Kéthani Read online

  “I hope you feel pleased with yourself,” Barbara said one day, gin-drunk and vindictive.

  He had lowered his newspaper. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why the hell do you want to work for them, do their dirty work?” Then she had smiled. “Because, Mr. Bloody Ferryman, you’d rather side with them than with me. I’m only your bloody wife, after all.”

  And Lincoln had returned to the paper, wondering whether what she had said was true.

  Over the next few weeks their relationship, never steady, had deteriorated rapidly. They lived separate lives, meeting for occasional meals when, depending on how much she had drunk, Barbara could be sullenly uncommunicative or hysterically spiteful.

  Complacent, Lincoln had assumed the rift would heal in time.

  Her decision to leave had initially shocked him. Then, as her decision turned from threat to reality, he saw the logic of their separation—it was, after all, the last step in the process of isolation he had been moving towards for a long, long time.

  He had pleaded with her, before she left, to think again about having the implant operation.

  “The first resurrectees will be returning soon,” he told her. “Then you’ll find you have nothing to fear.”

  But Barbara had merely shaken her head and walked out of his life.

  He wrote to her at Susanne’s address over the next couple of months, self-conscious letters expressing his hopes that Barbara was doing okay, would think again about having an implant. Reading the letters back to himself, he had realised how little he had said—how little there was to say—about himself and his own life.

  Then last autumn, Lincoln had received a phone call from Susanne. The sound of her voice—the novelty of her call—told Lincoln that something was wrong.

  “It’s your mother—” he began.

  “Dad… I’m sorry. She didn’t want you to know. She was ill for a month—she wasn’t in pain.”

  All he could say was, “What?” as a cold hollow expanded inside his chest.

  “Cancer. It was inoperable.”

  Silence—then, against his better judgement, he asked, “Did—did she have the implant, Susanne?”

  An even longer silence greeted the question, and Lincoln knew full well the answer.

  “She didn’t want a funeral,” Susanne said. “I scattered her ashes on the pond at Rochester.”

  A week later he had travelled down to London. He called at his daughter’s flat, but she was either out or ignoring him. He drove on to Rochester, his wife’s birthplace, not really knowing why he was going but aware that, somehow, the pilgrimage was necessary.

  He had stood beside the pond, staring into the water and weeping quietly to himself. Christ, he had hated the bitch at times—but, again, at certain times with Barbara he had also experienced all the love he had ever known.

  As if to mock the fact of his wife’s death, her immutable non-existence, the rearing crystal obelisk of this sector’s Onward Station towered over the town like a monument to humankind’s newfound immortality, or an epitaph to the legion of dead and gone.

  He had returned home and resumed his work, and over the months the pain had become bearable. His daughter’s return, last night, had reopened the old wound.

  By the time he arrived at the Station a silver dawn was breaking over the horizon, revealing a landscape redesigned, seemingly inflated, by the night’s snowfall. The Onward Station appeared on the skyline, a fabulous tower of spun glass scintillating in the light of the rising sun.

  He visited the Station perhaps four or five times a week, and never failed to stare in awe— struck not only by the structure’s ethereal architecture, but by what it meant for the future of humankind.

  He braked in the car park alongside the vehicles of the dozen other ferrymen on duty today. He climbed out and pulled the polycarbon container from the back of the Range Rover, the collapsible chromium trolley taking its weight. His breath pluming before him in the ice-cold air, he hurried towards the entrance set into the sloping walls.

  The interior design of the Station was arctic in its antiseptic inhospitality, the corridors shining with sourceless, polar light. As he manoeuvred the trolley down the seemingly endless corridors, he felt as ever that he was, truly, trespassing on territory forever alien.

  He arrived at the preparation room and eased the container onto the circular reception table, opening the lid. The farmer lay unmoving, maintained by the host of alien nanomechs that later, augmented by others more powerful, would begin the resurrection process. They would not only restore him to life, strip away the years, but make him fit and strong again; the man who returned to Earth in six months would be physically in his thirties, but effectively immortal.

  In this room, Lincoln never ceased to be overcome by the wonder, as might a believer at the altar of some mighty cathedral.

  He backed out, pulling the trolley after him, and retraced his steps. To either side of the foyer, cleaners vacuumed carpets and arranged sprays of flowers in the greeting rooms, ready to receive the day’s returnees, their relatives and loved ones.

  He emerged into the ice-cold dawn and hurried across to the Range Rover. On the road that climbed the hill behind the Station, he braked and sat for ten minutes staring down at the diaphanous structure.

  Every day a dozen bodies were beamed from this Station to the starship in geo-sync orbit, pulses of energy invisible during the daylight hours. At night the pulses were blinding columns of white lightning, illuminating the land for miles around.

  Lincoln looked up, into the rapidly fading darkness. A few bright stars still glimmered, stars that for so long had been mysterious and unattainable—but which now, hard though it was sometimes to believe, had been thrown open to humankind by the beneficence of beings still mistrusted by many, but accepted by others as saviours.

  And why had the Kéthani made their offer to humankind?

