I smiled. "No, local. It takes about ten minutes. I simply make an incision in the skin of the temple and insert the implant. I seal the wound, and the implant does the rest. It releases nano-machines into the subject's body, which monitor the metabolism. When the subject 'dies', the implant takes over and revives the system."

Mrs. Emmett was shaking her head. "And then, when Davey is returned, he can make his decision as to whether or not he wishes to retain the implant?"

I nodded. "That's right. Now, if you'd care to step this way."

Davey proved to be a docile patient. A nurse administered a sedative and a local anaesthetic, and while Davey lay on the couch with his head turned to the left, I made the slit in his right temple, eased the implant home, and sealed the wound.

Mrs. Emmett perched on a stool, watching intently.

I looked up and smiled. "There, done."

"Quite amazing, Khalid."

While Davey was drinking a cup of sugary tea, Mrs. Emmett confided her concerns to me. "It will be a very strange experience, Khalid, when Davey returns, to see him as he might have been if not for..." She smiled, sadly. "You see, so much of my life has been taken up with his welfare. I retired early in order to keep him with me. I could have sent him to a care home, but after my husband died... well, Davey was all I had."

She fell silent, her gaze distant, perhaps considering how her life might have worked out had it not been for Davey's handicap.

I realised, then, that Davey's return would be at once a cause for celebration and, for Mrs. Emmett, much soul-searching.

Once Davey was implanted, he was spared the treatment he would have undergone for his condition. A month after his implant, he was admitted to Bradley General where he died peacefully. Richard Lincoln, accompanied by Mrs. Emmett and myself, drove the body up to the Onward Station. There was a small, secular ceremony of leave-taking, and then Davey was beamed aboard the orbiting Kethani starship. I drove Mrs. Emmett home, promising to accompany her to the ceremony that would greet Davey's return to Earth in six months' time.

That year, winter hung on well into April. There was a late fall of snow at Easter, transforming the land with its total and pristine beauty. Life proceeded as normal, a round of work and Tuesday night sessions at the Fleece. They were the highlight of the week, a few hours of relaxation among good friends.

I saw Zara once in Bradley, and that was painful. She was walking arm in arm with her new husband, on the opposite side of the street. They didn't see me, for which I was thankful. The sight of her, tall and beautiful and seemingly happy, released a slew of painful memories. I went over and over our final days together, and Zara's accusations. I was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, she had said, a domineering, selfish, bigoted, s.e.xist b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

And then I had killed myself and been resurrected-remade, as it were, by the Kethani. I became a new man.

A few months after Davey Emmett's death, Richard Lincoln took me to one side in the Fleece and told me that Mrs. Emmett was in hospital.

"I saw her yesterday while I was making a pick up," he said. "She has cancer. It's terminal. She said she wanted to see you."

I looked at him. "You don't think...?" I began.

"What, that she wants to be implanted? A conversion at the eleventh hour? I doubt it, not our Mrs. Emmett."

"I'll drop by and see her tomorrow," I promised, and returned to my pint, wondering what the old lady might want to see me about.

She was in a private room on the oncology ward, sitting upright in bed and hooked up to a bank of machines. If I had expected a feeble, self-sorry old woman who had given up all hope, then I had grossly underestimated Mrs. Katherine Emmett.

She gave a cheery smile when I hesitantly entered the room. "Khalid, pull up a chair. How are you?"

I smiled and shook my head. "Isn't it me who should be asking you how you are?"

She laughed. "I'm fine, Khalid. Oddly enough, given the circ.u.mstances, I've really never felt better."

I took her hand. "You're an amazing woman," I found myself saying.

She laughed again, mockingly this time. "I'm seventy-six, Khalid, and I've had a full and eventful life. I'm quite prepared for the end of this stage of existence."

I gestured at the equipment surrounding the bed. "They're doing their d.a.m.nedest to keep you alive."

She leaned forward and whispered, mock-conspiratorially, "It's because I'm not implanted, Khalid. They're frightened to death of death. They're trying to do everything they can to squeeze a few more weeks of life from me. But as I've told them over and over, I'm ready to go."

"They haven't tried to get you to agree to an implant?"

