Kéthani

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Everyone remembers what they were doing on the day the Onward Stations, those towering monuments to the fact of extraterrestrial intelligence, appeared on Earth.

I was in my mid-twenties, finishing my internship at Bradley General Hospital in the wild moorland of West Yorkshire. Life was good; I enjoyed my work, and the prospect of specialisation. I had met a wonderful woman a year earlier—Zara, whom I would marry in eighteen months—and I was adapting well to life in the country after twenty-five years of living in Bradford.

And then the Kéthani came, and for a while everything was in turmoil.

On the day planet Earth was made aware that sentient alien life existed out there beyond the solar system, I had the privilege of witnessing the appearance of the strange alien construct on the harsh winter landscape of the moorland above the village of Oxenworth.

It was midday on a freezing Monday in mid-January, and I had set off early for a late shift at the hospital. What was in my head as I drove from the village and climbed the narrow lane onto the brow of the moors, from which it seemed the entire world could be viewed? Well, as ever I was thanking my lucky stars, and no doubt enjoying the panorama. After the cramped shabbiness of my life in Bradford, the unspoilt landscape of the moorland, giving way to rolling farmland in the distance, seemed pristine and limitless. Not unlike my future—though little did I realise this at the time.

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