by E M Gale
She grimaced. Alucard smiled in an unsure manner and let go of her hand and looked at me for direction.
“Anna’s picky, so I wouldn’t bother to chat her up if I were you,” I whispered sotto voce. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
Alucard addressed himself to Rob. “My aim was to catch pirates unawares, not scare honest customers. I’ll make it up to you by refunding the cost of your rooms, Dr. Deegen.”
‘Huh… of course we haven’t paid for them, the robot organised it. My guess is it will be a while until Alucard does his accounts and realises what the robot has been up to.’
“Ah, thank you very much, Alucard!” said Rob. Rob’s extravagance beat Alucard’s badly-acted flamboyance hands down.
“Well, goodbye then,” said Alucard.
“Ah, uh, Great Vampire Alucard,” stuttered Anna. We all stared at her. “You own this space station, don’t you?”
Alucard turned back to her and nodded.
“Well, uh… why are there so many little shops selling such lovely things on a pirate base?”
Alucard smiled and shook his head. “A pirate base? Who has been filling your beautiful head with such stories?”
Anna looked around at us all in confusion.
“This is a neutral, independent port. We are free traders. We will trade with anyone, from the AIW, to the Kreegle Empire, the orcs”–he was counting them off on his fingers–“the Outer Colonies, the Etrusians and even those trumped-up van Helsing wannabe Boy Scout hunters! Only the Solan Empire doesn’t… officially trade here.” He smiled.
“Hunters?” asked Mark. “Why would a vampire trade with them?”
Alucard swept his cloak back and held the back of his hand to his forehead. Again. “While I do not trade with such… people, anyone is welcome to trade here, so long as they follow my rules.” He turned slightly and stared off at the wall, perhaps deliberately giving us a dramatic view of his profile. “Ah, would that I could ban them. They have killed many good friends.”
“How many?” asked Jane.
Alucard stared at her and screwed up his nose.
“Well, that I know and actually like, uh, none.” His accent had slipped to Outer Colonies again. “I heard Captain Black Bellamy was done in by a hunter, but that was no loss to vampirekind. That cunt never did pay me back. Fucker.”
“Well…” started Anna. “Why are the shops so expensive, then? I suppose if you’re the owner… there must be some cheaper ones here, right?”
Alucard sneered at her.
“You could go to Trader’s Outfitters,” suggested the robot.
“Yes, but…”
“My dear Anna,” said Alucard, “as the Great Alucard often says, ‘Things cost what they cost.’” His accent was very English when he was quoting himself. “No point whingeing about it.” Alucard shook his head.
I sighed.
‘Could he be more pompous? And the guy’s obviously never been poor.’
“And with that, I must bid you adieu,” he said in an accent that was about as French as French fries.
Anna was blushing. The others chorused their goodbyes as Alucard stepped backwards into the shadows, turned into a mist then drifted from the room. I really had to concentrate not to follow the misted vampire’s path with my eyes.
I leant back, putting my head on the back of the sofa so that I was looking straight up at the ceiling.
“Well, now we’ve met the mysterious Dracula!” said Rob in an impressed tone of voice.
“Is he still here?” whispered Anna in fear.
‘Well, Clarke, I hope you feel stupid now. Rob isn’t a vampire, he is dead like the robot kept telling you. Why do I feel like this? I think I started to believe that he wasn’t dead. I had no evidence, why did I come up with such a stupid idea in the first place? Just because the robot used some of his phrases? He survives that awful war, why did I expect him to survive any longer?’
“You see, Clarke, he was Dracula. He looked the part and everything, he even had a Transylvanian accent,” said Rob excitedly.
“I didn’t like him, he was creepy. Just like Price was,” said Anna, shaking her head.
‘Why does Anna become a vampire and Rob not? Anna doesn’t seem to like them much. And I thought she liked Price. Why is she now saying he was creepy?’
I sighed and moved my head back to the vertical, shaking it from side to side.
