The Ephemera (4 page)

There were maybe half a dozen people standing around—or in—the rosebed, which itself was now covered in an open tent of heavy plastic sheeting. Calum's mother stood to one side in her dressing gown and slippers talking to a rumpled-looking man in a hairy suit. Calum would have recognised his boss from his posture alone.

"Good to see you, Clarence," he said. From the centre of the group clustered around the roses came sounds of exertion and a metallic grating that made Calum think of sharpening knives.

Sneijder turned. He didn't look happy, but then he rarely did. "You should have notified us."

"I followed procedure," Calum replied calmly. "Species discovered in pre-nomenclatured areas have to be cross-referenced with both local and Lexicon lists."

The Dutchman's lip curled. "Calum, you understand, don't you, the implications if this turns out to be a completely new species? You should have notified us straight away. God, for containment and assessment, if nothing else."

Calum felt the feeling shift inside him again. He could almost hear the sighing of the slipping sand. One of the workers stepped to the side, revealing that the plant had already erupted into a dense bush as tall as his chest, sprouting fists of blade-leaves in all directions. One of the other workers did something that set the whole thing quivering with a noise like an emptied cutlery drawer. "
Bloody... thing
," the worker tailed off, at a loss for a suitable epithet. Then, examining his steel mail gloves for damage, he told someone to
fetch the torch
.

"All the more reason for following procedure," Calum told Sneijder. "Given the political ramifications, they will be examining every step of the process. We've got to be above board all the way." This was true, but what was truer was that he'd suspected that he knew what was going on from the moment he saw the plant, and he'd wanted to postpone all of this as long as possible. If there was a contamination risk, the botanical one at least wasn't unmanageable. At least he'd got a decent night's sleep out of it.

"All right, what's done is done," Sneijder came closer. "But I need to ask you about Ghessareen."

Calum had thought he might. "What about it?"

"Well, specifically the quarantine procedures?" Sneijder said. "Is there any chance at all..."

"That I could have brought something back with me?" Calum sighed. "Well, let's see. They pulled us off Ghessareen with the job half done and no explanation, and replaced us with an inexperienced team of Bellussibellom. Then they quibbled over every item in our necessarily incomplete report, rendering any information about any of the catalogued species confused to the point of useless. And even though they made us go through the decontamination procedure three times before they let us leave the station, virtually everything on the Ghessareen orbital just happened to be glitching from a suspected virus that they never did track down. So, in short, yes, it's possible that I brought something back with me that wasn't killed dead like it should have been. It would certainly be one explanation for how this thing ended up in my mother's garden."

Sneijder's nose wrinkled in disgust. He might have known what the problem was with the Ghessareen survey, but he wasn't telling.

Calum wasn't going to let being kept in the dark about it upset him. "Look there are plants not a million miles away from this in the northern archipelagos. Similar, but not the same. The plants that grow on Ghessareen wouldn't survive our alkali soil, let alone flourish like this. This is totally new." He looked at Sneijder to see if he had caught the subtext.

The Dutchman arched a bushy brow, lowered his voice. "Mutation?"

"Almost certainly."

"Natural or engineered."

"I'm not a botanist, Clarence, but given the source of the naming assignation that we used on Ghessareen..."

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"Peloquin."

"Fuck," Sneijder spat. "Fuck, fuck, fuck! I thought they were pretty quick to get out here."

"Exactly." This time Sneijder sighed with him.

"I'm going to have to get guidance from the diplomats on this," he said at length. "I shouldn't do this because of your involvement, but none of the others can get here sooner than a week, so I'm officially appointing you the case euonymist. But do me a favour. Don't go making any promises until you hear from me."

"No fear on that score," Calum said. "I'm going back to bed."

~

It turned out to be the best thing he could have done. Not only did it give him the chance to rest, but it also insulated him from having to actually interact with the various Bloc representatives who were still crowding the house. He didn't sleep, just lay there in the darkened room, staring at what had been his childhood bedroom walls. Beside the closet there had been an RSPB poster showing a montage of British garden birds, and he had memorised every one of them by the age of ten, spellbound by the names.
Finches: chaffinch, bullfinch, goldfinch, greenfinch, crossbill, linnet, yellowhammer... Yellowhammer
. There was a euonym if ever there was one. Surrounded by names like those it was little wonder that he'd found himself suited to a career in euonymy. If only there had turned out to be more naming and less strenuous diplomacy involved in the job, it would have been perfect.

Calum engaged his translator implant and listened in to the discussions still going on in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, the Peloquin pair were trying every trick in the book to get an audience with him, but the liaison Sneijder had left behind did a fine job of stonewalling. Eventually it was his mother who brought peace to the house by turfing them all out.

