Kéthani Read online

  Kéthani

  Eric Brown

  An alien race known as the Kéthani come to Earth bearing a dubious but amazing gift: immortality. Each chapter is an episode that deals with human emotions in the face of the vast consequences of the alien arrival, and how the lives of a group of friends are changed.

  KÉTHANI

  By Eric Brown

  Prelude

  THE COMING OF THE KÉTHANI

  Everyone remembers what they were doing on the day the Onward Stations, those towering monuments to the fact of extraterrestrial intelligence, appeared on Earth.

  I was in my mid-twenties, finishing my internship at Bradley General Hospital in the wild moorland of West Yorkshire. Life was good; I enjoyed my work, and the prospect of specialisation. I had met a wonderful woman a year earlier—Zara, whom I would marry in eighteen months—and I was adapting well to life in the country after twenty-five years of living in Bradford.

  And then the Kéthani came, and for a while everything was in turmoil.

  On the day planet Earth was made aware that sentient alien life existed out there beyond the solar system, I had the privilege of witnessing the appearance of the strange alien construct on the harsh winter landscape of the moorland above the village of Oxenworth.

  It was midday on a freezing Monday in mid-January, and I had set off early for a late shift at the hospital. What was in my head as I drove from the village and climbed the narrow lane onto the brow of the moors, from which it seemed the entire world could be viewed? Well, as ever I was thanking my lucky stars, and no doubt enjoying the panorama. After the cramped shabbiness of my life in Bradford, the unspoilt landscape of the moorland, giving way to rolling farmland in the distance, seemed pristine and limitless. Not unlike my future—though little did I realise this at the time.

  I was slowing down to appreciate the view to my right when it happened.

  To my left, something flashed. It was so bright that it caused me to brake and peer through the side window, giving an involuntary cry of surprise.

  The crest of the moorland, perhaps half a mile above me, was shimmering—the kind of corrugated effect produced by heat haze above a road in summer, except that this shimmer extended vertically perhaps five hundred metres into the clear blue winter sky.

  I just sat and stared.

  The shimmer vanished, and in its place I made out a slim obelisk fashioned, I thought instantly, from ice. It reflected the sun in golden bursts, and where its steep planes did not coruscate with the winter sunlight, they had a dazzling silver aluminium sheen.

  I know it’s a cliché, but I did not believe my eyes.

  I was convinced that I was seeing things, that the needle-slim tower was an effect of the sunlight on the snow, or perhaps an icicle in the foreground which my brain processed as much larger than it was, which was ridiculous, of course. But at the time I was dazed and shaken, to say the least.

  I started the car and drove on 100 metres, to be as close to the thing as the road would take me. Then I climbed out and began walking towards it, leaving the tarmac and wading through the snow-covered heather.

  I was filled with wonder. I could not analyse my feelings then, though I’ve had plenty of time since to work out why I felt what I did. The inexplicable arrival of the obelisk was sufficient in itself to rouse awe from the most sceptical of people, and, if that were not enough, then the actual physical beauty of the construct, its alien perfection, tugged something in the heart. I say alien perfection, but this is not the wisdom of hindsight: the strange architecture of the tower spoke of a design never dreamed up by a human mind. As I drew closer and stared up, craning my neck to peer at its summit some 500 metres above me, I made out the odd swirling patterns etched into the material of its rearing flanks— ice, I mistakenly thought of the material then. There was something ineluctably other in the curlicue whorls that climbed the needle, something random like an abstract pattern, and yet obeying a logic that spoke almost of some kind of language.

  At the base of the tower was a rectangular block, and set into its sides was what appeared to be a triangular door, and to either side long, horizontal viewscreens. These were the most identifiable aspect of the tower, and yet still possessed a strangeness not of this world.

  I fumbled with my mobile and got through to Zara. She was still on holiday, preparing lessons for the start of the new term.

  “Khalid?” She sounded worried. I rarely used the mobile. “What is it?”

  “Zara. Drop what you’re doing and look out of the front window.”

  “What…? Khalid, are you—?”

  “Do it!”

  A silence of five seconds, then a soft, “Oh, my… Khalid, what is it? Oh… oh, it’s so beautiful.”

  “I’m standing right beside it. Can you see my car on the road? Look, get yourself up here.”

  “I’m coming, Khalid.” She cut the connection.

  My heart was beating fast. I just wanted to hold Zara and cry. Perhaps it was some odd effect of the tower, its alien influence. Perhaps the Kéthani were manipulating us, even then.

  I heard a car on the road behind me, and then another. Within a minute there were half a dozen cars lined up in the lane, their owners making their way through the snow and heather, gazing up in silent wonder. Behind them, I made out the roads leading from Oxenworth. The sun dazzled on a dozen car windscreens.

  I recognised a couple of people in the small group: Richard Lincoln, who I’d chatted to a few times in the Fleece, and Jeff Morrow, a local teacher. They joined me.

  I said, “It just appeared. Like magic. It wasn’t there… and then… the air shimmered and it just… appeared.” I realised I was babbling and shut up.

