Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  My eyes were still shut, but I experienced a weird kind of quasi-visual hallucination. I ‘saw’ Anne tilt back her head, opening her mouth as she did so, to take hold of my neck as though to bite it—but I knew she didn't really do any such thing, because I couldn't feel her lips or teeth at all when she lifted herself slightly to make contact. Instead, I felt as if the side of my throat were becoming numb, strange, molten. It felt as if something were being drawn out of me, ever so gently: perhaps blood, perhaps energy ... or perhaps something else, something unnameable, unimaginable.

  I gasped in surprise, because the sudden awareness that the horizons of my experience could still be stretched in that almost magical way seemed to be a very significant discovery.

  I felt dizzy, and then I felt tired, but the way the dizziness dissolved into tiredness was so very smooth and seemingly natural that I just went with it and didn't try to resist at all. I felt that I was falling, and I just let myself go, without any thought at all of what might happen when the fall was arrested. I think I would have fallen into a drugged sleep, if it hadn't been for Anne.

  All of a sudden, Anne screamed.

  It probably wasn't the virus which made her do it—I'm not certain that she'd already been infected at that point in time. I think it was probably me. She was probably relaxing, falling asleep herself, when I let my full weight down on her. I had always taken good care to support my weight on my elbows, but in the grip of that strange drunkenness I must have become a dead weight—and she must have suddenly become aware of me pressing down, seemingly threatening to crush and suffocate her. Maybe it recalled some secret fear of hers, or invoked one of those irrational phobias we all have.

  Anyhow, she overreacted.

  Her scream pulled me out of it, and I immediately caught myself up, pulled back from her. We came apart, and I tried to throw myself sideways, to set her free—but she caught me and tried to hold me. She was presumably ashamed of her overreaction, trying to take back the effect of her scream.

  'It's all right,’ she said. ‘I'm sorry—it's all right.'

  'Jesus,’ I said weakly, not yet quite able to get my thoughts together sufficiently to make light of it. ‘You scared the shit out of me. What the hell was it?'

  It was a stupid question, but I was still befuddled.

  'A dream,’ she said quickly. ‘Only a dream.'

  When she let me go, I carried on falling, overtaken by an overwhelming lethargy. There was nowhere to fall to, but even when I was flat on my back I seemed to be falling still. I didn't know what was happening, and couldn't seem to pull myself together.

  'It's okay,’ she said, while she was putting her clothes on. ‘It's fine. Don't get up. It's not late. I'll be all right.’ Her voice was forced, but it was more embarrassment than fear. She was ashamed of herself for having upset the mood of the moment, and now she wanted to run away. She was often like that, and I had never figured out a good way to handle it. She was so nervous, sometimes, that she had to be allowed to run and hide; any attempt to make her stay would simply make her shrivel up with anxiety. Even so, I told her that she could stay, that she didn't have to go. She muttered something about not having brought her things, and I knew it was useless to press the point.

  I was still falling. I felt as weak as a kitten. ‘I don't know what's the matter with me,’ I said, more truthfully than I knew.

  'Too much excitement,’ she said. ‘Go to sleep—get some rest.’ It was an embarrassment to her that I was still awake; she just wanted to get out. It was a pity, after we'd achieved so much earlier in the evening. I had to hope that we'd be able to pick up the pieces another time.

  I let myself down on the pillow. I must have fallen asleep before she left the flat.

  I woke up next morning knowing that I'd had a bad night, beset by delirious nightmares I couldn't quite remember. There must have been a few minutes in between sleep and wakefulness when the substance of those nightmares was still present to my awakening mind, but I lost my grip on them before I could collect myself and force myself to review them carefully and lucidly.

  By the time I was fully conscious I could only remember that there had been predatory vampires in the dream, and that I had become obsessed—as I so often used to do in disturbed dreams—with the absolute necessity of carrying out some inherently absurd and appalling action. The details were soon lost, overwhelmed by the knowledge that I had a headache and a sore throat. The mere fact of becoming aware of these things seemed to make them instantly worse, and I knew that I had a cold coming on.

