Kéthani

by Eric Brown

  “So,” Richard said. “Who’s it by?”

  “Three guesses,” I said.

  “You,” Stuart Kingsley said. “You’ve retired from the implant ward and started writing?”

  “Not me, Stuart. But you do know him.”

  Sam cheated. She was sitting next to me, and she tipped her stool and peeked at the author’s photo on the back of the jacket.

  “Aha!” she said. “Mystery solved.”

  I removed my hand from the byline.

  Dan said, “Gregory!”

  “This explains a few things,” I said. “His experience, his reluctance to talk about himself—some writers are notoriously modest.” I opened the book and read the mini-biography inside the back flap. “Gregory Merrall was born in 1965 in London. He has been a full-time freelance writer for more than thirty years, with novels, collections, and volumes of poetry to his name.”

  Five minutes later Gregory hurried in, hugging himself against the bone-aching cold. He crossed to the fire and roasted his outstretched hands before the flames.

  He saw the book, which I’d placed on the table before me, and laughed. “So… my secret’s out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Richard said, returning from the bar with a pint for our resident writer.

  Gregory took a long draught. “It’s something I don’t much like talking about,” he said. “People assume a number of things when you mention you’re a scribbler. They either think you’re bragging, that you’re incredibly well-off—would that that were so!—that you’re some kind of intellectual heavyweight, or that you’ll immediately start regaling them with fabulous stories.”

  “Well,” Sam said, “you have told us some fascinating tales.”

  Gregory inclined his head in gracious assent. “It’s just not something I feel the need to talk about,” he went on. “What matters is not so much talking about it, but getting it done.”

  The evening unfolded, and at one point someone asked Gregory (it was Stuart, a lecturer at Leeds and something of an egghead himself), “How do you think the coming of the Kéthani has affected how we write about the human experience?”

  Gregory frowned into his pint. “Where to begin? Well, it’s certainly polarised writers around the world. Some have turned even further inwards, minutely chronicling the human condition in the light of our new-found immortality. Others have ignored it and written about the past, and there’s a vast market for nostalgia these days! A few speculate about what life might be like post-death, when we take the leap into the vast inhabited universe.”

  Richard looked at him. “And where would you put yourself, Gregory?”

  Merrall picked up his novel and leafed through it, pausing occasionally to read a line or two. “I’m firmly in the speculative camp,” he said, “trying to come to some understanding of what life out there might be like, why the Kéthani came to Earth—what their motives might be.”

  That set the subject for the rest of the evening: the Kéthani and their modus operandi. Of the nine regulars around the table that night, only three of us had died, been resurrected on the home planet of the Kéthani, and returned to Earth: Stuart and Samantha Kingsley, and myself.

  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, b
ack 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.

  At last I said, “And you, Gregory. What would you do?”

  He stared at us, one by one. “When I die, which I think won’t be long in happening, then I’ll remain out there among the stars, doing whatever the Kéthani want me to do.”

  A few days later I received a package of books through the post. They were the Returnee trilogy, by Gregory Merrall, sent courtesy of his publisher in London.

  That week at the pub I found that every one of us in the group had received the trilogy.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting,” Stuart said, “but they’re good.”

  “More than good,” said Elisabeth, who was the literary pundit amongst us. “I’d say they were excellent, profoundly moving.”

  Dan nodded. “I’d second that. I’m more of a non-fiction man myself, but I found Gregory’s books compelling stuff.”

  Gregory was away that Tuesday—visiting his publisher—so we didn’t have the opportunity to thank him. That week I devoured the books, and like Stuart and Elisabeth and Dan found them a heady experience.

  He had the ability to write about ideas and the human experience in such a way that the one complemented the other. His characters were real, fully fleshed human beings, about whom the reader cared with a passion. At the same time, he wrote about their experiences in a series of philosophical debates that were at once—for a literary dunce like myself—understandable and page turning.

  I canvassed Stuart’s opinion on the following Tuesday. I wondered if he, as an intellectual, had been as impressed by Gregory’s books as I had. He had, and for an hour that evening before the man himself turned up, all of us discussed the Returnee trilogy with passion and something like awe that we knew its author.

  At one point Stuart said, “But what did you all think about the finale, and what did it mean? Gregory seemed to be saying that life on Earth was over, that only humankind’s journey among the stars was what mattered.”

  Ben nodded. “As if Earth were a rock pool, which we had to leave in order to evolve.”

  At that point Gregory came in with a fanfare of wind and a swirl of snowflakes. We fought to buy him a drink and heaped praise on his novels.

