Kissing Carrion (22 page)

And yet . . .

. . . that's what happens, isn't it?
She thought, with a certain contemptuous impatience—restless, reckless, heartless as ever, by poor Eudo's wounded estimation.
When your children grow up, I mean.

Though, as God knew (or didn't, depending on who you asked), she sometimes did wish hers
would
—just to add even some small hint of variety to the well-established pattern.

Eudo again, sniffing, at her mind's ear:
Fools. Freaks. Flesh-drunk addicts. Cannon fodder.

Oh, yes. All that, and far, far less.

But herein lay the difference: Only choosing spawn who came with clearly-marked expiry dates was the safest and most certain way Elder'd yet found to make sure they'd burn out long before you ever had to drive them away, or kill them. Which, in its turn, all but guaranteed you'd never again have to spend even a moment of your eternal life alone . . .

. . . unless you wanted to.

* * *

Tomorrow, next night: Upstairs, where a floor-full of ‘Nought-i.e. nightcrawlers jigged and jumped, taking turns posing for each other while Elder watched, sipping her usual blood-and-tonic mixer, overcranked still center of their pathetically stop-motion world. And taking a certain secret pleasure in the knowledge that, all the while, a similarly stylish set of vampire younglings were going mosh-wild in the Tank beneath her feet, nipping and howling at each other as they jockeyed to get first bite at whatever tapped-out ex-Familiar the handlers threw in on top of them next. Flipping back and forth to deejays scratching 300 BPM, frenzied with white noise madness mixed far too fast for mere humans to hear, let alone follow . . . doing sept-, oct-, nonotuple twists in mid-air, upright and mid-step again before they even hit the ground . . .

Now, that was a fuckin'
party
, like this was just work under a different name: Nothing less than necessary, but definitely nothing more. Waiting, barely patient, on Flynn to sweet-talk the NASA guy through her front door and into her clutches—Elder could hear them clearly, music notwithstanding, and it didn't sound like any known version of a sure thing, as yet.

“You
know
it, G. She's, like, sooo totally hot for you—tellin' me just the other day how she wanted to meet you, dude. No lie.”

“And what's her name, again?”

“Elder, man. Like the sign says.”

Waste of time, unless the geek in question was even squarer than he look from where she stood. Which was—well—

—always possible.

Another sip, tiny hemoglobin hit sparking bright across her palate and up behind her eyes, making her already-pixilated pupils go click, bang, zoom. And starting to smile in spite of herself, with a brief black-light flash of teeth; studying her mark a little more closely from across the crowd room, and seeing a big, black man in a big, black, button-down suit, too-careful attempts at “hipness” screaming out from his mini-dreaded scalp on down. Straightening those press conference-ready little steel-rimmed specs as he repeated, slowly:

“So . . . she's ‘hot'. For
me
.”

Weighing the word, with its single unlikely syllable, as carefully as if it were some unfamiliar new scientific term. While Flynn laughed out loud like the big, sloppy-cute dolt he still was, almost forty years after Elder'd sucked him to death on the woodsmoke-scented Malibu sands. And assured Mr. Suit right on back, with a twinkle in his red-tinged eyes—

“Oh yeah, seriously. And Elder? She, I mean, she's . . . ”

. . . the fuckin' living
end
.

Later, in Elder's private elevator—Tank-bound, with the scientist (his name had proved to be Darnell) still playing it strictly on the wide-eyed tip: Poor, boring, office-bred me, cut hopelessly adrift against the likes of exotic, downtown-dangerous you. Unlucky for him, in context, that it was only a stance; his self-delusion meant the shock of being turned would be severe, no matter how Elder chose to do it—fast or slow, sidelong or straight-on. Gentle, reassuring. Or, maybe—

—not.

“I don't suppose I'm up to the kind of conversation you're used to,” Scientist Darnell allowed. To which Elder replied, without pretense at preamble:

“Actually, I was hoping you could enlighten me about something. You're going to be using string theory on the new G-Class Interplanetary, right?”

