Eric Brown: Kéthani

Five minutes later we found out. We were in a small reception lounge furnished with a few chairs and a table bearing wine and fruit juice. Normally, more people would attend a returning ceremony, and a larger lounge would be required: but Davey had made few friends during his thirty years on Earth.

The sliding door at the back of the room opened, and Davey stepped through. The woman beside me gasped, and I understood her reaction. Even I, who had been expecting a marked metamorphosis, was taken aback.

Gone was the overweight adult-child, the sallow-faced, balding misfit unable to establish eye contact or hold a conversation.

Davey Emmett seemed taller, slimmer. His face was lean, even handsome; he appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He wore a neat suit and strode purposefully into the room, smiling.

He shook our hands, greeting us by name. “It’s good to see you, Khalid.”

We exchanged inane pleasantries for a while. I recalled my own resurrection ceremony, and the mutual inability of the returnee to express quite what he had been through, and the circumspection of the celebrants faced with the miracle of someone returned from the dead.

“Director Masters informed me of my mother’s passing,” Davey said. Masters was head of the Onward Station. “Khalid, if you could drive me home via the cemetery…?”

“Of course.”

The meeting broke up five minutes later and I drove Davey from the towering crystal obelisk of the Station, through the snow-covered landscape towards Oxenworth.

After a minute, I broke the silence. “I saw your mother during her illness, Davey. She wasn’t in pain, and didn’t fear death. She had her own strong faith.”

Davey nodded. “I know. I remember her telling me all about it.”

I glanced across at him. “How much do you recall from… from before?”

He considered for a second or two, frowning. “It’s strange, but I recall everything. Who I was, my thoughts and reactions. But it’s very much like an adult looking back on his childhood. We have only a refracted, blurred image of who that person was. It’s almost like looking back at the life of a stranger.”

He was silent for a while, staring out at the snow-softened landscape undulating to the distant moorland horizon.

“The Kéthani remade me completely, Khalid. They took what they had, the fundamental David Emmett, and rebuilt a fully functioning, intelligent human being from the unpromising raw material. The odd thing is, I feel that they maintained a continuity. I am David Emmett, but whole, now.”

“I think I know what you mean, Davey. I died ten years ago. The person who came back… well, he was much changed, too.”

We came to the cemetery and I turned into the long drive.

We climbed from the car, into the teeth of the subzero wind, and I led Davey across to where his mother was interred.

Her grey marble headstone projected from the fleecy snow, bearing her name, date of birth and death, and a line from a Buddhist text: We each of us have a choice of eternities.

There were few deaths these days, and the cemetery was little used. The headstone next to Mrs. Emmett’s recorded that Claudine Hainault had been buried there twelve years previously.

I felt tears stinging my eyes.

Davey stood at the foot of his mother’s grave, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. The cold wind stirred his full head of black hair.

I said, “Your mother asked me to explain why she couldn’t be here to meet you, Davey. And she asked me to give you this.” I passed him the letter.

He took it and looked at me. “You mean, why she couldn’t face the person I would be—the person I might have been, but for the accident?”

I smiled to myself. He was ahead of me and had saved me from an awkward explanation.

“Do you understand how it must have been, from her point of view?” I said inadequately.

“I understand,” he said. “I just wonder how much her belief system was a result of the guilt she felt after the accident. I wonder if she rationalised that she was atoning in this life for sins accrued in a previous one… and if she believed in reincarnation in the hope that my next existence might be a better one.” He smiled to himself. “This was all before the coming of the Kéthani, of course.”

I shook my head and shrugged, smiling sadly at the thought of Mrs. Emmett.

“The terrible thing was,” Davey went on, “that my mother wasn’t responsible for the accident. We were standing at the side of the road and I just pulled my hand from hers and ran off, into the path of a car… Thanks to the Kéthani, I remember everything.” He paused, then said, “My mother blamed herself, of course.”

He lifted his head and stared into the heavens, and I saw that his eyes were filmed with tears.

“I wonder if she’d forgive me?” he asked at last.

“Your mother was a good and forgiving person,” I said.

He stared at the cold, grey headstone. “Would things have turned out differently, for her, but for that incident?”

I said at last, “Who can tell?”

“I wonder if she is happy, wherever she is?”

I let that question blow away on the cold wind, and said instead, “Can I drive you home?”

He hesitated. “No. No, thanks, Khalid.” He pointed across the valley, to High Fold Farm. “It’s not far, I’ll walk.”

I shook his hand and made my way back to the car.

I thought of the way the Kéthani had remade us, and then it came to me that, since my return, I had never contacted Zara to apologise for how I had treated her over the years. I knew in my heart that it was my duty to do so, but even then I honestly doubted whether I would be man enough to go through with it.

The Kéthani improve us all, to varying degrees.

I drove from the cemetery, then braked on the road that climbs over the moors. I gazed down on a desolate scene of continuous snow and rank upon rank of headstones, those terrible reminders of the dead.

Davey Emmett was the only living figure in the vast and inimical landscape. As I watched, he opened the letter from his mother and read it slowly. Then he raised his head and stared into the sky, at the stars just beginning to appear in the heavens.

I looked at the road ahead, then started the car and drove towards Oxenworth and home.

Over the twenty years since the coming of the Kéthani, the Tuesday night group of friends at the Fleece had grown, evolved, and become for me a second family… or even a first family, if the truth be told. I came to love these quiet, ordinary people, and I was heartened by the fact that my acquaintance with them would continue far into the future.

I arrived late at the Fleece that night, after a busy shift on the implant ward. It was almost ten o’clock by the time I shrugged off my coat, grabbed a welcome pint, and eased myself into my customary seat beside the fire.

Sam said, “Khal, we were beginning to think you’d never make it.”

“I was beginning to worry, too,” I laughed, taking a swallow of the amber nectar.

Over the years, my actual workload at Bradley General had decreased—there were fewer citizens to be implanted, these days, as more and more people elected to go out among the stars, or to stay out there immediately after their resurrections. I had cut down my hours in the ward to just four a day: today’s rush had been a statistical blip.

Dan Chester said, “I’ve just had this from Lucy. They’re…” he smiled and shook his head, as if in wonderment. “I find this hard to believe, but they’re aboard a Kéthani faster-than-light ship beyond the Nilakantha Stardrift, en route to their second posting on an Earth-like world orbiting a super-massive red giant… Anyway,” he finished, passing me an information pin and a screen.