Kéthani

by Eric Brown

  Lucy went downhill rapidly after that.

  The next time she stayed with me, she spent most of the entire three days in bed, listless and apathetic, and too drugged up even to talk much or play games. I told her that she was ill but that in time she would recover, and she gave a brave smile and squeezed my fingers.

  During the course of the last two weeks, Marianne and I took time off work and nursed Lucy at home, looking after her for alternating periods of three days.

  At one point, Lucy lowered the book she was reading and stared at me from the sofa. “If I die,” she said, “will the aliens take me away and make me better again?”

  I nodded. “If that happens, you mustn’t be frightened, okay? The Kéthani will take good care of you, and in six months you’ll come back home to Mum and me.”

  She smiled to herself. “I wonder what the aliens look like?”

  Two days before Lucy died, she was admitted to Bradley General, and I was with her until the end.

  She was unconscious, and dosed with painkillers. She had lost a lot of weight and looked pitifully thin beneath the crisp hospital sheets.

  I held her hand during the first day and well into the night, falling asleep in my chair and waking at dawn with cramps and multiple aches. Marianne arrived shortly after that and sat with Lucy. I took the opportunity to grab a bite to eat.

  On the evening of the second day, Lucy’s breathing became uneven. A doctor murmured to Marianne and me that she had only a matter of hours to live.

  Marianne sat across the bed from me, gripping her daughter’s hand and weeping. After an hour, she could take no more.

  She stood and made for the door.

  “Marianne…?” I said.

  “I’m sorry. This is too much. I’m going.”

  “This is just the start,” I said. “She isn’t truly dying, Marianne.”

  She looked at me. “I’m sorry Dan,” she said, and hurried out.

  I returned to my vigil. I stared at my daughter, and thought of the time, six months away, when she would be returned to me, remade. Glorious years stretched ahead.

  I thought of Marianne, and her inability to see it through to the end. I was struck, then, by an idea so terrible I was ashamed that it had occurred to me.

  I told myself that I was being paranoid, that even Marianne could not do such a thing. But once the seed of doubt had been planted, it would not be eradicated.

  What if I were right, I asked myself? I had to be sure. I had to know for certain.

  Beside myself with panic, I fumbled with my mobile and found Khalid’s number.

  The dial tone purred for an age. I swore at him to reply, and at last he did.

  “Hello?”

  “Khalid, thank God! Where are you?”

  “Dan? I’m just leaving the hospital.”

  “Khalid, I need your help.” I explained the situation, my fear. “Please, will you come over?”

  There was no hesitation. “Of course. I’m on my way.” He cut the connection.

  He seemed to take aeons to arrive, but only two minutes elapsed before his neat, suited figure appeared around the door. He hurried over, concern etched on his face.

  “I need to be sure, Khalid. It might be okay, but I need to know.”

  He nodded. “Fine. You don’t need to explain yourself, Dan. I understand.”

  He moved around the bed, and I watched in silent desperation. He pulled something from his inside pocket, a device like a miniature mobile phone, and stabbed a code into the keypad.

  Then he glanced at me, stepped towards Lucy, and applied the device to the implant at her temple.

  He read something from the tiny screen, and shock invaded his expression. He slumped into the seat which minutes before my wife had occupied, and he said something, rapidly, in Urdu.

  “Khalid?” I almost wept.

  He was shaking his head. “Dan, it’s a fake.”

  I nodded. I felt very cold. I pressed my hands to my cheeks and stared at him. I wanted to throw up, but I hadn’t eaten anything for half a day. Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it with difficulty.

  “Khalid,” I said. “You’ve got to help me.”

  “Dan…” It was a plea to make me understand the impossibility of what I was asking him.

  “How long does an implantation take?” I asked. “Thirty minutes? We have time. If you can get an implant, make the cut…” I realised, as I was speaking, that I was weeping, pleading with him through my tears.

