Sunshine (32 page)

Aimil said, studying the screen, “I save anything that—well, that I guess comes from an Other, right? That feels funny. That's what these guys pay me for. There are a lot of us doing it—we don't know who each other are of course but I doubt we're all librarians—and when some nettag is making a lot of us jumpy, SOF tries to find out more about who's—or what's—behind it. Jesse asked me to separate off some tags that are on SOF's active list that I personally think feel like vampires rather than something else, and …”

“We wondered if any of them might mean something to you, you know, locationally,” said Jesse.

Locationally? I thought irrelevantly. Is this the same English I speak?

“After what happened the other night,” said Jesse. “The way you knew where it was even though it was too far away for you to, er, hear, in the usual way. Or see. What made you jump when Aimil opened her mailsave list?”

I shook my head. “Presumably I'm reacting to what you want me to be reacting to, yes,” I said. “But whether it's going to be anything but a sensation like putting your finger in an electric socket I don't know.”

“Try it,” said Jesse.

Aimil stood up from the chair and I sat down, trying to examine myself for signs that my evil gene was waking up. This would be a logical moment for it, I felt, and probably quite a practical one too, from the perspective of lingering final moments of philanthropic sanity. Jesse and Pat would be trained in hand-to-hand, and even amok, and thor as hell with the muscles you get if you bash The Blob into trays of cinnamon rolls every morning, I should be a pushover for a couple of veteran SOF field agents.

The screen glowed at me balefully. I shut my eyes. Nothing was happening. My body went on breathing quietly, waiting for me to ask it to do something. “What do I do?”

“If you hit
next
,” Aimil said, “you go to the next message.”

I opened my eyes long enough to find the NEXT button. I could look at the keyboard. I glanced at the screen. The words there wriggled. I didn't like it but it didn't say “vampire” to me either. I hit NEXT.

More wriggly words. Ugh. Nothing else though. I hit NEXT.

And the next NEXT.

There was an odd building-up of internal pressure that I couldn't quite put down either to trying to look while not looking at a com-screen that was longing to give me a lightning-bolt-thunder-roll odin-bloody headache or to the knowledge that I was surrounded by SOFs avidly waiting for me to do something. Or that
I
was waiting to pop into Incredible Hulk mode and try to eat somebody. So I could guess that my shady rapport, affinity, Global Navigational Pinpoint Precision Positioning Device (patent pending), or whatever, was acknowledging the presence of vampires somewhere out there behind the screen, but—so?

Next. Next. Next. I was sweating.

I realized what the pressure was. Expectation. I was getting close.

Close to
what
?

Next.

HERE.

I snapped my eyes closed and flung myself back in the chair, which rolled several feet away from the desk till it hit the corner of a table pushed against the wall. An unhandily stacked heap of paper spilled off onto the floor with a
swoosh
.

I got up, shakily, keeping my eyes averted from the screen. I could feel the beating of the HERE. I turned my head back and forth as if I was standing in a field looking for a landmark. No. Not there. I moved round a quarter turn, and waited to reorient the HERE. No. I moved another quarter turn … almost. An eighth turn back. No. An eighth turn forward, then another eighth. Yes. HERE.

I raised an arm. “That way. Now turn whatever it is off, because it's making me sick.”

Aimil dived for it, and the screen went blank.

I sat down.

“Well, well, well,” said Pat. The satisfaction in his voice made me suddenly very angry, but I felt too tired and sick to tell him so. I closed my eyes.

I opened them again a minute later. Steam from a cup of hot tea was caressing my face. I accepted the cup. Caffeine was my friend. I wasn't sure if I had any other friends in that room or not.

The Special Other Forces exist to control, defeat, neutralize, or exterminate all Other threat to humans. That was easy and straightforward, and as a human it sounded—had sounded—pretty good to me, although at the same time I'd had a problem with the politics of anything Other defined as bad, which seemed to be the unofficial SOF motto. Now I was learning that in fact SOF was—apparently—full of partbloods, maybe fullbloods, and presumably Weres, and was clandestinely sympathetic to the registry dodgers.

