“Never mind.” There was an awful lot to take in here. A thought struck me.
“You don’t seem at all afraid. Here I am, a stranger, just dropped out of the sky, and you don’t seem in the slightest bit worried.”
“Why should I be worried? I’m primed.” She pointed to her broad belt, which gathered in the taut fabric and accentuated her curvaceous body even more, and patted something she was carrying in a kind of holster on one side. I had a glimpse of a pulsing light and cooling fins. “I vaporized the insect. I can do the same to you if you want to be a problem.”
“No, no,” I blurted hastily. “I have no wish to be a problem, I assure you.”
She smothered a smile. I think my syntax was a bit strange to her ears. Then she smiled properly and seemed to be looking right into me. She cocked her head prettily to one side and said, “Do you like sex?”
I don’t know if my jaw dropped. It certainly felt like it did. Things seemed to have moved on a bit since I first started to date Jessica.
Her face clouded as something occurred to her. “I mean sex with women,” she added.
I would have to tread carefully. “Er…it depends who with.”
“Well, would you like to have sex with me?” she said brightly.
“Well, yes. I mean, I think that would be, er, delightful.”
“Oh good. For a moment there I thought things were too good to be true.” She chuckled. It was a low, teasing sound. “The girls will be so jealous.”
“The girls? Why?”
“Because none of them has their own man, of course.”
I was lost. “Why not?”
“Oh yes, it was all after your time, wasn’t it? First the planetary wars and the germ warfare. Then M-AIDS.”
“M-AIDS?”
“The resistant strain that’s specific to lymphocytes with a Y-chromosome. Spread by droplet infection, like the common cold. Wiped out nearly all the male population. What was left of it.”
“Good grief.” I pondered this for a moment. “What about all the jobs men used to do? Business, industry, space transport, all that kind of thing?”
“Oh, girls do all that now. There’s nothing that requires a man’s physical strength – hasn’t been for years. All the heavy stuff’s robotized. Truth to tell it was even before the men got wiped out, but they still hung on to their jobs as if strength mattered. Now girls do the decision-making, finance, strategic planning, all those things. We’re good at it. And there aren’t wars, not any more. That was a male thing.”
“And, er, procreation… you know, having children?”
“IVF. There are still sperm banks. All very clinical and not available to everyone. The population’s still declining.” Her face illuminated. “See, you’re a prize. The other girls will want to share you, of course, but I don’t think I’ll let them. At least, not at first. Do you mind?”
I swallowed hard. “Er no, I don’t think so. Whatever you say.”
I’d been wrong all along. This really was Heaven.
I saw her looking at my forehead. “You’re beginning to bruise. I think we’ll spray a dressing on that. Then I’ll order something to eat, and then if you feel up to it, we can go to bed.” She stroked long, soft fingers along my jaw.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
I reached up and closed my fingers gently around her soft hand. “Sam. What’s yours?”
“Soulange.”
“That’s a pretty name,” I said. “Unusual too.”
“Yes. I think my mother named me after a tree that used to be here.”
That’s when it hit me. Soulange – Magnolia soulangeana!
“What a remarkable coincidence!”
“What is?”
“Never mind. It’s a gardening story, and it happened a long, long time ago.”
[First published in Alexei’s Tree and Other Stories, Matador, 2005]
Benson
The media had begun to arrive. Television camera crews and sound technicians busied themselves plugging in lights and assembling a small battery of microphones on a temporary podium. Behind the podium rose a gigantic eidophor screen and beyond that, fenced off by security barriers, was the laboratory building. A large blue-painted windowless structure, its roofline was interrupted at one end by a tall tower topped by an elaborate antenna array. The reporters paid no attention to it. They stood around noisily greeting old friends and old rivals. As their numbers increased so did the volume of conversation.
The Press Release from Transkinetics Corporation had revealed little of what they had been invited to see. It had, however, promised them a dazzling demonstration of a technological breakthrough that would revolutionise travel. They’d heard it all before, of course, but they turned up just the same because their editors couldn’t afford to overlook the remote possibility that it might be true.
In a low, glass-and-steel office building not far away, two men were standing at one end of an otherwise empty Board Room. They stood with their backs to the long rosewood table, the leather armchairs, the wood panelling and the deep pile carpet, facing a window that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Beyond the window were grassy lawns and subtropical gardens, sustained in this desert climate by sprinklers that operated morning and evening, but they were too lost in their own thoughts for any of this to register with them.
Yves Duval was Public Relations Manager for Transkinetics Corporation. He was upwardly mobile, at least as upwardly mobile as he could manage. He wore immaculate suits, tailored silk shirts with matching pocket handkerchiefs, and hand-made shoes. He paid a hairdresser handsomely to cultivate the careful casualness of his coiffure. He subscribed to a gym, where he succeeded in offsetting the worst effects of frequent expense-account lunches. He drove a Mercedes convertible. He had a large disposable income and this was just as well, for his wife had an exceptional talent for disposing of it. Her ardent pursuit of fashionable clothes, parties and holidays was spurred less by the joy of being ahead than by the fear of being left behind.
