by Unknown
Then she’s herself again, the older wiser Anka he warned her of and promised, in the time before he left her. She straightens and stares up into his face. The face of Taras.
He is real, sentient. He is older. Now his hair is iced silver, his face everywhere finely lined. He looks … like a beautiful, hale, thin, indomitable man, perhaps sixty-five, sixty-seven. His teeth, what else, are flawless. His black eyes clear as space itself inside a lens. And he has not let her go.
He says, “We’ll drink geneva. Then.”
“Then,” she answers. “Then.”
Their entity formed, body to body, mouth to mouth, there could be, and was, no margin or necessity for any explanation or debate, no other element but this love, this truth, vaster than a world, more infinite than time. Life after death.
I cry my heart out, as I was aware I should. They leave me to myself, my Blood-Donors. My work is in-date, the program on target. They’ve learnt, after a few hours I’ll be back to normal. This has happened before.
I loved him so much, Taras. I’ll always love him like that. A dead coal in my guts that flares up like an igniting sun, just as Simlon will, in seven more months.
No one can be blamed for their dreams. Particularly not us, the Vampire kind. Out here, in perpetual darkness where we never need to sleep … our dreams take on a specialized waking form. We hear them approach, like footsteps, but can’t hold them off. Conveyed by an awake consciousness, they have a potency, a realness as vital — more — than reality itself. Our dreams come true. While they last. And when they’re done, what’s left — is cobwebs. Dust.
Tonight we were lovers again, Taras and Anka. And I was alive as never otherwise I shall be, even if my body lasts forever.
This dream visits me quite often. I dread it. I welcome it. I pray to God it will come back.
But now, on and on, I shed my tears.
In Endless Night, the ghost of lost love shines so brightly it fades the stars. Such fire — is beyond the sun.
* * * * *
Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in North London, England. She didn’t learn to read until nearly 8, and started writing at 9. After schooling, she worked at a variety of jobs (badly), until DAW Books of America liberated her into full time professional writing by publishing her novel, The BirthGrave. Since then she has written almost 100 books, and almost 300 short stories. She has also written for TV and radio, and certain of her stories are still regularly broadcast. At present she is working on a new Paradys collection. She lives on the South East Coast with her husband, writer/artist/photographer John Kaiine, and The Cats.
The Slowing of the World
By Sandra Kasturi
The earth is cooling.
I know this because Aurore has told me, yet again, that it is happening. Even the climatologists are beginning to notice now, and there has been some mild talk, but not in any seriously scientific way. And soon it will be too late to do anything about it. Most people are still going on about global warming. Which, incidentally, Aurore tells me isn’t really going to be relevant any more. Not for a long time.
I’m new to the vampire game — I’ve been “Turned” (they use this term with amusement, having cribbed it from films), but the changes are slow ones. My blood is still mostly my own and my genitals haven’t entirely retreated and changed. When I think of the hunger I used to feel for Aurore, it seems distant. Pleasant, but far away, like a rewritten childhood memory, or some mild opiate-induced haze.
I notice the deepening chill for the first time in many springs. It takes longer than usual for the ice to retreat from the lake’s shore, snow stays on the foothills permanently, and the returning swallows don’t make it back until July. But these are small things. Maybe the scientists are worried, but if they are, they’re not telling anyone. And the vampires think in terms of millennia, epochs and eons. They’ve been a perpetual whisper on the crust of this planet since before the dinosaurs. Evolution, adaptation — it’s rote now, so easy, it’s a parlour trick.
Most of the Elders have retreated into the mountains, laid themselves ready for the Long Night. It started back in the 2060s, when things had gotten too hot, and there were too many of us. Too many of them, rather. Too many humans. I’m not one of them anymore, but the Change comes like a glacier, so sometimes I forget.
The humans were just making things hotter, and the birth rate was climbing even further. The Elders decided it was time to cool things down, cull the herd. They — we — need humans to live, but if there are too many — too many cars, too many hamburgers — it becomes dangerous for everyone, predators and prey. Too many shoes and Q-tips and Tupperware containers, too many vacationers in the Caribbean, too many paper clips and rock songs and lap dogs, and everything falls apart.
They’ve done it before, with the dinosaurs who were getting uppity, vicious and overly smart. With previous civilizations. They’ve done it with water, fire, with stars falling from the sky. But the ice is their favorite. Ice works best. It’s quiet, slow and soothing. It takes time, and they, we, like things that take time. We are more patient than trees, than dust.
The Long Night will start in the mountains. As the Elders’ bodies cool, the glaciers will make their slow way down, until humanity is contained in one small area. Our cities will be ironed to nothing, our pills and pornographies forgotten, our words and wisdom gone to smoke. Only then, when we —when they — are manageable again, will the ice retreat as the Elders wake.