  Richard stepped forward, leaving the group and approaching the silver building that formed the base of the tower. He reached out tentatively, touched the material with his fingertips and didn’t take his hand away.

  I often wonder what drew him to the construct, if it were some knowledge that soon, very soon, he would be in the employ of our alien visitors.

  He looked back at us, still connected to the wall by his fingertips. “It’s warm,” he whispered.

  We all approached then and touched the silver flank, and Lincoln was right. The material seemed… well, alive. I swore I felt, other than warmth, a pulse beneath my hand. I tried to peer through, but the material was opaque and nothing of the interior could be seen.

  Jeff Morrow said, almost to himself, “And now this…”

  It took a few seconds before I realised what he meant. Caroline, his wife, had been killed in a car accident a couple of weeks before Christmas… and as if that were not enough for him to cope with, the questioning that accompanies grief was compounded by this mystery.

  Later, when the Kéthani explained their mission on Earth, Jeff Morrow’s grief would be tested even further. Perhaps he intuited this even then, or perhaps the dead light in his eyes as he beheld the tower was merely sadness that he could not share the moment with his wife.

  I heard a sound behind me, my name. It was Zara, tramping through the snow, her sari hitched up to her knees. In her other hand she clutched, incongruously, a transistor radio.

  “Khalid,” she called. “It’s not the only one! There are reports coming in… there’s hundreds of them… thousands, all over the world.”

  She joined us and upped the volume. The tinny voice of an on-the-scene reporter filled the air. “… standing beside the tower on the south downs a mile west of Lewes. Reports are that the tower just appeared out of the blue at midday precisely. I have with me an eyewitness…”

  I listened, but with only half an ear, to a largely incoherent account of the wonder that had occurred in Sussex.

  I held Zara to me, a strange emotion welling in my chest.
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br />   Ten minutes later it seemed that the entire population of Oxenworth and the surrounding villages had poured out and were massed at the foot of the tower. We stood in a crowd five deep, staring up and listening to Zara’s radio as reports flooded in from around the world. The story was the same from Austria to Zaire, Australia to Zanzibar: at the same time, all around the globe, the towers had appeared in relatively unpopulated areas beside small villages or towns. There were no reports of their appearing in cities, nor in uninhabited areas like deserts. The initial estimate, garnered in the first hour by the BBC, was that tens of thousands had appeared across the face of the Earth. The actual figure, it eventuated, was precisely 110,000.

  The government had issued warnings that under no circumstances must citizens approach the towers. The army had been mobilised, and experts were being called in—though experts in precisely what was never explained.

  One hour after the arrival of the towers, the next stage of the phenomenon occurred.

  A bright white light, arching through the heavens in a vast parabola, fell and hit the summit of the obelisk. The light dazzled, and drew gasps from the surrounding crowd, but was in itself completely silent. It lasted merely seconds, and then was gone.

  But I swore that the tower changed.

  It had possessed some kind of life before, but— and maybe this was my imagination, playing tricks, or again a trick of retrospect— I was convinced that now the tower was possessed of intelligence.

  We flocked to touch the surface of the tower, and I was flooded with a strange sense of wellbeing. I felt as if something, or someone, had attempted to communicate with me.

  The arc of light had descended on the towers at the same instant all around the world, apparently. The radio reporter near Lewes was almost speechless as he tried to convey the effect.

  One hour later, the cold getting to us, Zara and I made our reluctant way home, turned on the TV—every channel was carrying the story live— and watched the unfolding of the greatest event in the history of the world.

  Over the course of the next day we watched reports from hundreds of locations around the globe. It was as if the towers had been positioned systematically, equal distances apart, on every continent, country and island. We watched a succession of fazed politicians attempt the reassure their citizens that everything was under control, that there was no danger or threat from the towers. In some instances, it was obvious that the politicians were not believed, as angry mobs in Malaysia and Sudan rioted and attempted to burn down their respective towers. When the flames and embers died, it was revealed that not the slightest damage had been done to the unearthly constructions.

  Precisely one day after the arrival of the towers, the heads of every country in the world appeared live on television and gave more or less the same address.

  They had, they reported, been contacted by the agents responsible for the imposition of the towers. The agents were extraterrestrial in origin, and hailed from the planet orbiting the star Delta Pavonis, almost twenty light years from Earth. They called their planet Kéthan. They had come in peace, and reassured the citizens of Earth that there was absolutely no cause for concern.

  It was not reported how the aliens had made the contact and communicated their message, which fuelled wild speculation in the press for twenty-four hours. Sources close to the world governments let slip that officials had been in meetings with impeccably dressed humanoids shortly before the Kéthani, as they came to be known, issued their communiqué to the world. Later, government officials across the world denied that they had had face-to-face meetings with the Kéthani, and the accepted story now is that all communications were via televisual links.

  Two days after the arrival of the towers, newspapers, television and radio were running stories that asked the obvious question: what did the Kéthani want from Earth?

