The government had issued warnings that under no circumstances must citizens approach the towers. The army had been mobilised, and experts were being called in—though experts in precisely what was never explained.
One hour after the arrival of the towers, the next stage of the phenomenon occurred.
A bright white light, arching through the heavens in a vast parabola, fell and hit the summit of the obelisk. The light dazzled, and drew gasps from the surrounding crowd, but was in itself completely silent. It lasted merely seconds, and then was gone.
But I swore that the tower changed.
It had possessed some kind of life before, but— and maybe this was my imagination, playing tricks, or again a trick of retrospect— I was convinced that now the tower was possessed of intelligence.
We flocked to touch the surface of the tower, and I was flooded with a strange sense of wellbeing. I felt as if something, or someone, had attempted to communicate with me.
The arc of light had descended on the towers at the same instant all around the world, apparently. The radio reporter near Lewes was almost speechless as he tried to convey the effect.
One hour later, the cold getting to us, Zara and I made our reluctant way home, turned on the TV—every channel was carrying the story live— and watched the unfolding of the greatest event in the history of the world.
Over the course of the next day we watched reports from hundreds of locations around the globe. It was as if the towers had been positioned systematically, equal distances apart, on every continent, country and island. We watched a succession of fazed politicians attempt the reassure their citizens that everything was under control, that there was no danger or threat from the towers. In some instances, it was obvious that the politicians were not believed, as angry mobs in Malaysia and Sudan rioted and attempted to burn down their respective towers. When the flames and embers died, it was revealed that not the slightest damage had been done to the unearthly constructions.
Precisely one day after the arrival of the towers, the heads of every country in the world appeared live on television and gave more or less the same address.
They had, they reported, been contacted by the agents responsible for the imposition of the towers. The agents were extraterrestrial in origin, and hailed from the planet orbiting the star Delta Pavonis, almost twenty light years from Earth. They called their planet Kéthan. They had come in peace, and reassured the citizens of Earth that there was absolutely no cause for concern.
It was not reported how the aliens had made the contact and communicated their message, which fuelled wild speculation in the press for twenty-four hours. Sources close to the world governments let slip that officials had been in meetings with impeccably dressed humanoids shortly before the Kéthani, as they came to be known, issued their communiqué to the world. Later, government officials across the world denied that they had had face-to-face meetings with the Kéthani, and the accepted story now is that all communications were via televisual links.
Two days after the arrival of the towers, newspapers, television and radio were running stories that asked the obvious question: what did the Kéthani want from Earth?
The answers, depending on the quality of the paper you read, ranged from scare stories straight from B-movies along the lines of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers to more peaceful scenarios that cast the aliens as Messiah figures come to put the planet to rights.
Three days after that fateful noon arrival, a tired-looking prime minister went on air and addressed the British nation.
Something in the expression on the man’s face, a kind of manic euphoria combined with exhaustion and perhaps a dash of disbelief, told me that this was what we had been waiting for.
I gripped Zara’s hand as we sat side by side on the sofa and watched with mounting incredulity as the leader of our country stared into the camera and told his citizens why the Kéthani had come to Earth.
Over the course of the next fifteen years I came to know a group of people in the village of Oxenworth who became dear to me. It is through the eyes of these people that I wish to tell the story of how the coming of the Kéthani affected the lives of everyone on Earth. Much has been written about the gift of the elusive aliens, and I cannot claim that what follows is in any way original. What is special about this document, I think, is that it concentrates on the small-scale lives of ordinary, everyday people during this unique time of change.
A long time after the coming of the Kéthani, I approached my friends and asked them to describe, in their own words, their stories in the light of the Kéthani’s gift to humanity. For the most part I have reproduced their stories in full, with only minor corrections and emendations. In a couple of instances my friends, for whatever reasons, were unable or unwilling to record their reactions, and I have taken the liberty of producing documents recounting their stories, having of course first obtained their permission. I have included two of my own first-hand accounts of life during the period of transition, for the sake of completeness.
Nothing was ever the same again, after the Kéthani came. It is safe to say that the life of everyone on Earth was changed irrevocably from that momentous day. This is the story of how my life and the lives of my friends were transformed, forever and ever…
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.