Vampires of Avonmouth

by Tim Kindberg

  “And she has the extra beads which are apparently necessary for those preparations. It is no matter. I, Pempamsie, will take the bone circuit. Let Obayifa try to wrest it from me. I shall take it to Super Mare while I am stronger than she is. There is at least a hope that whoever I need to find there can work the bones without these beads. Or knows another way to help me altogether.”

  David felt panic at the mention of her leaving. He needed to explain that there was no Super Mare to go to.

  “Wait. I can’t let you go. Not that you even know where you are going.”

  “Why ever not? I’ll find Super Mare somehow. Do you think Pempamsie has needed help before? Pempamsie would be Pempamsie again, pure. I would be unnonned. I would have my clarity back. I will take the consequences. As long as I keep the bones from her, I know that the vampire cannot have her way with me.”

  “Please, stop and think about what you’re proposing,” David said. “You’re going to a place called Super Mare because you believe that someone there can relieve you of your vodu. Even if you’re right, do you think you’ll be able to walk away, intact? You’ll no longer be nonned to IANI. Obayifa would be able to steal your mind. You’ll be prey to Swirling Suit and IANI. What chance do you have?”

  “My inhabitant is dissolving me as we speak. I’d rather be me again; I’ll take my chances. I can look after myself. What kinds of things do you imagine I have done, to want to be nonned through such extremes in the first place? And what about you, David: you need to be saved too. Perhaps you should come with me. We can find a solution together. Obi nka obi: bite not one another.”

  “I sense folly if not impossibility,” said Dirac. “Owo foro adobe: a snake climbing the palm.”

  Pempamsie clapped her hands slowly. “Bravo, Professor. How long have you spent alone in your labnode, without even a robot for company, reading obscure texts on the adinkras of Westaf? And now you have the presence of five women – or should I say a handsome man? A lot of excitement. Calm yourself.”

  Dirac sneered. “The Westaf has a point. What’s good for her may be good for you, too. But a wild goose chase to Super Mare is hardly the best course of action. We should stay here with the circuitry and find a way to use it on you.”

  David decided to pass over their mutual hostility. His vodu was listening with heightened intensity, from a pool of darkness filling like blood. “My vodu’s different from hers. In a cage. Would it work?”

  “We can try,” Dirac said. “Always assuming we can get hold of those beads. Or find an alternative.”

  The vodu was grinning sickly, up against the bars. As though it were imagining its own liberation from the cage, without understanding that they meant to trap it. Could it be extracted into the bones despite its incarceration, or was it anchored into his mental nexus now, a part of him forever?

  If he were to be liberated from it, he could return to Westaf. To Yaa. He could get back everything he had lost, if Dirac could make these bones work for him. Equally he needed to help Pempamsie: could not stand by and watch her decline continue. But if she, and not he, became vodu-free, they would have to be separated; they could never see one another again.

  “I ask you to help make the bones work for both of us or not at all, Professor. Come with us to Super Mare,” he added with a knowing look, curious that the normally bluff professor had not dismissed the existence of the place after several mentions.

  “I couldn’t possibly. I’d rather go anywhere else than there.”

  “What is it? What do you know about Super Mare that causes such strong feelings?”

  “All flesh know of Super Mare.”

  “Except that we don’t, do we? We act as though we think we know. When none of us has ever been there. Who might this someone be that Pempamsie’s been told about?”

  Dirac laughed uncomfortably. “We have only the word of a youth in Accra city that any such person exists.”

  “There’s something the professor is not telling us,” said Pempamsie. “I know the words of Nsoroma, the child of the sky, to be true. The truth is offline. Does that sound quaint to you, Professor? Not sufficiently scientific? Is even your discovery, psychblood, truly understood, Professor? Yes, I know all about that, too.”

  “And I thought history ended decades ago,” scoffed Dirac. “David, don’t you think I’d have told you if I knew of a way to extract your vodu? Without harm, that is.”

  “She’s right. You do know something.” David stepped closer to him.

  “And I have realised my mistake,” said Pempamsie. “Nsoroma was correct in sending me first to Avonmouth city to find one who knows of vodus. That person is not you, David. It’s him.”

  Dirac paled, closed his eyes, as though composing what he could say, and opened them again; after storming over to the window, he stood silhouetted against the glare, his hands in his jacket pockets.

  “Professor, where is Super Mare and what exists there?” Pempamsie sounded a gentler tone.

  “Did Nsoroma say anything about the flesh you seek in Super Mare?” Dirac asked in return.

  “Only that he has removed his own beads.”

  “Only that,” Dirac repeated with sarcasm.

  “You didn’t tell me,” said David.

  “And you didn’t tell me that you doubted Super Mare existed,” said Pempamsie.

  “I didn’t want—”

  “It wasn’t your place.”

  Dirac remained looking out at the vista of sky and sea. “Labnode,” he said. “Go completely offline.”

