The New Watch nw-5

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  How strangely life works out sometimes. There I am sitting in Moscow, delighted at the idea of a short work trip to London – and suddenly I get caught up in a swirl of events and dragged off to the other side of the world, to a place I don’t really know anything about… even though half the computer hardware I can remember was produced in Taiwan.

  And who with? A former witch who is now a Light Other. Someone I once fought a deadly duel with…

  I felt a sudden ache in my chest. It wasn’t a physical pain, but a clear, piercing realisation that my duel with Arina wasn’t just a thing of the past, it was waiting for me in the future too.

  It wasn’t a vision of the future, no. Something else. As if subconsciously I had already understood everything that hadn’t yet come together, that was still stuck in my conscious memory in the form of separate, scattered splinters. All these Prophets, dreams, visions, Tigers, Witches, Gesar and Zabulon – it had all merged together to produce a result that I didn’t like at all.

  And the main reason I didn’t like it was because I would have to kill. Or be killed.

  What the hell was going on! What rotten damned impulse had made me pay attention to some bawling kid at an airport – I could have just walked on by…

  I winced painfully. I could have just walked on by. And allowed him to die? And another hundred and fifty people with him?

  Of course I couldn’t.

  That’s the way things are arranged in this world – one person’s life is always another person’s death.

  The pretty air hostess walked by quietly, smiling. Catching my eye, she inclined her head slightly and glanced inquiringly at the empty glass on the broad armrest of the seat. I nodded. I waited for her to bring the cognac, took a sip – and stayed there, half-lying in the seat. I could have done with a bit of sleep… but sleep wouldn’t come now. My biological clock would go completely haywire. First from Moscow to London, then from London to Taipei…

  Why was I certain that I would have to fight with Arina?

  And not simply fight, but fight to the death?

  Yes, she had become a Light One, but she was still a dark schemer… as bad as Gesar.

  Yes, she had revealed a certain amount of information to me, but she was concealing even more.

  Yes, somehow she knew things that she ought not to know. I had the feeling that she had a source in one of the Watches… I made a mental note to investigate the idea. Of course, she said that she hated Zabulon, and she really had changed her colour – but where was the real truth in all of this?

  All of us, even in relationships with our friends, leave some things unsaid and hide others. Not necessarily with any bad intention. Sometimes it’s simpler and quicker not to say something than to try to explain and persuade.

  What was it that had disconcerted me?

  Arina had sworn that she hadn’t influenced me. I believed her, and it wasn’t just a matter of the oath – with her persuasive abilities she had no need to resort to direct magical influence on a person’s mind.

  But her oath had referred to the past. She hadn’t said that she wouldn’t do me any harm. That she wouldn’t ever try to deceive me or fight against me. A mere detail, of course… but if she hadn’t been keeping that possibility in mind, she would definitely have tried to intensify her oath, make it more convincing.

  What else?

  I took a sip of the pungent cognac and tried to summon up Arina’s face in my memory. Strange, in my mind’s eye, even though she was still young, her eyes were old and faded… wise… and sad.

  Those eyes were already gazing into the future.

  She knew that our alliance was a brief one.

  Or, at least, she took the possibility seriously.

  Arina looked at me as if I were someone she liked, but who would inevitably become an enemy – and soon, very soon.

  Well, then… two could play at that game.

  For the time being our interests coincided.

  We’d have to see how things went.

  Of course, I didn’t feel like sleeping. I switched on the entertainment centre built into the seat, leafed through the film listing, watched some movie about vampire hunters for about ten minutes, chuckling. On the one hand, it was very funny. It was like the way Russians watch Hollywood movies about Russia, the way a real doctor laughs when he watches House or Doc Martin. But then, really, it was all just wrong! In recent times the classic poppycock about vampires being afraid of holy water, garlic and crosses has disappeared without trace. But that doesn’t mean the screenplays have got any more intelligent. It’s just that the old, unfashionable clichés have been replaced by new nonsense – by vampires who are glamorous, mysterious, elegant… Various pseudoscientific explanations have appeared – either vampirism is caused by a virus, or a vampire’s blood has a low haemoglobin content, or it’s a mutation (movie directors are happy to put absolutely anything down to a mutation).

  In actual fact, it’s all much simpler than that. The first vampires were obviously beings who assumed that form in the Twilight. It was some kind of sadomasochistic complex, very probably a perfectly banal disorder of sexual appetence, but manifested in an Other rather than in a human being. I think that initially there was nothing to it except the sexual excitement that the Other derived from biting pretty girls and being able to do this with impunity, thanks to his special abilities. What else could he do? It was the Middle Ages, social manners were simple, back then there weren’t any of our modern, specialised clubs for people who like to bite each other – in those days that led straight to the stake and the fire. One of the first vampires – perhaps this is secret knowledge that they preserve in their legends – experimented with the composition of the toxin that vampires inject into their victim. After all, a standard vampire bite doesn’t kill, it plunges the victim into a blissful and helpless condition. By injecting slightly more poison, the vampire induces retrograde amnesia in the victim. And with just a little more – the person dies. Not even from loss of blood – most vampires only need two or three hundred millilitres a month – but simply from poisoning…

  But one day a vampire dragged his victim into the Twilight. Some version of the toxin developed by one of the first vampires killed the victim – but the death occurred in the Twilight, which has its own laws. And the human being ceased living, but did not completely die. He was transformed into something capable of existing for an infinitely long time, while retaining his reason, acquiring an absolutely incredible regenerative capacity and also, in part, the abilities of an Other – even if he had not possessed them initially.

