Kethani (22 page)

“Each one is a sun,” she said, like an awestruck child, “and millions of them have planets and people... well, aliens. Just think of it, Stuart, just think of everything that’s out there that we can’t even begin to dream about.”

I hugged her to me. “You’re a poet and a philosopher, Samantha Gardner,” I whispered. “And I love you.”

A couple of days later we attended the returning ceremony of Graham Leicester, a friend who’d died of a heart attack six months earlier.

I’d never before entered the Onward Station, and I was unsure what to expect. We left the car in the snow-covered parking lot and shuffled across the slush behind the file of fellow celebrants. Samantha gripped my hand and shivered. “C-cold,” she brrr’d.

A blue-uniformed official, with the fixed smile and plastic good looks of an air hostess, ushered us into a reception lounge. It was a big, white-walled room with a sky blue carpet. Abstract murals hung on the walls, swirls of pastel colour. I wondered if this was Kéthani artwork.

A long table stood before a window overlooking the white, undulating moorland. A buffet was laid out, tiny sandwiches and canapés, and red and white wine.

Graham’s friends, his neighbours and the regulars from the Fleece, were already tucking in. Sam brought me a glass of red wine and we stood talking to Richard Lincoln.

“I wonder if he’ll be the same old happy-go-lucky Graham as before?” Sam asked.

Richard smiled. “I don’t see why not,” he said.

“But he’ll be changed, won’t he?” Sam persisted. “I mean, not just physically?”

Richard shrugged. “He’ll appear a little younger, fitter. And who knows how the experience will have changed him psychologically.”

“But don’t the aliens—” Sam began.

Richard was saved the need to reply. A door at the far end of the room opened and the Station Director, Masters, stepped into the reception lounge and cleared his throat.

“First of all, I’d like to welcome you all to the Onward Station.” He gave a little speech extolling the service to humankind bestowed by the Kéthani and then explained that Graham Leicester was with close family members right at this moment, his wife and children, and would join us presently.

I must admit that I was more than a little curious as to how the experience of dying, being resurrected, and returning to Earth after six months had affected Graham. I’d heard rumours about the post-resurrection period on Kéthan: humans were brought back to life and ‘instructed’, informed about the universe, the other life-forms that existed out there, the various tenets and philosophies they held. But I wanted to hear firsthand from Graham exactly what he’d undergone.

I expected to be disappointed. I’d read many a time that returnees rarely spoke of their experiences on Kéthan: that either they were reluctant to do so or were somehow inhibited by their alien saviours.

Five minutes later Graham stepped through the sliding door, followed by his wife and two teenage daughters.

I suppose the reaction to his appearance could be described as a muted gasp—an indrawn breath of mixed delight and amazement.

Graham had run the local hardware store, a big, affable, overweight fifty-something, with a drinker’s nose and a rapidly balding head.

Enter a revamped Graham Leicester. He looked twenty years younger, leaner and fitter; gone was the rubicund, veined face, the beer belly. Even his hair had grown back.

He circulated, moving from group to group, shaking hands and hugging his delighted friends.

He saw us and hurried over, gave Sam a great bear hug and winked at me over her shoulder. I embraced him. “Great to see you back, Graham.”

“Good to be back.”

His wife was beside him. “We’re having a little do down at the Fleece, if you’d like to come along.”

Graham said, “A pint of Landlord after the strange watery stuff I had out there...” He smiled at the thought.

Thirty minutes later we were sitting around a table in the main bar of our local, about ten of us. Oddly enough, talk was all about what had happened in the village during the six months that Graham had been away. He led the conversation, wanting to know all the gossip. I wondered how much this was due to a reluctance to divulge his experiences on Kéthan.

I watched him as he sipped his first pint back on Earth.

Was it my imagination, or did he seem quieter, a little more reflective than the Graham of old? He didn’t gulp his beer, but took small sips. At one point I asked him, nodding at his half-filled glass. “Worth waiting for? Can I get you another?”

He smiled. “It’s not as I remembered it, Stuart. No, I’m okay for now.”

