Young Blood

by Brian Stableford

  'I know I'm just being a coward, and I know that someone's child dies every day of the week, including single mothers, and that they just have to carry on, and that they do carry on, somehow, but I don't know how...

  'I mean, how?'

  She collapsed on to the bed again, overdramatically. She started to cry.

  I didn't know. I knew that she shouldn't be unloading it all on to me, given that I was ten years younger than she was and only just out of the parental nest myself, but I knew that she probably knew that too, and couldn't help herself. Anyhow, although she didn't know it, it was my fault, at least in part. I had a duty to her, a moral obligation to make some kind of reparation, however inadequate, if I possibly could.

  I went to sit down beside her, and I put my thin arm around her shoulders. ‘It's okay,’ I said, hypocritically. ‘Just let it all out.’ I knew it was conventional advice. I knew it was what she was expecting. Personally, I'd always felt that the prejudice people had against bottling things up was stupidly mistaken. I didn't believe that ‘letting things out’ solved anything at all, or had the slightest cathartic effect. The idea was a hangover from the days when doctors used leeches to let the blood out of sick people: a useless superstition. But I had to play my part. I had created the monster which had killed her child; I was the source of the disease which had blighted her life. I had to do what was expected of me. It wouldn't have mattered even if I'd wanted to say, ‘Die then! Don't try to cope! Kill yourself!’ I could only say what I did say. It was all that the situation allowed.

  Cynthia probably felt that she was entitled to do what she was doing, absurd as it might have seemed to someone looking in from the outside, because the circumstances were so extraordinary—but in fact, this was just a magnification of her customary craving for reassurance, her addictive dependence. I could see that now, because I could see how similar I'd been, all my life. Maldureve was even more inappropriate as someone for me turn to than I was as someone for her to turn to, but the principle was the same. I understood, now, how much supposed affection and how much supposed love must really be the demand for reassurance and the dutiful meeting of that demand.

  'Well,’ said Cynthia, when she finally found the strength to mop up the tears, ‘at least I'm doing my practical homework, even though I'm not writing anything. What do you think Dr Gray would say if I volunteered to give a demonstration of the emotions in action, instead of an essay?'

  'You have to give it time,’ I told her, virtuously. ‘Your wound isn't like mine—it can't just heal—but you have to live, day by day, until you learn to do it. Practice may not make perfect, but it makes possible. It's like a scientist who has to learn to handle viruses or tarantulas; no matter how hard it is to do, they just have to reach a point at which it becomes possible. Gil thought he could do that, but when he was tested ... he went out of control. He didn't give himself time. He let himself become mad, and his madness made him kill Janine, and then he had to kill himself. You mustn't let yourself be destroyed. It would just be adding to the tragedy.'

  She recoiled out of my embrace. ‘You don't know that!’ she said, profoundly shocked. ‘You mustn't think that! It couldn't have been Gil!'

  I did know it, but I knew that there was no way to explain it to her. I wondered if I had the power to bring Janine Leigh's ghost out of the borderlands, to let Cynthia see her; but I knew that no good result could possibly be achieved. Even if Cynthia could accept what she saw as real, even if everything were explained to her and made clear, it wouldn't make it any easier for her to begin to cope, to begin the painful work of reconstituting her life. Hers was not the kind of tragedy which knowledge could ameliorate.

  'I don't know what to think,’ I told her, falsely laying claim to some inner turmoil of my own, reminding her that she was not the only one to have suffered a loss. It was required of me: I had to show solidarity, to imply as carefully as I could that my outward behaviour was only a mask hiding a dispiritedness and a despair at least comparable to her own.

  'Why?’ she whispered, playing the game. ‘Why would he do such a thing?'

  'He was very distressed,’ I told her. ‘He was scared that he'd caught some virus from the lab—scared for no good reason, but scared nevertheless. Then I was attacked ... it must have made things much worse. He could have gone crazy. He could have gone completely crazy. That's what the detective sergeant thinks. It's possible. I don't know. We probably never will. If he did do it, they'll never be able to charge anyone. Nobody will ever know for sure.'

