The Ephemera (3 page)

"I can feel every note you play. Vibrating. Your music is so beautiful, but it lasts so short a time."

I put the guitar down and went over to her, touching her hair.

"Come on," I said. "Let's go to bed."

Lying together, relishing every warm point of contact between us. So good to return to this at last. So good to have the old Annie back. As I drifted into sleep Annie whispered into my spine.

"You will bring your music back to me, Lorna, won't you?"

"Of course."

"I couldn't live without your music."

"I love you too, Annie."

~

As soon as I opened the door I knew Annie was gone. The house sighed its emptiness. Crossing the threshold, I stepped into a calmness, as if a great tension, invisible until now, had been released. It was the relief of looking up at the inky-black, star-pocked sky after a long day under a fierce, unrelenting sun.

The TV drew my attention first. For weeks it had been on constantly in the background, showing Annie's videos of nature programmes, and now it was conspicuous by its silence. Easy to see why. Its screen had been caved in, spilling dead-grey chunks of glass onto the carpet. There was more. The bedroom mirror had suffered similar vandalism; and around the house various other items had been smashed or broken.

In the kitchen, the late evening sun illuminated a wedge of floor; a hot knife blade of light slicing across Annie's mosaic. Now, at last, I could see the picture. Why only now? Tears blurred my vision as I began to understand the sense of it, as if my body was trying to blind me even at this late stage.

A scene; so real, so clever. I could almost feel the warmth of the clay road beneath the naked soles of my feet, baked by the polished copper disc of the sun. To the sides of the road, smudged greenery was beginning to sprout from the dark earth, and in the distance a smoky grey forest, restless with quick shadows that echoed with the calls of exotic birds and animals. Off to one side, a cold lake, still and clear as glass, invited me to drink.

In the centre, at the focus of the piece, two of Annie's string people, one long and one short. Two thin strands composed from slices of silvered glass, shining with the sun's white-yellow brilliance. I let my fingers trace the strips of warm glass thoughtfully, then the aperture beside the figures, a dark hole similar to them in shape. The only piece of the mosaic that remained to be completed.

Annie had left a note. It lay on the table weighed down by the empty wine bottle from that last meal and a hand-sized rectangular mirror which reflected my face. Not pretty. Puffy, dewy eyes betrayed my feelings, but there was no-one there to see them. The handwriting was neat, almost childlike. As was her way, it said very little, and it spoke volumes.

Sorry Lorna. So beautiful, couldn't wait. A

First I swept up the broken things around the house, and then tidied up in general, washing and scrubbing, brushing, polishing.
Erasing
. Then, when the house was a place I felt I could live in normally again, I went to the step and broke the glass, selecting appropriate pieces and tidying the rest into the bin. In the kitchen I cemented the pieces into the place reserved for them. They glowed in the sunlight as if lit from the inside; a soulful, bottle green, so deep I could almost hear captured chords strummed softly on an old guitar, remembered music rising with the heat in the shimmering air, echoing far across the lake. And yes, I thought, it
was
beautiful.

I took pride in that thought. With night falling I grabbed my guitar and went to sit on the step. Sitting under the stars, my seat still surrounded by splinters of glass and china and clay, I rediscovered chords and melodies. I sat and sang all my old songs until they were exhausted, and then, remembering how, I started to make a new one. In it, I wished Annie and the baby well, wherever they were, and then, after that, I just played for the pleasure of playing for myself.

~

The seed for this story—rarely for me—was the title. The phrase just appeared in my brain one day, and the story was written to find out what it meant. Later, I recognised that the title was cumbersome, but by then it was the heart of the story and I couldn't have changed it if I'd wanted to.