‘I don’t think I realised how much I had hoped that Alucard was Rob. I started to believe it. I even called the robot Rob.’
He was looking at me–the robot, that was–but luckily no one else was. I rubbed my eyes angrily with the heel of my palm.
‘OK, Clarke, calm down.’
“And how do you think he did that? Just appearing like that?” asked Rob. He sounded fascinated.
“Magic,” said Anna.
“No, not magic, magic’s not possible, Anna. Well, Clarke, what do you think?” Rob was looking at me, eager and interested.
‘Huh.’
“What?” I asked, not doing very well at faking listening. I picked up one of the big cushions, crossed my legs round the bottom and hugged the cushion up to my face.
“How did he do that?” asked Rob again.
“What, the magic trick?” I queried.
“Clarke, don’t put your shoes on my sofa,” said Anna, frowning at me.
“Yes, you don’t think it was magic, do you?” Rob said.
I thought for a moment. “No. Colloids. Or aerosols. Or quantum mechanics.”
“What do you mean?”
‘OK, Clarke, no one’s noticed, just don’t think about it.’
I wiped my eyes again and sniffed.
“Well, if the vampire could turn his body into colloids or an aerosol he could drift, though how he could reform I have no idea.”
Rob was nodding eagerly. The others were looking interested, but they didn’t seem to have noticed that I was upset.
‘And I shouldn’t be upset. I shouldn’t have been stupid enough to wish Rob was still alive as a vampire.’
I sighed.
‘I guess after seeing him ‘die’, and finding out that he survives that, I just assumed that he could survive even more. In fact, why didn’t he sell his spaceship in exchange for eternal life by becoming a vampire? I would have. Well, that was if I couldn’t get eternal life for free by heading into a vampire bar and just asking for it.’
“Or quantum mechanics. If you think of the human body in its normal state as a particle, maybe the vampire was just using the waveform state of the human body,” I suggested. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was saying. Rob nodded.
“So, what, you reckon he ran really fast at a diffraction grating?” suggested Rob.
‘Well… no… I just think about becoming a mist and I can.’
I shrugged.
‘Actually, thinking about it, it is a very weird thing to be able to do.’
“I have no idea. I could be wrong about the quantum mechanics. I’m not sure if it works like that.”
“Bucky balls can be diffracted, but humans are a bit bigger…” mused Rob.
“Or he stood outside the door and figured out how to tunnel through a probability barrier,” I said dazedly. I knew that that wasn’t how I did it, I turned into a mist and drifted. I sighed, looked down at my feet, and wiggled my toes in my boots. They were thin enough I could see my feet moving.
“Clarke, shoes on my sofa,” said Anna. I covered the boots with my dress.
“Yeah, yeah, that makes sense,” said Rob thoughtfully. “Do you think he’d let me experiment on him?”
I looked up at Rob in amazement, and then smiled, shaking my head.
‘Just like Cleckley.’
“You don’t want to go and ask him, do you?” said Anna.
“Well, why not? He was rather polite. Do you think he really is THE Dracula?” Rob asked me.
“Nah, Dracula is still a fictional character: that was a vampire pretending to be D
racula,” I said.
“Clarke!” yelled Anna. “Feet off the sofa!” She looked angry about something. It couldn’t be the sofa, surely, as this was a hotel room. I put my feet down, but still hugged the big cushion up to my face. The robot had been staring at me the whole time, although I had been getting used to that.
I turned to him. “This is all your fault, you know, you stupid robot.”
“I’m sorry, Clarke,” he said. He even sounded sorry. I nodded.
‘Hey, hold on, apologising. Surely that’s unroboty?’
But the others hadn’t noticed. As I now knew that the robot wasn’t the future version of Rob hiding for some obscure reason, I didn’t really care whether Jane agreed with me about the robot being capable of more than just answering questions about the locations of things.
“Hey, I wonder if he can turn into bats or a wolf or something freaky like that?” said Rob.
‘Well… I don’t think I can. Not tried, mind you.’