  After a pause he went on. “There was a man I worked with, Higgs. I sought him out and told him about the compound that became known as psychblood when I first discovered it. He was the only person I thought would understand what I had done. This was in forty-eight, ten years after the Disruption, you understand. Multinats everywhere, and beads which the public had to accept as passes to services in Big Data, as they still called it then. But no mental content yet. I showed Higgs the compound I had uncovered as a potential cure for dementia. I did so in confidence. He went off with it and… To cut a long story short, he proved that it wasn’t viable as a cure after all.”

  “You sound bitter,” said David. “You can’t blame a scientist for doing his job.”

  “But he did something else. He was careless. He showed it to the wrong people, who immediately saw its use as an electro-psychotropic agent. They learned how to manufacture it in bulk. And, lo and behold, within a couple of years we had this mental content – sensa, as they call it nowadays – pumping through beads. The internet of minds. With my discovery, psychblood, at the heart of it.”

  “Which you gained no credit for. Are you saying Higgs did?” said David.

  “I’m surprised if you think I ever wanted a reward for subjugating the genpop, David. These people cared not for pursuing psychblood’s potential curative properties. We needed to develop it, perform more tests, but they banned all uses in favour of telepathic transmission. To his credit, Higgs was appalled too. I was demoted to obscurity and he… he eventually disappeared.”

  “I’m guessing to Super Mare, and that he is the man I seek,” said Pempamsie.

  “Quite possibly. I happen to know that he removed his beads.”

  “By cutting off his arm? Otherwise, how is this possible?” said Pempamsie.

  “No, only his beads. He let it be known to me through a grapevine of sorts. He always was ingenious. To take off his beads without psychic damage was a considerable feat. There are no other known cases. Perhaps you can confirm that as a former agent of IANI?”

  “We knew of no cases,” said Pempamsie. “Including him. I recognise the name, Higgs. IANI considered him dead.”

  “There you are. Ingenious. I wonder how your Nsoroma knew of him. Higgs must trust him. But Westaf – or their renegades, as you would have it – have got to Nsoroma, haven’t they? This Swirling Suit that David mentioned. Or they wouldn’t know you were here. So they might know about Super Mare, too.”
r />   “Perhaps,” said David, “you could tell us about Super Mare?”

  “Create a meme among the genpop about a place that, as far as they know, does not exist but stands as a symbol. An El Dorado, if you will, but one so laden with irony that almost no one would even think of travelling there. Position it precisely in the collective conscious at a point in cognitive space that evades all significance according to the algorithms of Big Mind. As far as IANI and the multinats are aware, it does not exist. You might say that it goes over the head of Big Mind and thus all of the agencies hooked up to it. It does not appear on maps – who would expect it to? As far as 99.9% of the genpop are concerned, too, it does not exist except as a meme. Only it does, just along the coast from here. It’s where Higgs resides, as far as I know. He is plotting the downfall of the system there. Ready to manipulate Super Mare’s symbolism with the genpop when the time is right. To turn it into a rallying point.”

  “Effectively, he’s nonned the place,” said David.

  “You could say that. Like Pempamsie, who exists once you have come across her physical actuality but otherwise does not exist at all except as a chimera in virtual space.”

  “And you have not joined him there? You could have had your beads removed too,” said Pempamsie.

  “I admire him, but I cannot stand the man after what he did.”

  “We need to go to Super Mare,” said David. “With or without you. If you’re not coming, tell us how to get there.”

  “I will tell you,” said Dirac.” But you must realise that once you leave here with that case, I can no longer tunnel its emanations to a false location. Obayifa will be able to follow you. I’ve been sending the emanations all over Avonmouth city. After your little legerdemain with the fake case she definitely knows of our diversionary capability – but I don’t imagine that a creature like that will give up.”

  “I first need to find protection for these women,” said David, “and for us. Plus I need to pick something up. We’ll be back. I hope by the time we return for the case you’ll have changed your mind. We won’t be long.”

  There was a stirring within David which he dimly recognised as hope; straight away he counselled himself not to allow it to grow too far.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Supervirtual

  They left the labnode: David, Pempamsie, the four Royal girls and Breakage. The air, clammy under the corrugated sky, carried the sounds of waves breaking languorously, the pungent smell of seaweed.

  Their launch was tied up on the beach. Breakage, who could not travel by water in his current bod, departed inland, just as he had arrived. They briefly watched the factory worker set off towards the nodes that filled the down-below and the near-above in the middle distance, a scaffold in which flesh toiled and took their breaks, like tiny construction workers in old black-and-white photographs.

  The four women still seemed barely aware of what was happening to them. “I’m going to have to find a safe node for you,” said David. “And as for you and me, Pempamsie, we need a dog.”

  “Because?” Pempamsie obviously did not like the idea.

  “Vampires are supposed to be scared of them, and I have a hunch that Obayifa will be too, even if her appetite is psychic rather than sanguivorous. Also, a dog could sniff her out from afar. We still have some of her clothes from the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy for a scent.”

  “I don’t like dogs. The hounds running around Accra city were a nuisance.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “They shit and need walking. Are there even any here? I’ve seen none.”

