Eric Brown - Kéthani

Around seven that evening I received a phone call.

“Richard?”

“Khalid! Where are you?”

“I’m at home. I was wondering… could you call round?”

“Of course. I’m on my way.”

Two minutes later I stepped into the lounge where, six months earlier, I had seen Khalid sprawled dead, a bullet hole in his chest.

Now he stood in the middle of the room, as large as life. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, identical to the one I had seen saturated in blood; it seemed a lifetime ago, now.

We live life with a mere abstract understanding of what the implants—the symbol of our immortality—mean to us. The concept of continued life is just too vast a notion for our puny human brains to grasp. I found it hard to believe, as I stared at him across the room, that Khalid had died and been returned.

I stepped forward and hugged him. “It’s great to have you back, Khal.”

He smiled, his eyes filmed with tears. “You don’t know how good it is to be back.”

He fixed me a coffee, and we sat before the empty hearth while I brought him up to date with what had been happening in the village in his absence.

We seemed to be playing around the edges of, what we really wanted to talk about. I had the burning desire to ask him, firstly, what it had been like on the home planet of the Kéthani. Returnees rarely talk of their experiences on Kéthan, and then only in the most abstract of terms. It’s as if the desire to expound on the circumstances of their resurrections had been programmed out of them by their alien benefactors. The first returnees had been besieged by the media with offers of riches for their stories. They all refused.

Then, of course, I wanted to ask him about what had happened on the evening of his death.

After a period of silence, Khalid stared into the empty fire. He played with his coffee cup. “I had a lot of time to think about life while I was up there,” he said.

I nodded. “It must have been a profound experience. “

“We never saw the Kéthani, you know. We were schooled by human instructors, who oddly enough seemed alien themselves. Calm, centred, all knowing.”

“What was it like?”

He shook his head. “We were housed in vast domes, looking out over idyllic pastures.” This was the stock line the returnees came out with. “I suspect the landscape wasn’t what Kéthan was like at all, just some virtual scene manufactured to soothe us. I met many people. We meditated a lot, were instructed in what I can only call Kéthani-Zen.” He laughed. “And me, a good ex-Muslim!”

He paused, then continued, “I looked into myself, Richard. I saw what a shallow, self-centred person I was, before. The way I treated Zara, for instance.”

I looked away, embarrassed.

He went on, “It might have looked like the perfect marriage from the outside, but I wasn’t the perfect husband.” He smiled to himself. “In retrospect, it’s little wonder she left me for someone else.”

I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable. To change the subject, I said, “The night you… you died. Zara found you and came round.” I shrugged. “Everyone thought you’d interrupted an intruder. There was a scuffle…”

He stared at me, his gaze uncomfortably penetrating. “I’ve just told the police that I came from upstairs to find a masked man in the lounge. I picked up the first thing to hand—a poker,” he indicated the implement, standing innocently in its holder, “and went for him. The man drew a gun and fired before I could react. I told the police that I had no hope of recognising him.”

“So the killer’s still out there somewhere,” I said.

Khalid lifted his gaze and stared at me. “Except, Richard, that isn’t what happened.”

My stomach turned. I recalled meeting Zara in the supermarket, tall and elegant and quite beautiful. I wondered how she could have brought herself to kill—or cause to have killed—her husband, no matter how domineering he might have been.

Despite my objections to Dan Chester’s theory in the pub all those months ago, I knew what was coming.

“You mean,” I found my voice at last, “it was Zara or Simon?”

He smiled. “No,” he said, “but at first that’s what I’d planned.”

I stared at him. “I’m sorry? You’ve lost me.”

“I was consumed by so much rage and hatred in the months after Zara left me,” he said. “I never thought I could feel such anger towards anyone. And then I had that run-in with Simon. All I wanted was revenge. Life seemed pointless. Then it came to me, how I could kill two birds with one stone, as it were.”

I felt a growing emptiness inside me. “I’m not sure I follow…”

“I planned to come back and incriminate either Zara or Simon. I wasn’t sure which. Maybe both of them. I’d come back and tell the police that they’d entered the house, we’d argued, then they’d pulled a gun, and bang… But I learned a lot up there, Richard. I learned that I shouldn’t blame others, but look into myself and seek the causes there.”

The silence stretched. “You killed yourself,” I murmured at last. “But how on Earth…? I mean, they never found the gun—”

He silenced me by reaching behind a cushion on the sofa and handing me a torch. I stared at it. For a second I thought that this was the murder weapon, ingeniously disguised.

But Khalid was indicating the open hearth. “Look up the chimney, Richard. It’s okay, it’s clean.”

I stared at him, switched on the torch, then manoeuvred myself into the roomy fireplace. Khalid had removed the grate, and I crouched and shone the torch upwards, illuminating draughty brickwork.

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Reach up, behind that projecting stone.”

I did as instructed, and my hand touched something icy cold. I pulled, but was met with resistance. “It isn’t coming,” I said, and I knew why, then.

I pulled harder, and the icy object appeared around the brickwork. It reflected the light of the torch.

The pistol was affixed to the elasticated rope I had given Khalid the week before his death.

I ducked from the hearth, pulling the pistol after me. The rope reached the limit of its elasticity, about a metre from the fireplace.

“It’s okay,” he said, noticing my distaste as I stared at the weapon. “It was loaded with a single bullet.”

I looked at him. “You messed up the room, made it look as if there’d been a struggle. Then, when Zara was due…” I lifted the pistol to my chest. “Bang,” I said and released my grip on the weapon.

It crashed against the brass cowling and rattled up the chimney breast. “Ingenious,” I said.

“It was a measure of my anger, my immaturity, my jealousy,” Khalid said. “I’ve come to realise that now. We live and learn.” He smiled. “Or rather, in my case, we die and learn.”

I hesitated. “What now?” I said.

“I had to tell someone,” Khalid said. “Now it’s up to you. You can tell the authorities, and they’ll charge me for wasting valuable police time. I’d understand—”

I stopped him. “You’ve come to see what a mistake you made,” I said. “Nothing else matters.”

He released a long, pent-up breath. “I could kill a pint, Richard.”

We stepped from the house, turned, and hurried along the lane. Then we stopped and stared into the night sky.

High over the moors, arching into the darkness, was a bolt of pure white energy, the latest consignment of dead to be beamed from the Onward Station towards the waiting Kéthani starship.

I looked at Khalid. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“I considered going among the stars,” he said, “an ambassador for the Kéthani. Maybe I’ll go later, Richard. I have all the time in the universe, after all.”