  At first, when the thought that I might have picked up a virus at the lab came into my mind, I was inclined to dismiss it as the kind of anxious speculation which had to be scrupulously avoided by a person in my line of work—but then I began to remember what had happened before I went to sleep, and I began to wonder.

  'No,’ I said, in the end, speaking aloud for emphasis. ‘Don't be paranoid. This is the first test, and you have to stick to your guns. It's just some lousy British virus discovering American flesh for the first time.'

  I tried to take things slowly. I got up, made myself a cup of coffee, and took two aspirins for the headache. I got dressed and forced myself to eat some cereal and toast for breakfast, thinking that I'd be able to get a proper grip on myself once I was in a fit state to face the day. It didn't work. I felt awful. I kept telling myself, over and over, that I only felt awful because I had a cold, and that it was only the slight fever associated with the cold that was filling my head with other fears. I wasn't convinced, but I tried to put that down to the cold, too. I was in such a state of confusion that I didn't dare go out of the flat, let alone go into the lab.

  Eventually, I went back to bed. I switched the radio on and played with the dial until I found a station which hadn't been entirely taken over by moronic disc jockeys with verbal diarrhoea. I lay there, silently instructing myself to stop being silly, and to remember all my own good advice about it not mattering overmuch even if some chance-in-a-million slip in sterile technique did lead to my infecting myself, because the infection would only last a few days, and would be no more troublesome than any everyday cold virus.

  This advice—sound or not—would probably have been sufficient to calm my anxieties for a while, had they not been complicated by thoughts of Teresa. Because I was alone, with time weighing heavily on my hands, I couldn't help my fears extending themselves. I couldn't avoid saying to myself: ‘Suppose it wasn't a chance-in-a-million failure of my sterile technique; suppose the failure had already happened; suppose you caught it from Teresa.’ Nor could I help saying to myself: ‘That's only guilt talking; only your own inability to take what was offered as casually as it was offered; only ...'

  Ironically enough, I had also to wonder whether my very confusion, my inability to think straight, might be symptoms of a hypothetical psychotropic virus.

  Once any such possibility is entertained, of course, anything and everything can become relevant evidence. Even the fact that I wasn't yet prepared to jump to any conclusion might be regarded as a symptom, or at least as something symptom-affected.

  The opposite, I suppose, is also true and equally ironic. My eventual decision and firm conviction—my eventual absolute certainty that I had been infected, either by my own carelessness or by Teresa—might have owed more to the fact of the infection than to the incontrovertibility of rational argument. But none of that matters. The simple fact is that I was infected, and thereby doomed. From that very first moment, when I felt my flesh melt, impossibly, beneath the intangible pressure of Anne's hungry mouth, I was damned.

  The moment I began that uncanny fall, my eventual fate was sealed and certain, written in the book of destiny in my own bright blood.

  2

  Coming to England wasn't such a big deal for me. I think it meant more to my dad. It's not that I wasn't ambitious, but I'd have been content to stay with the system I knew if the prospects had looked better. CalTech didn't seem so bad to me, and most
people would consider it a better school than any in England, except maybe Oxford and Cambridge. But Dad always had this big thing about US insularity and the necessity of a cosmopolitan world-view—his words, of course. His own parents had come to the States as refugees, dispossessed of whatever heritage they'd had by the political chaos that followed the end of World War II. I don't know for sure what part of what country they came from, or even what language they spoke. Dad must have known a little of the old language when he was a kid, but his parents made a big thing out of speaking English at home, so that it would become his first language, and he dutifully forgot what he knew of the other, so that they could be proud of him. At a guess, where my grandparents came from was probably part of Yugoslavia when they left it, though it must have been some other country when they were born and it looks like being some other country again before much longer.

