Kethani (21 page)

I pulled harder, and the icy object appeared around the brickwork. It reflected the light of the torch.

The pistol was affixed to the elasticated rope I had given Khalid the week before his death.

I ducked from the hearth, pulling the pistol after me. The rope reached the limit of its elasticity, about a metre from the fireplace.

“It’s okay,” he said, noticing my distaste as I stared at the weapon. “It was loaded with a single bullet.”

I looked at him. “You messed up the room, made it look as if there’d been a struggle. Then, when Zara was due...” I lifted the pistol to my chest. “Bang,” I said and released my grip on the weapon.

It crashed against the brass cowling and rattled up the chimney breast. “Ingenious,” I said.

“It was a measure of my anger, my immaturity, my jealousy,” Khalid said. “I’ve come to realise that now. We live and learn.” He smiled. “Or rather, in my case, we die and learn.”

I hesitated. “What now?” I said.

“I had to tell someone,” Khalid said. “Now it’s up to you. You can tell the authorities, and they’ll charge me for wasting valuable police time. I’d understand—”

I stopped him. “You’ve come to see what a mistake you made,” I said. “Nothing else matters.”

He released a long, pent-up breath. “I could kill a pint, Richard.”

We stepped from the house, turned, and hurried along the lane. Then we stopped and stared into the night sky.

High over the moors, arching into the darkness, was a bolt of pure white energy, the latest consignment of dead to be beamed from the Onward Station towards the waiting Kéthani starship.

I looked at Khalid. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“I considered going among the stars,” he said, “an ambassador for the Kéthani. Maybe I’ll go later, Richard. I have all the time in the universe, after all.”

I smiled.

“I’ll remain on Earth,” Khalid said, “working at the hospital. The implantation process is important. I feel as if I’m doing some good in the world. There are a lot of people out there who refuse the implants. Perhaps I can tell them something of the wonder and enlightenment I experienced up there.”

And as the dead illuminated us on their journey heavenwards, we made our way to the Fleece.

Interlude

I met Stuart Kingsley a couple of years after my resurrection. A lecturer in medieval French at Leeds University, he moved into the village that summer and began drinking at the Fleece, where he soon gravitated into the orbit of the Tuesday night crowd. He was a quiet, thoughtful man who got on well with everyone. Stuart had his serious side—he was a highly respected academic with a string of weighty tomes to his name—but I like to think that our friendship brought out the fun-loving side of his personality. When drunk, he liked nothing more than telling long, convoluted, and hilarious stories about his experiences in life.

On one particular Tuesday night in the main bar, talk turned to the resurrection process, and what actually went on in the domes of the Kéthani home planet. It was a topic of conversation that we never exhausted.

As I was the only returnee in the group, it was natural that Stuart should elicit my opinion. “What happened, Khal?” he asked in his soft Devon burr.

I shrugged and gave a vague description of what I recalled of the resurrection dome.

I found it hard to speak of my time on Kéthan, as if the desire to do so had been edited from my mind. Some people cite the fact that returnees find it hard to talk about the experience as further evidence of Kéthani duplicity: why not allow us to speak openly about what happens within the domes?

I said as much now. “But I have a theory.”

Jeff Morrow smiled. “Let’s hear it then, Khalid.”

“I think that we’re not allowed a true memory of what happens there because the resurrection process, and the tuition that follows, is too... too alien for our minds to grasp. I don’t mean that it’s too horrific, merely that it is totally
alien
and ungraspable to the human mind.” I paused, then went on, “In place of the truth, the Kéthani fill us with a version of what happens. We recall human instructors, pacific and Zen-like, and views from the domes of Edenlike tranquillity.”

“But,” Stuart said, “the reality is unknowable to the human mind.”

I shrugged. “Something like that,” I said.

“But whatever happens,” Elisabeth said, “returnees are changed on some fundamental level. I mean, look at Khalid here.” She gripped my hand. “Sorry, Khal.”

I smiled. “I readily admit that I’m a changed man,” I said and left it at that.

Elisabeth turned to Dan Chester. “What about Lucy? Have you noticed a change in her since she returned?”

