“Do you have any advice, Edmund?”
“Yes. Do not try to control by terror and persecution the things that are happening. Let your rule be unkind now, as it has been before, and it will open the way to destruction. Should you concede power gently, you might live for centuries yet, but if you strike out … your enemies will strike back.”
The vampire lady leaned back her head, looking at the ceiling. She contrived a small laugh.
“I cannot take advice such as that to the archduke,” she told him flatly.
“I thought not, my lady,” Edmund replied very calmly.
“You humans have your own immortality,” she complained. “Your faith promises it, and you all affirm it. Your faith tells you that you must not covet the immortality that is ours, and we do no more than agree with you when we guard it so jealously. You should look to your Christ for fortune, not to us. I think you know well enough that we could not convert the world if we wanted to. Our magic is such that it can be used only sparingly. Are you distressed because it has never been offered to you? Are you bitter? Are you becoming our enemy because you cannot become our kin?”
“You have nothing to fear from me, my lady,” he lied. Then he added, not quite sure whether it was a lie or not: “I loved you faithfully. I still do.”
She sat up straight then, and reached out a hand as though to stroke his cheek, though he was too far away for her to reach.
“That is what I told the archduke,” she said, “when he suggested to me that you might be a traitor. I promised him that I could test your loyalty more keenly in my chambers than his officers in theirs. I do not think you could delude me. Edmund. Do you?”
“No, my lady,” he replied.
“By morning,” she told him gently, “I will know whether or not you are a traitor.”
“That you will,” he assured her. “That you will, my lady.”
* * *
He woke before her, his mouth dry and his forehead burning. He was not sweating—indeed, he was possessed by a feeling of desiccation, as though the moisture were being squeezed out of his organs. His head was aching, and the light of the morning sun that streamed through the unshuttered window hurt his eyes.
He pulled himself up to a half-sitting position, pushing the coverlet back from his bare chest.
So soon! he thought. He had not expected to be consumed so quickly, but he was surprised to find that his reaction was one of relief rather than fear or regret. He had difficulty collecting his thoughts, and was perversely glad to accept that he did not need to.
He looked down at the cuts that she had made on his breast with her little silver knife; they were raw and red, and made a strange contrast with the faded scars whose crisscross pattern still engraved the story of unforgotten passions. He touched the new wounds gently with his fingers, and winced at the fiery pain.
She woke up then, and saw him inspecting the marks.
“Have you missed the knife?” she asked sleepily. “Were you hungry for its touch?”
There was no need to lie now, and there was a delicious sense of freedom in that knowledge. There was a joy in being able to face her, at last, quite naked in his thoughts as well as his flesh.
“Yes, my lady,” he said with a slight croak in his voice. “I had missed the knife. Its touch … rekindled flames in my soul.”
She had closed her eyes again, to allow herself to wake slowly. She laughed. “It is pleasant, sometimes, to return to forsaken pastures. You can have no notion how a particular taste may stir memories. I am glad to have seen you again, in this way. I had grown quite used to you as the gray mechanician. But now.…”
He laughed, as lightly as she, but the laugh turned to a cough, and something in the sound alerted her to the fact that all was not as it should be. She opened her eyes and raised her head, turning toward him.
“Why, Edmund,” she said, “you’re as pale as death!”
She reached out to touch his cheek, and snatched her hand away again as she found it unexpectedly hot and dry. A blush of confusion spread across her own features. He took her hand and held it, looking steadily into her eyes.
“Edmund,” she said softly. “What have you done?”
“I can’t be sure,” he said, “and I will not live to find out, but I have tried to kill you, my lady.”
He was pleased by the way her mouth gaped in astonishment. He watched disbelief and anxiety mingle in her expression, as though fighting for control. She did not call out for help.
“This is nonsense,” she whispered.
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Perhaps it was also nonsense that we talked last evening. Nonsense about treason. Why did you ask me to make the microscope, my lady, when you knew that making me a party to such a secret was as good as signing my death warrant?”
