Richard Lincoln stepped forward and gripped my arm. “Stuart, Sam isn’t here.”
“What—?” I began.
“Two days after your accident,” Richard said, “she took her own life. She left a note, saying she wanted to be resurrected with you.”
I nodded, trying to work out where that left us, now. She had never read anything about the Kéthani. How could she have known that the Kéthani never conducted the rebirth of loved ones together in the same dome, for whatever reasons?
I contemplated her return in two days’ time and joined my friends in the Fleece for a quiet pint.
In the two days I was on my own, in the house we had shared for a year, I thought of the woman who was my wife and what she had done because she loved me.
I moved from room to room, the place empty now without Sam’s presence to fill it, to give it life and vitality. Each room was haunted by so many memories. I tried to avoid the bedroom where she had slit her wrists, and slept in the lounge instead.
And, amazingly, something human stirred within me, something very like the first blossoming of love I had felt for Samantha Gardner. It came to me that knowledge and learning was all very well, but was nothing beside the miracle that is the love and compassion we can feel for another human being. I faced the prospect of Sam’s return with a strange mixture of ecstasy and dread.
The Station seemed even more alien today, rearing like an inverted icicle from the moorland. I left my car in the snow and hurried inside. Director Masters ushered me into the private reception room, where I paced like something caged and contemplated the future.
It all depended, really, on Sam, on her reaction to what she had undergone on the home planet of the Kéthani.
Long minutes later the sliding door sighed open and she stepped through, smiling tentatively at me.
My heart gave a kick.
She came into my arms, crying.
“Sam?” I said, and I had never feared her words so much as now.
“We have a lot to talk about,” she said. “I learned so much out there.”
I nodded, at a loss for words. At last I said, “Have you decided…?”
She stared into my eyes, shook her head. “Let’s get this over with,” she said and, taking my arm, led me into the reception lounge before I could protest.
I endured the following hour with Sam’s family and mutual friends, and then we made our excuses and left the Onward Station. It was a short drive home across the moors, fraught with silence. More than once I almost asked whether she would remain with me on Earth.
But it was Sam who broke the silence. “Do you understand why I did it, Stuart? Why I…”
I glanced at her as I turned into the driveway. “You feared losing me?”
She nodded. “I was desperate. I… I thought that perhaps if I experienced what you were going through, then it might bring us closer together when we got back.”
I braked. “And has it?”
She stared at me without replying, and said, “What about you, Stuart? Do you still love me?”
“More than ever.”
Quickly she opened the door and hurried from the car.
The house was warm. I fixed coffee and we sat’ in the lounge, staring out through the picture window at the vast spread of the snow-covered moorland. The sun was going down, laying gorgeous tangerine strata across the horizon. In the distance, the Onward Station scintillated in the dying light.
Sam said, “I became a different person on Kéthan.”
I nodded. “So did I.”
“The small concerns of being human, of life on Earth, seem less important now.”
I wanted to ask her if her love for me was a small concern, but was too afraid to pose the question.
“Could you remain here on Earth?” I asked.
She stood and paced to the window, hugging herself, staring out. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not after what I’ve learned about what’s out there. What about you?”
I was silent for a time. “Do you remember what you said all those months ago, about the Kéthani taking away our ability to feel love?”
She looked at me, nodded minimally.
“Well, do you think it’s true for you?” I asked.
“I… I don’t know. What I feel for you has changed.”
I wanted to ask her if I could compete with the allure of the stars. Instead I said, “I have an idea, Sam. There are plenty of vacancies for couples out there. We could explore the stars together.”
Without warning she hurried from the room, alarming me.
“Sam?”
“I need time to think!” she cried from the hall. I heard the front door slam.
A minute later I saw her, bundled up in her parka and moon boots, tramping across the snow before the house, a tiny figure lost in the daunting winter wilderness.
She stopped and gazed up into the night sky.
I looked up, too, and stared in wonder.
Then, slowly, I dropped my gaze to the woman I loved. She was struggling through the deep snow, running back towards the house and waving at me.
My heart hammering, I rushed from the house to meet her.
Overhead the night was clear, and the stars were appearing in their teeming millions, a vast spread of brilliant luminosity promising the universe.
Interlude
“In the first five years after the coming of the Kéthani,” Stuart Kingsley was saying, “the population of Earth did inevitably increase.”
We were sitting in the beer garden of the Fleece and watching the sun going down over the moors in great orange and red banners; it was high summer, and the day had been blistering.
Andy Souter, the latest member of the Tuesday night group, had initiated this line of conversation by asking what the present population of the world might be. He wanted to know if any more resurrectees were staying out there to do the work of the Kéthani.
Stuart went on, “Now, thirteen years later, I’d say things have reached an equilibrium. The same number come back as stay out there.”
Richard Lincoln laughed. “What Stuart’s getting round to saying is that the world’s population stands at around five billion, give or take a few.”
Andy said, “But that wasn’t always the case, was it?” He shrugged and mopped a strand of ginger curls from his perspiring forehead. “I mean, in the early days how did we cope with the population explosion?”
Dan Chester pointed at him. “We had help.”
“Help?”
“Think about it. How could we have coped with a population growing by ten per cent every few months? How could we house these people, let alone feed them? We had help.”
Andy said, “The Kéthani?”
Richard nodded. “Didn’t you notice the fleet of white juggernauts coming to and going from the Onward Station all night long for years? The Kéthani beamed down all the provisions we’d ever need to supply a burgeoning population.”
“And now?”
“No longer necessary,” Richard said.
“In fact,” Stuart said, “the world’s population is undergoing a gradual decline. In a few years the place will be depopulated as citizens take to the stars…”
We sat and thought about this for a while, and then Sam asked if anyone had seen the latest computer-animated Bogart movie.
I turned to Stuart and asked if he’d thought any more about leaving Earth. After his and Sam’s resurrection, they had seriously considered the option.
He stared into his pint, then said, “It’s strange, but we had more or less decided that that’s what we were going to do. We still contemplate it, from time to time… Then,” he smiled sheepishly, “then we slip back into the old routine: work, the village, friends. I don’t know, maybe one day…”