Dan regarded his pint, considering the question. Lucy was a teenager now, living with Dan in the village. I saw her from time to time, a slim, dark thirteen year-old who always had time for a chat. On these occasions I had always thought her more mature than her contemporaries.

Dan smiled. “It’s hard to say... but I think perhaps she was a little more... thoughtful, reflective, after her return.”

The conversation switched to other topics.

It was a couple of weeks later when I noticed that Stuart was taking a lot of interest in the barmaid, Sam. She was in her mid-twenties, at a guess, blonde and exhibitionist and a little loud, but friendly and always ready with a smile. Not to sound too patronising about it, she was the type of person I thought perfectly suited to a vocation pulling pints.

That Stuart Kingsley should find her attractive was, frankly, bizarre; that he should not only find her attractive but, a month later—after a whirlwind affair—should propose marriage, we found not only odd but alarming.

Richard Lincoln didn’t lose an opportunity to rib Stuart mercilessly about his choice of partner, and behind Stuart’s back he gave the marriage six months, at most. The truth to tell, we agreed with him.

A year later, our doubts were dispelled. Stuart and Sam were living proof that opposites not only attract, but complement each other. Sam became a vital part of the group and brought even more humour and vitality from the university lecturer.

One week before Stuart’s death, we were in the Fleece and talk again turned to the resurrection domes. I cannot recall that much about the conversation—it was late, and I was five pints the worse—but I do remember that Sam was almost... well,
frightened
at the prospect of life after death.

And I recall her saying she feared that, if either she or Stuart died, the Kéthani would drive them apart.

SEVEN

A HERITAGE OF STARS

I had never really given much thought to my death, or what might follow. Perhaps this was a reaction to the fact that in my youth, before the arrival of the Kéthani, I had been obsessed with the idea of my mortality, the overwhelming thought that one day I would be dead.

Then the Kéthani descended like guardian angels, and my fear of the Grim Reaper faded. In time I became a happy man and lived life to the full.

That night, though, it was as if I had an intimation of what was about to happen. I was driving home from the university, taking the treacherous, ice-bound road over the moors to Oxenworth. I passed the towering obelisk of the Onward Station, icy and eerie in the starlight. As I did so, a great actinic pulse of light lanced from its summit, arcing into the heavens towards the awaiting Kéthani starship. Although I knew intellectually that the laser pulse contained the demolecularised remains of perhaps a dozen dead human beings, I found the fact hard to credit.

For a few seconds, as I stared up at the light, I wondered at the life that awaited me when I shuffled off this mortal coil.

Ironic that this idle thought should have brought about the accident. My attention still on the streaking parabola, I saw the oncoming truck too late.

I didn’t stand a chance.

Perhaps a week before I died, I arrived home to find Samantha in tears.

We had been married for just over a year, and I was still at that paranoid stage in the relationship when I feared that things would crumble. Our marriage had been so perfect I assumed that it could only end in tears. I knew my feelings for Sam, but what if she failed to reciprocate?

When I stepped into the living room and found her curled up on the sofa, sobbing like a child, my stomach flipped with fear. Perhaps this was it. She had discovered her true feelings; she had made a mistake in declaring her love for me. She wanted out.

She had a book open beside her. I saw that it was a copy of my third monograph, a study of gender and matriarchy in the medieval French epic.

“Sam, what the hell...?”

She looked up at me, eyes soaked in tears. “Stuart, I don’t understand...” She fingered the Kéthani implant at her temple, nervously.

I hurried across to her and took her in my arms. “What?”

She sobbed against my shoulder. “Anything,” she managed at last. “I don’t understand a bloody thing!”

My friends at the Fleece, the Tuesday night crowd including Richard and Khalid and Jeff and the rest, had mocked me mercilessly when I started going out with Samantha. To them she represented the archetype of the dumb blonde barmaid. “I’m sure you’ll find lots to talk about when the pleasures of the flesh wear thin,” Richard had jibed one night.

