Kethani (7 page)

I sank to the floor, disbelieving. I moaned with grief intensified, made more painful than I ever imagined possible.

I read her note a second time, then again and again, as if by doing so I might change what she had written, and what it meant.

My Dear Jeff,
she began, and continued with words I would never forget,
I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry—but I can’t go on. I love you, but it can’t last, nothing lasts. I’ve known joy with you and perhaps it is best to end that joy at its height, rather than have it spoil.

And I wanted to cry,
no!
I wanted the chance to vent my anger and tell her how very wrong she was.

You know I don’t want immortality. Life is so very hard to bear at the best of times. To face life everlasting... I feel at peace when I contemplate what I’m going to do—please try to understand.
She was going to leave her house—
had
left her house—and walk to the reservoir, and give herself to the frigid embrace of the water... How could I understand
that
? How could I understand an act so irrational, an act of violence provoked by fears and pressures known only to herself? How often since have I wished I had known her better, had been a lover capable of being there when she needed me most?

I can hear you asking how could I do this to you. But, Jeff, you will survive—you have all the time in the universe. In a hundred years I will be a fleeting memory, and in a thousand...

They say that time heals all wounds.

And she had finished,
With all my love, Claudine.

I spend a long time contemplating the events of the past, going over my time with Claudine and wondering where I went wrong. I blame myself, of course, for not persuading her to undergo the implantation process, for not being able to show her how much I loved her. I blame myself for not giving her reason enough to go on living.

I am haunted by her words,
You have all the time in the universe...

At night I sit in the darkened lounge and stare out at the rearing edifice of the Onward Station, marvelling at its beauty and contemplating the terrible gift of the Kéthani.

Interlude

Five years had passed since the coming of the Kéthani, and after the first two years of turbulent change—two years of rioting and protest around the world—order had been restored. Hundreds of thousands of returnees came back to Earth, and though they had been subtly changed by the experience of dying and being reborn, none were the zombies or monsters that the Jeremiahs and prophets of doom had forecast.

Slowly, things began to change on Earth. So slowly, so gradually, that it was almost unnoticeable.

That evening—after a long day on the ward where I worked as an implant surgeon—I was enjoying a pint in the Fleece when Jeffrey Morrow said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but over the past few years things have got better on Earth, don’t you think?”

We looked at him. Jeffrey had greyed in the years since I first got to know him, which wasn’t at all surprising, considering what he’d undergone. He was a quiet man, much given to introspection and thoughtful silences. After Claudine’s death, we had persuaded him to remain in the area, to stay on at the school in Bradley, to face the terrors of his past and not to run away.

Considering what Jeffrey had experienced in recent years, this latest pronouncement was a little unexpected, to say the least.

“Got better?” I said. “How do you mean?”

“I came across an academic paper the other day,” Jeffrey said, “by some high-up in the UN.” He was on his fourth pint, and his eyes were distant. “It was a breakdown of the incidences of conflict around the world. And do you know something—since the coming of the Kéthani, cases of armed conflict have decreased globally by almost seventy per cent.”

Richard Lincoln nodded. “I’ve heard the same. Not only that, violence in general has fallen around the world. For instance, murder rates are in decline.”

That led us to speculate about the reasons for this gradual amelioration of the human condition...

Richard said, “Well, you know what I think—”

Zara laughed and hummed the spooky opening bars of the
Twilight Zone.
“The aliens are amongst us, Richard?”

He pointed at her, mock stern. “Oh, ye of little faith. The Kéthani have powers which we can’t even dream of, so it stands to reason that they’d come among us to help us along the way.”

I thought about that, then said, “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Richard. But I think that that might be unnecessary.”

Richard downed half his pint. “Go on.”

“Think about it. We die. They transport us to their homeworld. They bring us back to life. And we come back—changed. I’ve heard it said that people come back... I don’t know...
better,
improved.”

Richard objected, “But that doesn’t disprove my thesis, Khalid!”