  The world is less stable than it seems. Borders come and go. Names change. And all the while, blood is shed by those who seek to preserve or change them.

  Dad's ideas of what Europe was like were all illusion, of course. Not that he hadn't been there, on business and as a tourist—it's just that he'd seen whatever he'd seen through the lenses of his illusions, and thus preserved them from any breakage. He really thought it was great when I got the chance to come here, even though England was only the home of his adopted language, not a place to which any of us could trace authentic roots.

  Even psychotropic biology was a compromise between us. Dad had tried his damnedest to push me in the direction of commercial biotechnology since I was fifteen and first showed aptitude in the relevant sciences. I had tried my damnedest to stay out of it, but not for any good reason. I just wanted to be my own person, not something shaped by my dad out of his own frustrated ambitions. The net result of his shoving and my sidestepping was that I ended up in the borderlands between biology and psychology, neither one thing nor the other.

  His grudging judgement, when we finally settled the matter in a slightly hot-tempered debate, was that my chosen field did seem to have potential, but that it was perilously close to the lunatic fringe. How right he was! How absolutely typical of him to be far more precise in his choice of words than he could possibly have imagined. But he really was trying to look out for me, trying to steer me right. He was no bully; he was just trying to lay the groundwork for a successful life. He always wanted me to be able to be proud of who and what I was. He wanted me to be a credit to the family name, and he wanted the family name to be a credit to me.

  He pulled strings, in the end, to get me what I finally decided I wanted. He got money from the Foundation so that I could become a spy for American science in a half-forgotten corner of the great big world of scientific research.

  He was pleased when I described what I was doing in my letters home. When I told him about the animals, he was reassured that it was real science—authentic hands-on stuff. He probably didn't know what chromatography and electrophoresis were, but when I sent him some colour slides I'd made of rabbit brain-tissue he was delighted. They didn't mean a damned thing in the context of my research but they were something he could shine on the wall instead of home movies. They were solid; they were real.

  Everybody warned me that England would be cold and grey and dismal, but it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. There was no snow on the ground, even in December, and no sub-zero temperatures. It wasn't warm, but if God hadn't meant us to be able to live in cold climates he'd never have given us synthetic fur and central heating. As for being grey—well, I guess if you averaged out the days they'd have a pretty cloudy mean, but there was a lot more standard deviation about the weather in England than there ever had been back home. It was too interesting to be dismal. It wasn't quaint, although I'd half expected it to be, but it was different. There was always something to look at that wasn't the way it would have been back home, always something to overhear that was funny.

  September was a good time to arrive, because it was the very end of summer; practically from the day I stepped off the plane the landscape began to slough its skin. The leaves started falling off the trees; the colours started changing. Every day, in every way, things were just a little bit different. The campus was a good place to see all that, because it was such a crazy patchwork. The university had just moved into this old park, colonising it bit by bit, but you could still see traces of earlier inhabitants, and patches of wilderness which didn't really belong. Some of the old buildings tended to the grotesque, but that didn't matter; that was just character. It was a great place to be, especially in the first couple of weeks, before the undergraduate term started, when the serious scholars didn't have to lose themselves in crowds of kids.

  If I wanted to be cruel, I could say that the most dismal thing about England turned out to be Professor Michael R. Viners, but that wouldn't be entirely fair. Maybe I was expecting too much of him, on the basis of the paper he'd given back home; like most people, he had a special conference persona quite distinct from the personality he wore when he was doing the day-by-day work. Conferences require performance and a bit of glitz, and you only have fifteen minutes at the podium to make your point. In the lab, you have to work the year round to produce the results that go into your fifteen-minute presentation, and you have to be patient, painstaking and methodical. You have to be dull, in fact.