I’ve asked Aurore: how long? The answer? As long as it takes. Which is no answer at all. But then, I am still young, filled with impatience. The fact that two sentences with Aurore take a year bothers me until I remember again that we will have nearly forever for conversation, the earth whizzing around the sun in an eyeblink.
Aurore and I will be the last. I am almost completely Turned now, my body smooth, but for a fine layer of something like down, my genitals retracted within my body cavity. To the vampires, “male” and “female” have no meaning. They — we — are both. And neither.
Aurore tells me of a time, centuries ago, as the humans reckon it, when the vampires tried to breed with humans, mix their DNA, raise hybrids that weren’t dependent on blood supply. It never worked well. And so the vampire fables started — half-breeds crazed with desire or bloodlust, Vlad the Impaler, Wendigo, mutants and myths. The vampires put a stop to it and went another route.
“We cultivated humans, raised them like … not cattle. Pets? Beloved intelligent pets,” says Aurore. This conversation takes nearly a decade, but I don’t notice the time passing like I used to.
I’ve changed. My body and Aurore’s have Slowed too. The blood we need is minimal. Once we’ve made sure the Elders and the rest of our population are suspended and safe, then we, too, will retire into the Long Night. The entrances to our cave system are well hidden by the brambles and spiny trees they encouraged everyone to grow before the world cooled; the encroaching ice is an added protection.
In the stories, I don’t think the bad fairy stayed with Sleeping Beauty in the castle, but maybe that’s how the story should really have gone: the two of them together, cooling bodies entwined, dreams meshing in warp and weft, and the spinning wheel turning endlessly, a metaphorical perpetual motion machine.
“If we — I mean they, the humans — were beloved, why didn’t it work out?” I ask Aurore.
Another year goes by. “I don’t know,” comes the answer, finally. “You bred too fast. Your blood thinned. You were too violent. All or none of the above. It grew harder for us to feed from you, and the world was growing too warm.”
“And it had happened before,” I say, after another year passes, our talks taking on the steady rhythm of stars wheeling in the sky.
The world is asleep, under ice. The noise of the humans and the remaining animals, a distant chatter.
“How will we know to wake?” I ask.
Meteors fall, humans breed, it grows colder before Aurore answers me. “When the blood we have st
ored runs out, we will wake. It will be quieter. We can begin again.”
“How many times have you done this?”
The pause is longer. A century goes by. Aurore is nearing the Long Night. “Many,” is the answer. “Many times.”
And then — nothing.
It’s just me left. I’m on the path to the final Slowing.
To awaken in a century or seven or a thousand and seven. When the thrum of the blood supply is done. The hunger will be the kiss that wakens us, and our bodies will warm, and the ice will retreat. And the humans will scurry and breed.
Perhaps this time we’ll play at being gods once more, demand blood sacrifice. Or maybe we’ll go the Fairyland route, whisking humans away to Tir-na-nog, Under-the-hill, Brigadoon. Or we’ll try interbreeding again. We have better data now, better knowledge.
I lie down in the sleeping pod next to Aurore. My body Slows further. The machinery whirs gently, and the blood — just enough to keep me alive, suspended — begins its slow journey through my system. I begin the final wind-down, the unspringing of the body’s clock.
When we waken, the world will be cleansed of its fever; the cool palm of ice laid on the brow of the earth will give us all a new beginning, an immaculate story.
* * * * *
Sandra Kasturi is a writer, editor, publisher and book reviewer living in Ontario. She is co-publisher of ChiZine Publications and poetry editor at ChiZine.com. Sandra’s work has appeared in various places, including Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, TransVersions, On Spec, Taddle Creek, Shadows & Tall Trees, Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, Chilling Tales and several books in the Tesseracts series. She managed to snag an introduction from Neil Gaiman for her first full-length poetry collection, The Animal Bridegroom (Tightrope Books). She won the ARC Poem of the Year award in 2005 and the Whittaker Prize for poetry in 2010.
EVOLVE TWO
Vampire Stories of the Future Undead
Copyright © 2011
All individual contributions copyright
by their respective authors.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada
Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick
Cover Illustration by John Kaiine
Evolve logo by Ryanne Hamilton
e Book ISBN: 978-1-894817-93-6
* * * * *
All rights reserved. Under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
* * * * *
EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
(J-20110726)
www.edgewebsite.com
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Notice
Acknowledgements
1-Introduction
2-Pre-Apocalypse
3-The List
4-Nosangreal
5-A Puddle of Blood
6-V-Link
7-Six Underground
8-Outwitted
9-Toothless
10-Symbiosis
11-Post-Apocalypse
12-Forest-Bathing
13-The Deal
14-Homo Sanguinus
15-Out With The Old
16-Chelsea Mourning
17-Blood that Burns So Bright
18-Survival of the Fittest
19-The Faith of Burning Glass
20-New World Order
21-Soulglobe
22-Red Planet
23-Beacons Among the Stars
24-The Big Empty
25-Beyond the Sun
26-The Slowing of the World
Details