Young Blood

by Brian Stableford

'Nonsense,’ he said. ‘No such thing as being too rich or too thin, isn't that what they say?'

  'That's what they say,’ I agreed.

  'Not that you'll ever be in danger of growing too rich in our line of work,’ he said, expansively, ‘unless you're simply using me as a stepping stone to train you up for a career in genetic engineering. There really is big money in helping to put together the blueprints for Homo superior—or there will be, as soon as the market gets under way.'

  'It would be nice to give evolution a helping hand,’ I said, insouciantly. ‘But for the time being, I still have a great deal to learn. I think I'll take things one step at a time. After all, I still have to get my degree. If I don't do well enough in the finals, this discussion will have been a complete waste of time.'

  'I don't think you need worry about that,’ he said, not quite adding ‘my dear'. ‘You seem to have everything under control, and your tutor obviously thinks highly of you.'

  'I should be all right,’ I said. ‘I'm reasonably fit, and I didn't suffer from nerves in the second-year exams. It's just a matter of doing the work.'

  'In that case,’ he said, ‘I'm sure there's no problem. It's just a matter of putting the past behind us, and making a fresh start. You are sure, aren't you, that the past is ... well, not forgotten, but ...'

  I knew well enough what he meant, and what he was anxious about. Gil's ghost was still haunting him, in the deep recesses of his mind. He was afraid of being reminded, of the whole thing blowing up again.

  'I'm a philosopher, Professor Viners,’ I said. ‘I'm a great admirer of Bertrand Russell's Analysis of Mind. The past has no reality other than its present memory. There's no logical necessity in the belief that our memories are reflections of a real past. It's entirely natural that we should suppose that there really was a past, but we have to accept that it's dead and gone and might conceivably be nothing but a figment of our imagination. We can only live in the present, and those aspects of the past which survive as our memories, whether they be real or illusory, have to serve the needs of the present.'

  He blinked. ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘It's good to be able to take a level-headed view of these things. What happened to Gil ... well, as you say, it's all in the past. Life has to go on.'

  'Yes,’ I said. He had hit the nail right on the head. Life has to go on. That was all there was to it, really.

  'I'm sure I'll be seeing you again in October,’ he said, when he ushered me out of his office. ‘I look forward to it.'

  I looked forward to it too. As I passed the window let into the wall of the high-security lab, I paused to look in on Teresa. She was working away with the same dreamy efficiency she always had. A rock indeed. She hadn't changed at all.

  After thirty seconds or so she suddenly looked round, as if she'd somehow become aware of the fact that she was being watched. Her eyebrows went up as she recognised me and remembered...

  She looked down again, ignoring me, just as she had the last time. I didn't mind. She wasn't a philosopher. She didn't understand that the past is just something contained in our memories, and that our memories disagree about it to a much greater extent than most of us care to admit. I knew that I could begin to make her understand, if I got the chance. And I didn't really doubt that I would get the chance.

  I could see myself reflected in the glass. It was as though there were another person in there, standing in the lab looking out. She was a handsome and self-assured person, who looked very much at home there: a person who was not too thin, nor too pale, nor too nervous to belong. She had my eyes, my hair and my mouth, but she wore Gil's smile.

  Because she was a reflection and not a solid entity, I could look through her as well as at her. I could see what lay behind that public façade. I knew what she was inside. She had once been a victim, and she had once been a vampire, but she was neither now. She had learned to be hungry, and she had learned not to be hungry. She had learned to take part in the business of the world without becoming a slave to greed and avarice. She had found the kind of internal harmony that real philosophy can't and doesn't even try to impart. She had found the kind of balance which might be sustained for a lifetime. She had become an explorer, in the best sense of the word.

  I liked her. I had confidence in her. She had the beginnings of wisdom, and maybe a little more.

  I smiled at her again, and then I walked away.

