Kethani (2 page)

Nothing was ever the same again, after the Kéthani came. It is safe to say that the life of everyone on Earth was changed irrevocably from that momentous day. This is the story of how my life and the lives of my friends were transformed, forever and ever...

Interlude

Every Tuesday night, come rain or shine, Zara and I headed for the Fleece at nine o’clock and settled ourselves in the main bar. Over the years the circle of our friends grew to become a crowd, but at that point—a year after the coming of the Kéthani—we were a group of four: Zara, myself, Richard Lincoln and Jeff Morrow. Lincoln was a ferryman, employed by the local Onward Station, Morrow a teacher at Zara’s school over in Bradley. I had known Lincoln a little before the Kéthani came—he was a fixture in the Fleece— and over the past few months we had come to know him better. He was a big, quiet, reserved man who gave the air of harbouring a sadness it was not in his nature to articulate.

That particular night he seemed even more subdued than normal. A television set was playing in the corner of the room, the sound turned low. It was not a regular fitting in the main bar, but the landlord had installed it because Leeds had been playing in Europe that night, and no one had bothered to turn it off.

Lincoln nursed his pint and stared at the flickering images, as if in a daze.

He was married to a big, red-headed woman called Barbara, who had left him that summer and moved down south. She had never, in all my time in the village, accompanied him to the Fleece. In fact, I had never seen them out together. When I had come across her in the village, she had always seemed preoccupied and not particularly friendly. It was an indication of Lincoln’s reserve that, when Barbara walked out that summer, he told us that she was taking a long holiday with her sister, and never again mentioned his wife.

Zara and I were living together at the time, and planning our marriage in the summer. We were at that stage of our relationship where we were consumed by mutual love; I felt it must have been obvious to all our friends, like a glow. I held complex feelings for Richard Lincoln; I did not want to flaunt my happiness with Zara, when his relationship with his own wife had so obviously failed—and oddly, at the same time, I felt uneasy in his company, as if what he had gone through with Barbara compromised the possibility of my lasting happiness with my bride-to-be. I received the impression that the older, more experienced Lincoln was watching me and smiling to himself with the wry tolerance of the once-bitten.

“My God,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “I sometimes wonder...”

His pronouncement startled us. He was staring at the TV screen. Zara stopped talking to Jeff about their school and said, “What, Richard?”

He nodded towards the news programme. “Look at that. Chaos. How will it end, for God-sake? I sometimes wonder why I became a ferryman...”

In silence we turned to the screen and watched. A year of turmoil had followed the coming of the Kéthani. The human race, suspicious and hostile at the best of times, did not trust the alien race that had arrived unannounced bearing its gift from the stars.

There had to be a catch, some said. No race could be so altruistic. We were, of course, judging the Kéthani by our own standards, which is always a mistake when attempting to understand the motivating forces of others.

The report showed scenes of rioting in the Philippines. Manila was ablaze. The government, pro-Kéthani, had been toppled by the anti-Kéthani armed forces, and a bloody coup was in progress. 3000 citizens were reported dead.

The scene shifted to a BBC reporter in Pakistan. There, the imams had declared the Kéthani evil and the implants an abomination. Hundreds of implanted citizens had been attacked and slaughtered.

The world was in chaos. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had lost their lives in the rioting. Two camps were emerging from the chaos: those opposed to the Kéthani and those who embraced the gift of the aliens with wholehearted enthusiasm. The divide happened on a global level: some countries accepted the gift, while others rejected it. Many nations were torn by internal opposing forces.

“Do you mind?” Lincoln asked, gesturing to the screen. “I don’t think I can take much more.”

Perhaps sensing that his disquiet had its source much closer to home, we murmured that of course he could turn it off.

He downed his pint and-turned to us. “Did I tell you that Barbara was...
is...
fervently opposed to the Kéthani?” he asked.

The divide was repeated on a smaller scale, splitting families, even husbands and wives.