A quiet knock on the bedroom door.

"Can I come in?" It reminded him of when he was a teenager, made him smile.

"Of course," he said.

His mother sat on the end of the bed. "Is it always like this in your job?"

He nodded, shrugged. "Can be," he said. "Cultural imperialism is a big deal. There's a lot of prestige awarded when one race's languages are used for naming over another and it can all get a bit heated. There have been wars fought over the naming of a new planet, civilisations wiped out. In fact it's one of the reasons the Bloc exists. It was originally set up to ensure fairness, and encourage harmony and trade, but in lieu of conflict the various races have developed internecine oneupmanship to a fine art. My job is to ensure that all of the languages in the Lexicon are represented equally while at the same time apportioning a name that is apt."

"Sounds like a bit of a juggling act," his mother said.

"Mostly, it's close to impossible," he replied. "There's so much diplomatic bartering involved that your newly discovered planetary system ends up with a nomenclature comprising a hundred different languages. It's a mess."

"How do you decide which languages to use then?"

"We cross reference terrain, flora, fauna, weather types—a whole bunch of criteria—and derive the names from the things that we already have names for. The Lexicon provides a ballpark and we go with that. The races whose languages are used gain a little extra cultural clout in the world in question." He sighed. "Which is why discovering a plant on Earth that resembles a species we have just named using a Peloquin language is a problem."

"Why?"

"If we use the same nomenclature, it gives them the first non-human cultural claim on Earth."

"That doesn't seem very fair. They don't let people name the plants that are grown in their own gardens?"

"Existing species are fine, they've already got names. And if contact had been yesterday, before we were adopted into the Bloc, we could have used any language we liked to name this thing. But on a Bloc world any newly discovered species has to be named using the Lexicon. And all of Earth's living languages—English, Mandarin, Spanish, German, all the way down to Gaelic and Swahili, everything that's taught in schools—are in the Lexicon. And they
know this
."

His mother looked shocked. "You think all of this is deliberate?" She whispered it as if she might be overheard.

"I'd bet on it," Calum muttered. "Of course we can't prove that I didn't bring back some germ with me from Ghessareen. That whole operation was such a mess that I'm not even certain of that myself. I'd be surprised if they don't conveniently provide a very clear trail of evidence to prove it. So I'm afraid they've succeeded. There's nothing we can do."

~

It was lunchtime when the call came through. Sneijder, who had smartened himself up in the intervening time, was back on the orbital. Calum recognised a canteen that had been turned into a makeshift hearing chamber. The Bloc representatives could be seen assembled in the background of the picture.

Calum had set his phone up to take in both his and his mother's deckchairs and the susurrating rust-silver tree that now overhung the corner of the garden.

"Calum, you've had time to consult the Lexicon. The representatives are eager to hear your judgement," Sneijder said. He fidgeted. "I should advise you that this call is being broadcast to the United Nations." He looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end didn't. The fact that Calum hadn't heard from Sneijder before this just meant that their hands were tied diplomatically as surely as they had been euonymically.

Calum straightened himself in his chair. "Yes, indeed," he said. He had spent the last few hours trawling all of the languages in the Lexicon for an alternative. Sneijder's silence confirmed what he already knew. That there was none. There was a clear path of semblance and antecedence. No matter what tack he took the Lexicon always brought him round to using the Peloquin naming.

Calum looked squarely into the phone's little screen. The human contingent looked nervous, the Peloquin looked eager—but then they always did. He had delivered naming judgements to similar groups many times, and while some of those occasions had been fraught with complicated layers of vested interests, he had never felt so personally responsible before. That was the moment that he decided that he'd had enough. He'd perform this one last naming and later he'd call Sneijder and resign. The job had so little to do with an ability with names that there had been little or no satisfaction in it for him for years.

"Oh aye, that's it is it? Loonging aboot, ye docksie pair, when I'm after my twaloors. What's all this oancairy onywey?" Aunt Bella's timing could not have been better. Calum's mum sprang to her feet to turn the old woman around and fix her something to eat in the kitchen, but Bella had already covered the ground between them.

"Calum, who is that woman?" It was Sneijder's voice, but the phone's screen was blocked by Bella's stout frame. "I can't make out a word she is saying."

"Aye, well?" Bella said, either ignoring or not hearing Sneijder. "Brian, son, you look awfy peelie-wallie. You maun be scunnered with all the palaiver that's been ongaun the day."

Calum looked at Bella with wonder. That was the word.
Scunnered
.

"Calum?"