  “Dan, we need the signatures of both parents. If anyone found out…”

  I recalled, then, the consent form that I had signed two weeks ago. My heart skipped at the sudden thought that there had existed a form bearing both our signatures… But for how long, before Marianne had destroyed it?

  My mobile rang, and I snatched it from my pocket. “What?”

  “Mr. Daniel Chester?”

  “What do you want? Who is it?”

  The woman gave her name. I cannot recall it now, but she was a police officer. “If you could make your way to Hockton police station…” she was saying.

  I laughed at the absurdity of the situation. “Listen, I’m at Bradley Hospital with my daughter. She’s dying, and if you think for a second that I’m leaving her—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Chester. We’ll be over right away.” She cut the connection. It was evidence of my agitated state that I managed to push the call from my mind.

  I sat down and gripped Lucy’s hand. I looked up, across the bed at Khalid. I said, “What’s more important? Your job or Lucy’s life?”

  He shook his head, staring at me. “You can’t blackmail me, Dan. Marianne doesn’t want this. I’m not saying that what she did was right, but you’ve got to understand that there are laws to obey.”

  “Sod the fucking laws!” I yelled. “We’re talking about the life of my daughter, for Chrissake.”

  He stared at his clasped hands, his expression set.

  I went on, “If this were your daughter, in this situation, what would you do? All it would take is a quick cut. Replace the implant with a genuine one.”

  He was shaking his head, tears tracking down his cheeks.

  “For Chrissake,” I hissed. “We’re alone. No one would see.”

  “Dan, I’d need to do paperwork, make a requisition order for an implant. They’re all numbered, accounted for. If one went missing…”

  I stared at him. I am not proud of what I said then, but I was driven by desperation. “You could replace the genuine implant with this fake,” I said, gesturing towards Lucy.

  He stared at me in shock, and only then did I realise what I’d asked him to do.

  He stood up quickly and strode to the window, staring out into the night.

  I sat by the bed, gripping Lucy’s hot hand and quietly sobbing. Minutes passed like seconds.

  “Mr. Chester?”

  The interruption was unwelcome. A small, Asian WPC stood by the door. A constable, who appeared about half my age, accompanied her.

  “What the hell?” I began.

  “Mr. Chester, it’s about your wife, Marianne Chester.”

  “What?” I said, my stomach turning.

  “If you’d care to step this way…”

  In a daze I left my seat and accompanied the police officers into the corridor. They escorted me to a side room, where we could be alone.

  I sat down, and the WPC sat opposite me. The juvenile constable remained by the door, avoiding my eyes.

  “Mr. Chester,” the woman said, “I’m sorry to inform you that your wife was found dead a little under one hour ago. A neighbour noticed the front door open. I’m sorry. It appears that she took her own life.”

  I stared at her. “What?” I said, though I had heard her clearly enough.

  I’ve since learned that police officers are prepared to repeat bad news to people in shock. Patiently, kindly, she told me again.

  Marianne was dead. What she had done to my daughter, what she had done to
me, had been too much of a burden to bear. She had taken her own life. I understood the words, but not the actuality of what she had done.

  I nodded, stood, and crossed the corridor. I returned to Lucy’s room. Khalid was still there, seated beside the bed, clutching my daughter’s hand and quietly crying.

  I sat down and told him what had happened.

  One of the joys of being a father is not only the wonder of the moment, the love one feels for one’s child every minute of every day, but contemplation of the future. How long had I spent daydreaming about the girl Lucy would be at the age of thirteen, and then at eighteen, on the verge of womanhood? I saw myself with her when she was twenty, and thirty, sharing her life, loving her. Such pre-emptive ‘memories’, as it were, are one of the delights of fatherhood.

  One hour later, Lucy died.

  I was holding her hand, listening to her stertorous breathing and to the regular pulse of the cardiogram. Then her breathing hiccuped, rattled, and a second later the cardiogram flatlined, maintaining an even, continuous note.