I glanced across the table. Sam was deep in conversation with Graham’s wife, Marjorie. Sam looked concerned. I said to Graham, “I’ve read that other returnees have trouble recalling their experiences out there.”

He looked at me. “I know what they mean. It’s strange, but although I can remember lots...” He shook his head. “When I try to talk about it...” He looked bewildered. “I mean, I know what happened in the dome, but I can’t begin to express it.”

I nodded, feigning comprehension.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do now?”

His gaze seemed to slip into neutral. “I don’t know. I recall something from the domes. We were shown the universe, the vastness, the races and planets... The Kéthani want us to go out there, Stuart, work with them in bringing the word of the Kéthani to all the other races. I was offered so many positions out there...”

I had to repress a smile at the thought of Graham Leicester, ex-Oxenworth hardware store owner, as an ambassador to the stars.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do?” I asked.

He stared into his half-drunk pint. “No,” he said at last. “No, I haven’t.” He looked up at me. “I never thought the stars would be so attractive,” he murmured.

Graham and his wife left at nine, and the drinking continued. Around midnight Sam and I wended our way home, holding onto each other as we negotiated the snowdrifts.

She was very quiet, and at home took me in a fierce embrace. “Stuart,” she whispered, “rip all my clothes off and make love to me.”

Sometimes the act of sex can transcend the mere familiar mechanics that often, after a year of marriage, become rote. That night, for some reason, we were imbued with a passion that recalled our earlier times together. Later we sprawled on the bed, sweating and breathless. I was overcome with an inexpressible surge of love for the woman who was my wife.

“Stuart,” she whispered.

I stroked her thigh. “Mmm?”

“I was talking to Marjorie. She says Graham’s changed. He isn’t the man he was. She’s afraid.”

I held her. “Sam, he’s undergone an incredible experience. Of course he’s changed a little, but he’s still the same old Graham underneath. It’ll just take time for him to readjust.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, before saying, “Perhaps, Stuart, they take our humanity away?”

“Nonsense!” I said. “If anything, they give us a greater humanity. You’ve heard all those stories about dictators and cynical businessmen who return full of compassion and charity.”

She didn’t reply. Perhaps five minutes later she said, “Perhaps the Kéthani take away our ability to love.”

Troubled, I pulled Sam to me and held her tight.

A few days later I arrived home with a book for Samantha. It was Farmer’s critically acclaimed account of the arrival of the Kéthani and its radical social consequences.

I left it on the kitchen table and over dinner said, “I found this in the library. Fascinating stuff. Perhaps you’d like to read it.”

She picked up the book and leafed through it, sniffed, with that small, disdainful wrinkle of her nose I found so attractive.

“Wouldn’t understand it if I did,” she said.

After dinner she poured two glasses of red wine and joined me in the living room. She curled next to me on the sofa.

“Stuart...” She began.

She often did this—said my name and then failed to qualify it. The habit at first drove me crazy, but soon became just another of her idiosyncrasies that I came to love.

“Do you know something?” she began again. “Once upon a time there were certainties, weren’t there?” She fingered her implant, perhaps unaware that she was doing so.

I stared at her. “Such as?”

“Death,” she said. “And, like, if you loved someone so much, then you were certain that it would last forever.”

“Well, I suppose so.”

“But not any more.”

“Well, death’s been banished.”

She looked up at me, her gaze intense. “When I met you and fell in love, Stuart, it was like nothing I’d experienced before. You were the one, kind and gentle and caring. You loved me—”

“I still do.”

She squeezed my hand. “I know you do, but...”

“But what?”

“But with the coming of the Kéthani, how long will that last? Once, true love lasted forever—until death—or it could if it really
was
true. But now, when we live forever, on and on, for centuries...” She shook her head at the enormity of that concept. “Then how can our love last so long?”

And she began crying, copiously and inconsolably.

Even later, when I awoke in the early hours and watched a beam of light pulse high into the dark sky, Sam was still sobbing beside me.

I reached out and pulled her to me. “I love you so much,” I said.

They were the last words I ever spoke to her, in this incarnation.