  The crucial point was that this version of the toxin did not kill human cells: it deprived them of the ability to renew themselves naturally by dividing, but it endowed them with a quite fantastic capacity for intra-cellular regeneration. A large dose of the toxin ‘preserved’ a human being almost instantly – young vampires remained young for ever, any injuries regenerated within minutes. A smaller dose transformed a human being into a vampire gradually – children grew up, young people aged… until the toxin triumphed completely and the vampire ‘froze’ in its final form, like a fly in amber. Without the abilities of an Other, without the Twilight, this would not have been of any great advantage to the vampires – theoretically speaking, a vampire would not have been able to regenerate a severed limb, any totally destroyed cell would have died for ever, there would have been nothing to replace it with… But the vampires were helped out here by their magical abilities. On entering the Twilight, they created something like a map of their organism, a Twilight matrix – and so they were able to control their bodies perfectly in the Twilight, by checking against this matrix: they could grow younger or older as they wished, change their appearance, regrow lost limbs… and the most experienced and powerful of them could even shift into non-human form.

  So far, even in all this, there was nothing truly horrible: it was more an expression of the human dream of immortality. Although in consummate vampires the reproduc
tive function disappeared, those who had not been completely transformed were even capable of producing offspring…

  There was only one problem. The vampires were no longer alive. Growth and the multiplication of cells – these are the very essence of life. The ‘preserved’ cells were no longer alive, but they were not dead. They did not radiate energy into the Twilight, did not make any contribution to the Power on which all Others draw. And consequently they could not receive energy. In order to remain a full-fledged vampire, consume Power and not fall apart owing to the creeping, inevitable death of individual cells, vampires require living cells. Even if they are not their own.

  Blood provided these cells. It was the easiest form of all to maintain alive within the vampire organism. By the way, novice vampires prefer to drink blood of their own group, it’s easier for them to work with. And the thirst for this blood, the organism’s desperate striving not to die completely, developed into the vampire Hunger that is the source of so many problems. Experienced vampires can cope with it, but not all new converts can – that’s why vampires’ victims die so often from being drunk dry, although in reality the vampire has no need to do this, and he will vomit up the excess blood a few minutes later in any case… Blood from blood banks offers a solution, but not a complete one – the vampire’s subconscious still demands fresh, hot blood, flowing into his mouth straight from the arteries…

  There were plenty of other interesting things concerning vampires. Some of them, strangely enough, have filtered through into the human sphere and been incorporated into folklore. For instance, the Master of Vampires. If a human being is turning into a vampire gradually – and that, after all, is the route followed in most cases – the level of toxin in his organism dwindles and it has to be constantly topped up by further bites. And the bites have to be from the same vampire who initiated him. The alternative is death. A fully formed vampire no longer requires this, but for reasons that are obvious to any politician, old and experienced vampires try not to spawn fully formed vampires. It is far better to keep your brood on a short leash and maintain genuinely absolute power over at least a small handful of the undead…

  By the way, the biology of werewolves and shape-shifters is extremely complicated. However, they don’t drink blood, they eat raw flesh. The Light shape-shifters, who prefer to call themselves simply shifters, eat animal flesh. Dark shape-shifters eat human flesh. As far as I can see, here again the problem is mental rather than physiological – Bear told me that he couldn’t sense any difference in the influx of Power…

  At the time I didn’t happen to ask about the circumstances in which he had tried human flesh. There were rumours that he used to be a Dark One. And there were rumours that he had fought in a human army and had been a Russian partisan during World War Two, although it could have been another war. There were even rumours that our scientific section had spent a long time studying him, and you could expect them to carry out any kind of experiment…

  I’m not convinced that knowledge makes people happier: as a general rule, those who are unaware of the truth are far more carefree.

  So had Zabulon been right when he quoted that biblical truth to me: ‘With great knowledge comes great sorrow’?

  No, that way of thinking wasn’t right, either. Absolutely no truths are absolute.

  I smiled at my sophistical turn of thought, but then decided that it wasn’t sophistry after all, more of an aporia or, perhaps, a case of Eubulides’ ‘paradox of the liar’.

  I carried on for a while pondering the binary, ternary and quaternary logic that had been encouraged so vigorously by the cognac. Then I turned the film on again. The hero was killing a vampire. The vampire was screeching malignly, mouthing vague curses and stubbornly refusing to accept the inevitable.