Duval saw himself as someone who made things happen. What that actually meant was that he arranged for other people to make things happen. He was smooth and accomplished. Normally. Right now his insides were knotted with fear. He tried to conceal it. He glanced again at his gold Rolex watch. Not long to go.
Was there some way—he wondered for the umpteenth time—that he could have played it differently? He’d only met with the Board to finalise the publicity for the test run. It should have been straightforward enough. They’d really gone for his idea of a camera crew on a crane who would film a sequence that started with a tight shot of the arrival pad and then panned out to include Niagara Falls. They’d discussed a few details about the reception and approved the budget. And then, right at the end, Philip Menton had spoken, in his usual grave, slow voice.
“Gentlemen, we’ve always known that it would be a major problem to convince our investors and the media and the general public that this was going to be a safe and feasible way to travel. Would it be right, Duval, to say that what we have here is a crucial opportunity to achieve that objective?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Nothing, in fact, is more important?”
“Nothing.”
“Then it seems to me that you have overlooked the most convincing possible way of making that point.”
“Oh, really, sir? What is that?”
“Why, you must go yourself, of course.”
There was a moment of shocked silence, the shock being registered mainly by Yves Duval.
“Think about it. Our PR man is seen briefing the Press at San José and moments later the same man is seen circulating at Buffalo. It could hardly have more impact. Don’t you agree, gentlemen?”
There was a murmur of approval around the table. The Board was in resounding agreement, so long as none of them were not in that position.
“But, but…”
“Besides, we need you in Buffalo. I’ve invited some
prominent people to the reception and I want you to look after them properly – introduce them, make them feel important, all that sort of thing.”
“I could fly up the day before…” Duval’s voice sounded weak, even to himself.
Menton gave him a hard look. “You don’t harbour any doubts about the project, do you, Duval?”
“Me? No, of course not. But…”
“After all, Viktor himself is going, isn’t he? He made it clear from the start that he was only underwriting the whole development if he could be on the first test run.”
“Yes, sir, but…”
“Good, then that’s settled.”
It was a disaster. His wife thought he’d gone crazy when he’d told her but there was nothing he could do about it, short of resigning. And how could he resign? It had taken years to claw his way up to his present position and he shrank from the thought that he and his wife might have to accept a decline in her standard of living. He’d just have to ride it out and hope for the best. Now that the moment had arrived he wanted very much to look cool and confident but he couldn’t seem to manage it. He patted a linen handkerchief to his damp forehead and looked at his watch again.
*
Viktor Koussalis did his best to ignore the PR man’s agitation. This was, after all, a moment to be savoured. He turned his wrist to glance at a disposable plastic watch and replaced his hand in the pocket of his crumpled linen jacket. Appearances mattered little to him and with a fortune of several billion dollars to his name he had no need to advertise his wealth. His father had left him a moderately successful company and he’d built it into a multinational corporation. He’d become bored with it and gave it over to others to manage. Then he bought up some embryonic companies and turned them into successful enterprises. The satisfaction this brought him had nothing to do with profit; it was the creative process that interested him. He kept himself up to date, perpetually on the lookout for new ideas which, with his venture capital and business skills, could be turned into profitable companies. Not all were success stories, of course. The semiconductor plant here in San José, making large single crystals of germanium and gallium arsenide, had been a commercial failure. It just wasn’t competitive, largely because the energy costs had become prohibitive. He’d been about to divest himself of the company when he’d found another use for it. And for the specialist steel-making plant in Buffalo. It was funny how everything had fallen into place.
It had started in England, he remembered, at a conference called “Technologies for the Next Millennium”. He’d noticed a paper with an intriguing title in a session on transport technology. The speaker had turned out to be a short, middle-aged, balding gentleman with the face of a cherub and a bumbling manner – in fact Professor William Bullivant could have been the stereotype for the absent-minded English professor of a hundred B-movies. The man spoke obscurely, but with evident conviction, about a new theory of mass transport. There were no questions. People in the audience looked at each other with sardonic smiles and raised eyebrows. Clearly no one took it seriously. No one, that is, except Viktor. As soon as he’d returned to the States he arranged for Richard Ingwall, a physicist, and George Holt, an engineer – people whose opinion he trusted – to visit the Professor in his lab. Afterwards they set up a three-way conference call.
“So, Richard, what do you think of him?”
“Bullivant? I think he’s a nutcase.”
“Okay, but what about his theory. Anything in it?”
“Well, that’s the curious thing. I think there could be. I tried to get him to take us through it. He drove me crazy going back and forth with the calculations; anyone would have thought he was looking at them for the first time. He didn’t hide anything, though, so we could decipher it all in the end. I must say his approach is weird; I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, normally you’d start with basic physical laws and work forwards to a result. He starts with the result he wants and works backwards. I’ve had a quick shot at trying to get the same result in a more conventional way, but I can’t get it to work. All the same, I can’t fault his conclusions.”
