The Ephemera (16 page)

Bennie stuck his hands in his pockets, walked away from the bonobo. This was madness. Twenty minutes ago he had been watching the evidence of his assured fame with his own eyes. It was a
certainty
. It was in the sunbeams bouncing off the polished steel carriage and it was in the faces of the passengers. How could it not be, after all this time, all this hard work? And yet, he had already had prickly dealings with the railways.
He felt his certainty crack
. And if the world did indeed go to war again so soon...
He felt it crumble
. There'd be no investment, not even from the Americans.
He swore he
heard
it crash
.

Mrs Blanchflower must have heard it too. "You see," she said softly, "we're the same."

Bennie rounded on her then, finding that anger had replaced the denial. "Exactly
how
, madam, can we be considered
the same
..." he began.

It was that sad look in her eyes again that killed the anger as quickly as it had arisen. "Because in
my
future, George, the one that's virtually impossible to locate unless you already came from there and know how to get back—the one where, despite everything, you did succeed—it's the centuries-long, world-wide dominance of the Bennie Transport Corporation that stifles new ideas, new inventions—like this one, yes—if there's even a possibility that they might challenge a fraction of its monopoly."

Mrs Blanchflower stepped in front of the archway and held out her hand. "Would you like to see?"

~

The future was exactly as Bennie had dreamed it. Glasgow had grown larger, taller, brighter, and its four great railway stations had become the looms for gigantic silver ribbons of clustered bennie lines that spun out of the city to the north, the east, the south and the west; to the rest of Scotland, and the United Kingdom, and via miraculous bridges to Europe, and beyond.

Their journey across the Atlantic would take no more than an hour and a half. Bennie had wanted to stay in Glasgow, but Mrs Blanchflower pointed out, somewhat peevishly but correctly enough, that there was nothing left there of the city he knew in his time.

Since they had arrived in the future, the bonobo had become withdrawn. She clearly had plans she wanted to be getting on with. It was as well, then, to accompany her to New York. If he wanted to come back later it was only a short hop after all.

The view from the upper level of the triple-decker behemoth as it zephyred along the gentle sine of its track was stunning. The great grey North Atlantic reared and swirled as a storm raged below them. Rain rattled against the observation windows, but the megabennie—as he was told it was called, and he was pleased to recognize many similarities to his original design despite the various improvements that had been made—continued on, smooth and true.

Marvellous
.

Mrs Blanchflower coughed to attract his attention. That was when he realized that the rattling he had heard was not the rain. She had pulled up a section of deep-pile carpet and was busy turning a square of metal decking into another of her archways.

"I thought I was going to see New York," Bennie said, disappointed that she was sending him home already. Home, it was suggested, to humiliation and failure. She'd shown him 1957. It had been horrible.

"This isn't for you," she said, and nodded to the chair next to his. Where she had been sitting, there was a plastic card. "The keys to my apartment and my bank account," she said. "It's not much, I'm afraid, but then you know how it is being a struggling genius and all."

So he was staying here? But that meant...

"What are you going to do?" Bennie asked.

That sad look came over her face again. "This is
your
future, George," she said. "I'm off in search of
mine
."

She was wrong on that account, or at least unspecific. This wasn't
his
future, or that of thousands of other versions of himself, but it was the future of some randomly favoured George Bennie who had somehow fluked his dream into actuality. Since this remarkable trip had begun, he had clung to the slenderest hope that he would return to his 1930 and, armed with the certainty that his vision could be fulfilled, would make it so. The very fact that Mrs Blanchflower was leaving him here with no opportunity of return, and that
here
, and in particular the vehicle he rode on, still existed, proved that it wasn't he after all who had succeeded.

Bennie appreciated the fact that she didn't make any more fuss than that. One minute the talking ape was standing beside her invention, the next ... the archway encompassed her in a complex and quite frightening folding motion and both she and it were gone.

Bennie stared at the hole in the floor, and the two stumps of slag that marked where it had stood.
Where's the elegance in that?
he thought.
It'll never catch on
.