“Wouldn’t a wolf look kinda out of place on a space station?” I remarked.
“Hmm, I guess so,” said Rob. “Perhaps a space wolf then.”
I stared at him incredulously. He shrugged and grinned a silly grin, so I grinned back.
“Well, I don’t like them,” said Anna.
“Wolves?” I wouldn’t have expected her to really.
“Vampires.”
“You liked that ‘nice Mr. Price’, as you put it.”
‘Cleckley was right, I do miss him, weirdly.’
“Well… he was OK, maybe. But I didn’t like Dracula.” She was pouting.
‘Whatever. I feel no reason to defend a strange vampire who isn’t Rob.’
“They’re all scum,” said Jane. I looked at her in surprise, and she glared back at me.
‘Does…’
‘ … she…’
‘ … know?’
“I wouldn’t trust any of them,” she added, looking straight at me as she said that. I frowned.
‘Huh. Maybe she knows.’
I raised an eyebrow at Jane. She just stared me out.
Oblivious to the tension, Rob continued: “Well, I don’t know. Alucard didn’t seem that bad, and who wouldn’t want to spend their time hanging out on a cool space station built by the great genius, yours truly?”
Jane eyed him narrowly. “I don’t think much of bipolar scientists drunk on their own ego either.”
“You really are in an antagonistic mood today, Jane. What has poor Rob done this time?” I asked.
“Poor Rob? Why exactly is he ‘poor Rob’? And all the guy keeps doing is going on about how great he is.”
I thought for a moment. Rob opened his mouth to say something, but I got in first. “But he is great, so why is that a problem?” I said with a shrug. “He is, after all, called the Great Engineer.”
‘Oh, this is interesting. What have I said?’
Jane was glaring at both me and Rob, Anna looked annoyed and Rob looked stunned.
“Sorry, what did I say that was wrong?”
‘Sometimes, what I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to say just isn’t for some bizarre reason. Is this one of those times?’
Mark chuckled, but no one said anything.
‘Well then, I guess not.’
I sighed and shook my head.
“So then, guys, what shall we do today?”
“I don’t really keep going on about it, do I?” asked Rob slightly plaintively. He was looking at me.
‘Eh? Why’s he asking me?’
I shrugged. “Ask Jane.”
‘She’s the one who has a problem with it, not me.’
“Oh, honestly,” she said, in an annoyed fashion. “Yes, you do, Rob, let it drop.”
“Well, look, Jane”–something about her had comment aggravated me– “I know he is making a big thing of himself at the moment, but he has built a time machine. Yesterday we found out that he built a robot that I thought was a real person and a space station that–”
‘–we nicked, oops.’
“–uh… is very cool. On top of that he sat and read all his papers yesterday afternoon–”
“Not all of them.”
“Really, I don’t think it’s surprising that he’s mentioning how brilliant he is. The guy has just seen his life’s work laid before him in a day and it was an amazing amount of work for one lifetime. To see it all on a single day, what on earth do you expect?”
She looked stunned.
Rob looked at me. “You’ve seen some of it, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “I thought you knew that.”
He shook his head.
“How else would I have been able to tell you about the Nobel Prize?”
He grinned at me.
“He gets the Nobel Prize?” asked Mark. I nodded. He looked rather impressed. But oddly, Rob didn’t bask in the glory of that revelation.
“Clarke, have you looked up your life’s work yet?” Rob asked.
“Eh? What are you talking about?”
“Well, aren’t you motivated by the same things as me? Surely you would want to look up everything you will do?”
I shook my head vehemently. “No, I told you, I don’t want to know. It’ll just confuse me.”
“So you have no idea what you will do with your life when you get back?” asked Jane, amazed.
‘Eh? Why is that surprising?’
“Why would anyone want to know? You’d dwell on the bad bits and the good bits would lose their impact because you’d see them coming. And anyway, if my future self is like me, she definitely wings it, so I guess I’ll have to as well.”