“So if we mounted a full-scale trial, do you think it would work?”
There was a short silence at the other end of the line. “You’re asking me if I’d put a hundred million dollars of my own money on it?”
“No, I’m not asking you that, Richard. It’s my money; I’ll take the risks. I just want your judgement.”
“Well, at worst, you’d uncover some very interesting science. At best… well, it might actually work.”
“What are the chances, do you think?”
“The chances of it working? I don’t know. Maybe one in five.”
“As high as that? I’ve had worse odds. What does George think about the practicalities?”
“Hi, Viktor. It’s a bit difficult because this chap couldn’t give me a proper steer about scaling it up. I had to make a few basic assumptions. It looks possible though. The main problem is energy: you need a lot, but only for a very short time.”
“What are we talking about here, George?”
“Let’s put it this way. It’s a bit like taking a very powerful long-distance broadcasting station, putting every channel onto the same frequency, and then transmitting a whole year’s worth of programmes in a few seconds. And you need to do that at both ends.”
Viktor thought for a moment. “George, I’ve got a couple of plants over here that use a lot of electric furnaces. I was thinking of getting rid of them because they’re so energy-hungry. We have a special sub-station for the one in Buffalo, and the one in San José has its own generator. Energy-wise, am I in the right ballpark?”
“Erm, let’s see. Yeah, I think so. I’d have to look at the figures again but I think that’d be about right.”
And so, seven years ago, Viktor Koussalis had arranged to bring Professor William Bullivant from his ill-equipped laboratory in a remote English university to a state-of-the-art industrial complex in California, which Viktor had salvaged from his ailing semiconductor plant. In fact he’d brought the whole entourage: the Professor, his infernal dog, and that curiously insouciant woman…
“Are you two ready?”
The two men turned at the sound. The door of the Board Room was open and Alex Fellowes was standing there.
Duval spoke first. “Ah, Alex. Come in for moment, would you? I’d just like to go over some things with you.”
She entered the room, with some reluctance. “Well, only for a minute. We do have a schedule to keep to, you know.”
Alex Fellowes was a tall blonde whose willowy figure was effectively concealed for much of the time under a lumpy sweater and jeans. Once in a while she would put on make-up and wear a dress for a party or special occasion. It amused her to watch the heads turn – men she knew, seeing her as if for the first time. For the most part she couldn’t be bothered. It wasn’t important to her to be in a permanent relationship, especially as she’d yet to meet a man who didn’t disappoint her. Other than the Professor, of course, but then she didn’t think of him in that context.
She’d started to work in his lab as a junior technician after leaving school. Soon she was taking on more responsibility, and before long she was running the lab and acting as the Prof’s Personal Assistant. She was totally loyal to him – it wouldn’t have occurred to her to be anything else – and she had unhesitatingly accepted the offer to accompany him to the States. The salary she was getting now was more than enough for her modest needs. Although there was a huge gulf between their personal fortunes, she shared Koussalis’s indifference to material things. All that mattered to her was to run a tight show; if anything did go wrong she was going to be very sure it wasn’t through any oversight on her part.
Among her other duties she had been made responsible for managing day-to-day liaison with the engineering team and the construction staff. People were initially taken aback by her bru
sque manner, but they came to accept it, especially when they realized that everyone got the same treatment. That was the way she was, and she had no intention of changing the way she was, however senior the people she was talking to.
“What’s the problem, then?” she demanded.
“Er, well, not exactly a problem. We start by briefing the media, right?”
“Yes. They’re all waiting outside. Prof’s in the lab; I’ll bring him out as soon as the two of you are up there. Ten minutes for the briefing and then we’ll go to the capsule. Look, we’ve been over all this before. What’s the problem?”
“No, no problem. Just that…um, Alex, are you sure it’s safe?”
“Of course it’s safe. Prof did the test run with Benson, didn’t he?”
“Am I supposed to find that reassuring?”
“You should. The Professor thinks a lot of that dog. Come on, we’re wasting time.”
She led a reluctant Duval and an amused Koussalis out of the building and across to the podium. Moments later they were joined there by the Professor, and the briefing began.
Duval took charge with a brief introduction, forgetting his nerves for the moment as he slipped into his familiar role.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I have invited you here to witness an historic event. We are about to embark on a new era of travel. In a few moments my colleagues and I will be going into the laboratory behind us. There will be some final preparations and then we will be projected to Buffalo. That is a distance of about 2300 miles.” He checked his watch. “Our scheduled departure time is six-thirty. We are going to be there,” he paused for effect, “in a matter of seconds.”
There was a stunned silence. Then someone asked, “Will we be coming into the lab to watch?”
“No, you won’t be allowed beyond the barriers, for security reasons. But the large screen behind me will be projecting an image of the receiving area at Buffalo. You should see us emerge there.”
“Are you sure this whole thing isn’t an elaborate conjuring trick?”
The Tomb and Other Stories Page 12
