Kethani

I glanced at her. "You are?"

She smiled. "Why not?" she replied. "They seem to have all the answers, I think."

"Do they?" I said, surprised. "I would have thought that a young girl like you..."

We came to a halt at the end of the track leading to her house, and the sudden silence was startling. She stared at me. I could see that she had half a mind to tell me not to be so patronising. Instead she shook her head.

"Life is awful, Mr. Morrow," she said. "It always has been. And it hasn"t improved since they they arrived. If anything, it has made things even worse." arrived. If anything, it has made things even worse."

Tentatively, I reached out and took her hand. I wondered for a second if I had misjudged the situation completely; if she would react with indignation and fright, or even report me.

"If there"s anything I can do to help..." I said. Did she realise, in her teenage wisdom, that my words were just as much a cry for help as an offer of the same?

She smiled brightly, filling me with relief. "Thanks, Mr. Morrow. It"s nice to be able to talk to someone." She climbed out and waved to me with a mittened hand before setting off down the farm track.

That night I set out to get seriously drunk. I placed three bottles of claret on the coffee table before the fire and sat in the darkness and drank. I would be lying if I claimed that I was trying to banish the painful memories of Caroline that Claudine stirred in me. More truthfully, I wanted to banish the knowledge of the failure I had become through inaction and fear. A lonely man has the capacity for self-pity so much greater than his ability, or desire, to change the circ.u.mstances that brought about such self-pity in the first place.

I was drinking because I realised the futility of trying to seek solace and companionship from a mixed-up eighteen year-old schoolgirl.

I awoke late the following day, lost myself in a book for a couple of hours, and later that afternoon watched the live match on television. Leeds had a returnee playing up front, but after the year"s lay off he had yet to find his previous form, and the game ended in a dull nil-nil draw. At six, as a new snowfall created a pointillistic flurry in the darkness outside, I started on the half bottle of claret remaining from the night before.

I was contemplating another drunken evening when I heard a call from outside and seconds later a frenzied banging on the front door.

Claudine stood on the doorstep, wet, bedraggled, and frozen. She began as soon as I pulled open the door, "She has fallen and hit her head. The lines are down and I can"t call the ambulance. We don"t have a mobile."

"Slow down," I said, taking her hand and pulling her across the threshold. "Who"s fallen?"

"My mother. She was drinking. She fell down the stairs. She is unconscious."

She was wearing a thin anorak, a short skirt, and incongruously bulky moon-boots. Her legs were bare and whipped red from the frozen wind.

"I"ve a mobile somewhere." I hurried into the lounge, dug through the cushions of the settee for the phone, and called an ambulance.

Claudine watched me, teeth chattering. With her hair plastered to her forehead, and her bare knees knocking, she looked about twelve years old.

I took her hand, hurried her from the house to my car. She sat in silence as I drove past the reservoir and turned down the track to her house.

She had left the front door wide open in her haste to summon help. I rushed inside. "In the lounge," Claudine said. "Through there."

The lounge was a split-level affair, with three steps leading from the higher level to a s.p.a.cious area with a picture window overlooking the water. Claudine"s mother sprawled across the floor, having tumbled and struck her head on the edge of a wrought-iron coffee table. She was a thin, tanned woman with bleached-blonde hair. In her unconscious features I saw the likeness of Claudine, thirty years on.

The reek of whisky, spilt from the gla.s.s she had been carrying, filled the room.

I rolled her onto her side and did my best to staunch the flow of blood from her forehead, noticing as I did so that she, unlike her daughter, was implanted.

The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. The paramedics examined Claudine"s mother, then eased her onto a stretcher. I watched them load her into the back of the vehicle, my arm around Claudine. One of the medics asked Claudine if she wanted to accompany her mother in the ambulance.

"I"ll take her in the car," I said before she had time to reply.

The ambulance backed up the track and raced, blue light flashing, down the lane into town. I made for the car.

Behind me, Claudine said, "I don"t want to go."

"What?"

She stood, pathetic and frozen, in the snow. She shook her head. "I don"t want to go to the hospital. I"ll stay here."

"On your own?"

She gave an apathetic shrug.

"Look... there"s a spare room at my place. You can stay there until your mother"s released, okay?"

She stared at me through the falling snow. "Are you sure?"

"Go get some clothes and things. And lock the door. I"ll be waiting here."

