Eric Brown - Kéthani

Enter a revamped Graham Leicester. He looked twenty years younger, leaner and fitter; gone was the rubicund, veined face, the beer belly. Even his hair had grown back.

He circulated, moving from group to group, shaking hands and hugging his delighted friends.

He saw us and hurried over, gave Sam a great bear hug and winked at me over her shoulder. I embraced him. “Great to see you back, Graham.”

“Good to be back.”

His wife was beside him. “We’re having a little do down at the Fleece, if you’d like to come along.”

Graham said, “A pint of Landlord after the strange watery stuff I had out there…” He smiled at the thought.

Thirty minutes later we were sitting around a table in the main bar of our local, about ten of us. Oddly enough, talk was all about what had happened in the village during the six months that Graham had been away. He led the conversation, wanting to know all the gossip. I wondered how much this was due to a reluctance to divulge his experiences on Kéthan.

I watched him as he sipped his first pint back on Earth.

Was it my imagination, or did he seem quieter, a little more reflective than the Graham of old? He didn’t gulp his beer, but took small sips. At one point I asked him, nodding at his half-filled glass. “Worth waiting for? Can I get you another?”

He smiled. “It’s not as I remembered it, Stuart. No, I’m okay for now.”

I glanced across the table. Sam was deep in conversation with Graham’s wife, Marjorie. Sam looked concerned. I said to Graham, “I’ve read that other returnees have trouble recalling their experiences out there.”

He looked at me. “I know what they mean. It’s strange, but although I can remember lots…” He shook his head. “When I try to talk about it…” He looked bewildered. “I mean, I know what happened in the dome, but I can’t begin to express it.”

I nodded, feigning comprehension.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do now?”

His gaze seemed to slip into neutral. “I don’t know. I recall something from the domes. We were shown the universe, the vastness, the races and planets… The Kéthani want us to go out there, Stuart, work with them in bringing the word of the Kéthani to all the other races. I was offered so many positions out there…”

I had to repress a smile at the thought of Graham Leicester, ex-Oxenworth hardware store owner, as an ambassador to the stars.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do?” I asked.

He stared into his half-drunk pint. “No,” he said at last. “No, I haven’t.” He looked up at me. “I never thought the stars would be so attractive,” he murmured.

Graham and his wife left at nine, and the drinking continued. Around midnight Sam and I wended our way home, holding onto each other as we negotiated the snowdrifts.

She was very quiet, and at home took me in a fierce embrace. “Stuart,” she whispered, “rip all my clothes off and make love to me.”

Sometimes the act of sex can transcend the mere familiar mechanics that often, after a year of marriage, become rote. That night, for some reason, we were imbued with a passion that recalled our earlier times together. Later we sprawled on the bed, sweating and breathless. I was overcome with an inexpressible surge of love for the woman who was my wife.

“Stuart,” she whispered.

I stroked her thigh. “Mmm?”

“I was talking to Marjorie. She says Graham’s changed. He isn’t the man he was. She’s afraid.”

I held her. “Sam, he’s undergone an incredible experience. Of course he’s changed a little, but he’s still the same old Graham underneath. It’ll just take time for him to readjust.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, before saying, “Perhaps, Stuart, they take our humanity away?”

“Nonsense!” I said. “If anything, they give us a greater humanity. You’ve heard all those stories about dictators and cynical businessmen who return full of compassion and charity.”

She didn’t reply. Perhaps five minutes later she said, “Perhaps the Kéthani take away our ability to love.”

Troubled, I pulled Sam to me and held her tight.

A few days later I arrived home with a book for Samantha. It was Farmer’s critically acclaimed account of the arrival of the Kéthani and its radical social consequences.

I left it on the kitchen table and over dinner said, “I found this in the library. Fascinating stuff. Perhaps you’d like to read it.”

She picked up the book and leafed through it, sniffed, with that small, disdainful wrinkle of her nose I found so attractive.

“Wouldn’t understand it if I did,” she said.

After dinner she poured two glasses of red wine and joined me in the living room. She curled next to me on the sofa.

“Stuart…” She began.

She often did this—said my name and then failed to qualify it. The habit at first drove me crazy, but soon became just another of her idiosyncrasies that I came to love.

“Do you know something?” she began again. “Once upon a time there were certainties, weren’t there?” She fingered her implant, perhaps unaware that she was doing so.

I stared at her. “Such as?”

“Death,” she said. “And, like, if you loved someone so much, then you were certain that it would last forever.”

“Well, I suppose so.”

“But not any more.”

“Well, death’s been banished.”

She looked up at me, her gaze intense. “When I met you and fell in love, Stuart, it was like nothing I’d experienced before. You were the one, kind and gentle and caring. You loved me—”

“I still do.”

She squeezed my hand. “I know you do, but…”

“But what?”

“But with the coming of the Kéthani, how long will that last? Once, true love lasted forever—until death—or it could if it really was true. But now, when we live forever, on and on, for centuries…” She shook her head at the enormity of that concept. “Then how can our love last so long?”

And she began crying, copiously and inconsolably.

Even later, when I awoke in the early hours and watched a beam of light pulse high into the dark sky, Sam was still sobbing beside me.

I reached out and pulled her to me. “I love you so much,” I said.

They were the last words I ever spoke to her, in this incarnation.

She was still asleep early the following morning when I dressed and left the house. I spent an average day at the faculty, conducting a couple of seminars on chivalry in the French medieval epic. And from time to time, unbidden but welcome, visions of my wife flooded my consciousness with joy.

That night, driving past the Onward Station, I stared in wonder at the pulsing light.

I saw the oncoming truck, its blinding headlights bearing down, but too late. I swerved to avoid the vehicle, but not fast enough to avert the shattering impact.

I died instantly, apparently. Various pieces of the truck’s cab sheared through the car, decapitating me and cutting me in half, just below the ribs. Much later, over a pint in the Fleece, Richard Lincoln laughingly reported that I’d been the messiest corpse he’d ever dealt with.

The last thing I recalled was the light—and, upon awakening, the first thing I beheld was another light, just as bright.

I remember a face hovering over me, telling me that the resurrection was complete, and that I could begin the lessons when I next awoke.

At least, I think the word was “lessons”. Perhaps I’m wrong. There is so much about that period that I cannot fully recall, or, if I do recall, do so vaguely. I know I was on the Kéthani home planet for exactly six months, though in retrospect it seems like as many weeks.

As with every other resurrectee, I was housed in a dome with five other humans. There were perhaps as many teachers as resurrectees, though whether they were humans or Kéthani wearing human forms I cannot say. Beyond the wall of the dome was a pastoral vista of rolling green glades and meadows, which must surely have been some virtual image designed to sedate us with the familiar.