  I walked along the corridor, down the stairs, and across the campus. I crossed the bridge and passed the door of Wombwell House. I paused by the Marquis of Membury's Garden, and stood there for a little while, looking in at the imprisoned trees. I felt sorry for the poor, twisted specimens which were thousands of miles from their natural habitat, brought here by a whim of chance to set down their roots among oaks and beeches. The Marquis of Membury's foreign imports had never had a chance to grow in the manner to which their kin were accustomed. They had never had a chance to fulfil the innate ambition of their genes.

  They didn't deserve their fate. There had been neither sense nor justice in their transplantation; there was neither sense nor justice in their imprisonment. But I knew that it didn't really matter. After all, they weren't people.

  When a couple of minutes had gone by I started walking again. I was going home to Brennan Hall, but I was going home replete with the knowledge that I had made a new beginning, and had set my feet upon a new path.

  I was right, of course, in what I had told Professor Viners. It was just a matter of doing the work and going through the motions. The result was a foregone conclusion. No illness intervened, no accident, no sudden relapse into nervous anxiety. All that was behind me.

  In October, as we had both foreseen, I arrived in Professor Viners’ lab, ready and willing to learn all there was to know about the chemistry of the brain, and the dreams of cats and rats and rabbits.

  It was only a small step in the right direction, but you have to take the first step before you can take the second, and you can't miss any out if you intend eventually to learn to run. In order to begin the work of knowing who and what you are, you have to make use of every tool at your disposal, and you have to improve them as best you can.

  It really felt good to be back again. It felt like coming home.

  2

  One day, I felt sure, I would be able to go back to California too, to see LA and the Pacific Ocean again, to feel the real sun and eat real ice cream. That, I thought, would be the true homecoming—but in the meantime, it was good to be able to make any sort of connection. Every connection is important, if you're to retain any proper sense of identity. Sometimes, it isn't easy.

  It was good to see Mike Viners on a day-to-day basis, even if there was something creepy about having him look at me the way he'd never looked at me before. I'd got used to that kind of thing in general, but almost all my memories of Viners were tied up in a different bundle, and it wasn't easy to accommodate that difference. Also, he seemed taller—but so did everyone I'd known before.

  Teresa seemed taller. Quite a bit taller, in fact, although she hadn't changed at all. She was awkward about my coming back, not because of my situation—of which she was not, of course, aware—but because she had decided to be awkward. She didn't like her lab space being invaded, especially not by me. I suppose you could say that wasn't personal, in that I didn't seem to her to be me, but in another way, it was personal, because of who I did seem to be. She didn't go out of her way to make things difficult, but she didn't go out of her way to make them easy either. Not that she ever said anything straight out. Englishwomen can be so tight-assed about things.

  The whole English culture is tight-assed. It comes from being a narrow island and having such a miserable climate. But home is where the heart is, and the only heart I have now is as cool and as gently deceptive as early morning mist on the M40, English through and through. Take my advice; never burn your bridges before you come to them, no matter how hopeless things seem.

  I slipped back into the work more eas
ily than I'd anticipated. I'd had a good deal of trouble with my new hands, but I must have turned the corner, dexterity-wise, because the old scalpel skills came back as smoothly as I could have wished. I still couldn't stand the smell of pyridine, though; some things are so intrinsically horrible that getting a new nose doesn't help.

  I found my old lab book in a drawer, where it had been carefully filed and forgotten. Viners was a careful man, and made it a point of principle never to throw bits of paper away if they had records of experiments. One day, some nosy sociologist of science would be able to go through his work with a fine-toothed comb, searching for evidence of fudging and fraud. They'd be disappointed. He never massaged his figures, and always reported his ballsed-up experiments in appendices to his papers. If only there were more like him! I read through the book, and put it back. I couldn't decipher some of the scribbled notes, and others no longer made much sense, but it put me in closer touch with my former self than most of my little adventures in self-rediscovery.

  In the end, when the Teresa problem got to be too much of an irritant, I settled it. One night, when we were working late together after Viners had gone home, I put my hand on her shoulder and said: ‘I'll give you a blow job if you'll give me one.'

  She turned round as if she'd been hit by lightning, and stared me in the face. I could see all the possibilities flitting across her mind. I saw her wonder whether she'd seen a ghost, and saw her reject the hypothesis as an absurdity. I saw her decide instead that I must have told on her, two and a half years before—confessed it all to my loving girlfriend.

