by Alicorn
Carlisle took all this in fairly calmly, although I'd gotten reasonably animated towards the end. "I take it you aren't a religious sort," he said.
I shrugged. "I can tell a nest of bad logic when I see one, religion or no. Charlie's Lutheran but doesn't go to church, and Renée's flavor of the week is Episcopalian, I think. I don't think I'm anything."
"Well, there's a lot of myth and legend that holds that vampires are damned in exchange for our immortality on earth," said Carlisle. "Bad logic or not, it's hardly an uncommon view, if you start from the premise that vampires exist."
"Is that what Edward thinks, then?"
"No, actually," he replied. "Edward doesn't believe there is any afterlife at all for our kind."
"But he thinks there is one for humans. Does he think there's a deity orchestrating everything?"
"He's never put forth an opinion on that for sure, one way or the other," Carlisle said. "You probably noticed that his is a vague sort of belief."
"A deity would make less sense. There's no reason to automatically obliterate vampires - involuntary ones, willing ones, nice ones, mean ones, ones that lived for ten years and ones that lived for a thousand, all indiscriminately - instead of providing an afterlife. You haven't all killed people, have you?" I asked.
"We have not all killed people," Carlisle agreed.
"So no deity sane enough that Edward or anybody else could guess at its reasoning would take vampires, as a group, off the guest list for the afterlife," I said. "If it does, then it's acting so arbitrarily that it might just as easily boot you for owning white socks. You can't base decisions on something like that, even if it were true."
"You seem very open to the possibility of religions having some things right, for someone who "isn't anything"," Carlisle observed.
"Not that long ago, I discovered that vampires exist," I pointed out. "It's making it seem more likely that something about how I evaluate supernatural claims is off, so I'm trying to be more careful. Anyway. A force of nature doesn't need to act for reasons," I continued. "So it could do something mean and pointless like not letting vampires have an afterlife if there were one available. But the problem with that hypothesis is that because you can't reason from motivesabout the impersonal laws of the universe, the only way to know what they do is to watch them doing it. I don't suppose Alice can see souls as they float off to their final destinations?" I guessed.
"She cannot," Carlisle confirmed.
"Edward can't read the minds of dead people? Jasper doesn't get mood readings off corpses? None of the Volturi or anybody have empirical data on what happens to vampires, or humans, once they pass on?"
Carlisle shook his head. He was a good audience - inserting facts where I needed them and otherwise letting me think aloud.
"Is there any observation that anyone has plausibly claimed to make ever indicating that an afterlife exists and that vampires don't get in?" I inquired, and Carlisle shook his head again.
"Then that leaves us with a few possibilities consistent with vampires losing the ability to go to an afterlife," I said. "There is a deity sorting souls which dislikes vampires, and it acts so inscrutably in so disliking that there's no way to follow its reasoning and be sure to get good results by acting in ways it likes. Or, there is a law of nature governing the afterlife which prohibits vampires from getting in, which nobody has any way of observing, and which we therefore have no reason to believe exists. Am I missing something?" I asked.
"Not as far as I can tell," Carlisle said.
"And neither of those situations leaves me with a good reason not to become a vampire," I concluded. "In either case, there's just no information. A deity, if one exists, either acts for consistent reasons that our minds can approximate, or it can't be tracked in such a way that there's potentially efficacious things we can do to try and please it. A naturally-arranged afterlife, if one exists, either admits vampires or doesn't - for that matter, it either admits humans or doesn't - and there is absolutely no way to tell. And furthermore, there's no reason to believe that an afterlife of any kind exists, given that there are no observations of it and the universe in general doesn't seem like someone sane is running it. And all of that means that the only criteria on which I should base my decision about becoming a vampire on are how my life - the part spent kicking about on Earth with my eyes open and my brain running - will be as a vampire or a human. And that seems to come firmly down on the side of vampire, with the whole immortal and superpowered thing. There are a couple of disadvantages, but none worth literally dying to avoid."
I heard Alice's voice from down the hall hollering, "Thank youuuuuuuu," in relieved tones. Apparently my future had snapped back into place.
"You've given this a lot of thought," said Carlisle.
"Most of it just now," I said. "It helps to have an audience - usually I write, and that does the job, but if I just think, I wind up revising things so they're pleasant instead of trying to make sure they're true."
"I'm glad I could help." He sounded very genuine when he said it - he was really pleased to have been able to serve as a sounding board and fact-checker for my thought process.
"Yeah, thank you," I said brightly. "Now I just have to figure out how to explain this to Edward so he doesn't avoid the topic like the plague or continue to complain about me wanting to be a vampire. Although I suppose he heard this entire conversation, unless he left the house and got out of thought range or is tuning you out."
Carlisle nodded. "I somehow doubt that he did leave," he said.
"I guess I'll go see. Thanks again," I said with a warm smile.
And I left the office and descended the stairs to see what Edward thought of the entire mess.
