Kéthani Read online

  Perhaps sensing that his disquiet had its source much closer to home, we murmured that of course he could turn it off.

  He downed his pint and-turned to us. “Did I tell you that Barbara was… is… fervently opposed to the Kéthani?” he asked.

  The divide was repeated on a smaller scale, splitting families, even husbands and wives.

  “I was fifty years old when the Kéthani came,” Lincoln said now, staring into his empty glass, “and I’d felt that something was wrong for years. When they came, I thought that was obviously the answer.” He gestured at the screen. “I wonder now how things will end?”

  Little by little, over the next few months, I came to understand what Richard Lincoln was going through.

  ONE

  FERRYMAN

  Lincoln sat in the darkened living room and half-listened to the radio news. More unrest in the East; riots and protests against the implantation process in India and Malaysia. The president of France had taken his life, another suicide statistic to add to the growing list. The news finished and was followed by a weather report: a severe snowfall was forecast for that night and the following day.

  Lincoln was hoping for a quiet shift when his mobile rang. It was his controller at the Station. She gave the name and address of the dead subject, then rang off.

  Despite the weather and the inconvenience of the late hour—or rather the early hour; it was two in the morning—as ever he felt the visceral thrill of embarkation, the anticipation of what was to come.

  He stepped into the hall and found his coat, already planning the route twenty miles over the moors to the dead man’s town.

  He was checking his pocket for the Range Rover’s keys when he heard the muffled grumble, amplified by the snow, of a car engine. His cottage was a mile from the nearest road, serviced by a potholed cart track. No one ever turned down the track by mistake, and he’d had no visitors in years.

  He waited, as if half-expecting the noise to go away, but the vehicle’s irritable whine increased as it fought through the snow and ice towards the cottage. Lincoln switched on the outside light and returned to the living room, pulling aside the curtain and peering out.

  A white Fiat Electra lurched from pothole to pothole, headlights bouncing. It came to a stop outside the cottage, the sudden silence profound, and a second later someone climbed out.

  Lincoln watched his daughter slam the car door and pick her way carefully through the snow.

  The doorbell chimed.

  He envisaged the tense confrontation that would follow, thankful for the call-out that would reduce his contact with Susanne to a minimum.

  He pulled open the door. She stood tall in an expensive white mackintosh, collar turned up around her long, dark, snow-specked hair.

  Her implant showed as a slight bulge at her temple.

  She could hardly bring herself to look him in the eye. Which, he thought, was hardly surprising.

  She gave a timid half-smile. “It’s cold out here, Richard.”

  “Ah… Come in. This is a surprise. Why didn’t you ring?”

  “I couldn’t talk over the phone. I needed to see you in person.”

  To explain herself, he thought; to excuse her recent conduct.

  She swept past him, shaking the melted snow from her hair. She hung her coat in the hall and walked into the living room.

  Lincoln paused behind her, his throat constricted with an emotion he found hard to identify. He knew he should have felt angry, but all he did feel was the desire for Susanne to leave.

  “I’m sorry. I should have come sooner. I’ve been busy.”

  She was thirty, tall and good-looking and— damn them—treacherous genes had bequeathed her the unsettling appearance of her mother.

  As he stared at her, Lincoln realised that he no longer knew the woman who was his daughter.

  “But I’m here now,” she said. “I’ve come about—”

  He interrupted, his pulse racing. “I don’t want to talk about your mother.”

  “Well I do,” Susanne said. “This is important.”

  “Look, it’s impossible right now. I’ve just had a call from the Station.”

  “You’re going? Just when I get here?”

  “I’m sorry, Susanne. Thing is, it’s quite a way—Hebden Bridge. I should really be setting off. Look… make yourself at home. You know where the spare room is. We can… we’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

  He caught the flash of impatience on her face, soon doused by the realisation that nothing came between him and his calling.

  She sighed. “Fine. See you in the morning.”

  Relief lifting from his shoulders like a weight, Lincoln nodded and hurried outside. Seconds later he was revving the Range Rover up the uneven track, into the darkness.

  The main road had been gritted earlier that night, and the snow that had fallen since had turned into a thin grey mush. Lincoln drove cautiously, his the only vehicle out this late. Insulated from the cold outside, he tried to forget about the presence of Susanne back at the cottage. He half-listened to a discussion programme on the World Service. He imagined half a dozen dusty academics huddled in a tiny studio in Bush House. Cockburn, the Cambridge philosopher, had the microphone: “It is indeed possible that individuals will experience a certain disaffection, even apathy, which is the result of knowing that there is more to existence than this life…”

  Lincoln wondered if this might explain the alienation he had felt for a year, since accepting his present position. But then he’d always had difficulty in showing his emotions and consequently accepting that anyone else had emotions to show.

  This life is a prelude, he thought, a farce I’ve endured for fifty years—the end of which I look forward to with anticipation.

  It took him almost an hour to reach Hebden Bridge. The small town, occupying the depths of a steep valley, was dank and quiet in the continuing snowfall. Streetlights sparkled through the darkness.