The Euonymist

Calum knew there was a word for it. This sick feeling that had been accreting stealthily in his gut since the transport burned down from the orbital and lit in over the North Atlantic; that had formed a discernible kernel over Arran and bubbled up to his chest when they landed. When he set foot on Scottish tarmac again, he felt it tickle his heart in a most unwelcome way. It was like anticipation of something you knew you should be looking forward to but suspected might not turn out the way you wanted at all. Anticipation, yes, and there was an element of leaden fatigue to it too. There was definitely a word. Calum pondered it as the government car shushed him southwards out of Prestwick on the rain-glittered expressway heading down the Ayrshire coast. If anyone should have been able to come up with the name of this feeling, it should have been him but, even with the implants off, his head was still mired in the Lexicon mindset. None of the words that came to him out of the residuals created in his flesh brain by the thousand-language database were quite right.

It was a human feeling. It needed a human word. He was sure it would come to him in time. Now that he was home.

Scotland in July. The lazy, wheeling polka of sun and rain, baking the earth to oven stillness before dousing it with steaming flash showers. Chasing the clouds down past Ayr, heading inland via Maybole, the car's windows were slapped with wet foliage so lush and luminous green that for a disorientating moment Calum could have been back in Ghessareen's island jungles. To stop from thinking about that he mouthed the names of the roadside plants to himself—the thick ferns, the wide-leafed sycamores and chestnuts, the tall, purple foxgloves springing erect, relieved of their burden of water by the car's passing. Calum enjoyed the foursquare precision of the Latin, the quirky, old folksiness of the English. On Ghessareen nothing had a name until he had given it one. Here, it had all been done centuries ago.
Foxglove
, he thought. Whoever it had been that came up with that, they had a sure gift for euonymy. The name fit perfectly. Of course it had originally been 'folk's glove', but whoever had decided that the little bell-shaped blossoms might have been used as faerie mittens had created a lasting image. Calum sometimes wondered what it would have been like if the Unification Bloc had come here before humans had evolved language. What would a foxglove have been called then? If the influence of the Integrated Machine Intelligences had been ascendant at that point it would have been something horribly functional like, 'flowering-plant-of-average-height:0.7m-with-many-blossoms-of-hue:400nm-wavelength'. Thank Christ Earth had been overlooked for long enough for uniquely imaginative names like foxglove to rise up, get spread around, and achieve acceptance through established use and their own organic rightness.

"Foxglove." He said it aloud, and the unnamed feeling receded.

~

Calum looked into the baby's eyes once more, just to be sure. The infant gazed up, yawned in a way that suggested the serenity she had displayed for the last five minutes was about to slip into boredom. He took it as a warning sign. He'd had her long enough anyway.

When Calum opened the door the expectant
sotto voce
murmur stilled, and the faces of thirty or so assorted family, extended family and close friends and neighbours all turned his way. En masse they leaned forward an inch or two. The youthful mother—his cousin Donna, who had barely started secondary school when Calum had left Earth—and her equally callow boyfriend beamed like idiots. This was almost as stressful as reporting a naming judgement to the Bloc.

"She looks to me," he said, "like an Ellen."

There was a pause before the predictable chorus of
oohs
came, followed by a smattering of applause. It had been just a hint of a pause, but it was a familiar one to Calum and it brought the feeling back with a vengeance. It was the pause that happened when no-one wanted to react to a new name until they found out what the person it mattered most to thought. A grimace of consternation passed across the baby's features. It matched the look on her mother's face. Calum decided it was a good time to reunite them.

"There you go," he said. "Congratulations."

Donna offered a niggardly smile. "Thanks."

As if seeking to head off an onrushing display of petulant ingratitude, Calum's always harmonious Uncle Dan wedged himself into the picture.

"Well done, Calum, son." He pumped Calum's hand. "We're very grateful." His eyes widened. "
Honoured
, even."

"There's no need really," Calum murmured. "For the family, it's a pleasure."

Through the resuming chatter, and the baby's precursory whimpers, Calum heard Donna whine peevishly to her mother. He matched Uncle Dan's fixed grin with one of his own.

"Honoured," Dan repeated. "That a famous... er..."

"Euonymist," Calum supplied.

"Darling, you can always use it as a middle name." The whole room must have heard his Aunt Geraldine's whisper. The volume of conversation swelled with shared discomfort.