* * *
I tiptoed down three stairs, foolishly hoping to sneak up on Edward and get a clue of his reaction before he noticed my approach, and then I realized this was stupid - I couldn't possibly walk quietly enough that he wouldn't hear from any point in the house. So I clomped down the stairs normally, and when my view of the first floor came to include Edward, I found I needn't have bothered to tiptoe even if it would have hidden me. He wasn't making any effort to conceal his body language - it screamed tension. His hands were clenched in his hair and he was bent forward with his elbows planted on the table. I couldn't see his face, but guessed it was in some contortion of displeasure.
"Edward?" I murmured.
"Hello, Bella," he said, just loud enough for me to hear. I reached the bottom of the stairs and walked towards him. When I retook my chair, he murmured, "There's no convincing you, is there?"
"If I'm missing some facts, or I made a bad inference somewhere, please, tell me," I replied. "I realize there are drawbacks to being a vampire, but... unless you're missing something huge in your informational brochure... none of it looks worth dying to avoid. And that's what it would be to stay human. You know that."
"There's no need for it to be soon, though," he said. Apparently he'd either been convinced by my exchange with Carlisle, or considered me so entrenched in my existing reasoning that he'd given up attacking it. "You could wait. Finish high school, go to college."
"What's the advantage to doing that while human?" I asked. I could see disadvantages: if I waited too long to turn, I'd be stuck looking like a cougar forever once I wound up inevitably-vampire-married to Edward, who'd been turned when he was seventeen and would stay that way. Some cause of death Alice couldn't predict well in advance could get me - an indecisive murderer or something. I would have imperfect recall of the experiences I accumulated during those years (or even, depending on what had caused Alice's amnesia and how common it was, none at all). The Volturi could discover and get annoyed with my continued status as a human in-the-know, and force the issue at a time not of my choosing.
Surprisingly, Edward didn't deflect the question or answer with floaty vagueness. "Timing," he said. "You might be able to safely return to high school after only a summer to adjust - you might not. And "not" is the
sort of thing that we would find out for sure only if you actually killed someone, so pushing it wouldn't be wise. In particular, you'd need to avoid your family. Even after we were sure it was safe for you to be around humans, the change would be very noticeable. You'll look different, you'll move differently, you won't want to eat human food or go out in the sun publicly - all of these are things that people who know you would pick up on. If anyone got inquisitive enough to find something out, we'd need to turn them, too, whether they liked it or not, or hide them from the Volturi well enough to keep them from getting killed - impractical, you should know."
"That it?" I asked, when he seemed to have finished.
"That's all I think you're likely to find swaying," he said.
I frowned - that wasn't a good sign regarding Edward's own opinion of what was and wasn't worth consideration - but chose to put off pressing the issue. "Okay," I said. "How does this timeline sound? You and I make it known that we're an item, for setup purposes - tomorrow, perhaps, I'll tell Jessica and she can tell the whole school. We finish out the school year as the showiest, most sickeningly inseparable couple in the universe."
I closed my eyes, envisioning how the rest of the scenario would play out, and went on. "We let out that your family is going on vacation to Europe for the summer and I go along. Carlisle already looks suspiciouslyyoung for the age he's claiming - you couldn't have planned to stay here much longer; I expect you were going to split once you got out of high school. We could really go to Europe, or someplace else, depending on how curious Charlie seems and accordingly how likely we are to need to verifiably prove it - he's the most likely point of failure here, since he has the most interest in my personal life and the most resources to poke around with. As soon as we get wherever we go, you turn me and I start adjusting - I'll be "sick" for three days, if anybody asks.
"I can keep in touch with my family by e-mail and phone. Maybe I'll get a webcam with a really terrible picture and use it in a room with bad light so they can see me without noticing I'm suddenly even paler and have different colored eyes. And then I tell them we've eloped and I'm going to take a super-long honeymoon-cum-gap year. That should be long enough, since Alice saw me with newborn eyes near live humans without being in the process of sucking their blood. Then I enroll in a college someplace really inconvenient for either of my parents to travel to, maybe in Australia, with a forged high school transcript if necessary, and keep up with the electronic communication. We send them photos where we're really tiny figures in the background, and/or where we touch up the images so I look suitably pink and we both look the right non-seventeen age."
I opened my eyes. Edward looked some awkward combination of impressed, hopeful, and despairing. "Well?" I said.
"You're going to tell the entire school that we're an "item"?" he said.
"If I'm going to turn, it's going to happen eventually," I said. "And it lends plausibility to the rest of the story. I can't tell Jessica the entire slew of details if I want her to live."
"It's interesting that you're so eager to be a vampire yourself, but you don't want to change everyone you know, too," Edward said slyly.
"That's not it," I said. "It would be wonderful if Jessica and Angela and Charlie and Renée and everyone else could all live forever. But I'd need to inform them of what that would entail before I did it, to satisfy my conscience. I can't assume they'll agree with me. And if I informed them, and they didn't like the idea, then they'd have to be hidden from the Volturi forever, or they and I would be killed for breach of masquerade. I'd be risking my life to force anyone I told into a choice between untimely death or potentially unwanted vampire life. Do I have that about right?"
Edward nodded, looking disappointed that he hadn't actually found a chink in my logic.
