Interlude I met Stuart Kingsley a couple of years after my resurrection. A lecturer in medieval French at Leeds University, he moved into the village that summer and began drinking at the Fleece, where he soon gravitated into the orbit of the Tuesday night crowd. He was a quiet, thoughtful man who got on well with everyone. Stuart had his serious side-he was a highly respected academic with a string of weighty tomes to his name-but I like to think that our friendship brought out the fun-loving side of his personality. When drunk, he liked nothing more than telling long, convoluted, and hilarious stories about his experiences in life.

On one particular Tuesday night in the main bar, talk turned to the resurrection process, and what actually went on in the domes of the Kethani home planet. It was a topic of conversation that we never exhausted.

As I was the only returnee in the group, it was natural that Stuart should elicit my opinion. "What happened, Khal?" he asked in his soft Devon burr.

I shrugged and gave a vague description of what I recalled of the resurrection dome.

I found it hard to speak of my time on Kethan, as if the desire to do so had been edited from my mind. Some people cite the fact that returnees find it hard to talk about the experience as further evidence of Kethani duplicity: why not allow us to speak openly about what happens within the domes?

I said as much now. "But I have a theory."

Jeff Morrow smiled. "Let's hear it then, Khalid."

"I think that we're not allowed a true memory of what happens there because the resurrection process, and the tuition that follows, is too... too alien for our minds to grasp. I don't mean that it's too horrific, merely that it is totally alien alien and ungraspable to the human mind." I paused, then went on, "In place of the truth, the Kethani fill us with a version of what happens. We recall human instructors, pacific and Zen-like, and views from the domes of Edenlike tranquillity." and ungraspable to the human mind." I paused, then went on, "In place of the truth, the Kethani fill us with a version of what happens. We recall human instructors, pacific and Zen-like, and views from the domes of Edenlike tranquillity."

"But," Stuart said, "the reality is unknowable to the human mind."

I shrugged. "Something like that," I said.

"But whatever happens," Elisabeth said, "returnees are changed on some fundamental level. I mean, look at Khalid here." She gripped my hand. "Sorry, Khal."

I smiled. "I readily admit that I'm a changed man," I said and left it at that.

Elisabeth turned to Dan Chester. "What about Lucy? Have you noticed a change in her since she returned?"

Dan regarded his pint, considering the question. Lucy was a teenager now, living with Dan in the village. I saw her from time to time, a slim, dark thirteen year-old who always had time for a chat. On these occasions I had always thought her more mature than her contemporaries.

Dan smiled. "It's hard to say... but I think perhaps she was a little more... thoughtful, reflective, after her return."

The conversation switched to other topics.

It was a couple of weeks later when I noticed that Stuart was taking a lot of interest in the barmaid, Sam. She was in her mid-twenties, at a guess, blonde and exhibitionist and a little loud, but friendly and always ready with a smile. Not to sound too patronising about it, she was the type of person I thought perfectly suited to a vocation pulling pints.

That Stuart Kingsley should find her attractive was, frankly, bizarre; that he should not only find her attractive but, a month later-after a whirlwind affair-should propose marriage, we found not only odd but alarming.

Richard Lincoln didn't lose an opportunity to rib Stuart mercilessly about his choice of partner, and behind Stuart's back he gave the marriage six months, at most. The truth to tell, we agreed with him.

A year later, our doubts were dispelled. Stuart and Sam were living proof that opposites not only attract, but complement each other. Sam became a vital part of the group and brought even more humour and vitality from the university lecturer.

One week before Stuart's death, we were in the Fleece and talk again turned to the resurrection domes. I cannot recall that much about the conversation-it was late, and I was five pints the worse-but I do remember that Sam was almost... well, frightened frightened at the prospect of life after death. at the prospect of life after death.

And I recall her saying she feared that, if either she or Stuart died, the Kethani would drive them apart.

SEVEN.

A HERITAGE OF STARS.

I had never really given much thought to my death, or what might follow. Perhaps this was a reaction to the fact that in my youth, before the arrival of the Kethani, I had been obsessed with the idea of my mortality, the overwhelming thought that one day I would be dead.

Then the Kethani descended like guardian angels, and my fear of the Grim Reaper faded. In time I became a happy man and lived life to the full.