It should have cheered me up. If I was a partblood myself, I was a partblood among partbloods. I should be eager to cooperate with my own little group of SOFs.

Who hated vampires. All vampires. By definition. Who hated and targeted vampires because they believed that vampires were not merely making everybody's lives more dangerous, but their own lives harder, their lives as good, socially well-adjusted and well-disposed part-demons or demons, as Weres who only needed a night off once a month. If it wasn't for vampires (so Pat's theory went) the humans would probably repeal the laws that automatically prevented anyone with Other blood from enjoying full human rights.

The theory was probably right.

Not to mention the less-than-a-hundred-years-before-we-all-go-under-the-dark thing.

It wasn't only that seeing in the dark creeped me out because it came from a vampire. It was that it made me permanently, relentlessly, continuously conscious of being
connected
to … vampireness.

I do not know what I have given you tonight. I do not know what you have given me
.

I was aware of it standing motionless outdoors at noon on a sunny day. Even the absence of shadow is a kind of shadow. You may not know that but I do. I did now. I wondered if this was anything like the dare-I-say
usual
realization of partbloodedness: knowing that you are—and are not—human, but angrily, frustratedly believing that this didn't make you any less of a …

A what, exactly? A human? A person? An individual? A rational creature?

Remind me that you are a rational creature
.

I wished I could ask somebody. But nobody was part vampire, it wasn't possible. Whatever I was, that wasn't it. Was it. Was it?

Drink your tea, Sunshine, and stop thinking. Thinking is not your strong suit.

There was something else that was bothering me about all this, but I couldn't get that far yet. I didn't have to. Where I was was far enough to feel nomad about.

“Feeling better?” said Pat.

“No,” I said.

“Do you know what you were pointing at?”

“No,” I said. I looked up, along the line I had indicated, and thought about which way the SOF building lay and where I thought I was in it. I'd probably been pointing west, something like west. That wasn't a big help; west was where all the deserted factories were, where the worst of the urban bad spots were. Nobody lived out that way now; as the population slowly began to recover from the Voodoo Wars, rather than trying to reclaim any of that area, new malls and office blocks and housing developments were going up in the south and east and—also avoiding the lake and its bad spots—curling around eventually (avoiding druggie nirvana) up to the north. The reason anybody was trying to salvage Chesterfield was because it was south. In twenty or thirty years we and the next town to the south, Piscataweh, would probably be one big city. Unless we all went under the dark early.

The western end of New Arcadia isn't entirely deserted; it has some rather murky small businesses scattered around and some clubs the police keep closing down that open again a day or a week later. Sometimes they reopen briefly somewhere else, sometimes they don't bother to pretend to move. It is the western end of town where gangs of mostly human, mostly teenage boys go to play chicken and look for vampires. It is also a popular area for squatters, although the attrition by death rate is pretty severe. A lot of the murky small businesses that manage to hold on there cater to squatters who can't afford to pay for housing, but if they want to stay alive have to pay for some warding. There are two kinds of cheap wards: the ones that don't work, and the ones that mess with what for want of a better phrase I'm going to call black magic. Which gives you the idea. The homeless are better off sleeping in the gutters in Old Town, but I admit that for Old Town's sake it's a good thing most of them don't.

It didn't take a combox or a kick in the head to tell anyone in New Arcadia that if they were looking for suckers to look west.

“I was pointing west,” I said grudgingly. “Big deal.”

“We don't know if it's a big deal yet or not,” said Pat reasonably. “We won't know till we drive you out there.”

“No,” I said.

“It might be, for example,” Pat continued unfazed, “that it isn't the west of New Arcadia at all; it could be somewhere a lot farther away—Springfield, Lucknow, Manchester.” Manchester had a rep as a vampire city. “The globenet is the globenet; you never know where a specific piece of cosmail has come from.”

“Unless you're SOF, and you track it down,” I said.

There was a little silence. Jesse sighed. “It's not that easy. I mean, tracing something off the net is never easy—”

“There are all those boring laws about privacy,” I said.

