by Unknown
He was called Taras. No second name was to be used.
There was one window, a fake with softly grey-lighted glass. In this austere if silvery glow she took in his black hair and lens-dark eyes. He had wonderful musician’s hands, and a slightly crooked nose.
“It was kind of you to visit,” he said. “Anka — do I have your name correctly?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounded thin to her own ears.
“Please sit down, the red chair’s quite comfortable. Or do you prefer the green chair? Some of my guests…” he hesitated.
She said, brazen with nerves, “They don’t like the red chair because it’s the color of blood.”
“It isn’t, nevertheless,” he flatly answered. “Have you ever seen blood? I mean looked at it? There’s no color on earth quite like it, Anka. But please, I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Would you like a drink?”
“Water,” she said.
“Water.” He lowered his eyes and smiled slightly. “You all want water.” He added with a strange and unsuitable urbanity, “As if you can wash your insides clean of what I’ll do. As if it will stain. It won’t, Anka. I swear it.”
Anka sat in the red chair. She crossed her legs so the short skirt — short was the fashion that summer — rode up. He glanced, no more. “I’ll have a geneva then, thank you.”
Then he laughed. This was a fantastic laugh, like that of a very young man. But he was, she had been told, about 190 years of age. He looked barely forty. Lean and strong, elegant. Yet … old too, in there behind the polarized dark of his eyes.
It was part of her Citizen Service, to be here. Others took up assistant teaching or nursing, or police work, or training-and-enactment in the Military Corps. But those options all entailed one full year stint. While to do this, help maintain the Vampire population — who were turning out to be so useful — was only a matter of three months with, if properly performed, a guaranteed financial increment.
Anka had not been afraid. She had believed this work was straightforward. By then no Vampire would harm you, for if such a thing occurred, they were subject to the force of a computerized and infallible law, equally paramount and non-negotiable. Any trespass would result in what was known as Expungement.
Why then this terror that assailed her the moment she was shown the image of Taras on a screen? And why too had she not backed out? There were always three choices of client. Why was she here? She was just nineteen.
He brought her the geneva and she drank it in a gulp. He sat down again, facing her.
“Well,” she said briskly. “Let’s get on.”
He cleared his throat. “Anka, I don’t want you if you’re frightened.”
“Oh, aren’t any of your — visitors ever nervous?”
“Yes, but there’s a difference between uncertainty and terror.”
“I’m not terrified.”
“Thank you,” he said, rising, “for calling. Don’t worry, I’ll be tactful with the agency. Nothing to concern you.”
She too flung up from her chair. “No! I’m not going anywhere.” Her heart raced, she felt her face scald with passion — was it anger or panic? She heard herself cry in a wild pleading voice, “Don’t send me away—”
And then he laughed once more, a laugh quite unlike the first, soft and dark and very low. “My God,” said Taras, “you’re in love with me. I didn’t know I could still do that.”
“What?” But her mind was caught up on his use of the term ‘God’, now generally obsolete. Her mind could not get past the odd ‘God’ word. And so she began to feel what the rest of her was really saying. Anka wilted, now white as the electra-light inside the silver window.
And Taras came to her and took her in his arms and held her gently, inescapably, pressed the length of his body, and through the blackness of his shirt she felt the slow steady immortal thunder of his own almighty heart.
“My love,” he said into her hair, against her lips as he kissed them, “I don’t deserve such a beautiful gift, after so many years. My love,” he said. “My Anka.”
While he drank directly from her neck, she started only vaguely at the initial deflowering sting. She was already falling down and down through the illimitable haven of him, of Taras. As if through the star-streamed heaven of space. Never so lost, never so found. Safe in abandon. Like death. Better even than sex, (even the glorious sex they two would also partner in) this psychic orgasm of consensual surrender.
