I looked back to my resurrection and what I had learned. I had become a better human being, thanks to the aliens, but in common with everyone else who had been resurrected and returned to Earth, I found it difficult to pin down precisely how I had become a better person.
At one point Andy Souter said, “I read a novel, a couple of years ago, about a guy who was really a Kéthani disguised as a human, come among us to change our ways.”
Gregory nodded. “I know it. The Effectuator by Duchamp.”
“I’ve heard rumours that that happens,” I said. I shrugged. “Who knows?”
“There are rumours up at the Station,” Dan said. “Some of the backroom staff up there are pretty remote. Isn’t that right, Richard?”
Richard smiled. “They’re just cussed Yorkshire folk,” he laughed.
Sam lowered her pint of lager and asked Gregory, “Do you think that happens? Do you think the Kéthani are amongst us?”
Gregory considered. “It’s entirely possible,” he said. “No one has ever seen a Kéthani, and as they obviously possess technology far in advance of anything we know, then passing themselves off as human wouldn’t pose that much of a problem.”
Andy said, “But the morality of it… I mean, surely if they’re working for our good, then they could at least be open about it.”
“The Kéthani work in mysterious ways…” Sam said.
Andy went on, “We take them for granted… we assume they’re working for our good. But we don’t really know, for sure.”
Six pints the worse, I turned to Gregory and said, “Well, you write about the… the whole thing, the Kéthani, death and revival… what do you think?”
He was some seconds before replying. He stared into the fire. “I think,” he said, “that the Kéthani are the saviours of our race, and that whatever they have planned for us when we venture out there—though I don’t presume to know what that might be—will be wholly for our good.”
After that, talk turned to how things had changed due to the coming of the Kéthani. I said, “The change has been gradual, very gradual. I mean, so slow it’s been hardly noticeable.” I looked around the table. “You’ve all felt it: it’s as if we’re treading water, biding our time. It’s as if a vast sense of complacency has descended over the human race.” I’d never put these feelings into words before—they’d been a kind of background niggle in my consciousness. “I don’t know… Sometimes I feel as if I’m only really alive among you lot on Tuesday nights!”
Richard laughed. “I know what you mean. Things that once were seen as important—everything from politics to sport—no longer have that… vitality.”
“And,” Stuart put in, “England is emptying. Come to that, the world is. I don’t know what the figures are, but more and more people are staying out there when they die.”
And with that thought we called it a night, departed the cosy confines of the main bar and stepped out into the bracing winter chill.
The Onward Station was like an inverted icicle in the light of the full moon, and as I made my way home a brilliant bolt of magnesium light illuminated the night as it ascended to the waiting Kéthani starship.
A couple of weeks later the conversation returned to the perennial subject of the Kéthani, and what awaited us when we died.
Richard Lincoln posed the question: would we return to Earth after our resurrections, or would we travel among the stars as the ambassadors of our alien benefactors?
Gregory looked across at me. “You returned to Earth, didn’t you, Khalid? Why, when all the universe awaited you?”
I shrugged, smiled. “I must admit… I was tempted to remain out there. The universe… the lure of new experience… it was almost too much to refuse. But—I don’t know. I was torn. Part of me wanted to travel among the stars, but another, stronger part of me wanted to return.” I looked across at Richard Lincoln; he was the only person I had told about the reasons for my suicide. “Perhaps I feared the new,” I finished. “Perhaps I fled back to what was familiar, safe…” I shrugged again, a little embarrassed at my inarticulacy under the penetrating scrutiny of Gregory Merrall.
He turned to Stuart and Sam. “And you?”
The couple exchanged a glance. Stuart was in his mid-forties, Sam ten years younger, and they were inseparable—as if what they’d experienced, separately, in the resurrection domes on that far-off alien world, had brought them closer together.
Stuart said, “I hadn’t really given much thought to my death, or resurrection, before it happened. I naturally assumed I’d come back to Earth, continue life with Sam—we’d been married just over a year when I had the accident—go back to my lectureship at the university. But while I was in the dome I… I learned that there was far more to life than what I’d experienced, and would experience, back on Earth.”
“And yet you returned,” Gregory said.
Stuart looked across at his wife. “I loved Sam,” he said. “I was tempted… tempted to remain out there. But I reasoned that I could always return to the stars, later.”
Sam said, looking at Gregory almost with defiance, “Two days after Stu died, I killed myself. I wanted to be with him. I couldn’t live without him, not even for six months.” She stopped abruptly and stared down into her drink.
“And?” Gregory prompted gently.
“And when I got up there, when I was resurrected… I mean… I still loved Stu, but something… I don’t know—something was different.” She smiled. “The stars called, and nothing would be the same again. Anyway, I decided to come back, see how it went with Stu, and take it from there.”
I said, “And look what happened. ‘Happily ever after’, or what?”
“We both felt the same,” Stuart said. “It was as if our love had been tested by what we learnt out there. We considered going back, but… well, we fell into the old routine, work and the pub…” He laughed and raised his pint in ironic salutation.
“That’s very interesting,” Gregory said. “I’ve done some research. In the early days, only two in ten who died and were resurrected chose to remain out there. The majority opted for what they knew. Now, out of every ten, seven remain. And the average is rising.”
“Why do you think that is?” Ben asked.
Gregory pursed his lips, as if by a drawstring, and contemplated the question. “Perhaps we’ve come to trust the Kéthani. We’ve heard the stories of those who’ve been to the stars and returned, and we know there’s nothing to fear.”
“But,” Elisabeth said, with a down-to-earth practicality, “surely the draw of the familiar should be too much for most of us, those of us who want to return and do all the things on Earth that we never got round to doing.”
But Gregory was shaking his head. “You’d think so, but once you’ve experienced resurrectionand instruction by the Kéthani, and gone among the stars—”
Stuart interrupted, “You sound as if you’ve experienced it first-hand?”
Gregory smiled. “I haven’t. But I have interviewed hundreds, maybe even thousands, of returnees from life among the stars, for a series of novels I wrote about the Kéthani.”
“And?” I said.
“And I found that the idea of a renewed life on Earth, for many, palls alongside the promise of the stars. And when these people experience life out there, they find life on Earth well-nigh impossible.” He smiled. “‘Provincial’ was the word that cropped up again and again.”
We contemplated our beers in silence.