Then he settled back in his seat and enjoyed the rest of his trip to the capital of a New World where they clearly knew a good prospect when they saw it.

~

I'd wanted to work the Bennie Railplane into a story for a long time. The carcass of the prototype could be seen, along with the rusting remains of its test track, in Milngavie for years. They're now gone, but go and see the working model in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Gallery, and you'll understand why it had to be written about. Don't ask me where the bonobo came from. I have no idea.

A Horse In Drifting Light

I wanted a change of scene. Something more than these four walls. Don't get me wrong, the apartment is fantastic—the company is good in that respect—but it was slowly driving me crazy. Little things—the mark on the living room wall that showed through any decoration, the too-cheerful chime of incoming work, the fridge's thing about ordering olives. It used to order a jar of olives every week. Green, black, stuffed with pimentos. Obviously the previous tenant was something of a fan. Me, I can't stand them. They leave a bad taste. I'd reprogrammed the fridge countless times. Mostly my groceries are olive-free now but the occasional jar still manages to sneak its way in. Like I say, little things but when you spend your entire day on your own in the one place it gets to you. It was definitely getting to me.

I could have taken the underground down to Knightswood where the company kept an office for those who expressed a preference for enjoying the 'social aspects of their work', but usually they turned out to be refugees from bad home situations who made sure they brought their problems to work with them. Keeping clear of that type was the number one reason most people elected for the home office package.

Possibly it was getting close to time to request a transfer again. Novalogue had manufactories on five continents and I'd been based at the Glasgow hub for six years now, but I knew they wouldn't sanction it until I'd sorted out the production problems in Sao Paolo.

Same went double for a holiday.

Knowing all this made each day in the flat increasingly difficult to bear. An interim solution had to be found.

The idea lodged itself in my brain following a drunken evening with Des from Seattle. Wednesday night, football night. We'd drunk a few beers and after the match—one of us bitching, the other crowing in our usual friendly kind of way—the conversation had turned to cars, the old kind people drove around by themselves.

"They were beautiful," Des slurred, his image freezing and skipping momentarily, indicating a surge in server loading. Probably the Japanese evening recreation traffic kicking in. I popped up a clock. Sure enough it was that late. As if triggered by the knowledge, I felt a wave of fatigue.

"Des," I yawned. "Everyone knows they were wasteful, environmentally unsound and dangerous as hell. That's why they were banned in every civilised country."

Des grunted.

"Besides," I went on. "Society doesn't need them now. Everything you want can be delivered to your door. Anyone you want to speak to, anywhere in the world, you can do from your favourite chair. Any place you want to go there's transport that can take you. I remember cars, even if unlike you I wasn't old enough to drive before they were gone. Des, I don't miss them. I don't miss the fumes or the gridlock or the daily RTA reports. Come on, mate, move with the times. They're gone. Forget them."

He peered at me. "Gordon," he sighed, and I thought there was some deep misery exposed then on his face. "You don't understand, son. When you were driving you had freedom, you felt in control of your life. You know what I mean? Not just where you were going, but every second of the journey. At every junction, around every corner, over every bump and hole in the road. You had control. Today, we're all just passengers and the world overtakes us. Leaves us behind."

I didn't know how to respond to that. A bubble of silence stretched thin before Des popped it with some noncommittal dissembling, a joke or something, I don't remember. We logged off shortly after and I went to bed with a new hollowness in me, but also the germ of an idea.

So this was how I came to be in a car motoring through the countryside south of the city. Obviously it wasn't the kind of car that Des was nostalgic for. This could more accurately be called a private transport bus. Exorbitantly expensive, but for the sake of my mental health I figured it was worth it. I requested a route that would take me out of the city for the day and back again, but otherwise was random. I didn't care where I went as long as the scenery kept changing. At one point I passed wide fields packed with a plant in bloom, its blossom a heavily saturated yellow with a substantial content of green. The effect was bright but somewhat sickly.

Rape, the car told me. GM'd to manufacture insulin.

At least it was different. I quickly found myself able to relax and enjoy the journey.