“I was fifty years old when the Kéthani came,” Lincoln said now, staring into his empty glass, “and I’d felt that something was wrong for years. When they came, I thought that was obviously the answer.” He gestured at the screen. “I wonder now how things will end?”

Little by little, over the next few months, I came to understand what Richard Lincoln was going through.

ONE

FERRYMAN

Lincoln sat in the darkened living room and half-listened to the radio news. More unrest in the East; riots and protests against the implantation process in India and Malaysia. The president of France had taken his life, another suicide statistic to add to the growing list. The news finished and was followed by a weather report: a severe snowfall was forecast for that night and the following day.

Lincoln was hoping for a quiet shift when his mobile rang. It was his controller at the Station. She gave the name and address of the dead subject, then rang off.

Despite the weather and the inconvenience of the late hour—or rather the early hour; it was two in the morning—as ever he felt the visceral thrill of embarkation, the anticipation of what was to come.

He stepped into the hall and found his coat, already planning the route twenty miles over the moors to the dead man’s town.

He was checking his pocket for the Range Rover’s keys when he heard the muffled grumble, amplified by the snow, of a car engine. His cottage was a mile from the nearest road, serviced by a potholed cart track. No one ever turned down the track by mistake, and he’d had no visitors in years.

He waited, as if half-expecting the noise to go away, but the vehicle’s irritable whine increased as it fought through the snow and ice towards the cottage. Lincoln switched on the outside light and returned to the living room, pulling aside the curtain and peering out.

A white Fiat Electra lurched from pothole to pothole, headlights bouncing. It came to a stop outside the cottage, the sudden silence profound, and a second later someone climbed out.

Lincoln watched his daughter slam the car door and pick her way carefully through the snow.

The doorbell chimed.

He envisaged the tense confrontation that would follow, thankful for the call-out that would reduce his contact with Susanne to a minimum.

He pulled open the door. She stood tall in an expensive white mackintosh, collar turned up around her long, dark, snow-specked hair.

Her implant showed as a slight bulge at her temple.

She could hardly bring herself to look him in the eye. Which, he thought, was hardly surprising.

She gave a timid half-smile. “It’s cold out here, Richard.”

“Ah... Come in. This is a surprise. Why didn’t you ring?”

“I couldn’t talk over the phone. I needed to see you in person.”

To explain herself, he thought; to excuse her recent conduct.

She swept past him, shaking the melted snow from her hair. She hung her coat in the hall and walked into the living room.

Lincoln paused behind her, his throat constricted with an emotion he found hard to identify. He knew he should have felt angry, but all he did feel was the desire for Susanne to leave.

“I’m sorry. I should have come sooner. I’ve been busy.”

She was thirty, tall and good-looking and—
damn them
—treacherous genes had bequeathed her the unsettling appearance of her mother.

As he stared at her, Lincoln realised that he no longer knew the woman who was his daughter.

“But I’m here now,” she said. “I’ve come about—”

He interrupted, his pulse racing. “I don’t want to talk about your mother.”

“Well I do,” Susanne said. “This is important.”

“Look, it’s impossible right now. I’ve just had a call from the Station.”

“You’re going? Just when I get here?”

“I’m sorry, Susanne. Thing is, it’s quite a way—Hebden Bridge. I should really be setting off. Look... make yourself at home. You know where the spare room is. We can... we’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

He caught the flash of impatience on her face, soon doused by the realisation that nothing came between him and his calling.

She sighed. “Fine. See you in the morning.”

Relief lifting from his shoulders like a weight, Lincoln nodded and hurried outside. Seconds later he was revving the Range Rover up the uneven track, into the darkness.

The main road had been gritted earlier that night, and the snow that had fallen since had turned into a thin grey mush. Lincoln drove cautiously, his the only vehicle out this late. Insulated from the cold outside, he tried to forget about the presence of Susanne back at the cottage. He half-listened to a discussion programme on the World Service. He imagined half a dozen dusty academics huddled in a tiny studio in Bush House. Cockburn, the Cambridge philosopher, had the microphone: “It is indeed possible that individuals will experience a certain disaffection, even apathy, which is the result of knowing that there is more to existence than this life...”

