Kéthani

SEVEN A HERITAGE OF STARS

I had never really given much thought to my death, or what might follow. Perhaps this was a reaction to the fact that in my youth, before the arrival of the Kéthani, I had been obsessed with the idea of my mortality, the overwhelming thought that one day I would be dead.

Then the Kéthani descended like guardian angels, and my fear of the Grim Reaper faded. In time I became a happy man and lived life to the full.

That night, though, it was as if I had an intimation of what was about to happen. I was driving home from the university, taking the treacherous, ice-bound road over the moors to Oxenworth. I passed the towering obelisk of the Onward Station, icy and eerie in the starlight. As I did so, a great actinic pulse of light lanced from its summit, arcing into the heavens towards the awaiting Kéthani starship. Although I knew intellectually that the laser pulse contained the demolecularised remains of perhaps a dozen dead human beings, I found the fact hard to credit.

For a few seconds, as I stared up at the light, I wondered at the life that awaited me when I shuffled off this mortal coil.

Ironic that this idle thought should have brought about the accident. My attention still on the streaking parabola, I saw the oncoming truck too late.

I didn’t stand a chance.

Perhaps a week before I died, I arrived home to find Samantha in tears.

We had been married for just over a year, and I was still at that paranoid stage in the relationship when I feared that things would crumble. Our marriage had been so perfect I assumed that it could only end in tears. I knew my feelings for Sam, but what if she failed to reciprocate?

When I stepped into the living room and found her curled up on the sofa, sobbing like a child, my stomach flipped with fear. Perhaps this was it. She had discovered her true feelings; she had made a mistake in declaring her love for me. She wanted out.

She had a book open beside her. I saw that it was a copy of my third monograph, a study of gender and matriarchy in the medieval French epic.

“Sam, what the hell…?”

She looked up at me, eyes soaked in tears. “Stuart, I don’t understand…” She fingered the Kéthani implant at her temple, nervously.

I hurried across to her and took her in my arms. “What?”

She sobbed against my shoulder. “Anything,” she managed at last. “I don’t understand a bloody thing!”

My friends at the Fleece, the Tuesday night crowd including Richard and Khalid and Jeff and the rest, had mocked me mercilessly when I started going out with Samantha. To them she represented the archetype of the dumb blonde barmaid. “I’m sure you’ll find lots to talk about when the pleasures of the flesh wear thin,” Richard had jibed one night.

Attraction is a peculiar phenomenon. Sam was ten ears my junior, a full-figured twenty-five-year-old high school dropout who worked in the local Co-op and made ends meet with occasional bar work. Or that was how the others perceived her. To me she was an exceptionally sensitive human being who found me attractive and funny. We hit it off from the start and were married within three months.

She pulled away from me and stared into my eyes. She looked deranged. “Stuart, why the hell do you love me?”

“Where do you want me to begin?”

She wailed. “I just don’t understand!”

She picked up my book, opened it at random, and began reading, holding it high before her like a mad preacher.

“… as Sinclair so perceptively states in Milk and Blood: ‘The writing and the page exist in a symbiotic relation that serves to mark the feminine “page” as originally blank and devoid of signification…’ a dichotomy that stands as a radical antithesis to Cixous’s notion of writing the body.”

She shook her head and stared at me. “Stuart, what the hell does it all mean?” She sobbed. “I’m so bloody stupid—what do you see in me?”

I snatched the book from her and flung it across the room, a gesture symbolising my contempt for theory at that moment.

I eased her back onto the sofa and sat beside her. “Sam, listen to me. A Frenchman comes to England. He speaks no English—”

She snorted and tried to pull away. I held onto her. “Hear me out, Sam. So, Pierre is in England. He never learned to speak our language, so he doesn’t understand when someone asks him the time. That doesn’t make him stupid, does it?”

She stared at me, angry. “What do you mean?”