  I looked across at Khalid, and he nodded.

  I reached out and touched the implant at her temple, the implant which Khalid had installed thirty minutes ago when, as Lucy’s sole remaining parent, I had signed the consent form. The implant purred beneath my fingertips, restoring my daughter to life.

  Presently a ferryman arrived and, between us, we lifted Lucy into the container, which we do not call coffins. Before she was taken away, I kissed her forehead and told her that I would be there to welcome her back in six months. I did not want a farewell ceremony; she would leave for the Kéthani starship tonight.

  Later, I left the hospital and drove to Hockton, where I called in at the police station and read the note that Marianne had left. It was sealed in a cellophane folder, and I could not take it away with me.

  Dan, I read, Please forgive me. You will never understand. I know I have done the right thing by saving Lucy from the Kéthani, even though what I have done to you is unforgivable. Also, what I am about to do to myself. It’s enough to know that Lucy is saved, even if I am damned by my actions.

  Marianne.

  I left the police station and drove onto the moors overlooking the towering obelisk of the Onward Station. It rose in the moonlight like a pinnacle of ice, promising eternity. As I climbed from the Rover and watched, the first of that evening’s energy beams pulsed from its summit and arced through the stratosphere. Thus the dead of Earth were transmitted to the Kéthani starship waiting high above.

  Thursday’s child has far to go…

  Interlude

  Ten years had elapsed since the arrival of the Kéthani when we met Doug Standish, though he had been friend of Richard Lincoln’s long before he became a fixture in the Tuesday night group. He was a big, bluff, slab-faced Yorkshireman, an almost stereotypical copper. He’d worked for the homicide division in Leeds for years before the Kéthani came, and now was stationed in Bradley. I said almost stereotypical, because once you got to know him, learned something of the real man beneath the pint-and-pipe exterior, it became apparent that Doug was a shy, sensitive man whose separation from his wife had affected him deeply.

  They were in the process of splitting up when we met him. He was investigating a murder—an incredibly rare event these days—in a nearby farmhouse and came into the Fleece with Richard Lincoln to question Ben Knightly, who might have witnessed something germane to the case. A few days later, on Richard’s invitation, he joined us again, this time in an unofficial capacity.

  I warmed to Doug from the outset. I think, initially, I empathised with what he was going through with his wife.

  Things between Zara and myself were tense then.

  It was much later—years later, in fact—that Doug told us the story of the murder investigation that winter. The fact was that even he, at the time, was not aware of the larger story being played out behind the smaller, though extraordinary, murder enquiry. He was a pawn in an extraterrestrial game; he was also, perhaps, the first person we had ever met who’d had contact with—albeit unwittingly—a member of the Kéthani race.

  A week after the murder investigation was officially closed, Doug and I shared a few pints in a late night lock-in at the Fleece.

  “I don’t think I’ve told you about Amanda, have I?”

  “Your wife?”

  He stared into his fourth pint. “My soon-to-be ex-wife, Khalid.”

  His words caused me to shift uneasily. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s a disaster…” He took a deep breath and smiled. “But it’s nearly over, now. I can look ahead. It’s just… when I think about her with this other bloke, and how she deceived me for months…”

  He told me the full story.

  An hour and three pints later we staggered from the Fleece. I made my way home, let myself in through the front door—after a few futile attempts—and climbed to the bedroom.

  As I’d expected, Zara was still out. The bed was empty. I sat on the edge of the duvet and tried not to weep. It was one in the morning. Zara would be back, soon, and would slide quietly into bed in an attempt not to wake me. Over breakfast she’d make the excuse that the study group had run on late and they’d continued the discussion back at a friend’s house in Bradley. And I would smile and try not to show my suspicions, and then we would part and go to our respective jobs, and I would be sick with jealousy for the rest of the day.

  But… less about my problems, at this juncture. The next episode concerns Doug Standish and the strange events that occurred that winter.

