“And,” Sam said, and hesitated.
Gregory laughed. “Come on—out with it!”
“Well… we’ve come to the conclusion, each of us, independently, that there was something lacking in our lives of late…” She went on, neatly synopsising what each of us had expressed the night before.
She finished, “So… we’ve decided that we need to move on, to make the next step, to go out there.”
Gregory heard her out in silence, a judicial forefinger placed across his lips.
A hush fell across the table. It was as if we were holding our breath in anticipation of his response.
At last he nodded and smiled. “I understand,” he said, “and to be honest I’ve been thinking along the same lines myself of late.” He looked around the group, at each of us in turn, and continued, “I wonder if you’d mind if I joined you?”
The party was set for the first Saturday in February, which gave us less than a fortnight to settle our affairs on Earth and say our goodbyes. I resigned my internship at Bradley General and told my colleagues that I was taking a year’s break to travel—which was not that far removed from the truth. I had no real friends outside the Tuesday evening group, so the farewells I did make were in no way emotionally fraught.
I considered contacting Zara, my ex-wife, and telling her the truth of my going, but on reflection I came to realise that she was part of a past life that was long gone and almost forgotten.
I put my affairs in order, left instructions with my solicitor for the sale of my house, and bequeathed all I possessed to Zara.
Gregory Merrall insisted that he host the farewell party, and it seemed fitting that this should be so.
I would attend the party along with Sam and Stuart but, as we had died once and been resurrected, we would not take part in the ritual suicide. I wondered what I might feel as I watched my friends take their final drink on Earth.
On the day before the party, the doorbell chimed. It was Andy Souter. He stood on the doorstep, shuffling his feet, his ginger hair aflame in the light of the porch. “Andy. Get in here. It’s freezing!”
He stepped inside, snow-covered, silent, and a little cowed. “Coffee?” I asked, uneasy myself.
He shook his head. “I won’t stay long. I just…” He met my gaze for the first time. “Is it true? You’re all planning to… to go, tomorrow night?”
I showed him into the lounge. “That’s right. We’ve thought long and hard about what we’re planning. It seems the right thing to do.”
Andy shook his head. “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about it.”
I smiled, pointed to the raised square of the implant at his temple. “But you’re implanted, Andy. You’ll go when you die…”
He smiled bleakly. “I know, but that’s different. I’ll die of natural causes or accidentally. I won’t take my life at the behest of some stranger.”
I said, “Gregory’s no stranger, now.”
He stared at me. “Isn’t he?”
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“I don’t know. Put it this way, I’m not wholly convinced.”
I laughed. “About what, exactly?”
He looked bleak. “That’s just it. I don’t know. I just have this… feeling.”
I said, “Look, we’re going to the Fleece at nine for a last drink. Why don’t you come along, say goodbye.”
He shook his head, “I’ve said goodbye to everyone individually.” He held out his hand. “Take care, Khalid.”
The following evening Richard Lincoln knocked on my door, and I left the house for the very last time. We walked in silence past the Fleece, through the village, and up the hillside towards the beckoning lights of Merrall’s converted farmhouse.
Our friends were already there, armed with drinks.
There was, unlike our last few nights in the Fleece, a party atmosphere in the air, a fin-de-siecle sense of closure, of new beginnings.
We drank and chatted about the past. We regaled Gregory with incidents of village life over the past twenty years, the emotional highs and lows: the break up of my marriage, the resurrection of Ben’s father, the going of Father Renbourn… It was as if, with this incantatory summoning of the past, we were putting off the inevitability of the future.
Then we ate, seated around a long pine table, a lavish meal of roast beef and baked potatoes. Conversation turned to the Kéthani and our mission as ambassadors among the stars.
A little drunk, I laughed. “It seems impossible to reconcile my life so far, the insignificance of my existence until now, with what might happen out there.” And I swung my wine glass in an abandoned gesture at the stars.
Gregory said, “We will be taken, and trained, and we will behold wonders we cannot even guess at.”
Beside me, Sam said, “I wish Andy was coming with us.”
A silence settled around the table as we pondered our absent, sceptical friend.
We finished the meal and Gregory poured the wine. He went around the table, clockwise, and tipped an exact measure of French claret, laced with cyanide, into each glass.
Sam, Stuart, and I sat together at the end of the table. I felt a subtle sense of exclusion from the act about to take place. Later tonight we three would report to the Onward Station, would be beamed up in the same transmission as our friends, and begin our journey to the stars.
I was aware of my heart thudding as I watched my friends raise their glasses and Richard Lincoln pronounce a toast. “To friends,” he said, “and to the future!”
“To friends and to the future!” they echoed, and drank.
I watched Richard Lincoln relax, smiling, and slump into his seat, as if asleep, and I reached across the table and gripped his hand as if to ease his passing. I looked around, taking in the enormity of the fact that my friends of so many years were dead or dying… Jeffrey leaned forward, resting his head on his arms; Doug Standish sat upright, a smile on his stilled face; Ben and Elisabeth leaned towards each other, embracing, and died together; Dan Chester had fallen sideways in his seat, head lolling. At the head of the table, Gregory Merrall slumped in his seat, chin on chest.
A silence filled the room and I felt like weeping.
Someone was clutching my hand. I looked up. Sam was staring at me through her tears.
We stood and moved towards the door. Already, our friends’ implants would be registering the fact of their death. In minutes, the ferrymen from the Onward Station would arrive to collect their bodies.
I took one last glance at the tableau of stilled and lifeless remains, then joined Sam and Stuart and stepped into the freezing night.
Stuart indicated his car. “We might as well go straight to the Station.”
I said, “Do you mind if I walk?”
They smiled, understanding. I sketched a wave and set off along the footpath that climbed across the snow-covered moorland to the soaring tower of the Onward Station in the distance.
Their car started and drove away, and soon the sound of its engine died and left a profound silence in its wake.
I strode across the brow of the hill, my boots compacting snow, my head too full of recent events to look ahead with any clarity.
At one point I stopped, turned, and looked down at the farmhouse, dark against the snow. The lights glowed in the windows, and it reminded me of a nativity scene.
I was about to resume my march when, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement at the back door. At first I thought it was a ferryman, arrived early—then realised that I had heard no car.
I stared and caught my breath in shock.
A figure stepped through the kitchen door and strode out into the gravelled driveway, and in the light of the gibbous moon I recognised the tweed-clad shape of Gregory Merrall.
At that moment I felt very alone. I wanted Sam and Stuart beside me, to affirm that I was not losing my senses.