Most of my meetings that day passed without anyone remarking on my change of surroundings, although Angelina at the Brazilian Head Office did ask about the electric hum in the background. When I told her the reason, she looked puzzled and said, "Oh."

Around mid-day I got the car to stop two-thirds or so of the way up a hill. I climbed out to stretch my legs and eat a sandwich from the selection in the fridge.

The sky was enormous. It seemed silly but seeing it unbounded by the regular framework of the city's buildings I couldn't believe there was so much of it. The sun blazed down from the summit of the hill, warming my neck as I watched clouds shift across the valley below me. I was surprised to be made aware, it felt possibly for the first time in my life, of the three dimensional nature of the sky; low cumulus scudding quickly, towering cirrus passing more slowly. The clouds passed over fields, a wide river, and, further away, a town of some size. My memory suggested that it might be Hamilton, but having never seen it from the outside, I wasn't sure. The air was big too. I breathed in a deep lungful, sampling the freshness laced with a number of sweet flavours for which I had no name.

For the first time that I could remember I smiled in my own company.

I walked a little further up the hill. The road was uneven, pitted. A ditch ran roadside of a leafy hedge. I stopped when I came to a break in the greenery. An iron gate barred the way into a steep field of pasture. At first I thought the field empty but then my attention was snagged by something, a bright movement. Standing perfectly still some distance up the slope, I guessed a couple of hundred metres, was an animal, a horse. As if sensing my presence, it tossed its head and began to trot down towards the gate.

At first I thought the beast was on fire.

The sun sparkled and danced off its hide, spears of light lancing in arbitrary directions like an old disco glitterball. I watched the animal's leisurely progress in awe. It trotted at a genteel pace, stopping often to look around or investigate the grass. Certainly it didn't seem to be in pain.

The horse stopped in front of me, bobbed its head a couple of times over the gate, fixed me with a large blue eye. Blinked. I could not understand what I was seeing. In all respects the animal had the characteristics of a horse except that its coat was silvered. No, mirrored. Like chrome. I couldn't discern any individual hairs. I was suspicious of the eye colour too.

What did I know of horses? I'd never seen one in real life but I'd seen them in movies. Westerns and such. The closest experience I had was when I was very young. My mother took me once to the beach at Largs. There were donkey rides. An anachronistic form of entertainment even then. Possibly for the sake of novelty I was forced onto the back of an animal which was then dragged by its owner up the beach, turned around and back to my waiting mother. I remember feeling with my knees the outline of bones beneath warm, yeasty smelling skin, coarse hair rubbing against my bare legs, the black thatch of mane I clutched for dear life, the glistening of drool on the shiny metal bit in its mouth, the flies that buzzed around its docile big head. I remember the relief as I was lifted off, which voiced itself in the tantrum I kicked up as I was returned to my mother.

This creature smelled of nothing. Its mane and slowly swishing tail looked like very expensive Christmas tinsel. It snickered as I put out my hand, exposing a far more plausible mouth, all tongue and yellow teeth, but allowed me to touch it. Its skin was warm, but less like skin than extremely pliable aluminium. Its breath was warm on my face.

The horse demonstrated itself tame by allowing me to continue clapping it. I imagined perhaps it even enjoyed the attention but I really couldn't tell. I watched the sky mirrored in its flanks, the sun dazzling from chinks in the clouds which passed across its hide like time. We stayed like that, spellbound, until a large drop of rain, pregnant with encapsulated sky, broke on its brow, rolled smoothly down its long face. That drop was chased by another, and another. Became a flurry, then a downpour.

The horse stamped once, tossed its sparkling mane and turned away. A poem of fluid natural movement, it raced up the hill, its powerful legs carrying it out of sight in no time.

Realising I was soaked I went back to the car, and the car dried me and provided a warm drink, and sped me home by the shortest possible route.

And I let it.

~

It occurred to me that as the bulk of our experiential input shifts from direct experience to the increasingly selective and vicarious, there's a danger of disengagement. I wanted a living symbol for that disconnection, and I came up with the silver horse. How would such a thing come about? What would it be for? I didn't know, any more than the story's narrator does.