“Oh Edmund,” she said with a sigh. “You could not think that it was my own idea? I tried to protect you, Edmund, from Girard’s fears and suspicions. It was because I was your protector that I was made to bear the message. What have you done, Edmund?”
He began to reply, but the words turned into a fit of coughing.
She sat upright, wrenching her hand away from his enfeebled grip, and looked down at him as he sank back upon the pillow.
“For the love of God!” she exclaimed, as fearfully as any true believer. “It is the plague—the plague out of Africa!”
He tried to confirm her suspicion, but could do so only with a nod of his head as he fought for breath.
“But they held the Freemartin by the Essex coast for a full fortnight’s quarantine,” she protested. “There was no trace of plague aboard.”
“The disease kills men,” said Edmund in a shallow whisper. “But animals can carry it, in their blood, without dying.”
“You cannot know this!”
Edmund managed a small laugh. “My lady,” he said, “I am a member of that Fraternity that interests itself in everything that might kill a vampire. The information came to me in good time for me to arrange delivery of the rats—though when I asked for them, I had not in mind the means of using them that I eventually employed. More recent events.…” Again he was forced to stop, unable to draw sufficient breath even to sustain the thin whisper.
The Lady Carmilla put her hand to her throat, swallowing as if she expected to feel evidence already of her infection.
“You would destroy me, Edmund?” she asked, as though she genuinely found it difficult to believe.
“I would destroy you all,” he told her. “I would bring disaster, turn the world upside down, to end your rule.… We cannot allow you to stamp out learning itself to preserve your empire forever. Order must be fought with chaos, and chaos is come, my lady.”
When she tried to rise from the bed, he reached out to restrain her, and though there was no power left in him, she allowed herself to be checked. The coverlet fell away from her, to expose her breasts as she sat upright.
“The boy will die for this, Master Cordery,” she said. “His mother, too.”
“They’re gone,” he told her. “Noell went from your table to the custody of the society that I serve. By now they’re beyond your reach. The archduke will never catch them.”
She stared at him, and now he could see the beginnings of hate and fear in her stare.
“You came here last night to bring me poisoned blood,” she said. “In the hope that this new disease might kill even me, you condemned yourself to death. What did you do, Edmund?”
He reached out again to touch her arm, and was pleased to see her flinch and draw away: that he had become dreadful.
“Only vampires live forever,” he told her hoarsely. “But anyone may drink blood, if they have the stomach for it. I took full measure from my two sick rats … and I pray to God that the seed of this fever is raging in my blood … and in my semen, too. You, too, have received full measure, my lady … and you are in God’s hands now like any common mortal. I cannot know for sure whether you will catch the plague, or wheth
er it will kill you, but I—an unbeliever—am not ashamed to pray. Perhaps you could pray, too, my lady, so that we may know how the Lord favors one unbeliever over another.”
She looked down at him, her face gradually losing the expressions that had tugged at her features, becoming masklike in its steadiness.
“You could have taken our side, Edmund. I trusted you, and I could have made the archduke trust you, too. You could have become a vampire. We could have shared the centuries, you and I.”
This was dissimulation, and they both knew it. He had been her lover, and had ceased to be, and had grown older for so many years that now she remembered him as much in his son as in himself. The promises were all too obviously hollow now, and she realized that she could not even taunt him with them.
From beside the bed she took up the small silver knife that she had used to let his blood. She held it now as if it were a dagger, not a delicate instrument to be used with care and love.
“I thought you still loved me,” she told him. “I really did.”
That, at least, he thought, might be true.
He actually put his head farther back, to expose his throat to the expected thrust. He wanted her to strike him—angrily, brutally, passionately. He had nothing more to say, and would not confirm or deny that he did still love her.
He admitted to himself now that his motives had been mixed, and that he really did not know whether it was loyalty to the Fraternity that had made him submit to this extraordinary experiment. It did not matter.