  If I'd thought about it sensibly, I'd have realised that Viners in his home environment would be cooler and greyer than the English weather. It was a mistake to assume, or even hope, that the world's leading man in a sexy subject like psychotropic genetics would be a bit of a wild man—an unorthodox, anti-Establishment genius. I should have known that when we renewed our brief acquaintance I'd find him prim and distant and utterly uptight. Not that he disapproved of me—quite the opposite. Thanks to Dad's good friends at the Foundation, I was the academic equivalent of a World War II food parcel, come to lend a little milk and honey to a resource-starved project. I was a gift-wrapped donation from the wonderful world of private enterprise, of a kind that the British government had apparently instructed all university departments to seek out, but that very few of them seemed to be able to find. In his own scrupulously polite and ever-so-slightly downcast fashion he made me very welcome.

  'I can't promise you fame and fortune,’ he told me. ‘Nor can I promise you that the journals will be enthusiastic to publish the results of your research. Mere mention of the word “psychotropic” is enough to set all their alarm bells ringing, I'm afraid. I can't even guarantee you a safe and routine passage to your doctorate. All I can promise you is that you'll be involved in some genuine research, exploring uncharted territory.'

  'That's what I want,’ I assured him, sincerely enough.

  'I hope that you don't find it too boring,’ he went on. ‘The actual work isn't nearly as way out as it sounds.'

  'I know the score,’ I told him. ‘You have to get right down into the experimental gutter if you really want a clear sight of the theoretical stars.'

  'Precisely,’ he said, with a weak and watery grin.

  Later, when I tried to picture Viners playing sex games with Teresa in the mid-range CT room, it seemed too absurd to be possible. But absurdity and impossibility are two very different things. I had to wonder whether, if I had caught the virus from Teresa, he might have caught it too, in exactly the same undignified fashion. I even wondered whether it might have been the other way around—whether he might have infected her. Later, though, I found it very difficult even to begin to imagine Viners being driven by the hunger. If he'd ever suffered any symptoms at all, I decided, when things first began to look really bad, he couldn't have looked at me the way he did when I confessed my fears to him. He couldn't have. He was far too straight to carry off that kind of lie. That was Viners. Not dismal, exactly, but straight.

  Even without Anne, England would have been okay, but Anne added that special extra ingredient. Looking back, I suppose I have to be suspicious even of the attraction I felt for her, b
ut at the time it seemed to be perfectly innocent, uniquely pleasant and wholly good, and it probably was. It was something about which I never had a qualm of conscience, because it felt so natural. I never wanted to hurt her—not for a moment. I only wanted to do her good, and I was utterly sincere in that intention. I won't call it love, and I certainly won't call it love at first sight, but it was never an act with Anne, the way it always had been with other girls. I really did feel protective towards her, and gentle. It wasn't just a plan of campaign to persuade her to put out. I know she didn't see it that way—not at first—but that was only to be expected. If there was one thing I wanted more than anything else it was to persuade her that my feelings were authentic, that my intentions were honourable.

  That's why the insinuations of that slimy detective were so vilely insulting.

  Okay, I will say it. Why shouldn't I? I loved Anne. Not at first. At first I just thought she looked cute: frail and lonely and helpless and luminously pretty. But in time, as I tried harder to draw her closer to me, to break down the wall of her anxiety and restore her wounded self-esteem, I began to love her. I never told her so, but that was because it was true, not because it wasn't. I could have said it easily enough if it had been a lie, a move, a stratagem, but it's not so easy to say something like that when you have to weigh the meaning very carefully, when you want to be absolutely accurate. Whether I said it or not, it was true. I loved Anne. Not at the beginning, but certainly in the end—before everything blew up in my face.

  Our first meeting was an awkward one, pregnant with embarrassment on both sides. Our first conversation was almost monosyllabic—I think it took me nearly half an hour to wring a complete sentence out of her. I just couldn't find a way to get her involved, and I was so desperate that I made a couple of real foot-in-mouth blunders. I actually asked her whether she was anorexic, and had to watch her face set hard in response. Of course she was anorexic—it stuck out a mile—but the last thing I should have done was accuse her of it. It made it so much harder, later, to try to ease her out of it.