Kethani (32 page)

Our friends were already there, armed with drinks.

There was, unlike our last few nights in the Fleece, a party atmosphere in the air, a
fin-de-siecle
sense of closure, of new beginnings.

We drank and chatted about the past. We regaled Gregory with incidents of village life over the past twenty years, the emotional highs and lows: the break up of my marriage, the resurrection of Ben’s father, the going of Father Renbourn... It was as if, with this incantatory summoning of the past, we were putting off the inevitability of the future.

Then we ate, seated around a long pine table, a lavish meal of roast beef and baked potatoes. Conversation turned to the Kéthani and our mission as ambassadors among the stars.

A little drunk, I laughed. “It seems impossible to reconcile my life so far, the insignificance of my existence until now, with what might happen out there.” And I swung my wine glass in an abandoned gesture at the stars.

Gregory said, “We will be taken, and trained, and we will behold wonders we cannot even guess at.”

Beside me, Sam said, “I wish Andy was coming with us.”

A silence settled around the table as we pondered our absent, sceptical friend.

We finished the meal and Gregory poured the wine. He went around the table, clockwise, and tipped an exact measure of French claret, laced with cyanide, into each glass.

Sam, Stuart, and I sat together at the end of the table. I felt a subtle sense of exclusion from the act about to take place. Later tonight we three would report to the Onward Station, would be beamed up in the same transmission as our friends, and begin our journey to the stars.

I was aware of my heart thudding as I watched my friends raise their glasses and Richard Lincoln pronounce a toast. “To friends,” he said, “and to the future!”

“To friends and to the future!” they echoed, and drank.

I watched Richard Lincoln relax, smiling, and slump into his seat, as if asleep, and I reached across the table and gripped his hand as if to ease his passing. I looked around, taking in the enormity of the fact that my friends of so many years were dead or dying... Jeffrey leaned forward, resting his head on his arms; Doug Standish sat upright, a smile on his stilled face; Ben and Elisabeth leaned towards each other, embracing, and died together; Dan Chester had fallen sideways in his seat, head lolling. At the head of the table, Gregory Merrall slumped in his seat, chin on chest.

A silence filled the room and I felt like weeping.

Someone was clutching my hand. I looked up. Sam was staring at me through her tears.

We stood and moved towards the door. Already, our friends’ implants would be registering the fact of their death. In minutes, the ferrymen from the Onward Station would arrive to collect their bodies.

I took one last glance at the tableau of stilled and lifeless remains, then joined Sam and Stuart and stepped into the freezing night.

Stuart indicated his car. “We might as well go straight to the Station.”

I said, “Do you mind if I walk?”

They smiled, understanding. I sketched a wave and set off along the footpath that climbed across the snow-covered moorland to the soaring tower of the Onward Station in the distance.

Their car started and drove away, and soon the sound of its engine died and left a profound silence in its wake.

I strode across the brow of the hill, my boots compacting snow, my head too full of recent events to look ahead with any clarity.

At one point I stopped, turned, and looked down at the farmhouse, dark against the snow. The lights glowed in the windows, and it reminded me of a nativity scene.

I was about to resume my march when, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement at the back door. At first I thought it was a ferryman, arrived early—then realised that I had heard no car.

I stared and caught my breath in shock.

A figure stepped through the kitchen door and strode out into the gravelled driveway, and in the light of the gibbous moon I recognised the tweed-clad shape of Gregory Merrall.

At that moment I felt very alone. I wanted Sam and Stuart beside me, to affirm that I was not losing my senses.

As I watched, he stopped in the middle of the drive and stared up at the stars, and my mind was in chaos.

Why? I asked myself... Why had he—

And then the explanation came, falling from the heavens.

Gregory raised his arms above his head, as if in greeting or supplication, and from on high there descended, across the dark night sky like the scoring of a diamond point across a sheet of obsidian, what at first I thought was a shooting star. The vector it took, however, was vertical. It fell like a lance, heading for the farmhouse below, and I could only gasp in wonder, breathless, as it struck Gregory Merrall.

He vanished, and the light leapt up and retraced its course through the night sky, heading towards the waiting Kéthani starship.

My face stinging with tears, I set off towards the rearing obelisk of the Onward Station. I thought of Andy Souter, and his suspicion of Gregory Merrall, and his decision not to join us... and I wondered if Andy had been right to turn his back, this time, on the new life that awaited us.

I was sobbing by the time I reached the Station. I paused before its cut glass perfection, this thing of supernal alien beauty on the harsh Yorkshire landscape.

I wondered whether to tell Sam and Stuart that we had been lured to the stars by an... an impostor. Did it matter after all? I tried to marshal my emotions, to decide whether what Merrall had done could be considered an act of betrayal or of salvation. I wondered if I should go ahead with what we had planned.

I turned and stared out over the land that had been my home since birth, a land slowly emptying due to the ministrations of a mysterious alien race. Then I looked up at the stars, the million pulsating beacons of light, and I knew that there was only one course of action to take.

I hurried into the Station, to join my friends and to begin the new life that awaited me out there among the beckoning stars.

CODA

DIASPORA

A thousand years have passed since the events described in the preceding documents.

We went among the stars and experienced wonders beyond our wildest dreams; we each of us beheld sights almost beyond description, and certainly beyond the understanding of the humans we once were. We became the ambassadors of the Kéthani, and in so doing completed the next stage of our evolution, became more than human and at the same time more
humane.
We did the bidding of the Kéthani among the teeming races of the universe and learned that the reason our benefactors selected us for the task was a little more complex than we first thought. But that is another story.

Tomorrow I am meeting my old friends and we are returning to Earth, to the location where we first met, all those hundreds of years ago.

Earth is depopulated now; only a handful of wardens live among its petrified treasures, its overgrown vales, guardians of the cradle of humankind. Despite all the early objections, despite the scepticism and pessimism, the religious and philosophical opposition, time has worked to erode our fears and prove wrong the voices of dissent. The galaxy is now the true home of humankind, though people do return to Earth from time to time, so I’ve heard, to dwell in the past and relive old memories, before renewing their lives out there.

We will meet among the tumbled stones of the village we once called home, perhaps trace among the crumbled foundations the dwellings where we lived, the places where we met. We might even find the ruins of the Fleece...

We will recount our exploits on alien worlds, catching up with the deeds of friends we have not seen for dozens of years, in some cases a century or two. Then, talk will turn to the past, to life on Earth, when we were so very young and thought ourselves so experienced and wise.

And we might even shed a tear or two before we part again and return to our rightful place among the distant stars.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Portions of this novel appeared in the following publications:

“Ferryman” first appeared in
New Worlds, 1997.

“Onward Station” first appeared in
Interzone
135, 1998.

“The Kéthani Inheritance” first appeared in
Spectrum
7, 2001.

“Thursday’s Child” first appeared in
Spectrum 9,
2002.

“The Touch of Angels” first appeared in
Threshold Shift,
2006.

“The Wisdom of the Dead” first appeared in
Interzone
186, 2003.

“A Heritage of Stars” first appeared in
Constellations,
2005.

“Matthew’s Passion” (written with Tony Ballantyne) is original to the collection.

“A Choice of Eternities” first appeared in
Postscripts
1, 2004.

“The Farewell Party” first appeared in
The Solaris Book of New SF,
2007.

The sections entitled “The Coming of the Kéthani” and “Diaspora”, and the linking material, are original to the collection.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the editors of the anthologies and magazines where these stories first appeared: David Garnett, David Pringle, Paul Fraser, Gary Turner, Peter Crowther, and George Mann. The chapter entitled “Matthew’s Passion” was written with Tony Ballantyne, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for his input and hard work.