"...a famous
unanimist
..." Dan attempted gamely.

"Something classy, I agree..." Geraldine soothed.

"...should do us the honour of naming our wee Ellen."

"
Shaz-nay
!" bellowed Donna. "Her name's Shaznay!"

The feeling that Calum had been unable to name filled him completely. The heavy anticipation had blossomed into resigned embarrassment, and in its wake came that universal certainty of not being able to please all of the people all of the time. And by the way the rest of the onlookers were guzzling their drinks and inspecting the contents of their paper plates he suspected that they shared some of what he felt. He wondered if any of them knew what the feeling was called.

Calum looked around for a diversion, but no-one was helping him out on this one. Even his mum had vanished. Then an unlikely escape route appeared, and it came in the form of an old woman rearing up unsteadily off of one of the kitchen chairs that had been set out to provide extra seating. It was the dress Calum recognised. It was a violently puce floral affair that did nothing to disguise Auntie Bella's uncertain shape—a morphology of bone curvature and body fat redistribution peculiar to Scottish grande dames that Calum had long suspected was due to the accretion of density through years of accumulated nicotine, sarcasm and fried potato scones. It hadn't happened yet, but with the increased longevity treatments coming out of Earth's trade with the Bloc it was surely only a matter of time before the first Scottish granny turned herself inside out and ended up as a kind of greasy black hole. All that would be left would be a set of false teeth, a pair of wrinkly tights and a box of After Eight mints filled with empty wrappers.

"Whit's he cried the bairn then?" Auntie Bella's croaky caw had once engendered terror in all of Calum's cousins, seeing as it was usually followed by a smack on the legs or, worse, a flabby kiss. Now, however, it was more than welcome.

"She's called Shaznay." Donna's tone defied anyone to disagree.

Bella wobbled closer, peered at the increasingly fractious infant. "Shaznay?" she said. "Whit's that, Shaznay? Wha's cried Shaznay? Lookit thon face? Dis that resemmle a Shaznay to you?"

"Actually, the name was Ellen." Calum's mother had reappeared at the living room door. Better late than never. He made a mental note to thank her for her support later.

Bella regarded the baby again. "Aye, Ellen'd be fair eneuch, hen. Yer mither's got a second cuisin in Canada cawd Ellen."

"I have?" said a surprised Geraldine.

At that moment baby Shaznay/Ellen, or whatever she would eventually be known as when she was old enough to choose for herself, decided that enough was enough and began to scream.

"Aye, and she was a greeter an aw," finished Bella, turning her attention to a plate of hot sausage rolls.

~

Calum sat on the garden bench with his mother. Even at the end of the long-stretched summer evening, with the stars beginning to show in the deepening sky, it was still quite warm enough to sit out. If you didn't mind the midges. A cloud of them spun like a slow tornado around the nearby flowerbeds. There was another perfect euonym. The word just encapsulated the infuriating quality of the tiny insect; and it could be utilised as satisfying invective if the need arose.

"Midges." Calum smiled, then slapped his hand against his arm. "Wee bastards."

His mother smiled with him. "Thanks for doing that today," she said. "Pay no mind to Geraldine and Donna. They may not stick with the name you gave them, but they'll take the prestige that comes with it."

Calum shrugged. "I name planets for a living. What did they expect?"

The midge-cloud had gyrated above the roses, lingering there over the creamy, pinky, yellowy blossoms. Strange behaviour. Usually they headed straight for him, but he'd only been pestered by a couple of stray ones so far. Something about the rosebeds was apparently more interesting than him tonight. He wondered if it was the perfume. Did midges have a sense of smell, or was that the insects on Yrrow he was thinking of?

"You were the model of diplomacy," his mother said.

Calum laughed. "I've played to tougher audiences."

"You always had a way with words, though. Ever since..."

"Ever since I was four years old, when I looked at myself in the mirror for a whole hour and then told you I wasn't to be called Brian any more because my name should really be Calum. I remember."