That was the euonym for the feeling he had been trying to name since Ghessareen. Scunnered. In fact,
pure scunnered
. He'd not heard that word in years. Like most Scots words, it was essentially dead in linguistic terms. The old language, a historical victim of wave after wave of cultural erosion, had been steadily supplanted over generations with Anglicisms, Americanisms, Euroisms and most recently the backwash of intergalactic contact. Only the eldest in the rural areas still used it, spoke it, thought in it. Calum had been steeped in the Lexicon so long he had almost forgotten it existed. A few of the words had been absorbed into English, but never having been ratified as an official language in its own right, the Scots tongue hadn't made it into the Lexicon.

"Calum, if you can sort out the domestic business as soon as possible." Sneijder didn't try to hide the sarcasm. "The representatives are waiting."

Calum reached around Bella, spoke to the screen. "I'll call you right back." Then he took his elderly relative by the hand and led her gently to the knife tree.

"Bella, how long have you lived around here?" he asked.

"All my puff," she replied, looked at him sidelong. "How?"

Calum grinned. "I think you just might be about to save the planet," he said. "See this here? We're having a lot of trouble with it." He indicated the tree. "What would you call it?"
In your native language, that's not in the Lexicon
.

She peered at the plant: examined it slowly from its impenetrable roots right up to its branches and the deadly hanging blades of its leaves; twanged a steely twig with her finger. "Aye it's a scunner for sure," she declared at length. "You should howk it out and chuck it on the midden."

"A scunner, is it?" he asked, seeking confirmation.

"Aye, a scunner right enough." That said, Bella turned to Calum's mother. "Now, Magret, I'm hauf stairved, here."

"A
scunner
it is then," Calum said to himself, and picked up the phone. They weren't going to be happy about the use of a local language not in the Lexicon. In fact they'd be arguing about the legality of it for years. And by the time they sorted it out it'd be someone else's problem.

Now he'd made the decision he knew it was the right one. And now the feeling was gone, he was aware that it'd been with him for a lot longer than he'd realised. Before coming home, before Ghessareen even. A long time...

Scunnered
.

He knew there had been a word for it.

~

John Klima, editor of Electric Velocipede, issued a challenge with the intention of getting more interesting words into stories. The challenge was to choose a championship-deciding word from the Scripps Spelling Bee competition and build a story around it. The word I chose was:
euonym
, meaning a good or appropriate name.

The Bone Farmer

"Where are we going, Daddy?"

David could not look at her. Her eyes were water-blue, brimming with questions. He concentrated on starting the car while he searched for an answer that was not a lie, and he jumped when the wipers came on, sweeping away a season's dead leaves. Weak November sunlight washed the interior, highlighting the pallor of her face. Her skin had taken on that stretched translucency, a blue vein pulsing gently, snaking up under her thin blond hair. Sophie buckled her seat belt as he had shown her. She did this slowly, as if her hands inside her mittens were painful, and then looked up at him expectantly.

David was conscious of the urge to hug her to him, this fragile splinter of a child wrapped in coats and blankets on the seat beside him, but his fear of her condition overwhelmed it. Instead he forced the rusty gear shift into first, released the handbrake and eased the vehicle out into the street. In his rear view mirror Anne McGivern was standing, arms folded around an old 12-gauge, grasping it tightly to her body against the cold wind and the failure of his resolve. Her eyes were hard with determination, masking the sorrow he knew she felt. She was still standing like that, as if frozen, when the car crested the hill on the north road out of town and he lost sight of her.

Sophie asked again, "Where are we going?" This time an edge of anxiety to her voice. "Is Mum coming too?"

Lisa had not come. It was better this way.

"No sweetheart, Mum's not coming. It's just you and me." His voice sounded strange, thin and hard; brittle as ice, brittle as his daughter's life.

~

Grey fields stretched either side of the road, hard earth neglected for so long, turned to scrub. David drove slowly. The sun was low, sullen; its light baleful. He had to squint around the visor to see the road. Not that there was any danger from other traffic, of course, but he had not driven for some time. It was best to be careful.

Sophie was tired and her breathing deepened, becoming easier, less wheezy as she drifted into sleep. Her head, noticeably swollen, lolled on her shoulder. Listening to her he could almost believe that she was well, that they were both back safe in the arms of the community, back home with Lisa, and that this journey had never been necessary.

Sophie woke as they passed through what had once been a fairly large village. She doubled up in a fit of thin coughs. It was all he could do to resist the urge to comfort her, keep his hands on the wheel, keep driving. He was pretty sure the place was deserted but he was not going to stop and find out. Anyone left here would certainly try to kill them once they laid eyes on Sophie.

