Kethani (3 page)

He sat at the big wooden table and wrapped his hands around the steaming mug. The woman sat down across from him, nervously meeting his eyes.

“It happened so quickly. I can hardly believe it. He had a weak heart—we knew that. We told him to slow down. But he didn’t listen.”

Lincoln gestured. “He was implanted,” he said gently.

She nodded, eyes regarding her mug. “They all are, my mother, brothers and sisters.” She glanced up at him, something like mute appeal in her eyes. “It seems that all the country is, these days.”

When she looked away, Lincoln found his fingers straying to the outline of his own implant.

“But...” she whispered, “I’m sure things before were... I don’t know...
better.
I mean, look at all the suicides. Thousands of people every month take their lives...” She shook her head, confused. “Don’t you think that people are less... less concerned now, less caring?”

“I’ve heard Cockburn’s speeches. He says something along the same lines.”

“I agree with him. To so many people this life is no longer that important. It’s something to be got through, before what follows.”

How could he tell her that he felt this himself?

He said, “But wasn’t that what religious people thought about life, before the change?”

She stared at him as if he were an ignoramus. “No! Of course not. That might have been what atheists
thought
religious people felt... But we love life, Mr. Lincoln. We give thanks for the miracle of God’s gift.”

She turned her mug self-consciously between flattened palms. “I don’t like what’s happened to the world. I don’t think it’s
right.
I loved my father. We were close. I’ve never loved anyone quite so much.” She looked up at him, her eyes silver with tears. “He was such a wonderful man. We attended church together. And then the Kéthani came,” she said with venom, “and everything changed. My father, he...” she could not stop the tears now, “he believed what they said. He left the Church. He had the implant, like all the rest of you.”

He reached out and touched her hand. “Look, this might sound strange, coming from me, but I understand what you’re saying. I might not agree, but I know what you’re experiencing.”

She looked at him, something like hope in her eyes. “You do? You really do? Then...” She fell silent, regarding the scrubbed pine tabletop. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said at last, in a whispered entreaty, “do you really have to take him away?”

He sighed, pained. “Of course I do. It was his choice. He chose to be implanted. Don’t you realise that to violate his trust, his choice...” He paused. “You said you loved him. In that case respect his wishes.”

She was slowly shaking her head. “But I love God even more,” she said. “And I think that what is happening is wrong.”

He drained his tea with a gesture of finality. “There’ll be a religious service of your choice at the Station tomorrow.”

She looked up and murmured, “What do they want with our dead, Mr. Lincoln? Why are they doing this to us?”

He sighed. “You must have read the literature, seen the documentaries. It’s all in there.”

“But you... as a ferryman... surely you can tell me what they really want?”

“They want what they say—nothing more and nothing less.”

A silence came between them. She was nodding, staring into her empty mug. He stood and touched her shoulder as he left the kitchen. He said goodbye to the family in the living room— gathered like the survivors of some natural catastrophe, unsure quite how to proceed—and let himself out through the front door.

He climbed into the Range Rover, turned and accelerated south towards the Onward Station.

He drove for the next hour through the darkness, high over the West Yorkshire moors, cocooned in the warmth of the vehicle with a symphony by Haydn playing counterpoint to the grumble of the engine.

Neither the music nor the concentration required to keep the vehicle on the road fully occupied his thoughts. The events at the farmhouse, and his conversation with the dead man’s daughter, stirred memories and emotions he would rather not have recalled.

It was more than the woman’s professed love for her dead father that troubled him, reminding him of his failed relationship with his own daughter, Susanne. The fact that the farmer’s daughter had forgone the implant stirred a deep anger within him. He had said nothing at the time, but now he wanted to return and plead with her to think again about undergoing the simple process of implantation.

In July, at the height of summer, Lincoln’s wife had finally left him. After twenty-five years of marriage she had walked out, moved to London to stay with Susanne until she found a place of her own.