“No—what I’m saying is that if things have got better on Earth, if there is less conflict, then maybe it’s caused less by the activity of the Kéthani down here and more by what the Kéthani did to us up there. Maybe it’s the mentality of the returnees that is changing things.” It was a nice thought—and how was I to know that, in a few years time, I would have first-hand knowledge of just how the resurrection process could render change in an individual?

Zara said, “Whichever it is, we have the Kéthani to thank.”

For the first time that night, Ben spoke up. He was the only one among our group who was not implanted, and we had never questioned him as to why this was so. Some things, we thought, were just too personal to share.

“Perhaps,” he said, “the people who come back, the returnees, aren’t really the people they were. Perhaps,” and he smiled as he said this, making me think that he wasn’t entirely serious, “perhaps they’re aliens in disguise?”

We laughed and argued amongst ourselves for a while, and then Ben said, “I’ve often wondered about the bastards who die and come back. I mean, the really evil people. Killers, despots, psychotics. They come back changed—I know that. But who’s to say that they are who they once were?”

Zara smiled. “You don’t really think...?”

Ben laughed. “Of course not. I’ve read enough to realise that the maniacs are somehow mentally altered up there, for the better. Made humane.” He shook his head, his gaze lost in the leaping flames of the open fire. “It makes you wonder, though, exactly what does happen...”

Talk drifted onto other subjects.

Ben remained quiet for the rest of the evening. It was only later—a year later, to be precise—that he told us the reason why he was not implanted, and why he wondered at the process of transformation undergone by the returnees.

THREE

THE KÉTHANI INHERITANCE

That winter, two events occurred that changed my life. My father died and, for the first time in thirty years, I fell in love. I suppose the irony is that, but for my father’s illness, I would never have met Elisabeth Carstairs.

He was sitting in the lounge of the Sunny View nursing home that afternoon, chocked upright in his wheelchair with the aid of cushions, drooling and staring at me with blank eyes. The room reeked of vomit with an astringent overlay of bleach.

“Who’re you, then?”

I sighed. I was accustomed to the mind-numbing, repetitive charade. “Ben,” I said. “Benjamin. Your son.”

Sometimes it worked, and I would see the dull light of recognition in his rheumy eyes. Today, however, he remained blank.

“Who’re you, then? What do you want?”

“I’m Ben, your son. I’ve come to visit you.”

I looked around the room, at the other patients, or “guests” as the nurses called them; they all gazed into space, seeing not the future, but the past.

“Who’re you, then?”

Where was the strong man I had hated for so long? Such was his decrepitude that I could not bring myself to hate him any longer; I only wished that he would die.

I had wished him dead so many times in the past. Now it came to me that he was having his revenge, that he was protracting his life purely to spite me.

In Holland, I thought, where a euthanasia law had been passed years ago, the old bastard would be long dead.

I stood and moved to the window. The late afternoon view was far from sunny. Snow covered the hills to the far horizon, above which the sky was mauve with the promise of evening.

I was overcome with a sudden and soul-destroying depression.

“What’s this?” my father said.

I focused on his apparition reflected in the plate-glass window. His thin hand had strayed to his implant.

“What’s this, then?”

I returned to him and sat down. I would go through this one more time—for perhaps the hundredth time in a year—and then say goodbye and leave.

His frail fingers tapped the implant at his temple, creating a hollow drumming sound.

“It’s your implant,” I said.

“What’s it doing there?”

It sat beneath the papery skin of his temple, raised and rectangular, the approximate size of a matchbox.

“The medics put it there. Most people have them now. When you die, it will bring you back to life.”

His eyes stared at me, then through me, uncomprehendingly.

I stood. “I’m going now. I’ll pop in next week...” It would be more like next month, but, in his shattered mind, all days were one now.

As I strode quickly from the room I heard him say, “Who’re you, then?”

An infant-faced Filipino nurse beamed at me as I passed reception. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Knightly?”