  It was a natural mistake.

  I saw her intend to say no, too, and even contrive a little flicker of homophobic horror. But I was looking into her eyes, and I was challenging her to examine herself very thoroughly, and to make the decision she really wanted to make. I have very persuasive eyes: authoritative, compelling, predatory eyes. All the time she was being tight-assed with me, she'd had the opportunity to study my eyes, so she had been softened up for the full force of the stare. I saw her first intention gradually fade away, and I saw the uncertain softness begin the work of melting her, and I saw her gather up her reserves of hardness, to reconstitute her image.

  'He told you about that?’ she said, not quite evenly enough.

  'Who?’ I said.

  I saw her open her mouth to frame my name, and I saw her decide that there was just a chance that she had misread the situation, a wildly improbable chance that it was all just coincidence. It's strange how eager we are to catch absurd straws in situations which are, at worst, only mildly embarrassing.

  'Nobody,’ she said. That's me, I thought. Then she added: ‘Do you mean it?'

  'Sure,’ I said.

  She shrugged. All the hardness was back in place now. She could play her role, now that she'd decided exactly what her role was. A momentary shift in self-perception, and everything was back together, as smooth as if it had never been split.

  'Why not?’ she said. ‘I always use the medium CT room.'

  We went into the CT room and secured the door. Warily, she said: ‘You first.’ She still thought that I might not mean it, that I might be playing some peculiar game, that this might be some eccentric comeback from a long-gone act of petty infidelity in respect of which she felt—and quite rightly—not the slightest sense of wrongdoing.

  I knelt, and pulled her tights and knickers down. The first time, I knew, I'd been hopelessly inexpert, but I was more practised now. She began to be surprised long before she came to the climax, and she accepted the difference in sensation simply as an improvement.

  I took a little blood, but only a little. She was quite unconscious of its loss. It was hot, tangy blood, rich and smooth. It wasn't as young as most I drank, but its maturity was no disadvantage. It was beautiful. I didn't spill a drop, and the tender wound folded itself away, scrupulously neat.

  I never use the neck any more, in spite of the weight of ancient tradition. The flesh is too coarse there, the skin too dry. It's like eating a sweet with the wrapper on.

  I didn't need the blood, of course. I didn't have that awful hunger burning away in my guts: the merciless hunger which had destroyed that luckless child. That hunger had died when Anne's stake had pinned Maldureve down to his silk-lined womb, and it hadn't come back, even when she unpinned him. But I still had the ability. I still had the option, and I exercised it whenever the occasion seemed right. I could still enjoy the experience. In fact, now that it was pure joy, unalloyed with need, it was a better kind of joy altogether: an Epicurean joy, significant of self-knowledge and not to excess; the joy of the educated connoisseur rather than the appetite-driven consumer.

  That's another thing I've learned. It really is better to tame your animal passions. They are valuable, but their value is much enhanced by scrupulous control. The joy of the connoisseur may not have the cutting edge of the consumer's need, but that loss is more than compensated by the artistry, the delicacy and the mastery. Take my word for it: neither a vampire nor a victim be. Don't ever let yourself get addicted to the blood, but don't recoil with horror at the very thought. You never know; blood may be exactly what you need in order to become what you'd rather be. I mean that metaphorically, of course, as well as literally. We all have to find our own particular wellsprings of life and luxury, whoever and whatever we may be.

  Afterwards, Teresa and I changed places. I thought it only polite—although, of course, I didn't get a hundredth as much pleasure out of what she did to me as I'd had in doing unto her. This was a delicate relationship-in-embryo, and I knew it would have to be carefully nurtured. I knew that Teresa was loaded with antibodies, and I couldn't yet be sure that the problem could be overcome, even with lots of tender loving care, but I knew that I had to try, if only for sentimental reasons.