I climbed into the car and watched as the lights in the house went out one by one. Claudine appeared at the front door, carrying a holdall and fumbling with a key ring. She climbed into the pa.s.senger seat and I set off up the track, turned right and continued along the lane until we reached my place.

I showed Claudine to the bathroom, and while she showered and changed I prepared a simple pasta dish. I had experienced a rush of adrenalin while attending to her mother and waiting for the ambulance, and I realised that something of the anxiety was with me still. My hands were shaking as I set two places at the table. I went over and over what I would say during dinner.

I was wondering what was taking her so long when I heard a voice from the lounge. "This is really a beautiful place." There was a note of surprise in her voice, as if she thought that the domicile of a washed-up forty year-old teacher would prove to be an inhospitable dump.

I crossed the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching her as she moved around the lounge. She was barefoot, dressed in flared jeans, which were back in fashion, and a white T-shirt that had either shrunk in the wash or was designed to reveal a strip of slim stomach.

She paused before the photographs of Caroline on the wall. She looked at me.

"My wife," I said.

She said, casually, "I didn"t know you were married."

"I"m not," I said. "Any longer. She died in a car accident two years ago."

She winced, ever so slightly. "Before they came?" she asked.

"Just a month before," I said.

I joined her and stared at the photograph. Caroline smiled out at me. "She looked like a lovely person," Claudine said.

I nodded. "She was."

As if she feared that the subject might move us on to the reason why she was not implanted, Claudine drifted across the room to inspect the bookshelves.

I returned to the kitchen and served dinner.

We chatted as we ate, going over things we"d talked about before, school, local attractions, novels and films we admired.

"You can phone the hospital later," I said at one point. "I"ll drive you over tomorrow if you like."

She shook her head, not meeting my gaze. "It doesn"t matter. I"m not that bothered. She"ll come back when she"s better."

I paused. "What happened between you two?" I asked at last.

She smiled up at me. She was so pretty when she smiled; then again, she had a certain sullen hauteur hauteur that was equally as attractive when she deigned not to smile. that was equally as attractive when she deigned not to smile.

"Oh, we have never got on," she said. "I was always my father"s favourite. I think she was jealous. They fought a lot-it might have been because of me. I don"t know."

"Are they separated?"

Claudine looked at me with her oversized brown eyes. She shook her head. "You might have heard of him-Bertrand Hainault? He was a philosopher, one of those popular media intellectuals you don"t have over here, I think."

I shook my head. "Sorry. Not up on philosophy."

"My father took his life last year," she said quietly. "He and mother were fighting constantly, but I think it was more than that... I don"t know. It was all so confusing. I think it might have been a protest, too-a protest at what they they were doing." were doing."

Something caught in my throat. "He wasn"t implanted?"

"Oh, no. He was opposed to the whole process. He argued his position in televised debates and in a series of books, but of course no one took any notice."

Except you, I thought, beginning at last to understand the enigma that was Claudine Hainault. I thought, beginning at last to understand the enigma that was Claudine Hainault.

She changed the subject, suddenly brightening. "I"ll help you with the dishes, then can we watch a DVD?"

Later we sat on the settee, drank wine and watched a cla.s.sic Truffaut. Claudine curled up beside me, whispering comments on the film to herself. She fell asleep leaning against me, and I watched the remainder of the movie accompanied by the sound of her breathing and the pleasant weight of her shampooed head against my shoulder.

Rather than wake her, at midnight I carefully lowered her to the cushions and covered her with a blanket. In the pulsing blue light from the TV, I sat for a while and watched her sleeping.

In the morning I was woken by the unfamiliar sound of someone moving about the house. Then the aroma of a cooked breakfast eddied up the stairs. I had a quick shower and joined Claudine in the kitchen. She was sliding fried eggs and bacon onto plates. The coffee percolator bubbled. She could hardly bring herself to meet my eyes, as if fearing that I might consider this rite of domesticity an unwelcome escalation of the intimacy we had shared the night before.

Over breakfast, I suggested that we go for a long walk across the moors. It was a dazzling winter"s morning, the sky blue and the snow an unblemished mantle for as far as the eye could see.

I drove Claudine back to her house to change into walking boots and a thick coat. We left the car at my place and started along the bright, metalled lane. Later we struck off across the moors, following a bridleway that would take us, eventually, to the escarpment overlooking the valley, the reservoir and a scattering of farmhouses.