That night, though, it was as if I had an intimation of what was about to happen. I was driving home from the university, taking the treacherous, ice-bound road over the moors to Oxenworth. I pa.s.sed the towering obelisk of the Onward Station, icy and eerie in the starlight. As I did so, a great actinic pulse of light lanced from its summit, arcing into the heavens towards the awaiting Kethani starship. Although I knew intellectually that the laser pulse contained the demolecularised remains of perhaps a dozen dead human beings, I found the fact hard to credit.

For a few seconds, as I stared up at the light, I wondered at the life that awaited me when I shuffled off this mortal coil.

Ironic that this idle thought should have brought about the accident. My attention still on the streaking parabola, I saw the oncoming truck too late.

I didn't stand a chance.

Perhaps a week before I died, I arrived home to find Samantha in tears.

We had been married for just over a year, and I was still at that paranoid stage in the relationship when I feared that things would crumble. Our marriage had been so perfect I a.s.sumed that it could only end in tears. I knew my feelings for Sam, but what if she failed to reciprocate?

When I stepped into the living room and found her curled up on the sofa, sobbing like a child, my stomach flipped with fear. Perhaps this was it. She had discovered her true feelings; she had made a mistake in declaring her love for me. She wanted out.

She had a book open beside her. I saw that it was a copy of my third monograph, a study of gender and matriarchy in the medieval French epic.

"Sam, what the h.e.l.l...?"

She looked up at me, eyes soaked in tears. "Stuart, I don't understand..." She fingered the Kethani implant at her temple, nervously.

I hurried across to her and took her in my arms. "What?"

She sobbed against my shoulder. "Anything," she managed at last. "I don't understand a b.l.o.o.d.y thing!"

My friends at the Fleece, the Tuesday night crowd including Richard and Khalid and Jeff and the rest, had mocked me mercilessly when I started going out with Samantha. To them she represented the archetype of the dumb blonde barmaid. "I'm sure you'll find lots to talk about when the pleasures of the flesh wear thin," Richard had jibed one night.

Attraction is a peculiar phenomenon. Sam was ten ears my junior, a full-figured twenty-five-year-old high school dropout who worked in the local Co-op and made ends meet with occasional bar work. Or that was how the others perceived her. To me she was an exceptionally sensitive human being who found me attractive and funny. We hit it off from the start and were married within three months.

She pulled away from me and stared into my eyes. She looked deranged. "Stuart, why the h.e.l.l do you love me?"

"Where do you want me to begin?"

She wailed. "I just don't understand!"

She picked up my book, opened it at random, and began reading, holding it high before her like a mad preacher.

"... as Sinclair so perceptively states in Milk and Blood: Milk and Blood: 'The writing and the page exist in a symbiotic relation that serves to mark the feminine "page" as originally blank and devoid of signification...' a dichotomy that stands as a radical ant.i.thesis to Cixous's notion of writing the body." 'The writing and the page exist in a symbiotic relation that serves to mark the feminine "page" as originally blank and devoid of signification...' a dichotomy that stands as a radical ant.i.thesis to Cixous's notion of writing the body."

She shook her head and stared at me. "Stuart, what the h.e.l.l does it all mean?" She sobbed. "I'm so b.l.o.o.d.y stupid-what do you see in me?"

I s.n.a.t.c.hed the book from her and flung it across the room, a gesture symbolising my contempt for theory at that moment.

I eased her back onto the sofa and sat beside her. "Sam, listen to me. A Frenchman comes to England. He speaks no English-"

She snorted and tried to pull away. I held onto her. "Hear me out, Sam. So, Pierre is in England. He never learned to speak our language, so he doesn't understand when someone asks him the time. That doesn't make him stupid, does it?"

She stared at me, angry. "What do you mean?"

I gestured to the book. "All that... that academic-speak, is something I learned at university. It's a language we use amongst ourselves because we understand it. It's overwritten and convoluted and ninety-nine people out of a hundred wouldn't have a clue what we we're going on about. That doesn't make them stupid."

"No," she retorted, "just uneducated."

She had often derided herself for her lack of education. How many times had I tried to rea.s.sure her that I loved her because she was who she was, university degree or not?

That night, in bed, I held her close and said, "Tell me, what's really the matter? What's upsetting you?"

She was silent. The bedroom looked out over the moors, and I always left the curtains open so that I could stare across the valley to the Onward Station. Tonight, as we lay belly-to-back, my arms around her, I watched a spear of white light lance towards the orbiting starship.

She whispered, "Sometimes I wonder why you love me. I try to read your books, try to make sense of them. I wonder what you see in me, why you don't go for one of those high-flying women in your department."