  It really had started with Teresa, you see. She had caught it off Viners, and recovered; she had recovered easily enough—‘it', of course, being only half the puzzle; the key which had not yet found its lock. She gave it to me, probably within days of my arriving in the lab—if not before, then certainly during our first steamy session in the CT room. I passed it on to Anne long before we first went to bed—maybe the first time we kissed. It lies dormant, you see, for a long time. Most people form antibodies before they've even begun to show symptoms, the way we often do with trivial viruses. By the time symptoms show, the war is usually in its last stages. The antibodies usually win, in the end. But the virus clings on, usually in the dermis, near the sweat glands and other secretory cells. It isn't over when you stop sniffing; it isn't ever over, while you still have breath in your body and the need to dream.

  It isn't even over, necessarily, when you die. By then, you see, you might have crept into somebody else's dreams. There's a little bit of all of us in everyone we've loved. Sometimes, there's more than a little. Sometimes, when people croon to their lovers that they've got them under their skin, they mean it.

  I am dead. Dead and buried; dead and gone.

  No soul floated free of my poor burned body like an ectoplasmic will-o'-the-wisp, ready, willing and able to possess some unfortunate host. Maybe it'd be more fun if that's what I really were, but honesty compels me to admit to myself that I'm not. I'm just a memory: a very, very complex memory, but a memory nevertheless. Or perhaps a fantasy: an elaborate tissue of assumptions and inferences, heavily spiced with hopes and desires and stodgy imaginative padding.

  Maybe I delude myself into thinking that I'm more like me than I really am, when I'm really only Anne's idea of what I was and what I might have been. How can I know? How can I really be sure that I really am the authentic me, when I know that I'm just an alter ego in someone else's brain, a personality secondary to her own? The story I've told you rings true, I think, but how can I be sure that it really was like that for Gil—for the other Gil—during those last terrible days before his ... my ... suicide?

  Sometimes, I wonder whether I really did kill that little girl ... that is to say, whet
her he really killed her. I remember it so very well—but then, I would, wouldn't I? Nothing was ever proved, you see. The police never even said, publicly, that they believed that I had done it. Officially, it's still an unsolved crime. Sometimes, I ask myself whether the other Gil, the Gil of flesh and blood, actually was the kind of person who could do such a thing, even in some extreme of madness—and whether, if he wasn't, that makes any difference at all to me. It might not—because, after all, I did do it, didn't I?

  I have every right to feel guilty, even though it wasn't my fault. Except, of course, that it was my fault, because as well as being Gil, I'm the virus too. If there were no virus, there'd be no Gil, so there's no use in my saying ‘It wasn't me, it was the virus', because that doesn't make any difference, really. So I actually did do it, didn't I? At least, if he did, I did. But if I did, I really couldn't help myself. As Gil, I was driven by delusion; as the virus, I was simply being myself.

  I think he did do it—the actual Gil, that is. Nothing else makes sense, does it? But there is a difference between us, quite apart from the fact that I'm only a ghost, living on sufferance in someone else's memory, someone else's flesh. He was driven to do what he did, by a force he couldn't understand and couldn't begin to control. I'm free, and I deserve to be. I really have been rehabilitated; I'm fit to live in human society again. I'm better now, you see. I really am.

  I remember it still, as clearly as if it were yesterday. I did do it. Even if mine is only the phantom or the fantasy of a crime, I am the phantom or fantasy who committed it. But I've been saved from myself. I'm free of Maldureve for ever. There's no possibility of my ever repeating my crime.

  I shouldn't have killed myself. Even though I'd done what I'd done, and wrecked my life, I shouldn't have committed suicide. Because, you see, there are always new beginnings to be made. Always. And it was the virus that made me do it, when the virus was still out of control. After all, a virus can't sensibly be required to feel guilty about infecting people, can it? It's a virus's nature to infect people, to dodge the antibodies if it can, to lie dormant in the skin if it can, to infect others if it can ... and, if it can, to become something more than a virus. That's life—and I mean that very precisely. That is life. Life is nothing else but DNA meeting DNA, any which way it can, and setting up house according to whatever compromises it can make. That's what sex is, or tries to be; that's what infection is, or tries to be. What looks different from some points of view is all the same from others.