She cut his throat, and he watched her for a few long seconds while she stared at the blood gouting from the wound. When he saw her put stained fingers to her lips, knowing what she knew, he realized that after her own fashion, she still loved him.
STEVEN GOULD
Peaches for Mad Molly
In the story that follows, Steven Gould, a frequent contributor to Analog, takes the housing shortage to unprecedented extremes, and with uncommon skill gives us a fast-moving look at the consequences … and some of the very unexpected complications.
Recently married, Gould and his wife live in Bryan, Texas.
PEACHES FOR MAD MOLLY
Steven Gould
Sometime during the night the wind pulled a one-pointer off the west face of the building up around the 630th floor. I heard him screaming as he went by, very loud, like this was his last chance to voice an opinion, but it was all so sudden that he didn’t know what it was. Then he hit a microwave relay off 542 … hard, and the chance was gone. Chunks of him landed in Buffalo Bayou forty-five seconds later.
The alligators probably liked that.
I don’t know if his purchase failed or his rope broke or if the sucker just couldn’t tie a decent knot. He pissed me off though, because I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d checked all four of my belay points, the ropes, and the knots. Now if he’d fallen without expressing himself, maybe?
No, I would have heard the noise as he splattered through the rods of the antennae.
Stupid one-pointer.
The next morning I woke up a lot earlier than usual because someone was plucking one of my ropes, adagio, thrum, thrum, like the second movement of Ludwig’s seventh. It was Mad Molly.
“You awake, Bruce?” she asked.
I groaned. “I am now.” My name is not Bruce. Molly, for some reason, calls everyone Bruce. “Shto etta, Molly?”
She was crouched on a roughing point, one of the meter cubes sticking out of the tower face to induce the micro-turbulence boundary layer. She was dressed in a brightly flowered scarlet kimono, livid green bermuda shorts, a sweatshirt, and tabi socks. Her belay line, bright orange against the gray building, stretched from around the corner to Molly’s person where it vanished beneath her kimono, like a snake hiding its head.
“I got a batch to go to the Bruce, Bruce.”
I turned and looked down. There was a damp wind in my face. Some low clouds had come in overnight, hiding the ground, but the tower’s shadow stretched a long ways across the fluffy stuff below. “Jeeze, Molly. You know the Bruce won’t be on shift for another hour.” Damn, she had me doing it! “Oh, hell. I’ll be over after I get dressed.”
She blinked twice. Her eyes were black chips of stone in a face so seamed and browned by the sun that it was hard to tell her age. “Okay, Bruce,” she said, then stood abruptly and flung herself off the cube. She dropped maybe five meters before her rope tightened her fall into an arc that swung her down and around the corner.
I let out my breath. She’s not called Mad Molly for nothing.
I dressed, drank the water out of my catch basin, urinated on the clouds (seems only fair) and rolled up my bag.
Between the direct sunlight and the stuff bouncing off the clouds below the south face was blinding. I put my shades on at the corner.
Molly’s nest, like a mud dauber’s, hung from an industrial exhaust vent off the 611th floor. It was woven, sewed, tucked, patched, welded, snapped, zipped, and tied into creation. It looked like a wasp’s nest on a piece of chrome. It did not blend in.
Her pigeon coop, about two floors lower down, blended in even less. It was made of paper, sheet plastic, wire, and it was speckled with pigeon droppings. It was where it was because only a fool lives directly under under defecating birds, and Molly, while mad, was not stupid.
Molly was crouched in the doorway of her nest balanced on her feet like one of her pigeons. She was staring out at nothing and muttering angrily to herself.
“What’s wrong, Molly? Didn’t you sleep okay?”
She glared at me. “That damn Bruce got another three of my birds yesterday.”
I hooked my bag onto a beaner and hung it under her house. “What Bruce, Molly? That red tailed hawk?”