Somewhere along the way her mittened hand found my cold fingers and squeezed. She was smiling as I exaggerated the misfortunes of the school football team, which I organised. I would never have thought that I could be so cheered by something as simple as her smile.

Claudine looked up, ahead, and her expression changed. I followed the line of her gaze and saw the sparkling pinnacle of the Onward Station projecting above the crest of the hill.

Her mouth was open in wonder. "G.o.d... This is the closest I"ve been to it. I never realised it was so beautiful."

She pulled me along, up the incline. As we climbed, more and more of the Station was revealed in the valley below. At last we stood on the lip of the escarpment, staring down. My attention was divided equally between the alien edifice and Claudine. She gazed down with wide eyes, her nose and cheeks red with the cold, her thoughts unguessable.

It was not so much the architecture of the Station that struck the onlooker, as the material from which it was made. The Station-identical to the thousands of others situated around the world- rose from the snow-covered ground like a cathedral constructed from gla.s.s, climbing to a spire that coruscated in the bright winter sunlight.

As we watched, a pale beam-weakened by the daylight-fell through the sky towards the Station, bringing a cargo of returnees back home.

I put my arm around Claudine"s shoulders. She said, "The very fact of the Station is like the idea it promotes."

I made some interrogational noise.

"Beguiling," she said. "It is like some Christmas bauble that dazzles children, I think."

"For ages humankind has dreamed of becoming immortal," I said, staring at her. "Thanks to the Kethani..."

She laid her head against my shoulder, almost sadly. "But," she said, gesturing in a bid to articulate her objection. "But don"t you see, Jeff, that it really doesn"t matter? matter? Whether we live seventy years, or seven thousand-it"s still the same old futile repet.i.tion of day-to-day existence." Whether we live seventy years, or seven thousand-it"s still the same old futile repet.i.tion of day-to-day existence."

Anger slow-burned within me. "Futile? What about our ability to learn, to experience, to discover new and wondrous things out there?"

She was shaking her head. "It is merely repet.i.tion, Jeff-a going through the motions. We"ve done all these things on Earth, and so what? Are we any happier as a race?"

"But I think we are," I said. "Now that the spectre of death is banished-" I stopped myself.

Claudine just shook her head.

Into the silence, I said, "I honestly don"t understand why you aren"t implanted."

She looked up at me, so young and vulnerable. "I"ll tell you why, Jeff. I"ve read the philosophical works of the Kethani and the other races out there-or at least read summaries of them. My father and I... in the early days we went through them all. And do you know what?"

I shook my head, suddenly weary. "No. What? Tell me."

She smiled up at me, but her eyes were terrified. "They understand everything, and have come to the realisation that the universe and life in it is just one vast mechanistic carousel. It doesn"t mean mean anything." anything."

"Claudine, Claudine. Of course it doesn"t. But we must live with that. There never were any answers, unless you were religious. But you must make your own meaning. We have so much time ahead of us to live for the day, to love-"

She laughed. "Do you know something? I don"t believe in love, very much. I saw my parents" relationship deteriorate, turn to hate. I can feel it," she looked at me, "but I can"t believe that it will last."

"It changes," I began, then fell silent.

She squeezed my hand. "Let"s go home," she said. "I"m hungry. I"ll prepare lunch, okay?"

We set off down the hillside, pa.s.sing the Station. A ferryman driving a Range Rover pulled into the car park, delivering another dead citizen. Tonight, the darkness would pulse with white light as the bodies were transported to the Kethani starship in orbit high above.

After lunch that afternoon we lounged before the roaring fire and talked. When the words ran out it seemed entirely natural, an action of no consequence to the outside world, but important only to ourselves, that we should seek each other with touches and kisses, coming in silence to some mutual understanding of our needs.

That night, as we lay close in bed, we stared through the window at the constellations. The higher magnitude stars burned in the freezing night sky, while beyond them the sweep of the Milky Way was a hazy opaline blur.

"Hard to believe there are hundreds of thousands of humans out there," she said, close to sleep.

I thought of the new planets, the strange civilisations, that I would some day encounter-and I experienced a sudden surge of panic at the fact that Claudine was willingly forgoing the opportunity to do the same. I wanted to shake her in my sudden rage and demand that she underwent the implantation process.

It was a long while before I slept.