Andy shook his head. "I don"t know. I have a bad feeling about it."
I smiled, pointed to the raised square of the implant at his temple. "But you"re implanted, Andy. You"ll go when you die..."
He smiled bleakly. "I know, but that"s different. I"ll die of natural causes, or accidentally. I won"t take my life at the behest of some stranger."
I said, "Gregory"s no stranger, now."
He stared at me. "Isn"t he?"
"You don"t like him, do you?"
"I don"t know. Put it this way, I"m not wholly convinced."
I laughed. "About what, exactly?"
He looked bleak. "That"s just it. I don"t know. I just have this... feeling."
I said, "Look, we"re going to the Fleece at nine for a last drink. Why don"t you come along, say goodbye."
He shook his head, "I"ve said goodbye to everyone individually." He held out his hand. "Take care, Khalid."
THE FOLLOWING EVENING Richard Lincoln knocked on my door, and I left the house for the very last time. We walked in silence past the Fleece, through the village and up the hillside toward the beckoning lights of Merrall"s converted farmhouse.
Our friends were already there, armed with drinks.
There was, unlike our last few nights in the Fleece, a party atmosphere in the air, a fin-de-siecle sense of closure, of new beginnings.
We drank and chatted about the past. We regaled Gregory with incidents of village life over the past twenty years, the emotional highs and lows: the break-up of my marriage, the resurrection of Ben"s father; the going of Father Renbourn... It was as if, with this incantatory summoning of the past, we were putting off the inevitability of the future.
Then we ate, seated around a long pine table, a lavish meal of roast beef and baked potatoes. Conversation turned to the Kethani, and our mission as amba.s.sadors among the stars.
A little drunk, I laughed. "It seems impossible to reconcile my life so far, the insignificance of my existence until now, with what might happen out there." And I swung my wine gla.s.s in an abandoned gesture at the stars.
Gregory said, "We will be taken, and trained, and we will behold wonders we cannot even guess at."
Beside me, Sam said, "I wish Andy was coming with us."
A silence settled around the table as we pondered our absent, skeptical friend.
We finished the meal and Gregory poured the wine. He went around the table, clockwise, and tipped an exact measure of French claret, laced with cyanide, into each gla.s.s.
Sam, Stuart, and I sat together at the end of the table. I felt a subtle sense of exclusion from the act about to take place. Later tonight we three would report to the Onward Station, would be beamed up in the same transmission as our friends, and begin our journey to the stars.
I was aware of my heart thudding as I watched my friends raise their gla.s.ses and Richard Lincoln p.r.o.nounce a toast. "To friends," he said, "and to the future!"
"To friends, and to the future!" they echoed, and drank.
I watched Richard Lincoln relax, smiling, and slump into his seat, as if asleep, and I reached across the table and gripped his hand as if to ease his pa.s.sing. I looked around, taking in the enormity of the fact that my friends of so many years were dead, or dying... Jeffrey leaned forward, resting his head on his arms; Doug Standish sat upright, a smile on his stilled face; Ben and Elisabeth leaned toward each other, embracing, and died together. At the head of the table, Gregory Merrall slumped in his seat, his head flung back in death.
A silence filled the room and I felt like weeping.
Someone was clutching my hand. I looked up. Sam was staring at me through her tears.
We stood and moved toward the door. Already, our friends" implants would be registering the fact of their death. In minutes, the ferrymen from Onward Station would arrive to collect their bodies.
I took one last glance at the tableau of stilled and lifeless remains, then joined Sam and Stuart and stepped into the freezing night.
Stuart indicated his car. "We might as well go straight to the Station."
I said, "Do you mind if I walk?"
I sketched a wave and set off along the footpath that climbed across the snow-covered moorland to the soaring tower of the Onward Station in the distance.
Their car started and drove away, and soon the sound of its engine died and left a profound silence in its wake.
I strode across the brow of the hill, my boots compacting snow, my head too full of recent events to look ahead with any clarity.
At one point I stopped, turned and looked down at the farmhouse, dark against the snow. The lights glowed in the windows, and it reminded me of a nativity scene.
I was about to resume my march when, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement at the back door. At first I thought it was a ferryman, arrived early-then realized that I had heard no car.
I stared, and caught my breath in shock.
A figure stepped through the kitchen door and strode out into the graveled driveway, and in the light of the gibbous moon I recognized the tweed-clad shape of Gregory Merrall.
At that moment I felt very alone. I wanted Sam and Stuart beside me, to affirm that I was not losing my senses.
As I watched, he stopped in the middle of the drive and stared up at the stars, and my mind was in chaos.
Why? I asked myself... Why had he- And then the explanation came, falling from the heavens.
Gregory raised his arms above his head, as if in greeting or supplication, and from on high there descended, across the dark night sky like the scoring of a diamond point across a sheet of obsidian, what at first I thought was a shooting star. The vector it took, however, was vertical. It fell like a lance, heading for the farmhouse below, and I could only gasp in wonder, breathless, as it struck Gregory Merrall.
He vanished, and the light leapt up and retraced its course through the night sky, heading toward the waiting Kethani starship.
My face stinging with tears, I set off toward the rearing obelisk of Onward Station. I thought of Andy Souter, and his suspicion of Gregory Merrall, and his decision not to join us... and I wondered if Andy had been right to turn his back, this time, on the new life that awaited us.
I was sobbing by the time I reached the Station. I paused before its cut-gla.s.s perfection, this thing of supernal alien beauty on the harsh Yorkshire landscape.
I wondered whether to tell Sam and Stuart that we had been lured to the stars by an... an impostor. Did it matter, after all? I tried to marshal my emotions, decide whether what Merrall had done could be considered an act of betrayal, or of salvation. I wondered if I should go ahead with what we had planned.
I turned and stared out over the land that had been my home since birth, a land slowly emptying due to the ministrations of a mysterious alien race. Then I looked up at the stars, the million pulsating beacons of light, and I knew that there was only one course of action to take.
I hurried into the Station, to join my friends and to begin the new life that awaited me out there among the beckoning stars.
end.