  The answers, depending on the quality of the paper you read, ranged from scare stories straight from B-movies along the lines of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers to more peaceful scenarios that cast the aliens as Messiah figures come to put the planet to rights.

  Three days after that fateful noon arrival, a tired-looking prime minister went on air and addressed the British nation.

  Something in the expression on the man’s face, a kind of manic euphoria combined with exhaustion and perhaps a dash of disbelief, told me that this was what we had been waiting for.

  I gripped Zara’s hand as we sat side by side on the sofa and watched with mounting incredulity as the leader of our country stared into the camera and told his citizens why the Kéthani had come to Earth.

  Over the course of the next fifteen years I came to know a group of people in the village of Oxenworth who became dear to me. It is through the eyes of these people that I wish to tell the story of how the coming of the Kéthani affected the lives of everyone on Earth. Much has been written about the gift of the elusive aliens, and I cannot claim that what follows is in any way original. What is special about this document, I think, is that it concentrates on the small-scale lives of ordinary, everyday people during this unique time of change.

  A long time after the coming of the Kéthani, I approached my friends and asked them to describe, in their own words, their stories in the light of the Kéthani’s gift to humanity. For the most part I have reproduced their stories in full, with only minor corrections and emendations. In a couple of instances my friends, for whatever reasons, were unable or unwilling to record their reactions, and I have taken the liberty of producing documents recounting their stories, having of course first obtained their permission. I have included two of my own first-hand accounts of life during the period of transition, for the sake of completeness.

  Nothing was ever the same again, after the Kéthani came. It is safe to say that the life of everyone on Earth was changed irrevocably from that momentous day. This is the story of how my life and the lives of my friends were transformed, forever and ever…

  Interlude

  Every Tuesday night, come rain or shine, Zara and I headed for the Fleece at nine o’clock and settled ourselves in the main bar. Over the years the circle of our friends grew to become a crowd, but at that point—a year after the coming of the Kéthani—we were a group of four: Zara, myself, Richard Lincoln and Jeff Morrow. Lincoln was a ferryman, employed by the local Onward Station, Morrow a teacher at Zara’s school over in Bradley. I had known Lincoln a little before the Kéthani came—he was a fixture in the Fleece— and over the past few months we had come to know him better. He was a big, quiet, reserved man who gave the air of harbouring a sadness it was not in his nature to articulate.

  That particular night he seemed even more subdued than normal. A television set was playing in the corner of the room, the sound turned low. It was not a regular fitting in the main bar, but the landlord had installed it because Leeds had been playing in Europe that night, and no one had bothered to turn it off.

  Lincoln nursed his pint and stared at the flickering images, as if in a daze.

  He was married to a big, red-headed woman called Barbara, who had left him that summer and moved down south. She had never, in all my time in the village, accompanied him to the Fleece. In fact, I had never seen them out together. When I had come across her in the village, she had always seemed preoccupied and not particularly friendly. It was an indication of Lincoln’s reserve that, when Barbara walked out that summer, he told us that she was taking a long holiday with her sister, and never again mentioned his wife.

  Zara and I were living together at the time, and planning our marriage in the summer. We were at that stage of our relationship where we were consumed by mutual love; I felt it must have been obvious to all our friends, like a glow. I held complex feelings for Richard Lincoln; I did not want to flaunt my happiness with Zara, when his relationship with his own wife had so obviously failed—and oddly, at the same time, I felt uneasy in his company, as if what he had gone through with Barbara compromised the possibility of my lasting happiness wit
h my bride-to-be. I received the impression that the older, more experienced Lincoln was watching me and smiling to himself with the wry tolerance of the once-bitten.

  “My God,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “I sometimes wonder…”

  His pronouncement startled us. He was staring at the TV screen. Zara stopped talking to Jeff about their school and said, “What, Richard?”

  He nodded towards the news programme. “Look at that. Chaos. How will it end, for God-sake? I sometimes wonder why I became a ferryman…”

  In silence we turned to the screen and watched. A year of turmoil had followed the coming of the Kéthani. The human race, suspicious and hostile at the best of times, did not trust the alien race that had arrived unannounced bearing its gift from the stars.

  There had to be a catch, some said. No race could be so altruistic. We were, of course, judging the Kéthani by our own standards, which is always a mistake when attempting to understand the motivating forces of others.

  The report showed scenes of rioting in the Philippines. Manila was ablaze. The government, pro-Kéthani, had been toppled by the anti-Kéthani armed forces, and a bloody coup was in progress. 3000 citizens were reported dead.

  The scene shifted to a BBC reporter in Pakistan. There, the imams had declared the Kéthani evil and the implants an abomination. Hundreds of implanted citizens had been attacked and slaughtered.

  The world was in chaos. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had lost their lives in the rioting. Two camps were emerging from the chaos: those opposed to the Kéthani and those who embraced the gift of the aliens with wholehearted enthusiasm. The divide happened on a global level: some countries accepted the gift, while others rejected it. Many nations were torn by internal opposing forces.

  “Do you mind?” Lincoln asked, gesturing to the screen. “I don’t think I can take much more.”