  He drove through the town and up a steep hill, then turned right up an even steeper minor road. Hillcrest Farm occupied a bluff overlooking the acute incision of the valley. Coachlights burned orange around the front porch. A police car was parked outside.

  Lincoln climbed from the Range Rover and hurried across to the porch. He stood for a second before pressing the doorbell, composing himself. He always found it best to adopt a neutral attitude until he could assess the mood of the bereaved family. More often than not the atmosphere in the homes of the dead was one of excitement and anticipation.

  Infrequently, especially if the bereaved were religious, a more formal grief prevailed.

  He pressed the bell and seconds later a ruddy-faced local constable opened the door. “There you are. We’ve been wondering if you’d make it, weather like it is.”

  “Nice night for it,” Lincoln said, stepping into the hall.

  The constable gestured up a narrow flight of stairs. “The dead man’s a farmer—silly bugger went out looking for a lost ewe. Heart attack. His daughter was out with him—but he was dead by the time she fetched help. He’s in the front bedroom.”

  Lincoln followed the constable up the stairs and along a corridor. The entrance to the bedroom was impossibly low; both men had to stoop as if entering a cave.

  The farmer lay fully dressed on the bed, rugged and grey like the carving of a knight on a sarcophagus. Half a dozen men and women in their twenties and thirties were seated around the bed on dining chairs. An old woman, presumably the farmer’s widow, sat on the bed itself, her husband’s lifeless blue hand clutched in hers.

  Lincoln registered the looks he received as he entered the room: the light of hope and gratitude burned in the eyes of the family, as if he, Lincoln himself, was responsible for what would happen over the course of the next six months.

  An actor assuming a role, Lincoln nodded with suitable gravity to each of the family in turn.

  “If anyone has any questions, anything at all, I’ll be glad to answer them.” It was
a line he came out with every time to break the ice, but he was rarely questioned these days.

  He stepped forward and touched the implant at the dead man’s temple. It purred reassuringly. The nanomechs had begun the initial stage of the process upon the death of the farmer—the preparation of the body for its onward journey.

  “I’ll fetch the container,” Lincoln said—he never called it a coffin—and nodded to the constable.

  Together they carried the polycarbon container from the back of the Range Rover, easing it around the bends in the stairs. The family formed a silent huddle outside the bedroom door. Lincoln and the constable passed inside and closed the door behind them.

  They lifted the corpse into the container and Lincoln sealed the sliding lid. The job of carrying the container down the stairs—attempting to maintain dignity in the face of impossible angles and improbable bends—was made all the more difficult by the presence of the family, watching from the landing.

  Five minutes of gentle coaxing and patient lifting and turning, and the container was in the back of the Range Rover.

  The constable handed over a sheaf of papers, which Lincoln duly signed and passed back. “I’ll be on my way, Mr. Lincoln,” the constable said. “See you later.” He waved and climbed into his squad car.

  One of the farmer’s daughters hurried from the house. “You’ll stay for a cup of tea?”

  Lincoln was about to refuse, then had second thoughts. If he returned home early, there was always the chance that Susanne would have waited up for him. “Yes, that’d be nice. Thanks.”

  He followed her into a big, stone-flagged kitchen, an Aga stove filling the room with warmth.

  He could tell that she had been crying. She was a plain woman in her mid-thirties, with the stolid, resigned appearance of the unfortunate sibling left at home to help with the farm work.

  He saw the crucifix on a gold chain around her neck, and only then noticed that her temple was without an implant. He began to regret accepting the offer of tea.

  He sat at the big wooden table and wrapped his hands around the steaming mug. The woman sat down across from him, nervously meeting his eyes.

  “It happened so quickly. I can hardly believe it. He had a weak heart—we knew that. We told him to slow down. But he didn’t listen.”

  Lincoln gestured. “He was implanted,” he said gently.

  She nodded, eyes regarding her mug. “They all are, my mother, brothers and sisters.” She glanced up at him, something like mute appeal in her eyes. “It seems that all the country is, these days.”

  When she looked away, Lincoln found his fingers straying to the outline of his own implant.

  “But…” she whispered, “I’m sure things before were… I don’t know… better. I mean, look at all the suicides. Thousands of people every month take their lives…” She shook her head, confused. “Don’t you think that people are less… less concerned now, less caring?”

  “I’ve heard Cockburn’s speeches. He says something along the same lines.”

  “I agree with him. To so many people this life is no longer that important. It’s something to be got through, before what follows.”

  How could he tell her that he felt this himself?

  He said, “But wasn’t that what religious people thought about life, before the change?”

  She stared at him as if he were an ignoramus. “No! Of course not. That might have been what atheists thought religious people felt… But we love life, Mr. Lincoln. We give thanks for the miracle of God’s gift.”

  She turned her mug self-consciously between flattened palms. “I don’t like what’s happened to the world. I don’t think it’s right. I loved my father. We were close. I’ve never loved anyone quite so much.” She looked up at him, her eyes silver with tears. “He was such a wonderful man. We attended church together. And then the Kéthani came,” she said with venom, “and everything changed. My father, he…” she could not stop the tears now, “he believed what they said. He left the Church. He had the implant, like all the rest of you.”

