Kethani by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

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 classic 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. “God... 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 glass, 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 Kéthani...”
    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? Whether we live seventy years, or seven thousand—it’s still the same old futile repetition 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 repetition, Jeff—a going through the motions. We’ve done