  There were millions upon millions of galaxies out there, the aliens said, billions of solar systems, and countless, literally countless, planets that sustained life of various kinds. Explorers were needed, envoys and ambassadors, to discover new life, and make contact, and spread the greetings of the civilised universe far and wide.

  Lincoln stared up at the fading stars and thought what a wondrous fact, what a miracle; he considered the new worlds out there, waiting to be discovered, strange planets and civilisations, and it was almost too much to comprehend that, when he died and was reborn, he too would venture out on that greatest diaspora of all.

  He drove home slowly, tired after the exertions of the night. Only when he turned down the cart track, and saw the white Fiat parked outside the cottage, was he reminded of his daughter.

  He told himself that he would make an effort today. He would not reprimand her for saying nothing about Barbara’s illness, wouldn’t even question her. God knows, he had never done anything in the past to earn her trust and affection. It was perfectly understandable that she had complied with her mother’s last wishes.

  Still, despite his resolve, he felt a slow fuse of anger burning within him as he climbed from the Range Rover and let himself into the house.

  He moved to the kitchen to make himself a coffee, and as he was crossing the hall he noticed that Susanne’s coat was missing from the stand, and likewise her boots from beneath it.

  From the kitchen window he looked up at the broad sweep of the moorland, fleeced in brilliant snow, to the gold and silver laminated sunrise.

  He made out Susanne’s slim figure silhouetted against the brightness. She looked small and vulnerable, set against such vastness, and Lincoln felt something move within him, an emotion like sadness and regret, the realisation of squandered opportunity.

  On impulse he fetched his coat, left the cottage and followed the trail of her deep footprints up the hillside to the crest of the rise.

  She heard the crunch of his approach, turned and gave a wan half-smile. “Admiring the view,” she whispered.


  He stood beside her, staring down at the limitless expanse of the land, comprehensively white save for the lee sides of the dry-stone walls, the occasional distant farmhouse.

  Years ago he had taken long walks with Susanne, enjoyed summer afternoons with her on the wild and undulating moorland. Then she had grown, metamorphosed into a teenager he had no hope of comprehending, a unique individual—no longer a malleable child—over whom he had no control. He had found himself, as she came more and more to resemble her mother and take Barbara’s side in every argument, in a minority of one.

  He had become increasingly embittered, over the years. Now he wanted to reach out to Susanne, make some gesture to show her that he cared, but found himself unable to even contemplate the overture of reconciliation.

  In the distance, miles away on the far horizon, was the faerie structure of the Station, its tower flashing sunlight.

  At last she said, “I’m sorry,” so softly that he hardly heard.

  His voice seemed too loud by comparison. “I understand,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think you do.” She paused. Tears filled her eyes, and he wondered why she was crying like this.

  “Susanne…”

  “But you don’t understand.”

  “I do,” he said gently. “Your mother didn’t want me to know about her illness—she didn’t want me around. Christ, I was a pain enough to her when she was perfectly well.”

  “It wasn’t that,” Susanne said in a small voice. “You see, she didn’t want you to know that she’d been wrong.”

  “Wrong?” He stared at her, not comprehending. “Wrong about what?”

  She took a breath, said, “Wrong about the implant,” and tears escaped her eyes and tracked down her cheeks.

  Lincoln felt something tighten within his chest, constrict his throat, making words difficult.

  “What do you mean?” he asked at last.

  “Faced with death, in the last weeks… it was too much. I… I persuaded her to think again. At last she realised she’d been wrong. A week before she died, she had the implant.” Susanne looked away, not wanting, or not daring, to look upon his reaction to her duplicity.

  He found it impossible to speak, much less order his thoughts, as the realisation coursed through him.

  Good God. Barbara…

  He felt then love and hate, desire and a flare of anger.

  Susanne said, “She made me swear not to tell you. She hated you, towards the end.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I was a bastard. I deserved everything. It’s complex, Susanne, so bloody damned complex—loving someone and hating them at the same time, needing to be alone and yet needing what they can give.”

  A wind sprang up, lifting a tress of his daughter’s hair. She fingered it back into place behind her ear. “I heard from her three months ago—a kind of CD thing delivered from my local Station. She told me that she’d been terribly cruel in not telling you. I… I meant to come up and tell you earlier, but I had no idea how you’d react. I kept putting it off. I came up yesterday because it was the last chance before she returns.”

  “When?” Lincoln asked, suddenly aware of the steady pounding of his heart.

  “Today,” Susanne said. She glanced at her watch. “At noon today—at this Station.”

  “This Station?” Lincoln said. “Of all the hundreds in Britain?” He shook his head, some unnameable emotion making words difficult. “What… what does she want?”

  “To see you, of course. She wants to apologise. She told me she’s learned a great many things up there, and one of them was compassion.”

  Oh, Christ, he thought.

  “Susanne,” he said, “I don’t think I could face your mother right now.”

  She turned to him. “Please,” she said, “Please, this time, can’t you make the effort—for me? What do you think it’s been like, watching you two fight over the years?”

  Lincoln baulked at the idea of meeting this resurrected Barbara, this reconstructed, compassionate creature. He wanted nothing of her pity.