  He reached out and touched her hand. “Look, this might sound strange, coming from me, but I understand what you’re saying. I might not agree, but I know what you’re experiencing.”

  She looked at him, something like hope in her eyes. “You do? You really do? Then…” She fell silent, regarding the scrubbed pine tabletop. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said at last, in a whispered entreaty, “do you really have to take him away?”

  He sighed, pained. “Of course I do. It was his choice. He chose to be implanted. Don’t you realise that to violate his trust, his choice…” He paused. “You said you loved him. In that case respect his wishes.”

  She was slowly shaking her head. “But I love God even more,” she said. “And I think that what is happening is wrong.”

  He drained his tea with a gesture of finality. “There’ll be a religious service of your choice at the Station tomorrow.”

  She looked up and murmured, “What do they want with our dead, Mr. Lincoln? Why are they doing this to us?”

  He sighed. “You must have read the literature, seen the documentaries. It’s all in there.”

  “But you… as a ferryman… surely you can tell me what they really want?”

  “They want what they say—nothing more and nothing less.”

  A silence came between them. She was nodding, staring into her empty mug. He stood and touched her shoulder as he left the kitchen. He said goodbye to the family in the living room— gathered like the survivors of some natural catastrophe, unsure quite how to proceed—and let himself out through the front door.

  He climbed into the Range Rover, turned and accelerated south towards the Onward Station.

  He drove for the next hour through the darkness, high over the West Yorkshire moors, cocooned in the warmth of the vehicle with a symphony by Haydn playing counterpoint to the grumble of the engine.

  Neither the music nor the concentration required to keep the vehicle on the road fully occupied his thoughts. The events at the farmhouse, and his conversation with the dead man’s daughter, stirred memories and emotions he would rather not have recalled.

  It was more than the woman’s professed love for her dead father that troubled him, reminding him of his failed relationship with his own daughter, Susanne. The fact that the farmer’s daughter had forgone the implant stirred a deep anger within him. He had said nothing at the time, but now he wanted to return and plead with her to think again about undergoing the simple process of implantation.

  In July, at the height of summer, Lincoln’s wife had finally left him. After twenty-five years of marriage she had walked out, moved to London to stay with Susanne until she found a place of her own.

  In retrospect he was not surprised at her decision to leave; it was the inevitable culmination of years of neglect on his part. At the time, however, it had come as a shock—verification that the increasing disaffection he felt had at last destroyed their relationship.

  He recalled their confrontation on that final morning as clearly as if it were yesterday.

  Behind a barricade of suitcases piled in the hall, Barbara had stared at him with an expression little short of hatred. They had rehearsed the dialogue many times before.

  “You’ve changed, Rich,” she said accusingly. “Over the past few months, since taking the job.”

  He shook his head, tired of the same old argument. “I’m still the same person I always was.”

  She gave a bitter smile. “Oh, you’ve always been a cold and emotionless bastard, but since taking the job…”

  He wondered if he had applied for the position because of who and what he was, a natural progression from the solitary profession of freelance editor of scholastic textbooks. Ferrymen were looked upon by the general public with a certain degree of wariness, much as undertakers had been in the past. They were seen as a profession apart.

  Or, he wondered, did he become a ferryman to spite his wife?

  The
re had been mixed reactions to the news of the implants and their consequences: many people were euphoric at the prospect of renewed life; others had been cautiously wary, not to say suspicious. Barbara had placed herself among the latter.

  “There’s no hurry,” she had told Lincoln when he mentioned that he’d decided to have the operation. “I have no intention of dying, just yet.”

  At first he had taken her reluctance as no more than an obstinate stance, a desire to be different from the herd. Most people they knew had had the implant; Barbara’s abstention was a talking point.

  Then it occurred to Lincoln that she had decided against having the implantation specifically to annoy him; she had adopted these frustrating affectations during the years of their marriage: silly things like refusing to holiday on the coast because of her dislike of the sea, or rather because Lincoln loved the sea; deciding to become a vegetarian, and doing her damnedest to turn him into one, too.

  Then, drunk one evening after a long day of sneaking shots of gin, she had confessed that the reason she had refused the implant option was because she was petrified of what might happen to her after she died. She did not trust their motives.

  “How… how do we know that they’re telling the truth? How do we know what… what’ll happen to us once they have us in their grasp?”

  “You’re making them sound like B-movie monsters,” Lincoln said.

  “Aren’t they?”

  He had gone through the government pamphlets with her, reiterated the arguments both for and against. He had tried to persuade her that the implants were the greatest advance in the history of humankind.

  “But not everyone’s going along with it,” she had countered. “Look at all the protest groups. Look at what’s happening around the world. The riots, political assassinations—”

  “That’s because they cling to their bloody superstitious religions,” Lincoln had said. “Let’s go over it again…”

  But she had steadfastly refused to be convinced, and after a while he had given up trying to change her mind.

  Then he’d applied to become a ferryman, and was accepted.