  I knew for sure, but I had to pretend doubt. I simply had to, and that was all there was to it. There was nothing else I could do for her, except to play the part she expected. All she wanted for the time being was a straw to grasp, some phantom presence in her life which would allow her to think that she wasn't alone.

  When she eventually went, she apologised profusely for having interrupted me, for having made such a display of herself and for having reawakened my own troubles. She seemed to me to be apologising—at least by implication—for the state of the world at large, including the civil war in Azerbaijan and the eventual heat-death of the universe. I told her that it didn't matter, that none of it mattered, and that if ever she needed anything, she would always know where to find me.

  It was all pretence, but it was true in a sense.

  When I shut the door behind her, something made me reach out and turn out the light. I told myself as I did it that something must have afflicted my eyes, making me anxious for protective darkness—but that was a pretence, too. Inevitably, when I turned to face the window again, Maldureve was there.

  I breathed out unsteadily, slightly disturbed even though I wasn't unduly alarmed. I had expected to see him again, at least once more, now that I had discovered and reached his resting place. I wondered, briefly, whether he had come to make threats or entreaties.

  'I've missed you, Anne,’ he whispered, after a long hesitation. ‘You can't imagine how I've missed you.'

  'The world,’ I said, humourlessly, ‘is full of blood. There's nothing very special about mine.'

  I couldn't deny that I was a little bit afraid of him. He had substance and he had strength—gifts that I had given him and that now might be turned against me. It would have been easier to confront him on his own ground, where he was vulnerable, especially if he were quiescent in his coffin, as helpless as a baby.

  'You can't hurt me,’ I said to him, to bolster my own confidence. ‘The owls will protect me. You told me that you couldn't and wouldn't protect me from them, but they're stronger. They can and will protect me from you.'

  'I don't want to hurt you,’ he said, reaching out with both arms to invite me into his embrace. ‘I love you, and I always will. We've shared our blood and our being, you and I. How could you ever have thought that I would want to hurt you? I wanted you to be one with me and my kind. I wanted you to join me in the borderlands, to share the life of the shadows. We could have hunted and feasted together, ... we still can, if only you'll dare to listen to your heart. The owls have lied to you, they've twisted your mind and turned you against yourself. You don't understand what they did to you. Do you think it was coincidence that the man with the knife attacked you? They sent him. They sent him to trap you, to deliver you into their care. It was no accident of happenstance,—it was a cruel act of malice. Why do you think I couldn't help you? Did you think I was simply frightened? How could I be frightened of some mere bag of blood wielding a knife? If that had been what he was, he would have been nothing to me—I could have torn him limb from limb and scattered his flesh to the winds. But he was bait in a trap, he was the instrument of the owls. I couldn't even warn you. But you don't have to be their creature. You have a choice. You can still listen to your heart. We can be together again, you and I. There's no true satisfaction for you, anywhere in the world, unless you have the hunger to be satisfied. I think you know that, in your heart. You knew it last night, didn't you, when you came to destroy me, and paused at
the threshold? I knew then that the owls hadn't made you entirely their own. I didn't build that curtain of cobwebs—you did! You chose to awaken your own doubts, to play upon your own fears, because you knew, when you had descended to the real core of your being, that you and I are still the same: both of us creatures of the night; both of us hunters; both of us possessed of a hunger which nothing can satisfy but blood. I knew then that there was still hope. Here I am, Anne. Don't turn me away. Don't reject me. I love you. You can't imagine how much I love you. The owls don't love you—they're incapable of love as you and I know it. They have sex, after their own fashion, but they don't love, not with their hearts, not with every fibre of their being, the way you and I do. Have you forgotten what it was like? I don't believe that you have, or that you ever can. I was your first lover, and your only true lover. Let me love you, Anne. Come into the shadows, for ever.'

  I was tempted. It was unexpected, and all the more powerful because of that. I could feel the force of his persuasion. I didn't know whether what he said was true or false—what do any of us know of those reasons which the heart is supposed to have but of which logic knows nothing?—but there was something in his voice which made me want to believe. His presence brought memories flooding back into my mind, filling my mind with a kind of turbulence I hadn't felt since the moment of my imprisonment in the owls’ cage of light. And yet ... how could I trust him?