There’s a painting you can see in the Venezi-Gifford Gallery, New Kroy, or else reproduced here and there in various art books or dealers’ on-screen catalogues. It’s called Planting Out the Sheaves, and is a cute enough take on old Earth-west farming techniques, as applied to the ‘seeding’ of about-to-be-solar-system planets. (I hope that’s helpful, and not patronizing, to suggest it might assist you to get some idea of how I work out here, how it looks, vertically levitate-flying across the wide open plains and soaring mountain-sides, attended by my flock of clever machines. Some of the little robots and autohands are well-reproduced in this painting, particularly the tiny drivers that prepare the ground ahead and below. The male figure on the canvas, the painted Vampire overseer-farmer, of course, is romanticized to an ultimate degree. He looks like a cross between some gorgeous Earth Pre-Raphaelite saint — and one of their 21st Century super-heroes, and his golden hair flows behind him as he strides the midnight airlessness, mysteriously lit by chemo-mech moons.)
I travel usually about three meters above the surface. Sometimes I go up a bit higher, or dip down, more closely to inspect what the machines are doing. Occasionally I call them off one area, or send them to another they’ve missed. Robotics isn’t perfect, even now. Perhaps a good thing or would any of us have a job out here at all? Probably. There’s still enough human life in most of our genes to assess terrain and feasibility with — as they now call it — psycho-voyance. (Human intuition, I believe that means.)
Planet 3 is vast. The cliffs and mountains are colossal, evidence of thinned atmosphere even in the era of the first sun. Waterless seabeds, and the gigantic arteries of dead rivers, fissure its surface. The moons softly shine on all this; when they vanish to the planet’s far side, the stars render light. But I can see in total darkness.
Planet 2 (Corvyra’s Cuddles) is far less featured than 3 (Fatgirl). And Planet 1 (Champion) is mostly a defunct ocean. But oh, we’ll change all that. I’ve already seen to it there are myriad atoms and organisms peri-dormantly at work on Planet 1. Even Cuddles has a chance.
Inevitably, since building, I’ve checked the sun, too, during the months we’ve been here. An unlit solar-disc is no problem for my kind. And when that alters, Mirandusa, and all of us, Vampire, Bee-Dees, robot crew, Main Comp, will be standing way off. Down in her jet-black chamber, like a nice cozy tomb, Anka will only watch her viewer. And what will I see? A vacant lot, where suddenly a gargantuan explosion happens: it is impressively spectacular, aqua, emerald, scarlet. And then, behind the display, a tiny fiery yellow dot is burning through, the eye of Things To Come…
And that’s the new sun alight.
One question is often asked, despite the images freely available. Until ignition, what does a solarity — a constructed sun — look like?
Picture a huge spider’s web spun from black sapphire, with sapphire rods, lobes and weird antennae poking out of it. It hangs there, this exquisite mechanized chemecular skeleton, immobile, to all intents and purposes quiescent, purposeless. Till I press that magic button.
Maybe you see a psychological analogy… The seemingly moribund solar disc, the solarity Simlon 12. Inert — then galvanized awake, on fire, radiating and incinerous, alive. But no. That isn’t like Vampiric life.
Do you know what it’s like? Like memories that don’t fit anymore, that won’t lie still. Like old love that is dead and mummified to corundum, but which never can die because, after however many million centuries of forgetting, a moment’s recollected whisper or touch will raise it from the grave,
and bring it back to searing, quenchless flame.
We have a communal evening on the ship later. I say evening, since the time-pieces aboard mark solar planet time in the ‘human’ crew areas. Corvyra and Heth eat steaks and green apples from the store, and drink white champagne. I eat and drink my synth version of those items, all of which carry my essential nutrient, even in the alcohol.
After, we watch an old movie, I forget what it was. C and H pay little attention either, necking like a couple of kids. (I don’t mind this, why should I? I can have sex with Heth whenever I think I’ll enjoy it.) When they go off together to combine, machines neatly tidy the room.
Back in my cabin I update my work-journal and send it off to the receptors at New Kroy.
I sit looking out the port, watching the three planets infinitesimally turn, and the moons setting over their shoulders. My kind can see that sort of motion, just as we do the circling hands on an old clock.