“—which even SOF has to make an effort to break,” said Pat.

“—but a lot of the usual rules of, um, physics, don't work quite the same with Others as with humans,” Jesse continued.

Yeah, I thought. How
does
a hundred-and-eighty-pound man turn into a ninety-pound wolf? Where does the leftover ninety go? Does he park it in the umbrella stand overnight?

“Geography and vampires is one of the worst. Where they are and where we are often doesn't seem to, uh, relate.”

Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways … It is not the distance that is crucial, but the uniformity
.… Evidently this worked in both, um, directions. Einstein was wrong. I wondered if it was too late to give my skeggy old physics teacher a bad day.

“So even if we got a good read off a cosmail that we were sure was lobbed by a sucker we still might not know any more than we did before we wasted some of SOF's tax blinks cracking it. We can use all the help we can get.”

“Which I think I said to you already not long ago,” added Pat. “You might also keep in mind that the guys who don't want to be found usually have the edge on us guys who want to find them. Even the human ones, and they're usually easier. Sunshine, give us a break. We're not trying to ruin your life for fun, you know.”

I stared into the bottom of my mug. Not Jesse or Pat's fault that I was bound to a vampire. I didn't think they'd be real open to the idea of making an exception for him. I wasn't happy about it myself. But I could hardly tell Pat that the reason SOF was so full of covert partbloods now made me feel worse, not better.

I was getting to a pretty bad place if I was beginning to wonder if maybe going bonkers and having to be bagged for my own good might be my best choice.

What if what I had pointed toward was
Con
?

No. The answer came almost at once. No. What I had pointed toward was something … something in itself sick-making, antithetical to humans. To anything warm and breathing. Betrayal would be a different sort of sick. I was sure.

I was pretty sure.

A human shouldn't be able to think in terms of betraying a vampire. It didn't work. Like those nonsense sentences they used to wake you up when you are supposed to be learning a foreign language. I eat the hat of my uncle. I sit upon the cat of my aunt. Depends on the cat of course.

It didn't work, like being able to see in the dark didn't work. The bottom of my mug was in shadow. I hadn't drunk the last swallow because it had a fine dust of tea leaves in it. Even they threw shadows, tiny shadows within the shadow, floating in the shadowy dark liquid. “Okay,” I said.

It might have been Bo I'd found. That I'd felt through the globenet. That was about as sick-making a thought as I could have. Bo, that Con was supposed to be finding so we could go spoke his wheel before he spoked ours. Again. Permanently.

“Then you'll come with us?”

I thought about it. There wasn't much to think. “I have to be back at six,” I said.

“You got it,” said Pat.

I
T WAS JUST
Pat and Jesse and me. Aimil went back to the library. When we awkwardly said good-bye, her face was full of bright shadows I couldn't read. I looked at her, trying to resettle her in my mind as a partblood and a SOF. Did it take that much effort? I didn't know. It was taking me a lot of effort to be whatever I now was.

While Pat did some shifting-papers-around things and Jesse disappeared for a few minutes I moved over to the sunlight falling through the gray window of Pat's office. The sunlight felt thin, but it was sunlight. SOF windows were all gray because of the proofglass: proof against bullets, firebombs, kamikaze Weres, glass- and steel-cutting demon talons, spells, charms, almost everything but an armored division with howitzers. Proofglass had only come on the market about ten years ago, just after the Wars, which might have been a little less fatal if it had been invented a few years earlier. All high-risk businesses and the military and most other government departments, plus a lot of paranoids, both the kind with real enemies and the other kind, now had proofglass in their windows and their vehicles. Proofglass upgrader was a popular new career among young magic handlers. You didn't have to be a magic handler to get hired as an upgrader, but you'd probably live longer.

Nobody had figured out how to make it less gray though. Gray and depressing, like being in jail. Hadn't they done studies that humans really need sunlight? Not just light. Sunlight. And all humans, not just me. I hoped Charlie's wasn't going to have to put in proofglass.