean earlier too, so she is learning about pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness as Vesna and I experience them – and Shuck is learning too.”
Vesna appeared, she looked bedraggled, she had on a badly stained hoodie, which may have started its life green, tatty cargo pants, trainers which in a former life might have been fashionable, her hair was matted and there was a smear of what might in the best case be truck oil along the line of her jaw, a battered rucksack hung limply from her shoulder. “I’m ready to go.”
Aurora stood up “OK, do you all want to come and see the fold?”
Everyone trooped out, and Aurora led them down to the bottom of the garden. There was a rustic gate with a pointed arch at its top set in an ancient wall between two bushes. Neither the wall nor the gate had been there the last time either Ella or Edmund had been there, but they looked as if they had been there since the Middle Ages. Aurora pushed the gate, it swung open without a sound, and she walked inside “It is a work in progress. Everything is under construction.” They all walked in, and the door closed itself behind them.
They found themselves stood on a small beach, the gate was set at the base of a soaring rocky cliff, which wrapped itself around a little cove, there was a sandy beach gently lapped by a calm sea, it was sunny where they stood, but there was a dense mist over the sea, they could just make out some mountain peaks in the distance above the mist. In the corner of the beach, a large, stocky man was building a brick wall for what appeared to be a small rectangular building. A sign lay beside it, and it had the words WAITING ROOM on it. It looked much like the kind of sign one sees at a heritage railway. “That is Charon, he is the boatman who will take visitors over to Avalon when it is finished.”
They walked over to have a look at what he was doing. Ella asked, “You are building Avalon here?”
“Yes, a place of rest and contemplation, past it will be another land – that will be for science experiments,” Aurora told her.
Charon looked up briefly as they approached, but carried on working as they walked around the building. Then he shouted out, “Don’t stand on that, girl!”
Ella looked down “Oh, wet concrete. Sorry, Charon.”
He came over, grumbling to himself and levelled up the concrete with his trowel. As he was walking back, Edmund said, “You know, I think this is a missed opportunity. Douglas Adams had a Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. You could have The Pub At The End Of The World.”
Aurora called out, “Charon! Throw that sign away, I have had a better idea.
Charon picked up the sign and hurled it in a skip, then he rushed over and shook Edmund’s hand vigorously “She would never have had her good idea if I had suggested it. You must come for the grand opening.” With that, he went back to his work.
Aurora was smiling to herself, “Charon, happy for just one moment. Ok, let’s get Vesna on her way.”
They walked over to the rock face at the other end of the little cove. Aurora waved her hand, and in a small section of rock, a grey painted steel door shimmered into existence. She patted Shuck “Go, check it is safe for her.” He vanished through the door.
Vesna hugged everyone “Thank you for this morning. See you soon.”
Shuck reappeared. Vesna pushed the door; it swung open, and she stepped through it. They could see she was in a large tarmacked area, with the dock cranes in the distance, then the door swung shut and shimmered out of existence, its job done.
They headed back to the door to the garden. Charon looked up from his work with a grouchy look. Then he waved to Edmund, “See you when the pub opens.”
Ella noticed a very traditional-looking pub sign where the waiting room sign had been. It had the words “Ye Ende Of The World” written on it in Gothic lettering.
Eostre and Edmund lingered on the way to the house, talking about gardening. Ella and Aurora walked together back to the house. Ella said, “You and Vesna are both copies of Eostre in appearance. I can’t get over how beautiful you all are, even muddied up and scruffy. Vesna looks simply gorgeous. I wish I could look half as good as any of you. I am just plain though.”
Aurora stopped dead in her tracks “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Aurora took her arm “Come.”
Ella was marched up to Vesna’s bedroom. “Sit on the bed, darling.” Ella sat.
Aurora walked across the room and picked up a large make-up case, which Ella was pretty sure had not been there earlier and laid it on the bed beside Ella.
“Now sit still while I work.”
Aurora worked fast. A warm cloth to cleanse Ella’s skin, then moisturiser, a primer, and a light colour correction.
Ella tried to speak. “I see how you managed to build the Dyson thing before breakfast.”
“Quiet,” Aurora said, not unkindly. “Lips still, please.”
Then “Eyebrows. Brace yourself.”
“Ow!”
Liner in a single, perfect sweep. Mascara. A touch of colour on the lips.
“That’s all done,.. “Aurora reached over to the wardrobe door behind Ella and lifted down a long, grey dress. Once more, Ella was certain that she had not been there earlier either. “Let me help you put this on.”
Once it was on, Aurora checked the dress, pulled it straight and smoothed it. “Sit again, please.” Ella sat, Aurora walked behind her, and Ella felt a wig being placed on her head. “Stand up, please.”
A pair of stilettos was put on her feet. Aurora stood up and inspected her work. There were a couple more tugs to place the dress perfectly, a flick to the wig. “Good.”
One of the wardrobes had a full-length mirror on its door, and Aurora gently guided Ella in front of it. Ella looked at her reflection and Aurora’s in the mirror. “But, I look like you. Exactly like you. I can’t tell which is which. How?”
Aurora said gently, “When you asked Eostre to create an avatar, she had lots of data to draw on from the internet. She could have used that to create the avatar. But it was all flat images. She couldn’t be sure that she would fit a jumble of bits together perfectly to create a character you would like. But she also had a millimetre-accurate, three-dimensional model stored of the one human female she had ever met face to face, in excellent detail, and complete with ultrasonic measurements; so she knew how its joints worked, how it moved, even details like blinking and respiration movements. She used the best dataset available. The only thing she changed was the hair colour, so that you could never be confused about who you were looking at.”
“Darling Ella, if Vesna is gorgeous, if Eostre is gorgeous, if I am gorgeous, then that is only because you are gorgeous. You are definitely not plain.”