“Yeah, that Bruce. Then the other Bruce pops off last night and wakes me up so I can’t get back to sleep because I’m listening for that damn hawk.” She backed into her nest to let me in.
“Hawks don’t hunt at night, Molly.”
She flapped her arms. “So? Like maybe the vicious, son-of-a-bitchin’ Bruce gets into the coop? He could kill half my birds in one night!” She started coiling one of her ropes, pulling the line with short, angry jerks. “I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore, Bruce. It’s hot in the summer. It’s freezing in the winter. The Babs are always hassling me instead of the Howlers, the Howlers keep hassling me for free birds or they’ll cut me loose one night. I can’t cook on cloudy days unless I want to pay an arm and a leg for fuel. I can’t get fresh fruit or vegetables. That crazy social worker who’s afraid of heights comes by and asks if he can help me. I say ‘Yeah, get me some fresh fruit.’ He brings me applications for readmittance! God, I’d kill for a fresh peach! I’d be better off back in the home!”
I shrugged. “Maybe you would, Molly. After all, you’re getting on in years.”
“Fat lot you know, Bruce! You crazy or something? Trade this view for six walls? Breathe that stale stuff they got in there? Give up my birds? Give up my freedom? Shit, Bruce, who the hell’s side are you on anyway?”
I laughed. “Yours, Molly.”
She started wrapping the pigeons and swearing under her breath.
I looked at Molly’s clippings, bits of faded newsprint stuck to the wall of the tower itself. By the light coming through some of the plastic sheeting in the roof, I saw a picture of Molly on Mt. McKinley dated twenty years before. An article about her second attempt on Everest. Stories about her climbing buildings in New York, Chicago, and L.A. I looked closer at one that talked about her climbing the south face of El Capitan on her fourteenth birthday. It had the date.
I looked twice and tried to remember what day of the month it was. I had to count backwards in my head to be sure.
Tomorrow was Mad Molly’s birthday.
* * *
The Bruce in question was Murry Zapata, outdoor rec guard of the south balcony on the 480th floor. This meant I had to take the birds down 131 stories, or a little over half a kilometer. And
then climb back.
Even on the face of Le Bab tower, with a roughing cube or vent or external rail every meter or so, this is a serious climb. Molly’s pigeons alone were not worth the trip, so I dropped five floors and went to see Lenny.
It’s a real pain to climb around Lenny’s because nearly every horizontal surface has a plant box or pot on it. So I rappeled down even with him and shouted over to where he was fiddling with a clump of fennel.
“Hey, Lenny. I’m making a run. You got anything for Murry?”
He straightened up. “Yeah, wait a sec.” He was wearing shorts and his climbing harness and nothing else. He was brown all over. If I did that sort of thing I’d be a melanoma farm.
Lenny climbed down to his tent and disappeared inside. I worked my way over there, avoiding the plants. I smelled dirt, a rare smell up here. It was an odor rich and textured. It kicked in memories of freshly plowed fields or newly dug graves. When I got to Lenny’s tent, he came out with a bag.
“What’cha got,” I asked.
He shrugged. “Garlic, cumin, and anise. The weights are marked on the outside. Murry should have no trouble moving it. The Chicanos can’t get enough of the garlic. Tell Murry that I’ll have some of those tiny muy caliente chilis for him next week.”
“Got it.”
“By the way, Fran said yesterday to tell you she has some daisies ready to go down.”
“Check. You ever grow any fruit, Lenny?”
“On these little ledges? I thought about getting a dwarf orange once but decided against it. I grow dew berries but none of them are ripe right now. No way I could grow trees. Last year I grew some cantaloupe but that’s too much trouble. You need a bigger bed than I like.”
“Oh, well. It was a thought.” I added his bag to the pigeons in my pack. “I’ll probably be late getting back.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Better you than me, though. Last time I went, the Howlers stole all my tomatoes. Watch out down below. The Howlers are claiming the entire circumference from 520 to 530.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 14