"Of course they have. I had some young thing down here just yesterday. He didn't know his theology, though-I tied him up in knots."

"So it'd be useless if I tried to..."

"Absolutely and categorically futile, Khalid, my friend."

I tried another tack. "How long do they give you?"

"Perhaps a month. The liver, you see."

"But you won't be around to see Davey when he returns..."

She allowed a few seconds to elapse before she replied-sufficient time to make me regret the statement.

"No," she said, "I won't be around. And do you know something? I don't want to be around, to be honest."

I stared at her. "Surely-" I began, and stopped myself.

She leaned forward. "Khalid, I want to tell you something. I've never told another living soul this, and I want to get it off my chest before I go." I squeezed her hand, wondering what I was about to hear.

"Khalid, do you know what was wrong with Davey? I mean, what was responsible for his condition?"

I shook my head. "His medical records would have been privy only to his own doctor," I began.

She smiled, returning the pressure of my hand. "It was an accident, Khalid. When he was two years old. I'd taken him out shopping. If only I'd delayed going out or not gone at all... But we can't undo the past, can we? Oh, I've often wondered how what happened might have been the repercussions of sins I might have committed in a previous life. That was the only part of Buddhist theory that I found hard to accept." She laughed. "For obvious reasons, Khalid! Anyway, you see, it was my fault... the accident. We had stopped at the side of the road, and Davey got away from me... ran straight into the road, in front of..." She paused, gathering herself, and then went on. "The doctors said it was miracle that Davey survived, even though he was severely brain damaged."

She stopped, and the silence seemed to ring like an alarm. When I looked up at her, I saw tears streaming unchecked down her wrinkled cheeks. I found a tissue and pa.s.sed it to her, and she blotted the tears with a gesture at once dignified and pitiful.

"I've had to live with the guilt for so long," she said, "even though my acceptance of karma should lead me to be able to see guilt for the illusion it is. As I said, I'm not a very good Buddhist."

I began to protest.

She gave a sigh and went on, "So do you see why I couldn't bear to see Davey when he returned? He will be how he would have been, were it not for my neglect. And the sight of him, so changed, will remind me not only of my foolishness, but of the Davey I should have been able to love, growing up like other children."

She was crying again, and all I could do was grip her hand.

At last, tentatively, I said, "But if you were to be implanted, you would be able to share his life from now on."

She smiled at me through her tears. She lifted my hand and kissed my knuckles. "You're a good man, Khalid. You mean well. But Davey would be a stranger to me. It wasn't meant to be. Did you know," she said, more brightly now, "that scientists opposed to the Kethani have developed a new theory of consciousness?"

I smiled. "They have?"

She nodded, enthusiastic. "You see, they posit that our consciousness, the very essence that makes us ourselves, resides on some infinitesimally small, quantum level, a level that permeates the cosmos. And when we die, we don't just fizzle out like a spent match, but our consciousness remains integrated with the matrix of existence..." She laughed to herself. "It's what Buddha said all those hundreds of years ago, Khalid!"

"Well, what do you know, Mrs. Emmett," I smiled.

Before I left, promising to pop in the following day, she restrained me with a fierce grip. "Khalid, when Davey returns, will you meet him at the Station, explain what happened, why I couldn't be there for him? Will you make sure that he understands, Khalid?"

"Of course I will."

"And... something else." She reached across to the bedside table, and gave me a sealed letter. "Will you give this to him, Khalid? It's an explanation of my belief. I want him to consider everything, so that he can decide for himself whether he wants to retain his implant."

I squeezed her hand and promised that I would give him the letter, then said goodbye and slipped from the room.

I did return the following day, only to learn that Mrs. Emmett had died peacefully in the early hours of the morning.

Three months later, in the middle of October, a heavy fall of snow heralded Davey Emmett's return to Earth.

I was just one of three people gathered at the Onward Station to greet him. The other two were care a.s.sistants who had worked with Davey over the years. They had never, they said, met a returnee; I refrained from telling them that I had died and been resurrected by the Kethani.

I recalled my own transformation, both mentally and physically, and wondered how the Kethani might have remade Davey Emmett.