"And when we told you not to be so silly, you screamed the place down."

The midges had moved on to the big rhododendron in the garden's back corner. His mother got up from the bench and approached the roses, slipping a pair of secateurs out of her cardigan pocket as she knelt by the bed. "I hope young Shaznay has a similar moment of self determination when she... oh."

"What is it?" When his mother didn't answer Calum went over to find out.

"I don't know," she said. "I've never seen anything like this before." She leant back to let him see.

At first Calum thought it was just a stray shoot. Some sort of weed, no more than three inches tall, dwarfed among the tall rose stems, but with spiky looking stiletto leaves to rival its neighbours' thorns. Then he saw the way it gleamed in the last of the sunlight, flaky amber on silver like rusted steel.

His insides lurched. He had a very bad feeling about this. Much worse than the unnamed one. This one was the cast-iron cannonball of dread.

~

When Calum came back into the house his mother had turned the kitchen into a research centre. A stack of discarded gardening books surrounded her at the table where she had unrolled a screen and an interface to search the web for more exotic specimens. She tapped awkwardly at the flat keyboard. The lacerated gardening glove and blunted secateurs lay beside the screen. The end of her bandaged thumb was turning pink again.

"Nothing yet?" Calum asked, in hope rather than expectation. He wanted her to find it, but he was becoming increasingly certain that she would not. Not a viciously bladed bio-metallic organism like that. Not in all the botanical lists on this Earth. He sneaked a glance at the readout of his analyser.
Please wait
, it read. It would take longer to consult the vast botanical databases of the Bloc, of course, and while discovering a known extro species in his mum's back garden carried with it a number of unpleasant implications, it would still be preferable to it not finding anything at all. He hadn't turned on the Lexicon implants. That would come later, when all else had failed.

Calum looked out the window. It was too dark to see it now, but he could feel it out there, a problem growing with every minute that passed. It hadn't been there when his mother had been out that afternoon shortly before he arrived, she had assured him—and he believed her, gardeners had an eye for these things—which meant that it had grown four inches in a few hours. Which really wasn't a good thing at all.

Calum checked his analyser before he went to bed.
Please wait
. He knew he didn't have to wait. He was pretty sure what the answer would be anyway, so he could act now—
should
act now—but given the option, he waited.

~

They started arriving not long after dawn. Calum woke to a gabble of voices, the kind of squabble that universally signified opposing vested interests. He checked his watch, his phone, the analyser: 05:12, seven missed calls,
No species match
. The unnamed feeling woke too. It shifted inside him like slipping sand.

Calum got up, pulled on some clothes, then, reluctantly, sub-voxed a command that engaged the Lexicon implants.

The scene in the kitchen was chaotic. An auditory nightmare that his translator implants would have approached melt-down to make sense of. Fortunately, he had neglected to turn them on as well. Best just to leave it that way for now. That the majority of the yabbering occupants were human was something of a relief, but Calum immediately spotted representatives of at least three other Bloc races. A Peloquin pair were haranguing a black woman with a placatory attitude and a very expensive-looking suit. Earth-Bloc liaison, Calum decided. She could handle it. A breeze of movement and a purplish blur in the air told him there were Tage here too. He unfocussed his gaze for a moment and saw it clearer, a vague indigo outline. A noise like a jar of wasps—a
big
jar. It was agitated about something. Calum shrugged, tapped his ear to show he didn't understand, and the Tage buzzed angrily and moved on. The third species he recognised was a tall, butter-skinned Uidean. That was encouraging. If this panned out like he feared, Earth was going to need all of their friends on side. For now though the unfortunate sod had been cornered by Aunt Bella.

"Is sumbdy puttin the kettle on or no? I'm awfy drouthie, so I am," she told it.

The confused-looking extro was tapping the side of his head nervously, but Aunt Bella didn't seem to understand the signal. Calum thought about rescuing it, but the Uideans were seasoned diplomats. They'd surely faced worse—though perhaps not stranger—than Bella. Besides, there was activity in the garden that demanded his attendance.