I usually refused, wanting only to be out of the place, but that day something made me accept the offer.

Serendipity. Had I left Sunny View then, I might never have met Elisabeth. The thought often fills me with panic.

“Coffee, if that’s okay? I’ll be in here.” I indicated a room designated as the library, though stocked only with Mills and Boon paperbacks,
Reader’s Digest
magazines and large-print Western novels.

I scanned the chipboard bookcases for a real book, then gave up. I sat down in a big, comfortable armchair and stared out at the snow. A minute later the coffee arrived. The nurse intuited that I wished to be left alone.

I drank the coffee and gazed at my reflection in the glass. I felt like a patient, or rather a “guest”.

I think I was weeping when I heard, “It is depressing, isn’t it?”

The voice shocked me. She was standing behind my chair, gripping a steaming mug and smiling.

I dashed away a tear, overcome with irritation at the interruption.

She sat down in the chair next to mine. I guessed she was about my age—around thirty— though I learned later that she was thirty-five. She was broad and short with dark hair bobbed, like brackets, around a pleasant, homely face.

“I know what it’s like. My mother’s a guest here. She’s senile.” She had a direct way of speaking that I found refreshing.

“My father has Alzheimer’s,” I said. “He’s been in here for the past year.”

She rolled her eyes. “God! The repetition! I sometimes just want to strangle her. I suppose I shouldn’t be saying that, should I? The thing is, we were so close. I love her dearly.”

I found myself saying, “In time, when she dies and returns, her memory will—” I stopped, alarmed by something in her expression.

It was as if I had slapped her.

Her smile persisted, but it was a brave one now in the face of adversity. She shook her head. “She isn’t implanted. She refused.”

“Is she religious?”

“No,” she said, “just stubborn. And fearful. She doesn’t trust the Kéthani.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, as if to dismiss the matter. “I’m Elisabeth, by the way. Elisabeth Carstairs.”

She reached out a hand, and, a little surprised at the forthright gesture, I took it. I never even thought to tell her my own name.

She kept hold of my hand, turning it over like an expert palm reader. Only later did I come to realise that she was as lonely as I was: the difference being, of course, that Elisabeth had hope, something I had given up long ago.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, examining my weather-raw fingers. “You’re a farmer, right?”

I smiled. “Wrong. I build and repair dry-stone walls.”

She laughed. “Well, I was almost there, wasn’t I? You do work outdoors, with your hands.”

“What do you do?” I would never have asked normally, but something in her manner put me at ease. She did not threaten.

“I teach English. The comprehensive over at Bradley.”

“Then you must know Jeff Morrow. He’s a friend.”

“You know Jeff? What a small world.”

“We meet in the Fleece every Tuesday.” I shrugged. “Creatures of habit.”

She glanced at her watch and pulled a face. “I really should be getting off. It’s been nice talking...” She paused, looking quizzical.

I was slow on the uptake, then realised. “Ben,” I said. “Ben Knightly. Look, I’m driving into the village. I can give you a lift if you—”

She jangled car keys. “Thanks anyway.”

I stood to leave, nodding awkwardly, and for the first time she could see the left-hand side of my face.

She stared, something stricken in her eyes, at where my implant should have been.

I hurried from the nursing home and into the raw winter wind, climbed into my battered ten-year-old Sherpa van and drove away at speed.

The following evening, just as I was about to set off to the Fleece, the phone rang. I almost ignored it, but it might have been a prospective customer, and I was going through a lean spell.

“Hello, Ben Knightly? Elisabeth here, Elisabeth Carstairs. We met yesterday.”

“Of course, yes.” My heart was thudding, my mouth dry, the usual reactions of an inexperienced teenager to being phoned by a girl.

“The thing is, I have a wall that needs fixing. A couple of cows barged through it the other day. I don’t suppose...?”

“Always looking for work,” I said, experiencing a curious mixture of relief and disappointment. “I could come round tomorrow, or whenever’s convenient.”