Kéthani

Interlude

Every Tuesday night, come rain or shine, Zara and I headed for the Fleece at nine o’clock and settled ourselves in the main bar. Over the years the circle of our friends grew to become a crowd, but at that point—a year after the coming of the Kéthani—we were a group of four: Zara, myself, Richard Lincoln and Jeff Morrow. Lincoln was a ferryman, employed by the local Onward Station, Morrow a teacher at Zara’s school over in Bradley. I had known Lincoln a little before the Kéthani came—he was a fixture in the Fleece— and over the past few months we had come to know him better. He was a big, quiet, reserved man who gave the air of harbouring a sadness it was not in his nature to articulate.

That particular night he seemed even more subdued than normal. A television set was playing in the corner of the room, the sound turned low. It was not a regular fitting in the main bar, but the landlord had installed it because Leeds had been playing in Europe that night, and no one had bothered to turn it off.

Lincoln nursed his pint and stared at the flickering images, as if in a daze.

He was married to a big, red-headed woman called Barbara, who had left him that summer and moved down south. She had never, in all my time in the village, accompanied him to the Fleece. In fact, I had never seen them out together. When I had come across her in the village, she had always seemed preoccupied and not particularly friendly. It was an indication of Lincoln’s reserve that, when Barbara walked out that summer, he told us that she was taking a long holiday with her sister, and never again mentioned his wife.

Zara and I were living together at the time, and planning our marriage in the summer. We were at that stage of our relationship where we were consumed by mutual love; I felt it must have been obvious to all our friends, like a glow. I held complex feelings for Richard Lincoln; I did not want to flaunt my happiness with Zara, when his relationship with his own wife had so obviously failed—and oddly, at the same time, I felt uneasy in his company, as if what he had gone through with Barbara compromised the possibility of my lasting happiness with my bride-to-be. I received the impression that the older, more experienced Lincoln was watching me and smiling to himself with the wry tolerance of the once-bitten.

“My God,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “I sometimes wonder…”

His pronouncement startled us. He was staring at the TV screen. Zara stopped talking to Jeff about their school and said, “What, Richard?”

He nodded towards the news programme. “Look at that. Chaos. How will it end, for God-sake? I sometimes wonder why I became a ferryman…”

In silence we turned to the screen and watched. A year of turmoil had followed the coming of the Kéthani. The human race, suspicious and hostile at the best of times, did not trust the alien race that had arrived unannounced bearing its gift from the stars.

There had to be a catch, some said. No race could be so altruistic. We were, of course, judging the Kéthani by our own standards, which is always a mistake when attempting to understand the motivating forces of others.

The report showed scenes of rioting in the Philippines. Manila was ablaze. The government, pro-Kéthani, had been toppled by the anti-Kéthani armed forces, and a bloody coup was in progress. 3000 citizens were reported dead.

The scene shifted to a BBC reporter in Pakistan. There, the imams had declared the Kéthani evil and the implants an abomination. Hundreds of implanted citizens had been attacked and slaughtered.

The world was in chaos. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had lost their lives in the rioting. Two camps were emerging from the chaos: those opposed to the Kéthani and those who embraced the gift of the aliens with wholehearted enthusiasm. The divide happened on a global level: some countries accepted the gift, while others rejected it. Many nations were torn by internal opposing forces.

“Do you mind?” Lincoln asked, gesturing to the screen. “I don’t think I can take much more.”

Perhaps sensing that his disquiet had its source much closer to home, we murmured that of course he could turn it off.

He downed his pint and-turned to us. “Did I tell you that Barbara was… is… fervently opposed to the Kéthani?” he asked.

The divide was repeated on a smaller scale, splitting families, even husbands and wives.

“I was fifty years old when the Kéthani came,” Lincoln said now, staring into his empty glass, “and I’d felt that something was wrong for years. When they came, I thought that was obviously the answer.” He gestured at the screen. “I wonder now how things will end?”

Little by little, over the next few months, I came to understand what Richard Lincoln was going through.