  “There’s a pound I know. You can choose the one you want. One you feel comfortable with.”

  They sailed the launch back into the docks of Avonmouth.city under cover of an arriving ship and hid it there. David led them to a desres within a large block where they left Lana and the other Royal girls. It cost him a pretty penny. He bade them to remain until he could get word to them. The bodai guard stationed outside their door was more for their sense of protection than the reality of it: he had seen how Obayifa had been able to override Breakage. But there was nothing else for it. At least they were hidden for now.

  The pound lay inland in an obscure corner of the down-below. As they journeyed towards it through the near-above in an N-car, they passed an enormous disused grain silo from the twentieth century, which stood like an indestructible relic, its brutal flanks of blackened concrete rising to a castellated section at one end.

  “What is that?” Pempamsie asked.

  “It’s empty.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “It was Spillers’ grain silo. They built around it.”

  “Look at the density of nodes all around it. It’s in the way. Why not demolish it?”

  “No one knows for sure, except that some multinat obviously wants it preserved. It’s been there since the 1930s. I’ve been on a case there: inside is the most emptiness you’ll find in Avonmouth city.”

  “Not quite empty.” Pempamsie pointed.

  There was a figure looking out from a tall, smashed-through window high up.

  “My God,” said David. “It’s Obayifa.”

  “I can’t see her face from here. How can you be sure?”

  “I’m sure. It’s where she would go: a kind of castle. Why would any ordinary flesh be looking out from on high like that? It’s not a doll; it would have climbed to the very top.”

  “You think she can see from that far up? Like an eagle? I know you say she has mentalmagic, but how could she transcend the eyesight of her host – who presumably was mere flesh like us?”

  The N-car slowed. The figure repeatedly came in and out of view as the carriage passed nodes between them and the silo. When the N-car stopped, they saw that the figure was climbing down the outside of the building, descending its sheer, dirty concrete walls.

  “What were you saying?” David shifted in his seat. “That a vodu cannot transcend the physical limitations of its host? She may have spotted us.”

  The N-car seemed to take an eternity to leave the station. They were two stops from the dog pound. David reached for Pempamsie’s hand.

  She looked down at his veined hand on hers. “Is that for your benefit or mine?” she said. “You’re scared of her, even though you’re immune.”

  They walked down the car away from the windows. David’s heart raced for the remainder of the journey. They dismounted and walked quickly on a raised pavement, taking a lift down to ground level. No one else was around. The sky pressed on them as they walked, and heat emanated upwards from the pavement. There were weeds in the cracks, an unusual sight which told of the semi-abandonment of the quarter. David looked around and behind them as they made for the pound. It wasn’t far, but the seconds dragged. If they could only reach the dogs, they would be safe. Or so he hoped.

  A module appeared and followed them, slowing as it drew near. They kept walking. The small craft came alongside. It moved on as the gate of the pound opened automatically. The gate shut behind them.

  A mostly forgotten relic of the time before bodais, the pound had a forlorn air. The animals sat obediently in their cages. David had half expected them to bark at flesh visitors, but they greeted them with equanimity. Bodai handlers walked two of the dogs around the compound.

  “To think that they used to be called man’s best friend,” said David. “Now look at them: a subdued, joyless existence with no flesh in sight.”

  They drew closer to the cages.

  “Would you like to pick one?” said David.

  Pempamsie shrugged. “Pempamsie does not know of these animals.”

  “She may be waiting for us out there. I think you’ll be glad of a dog with you.”

  “You know that she won’t just take its mind?”

  “No. Do dogs have minds?”

  “That one” – she pointed at a dog staring at David – “seems to be conscious of you. I don’t know what to do with a dog. And won’t having
one simply call attention to us? How many other flesh are walking around Avonmouth city with a dog?”

  “Listen,” said David. “I’ll take it. Maybe you’d be better off on your own?”

  “No. We’ll take a dog.”

  They moved along the row of cages. The German Shepherds variously came up to smell and greet them or sat on their haunches and watched the visitors approach.

  “They’re all the same,” said Pempamsie. “How and why would you tell them apart?”

  “What about this one?”

  The dog’s coat was brindled. It lay with its head erect, tongue lolling in the heat, and looked at the arrivals with cool curiosity.

  David beckoned to a bodai. The dog emerged obediently by its side. David gestured to Pempamsie to take the lead but she shook her head. She and the dog eyed one another warily.

  “He doesn’t know what’s inside us, does he,” she said. “It’s me he’s not sure about: not my inhabitant. I hope he has a keener sense of the threat Obayifa presents to us.”

  “What’s his name?” David asked the bodai, who began to read out the string of digits from the dog’s electronic tag.

  “We’ll call him Coleridge. The poet walked these parts of UK land. Maybe he’ll give us luck in reaching Super Mare.”

  Coleridge sniffed at Pempamsie’s leg. She stepped back.

  “Will it bite?”

  “Not you. Are you sure you don’t want to take his lead? Get to know him?”