I gestured to the book. “All that… that academic-speak, is something I learned at university. It’s a language we use amongst ourselves because we understand it. It’s overwritten and convoluted and ninety-nine people out of a hundred wouldn’t have a clue what we we’re going on about. That doesn’t make them stupid.”

“No,” she retorted, “just uneducated.”

She had often derided herself for her lack of education. How many times had I tried to reassure her that I loved her because she was who she was, university degree or not?

That night, in bed, I held her close and said, “Tell me, what’s really the matter? What’s upsetting you?”

She was silent. The bedroom looked out over the moors, and I always left the curtains open so that I could stare across the valley to the Onward Station. Tonight, as we lay belly-to-back, my arms around her, I watched a spear of white light lance towards the orbiting starship.

She whispered, “Sometimes I wonder why you love me. I try to read your books, try to make sense of them. I wonder what you see in me, why you don’t go for one of those high-flying women in your department.”

“They aren’t you.”

She went on, ignoring me, “Sometimes I think about what you do, what you write about, and… I don’t know… it symbolises what I can’t understand about everything.”

“There,” I joked, “you’re beginning to sound like me.”

She elbowed me in the belly. “You see, Stuart, everything is just too much to understand.”

“Einstein said that we don’t know one millionth of one per cent of anything,” I said.

“You know a lot.”

“It’s all relative. You know more than Tina, say.”

“I want to know as much as you.”

I laughed. “And I could say I want to know as much as Derrida knew.” I squeezed her. “Listen to me. We all want to know more. One of the secrets of being happy is knowing that we’ll never know as much as we want to know. It doesn’t matter. I love you, sugar plum.”

She was silent for a long while after that. Then she said, “Stuart, I’m frightened.”

I sighed, squeezed her. The last time she’d said that, she confessed that she was frightened I would leave her. “Sam, I love you. There I was, an unhappy bachelor, never thinking I’d marry. And then the perfect woman comes along…”

“It’s not that. I’m frightened of the Kéthani.”

“Sam… There’s absolutely nothing to be frightened of. You’ve heard what the returnees say.”

“I don’t mean the Kéthani, really. I mean… I mean, what happens to us after we die. Listen, what if you die, and when you come back from the stars… I don’t know, what if you’ve seen more— more than there is here? What if you realise that I can’t give you what’s out there, among the stars?”

I kissed her neck. “You mean more to me than all the stars in the universe. And anyway, I don’t intend to die just yet.”

Silence, again. Then a whisper, “Stuart, you’re right. We don’t know anything, do we? I mean, look at the stars. Just look at them. Aren’t they beautiful?”

I stared at the million twinkling points of light spread across the ice-cold heavens.

“Each one is a sun,” she said, like an awestruck child, “and millions of them have planets and people… well, aliens. Just think of it, Stuart, just think of everything that’s out there that we can’t even begin to dream about.”

I hugged her to me. “You’re a poet and a philosopher, Samantha Gardner,” I whispered. “And I love you.”

A couple of days later we attended the returning ceremony of Graham Leicester, a friend who’d died of a heart attack six months earlier.

I’d never before entered the Onward Station, and I was unsure what to expect. We left the car in the snow-covered parking lot and shuffled across the slush behind the file of fellow celebrants. Samantha gripped my hand and shivered. “C-cold,” she brrr’d.

A blue-uniformed official, with the fixed smile and plastic good looks of an air hostess, ushered us into a reception lounge. It was a big, white-walled room with a sky blue carpet. Abstract murals hung on the walls, swirls of pastel colour. I wondered if this was Kéthani artwork.

A long table stood before a window overlooking the white, undulating moorland. A buffet was laid out, tiny sandwiches and canapés, and red and white wine.

Graham’s friends, his neighbours and the regulars from the Fleece, were already tucking in. Sam brought me a glass of red wine and we stood talking to Richard Lincoln.

“I wonder if he’ll be the same old happy-go-lucky Graham as before?” Sam asked.