Lincoln wondered if this might explain the alienation he had felt for a year, since accepting his present position. But then he’d always had difficulty in showing his emotions and consequently accepting that anyone else had emotions to show.

This life is a prelude, he thought, a farce I’ve endured for fifty years—the end of which I look forward to with anticipation.

It took him almost an hour to reach Hebden Bridge. The small town, occupying the depths of a steep valley, was dank and quiet in the continuing snowfall. Streetlights sparkled through the darkness.

He drove through the town and up a steep hill, then turned right up an even steeper minor road. Hillcrest Farm occupied a bluff overlooking the acute incision of the valley. Coachlights burned orange around the front porch. A police car was parked outside.

Lincoln climbed from the Range Rover and hurried across to the porch. He stood for a second before pressing the doorbell, composing himself. He always found it best to adopt a neutral attitude until he could assess the mood of the bereaved family. More often than not the atmosphere in the homes of the dead was one of excitement and anticipation.

Infrequently, especially if the bereaved were religious, a more formal grief prevailed.

He pressed the bell and seconds later a ruddy-faced local constable opened the door. “There you are. We’ve been wondering if you’d make it, weather like it is.”

“Nice night for it,” Lincoln said, stepping into the hall.

The constable gestured up a narrow flight of stairs. “The dead man’s a farmer—silly bugger went out looking for a lost ewe. Heart attack. His daughter was out with him—but he was dead by the time she fetched help. He’s in the front bedroom.”

Lincoln followed the constable up the stairs and along a corridor. The entrance to the bedroom was impossibly low; both men had to stoop as if entering a cave.

The farmer lay fully dressed on the bed, rugged and grey like the carving of a knight on a sarcophagus. Half a dozen men and women in their twenties and thirties were seated around the bed on dining chairs. An old woman, presumably the farmer’s widow, sat on the bed itself, her husband’s lifeless blue hand clutched in hers.

Lincoln registered the looks he received as he entered the room: the light of hope and gratitude burned in the eyes of the family, as if he, Lincoln himself, was responsible for what would happen over the course of the next six months.

An actor assuming a role, Lincoln nodded with suitable gravity to each of the family in turn.

“If anyone has any questions, anything at all, I’ll be glad to answer them.” It was a line he came out with every time to break the ice, but he was rarely questioned these days.

He stepped forward and touched the implant at the dead man’s temple. It purred reassuringly. The nanomechs had begun the initial stage of the process upon the death of the farmer—the preparation of the body for its onward journey.

“I’ll fetch the container,” Lincoln said—he never called it a coffin—and nodded to the constable.

Together they carried the polycarbon container from the back of the Range Rover, easing it around the bends in the stairs. The family formed a silent huddle outside the bedroom door. Lincoln and the constable passed inside and closed the door behind them.

They lifted the corpse into the container and Lincoln sealed the sliding lid. The job of carrying the container down the stairs—attempting to maintain dignity in the face of impossible angles and improbable bends—was made all the more difficult by the presence of the family, watching from the landing.

Five minutes of gentle coaxing and patient lifting and turning, and the container was in the back of the Range Rover.

The constable handed over a sheaf of papers, which Lincoln duly signed and passed back. “I’ll be on my way, Mr. Lincoln,” the constable said. “See you later.” He waved and climbed into his squad car.

One of the farmer’s daughters hurried from the house. “You’ll stay for a cup of tea?”

Lincoln was about to refuse, then had second thoughts. If he returned home early, there was always the chance that Susanne would have waited up for him. “Yes, that’d be nice. Thanks.”

He followed her into a big, stone-flagged kitchen, an Aga stove filling the room with warmth.

He could tell that she had been crying. She was a plain woman in her mid-thirties, with the stolid, resigned appearance of the unfortunate sibling left at home to help with the farm work.

He saw the crucifix on a gold chain around her neck, and only then noticed that her temple was without an implant. He began to regret accepting the offer of tea.