“ . . . right.”

“And how does that work, exactly?”

Darnell double-took; Elder just watched, waiting. Then started her smile sharpening, just a bit, as she saw him really
see
her for the first real time—assess her the way he'd judge any other unknown quantity, plunge past the “obvious” distractions of her pale, fragile, human veneer to solve for x. And get the barest hint, here and there, of some far older, less recognizable equation.

“That . . . would take a
really
long time to explain,” he said, at last.

The elevator touched ground, clicked in. Elder leaned to key her access code, pumping out a whiff of vampire perfume to make Darnell shiver: Morgue-cold, pheremone-choked. A black rose's poisoned pollen.

“Really,” she repeated. And showed him her fangs.

Tightness in the chest. Tightness at the fly. And Elder's glacial meltwater gaze, suddenly impossible to elude. Her little hand on his, claws sliding flick-quick to puncture his pulse on one bright flash of pain, one hot gout painting both their palms arterial red as he shuddered and jerked ridiculously in place, too caught even to gasp.

Six feet plus of gym-sleek bulk, all straining muscle and hammering, hemorrhaging tissue. But Elder already had him bent back over her knee by the throat, off-center-helpless as a child: Draining him quick and hard, and watching the Tank's apparently “empty” dance-floor fill up with gyrating bodies through his dimming eyes as the change took effect, rocketing him irreversibly towards immortality. And feeling the Tank's sound-system set her solar plexus spinning like some B-Movie mad scientist's hoary Hypno-Wheel, a different beat spiraling outward through every knotted, venom-flooded limb—while three centuries' worth of musical interplay clicked simultaneously by inside her head, lines piled one upon the other, like archaeological layers—

 

She's sold her rod, she's sold her reel

She's sold her only spinning-wheel

To buy her lad a sword of steel—

Her Johnny, who's gone for a soldier . . .

O believe me, if all those endearing young charms

That I gaze on so fondly today

Were to melt in an hour and fleet in my arms . . .

Gimme a pigsfoot and a bottle of beer

Get me gay, I don't care

Get all your razors and your guns

We gonna be wrasslin when the wagon comes . . .

It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it

Any old way you choose it . . .

No matter where you come from, no matter what you done

You got six million ways to die, choose one . . .

 

Surrounded by a circle of its sniggering soon-to-be peers, Scientist Darnell's dry husk folded up on itself like an old cocoon; his pulse slowed, stuttered, stopped. The younglings around him high-fived each other, cheered, and threw in at the bar to buy him a worthwhile first post-death drink, whenever his reborn cells chose to wake him back the fuck up.

Out on the Tank floor, meanwhile, Elder spun and sang, chin-slick with the last of Darnell's blood. Her mind returning, automatically—as it usually did, in such ecstatic moments—to the “secret” plan which had dictated his forcible conversion in the first place: Not exactly inaccessible to whoever wanted to hear about its particulars for quite some time now, though she did like to think it still both complex and unique . . .

. . . and Eudo's reaction alone, when she'd first explained it to him, had been more than enough to confirm
that
impression.

* * *

“Flynn's in with some half-closeted vamp fetishist down at NASA,” she'd told him, as they sat together in Eudo's idling car—shield discreetly up, muffling their voices from the Familiar chauffeur's prying, half-mortal ears. “According to him, they're gearing up to build themselves a Terrestrial Planet-Finder space telescope sometime during the next fifteen years, and launch it into Jupiter's orbit. It'll locate G-Class planets—that's Earth-sized worlds, with oxygen in their atmospheres—and then send pre-loaded probes on reconnaissance planetfalls, to scout 'em out.”

“And so?”

“And
so
,
I
'm gonna be on one of those probes, when the Planet-Finder fires it off. A hundred and twenty extra pounds of weight, all wrapped up in an information-gathering marker pod strapped to the undercarriage. They fit me with a softwire package that relays a fake telemetry back to Mission Control on Earth, I put myself into hibernation for most of the journey . . .”

“What is this science fiction nonsense?”