"They aren't you."

She went on, ignoring me, "Sometimes I think about what you do, what you write about, and... I don't know... it symbolises what I can't understand about everything."

"There," I joked, "you're beginning to sound like me."

She elbowed me in the belly. "You see, Stuart, everything is just too much to understand."

"Einstein said that we don't know one millionth of one per cent of anything," I said.

"You know a lot."

"It's all relative. You know more than Tina, say."

"I want to know as much as you."

I laughed. "And I could say I want to know as much as Derrida knew." I squeezed her. "Listen to me. We all want to know more. One of the secrets of being happy is knowing that we'll never know as much as we want to know. It doesn't matter. I love you, sugar plum."

She was silent for a long while after that. Then she said, "Stuart, I'm frightened."

I sighed, squeezed her. The last time she'd said that, she confessed that she was frightened I would leave her. "Sam, I love you. There I was, an unhappy bachelor, never thinking I'd marry. And then the perfect woman comes along..."

"It's not that. I'm frightened of the Kethani."

"Sam... There's absolutely nothing to be frightened of. You've heard what the returnees say."

"I don't mean the Kethani, really. I mean... I mean, what happens to us after we die. Listen, what if you die, and when you come back from the stars... I don't know, what if you've seen more- more than there is here? What if you realise that I can't give you what's out there, among the stars?"

I kissed her neck. "You mean more to me than all the stars in the universe. And anyway, I don't intend to die just yet."

Silence, again. Then a whisper, "Stuart, you're right. We don't know anything, do we? I mean, look at the stars. Just look at them. Aren't they beautiful?"

I stared at the million twinkling points of light spread across the ice-cold heavens.

"Each one is a sun," she said, like an awestruck child, "and millions of them have planets and people... well, aliens. Just think of it, Stuart, just think of everything that's out there that we can't even begin to dream about."

I hugged her to me. "You're a poet and a philosopher, Samantha Gardner," I whispered. "And I love you."

A couple of days later we attended the returning ceremony of Graham Leicester, a friend who'd died of a heart attack six months earlier.

I'd never before entered the Onward Station, and I was unsure what to expect. We left the car in the snow-covered parking lot and shuffled across the slush behind the file of fellow celebrants. Samantha gripped my hand and shivered. "C-cold," she brrr'd.

A blue-uniformed official, with the fixed smile and plastic good looks of an air hostess, ushered us into a reception lounge. It was a big, white-walled room with a sky blue carpet. Abstract murals hung on the walls, swirls of pastel colour. I wondered if this was Kethani artwork.

A long table stood before a window overlooking the white, undulating moorland. A buffet was laid out, tiny sandwiches and canapes, and red and white wine.

Graham's friends, his neighbours and the regulars from the Fleece, were already tucking in. Sam brought me a gla.s.s of red wine and we stood talking to Richard Lincoln.

"I wonder if he'll be the same old happy-go-lucky Graham as before?" Sam asked.

Richard smiled. "I don't see why not," he said.

"But he'll be changed, won't he?" Sam persisted. "I mean, not just physically?"

Richard shrugged. "He'll appear a little younger, fitter. And who knows how the experience will have changed him psychologically."

"But don't the aliens-" Sam began.

Richard was saved the need to reply. A door at the far end of the room opened and the Station Director, Masters, stepped into the reception lounge and cleared his throat.

"First of all, I'd like to welcome you all to the Onward Station." He gave a little speech extolling the service to humankind bestowed by the Kethani and then explained that Graham Leicester was with close family members right at this moment, his wife and children, and would join us presently.

I must admit that I was more than a little curious as to how the experience of dying, being resurrected, and returning to Earth after six months had affected Graham. I'd heard rumours about the post-resurrection period on Kethan: humans were brought back to life and 'instructed', informed about the universe, the other life-forms that existed out there, the various tenets and philosophies they held. But I wanted to hear firsthand from Graham exactly what he'd undergone.

I expected to be disappointed. I'd read many a time that returnees rarely spoke of their experiences on Kethan: that either they were reluctant to do so or were somehow inhibited by their alien saviours.

Five minutes later Graham stepped through the sliding door, followed by his wife and two teenage daughters.

I suppose the reaction to his appearance could be described as a muted gasp-an indrawn breath of mixed delight and amazement.

Graham had run the local hardware store, a big, affable, overweight fifty-something, with a drinker's nose and a rapidly balding head.