I didn’t think Jane’s eyes could get any wider, but they did. “Wow, that’s irresponsible. What if you were supposed to look it all up and take notes?”
I shrugged. “Then I’m in trouble. As usual.”
“So can I look you up?” said Rob. “After all, you looked me up.” He smiled.
I waved my hands at him. “No, no, no! Please don’t!” I protested. “I know it’s not fair, and anyway, I only looked up your papers–”
‘A small lie.’
“–so you can look up mine if you want–they suck–but please, please, please don’t look me up!”
Rob looked a little taken aback by this. I suppose it was quite an outburst. I continued without pausing for breath.
“I really, really, really don’t want to know. It would freak me out!”
‘And cost me five thousand pelfre.’
“And cost me five thousand pelfre,” I added.
‘That’s hardly the important point, now is it, Clarke?’
“OK, OK,” he said, holding his hands up in a calming gesture. “You don’t have to panic. I won’t look you up.” He grinned a lopsided grin. “I suppose you don’t want to go on about how great you are as well.”
‘Eh? Why does he think I would do that?’
I looked around at the others for a clue to Rob’s behaviour. Anna was looking murderous, Mark was looking a bit bored and Jane looked shell-shocked.
“Uh… well, no,” I said, since I didn’t really know how to answer that. Rob nodded and smiled.
‘Oh… I am so losing that bet. Well, Clarke, that’s what happens when you are arrogant enough to make stupid bets like that.’
“People already tell me I’m arrogant for some reason,” I muttered.
“The reason for that is not that hard to figure out, Clarke,” said Jane, shaking her head at me. I think it was wonder at my sheer stupidity.
‘Oh, well. Can’t win them all. Heh, even if you are me.’
‘That’ll be the arrogance there, Clarke.’
I grinned at her. She just shook her head.
Anna was glaring at me. “Clarke, stop mangling my cushion,” she said, snatching it back. “And why is it wet?”
I looked at her in confusion. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said, looking away.
“So who do you have
a bet with?” asked Jane.
‘Oh? How does she know about that? Did Cleckley tell her?’
“What bet? I never gamble,” I lied.
She raised her eyebrows, obviously not believing me. “The five thousand pelfre that you mentioned you’d lose.”
‘Oh, that.’
“The, um, what?”
‘Yeah, confusion. That’ll cover it.’
“Is it Dr. Cleckley?” asked Anna.
‘Wow, nice one. How does she know that? Has Anna been taking lessons in mind-reading from him? Although the idea that he told her would pass the Occam’s Razor test better. But why would he tell her about the bet? It’d be cheating, since she’s one of the people the outcome depends on. Unless Cleckley really wants to win his five thousand pelfre, but it’s not that much money in the grand scheme of things, why would he bother? Especially since I think he’ll win it anyway.’
“Why would you think that?” I asked, eyeing her closely and using the full extent of my vampire powers to pick up any hints.
“Well, you are always hanging out with him.” She looked annoyed, smelt of anger and of vanilla rose perfume, but her heart was beating normally so I didn’t think she was up to anything.
‘My vampire senses were a huge help there, then.’
I sighed. “Well, yes. He’s a good conversationalist.”
“Better than the robot, I hope,” said Jane with a sneer.
“She doesn’t like you,” I said to the robot. “And Cleckley’s really, really bright,” I said to Anna.
‘He figured out that we were time travellers, that was a good piece of reasoning. Few people would have managed it from the evidence he gathered.’
“Quite amazingly so,” I added with a nod.
“You don’t like him, do you?” asked Rob. He was screwing his face up in a frown. I looked at him in confusion.
‘What’s wrong with Cleckley? I thought everyone liked him.’
“Well, yes, most of the time.” I shrugged. “I don’t like him so much when he’s trying to chase me into his office.”
Rob pulled a funny sort of goggle-eyed expression.
“But isn’t he a little old for you?” he said, with a face like he was chewing on a raw potato.