Five minutes later we found out. We were in a small reception lounge furnished with a few chairs and a table bearing wine and fruit juice. Normally, more people would attend a returning ceremony, and a larger lounge would be required: but Davey had made few friends during his thirty years on Earth.

The sliding door at the back of the room opened, and Davey stepped through. The woman beside me gasped, and I understood her reaction. Even I, who had been expecting a marked metamorphosis, was taken aback.

Gone was the overweight adult-child, the sallow-faced, balding misfit unable to establish eye contact or hold a conversation.

Davey Emmett seemed taller, slimmer. His face was lean, even handsome; he appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He wore a neat suit and strode purposefully into the room, smiling.

He shook our hands, greeting us by name. "It's good to see you, Khalid."

We exchanged inane pleasantries for a while. I recalled my own resurrection ceremony, and the mutual inability of the returnee to express quite what he had been through, and the circ.u.mspection of the celebrants faced with the miracle of someone returned from the dead.

"Director Masters informed me of my mother's pa.s.sing," Davey said. Masters was head of the Onward Station. "Khalid, if you could drive me home via the cemetery...?"

"Of course."

The meeting broke up five minutes later and I drove Davey from the towering crystal obelisk of the Station, through the snow-covered landscape towards Oxenworth.

After a minute, I broke the silence. "I saw your mother during her illness, Davey. She wasn't in pain, and didn't fear death. She had her own strong faith."

Davey nodded. "I know. I remember her telling me all about it."

I glanced across at him. "How much do you recall from... from before?"

He considered for a second or two, frowning. "It's strange, but I recall everything. Who I was, my thoughts and reactions. But it's very much like an adult looking back on his childhood. We have only a refracted, blurred image of who that person was. It's almost like looking back at the life of a stranger."

He was silent for a while, staring out at the snow-softened landscape undulating to the distant moorland horizon.

"The Kethani remade me completely, Khalid. They took what they had, the fundamental David Emmett, and rebuilt a fully functioning, intelligent human being from the unpromising raw material. The odd thing is, I feel that they maintained a continuity. I am David Emmett, but whole, now."

"I think I know what you mean, Davey. I died ten years ago. The person who came back... well, he was much changed, too."

We came to the cemetery and I turned into the long drive.

We climbed from the car, into the teeth of the subzero wind, and I led Davey across to where his mother was interred.

Her grey marble headstone projected from the fleecy snow, bearing her name, date of birth and death, and a line from a Buddhist text: We each of us have a choice of eternities. We each of us have a choice of eternities.

There were few deaths these days, and the cemetery was little used. The headstone next to Mrs. Emmett's recorded that Claudine Hainault had been buried there twelve years previously.

I felt tears stinging my eyes.

Davey stood at the foot of his mother's grave, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. The cold wind stirred his full head of black hair.

I said, "Your mother asked me to explain why she couldn't be here to meet you, Davey. And she asked me to give you this." I pa.s.sed him the letter.

He took it and looked at me. "You mean, why she couldn't face the person I would be-the person I might have been, but for the accident?"

I smiled to myself. He was ahead of me and had saved me from an awkward explanation.

"Do you understand how it must have been, from her point of view?" I said inadequately.

"I understand," he said. "I just wonder how much her belief system was a result of the guilt she felt after the accident. I wonder if she rationalised that she was atoning in this life for sins accrued in a previous one... and if she believed in reincarnation in the hope that my next existence might be a better one." He smiled to himself. "This was all before the coming of the Kethani, of course."

I shook my head and shrugged, smiling sadly at the thought of Mrs. Emmett.

"The terrible thing was," Davey went on, "that my mother wasn't responsible for the accident. We were standing at the side of the road and I just pulled my hand from hers and ran off, into the path of a car... Thanks to the Kethani, I remember everything." He paused, then said, "My mother blamed herself, of course."

He lifted his head and stared into the heavens, and I saw that his eyes were filmed with tears.

"I wonder if she'd forgive me?" he asked at last.

"Your mother was a good and forgiving person," I said.

He stared at the cold, grey headstone. "Would things have turned out differently, for her, but for that incident?"

I said at last, "Who can tell?"

"I wonder if she is happy, wherever she is?"