Temur had no real use for the two passengers in his cab beyond the fare. His night was just beginning, and these two were the oddest pair he had seen yet in his three years in this miserable cold wet country. This cursed little dwarf and his huge, tall woman. No wonder they argued so much. Allah must have forsaken them for the most terrible of sins. Temur smirked at the idea of what those sins might have been.
Driving people for money here in Scotland was a great way to build his bank account back home, but he was getting an odd feeling from this pair. In his own country such malformed children as the little man were still being left out to die of exposure as late as thirty years ago. Some old prejudices take longer to expunge than do some old practices. And the woman was so beautiful, for a western woman. But she was so tall, and so broad! It is just unseemly for a woman to be so tall. He needed to go home, and soon.
Once he went home Temur would be faced by an even more daunting problem, joblessness. The oil fields of his once prosperous country no longer exported to the world. The Saudis always wanted oil, but they only bought a trickle from other lands. And Iran's oil fields were now as dry as a Torie's Soul.
And now, Temur read regularly in the news feeds, that they were sometimes called “Kings of the Beggars.” Any country not quick enough to have believed the Western Developed World's claims a century ago that they would stop using petrol products had shot itself in the leg. Temur's people had not believed. And they had not had the same reserves of wealth that some other countries had before the last round of Western Invasive Wars, and Middle Eastern Wars for Land, and none of those powers from a century ago thought Israel would ever use their deterrents against any of the Islamic lands. His great-grandfathers had been wrong. And his grandfathers had not learned, and so had also been wrong. And now his father's generation and his own, were left to try to change how the Middle East, what livable was left of it, would deal with the world as it was now. In a world where petroleum was a chemical product for production, but not the fuel driving production forward.
And so, Temur would have to go home to an impoverished land. Alternative fuels and new engines that ran close to soundlessly on everything and anything NOT petrol had bloomed like daisies from the EU, Australia, the New Turkish
Sultanate, and even from the United States soon after the destruction of Iran. Tehran was
not yet a glowing crater, and most of the former Afghani lands lived still as well now as when they had first seen new cars began to hit the Western World’s cobblestone roads.
The car he drove even now was powered by outdated hydrogen cells; at best a failed idea. The tank was oversized, the fuel combustion ate at the inner workings of the car over time, and the rest of the world had moved on to increasingly better and better batteries. The hydrogen fuel gas was getting harder and harder to find. Most fillemup stations were now battery rental stops, and recharging hubs, with service stations; hydrogen hardly ever sold anywhere. It took over sixty liters of the frail
vapor to fill his tank. His cousin said he had a line on a hydrogen cell generator that would fit in his shed. Temur would believe it when he saw it.
The large woman in the back was beginning to raise her voice at her dwarf. Temur smirked again, guiding the car along the road toward their destination. The tall hospital in the finer part of the city. I hope she is not pregnant with that one's sprog. It was an uncharitable thought, he knew. But it was better than thinking of how they got into that state.
The taxi he drove now was very reliable, though Temur would complain loudly to anyone that would listen. It sailed along quietly and was efficient save for a rupture in one of the lines that had water vapor constantly entering the car to make the seats smell musty. His dispatcher would promise every week that the newer chrysoberyl battery driven cars would be installed as the company's new taxi fleet. The P&R drives, while woefully
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outdated themselves, still did better than the hydrogen cell car he drove now, and would have been a cheaper alternative to the chrysoberyl flash battery drives that his boss was upgrading to.
I would love to drive one of the newer vacuum engine cars.
Some in his own country had been calling for research into new cash cows to fuel the ever greedy West. Most just ignored what they thought of as a hollow threat from the soft Europeans when they passed new laws demanding a cleaner world. A minority called for Jihad, saying the new laws were a Zionist plot. Then those same mad men had to go and blow up our cities…Oh! But for a time machine and a gun!
But that was folly, he knew. One might as well believe in fairies and elves; Temur looked in the rear view mirror at the giantess and the midget in the back seat and wondered what they argued about. He couldn’t make
anything of their chatter, it just made no sense. And the dwarf just let his wife yell at him in public. The English men had odd notions to Temur about how to treat women. And every night here he sat in this taxi, watching the interplay amongst the these sad, sour faced, unspiced-food-eating people.
If the Emirates had believed the world would move away from petrol, my family might be rich still; but, then again, we might be just as poor as well...his father often talked about how his Great Grandfather had been rich and of the small palace in which old El Fadil lived with his wife. He knew his father was exaggerating, they might have been oil men more than a century ago, most likely they were drillers, not owners… but we would still not allow a woman to so tower over a man! Soon I will have enough to go home!
Home was where, Temur knew, women were never taller than an average man, like himself. He saw no rings on her fingers, and that was no surprise; what man would want his bride to loom over him so? NO sane man, surely; but this was not his home. It was just a country to live in, and make a great deal of money while awaiting a new marriage to be arranged by his parents and his uncle. His first wife left him soon after they had come to Scotland; she had had been a perfect wife until they had moved here, and then she became like all of the other western women.
Now He just waited for word from his family they had found him a new, proper wife. A normal sized wife. She was very pretty, though; but not a proper woman. Her shoulders were very broad, good for work. And her hips were wide and rounded, like a good woman’s should be; but no proper woman was so freakish tall.
She must have been over two meters! By at least ten to twelve centimeters! At the same time, he found the coppery shade of her hair enticing, enchanting.
Luckily for him St Albans was just coming up as he turned this last corner. Temur was suddenly distracted by the sight of a tall man in white clothing tussling with a much smaller man on the sidewalk under the hospital’s front entrance. A large, oddly shaped dark lump lay at their feet.
The taller man clearly had the advantage, but his minute adversary seemed to dance around him as they tussled.
The little man pulled a long, slender, ivory white rod from his coat with his free hand, and as it flashed brilliantly in what must have been the reflected light from the lobby, quickly slapped the taller man in the face with it. A sharp, yet sinuously graceful
motion that clearly staggered the man in white.
Damned muggers! I’ll call the authorities on that little ragman! They never do that twice in my country! We cut the filthy hands from such thieves in the civilized worl…
He never felt the taxi come to a shuddering stop as his lifeless body fell forward over the wheel. Nor apparently, did he see or hear the flock of angrily buzzing bullets that destroyed the front of the hospital's entrance as one lone, shiny projectile entered through Temur's open window, and exited behind his left ear.