"There's a bottle of water on the floor by your feet, sweetheart." He watched and almost felt the pain etched on her face as she fumbled off her mittens and tried to manipulate the bottle top with those rigid claws that used to be her fingers. She managed to gulp a little down but most of it slopped out of her mouth, overspill from her constricted oesophagus.

~

How long had it been? He counted back two weeks to the day when Sophie had gone missing. He remembered spending the entire night holding Lisa close, by turns comforting her and restraining her from leaving the community to look for their child. Not that the others would have let her of course. It was one of the first rules. No one enters, no one leaves.
Stay away, stay awake
.

They had seemed impressed by his calmness, his composure. It was relatively easy once Lisa had eventually succumbed to sleep for him to slip unseen to the car pool. By the time they heard the engine it was too late.

When he returned he got as far as the edge of town before they stopped him. Four shotguns followed him as he slowly climbed out of the car. He could see Lisa. She was weeping and struggling to reach him and Sophie. Anne and Bobby were holding her firmly by the arms.

He appealed to them. He had found Sophie less than a quarter of a mile out of town, fast asleep in a farmhouse. There was no danger, surely. She said she had seen something in the sky, followed it and got lost. That's all. She had made no contact at all during that time. He didn't tell them about the delicate doll he had found cradled in the child's arms. A stylized figure carved from bone, bleached white, light and insubstantial; a featherweight thing. He had crushed it to powdered fragments under the heel of his boot while she slept.

He watched as they conferred. Some were adamant, some were swayed by pity. People he had thought were friends said no, looked away. Others he barely got on with pleaded his case with passion, he guessed for the sake of the child. Eventually they were granted quarantine. Eight weeks. If the symptoms had not shown by then, they could rejoin the community. Eleven days later in his converted police cell they told him that Sophie had begun to complain of headaches and stiff joints. David did not cry then. The loss had been inside him since the night she had disappeared, the tears shed over a mess of bone fragments while his child slept on in her innocence.

In the next cell his daughter was waiting to die, a grotesque and agonized end when it came. He was grateful that she had not been told. Alone in his own cell he waited for the stiffness to creep over him as well; the cancer pervading his marrow, fusing his joints, squeezing the life out of him day by day. He knew it was coming. He had been waiting for it for twelve years.

~

They had moved out of the city early. He could not have stayed there any longer, waking up every morning certain he could feel it in his legs, in his lungs; then realising that he had been granted one more day's reprieve. Lisa had called him paranoid but she had assented all the same. That was just the first move of many. Each time they moved further north, they became more remote from the population. Lost contact. Towns were becoming more insular, more suspicious of strangers bringing the disease from the south. They had only been adopted into this community because Lisa was pregnant with Sophie by that time. Five years ago.

Having been accepted, they were told the rules. The community was completely self-sufficient in everything: food, water, fuel. There was no necessity for any of them ever to leave. If you did, you did not come back. The only exception was sometimes when someone died. Then volunteers took the body away in one of the cars to be buried a safe distance from the living. They accepted the risks, the enforced quarantine, because every life seemed significant now, precious. This way was more dignified and personal than a cremation; and besides, there were sometimes fragments left after a burning.

~

To begin with Lisa was there every day talking, crying, just sitting on the other side of the door, being there. She took turns between Sophie and David although she spent most of her time with the child. Sometimes Anne came with her. Anne was really the only person in the community they could call a close friend, especially this last year since Kim died.

During the days before Sophie started showing symptoms, Lisa spent less time with David. The times she did sit with him, were spent in mostly one-sided argument.

"There's nothing we can do, Lise. It's the rules."

"But there's obviously nothing wrong with you. You're both clear. They'd know by now if you weren't. Normal incubation period, seven days, right? Why don't you make them see that? How can you just sit there and not even try? How can you be so fucking passive?"

"Because I don't know I'm clear. I don't know Sophie is. Not for sure. I feel okay, but we have to wait it out. The full eight weeks. I can cope with that."

"Well how the hell do you think I feel? I just want you back."

~

David stopped the car at a fork in the road, trying to remember the direction to take. He had driven this road only once previously. It had been night then and they'd had directions. He remembered that journey in the dark. They had seemed to be heading downhill all the way before they reached their destination. He looked out at the contours of the countryside. To the left, the land swept down into a wide glen. David gunned the accelerator and eased the car in that direction.