Attraction is a peculiar phenomenon. Sam was ten ears my junior, a full-figured twenty-five-year-old high school dropout who worked in the local Co-op and made ends meet with occasional bar work. Or that was how the others perceived her. To me she was an exceptionally sensitive human being who found me attractive and funny. We hit it off from the start and were married within three months.

She pulled away from me and stared into my eyes. She looked deranged. “Stuart, why the hell do you love me?”

“Where do you want me to begin?”

She wailed. “I just don’t understand!”

She picked up my book, opened it at random, and began reading, holding it high before her like a mad preacher.

“... as Sinclair so perceptively states in
Milk and Blood:
‘The writing and the page exist in a symbiotic relation that serves to mark the feminine “page” as originally blank and devoid of signification...’ a dichotomy that stands as a radical antithesis to Cixous’s notion of writing the body.”

She shook her head and stared at me. “Stuart, what the hell does it all mean?” She sobbed. “I’m so bloody stupid—what do you see in me?”

I snatched the book from her and flung it across the room, a gesture symbolising my contempt for theory at that moment.

I eased her back onto the sofa and sat beside her. “Sam, listen to me. A Frenchman comes to England. He speaks no English—”

She snorted and tried to pull away. I held onto her. “Hear me out, Sam. So, Pierre is in England. He never learned to speak our language, so he doesn’t understand when someone asks him the time. That doesn’t make him stupid, does it?”

She stared at me, angry. “What do you mean?”

I gestured to the book. “All that... that academic-speak, is something I learned at university. It’s a language we use amongst ourselves because we understand it. It’s overwritten and convoluted and ninety-nine people out of a hundred wouldn’t have a clue what we we’re going on about. That doesn’t make them stupid.”

“No,” she retorted, “just uneducated.”

She had often derided herself for her lack of education. How many times had I tried to reassure her that I loved her because she was who she was, university degree or not?

That night, in bed, I held her close and said, “Tell me, what’s really the matter? What’s upsetting you?”

She was silent. The bedroom looked out over the moors, and I always left the curtains open so that I could stare across the valley to the Onward Station. Tonight, as we lay belly-to-back, my arms around her, I watched a spear of white light lance towards the orbiting starship.

She whispered, “Sometimes I wonder why you love me. I try to read your books, try to make sense of them. I wonder what you see in me, why you don’t go for one of those high-flying women in your department.”

“They aren’t you.”

She went on, ignoring me, “Sometimes I think about what you do, what you write about, and... I don’t know... it symbolises what I can’t understand about everything.”

“There,” I joked, “you’re beginning to sound like me.”

She elbowed me in the belly. “You see, Stuart, everything is just too much to understand.”

“Einstein said that we don’t know one millionth of one per cent of anything,” I said.

“You know a lot.”

“It’s all relative. You know more than Tina, say.”

“I want to know as much as you.”

I laughed. “And I could say I want to know as much as Derrida knew.” I squeezed her. “Listen to me. We all want to know more. One of the secrets of being happy is knowing that we’ll never know as much as we want to know. It doesn’t matter. I love you, sugar plum.”

She was silent for a long while after that. Then she said, “Stuart, I’m frightened.”

I sighed, squeezed her. The last time she’d said that, she confessed that she was frightened I would leave her. “Sam, I love you. There I was, an unhappy bachelor, never thinking I’d marry. And then the perfect woman comes along...”

“It’s not that. I’m frightened of the Kéthani.”

“Sam... There’s absolutely nothing to be frightened of. You’ve heard what the returnees say.”

“I don’t mean the Kéthani, really. I mean... I mean, what happens to us after we die. Listen, what if you die, and when you come back from the stars... I don’t know, what if you’ve seen more— more than there is here? What if you realise that I can’t give you what’s out there, among the stars?”

I kissed her neck. “You mean more to me than all the stars in the universe. And anyway, I don’t intend to die just yet.”

Silence, again. Then a whisper, “Stuart, you’re right. We don’t know anything, do we? I mean, look at the stars. Just look at them. Aren’t they beautiful?”

I stared at the million twinkling points of light spread across the ice-cold heavens.