  I think he found all the fuss embarrassing. “I hope you didn’t think it a tad arrogant, my having the books sent.”

  We assured him otherwise.

  “It was just,” he said, “that I wanted you to know my position.” He smiled. “And it saved me giving a lecture.”

  Elisabeth asked, “What are you working on now, Gregory?”

  He hesitated, pint in hand. “Ah… Well, I make it a rule never to talk about work in progress. Superstition. Perhaps I fear that gabbing about the book will expend the energy I’d use writing it.”

  She gave a winning smile. “But on this occasion…”

  Gregory laughed. “On this occasion, seeing as I’m among friends, and I’ve almost finished the book anyway…”

  And he proceeded to tell us about his next novel, entitled The Suicide Club.

  It was about a group of friends who, dissatisfied with their routine existence on Earth, stage a farewell party at which they take their own lives, are resurrected, and then go among the stars as ambassadors of the Kéthani.

  Over the course of the next few weeks we became a reading group devoted to the works of Gregory Merrall.

  We read every novel he’d written, some fifteen in all. We were enthralled, captivated. We must have presented a strange picture to outsiders: a group of middle-class professionals continually carrying around the same books and discussing them passionately amongst themselves. We even arranged another night to meet and discuss the books, to spare Gregory the embarrassment, though we didn’t forgo our usual Tuesday outings.

  Only Andy Souter absented himself from the reading group. He was busy most nights with his brass band, and he’d admitted to me on the phone that he’d found the novels impenetrable.

  One Saturday evening I arrived early and Stuart was already propping up the bar. “Khalid. Just the man. I’ve been thinking…” He hesitated, as if unsure as to how to proceed.

  “Should think that’s expected of you, in your profession,” I quipped.

  “You’d never make a stand-up comedian, Azzam,” he said. “No, it struck me… Look, have you noticed something about the group?”

  “Only that we’ve become a devoted Gregory Merrall fan club—oh, and as a result we drink a hell of a lot more.” I raised my pint in cheers. “Which I’m not complaining about.”

  He looked at me. “Haven’t you noticed how we’re looking ahead more? I mean, at one point we seemed content, as a group, to look no further than the village, our jobs. It was as if the Kéthani didn’t exist.”

  “And now we’re considering the wider picture?” I shrugged. “Isn’t that to be expected? We’ve just read a dozen books about them and the consequences of their arrival. Damn it, I’ve never read so much in my life before now!”

  He was staring into his pint, miles away.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Reading Gregory’s books, thinking about the Kéthani, what it all might mean… It brings back to me how I felt immediately after my resurrection. The lure of the stars. The dissatisfaction with life on Earth. I think, ever since my return, I’ve been trying to push to the back of my
mind that… that niggling annoyance, the thought that I was treading water before the next stage of existence.” He looked up at me. “You said as much the other week.”

  I nodded. After Zara left me, and I killed myself and returned to Earth, I withdrew into myself—or rather into my safe circle of friends—and paid little heed to the world, or for that matter to the universe, outside.

  The door opened, admitting a blast of icy air and the rest of the group.

  For the next hour we discussed an early Gregory Merrall novel, The Coming of the Kéthani.

  Around ten o’clock a familiar figure strode into the main bar. We looked up, a little shocked and, I think, not a little embarrassed, like schoolkids caught smoking behind the bike shed.

  A couple of us tried to hide our copies of Gregory’s novel, but too late. He smiled as he joined us.

  “So this is what you get up to when my back’s turned?” he laughed.

  Elisabeth said, “You knew?”

  “How could you keep it a secret in a village the size of Oxenworth?” he asked.

  Only then did I notice the bundle under his arm.

  Gregory saw the direction of my gaze. He deposited the package on the table and went to the bar.

  We exchanged glances. Sam even tried to peek into the brown paper parcel, but hastily withdrew her hand, as if burned, as Gregory returned with his pint.

  Maddeningly, for the rest of the evening he made no reference to the package; he stowed it beneath the table and stoked the flagging conversation.

  At one point, Stuart asked, “We were discussing your novel.” He indicated The Coming of the Kéthani. “And we wondered how you could be so confident of the, ah… altruism of the Kéthani, back then? You never doubted their motives?”

  Gregory considered his words, then said, “Perhaps it was less good prophecy than a need to hope. I took them on trust, because I saw no other hope for humankind. They were our salvation. I thought it then, and I think so still.”

  We talked all night of our alien benefactors, and how life on Earth had changed since their arrival and the bestowal of immortality on the undeserving human race.