In retrospect he was not surprised at her decision to leave; it was the inevitable culmination of years of neglect on his part. At the time, however, it had come as a shock—verification that the increasing disaffection he felt had at last destroyed their relationship.

He recalled their confrontation on that final morning as clearly as if it were yesterday.

Behind a barricade of suitcases piled in the hall, Barbara had stared at him with an expression little short of hatred. They had rehearsed the dialogue many times before.

“You’ve changed, Rich,” she said accusingly. “Over the past few months, since taking the job.”

He shook his head, tired of the same old argument. “I’m still the same person I always was.”

She gave a bitter smile. “Oh, you’ve always been a cold and emotionless bastard, but since taking the job...”

He wondered if he had applied for the position because of who and what he was, a natural progression from the solitary profession of freelance editor of scholastic textbooks. Ferrymen were looked upon by the general public with a certain degree of wariness, much as undertakers had been in the past. They were seen as a profession apart.

Or, he wondered, did he become a ferryman to spite his wife?

There had been mixed reactions to the news of the implants and their consequences: many people were euphoric at the prospect of renewed life; others had been cautiously wary, not to say suspicious. Barbara had placed herself among the latter.

“There’s no hurry,” she had told Lincoln when he mentioned that he’d decided to have the operation. “I have no intention of dying, just yet.”

At first he had taken her reluctance as no more than an obstinate stance, a desire to be different from the herd. Most people they knew had had the implant; Barbara’s abstention was a talking point.

Then it occurred to Lincoln that she had decided against having the implantation specifically to annoy him; she had adopted these frustrating affectations during the years of their marriage: silly things like refusing to holiday on the coast because of her dislike of the sea, or rather because Lincoln loved the sea; deciding to become a vegetarian, and doing her damnedest to turn him into one, too.

Then, drunk one evening after a long day of sneaking shots of gin, she had confessed that the reason she had refused the implant option was because she was petrified of what might happen to her after she died. She did not trust their motives.

“How... how do we know that they’re telling the truth? How do we know what... what’ll happen to us once
they
have us in their grasp?”

“You’re making them sound like B-movie monsters,” Lincoln said.

“Aren’t they?”

He had gone through the government pamphlets with her, reiterated the arguments both for and against. He had tried to persuade her that the implants were the greatest advance in the history of humankind.

“But not everyone’s going along with it,” she had countered. “Look at all the protest groups. Look at what’s happening around the world. The riots, political assassinations—”

“That’s because they cling to their bloody superstitious religions,” Lincoln had said. “Let’s go over it again...”

But she had steadfastly refused to be convinced, and after a while he had given up trying to change her mind.

Then he’d applied to become a ferryman, and was accepted.

“I hope you feel pleased with yourself,” Barbara said one day, gin-drunk and vindictive.

He had lowered his newspaper. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why the hell do you want to work for
them,
do their dirty work?” Then she had smiled. “Because, Mr. Bloody Ferryman, you’d rather side with
them
than with me. I’m only your bloody wife, after all.”

And Lincoln had returned to the paper, wondering whether what she had said was true.

Over the next few weeks their relationship, never steady, had deteriorated rapidly. They lived separate lives, meeting for occasional meals when, depending on how much she had drunk, Barbara could be sullenly uncommunicative or hysterically spiteful.

Complacent, Lincoln had assumed the rift would heal in time.

Her decision to leave had initially shocked him. Then, as her decision turned from threat to reality, he saw the logic of their separation—it was, after all, the last step in the process of isolation he had been moving towards for a long, long time.

He had pleaded with her, before she left, to think again about having the implant operation.

“The first resurrectees will be returning soon,” he told her. “Then you’ll find you have nothing to fear.”

But Barbara had merely shaken her head and walked out of his life.

He wrote to her at Susanne’s address over the next couple of months, self-conscious letters expressing his hopes that Barbara was doing okay, would think again about having an implant. Reading the letters back to himself, he had realised how little he had said—how little there was to say—about himself and his own life.

