Eric Brown: Kéthani

Everyone remembers what they were doing on the day the Onward Stations, those towering monuments to the fact of extraterrestrial intelligence, appeared on Earth.

I was in my mid-twenties, finishing my internship at Bradley General Hospital in the wild moorland of West Yorkshire. Life was good; I enjoyed my work, and the prospect of specialisation. I had met a wonderful woman a year earlier—Zara, whom I would marry in eighteen months—and I was adapting well to life in the country after twenty-five years of living in Bradford.

And then the Kéthani came, and for a while everything was in turmoil.

On the day planet Earth was made aware that sentient alien life existed out there beyond the solar system, I had the privilege of witnessing the appearance of the strange alien construct on the harsh winter landscape of the moorland above the village of Oxenworth.

It was midday on a freezing Monday in mid-January, and I had set off early for a late shift at the hospital. What was in my head as I drove from the village and climbed the narrow lane onto the brow of the moors, from which it seemed the entire world could be viewed? Well, as ever I was thanking my lucky stars, and no doubt enjoying the panorama. After the cramped shabbiness of my life in Bradford, the unspoilt landscape of the moorland, giving way to rolling farmland in the distance, seemed pristine and limitless. Not unlike my future—though little did I realise this at the time.

I was slowing down to appreciate the view to my right when it happened.

To my left, something flashed. It was so bright that it caused me to brake and peer through the side window, giving an involuntary cry of surprise.

The crest of the moorland, perhaps half a mile above me, was shimmering—the kind of corrugated effect produced by heat haze above a road in summer, except that this shimmer extended vertically perhaps five hundred metres into the clear blue winter sky.

I just sat and stared.

The shimmer vanished, and in its place I made out a slim obelisk fashioned, I thought instantly, from ice. It reflected the sun in golden bursts, and where its steep planes did not coruscate with the winter sunlight, they had a dazzling silver aluminium sheen.

I know it’s a cliché, but I did not believe my eyes.

I was convinced that I was seeing things, that the needle-slim tower was an effect of the sunlight on the snow, or perhaps an icicle in the foreground which my brain processed as much larger than it was, which was ridiculous, of course. But at the time I was dazed and shaken, to say the least.

I started the car and drove on 100 metres, to be as close to the thing as the road would take me. Then I climbed out and began walking towards it, leaving the tarmac and wading through the snow-covered heather.

I was filled with wonder. I could not analyse my feelings then, though I’ve had plenty of time since to work out why I felt what I did. The inexplicable arrival of the obelisk was sufficient in itself to rouse awe from the most sceptical of people, and, if that were not enough, then the actual physical beauty of the construct, its alien perfection, tugged something in the heart. I say alien perfection, but this is not the wisdom of hindsight: the strange architecture of the tower spoke of a design never dreamed up by a human mind. As I drew closer and stared up, craning my neck to peer at its summit some 500 metres above me, I made out the odd swirling patterns etched into the material of its rearing flanks— ice, I mistakenly thought of the material then. There was something ineluctably other in the curlicue whorls that climbed the needle, something random like an abstract pattern, and yet obeying a logic that spoke almost of some kind of language.

At the base of the tower was a rectangular block, and set into its sides was what appeared to be a triangular door, and to either side long, horizontal viewscreens. These were the most identifiable aspect of the tower, and yet still possessed a strangeness not of this world.

I fumbled with my mobile and got through to Zara. She was still on holiday, preparing lessons for the start of the new term.

“Khalid?” She sounded worried. I rarely used the mobile. “What is it?”

“Zara. Drop what you’re doing and look out of the front window.”

“What…? Khalid, are you—?”

“Do it!”

A silence of five seconds, then a soft, “Oh, my… Khalid, what is it? Oh… oh, it’s so beautiful.”

“I’m standing right beside it. Can you see my car on the road? Look, get yourself up here.”

“I’m coming, Khalid.” She cut the connection.

My heart was beating fast. I just wanted to hold Zara and cry. Perhaps it was some odd effect of the tower, its alien influence. Perhaps the Kéthani were manipulating us, even then.

I heard a car on the road behind me, and then another. Within a minute there were half a dozen cars lined up in the lane, their owners making their way through the snow and heather, gazing up in silent wonder. Behind them, I made out the roads leading from Oxenworth. The sun dazzled on a dozen car windscreens.

I recognised a couple of people in the small group: Richard Lincoln, who I’d chatted to a few times in the Fleece, and Jeff Morrow, a local teacher. They joined me.

I said, “It just appeared. Like magic. It wasn’t there… and then… the air shimmered and it just… appeared.” I realised I was babbling and shut up.

Richard stepped forward, leaving the group and approaching the silver building that formed the base of the tower. He reached out tentatively, touched the material with his fingertips and didn’t take his hand away.

I often wonder what drew him to the construct, if it were some knowledge that soon, very soon, he would be in the employ of our alien visitors.

He looked back at us, still connected to the wall by his fingertips. “It’s warm,” he whispered.

We all approached then and touched the silver flank, and Lincoln was right. The material seemed… well, alive. I swore I felt, other than warmth, a pulse beneath my hand. I tried to peer through, but the material was opaque and nothing of the interior could be seen.

Jeff Morrow said, almost to himself, “And now this…”

It took a few seconds before I realised what he meant. Caroline, his wife, had been killed in a car accident a couple of weeks before Christmas… and as if that were not enough for him to cope with, the questioning that accompanies grief was compounded by this mystery.

Later, when the Kéthani explained their mission on Earth, Jeff Morrow’s grief would be tested even further. Perhaps he intuited this even then, or perhaps the dead light in his eyes as he beheld the tower was merely sadness that he could not share the moment with his wife.

I heard a sound behind me, my name. It was Zara, tramping through the snow, her sari hitched up to her knees. In her other hand she clutched, incongruously, a transistor radio.

“Khalid,” she called. “It’s not the only one! There are reports coming in… there’s hundreds of them… thousands, all over the world.”

She joined us and upped the volume. The tinny voice of an on-the-scene reporter filled the air. “… standing beside the tower on the south downs a mile west of Lewes. Reports are that the tower just appeared out of the blue at midday precisely. I have with me an eyewitness…”

I listened, but with only half an ear, to a largely incoherent account of the wonder that had occurred in Sussex.

I held Zara to me, a strange emotion welling in my chest.

Ten minutes later it seemed that the entire population of Oxenworth and the surrounding villages had poured out and were massed at the foot of the tower. We stood in a crowd five deep, staring up and listening to Zara’s radio as reports flooded in from around the world. The story was the same from Austria to Zaire, Australia to Zanzibar: at the same time, all around the globe, the towers had appeared in relatively unpopulated areas beside small villages or towns. There were no reports of their appearing in cities, nor in uninhabited areas like deserts. The initial estimate, garnered in the first hour by the BBC, was that tens of thousands had appeared across the face of the Earth. The actual figure, it eventuated, was precisely 110,000.