“It's progress, you fuckin' relic. Evolution.”

“An elaborate and expensive way to commit suicide.”

Elder snorted, twirling her cane impatiently; thought about how fast the blade inside would razor that sneer from Eudo's ex-monk face, if only she'd let herself let it. Then stepped down hard on that particular impulse, and snapped back—

“Way
I
see it, sport, we're all dead already. So who gives a big, fat, staving-off-creeping-mortification-of-the-flesh-through-drinking-hot-fresh-human-blood fuh—”

Breaking in, dismissively: “I
know
how it is that you ‘see it', Elder.”

“Oh, I'm very sure that you think you do.”

Eudo half-turned, favoring her with that look—the same one whose merest lowering hint had once been enough to pin her to her seat with fear and embarrassment, turn her insides to flame and her knees to water, render her instantly and automatically desperate to fall at his feet and do whatever it might take to make him happy again. But it'd been a good two hundred years since she'd felt either any of the above, or any need to conceal her feelings on the subject from the man-shaped thing who'd made and trained her: Her demon lover, her awful father. Her former master, still fuming over the mere fact of his pretty plaything's self-emancipation, even though it'd been years on years on
years
since the lack of his approval had had even the slightest possible effect on anything she did, or didn't do.

“They think it'll take about a century to reach full colonization,” Elder continued, “patiently.” “'Cause they'd need a compact power-source like an antimatter engine, and that takes a real conceptual breakthrough; hard to concentrate on, when you're still havin' to worry about petty little stuff like death and taxes. So Flynn brings Mr. Man by, I turn him and throw him back . . . this time next year, half of NASA's gonna be working 24/7 to find the next potential Earth.2, on nothing but a liquid diet.”

“The Clave would never approve such a venture.”

“Like I need their approval. For anything.”

“Elder . . . ” he began, then paused. And began again a moment after, with a strange—almost new, somehow—note in his voice: “This world is all we have, child. We must either live in it as it is, or change what little we can—and live with the consequences of those changes, afterward. There's nothing more
to
do, however much we may . . . occasionally . . . wish there were.”

And there was the Clave's party line, in a proverbial nutshell: Traditionalist, exclusionist, literally conservative. All about having to preserve the vampire world's “ancient, secret culture” at all and any cost, while conveniently forgetting that none of them actually
had
a culture to preserve,
per se
—just a bunch of fairly disgusting personal habits they'd somehow raised, over the millennia, to the status of (un)Holy Writ.

A calcified nightside parody of social structure run by those who deified the past to the point of glossing over how bad it had really been, back when they were still numerous enough to be feared, or their prey still knew enough to remember how to kill them. How they'd frozen stiff under the iron earth in cheap coffins, been poisoned like rats, hunted down and herded screaming from their catacombs to explode in the sunlight, tortured and scarred and burned at the fucking stake . . .

No, you've somehow skipped right on over all that
, she thought.
Because you don't change, even living forever. You just—endure.

But those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. As you, Eudo—should definitely know.

“So
dixit me, magistere
,” she asked, her tone kept strictly conversational. “The world
did
turn out to be flat after all, right? And that Don Cristobal de Colon guy . . . he just fall off the edge, or what?”

Man, where
was
I born, anyway?

A thousand years of ebb and flow, empire-rise and -set, with nothing happening that hadn't already happened a million times before. And then, three hundred years back—just around the time of Elder's own Re-birth, strange to say—a critical mass of ideas, exploding outward. So many new devices. Curiosity like a viral cluster, an ever-spreading plague, increasing exponentially.

Three hundred years of change, of nearly constant forward motion. But if studying history had taught her anything, it was that momentum always peaked and dropped, the same way that milk left to sit always curdled. That people always forgot how good they had it, comparatively speaking, because the most recent generation—these twentieth- to twenty-first-century vampires, for example, with their routinely endless, intrinsic sense of entitlement—rarely understood exactly what drawbacks they'd been lucky to avoid having to deal with, in the first place.