“You can phone the hospital later,” I said at one point. “I’ll drive you over tomorrow if you like.”
She shook her head, not meeting my gaze. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not that bothered. She’ll come back when she’s better.”
I paused. “What happened between you two?” I asked at last.
She smiled up at me. She was so pretty when she smiled; then again, she had a certain sullen hauteur that was equally as attractive when she deigned not to smile.
“Oh, we have never got on,” she said. “I was always my father’s favourite. I think she was jealous. They fought a lot—it might have been because of me. I don’t know.”
“Are they separated?”
Claudine looked at me with her oversized brown eyes. She shook her head. “You might have heard of him—Bertrand Hainault? He was a philosopher, one of those popular media intellectuals you don’t have over here, I think.”
I shook my head. “Sorry. Not up on philosophy.”
“My father took his life last year,” she said quietly. “He and mother were fighting constantly, but I think it was more than that… I don’t know. It was all so confusing. I think it might have been a protest, too—a protest at what they were doing.”
Something caught in my throat. “He wasn’t implanted?”
“Oh, no. He was opposed to the whole process. He argued his position in televised debates and in a series of books, but of course no one took any notice.”
Except you, I thought, beginning at last to understand the enigma that was Claudine Hainault.
She changed the subject, suddenly brightening. “I’ll help you with the dishes, then can we watch a DVD?”
Later we sat on the settee, drank wine and watched a classic Truffaut. Claudine curled up beside me, whispering comments on the film to herself. She fell asleep leaning against me, and I watched the remainder of the movie accompanied by the sound of her breathing and the pleasant weight of her shampooed head against my shoulder.
Rather than wake her, at midnight I carefully lowered her to the cushions and covered her with a blanket. In the pulsing blue light from the TV, I sat for a while and watched her sleeping.
In the morning I was woken by the unfamiliar sound of someone moving about the house. Then the aroma of a cooked breakfast eddied up the stairs. I had a quick shower and joined Claudine in the kitchen. She was sliding fried eggs and bacon onto plates. The coffee percolator bubbled. She could hardly bring herself to meet my eyes, as if fearing that I might consider this rite of domesticity an unwelcome escalation of the intimacy we had shared the night before.
Over breakfast, I suggested that we go for a long walk across the moors. It was a dazzling winter’s morning, the sky blue and the snow an unblemished mantle for as far as the eye could see.
I drove Claudine back to her house to change into walking boots and a thick coat. We left the car at my place and started along the bright, metalled lane. Later we struck off across the moors, following a bridleway that would take us, eventually, to the escarpment overlooking the valley, the reservoir and a scattering of farmhouses.
Somewhere along the way her mittened hand found my cold fingers and squeezed. She was smiling as I exaggerated the misfortunes of the school football team, which I organised. I would never have thought that I could be so cheered by something as simple as her smile.
Claudine looked up, ahead, and her expression changed. I followed the line of her gaze and saw the sparkling pinnacle of the Onward Station projecting above the crest of the hill.
Her mouth was open in wonder. “God… This is the closest I’ve been to it. I never realised it was so beautiful.”
She pulled me along, up the incline. As we climbed, more and more of the Station was revealed in the valley below. At last we stood on the lip of the escarpment, staring down. My attention was divided equally between the alien edifice and Claudine. She gazed down with wide eyes, her nose and cheeks red with the cold, her thoughts unguessable.
It was not so much the architecture of the Station that struck the onlooker, as the material from which it was made. The Station—identical to the thousands of others situated around the world— rose from the snow-covered ground like a cathedral constructed from glass, climbing to a spire that coruscated in the bright winter sunlight.
As we watched, a pale beam—weakened by the daylight—fell through the sky towards the Station, bringing a cargo of returnees back home.
I put my arm around Claudine’s shoulders. She said, “The very fact of the Station is like the idea it promotes.”
I made some interrogational noise.
“Beguiling,” she said. “It is like some Christmas bauble that dazzles children, I think.”
“For ages humankind has dreamed of becoming immortal,” I said, staring at her. “Thanks to the Kéthani…”
She laid her head against my shoulder, almost sadly. “But,” she said, gesturing in a bid to articulate her objection. “But don’t you see, Jeff, that it really doesn’t matter? Whether we live seventy years, or seven thousand—it’s still the same old futile repetition of day-to-day existence.”
Anger slow-burned within me. “Futile? What about our ability to learn, to experience, to discover new and wondrous things out there?”
She was shaking her head. “It is merely repetition, Jeff—a going through the motions. We’ve done all these things on Earth, and so what? Are we any happier as a race?”
“But I think we are,” I said. “Now that the spectre of death is banished—” I stopped myself.
Claudine just shook her head.
Into the silence, I said, “I honestly don’t understand why you aren’t implanted.”
She looked up at me, so young and vulnerable. “I’ll tell you why, Jeff. I’ve read the philosophical works of the Kéthani and the other races out there—or at least read summaries of them. My father and I… in the early days we went through them all. And do you know what?”
I shook my head, suddenly weary. “No. What? Tell me.”
She smiled up at me, but her eyes were terrified. “They understand everything, and have come to the realisation that the universe and life in it is just one vast mechanistic carousel. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Claudine, Claudine. Of course it doesn’t. But we must live with that. There never were any answers, unless you were religious. But you must make your own meaning. We have so much time ahead of us to live for the day, to love—”
She laughed. “Do you know something? I don’t believe in love, very much. I saw my parents’ relationship deteriorate, turn to hate. I can feel it,” she looked at me, “but I can’t believe that it will last.”
“It changes,” I began, then fell silent.
She squeezed my hand. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m hungry. I’ll prepare lunch, okay?”
We set off down the hillside, passing the Station. A ferryman driving a Range Rover pulled into the car park, delivering another dead citizen. Tonight, the darkness would pulse with white light as the bodies were transported to the Kéthani starship in orbit high above.
After lunch that afternoon we lounged before the roaring fire and talked. When the words ran out it seemed entirely natural, an action of no consequence to the outside world, but important only to ourselves, that we should seek each other with touches and kisses, coming in silence to some mutual understanding of our needs.
That night, as we lay close in bed, we stared through the window at the constellations. The higher magnitude stars burned in the freezing night sky, while beyond them the sweep of the Milky Way was a hazy opaline blur.