And if there’s no sunrise to hide from, we never need sleep. Sleep is only our massive all-over shut-down in the face of an untenable foe — sunlight. So out here in Endless Night, we have a lot of extra time. Just what humans constantly say they crave.
But that much time needs to get filled.
That much time.
You think you’ll never have enough. But then, you do.
She had been his only constant ‘partner’ for a year, when they decided that he would ‘turn’ her. Anka had known for several months that this was what she wanted most.
Taras then spoke very seriously to her, with an intense and almost paternal manner he sometimes assumed — which, by then, made her insanely and amusedly happy. She knew she could change him back into a thirty-five-year-old boy in seconds, into a sort of pantherine demiurge even. But she listened very carefully.
“No,” Anka said. “I don’t want to become what you are, for any of those reasons — longevity, strength — the power of levitating — God knows—” (by then too she had caught his habit of profaning ‘God’) “—I’d probably get vertigo — no, don’t interrupt me, Taras. I heard you out. But I know these things, and you know I don’t give a fuck—” (also obsolete obscenity, but it had made him smile) “—I want to be what you are because of what I feel about you, for you — I want to live as you do. I want to — to—”
“To be me?” he asked her quietly. “The absolute in possession?”
“No, no. Surely you must understand?”
She was only twenty, and her eyes had filled with tears. Of course, it had been she who had instigated the conversation. He said to her, a decade afterward, that he could not have presumed. At the time he said, now, gravely, “You realize that I shall need other partners for blood? As indeed, sweetheart, will you.”
“Yes, naturally I know that too.”
“Will it offend you? Hurt you?”
“No,” she said firmly. “So long as we stay lovers. More importantly, so long as we still have this.”
At which he lowered his eyes, that nearly feminine response he sometimes gave her. “My kind, our kind if you join us, live a great while. Maybe not forever, but for centuries. And we do age a little, too. You’re twenty, Anka. Perhaps in 150 years you’ll appear to be thirty, thirty-five. But inside, my love, you’ll have the experience and the passions of a woman far older. Will you still want me? Don’t forget, I’ll grow older too, and in both those same ways.”
But at this she laughed. “Does that mean you agree, then? Yes?”
The City Corps was pleased as well. They generally let such liaisons as hers with Taras continue well over term, in the hopes of a human deciding to ‘turn’. Vampires, now collated as they had been for some twenty-seven years into the mortal Life-Way, were proving virtually hourly of more value, their practical scope and physical talents far exceeding those of the best of mankind. So, there was no difficulty, and indeed a legal civil ceremony took place, reminding Anka of an old-fashioned marriage, and followed by a party.
Nor was she afraid of what had come to be called D & R, (Death and Resurrection). She fell asleep inside the fortress circle of his arms, and woke into the dawn of dark without a solitary regret.
Tonight, that is ship’s-night, I alone look at Anka in the mirror.
I know her pretty well after all this time, that dark-eyed, youngish woman of 212. So why look? Because, it sometimes seems to me, on these long nights amid the Endless Night, that I have an actual look of him. Of Taras. I dyed my hair black once, to enhance this illusion. That was about seventeen years after we parted. But strangely — or logically perhaps — to me I seemed less like him, then. They say too, don’t they, people (even un-people?) who stay connected, come to resemble each other. Even people who don’t live together, as he and I never did. Yet are close, in some way together, a great while.
Down the corridors of the Mirandusa the other lovers are making their love. Different, we know, from the mere ecstatic delights of really good sex, the sort I get with Heth, and he with me. I’m fond of them, my Bee-Dees, it’s more than sustenance. We three have grown together too, I suppose, over the eight and a half years we’ve shared this peripatetic life. I remember once, one of the hull shields malfunctioned during a meteor storm. We worked with the machines, Corvyra, Heth and I, and got the thing patched up and saved our skins. And when it was all over the three of us ran together, thoughtless as water-drops on a pane, there in the control room, under the Main Comp’s big blue benign maternal eye, and held each other close. Only for a moment. But it marks out that hour for Corvyra and Heth, for me, too. We are our own type of family. I never had one before I knew them. And with Taras, evidently, with him— ‘God’ knows what unnamable entity we two formed. But those uncountable hours were marked indelibly. And it lasted. It lasted all of seventy-one years.