"Alice could probably see that I would like the idea of becoming a vampire, before she told me the whole story," I said, excusing my own case. "And I think it would be a good use of time to see if she can check the likely reactions of a handful of favorite people, although I can already guess that Charlie and Renée would probably say no. But I alsosuspect that if this coven suddenly tripled in size, the Volturi would take that as some kind of power grab. I certainly don't want them to think we're challenging them, or about to. So even that, it wouldn't be safe to overdo."
(I didn't want the Volturi to think I was trying for a coup. I might want to actually commit one eventually - they seemed overfond of the death penalty and excessively dependent on secrecy. But Edward was not immune to Aro, their mindreader - and I might well be. Any such plans I might develop had to stay safely in my head, initial steps concealed by other overt reasons, until they were just about ready to spring into existence.)
"The one thing left that I don't think I know," I said, "which might be relevant, is the concern of Rosalie's you alluded to. Do you think she would be willing to share it, or let you tell me?"
"Perhaps," Edward said, looking suddenly hopeful. "I'll go speak to her." And he got up and disappeared up the stairs.
* * *
Chapter 8: The Future
Edward was gone for about fifteen minutes, and I passed the time by writing out the plan I'd devised, with some trivial embellishments. I knew Edward would remember it all perfectly, but I didn't want to have to consult him every time I wanted to check up on a detail.
I was scribbling a list of possible Europe and non-Europe destinations in the margins of my notebook when Edward and Rosalie came downstairs. She looked disgruntled but basically peaceable, and Edward held his features carefully neutral. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and watched her approach me, and then went back up - I supposed at least one of them thought it was a two-person conversation. Rosalie's high heels ticked regularly against the tile as she walked towards me and sat down.
"Edward said he didn't tell you about what led to - this," Rosalie said softly, gesturing at her perfect, white face. I nodded. "It's not a nice story," she said. "It doesn't have a happy ending. I'm going to keep it short."
It had been 1933, during the Great Depression, and Rosalie had been eighteen and living in Rochester with her parents and two brothers. And beautiful. Even as a human she'd been beautiful. The Depression didn't affect her family very much - her father had had a secure banking job, and Rosalie was quite able to traipse about town in pretty dresses imagining that the poor people she saw had brought their fates on themselves. She made her own life sound like a fairy tale - she was the lovely, happy princess, who wanted certain things and had every reason to believe she'd get them. Accordingly, one day the son of her father's employer began to court her. She went on at some length about the lavish wedding planned to end their whirlwind engagement, and about his habit of sending her a bouquet of roses every day so her house overflowed with them and she always smelled of their petals.
Rosalie experienced one pang of envy: a friend of hers had married young, at seventeen, and a year later had a baby boy, adorable with dark curls and dimples. They were not as sheltered from the economic troubles of the world as Rosalie's family was. Rosalie's parents would never have dreamed of letting her marry a man like her friend's carpenter husband, while they approved of the banker's son. But Rosalie's friend had the pretty baby, the happy marriage. So Rosalie amused herself with mental images of her own fair-haired children playing on the wide lawns she'd have surrounding her house soon enough.
The way Rosalie told it, it sounded almost rehearsed, like she'd thought a lot about all of the details and knew just how she preferred to describe them, the exact best intonation and vocabulary. Everything sounded floaty, and far away, memorized as much as remembered.
She implied, but did not quite state, the unhappy ending she'd promised.
But I was able to piece together the events well enough.
Her fiancé and several of his friends had gotten drunk, found her walking home alone from her friend's house, and gang-raped her, leaving her injured enough to be dying.
That was how Carlisle h
ad found her, broken and bleeding in the middle of the street under the unseasonable April snow. He'd brought her home and turned her - over, Rosalie said, Edward's objections (he thought she was too recognizable, Rosalie explained on his behalf; and if they'd met socially, I doubted he'd have been favorably impressed). Between her screams (which she informed me did nothing about the pain of the transition), they were able to explain what she was becoming; and finally, she finished, and finally believed them.
Rosalie then chose this moment to tell me, "You know, my record is almost as clean as Carlisle's. Better than Esme's. A thousand times better than Edward. I've never tasted human blood." She sounded proud.
"Almost as clean...?"
"I did kill them," she said, complacently, and I knew at once that "they" were her attackers, and I could feel no ill judgment towards her. "But I was very careful not to spill their blood. I knew I wouldn't be able to resist that, and I didn't want any part of them in me."
She described their deaths in a bit more detail than I thought necessary, though I didn't try to stop her. She went over how she saved her fiancé for last, hoping he'd hear about the deaths of his friends and live his last days in fear. Considering she'd found him in a windowless room with doors like a bank vault's and two armed men guarding him - whom she'd also killed - this seemed to have been effective. She had stolen a wedding dress to wear for the occasion, to be theatrical about it. But there had been no blood, and no feeding.
I now had reason to believe that all of the Cullens except Carlisle had killed humans before. Was he the only exception? It would be consistent with the statement "we have not all killed people" if only one had abstained. Maybe the Denali coven had better records. But there was Carlisle, and neither Rosalie nor Edward hadindeliberately killed. And I had been seen to adjust well, in Alice's visions. I might be all right. If I did not feel sure I would be all right, once I was a vampire and knew the scope of the thirst, then I would simply avoid humans in the flesh.