  What am I thinking of? Who needs all this – the paradox of the liar and the ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides, whose intellectual games once reduced Greek sages to suicide? Who needs logic, anyway – apart from a handful of armchair scholars, who will reduce it to a well-chewed pap of logical schemas, which more practical scholars will take as the basis for programming languages and mathematical models, which will eventually allow even more practical programmers to write programs making it possible for entirely business-minded directors to film in convincing detail all this stupid shit that is shown in cinemas and broadcast on TV all around the world?

  ‘Having fun?’

  I turned my head. Looked at Arina. Nodded.

  ‘Yes, kind of. It’s really such incredible nonsense, all this fantasy.’

  The witch was looking enchanting again.

  ‘I laughed for a long time at The Blair Witch Project,’ Arina admitted. ‘But you know… for two days afterwards I slept with the light on.’

  ‘You did?’ I asked, astounded.

  ‘What are you so surprised at? When you live alone in the forest, in a little hut, and you watch horrors like that at night…’

  I just shook my head. I hadn’t seen that film, but maybe there really was something horrific about it.

  ‘I liked The Lord of the Rings, though,’ said Arina, continuing to share her impressions. ‘Nonsense, of course, but what a wonderful fairy tale!’

  I didn’t try to argue with that. In our duty office The Lord of the Rings was shown non-stop: it had become a kind of ritual, like the Russian cosmonauts watching The White Sun of the Desert, and the entire population of Russia tuning in to A Twist of Fate on New Year’s Eve. They didn’t really watch the film, it just played along in the background, but from time to time heated arguments would break out about what kind of spell you could use to set your adversary spinning like that and whirl him up to the top of a high tower… or whether it was really possible to create an amulet that would imitate the One Ring of Power – so that it would influence its wearer, and be almost impossible to destroy, and make it possible to enter the Twilight effortlessly. Strangely enough, the film had actually contributed something new to practical magic – after all, there’s always someone who’s simply too stubborn to believe that ‘it can’t be done’ and will come up with a way to do it.

  ‘I suppose everything seemed very strange when you woke up?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Arina snorted. ‘Well… television and computers – they’re just human toys. But the medicines really did surprise me, yes… They almost put witches completely out of business.’

  ‘They almost did?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes. Although it was even worse in the 1930s – there was so much the doctors didn’t know how to do, but hardly anyone believed in folk healers. The young people would just laugh in your face. Nowadays it’s not too bad, in fact it’s all right. The first person anyone goes running to is a psychic or a healer,’ Arina declared derisively. ‘The X-ray or the blood analysis comes after that. It all helps the young witches, they have someone to practise on and the money’s good. The charlatans have multiplied too, of course: put the crystal ball on the table, pull the curtains, and away they go, intoning in an otherworldly voice: “I, Eleonora, hereditary White Witch, healer and diviner, mistress of the Tarot, ancient Tibetan magic and sacred incantations, do hereby remove the diadem of singlehood, casting the spell of good fortune…” And the doleful music plays, and the little lamps glow in different colours. But if you look closely, it’s just that old slut, Tanya Petrova, forty-two years old but looks fifty-five, who suffers from angina pectoris, thrush and an ingrown toenail – she used to be a Young Communist activist at the railway-carriage repair shop, and now she’s gone in for being a witch…’

  Arina gave a very lifelike imitation of the charlatan and I smiled and said: ‘We leave people like that alone. They distract attention from the Others.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know,’ Arina sighed. ‘I leave them alone, too… more or less. I might hex them with eczema on a tender spot… sometimes, if I get angry – just to teach them a lesson. And sometimes when I can’t take any more I feel like teaching them a serious lesson. But then I think
: just what am I doing? We could end up boiling in cauldrons next to each other in hell – me because I deserve it, and her for sheer stupidity and greed!’

  I scratched the tip of my nose. The conversation was getting interesting.

  ‘Do you seriously believe in hell?’

  ‘How can you believe in God and not believe in the devil?’ Arina asked. And the way she said it immediately made it clear that for her ‘God’ was written with a capital letter and ‘devil’ with a small one.

  ‘You believe in the cauldrons and griddles?’ I continued. ‘Forgive me if that’s a personal question…’

  ‘Not at all, what’s personal about it?’ Arina exclaimed in surprise. ‘I don’t believe in the cauldrons, of course, that’s a figure of speech…’

  ‘And the griddles?’ I asked, unable to resist.

  Arina smiled.

  ‘Those too. But the system has to have a feedback loop, there has to be a reward for a righteous life and a punishment for a sinful one.’

  ‘What system?’

  ‘The relationship between the Creator and his creatures. Humans and Others, that is. And while humans have a choice, unfortunately we don’t – we’re all guilty and doomed to the torments of hell.’

  This was getting more and more interesting.

  ‘Okay, so you believe in God, that’s your personal business,’ I said. ‘In actual fact, that’s not so very rare for an Other – but usually their view of God is more… er… humane.’

  ‘What has being humane got to do with God?’ Arina asked in surprise. ‘Humane attitudes are for human beings. That’s obvious even from the name.’

  ‘Okay, let’s accept that, but… You know, the usual idea is that God values people’s good deeds, their behaviour! You can be a magician, an Other, but still do good deeds…’