Then last autumn, Lincoln had received a phone call from Susanne. The sound of her voice—the novelty of her call—told Lincoln that something was wrong.

“It’s your mother—” he began.

“Dad... I’m sorry. She didn’t want you to know. She was ill for a month—she wasn’t in pain.”

All he could say was, “What?” as a cold hollow expanded inside his chest.

“Cancer. It was inoperable.”

Silence—then, against his better judgement, he asked, “Did—did she have the implant, Susanne?”

An even longer silence greeted the question, and Lincoln knew full well the answer.

“She didn’t want a funeral,” Susanne said. “I scattered her ashes on the pond at Rochester.”

A week later he had travelled down to London. He called at his daughter’s flat, but she was either out or ignoring him. He drove on to Rochester, his wife’s birthplace, not really knowing why he was going but aware that, somehow, the pilgrimage was necessary.

He had stood beside the pond, staring into the water and weeping quietly to himself. Christ, he had hated the bitch at times—but, again, at certain times with Barbara he had also experienced all the love he had ever known.

As if to mock the fact of his wife’s death, her immutable non-existence, the rearing crystal obelisk of this sector’s Onward Station towered over the town like a monument to humankind’s newfound immortality, or an epitaph to the legion of dead and gone.

He had returned home and resumed his work, and over the months the pain had become bearable. His daughter’s return, last night, had reopened the old wound.

By the time he arrived at the Station a silver dawn was breaking over the horizon, revealing a landscape redesigned, seemingly inflated, by the night’s snowfall. The Onward Station appeared on the skyline, a fabulous tower of spun glass scintillating in the light of the rising sun.

He visited the Station perhaps four or five times a week, and never failed to stare in awe— struck not only by the structure’s ethereal architecture, but by what it meant for the future of humankind.

He braked in the car park alongside the vehicles of the dozen other ferrymen on duty today. He climbed out and pulled the polycarbon container from the back of the Range Rover, the collapsible chromium trolley taking its weight. His breath pluming before him in the ice-cold air, he hurried towards the entrance set into the sloping walls.

The interior design of the Station was arctic in its antiseptic inhospitality, the corridors shining with sourceless, polar light. As he manoeuvred the trolley down the seemingly endless corridors, he felt as ever that he was, truly, trespassing on territory forever alien.

He arrived at the preparation room and eased the container onto the circular reception table, opening the lid. The farmer lay unmoving, maintained by the host of alien nanomechs that later, augmented by others more powerful, would begin the resurrection process. They would not only restore him to life, strip away the years, but make him fit and strong again; the man who returned to Earth in six months would be physically in his thirties, but effectively immortal.

In this room, Lincoln never ceased to be overcome by the wonder, as might a believer at the altar of some mighty cathedral.

He backed out, pulling the trolley after him, and retraced his steps. To either side of the foyer, cleaners vacuumed carpets and arranged sprays of flowers in the greeting rooms, ready to receive the day’s returnees, their relatives and loved ones.

He emerged into the ice-cold dawn and hurried across to the Range Rover. On the road that climbed the hill behind the Station, he braked and sat for ten minutes staring down at the diaphanous structure.

Every day a dozen bodies were beamed from this Station to the starship in geo-sync orbit, pulses of energy invisible during the daylight hours. At night the pulses were blinding columns of white lightning, illuminating the land for miles around.

Lincoln looked up, into the rapidly fading darkness. A few bright stars still glimmered, stars that for so long had been mysterious and unattainable—but which now, hard though it was sometimes to believe, had been thrown open to humankind by the beneficence of beings still mistrusted by many, but accepted by others as saviours.

And why had the Kéthani made their offer to humankind?

There were millions upon millions of galaxies out there, the aliens said, billions of solar systems, and countless, literally countless, planets that sustained life of various kinds. Explorers were needed, envoys and ambassadors, to discover new life, and make contact, and spread the greetings of the civilised universe far and wide.