Richard smiled. “I don’t see why not,” he said.

“But he’ll be changed, won’t he?” Sam persisted. “I mean, not just physically?”

Richard shrugged. “He’ll appear a little younger, fitter. And who knows how the experience will have changed him psychologically.”

“But don’t the aliens—” Sam began.

Richard was saved the need to reply. A door at the far end of the room opened and the Station Director, Masters, stepped into the reception lounge and cleared his throat.

“First of all, I’d like to welcome you all to the Onward Station.” He gave a little speech extolling the service to humankind bestowed by the Kéthani and then explained that Graham Leicester was with close family members right at this moment, his wife and children, and would join us presently.

I must admit that I was more than a little curious as to how the experience of dying, being resurrected, and returning to Earth after six months had affected Graham. I’d heard rumours about the post-resurrection period on Kéthan: humans were brought back to life and ‘instructed’, informed about the universe, the other life-forms that existed out there, the various tenets and philosophies they held. But I wanted to hear firsthand from Graham exactly what he’d undergone.

I expected to be disappointed. I’d read many a time that returnees rarely spoke of their experiences on Kéthan: that either they were reluctant to do so or were somehow inhibited by their alien saviours.

Five minutes later Graham stepped through the sliding door, followed by his wife and two teenage daughters.

I suppose the reaction to his appearance could be described as a muted gasp—an indrawn breath of mixed delight and amazement.

Graham had run the local hardware store, a big, affable, overweight fifty-something, with a drinker’s nose and a rapidly balding head.

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.

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.

I endured the following hour with Sam’s family and mutual friends, and then we made our excuses and left the Onward Station. It was a short drive home across the moors, fraught with silence. More than once I almost asked whether she would remain with me on Earth.

But it was Sam who broke the silence. “Do you understand why I did it, Stuart? Why I…”

I glanced at her as I turned into the driveway. “You feared losing me?”

She nodded. “I was desperate. I… I thought that perhaps if I experienced what you were going through, then it might bring us closer together when we got back.”

I braked. “And has it?”

She stared at me without replying, and said, “What about you, Stuart? Do you still love me?”

“More than ever.”

Quickly she opened the door and hurried from the car.

The house was warm. I fixed coffee and we sat’ in the lounge, staring out through the picture window at the vast spread of the snow-covered moorland. The sun was going down, laying gorgeous tangerine strata across the horizon. In the distance, the Onward Station scintillated in the dying light.

Sam said, “I became a different person on Kéthan.”

I nodded. “So did I.”

“The small concerns of being human, of life on Earth, seem less important now.”

I wanted to ask her if her love for me was a small concern, but was too afraid to pose the question.

“Could you remain here on Earth?” I asked.

She stood and paced to the window, hugging herself, staring out. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not after what I’ve learned about what’s out there. What about you?”

I was silent for a time. “Do you remember what you said all those months ago, about the Kéthani taking away our ability to feel love?”

She looked at me, nodded minimally.

“Well, do you think it’s true for you?” I asked.

“I… I don’t know. What I feel for you has changed.”

I wanted to ask her if I could compete with the allure of the stars. Instead I said, “I have an idea, Sam. There are plenty of vacancies for couples out there. We could explore the stars together.”

Without warning she hurried from the room, alarming me.

“Sam?”

“I need time to think!” she cried from the hall. I heard the front door slam.

A minute later I saw her, bundled up in her parka and moon boots, tramping across the snow before the house, a tiny figure lost in the daunting winter wilderness.

She stopped and gazed up into the night sky.

I looked up, too, and stared in wonder.

Then, slowly, I dropped my gaze to the woman I loved. She was struggling through the deep snow, running back towards the house and waving at me.

My heart hammering, I rushed from the house to meet her.

Overhead the night was clear, and the stars were appearing in their teeming millions, a vast spread of brilliant luminosity promising the universe.