  FIVE

  THE TOUCH OF THE ANGELS

  The sun was going down on another clear, sharp January day when Standish received the call. He’d left the station at the end of his shift and was driving over the snow-covered moors towards home and another cheerless evening with Amanda. As he reached the crossroads, he decided to stop at the Dog and Gun for a couple beforehand, let a few pints take the edge off his perceptions so that Amanda’s barbs might not bite so deep tonight.

  His mobile rang. It was Kathy at control. “Doug. Where are you?”

  “On my way home. Just passing the Onward Station.” The alien edifice was a five hundred metre tall spire like an inverted icicle on the nearby hillside.

  “Something’s just come up.”

  Standish groaned. Another farmer reporting stolen heifers, no doubt.

  “A ferryman just rang. There’s been a murder in the area. I’ve called in a scene-of-crime team.”

  He almost drove off the road. “A murder?”

  She gave him the address of a secluded farmhouse a couple of miles away, then rang off.

  He turned off the B-road and slowed, easing his Renault down a narrow lane between snow-topped dry-stone walls. The tyres cracked the panes of frozen puddles in a series of crunching reports. On either hand, for as far as the eye could see, the rolling moorland was covered in a pristine mantle of snow.

  Murder…

  Ten years ago Standish had worked as a detective inspector with the homicide division in Leeds. He had enjoyed the job. He’d been part of a good team and their detection and conviction rate had been high. He viewed his work as necessary in not only bringing law and order to an increasingly crime-ridden city, but also, in some metaphorical way, bringing a measure of order to what he saw as a disordered and chaotic universe. He had no doubt that every time he righted a wrong he was, on some deep subconscious level, putting right his own inability to cope with the hectic modern world he was finding less and less to his taste.

  And then the Kéthani came along…

  Within months, crime figures had dropped dramatically. Within a year, murders had fallen by almost eighty per cent. Why kill someone when, six months later, they would be resurrected and returned to Earth? In the early days, of course, murderers thought they could outwit the gift of the Kéthani. They killed their victims in hideous ways, ensuring that no trace of the body remained, and attempted to conceal or destroy the
implant devices. But the nanotech implants were indestructible, and emitted a signal that alerted the local Onward Station to their whereabouts. Each implant contained a sample of DNA and a record of the victim’s personality. Within a day of discovery, the device would be ferried to the Kéthani home planet, and the individual successfully brought back to life. And then they would return to Earth and assist with investigations…

  Two years after the coming of the Kéthani, the Leeds homicide division had been disbanded, and Standish shunted sideways into the routine investigation of car thefts and burglaries.

  Like most people he knew, he had rejoiced at the arrival of the aliens and the gift they gave to humanity. He had been implanted within a month and tried to adjust his mind to the fact that he was no longer haunted by the spectre of death.

  Shortly before the arrival of the Kéthani, Standish married Amanda Evans, the manageress of an optician’s franchise in Bradley. For a while, everything had been wonderful: love and life everlasting. But the years had passed, and his marriage to Amanda had undergone a subtle and inexplicable process of deterioration and he had gradually become aware that he was, somewhere within himself, deeply dissatisfied with life.

  And he had no idea who or what to blame, other than himself.

  The farmhouse was no longer the centre of a working farm but, like so many properties in the area, had been converted into an expensive holiday home. It sat on a hill with a spectacular view over the surrounding moorland.

  Standish turned a corner in the lane and found his way blocked by the Range Rover belonging to one of the local ferrymen. He braked and climbed out into the teeth of a bitter wind. He turned up the collar of his coat and hurried across to the vehicle.

  The ferryman sat in his cab, an indistinct blur seen through the misted side window. When Standish rapped on the glass and opened the door, he saw Richard Lincoln warming his hands on a mug of coffee from a Thermos.

  “Doug, that was quick. Didn’t expect you people out here for a while yet.”