"Daddy look!" Sophie's cry was sharp, so unexpected in the long silence that David reacted, stamping the brake pedal, bringing the car to an abrupt halt. He looked out of her window, following the line of her crooked finger pointing to the sky above the valley. At first he could not see whatever she had seen, but then it banked away from them and he caught sight of the triangular red sail scudding though the air. It banked full circle and then passed low over the valley floor, vibrant against the drab background. David knew that this was what Sophie had seen in the sky that day. From a distance she would not have seen the man dangling under the wing, would not have known it was dangerous. She could not know what a hanglider was.

"It's beautiful, isn't it Sophe?"

Sophie was entranced. They sat in silence watching as the hanglider banked again, a high arc. Then they lost it in the sun. Disappointment lined his daughter's face as she strained and stretched to find it again, but it was gone. She seemed to shrink back into herself, disappear into the blankets as David started the car once more, ready to move on. Then the hanglider was swooping low over the road. The red material rippled as the contraption turned exposing for a second the skeletal framework and the shape of a man hanging underneath, before it was arrowing away to the left back over the valley again and disappeared.

Sophie had seen the figure, a stranger, triggering the familiar children's litany. A whispered iteration, "Stay away. Stay awake. Not another soul to take."

~

After Sophie had first showed symptoms her health had deteriorated quickly. David had been able to hear her during the night. He had lain awake listening to the coughing and the laboured breathing, feeling frustrated by his isolation and guilty because he was still clear. They were taking less care with him now. Actually coming into the room to deliver his food, staying and talking for longer than necessary. Treating him as if everything were all right. He hated them for it.

Sophie, on the other hand, was a definite risk. They were talking about how to proceed. They told him how much pain she would suffer in the weeks to come; how the illness would change her, deform her; how long she might have left. They told him that the food allocation would be tight enough this winter. Sophie could last as long as March. It would be kinder. It was one of their rules.

Lisa came the day after Sophie was diagnosed. He watched her through the tiny cell window. She looked terrible. Her face was drawn, eyes puffy red smears. She was nervous and distracted, only able to meet his gaze for seconds at a time. She paced back and forward and stammered when she spoke.

"You knew, didn't you? When you found her. You knew then and you didn't tell me."

He could only mumble apologies. It was true. He had known it was a real possibility, had resigned himself to it, to his own death as well. But he could have been wrong, couldn't he? Lisa had had so much hope. How could he have deprived her of that?

After that Lisa stopped coming. Anne came and told him that she was coping very badly with the situation. Her face was wet when she told him that Lisa had consented to let them end it for Sophie. David wept with her. It had been the same for Kim.

Two days later Anne arranged for David to escape into exile with his daughter. She had told Lisa, given her the opportunity to join them, but in the end it was just the two of them.

~

The sculpture was eight feet high. A pale human form, a dancer preparing to leap. It stood alone in the centre of an empty field, too far away to see in detail. It was made entirely of bone.

"It's like the dolly I found," said Sophie in awe.

David said nothing, but drove on.

More sculptures became visible as the road wound its way down toward the valley floor. Some were far in the distance, others loomed over the road so close that the definition of the carving was lost.

They rounded a corner on the hillside and David stopped the car. The valley floor spread out in front of them. A wide bowl split by the path of a lazy snaking river. Mostly it had been farmland, now gone wild. Here and there clusters of trees stood naked and exposed in the aftermath of autumn. David reckoned he could see for maybe a mile and a half down the valley. The road continued to wind its way among the hills on this side, ending in the distance at what looked to be a town of some size. They would not be going that far though.

The sculptures took his breath away. There were maybe a couple of hundred of them fanning out in all directions over the fields of the valley floor. A pallid delta sweeping down from a focal point which was hidden by the curve of the hillside, but which he knew lay somewhere along this road.

Sophie was also enraptured, even more so than she had been when they had seen the first of the statues. She gazed down over the scene, drinking it all in with wide eyes. David had hoped she would find it beautiful. Anne had suggested it. A place to be at the end.

The scene had the same impact on him the first time. It had been night then, the moon lending its own ghostly sheen to the parade of figures. There was a great stillness but also a strange potential of animation. He and Anne had sat for hours in silence, the scene bleeding the last of their courage away, robbing them of words and action. Eventually, moved by the slow shift of light heralding the dawn, they had lain Kim's body by the roadside. They should have taken him all the way but this spot had been close enough for him to be found.

David reached over into the back and opened up the bundle Anne had hidden in the footwell. Food, not much: bread, cheese and the last of the autumn fruits. An envelope of folded paper containing what he guessed were painkillers, again not many. More blankets were wrapped around binoculars in a leather case, a small knife and a large polythene tub of drinking water. And last, a heavy thing wrapped in cloth. He hid this away under the seat. It would be loaded he knew. Just in case the pain was too much for her, or for him. Just in case he saw things their way after all.