Eric Brown - Kéthani

I wore a body I recalled from perhaps ten years ago, leaner than my recent form, healthier. My face was unlined. I felt physically wonderful, with no aftereffects of the accident that had killed me.

The resurrectees in my dome did not socialise. None were British, and none so far as I recall spoke English. We had our lessons, one to one with our instructors, and then returned to our separate rooms to eat and sleep.

The lessons consisted of meditation classes, in which we were instructed simply to empty our minds of everything. We were given “poems” to read, pieces that reminded me of haiku and koan, which although bearing much resemblance to Zen, were subtly other, alien.

After a while we were allowed access to what were called the library files. These consisted of needle-like devices that could be fed into a wallscreen, upon which materialised the texts of every book ever printed on Earth. They even had every one of my own dozen volumes.

But more. I soon discovered that there were other texts available, those not of Earth but penned by poets and philosophers and storytellers from many of the far-flung races of the universe. All were translated into English, and some were comprehensible and some so obscure as to be unfathomable. I struggled over texts too profound for my intellect, and then found others that expanded my awareness of being with the same heady rush of knowledge I experienced in my late teens when reading Freud and Lacan for the very first time.

I recall too—but this is vague, and I suspect our Kéthani overseers of having somehow edited it from my consciousness—being visited by other teachers, not those who usually instructed us. At the time I knew there was something odd about them. They did not speak to us, I seem to recall, but reached out, touched our brows, and later I would wake to find myself bequeathed knowledge new to me.

I became voracious, questing after all that was new in the universe. Perhaps I had become jaded on Earth, my mind dulled by the repetitive nature of my job, stressed by having to fit my original research into my spare time and study breaks. On Kéthan, it was as if my mind had been made suddenly a hundred per cent more receptive. I discovered alien writers and philosophers whose wisdom superseded the tired tenets of Earth’s finest thinkers.

I became aware, by degrees—surely a process carefully monitored by the Kéthani, so as not to overload our minds with too much information too soon—of the vast cornucopia of otherness existing out there, of the million teeming worlds and ways of thinking that awaited my inspection.

I recalled what Sam had said that night, which seemed like a lifetime ago, “Just think of it, Stuart, just think of everything that’s out there that we can’t even begin to dream about.”

And Sam? Was she in my thoughts? Did I miss her as I had, during the first months of our marriage, when research had taken me to Paris for three painful weeks?

I thought of her often during my first days there, and then, I must admit, not so frequently. Soon she was supplanted in my thoughts by the sheer wonder of what surrounded me, the possibilities suddenly open to my experience, the amazing inheritance that death and resurrection was offering.

At first I felt guilty, and then less so. Perhaps, even then, some survival mechanism was kicking in: I was forcing myself to realise that our love was doomed, a short-term thing, a mayfly liaison that could not hope to compete with the eternal allure of the stars.

She would understand, one day.

What had she said, so wisely? “But now, when we live forever, on and on, for centuries… Then how can our love last so long?”

At night I would lie awake and stare through the dome, marvelling at the spread of stars high overhead, the vast and magnificent drifts and nebulae. Their attraction was irresistible.

Towards the end of my stay on Kéthan, an instructor gave me a needle containing an almost endless list of vacancies open for my consideration. Teachers were required on primitive worlds in the Nilakantha Stardrift; tutors aboard vessels called quark-harvesters plying routes at the very periphery of the universe; ethnographers on planets newly discovered; sociologists on ancient worlds with complex rites and abstruse rituals…

I wept when I thought about the future, the wonder of discovery that awaited me, and the thought of telling Sam of my decision.

Six months to the day after my death, I was returned to Earth and the Onward Station high on the Yorkshire moors.

I came awake in a small room within the Onward Station. Director Masters was there to greet me. “Welcome back, Mr. Kingsley,” he said. “Your friends are in the reception lounge, but perhaps you’d care for a few minutes alone?”

I agreed, and he slipped from the room.

A china pot of tea, a cup and saucer, stood on a small table, all ridiculously English and twee.

I thought of Graham Leicester’s reception a while ago and recalled that he had spent time with his family before greeting his friends in the lounge. I had expected Sam to be the first person to welcome me home, and her absence relieved me.

I wondered if she was wary of the person I had become—the being remade by the Kéthani. What had she said, the night before my death? “Perhaps the Kéthani take away our ability to love.”

No fool, Samantha…

I stepped from the small room and entered the lounge. There were half a dozen familiar faces awaiting me—I had expected more and was instantly put out, and then troubled by the expression on their faces.

Richard Lincoln stepped forward and gripped my arm. “Stuart, Sam isn’t here.”

“What—?” I began.

“Two days after your accident,” Richard said, “she took her own life. She left a note, saying she wanted to be resurrected with you.”

I nodded, trying to work out where that left us, now. She had never read anything about the Kéthani. How could she have known that the Kéthani never conducted the rebirth of loved ones together in the same dome, for whatever reasons?

I contemplated her return in two days’ time and joined my friends in the Fleece for a quiet pint.

In the two days I was on my own, in the house we had shared for a year, I thought of the woman who was my wife and what she had done because she loved me.

I moved from room to room, the place empty now without Sam’s presence to fill it, to give it life and vitality. Each room was haunted by so many memories. I tried to avoid the bedroom where she had slit her wrists, and slept in the lounge instead.

And, amazingly, something human stirred within me, something very like the first blossoming of love I had felt for Samantha Gardner. It came to me that knowledge and learning was all very well, but was nothing beside the miracle that is the love and compassion we can feel for another human being. I faced the prospect of Sam’s return with a strange mixture of ecstasy and dread.

The Station seemed even more alien today, rearing like an inverted icicle from the moorland. I left my car in the snow and hurried inside. Director Masters ushered me into the private reception room, where I paced like something caged and contemplated the future.

It all depended, really, on Sam, on her reaction to what she had undergone on the home planet of the Kéthani.

Long minutes later the sliding door sighed open and she stepped through, smiling tentatively at me.

My heart gave a kick.

She came into my arms, crying.

“Sam?” I said, and I had never feared her words so much as now.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she said. “I learned so much out there.”

I nodded, at a loss for words. At last I said, “Have you decided…?”

She stared into my eyes, shook her head. “Let’s get this over with,” she said and, taking my arm, led me into the reception lounge before I could protest.