She stopped, and the silence seemed to ring like an alarm. When I looked up at her, I saw tears streaming unchecked down her wrinkled cheeks. I found a tissue and passed it to her, and she blotted the tears with a gesture at once dignified and pitiful.
“I’ve had to live with the guilt for so long,” she said, “even though my acceptance of karma should lead me to be able to see guilt for the illusion it is. As I said, I’m not a very good Buddhist.”
I began to protest.
She gave a sigh and went on, “So do you see why I couldn’t bear to see Davey when he returned? He will be how he would have been, were it not for my neglect. And the sight of him, so changed, will remind me not only of my foolishness, but of the Davey I should have been able to love, growing up like other children.”
She was crying again, and all I could do was grip her hand.
At last, tentatively, I said, “But if you were to be implanted, you would be able to share his life from now on.”
She smiled at me through her tears. She lifted my hand and kissed my knuckles. “You’re a good man, Khalid. You mean well. But Davey would be a stranger to me. It wasn’t meant to be. Did you know,” she said, more brightly now, “that scientists opposed to the Kéthani have developed a new theory of consciousness?”
I smiled. “They have?”
She nodded, enthusiastic. “You see, they posit that our consciousness, the very essence that makes us ourselves, resides on some infinitesimally small, quantum level, a level that permeates the cosmos. And when we die, we don’t just fizzle out like a spent match, but our consciousness remains integrated with the matrix of existence…” She laughed to herself. “It’s what Buddha said all those hundreds of years ago, Khalid!”
“Well, what do you know, Mrs. Emmett,” I smiled.
Before I left, promising to pop in the following day, she restrained me with a fierce grip. “Khalid, when Davey returns, will you meet him at the Station, explain what happened, why I couldn’t be there for him? Will you make sure that he understands, Khalid?”
“Of course I will.”
“And… something else.” She reached across to the bedside table, and gave me a sealed letter. “Will you give this to him, Khalid? It’s an explanation of my belief. I want him to consider everything, so that he can decide for himself whether he wants to retain his implant.”
I squeezed her hand and promised that I would give him the letter, then said goodbye and slipped from the room.
I did return the following day, only to learn that Mrs. Emmett had died peacefully in the early hours of the morning.
Three months later, in the middle of October, a heavy fall of snow heralded Davey Emmett’s return to Earth.
I was just one of three people gathered at the Onward Station to greet him. The other two were care assistants who had worked with Davey over the years. They had never, they said, met a returnee; I refrained from telling them that I had died and been resurrected by the Kéthani.
I recalled my own transformation, both mentally and physically, and wondered how the Kéthani might have remade Davey Emmett.
Five minutes later we found out. We were in a small reception lounge furnished with a few chairs and a table bearing wine and fruit juice. Normally, more people would attend a returning ceremony, and a larger lounge would be required: but Davey had made few friends during his thirty years on Earth.
The sliding door at the back of the room opened, and Davey stepped through. The woman beside me gasped, and I understood her reaction. Even I, who had been expecting a marked metamorphosis, was taken aback.
Gone was the overweight adult-child, the sallow-faced, balding misfit unable to establish eye contact or hold a conversation.
Davey Emmett seemed taller, slimmer. His face was lean, even handsome; he appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He wore a neat suit and strode purposefully into the room, smiling.
He shook our hands, greeting us by name. “It’s good to see you, Khalid.”
We exchanged inane pleasantries for a while. I recalled my own resurrection ceremony, and the mutual inability of the returnee to express quite what he had been through, and the circumspection of the celebrants faced with the miracle of someone returned from the dead.
“Director Masters informed me of my mother’s passing,” Davey said. Masters was head of the Onward Station. “Khalid, if you could drive me home via the cemetery…?”
“Of course.”
The meeting broke up five minutes later and I drove Davey from the towering crystal obelisk of the Station, through the snow-covered landscape towards Oxenworth.
After a minute, I broke the silence. “I saw your mother during her illness, Davey. She wasn’t in pain, and didn’t fear death. She had her own strong faith.”
Davey nodded. “I know. I remember her telling me all about it.”
I glanced across at him. “How much do you recall from… from before?”
He considered for a second or two, frowning. “It’s strange, but I recall everything. Who I was, my thoughts and reactions. But it’s very much like an adult looking back on his childhood. We have only a refracted, blurred image of who that person was. It’s almost like looking back at the life of a stranger.”
He was silent for a while, staring out at the snow-softened landscape undulating to the distant moorland horizon.
“The Kéthani remade me completely, Khalid. They took what they had, the fundamental David Emmett, and rebuilt a fully functioning, intelligent human being from the unpromising raw material. The odd thing is, I feel that they maintained a continuity. I am David Emmett, but whole, now.”
“I think I know what you mean, Davey. I died ten years ago. The person who came back… well, he was much changed, too.”
We came to the cemetery and I turned into the long drive.
We climbed from the car, into the teeth of the subzero wind, and I led Davey across to where his mother was interred.
Her grey marble headstone projected from the fleecy snow, bearing her name, date of birth and death, and a line from a Buddhist text: We each of us have a choice of eternities.
There were few deaths these days, and the cemetery was little used. The headstone next to Mrs. Emmett’s recorded that Claudine Hainault had been buried there twelve years previously.
I felt tears stinging my eyes.
Davey stood at the foot of his mother’s grave, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. The cold wind stirred his full head of black hair.
I said, “Your mother asked me to explain why she couldn’t be here to meet you, Davey. And she asked me to give you this.” I passed him the letter.
He took it and looked at me. “You mean, why she couldn’t face the person I would be—the person I might have been, but for the accident?”
I smiled to myself. He was ahead of me and had saved me from an awkward explanation.
“Do you understand how it must have been, from her point of view?” I said inadequately.
“I understand,” he said. “I just wonder how much her belief system was a result of the guilt she felt after the accident. I wonder if she rationalised that she was atoning in this life for sins accrued in a previous one… and if she believed in reincarnation in the hope that my next existence might be a better one.” He smiled to himself. “This was all before the coming of the Kéthani, of course.”
I shook my head and shrugged, smiling sadly at the thought of Mrs. Emmett.
“The terrible thing was,” Davey went on, “that my mother wasn’t responsible for the accident. We were standing at the side of the road and I just pulled my hand from hers and ran off, into the path of a car… Thanks to the Kéthani, I remember everything.” He paused, then said, “My mother blamed herself, of course.”