This cabin, mine, is the only room that ever sees me cry now. I’ll cry tonight.
Chasing the moons over the saucer-rim of a world, Planet 1, the Champion. The exhilaration of it — to fly — yes, fly, I’m flying — skimming the wide lake of black space with its shimmers and shallow skerries of rippling particles, gaseous flumes — down to the sunless seabed, with canyons deep as any philosopher’s abyss, and all of it now a fallow field that, with the coming of great Light, may — will — must blossom, bloom and grow. In a quadrennium, less, a fast-built home for humans, as they range forever outward through the stars.
But from here the stars aren’t suns. They’re friendly sprigs of neon hung in the night sky. And over there the big moon at full, and the smaller crescent that the planet’s shadow makes, even though the lunar fire is inside.
Where I’ve set down I stand, though my personally-engendered gravity already means I could run over the surface. I’ll be careful anyway, not to disturb the plantings.
Because I don’t breathe, there’s no waver to the vistas of space or landmass.
Despite the lack of breath, or air, a faint esoteric scent comes to me. The odor of an ancient past. The planet’s. My own.
I walk the world.
And through my mind my life spills, like a phantom of the planet’s ocean. My days, my years. And so I come again to Taras, and begin with and am with Taras, and at last, as it has to, the tide reaches its height, and brings to me that ultimate month we were together, when he told me we should part.
It wasn’t, he said, so tenderly and kindly, that he had ceased to love me, nor, he said, did he think I had yet grown tired of him. There was no other he wanted, or thought that I did. But this had been enough, he said. What, what did that mean — I cried to him. Enough? Enough? But he only repeated, in his wonderful dark voice, the same litany. We must leave each other and go our separate ways. We must do it before our union, our love — if I preferred that name — was stale. What we had had, still had, must never be spoiled by becoming less.
I raged and begged. I mocked him. He said no more. I didn’t believe he had not found another he liked better than me. Much farther on, knowing him as I had, I did believe, however
. There had been no replacement. Which made what happened worse. By the month’s finish I reckoned he had come around. I had arranged quite ordinarily to see him the next day, to which he seemed to agree. But when I went to his apartment, he was gone. It’s unachievable, to trace our kind, as you may be aware, if they legally refuse it. He did, it seems, so refuse. I never saw him, my Vampire lover, ever again. Except, you’ll guess, in my mind, the high tide of memory, by such and similar means.
If he lives still, or is dead, I don’t, I never shall, know.
And now—
Anka discovered the cave in the ravine wall almost inadvertently; her thoughts had been otherwise engaged. A warped black stalagmite pillar guarded the entrance.
Inside, lightglow arrested and astonished her.
With enormous care, she moved forward. The roof of the cave was quite high, and then the sides of it opened out. A sheer black chamber, bright at the centre with a chem-burner … reddish light.
There were other things in the cave, which plainly was being used as a sort of living room. A rock — a chair? (how had it been brought here?) on one side of the burner. A second chair waited back in the shadows. Moisture gleamed on the walls but the scent in the cave was wholesome and quite dry.
He stood behind the light. A tall silhouette.
Having no breath to catch, her ribs involuntarily convulse as she catches it. Vacuum, for a split second, sucks at Anka’s lungs. She begins to double over, though already her Vampire stamina has corrected the silly physical mistake. And then from dark through light to dark he springs toward her, grips her — inexorable, gentle — in a hold that paralyses with its knownness.
“How can you be here,” she mutters into the shoulder of his coat. “Have I gone mad?”
She can speak without breath. She has needed to.
“Oh, my love,” he says, in such a tired, sad, gladdened voice. “We — our kind — can go anywhere, do anything — didn’t I teach you that?”