  'The owls are dangerous, Anne,’ he told me. ‘They're cruel; they have no feelings. They're utterly cynical. They pretend that they're teaching you wisdom, but they're only making you into their instrument. They're all mind and no heart, all thought and no emotion. They're beautiful, in their way, but they're robotic, inhuman, anti-life. If you do what they want you to do, you'll become more and more like them. You'll become a killer, Anne: a bright and vicious thing, all caustic fire and corrosive brilliance. You'll become a destroyer, a thing without a heart. You've been carried away by their kind of vivid ecstasy, but it's all just show. Our kind of love is better by far: softer, more gentle, deeper, more meaningful. You know that, really, if you'll only listen to your heart. If you'll only resist the glamour of the owls, you'll see what you really need, what you really desire, what you really are.'

  I was tempted. It was all so very seductive, so very reassuring. But he no longer had the power to captivate me. I was no longer a ready-made victim. The iron had entered into my soul.

  'You're a kind of disease, Maldureve,’ I heard myself say, in Gil's voice! The vocal cords were mine, and I could feel the words forming in my throat, but the voice was definitely Gil's. ‘You're an open wound in the soul, which has to be cauterised and sterilised.'

  'You don't believe that, Anne,’ he said, taking a step towards me. He was very substantial, very solid, for all that he was really made of shadows. I knew that if he were to seize me, catching me by the hair, and then yank my head back to expose my throat, he could drain all the blood from my body as easily as Gil had drained the blood from Janine's. I felt that I was in mortal danger, and that the only real recourse I had was to yield, to say: ‘Yes, it's okay. Do it. Whether you love me or not, just get it over with.’ I didn't have a crucifix to brandish in his face, or any faith that it would work if I did. I only had my strength and my wisdom, both fortified by the owls. With the enemy in front of me, looming over me like a great black spider, I didn't know if those resources would suffice. But I didn't give in. I didn't yield.

  'You can't survive, Maldureve,’ said Gil's ghost, from somewhere within my body, where I had granted it a place to reside. ‘You can be absorbed, and integrated into the genome, on a purely somatic level; or you can be destroyed, crippled and ingested by the instruments of the immune system; but you can't survive.'

  'I love you, Anne,’ said Maldureve, mournfully. ‘I don't want to be your enemy. I only want to love you, to be with you. What else matters, Anne? What else is there, if you don't have love?'

  I looked up into his handsome, terrifying face. He was so seemingly powerful, and yet so rapturously infatuated. How could any face, I wondered—whether it belonged to an idol or a man—contain such contradictions? How could it be at once so loving and so utterly savage? And what was it in me which responded to that contradiction so yearningly, which desired to be crushed and broken and sucked dry? What was it in me which yearned for the oblivion which lay on the far side of his particular kind of ecstasy?

  Perhaps, I thought, he was right; perhaps I did love him, and only him; perhaps we had been made for one another; perhaps the owls could not keep us apart, and should not ever have tried their treacheries upon the likes of us.

  But Gil's voice couldn't be denied. It spoke again, triumphantly. ‘You're just a disease, Maldureve. A fleeting venereal sickness. We know what you are, and we know how to destroy you.'

  I watched him dissolve into the darkness, and heard him cry as he faded into the infinite reaches of the borderlands: ‘I love you, Anne. I love you!'

  It had to be a lie, hadn't it? What else could he do but pretend? What else was left to him?

  It had to be a lie.

  12

  I was slightly surprised when Cynthia turned up for the tutorial on Monday. I told her I was glad, because she clearly expected some congratulatory gesture on my part. I think her real reason for appearing was that she thought it would win her a healthy measure of approval from all concerned. Daniel and Dr Gray were as gracious as anyone could reasonably expect of them.

  I wasn't at all surprised when Dr Gray invited Daniel to read his essay. An invisible line had been tacitly drawn to separate those to whom circumstance had granted the gift of an undisturbed existence from the two madwomen who perversely insisted on getting their throats cut and their daughters murdered.