She was still asleep early the following morning when I dressed and left the house. I spent an average day at the faculty, conducting a couple of seminars on chivalry in the French medieval epic. And from time to time, unbidden but welcome, visions of my wife flooded my consciousness with joy.

That night, driving past the Onward Station, I stared in wonder at the pulsing light.

I saw the oncoming truck, its blinding headlights bearing down, but too late. I swerved to avoid the vehicle, but not fast enough to avert the shattering impact.

I died instantly, apparently. Various pieces of the truck’s cab sheared through the car, decapitating me and cutting me in half, just below the ribs. Much later, over a pint in the Fleece, Richard Lincoln laughingly reported that I’d been the messiest corpse he’d ever dealt with.

The last thing I recalled was the light—and, upon awakening, the first thing I beheld was another light, just as bright.

I remember a face hovering over me, telling me that the resurrection was complete, and that I could begin the lessons when I next awoke.

At least, I think the word was “lessons”. Perhaps I’m wrong. There is so much about that period that I cannot fully recall, or, if I do recall, do so vaguely. I know I was on the Kéthani home planet for exactly six months, though in retrospect it seems like as many weeks.

As with every other resurrectee, I was housed in a dome with five other humans. There were perhaps as many teachers as resurrectees, though whether they were humans or Kéthani wearing human forms I cannot say. Beyond the wall of the dome was a pastoral vista of rolling green glades and meadows, which must surely have been some virtual image designed to sedate us with the familiar.

I wore a body I recalled from perhaps ten years ago, leaner than my recent form, healthier. My face was unlined. I felt physically wonderful, with no aftereffects of the accident that had killed me.

The resurrectees in my dome did not socialise. None were British, and none so far as I recall spoke English. We had our lessons, one to one with our instructors, and then returned to our separate rooms to eat and sleep.

The lessons consisted of meditation classes, in which we were instructed simply to empty our minds of
everything.
We were given “poems” to read, pieces that reminded me of haiku and koan, which although bearing much resemblance to Zen, were subtly other, alien.

After a while we were allowed access to what were called the library files. These consisted of needle-like devices that could be fed into a wallscreen, upon which materialised the texts of every book ever printed on Earth. They even had every one of my own dozen volumes.

But more. I soon discovered that there were other texts available, those not of Earth but penned by poets and philosophers and storytellers from many of the far-flung races of the universe. All were translated into English, and some were comprehensible and some so obscure as to be unfathomable. I struggled over texts too profound for my intellect, and then found others that expanded my awareness of being with the same heady rush of knowledge I experienced in my late teens when reading Freud and Lacan for the very first time.

I recall too—but this is vague, and I suspect our Kéthani overseers of having somehow edited it from my consciousness—being visited by other teachers, not those who usually instructed us. At the time I knew there was something odd about them. They did not speak to us, I seem to recall, but reached out, touched our brows, and later I would wake to find myself bequeathed knowledge new to me.

I became voracious, questing after all that was new in the universe. Perhaps I had become jaded on Earth, my mind dulled by the repetitive nature of my job, stressed by having to fit my original research into my spare time and study breaks. On Kéthan, it was as if my mind had been made suddenly a hundred per cent more receptive. I discovered alien writers and philosophers whose wisdom superseded the tired tenets of Earth’s finest thinkers.

I became aware, by degrees—surely a process carefully monitored by the Kéthani, so as not to overload our minds with too much information too soon—of the vast cornucopia of otherness existing out there, of the million teeming worlds and ways of thinking that awaited my inspection.

I recalled what Sam had said that night, which seemed like a lifetime ago,
“Just think of it, Stuart, just think of everything that’s out there that we can’t even begin to dream about.”

And Sam? Was she in my thoughts? Did I miss her as I had, during the first months of our marriage, when research had taken me to Paris for three painful weeks?

I thought of her often during my first days there, and then, I must admit, not so frequently. Soon she was supplanted in my thoughts by the sheer wonder of what surrounded me, the possibilities suddenly open to my experience, the amazing inheritance that death and resurrection was offering.