With trembling fingers I ripped open the envelope and pulled out the single folded sheet.
I sank to the floor, disbelieving. I moaned with grief intensified, made more painful than I ever imagined possible.
I read her note a second time, then again and again, as if by doing so I might change what she had written, and what it meant.
My Dear Jeff, she began, and continued with words I would never forget, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry—but I can’t go on. I love you, but it can’t last, nothing lasts. I’ve known joy with you and perhaps it is best to end that joy at its height, rather than have it spoil.
And I wanted to cry, no! I wanted the chance to vent my anger and tell her how very wrong she was.
You know I don’t want immortality. Life is so very hard to bear at the best of times. To face life everlasting… I feel at peace when I contemplate what I’m going to do—please try to understand. She was going to leave her house—had left her house—and walk to the reservoir, and give herself to the frigid embrace of the water… How could I understand that? How could I understand an act so irrational, an act of violence provoked by fears and pressures known only to herself? How often since have I wished I had known her better, had been a lover capable of being there when she needed me most?
I can hear you asking how could I do this to you. But, Jeff, you will survive—you have all the time in the universe. In a hundred years I will be a fleeting memory, and in a thousand…
They say that time heals all wounds.
And she had finished, With all my love, Claudine.
I spend a long time contemplating the events of the past, going over my time with Claudine and wondering where I went wrong. I blame myself, of course, for not persuading her to undergo the implantation process, for not being able to show her how much I loved her. I blame myself for not giving her reason enough to go on living.
I am haunted by her words, You have all the time in the universe…
At night I sit in the darkened lounge and stare out at the rearing edifice of the Onward Station, marvelling at its beauty and contemplating the terrible gift of the Kéthani.
Interlude
Five years had passed since the coming of the Kéthani, and after the first two years of turbulent change—two years of rioting and protest around the world—order had been restored. Hundreds of thousands of returnees came back to Earth, and though they had been subtly changed by the experience of dying and being reborn, none were the zombies or monsters that the Jeremiahs and prophets of doom had forecast.
Slowly, things began to change on Earth. So slowly, so gradually, that it was almost unnoticeable.
That evening—after a long day on the ward where I worked as an implant surgeon—I was enjoying a pint in the Fleece when Jeffrey Morrow said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but over the past few years things have got better on Earth, don’t you think?”
We looked at him. Jeffrey had greyed in the years since I first got to know him, which wasn’t at all surprising, considering what he’d undergone. He was a quiet man, much given to introspection and thoughtful silences. After Claudine’s death, we had persuaded him to remain in the area, to stay on at the school in Bradley, to face the terrors of his past and not to run away.
Considering what Jeffrey had experienced in recent years, this latest pronouncement was a little unexpected, to say the least.
“Got better?” I said. “How do you mean?”
“I came across an academic paper the other day,” Jeffrey said, “by some high-up in the UN.” He was on his fourth pint, and his eyes were distant. “It was a breakdown of the incidences of conflict around the world. And do you know something—since the coming of the Kéthani, cases of armed conflict have decreased globally by almost seventy per cent.”
Richard Lincoln nodded. “I’ve heard the same. Not only that, violence in general has fallen around the world. For instance, murder rates are in decline.”
That led us to speculate about the reasons for this gradual amelioration of the human condition…
Richard said, “Well, you know what I think—”
Zara laughed and hummed the spooky opening bars of the Twilight Zone. “The aliens are amongst us, Richard?”
He pointed at her, mock stern. “Oh, ye of little faith. The Kéthani have powers which we can’t even dream of, so it stands to reason that they’d come among us to help us along the way.”
I thought about that, then said, “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Richard. But I think that that might be unnecessary.”
Richard downed half his pint. “Go on.”
“Think about it. We die. They transport us to their homeworld. They bring us back to life. And we come back—changed. I’ve heard it said that people come back… I don’t know… better, improved.”
Richard objected, “But that doesn’t disprove my thesis, Khalid!”
“No—what I’m saying is that if things have got better on Earth, if there is less conflict, then maybe it’s caused less by the activity of the Kéthani down here and more by what the Kéthani did to us up there. Maybe it’s the mentality of the returnees that is changing things.” It was a nice thought—and how was I to know that, in a few years time, I would have first-hand knowledge of just how the resurrection process could render change in an individual?
Zara said, “Whichever it is, we have the Kéthani to thank.”
For the first time that night, Ben spoke up. He was the only one among our group who was not implanted, and we had never questioned him as to why this was so. Some things, we thought, were just too personal to share.
“Perhaps,” he said, “the people who come back, the returnees, aren’t really the people they were. Perhaps,” and he smiled as he said this, making me think that he wasn’t entirely serious, “perhaps they’re aliens in disguise?”
We laughed and argued amongst ourselves for a while, and then Ben said, “I’ve often wondered about the bastards who die and come back. I mean, the really evil people. Killers, despots, psychotics. They come back changed—I know that. But who’s to say that they are who they once were?”
Zara smiled. “You don’t really think…?”
Ben laughed. “Of course not. I’ve read enough to realise that the maniacs are somehow mentally altered up there, for the better. Made humane.” He shook his head, his gaze lost in the leaping flames of the open fire. “It makes you wonder, though, exactly what does happen…”
Talk drifted onto other subjects.
Ben remained quiet for the rest of the evening. It was only later—a year later, to be precise—that he told us the reason why he was not implanted, and why he wondered at the process of transformation undergone by the returnees.
THREE
THE KÉTHANI INHERITANCE
That winter, two events occurred that changed my life. My father died and, for the first time in thirty years, I fell in love. I suppose the irony is that, but for my father’s illness, I would never have met Elisabeth Carstairs.
He was sitting in the lounge of the Sunny View nursing home that afternoon, chocked upright in his wheelchair with the aid of cushions, drooling and staring at me with blank eyes. The room reeked of vomit with an astringent overlay of bleach.
“Who’re you, then?”
I sighed. I was accustomed to the mind-numbing, repetitive charade. “Ben,” I said. “Benjamin. Your son.”