  Daniel had obviously anticipated this honour—or had been terrified by the possibility of having to endure the tutorial alone—and had done his best to produce an essay of considerable breadth, if not depth. We were entertained to a brief history of the notion of the divided self, delivered at a gallop. It began, like most essays in philosophy, with Plato, who had supposed that the human soul must be purely rational, but that when it became embedded in its material shell it had perforce to be associated with irrational impulses. Daniel pointed out that in Plato's view this was not entirely unfortunate, for there were some impulses which were noble ones—ambition, the desire for power, righteous wrath—but the rest of these passionate forces were ‘lower’ in kind, to be feared, despised and disciplined. Daniel scrupulously noted that such base temptations ought, in Plato's view, to be subject to the ruthless tyranny of the intellect. From the ideal society outlined in the Republic, poets were to be cast out, because they ‘nourished the well of the emotions’ while the true aim of civilised society should be to dry it up.

  Daniel observed that the more moderate views of Plato's successors were usually aligned on the same side. Aristotle felt that emotions could enrich experience, but also took care to draw a distinction between nobler emotions and the vulgar passions connected with basic bodily processes, which constituted the ‘animal part’ of man. The Stoics shared Plato's suspicions to the full, regarding the passions as perturbations of the mind, almost as a kind of mental disease. The Epicureans insisted on the naturalness of pleasure and preached a kind of hedonism, but there was no vulgarity in their pleasure-seeking; their search was for a purified, rather cerebral species of joy, fit for connoisseurs, and one of their mottoes was ‘Nothing to Excess'.

  It was obvious to me that Daniel did not much approve of the Stoics or the Epicureans, but he became even more contemptuous when he moved on to the Christian philosophers, for whom the passions were temptations of the devil, and giving way to them the very essence of sin. He noted that Descartes considered the passions to be excitations of the soul caused by the movement of ‘animal spirits', and that Spinoza, in laying down the foundation stones of his quasi-Euclidean system of ethics, accepted it as axiomatic that human freedom was based in the rational pow
er of the intellect, while the opposing power of the emotions must be reckoned a burdensome kind of servitude.

  I observed while listening to this discourse that Daniel had already acquired the faintly condescending and contemptuous tone which philosophers sometimes have when discussing mere scientists. His account of nineteenth-century models of the conflict between reason and emotion dismissed the ideas of practical men as mere parroting of ideas inherited from the great philosophers. Darwin, who considered our appetites and passions to be part of our evolutionary heritage, operating independently of the will as an ‘undirected flow of nerve-force’ was discarded in almost the same breath as Freud, who contended that the human ego must negotiate between, and if possible reconcile, two sets of contradictory pressures: the anarchic and amoral bundle of appetites which is the id; and the censorious and orderly superego. Daniel even took time out to put the boot into Havelock Ellis, who had identified two ‘great fundamental impulses’ supplying the ‘dynamic energy’ of all behaviour—hunger and sexual desire—and had, like Freud, become preoccupied with the idea that the latter might easily be transformed by ‘sublimation’ into other kinds of creative endeavour.

  Throughout the history of these dualistic accounts of human being, Daniel maintained, only a handful of heroes had appointed themselves champions of the passions. He spoke approvingly of Rousseau, who firmly believed in the nobility of savagery and became the father-figure of the cult of sensibilité; but he saved his final accolade for the more fashionable figure of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose theory of emotion refused to describe passion in quasi-mechanical terms, urging that we should instead view emotional experience as a kind of perception, characterised by a ‘magical’ world-view which contrasts with, but also complements, the ‘instrumental’ world-view underlying our rational and scientific understanding.

  'In this view,’ Daniel's essay concluded, probably lifting the quote lock, stock and barrel from whichever one of his sources he liked best, ‘we see the world in two ways, which overlap but never quite come into perfect focus: we see a world of objects to be manipulated, and a world of objects of desire. These two worlds are differently conceptualised and differently evaluated, and though we live simultaneously in both we can no more force our experience into a repressive existential straitjacket which recognizes only one form of perception than we can separate ourselves into two distinct individuals. Our task instead is to reach the most life-enhancing compromise we can.'