I pulled harder, and the icy object appeared around the brickwork. It reflected the light of the torch.
The pistol was affixed to the elasticated rope I had given Khalid the week before his death.
I ducked from the hearth, pulling the pistol after me. The rope reached the limit of its elasticity, about a metre from the fireplace.
“It’s okay,” he said, noticing my distaste as I stared at the weapon. “It was loaded with a single bullet.”
I looked at him. “You messed up the room, made it look as if there’d been a struggle. Then, when Zara was due…” I lifted the pistol to my chest. “Bang,” I said and released my grip on the weapon.
It crashed against the brass cowling and rattled up the chimney breast. “Ingenious,” I said.
“It was a measure of my anger, my immaturity, my jealousy,” Khalid said. “I’ve come to realise that now. We live and learn.” He smiled. “Or rather, in my case, we die and learn.”
I hesitated. “What now?” I said.
“I had to tell someone,” Khalid said. “Now it’s up to you. You can tell the authorities, and they’ll charge me for wasting valuable police time. I’d understand—”
I stopped him. “You’ve come to see what a mistake you made,” I said. “Nothing else matters.”
He released a long, pent-up breath. “I could kill a pint, Richard.”
We stepped from the house, turned, and hurried along the lane. Then we stopped and stared into the night sky.
High over the moors, arching into the darkness, was a bolt of pure white energy, the latest consignment of dead to be beamed from the Onward Station towards the waiting Kéthani starship.
I looked at Khalid. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
“I considered going among the stars,” he said, “an ambassador for the Kéthani. Maybe I’ll go later, Richard. I have all the time in the universe, after all.”
I smiled.
“I’ll remain on Earth,” Khalid said, “working at the hospital. The implantation process is important. I feel as if I’m doing some good in the world. There are a lot of people out there who refuse the implants. Perhaps I can tell them something of the wonder and enlightenment I experienced up there.”
And as the dead illuminated us on their journey heavenwards, we made our way to the Fleece.
Interlude
I met Stuart Kingsley a couple of years after my resurrection. A lecturer in medieval French at Leeds University, he moved into the village that summer and began drinking at the Fleece, where he soon gravitated into the orbit of the Tuesday night crowd. He was a quiet, thoughtful man who got on well with everyone. Stuart had his serious side—he was a highly respected academic with a string of weighty tomes to his name—but I like to think that our friendship brought out the fun-loving side of his personality. When drunk, he liked nothing more than telling long, convoluted, and hilarious stories about his experiences in life.
On one particular Tuesday night in the main bar, talk turned to the resurrection process, and what actually went on in the domes of the Kéthani home planet. It was a topic of conversation that we never exhausted.
As I was the only returnee in the group, it was natural that Stuart should elicit my opinion. “What happened, Khal?” he asked in his soft Devon burr.
I shrugged and gave a vague description of what I recalled of the resurrection dome.
I found it hard to speak of my time on Kéthan, as if the desire to do so had been edited from my mind. Some people cite the fact that returnees find it hard to talk about the experience as further evidence of Kéthani duplicity: why not allow us to speak openly about what happens within the domes?
I said as much now. “But I have a theory.”
Jeff Morrow smiled. “Let’s hear it then, Khalid.”
“I think that we’re not allowed a true memory of what happens there because the resurrection process, and the tuition that follows, is too… too alien for our minds to grasp. I don’t mean that it’s too horrific, merely that it is totally alien and ungraspable to the human mind.” I paused, then went on, “In place of the truth, the Kéthani fill us with a version of what happens. We recall human instructors, pacific and Zen-like, and views from the domes of Edenlike tranquillity.”
“But,” Stuart said, “the reality is unknowable to the human mind.”
I shrugged. “Something like that,” I said.
“But whatever happens,” Elisabeth said, “returnees are changed on some fundamental level. I mean, look at Khalid here.” She gripped my hand. “Sorry, Khal.”
I smiled. “I readily admit that I’m a changed man,” I said and left it at that.
Elisabeth turned to Dan Chester. “What about Lucy? Have you noticed a change in her since she returned?”
Dan regarded his pint, considering the question. Lucy was a teenager now, living with Dan in the village. I saw her from time to time, a slim, dark thirteen year-old who always had time for a chat. On these occasions I had always thought her more mature than her contemporaries.
Dan smiled. “It’s hard to say… but I think perhaps she was a little more… thoughtful, reflective, after her return.”
The conversation switched to other topics.
It was a couple of weeks later when I noticed that Stuart was taking a lot of interest in the barmaid, Sam. She was in her mid-twenties, at a guess, blonde and exhibitionist and a little loud, but friendly and always ready with a smile. Not to sound too patronising about it, she was the type of person I thought perfectly suited to a vocation pulling pints.
That Stuart Kingsley should find her attractive was, frankly, bizarre; that he should not only find her attractive but, a month later—after a whirlwind affair—should propose marriage, we found not only odd but alarming.
Richard Lincoln didn’t lose an opportunity to rib Stuart mercilessly about his choice of partner, and behind Stuart’s back he gave the marriage six months, at most. The truth to tell, we agreed with him.
A year later, our doubts were dispelled. Stuart and Sam were living proof that opposites not only attract, but complement each other. Sam became a vital part of the group and brought even more humour and vitality from the university lecturer.
One week before Stuart’s death, we were in the Fleece and talk again turned to the resurrection domes. I cannot recall that much about the conversation—it was late, and I was five pints the worse—but I do remember that Sam was almost… well, frightened at the prospect of life after death.
And I recall her saying she feared that, if either she or Stuart died, the Kéthani would drive them apart.
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.