  “Look,” Susanne said at last, “she’s leaving soon, going to some star I can’t even pronounce. She wants to say goodbye.”

  Lincoln looked towards the horizon, at the coruscating tower of the Station.

  “We used to walk a lot round here when I was young,” Susanne said. There was a note of desperation in her voice, a final appeal.

  Lincoln looked at his watch. It was almost ten. They could easily make it to the Station by midday, if they set off now.

  He wondered if he would have been able to face Barbara, had she intended to stay on Earth.

  At last, Lincoln reached out and took his daughter’s hand.

  They walked down the hill, through the snow, towards the achingly beautiful tower of the Onward Station.

  Interlude

  It was a freezing Tuesday evening and I was hurrying to the Fleece, anticipating the roaring fire and a pint or three of creamy Landlord ale, when I saw the muffled figure up ahead. It was a man, lagged in a greatcoat with a scarf bandaged around his ears. Only his eyes showed, as he leaned against the farm gate and stared over the snow-covered landscape at the bypass far below.

  He turned when I approached, and I realised with surprise that it was Jeffrey Morrow. “Jeff,” I said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Something about his posture, the way he was slumped against the gate, alarmed me, and when I drew close enough to look in his eyes I saw the unshed tears there.

  In reply, he just turned to the bypass and pointed a gloved finger. “It happened there, Khalid. Two years ago tomorrow. That bend, right there.”

  I gripped his arm. “Jeff. Come on, I’ll get you a pint.”

  “I was at home, doing some marking. I was expecting Caroline around six… Six came and went, and she didn’t phone. I knew something was wrong, then. You see, she always phoned. I tried her mobile, of course. It was switched off. At seven, Khalid, I was about to phone the police. Then Richard came to the door and told me…”

  A single tear trickled down his cheek, freezing before it reached his mouth. He dashed it off as if in denial, as if to leave it there would be an admission of weakness.

  “And a month later, a sodding month later, Khalid, the Kéthani came…”

  I gripped his arm even tighter and felt an incredible wave of compassion for my friend. “Come on, Jeff. It’s freezing out here. Let’s get inside. You need a drink.”

  He straightened up and took a deep breath, then looked at me and smiled. “I’m fine, Khalid. Yes. A pint. My round, okay?”

  I smiled as we set off side by side. “I won’t argue, Jeffrey.”

  The main bar of the Fleece greeted us with warmth and the hum of conversation. We settled ourselves around our usual table and Jeffrey got the pints in. The usual faces were there, warming themselves before the open fire: Richard Lincoln and Ben Knightly.

  “No Zara tonight?” Richard asked.

  “Ploughed under with work,“ I said. “I told her I’d have a pint or two for her.”

  Jeffrey returned from the bar with a tray of Taylor’s Landlord. He smiled at me. There was no sign of the emotion he had experienced minutes earlier.

  At one point that evening, he said, “I’ve been having… I suppose you’d call it counselling… about what happened to Caroline.”

  Ben said, “Haven’t the Kéthani set up… I don’t know what you’d call them—clinics? Anyway, places you can go to talk about what’s happened, how it affects you personally…” He stopped there. Ben, alone in our group, was not implanted, and he had never told us the reason why—but that’s another story.

  All across the world, stricken citizens remembered life before the Kéthani, grieving over loved ones who had died—died and gone to oblivion everlasting—while accepting the gift for themselves and suffering the consequences of renewed grief and guilt. I’d read about the psychiatric clinics set up to help us.

  Richard Lincoln
said, “Representatives of the Kéthani, humans recruited to do the administrative work of the aliens, have started counselling stations. The thing is, there are rumours.”

  I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “Look, this is just hearsay. But I’ve heard that these counsellors… well, that they’re actually representatives of the Kéthani race.”

  We stared at him. As a ferryman, his words on these matters carried a certain weight.

  “You’ve heard that at the Station?” I asked.

  “Unofficially, of course. Personally, I don’t know what to think…”

  Jeffrey said, with a distant look in his eyes, “To think of it, I might have been pouring out my woes to an extraterrestrial.”

  For the rest of the night, we chatted about the pros and cons of this idea.

  The thought of the Kéthani amongst us…

  Jeffrey said, “Whether I’ve been talking to a human or an alien,” he smiled, “I know that it’s done me some good. Some things just can’t be handled alone.”

  I was to remember these words, a few weeks later, when Jeffrey suffered another tragic loss.

  TWO

  ONWARD STATION

  That winter was the coldest in living memory, and January saw a record fall of snow across the north of England. On the last Monday of the month I sat in the warmth of the staff room and gazed out across the snow-sealed moorland, my mind completely blank. Miller, Head of Maths, dropped himself into the opposite seat, effectively blocking my view.

  “Jeffrey,” he said. “You take year thirteen for Film Studies, don’t you?”

  “For my sins.”

  “What do you make of the Hainault girl?”

  “I was away when she started,” I said. It had been mid-December, and I’d had other things on my mind.

  “Oh, of course. Sorry. Well, you take them today, don’t you?”

  “Last period. Why?”

  He had the annoying habit of tapping the implant at his temple with a nicotine-stained finger, producing an insistent, hollow beat.