Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  • • •

  “WAS THAT STRICTLY NECESSARY?”

  “Shut up and drink.”

  “Prosit. Pro—oh.” (Pause.) “Oh!”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re disgusting.” (Pause.) “Please tell me you haven’t wet yourself.”

  “N-no. Bitch.” (Pause.) “Look, there’s a drop left in the tube, I can’t lick it out . . .”

  “Rinse.”

  “Jesus Fuck, that was, that was amazing. Better than smack.”

  “Better than sex.”

  “Guess you’ve never had good sex, then.”

  “Animal.”

  “Dyke.” (Pause.) “It felt amazing. But I need more. There’s one tube left. Can I have—”

  “No, it’s for Oscar and Mhari.”

  “Come on, there’s twenty mils, we can split it, tell them there wasn’t—”

  “You’re not thinking this through, Evan.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got a problem. According to Google the NHS prices blood internally at £120 per unit, and a unit is only about a third of a liter. They never have more than about ten days’ supply in the Blood and Transplant service’s stores and she just told us they track it to the individual unit, on a per-patient basis. And I don’t know about you, but I could get used to this stuff.”

  “Shit. You know what that means, then?”

  “Yes. We’re going to have to convince Oscar to buy us a hospital. Which is why you’re not to drink the rest of the merchandise. Shit’s expensive.”

  • • •

  A PAIR OF VAMPIRES WITH CLIPBOARDS WALK INTO THE BACK of a church in time for evening mass.

  They do not burst into flames. Nor does the sight of the crucifix on the altar cause them to cringe or convulse, but the incense gives Alex a sneezing fit, at which point an elderly parishioner turns and glares at him with muted outrage. That is the worst reaction that makes it into the task tracking grid on Evan’s clipboard.

  “Dude, not cool. Try to look like you’re praying.”

  “How?”

  “Copy the peeps in front of us. Them over there, they seem to know what they’re doing.”

  The building is cold and dimly lit, the air dank with the chill of autumnal stonework. It seems almost deserted, but for a small cluster of officiants around the altar and pulpit at the front, and a scattering of worshipers, mostly old. The music sounds doleful and strange to Alex’s ears. As with many other natives of the British Isles, he has grown up in a family that fills in the “religion” question on the census forms with “Church of England” but only bothers with the institution itself when they want something: an impressively traditional venue for a wedding, or a place in a highly rated C of E school for the offspring. Consequently, he has only the vaguest grasp of the format and running order of a service, much less the audience participation bits. Evan, for his part, is no better off: he clutches the dog-eared Book of Common Prayer with both hands, trying to make sense of the card with its cryptic list of hymns and page numbers.

  “This makes no sense,” Alex complains, but help is at hand: Evan pulls out his phone—a ridiculously hypertrophied slab of black glass—and googles. After a moment he shoves it under Alex’s nose: “Follow this,” he whispers. They peer, shoulder to shoulder, through the narrow window onto churchofengland.org’s website, gaping in perplexity at an alien universe of liturgy and prayer.

  The service proceeds. There are prayers; there are hymns. There is a reading from the Holy Scripture. More prayers follow, and then the ritual preparation of the table. “Are you up for the free booze?” Evan asks as he prepares to join the queue of communion participants forming in the aisle.

  “No, I’ll just keep track in case you burst into flames or something.” Alex, to be honest, is somewhat bored: the religious symbols at the front of the church are no more cringeworthy than they would have been a week ago.

  “Coward.” Evan heads towards the queue. A few minutes later he’s back. “Cheap wine, and not enough of it,” he says.

  “And the, um, Eucharist?”

  “Tastes like chicken.” Evan elbows Alex in the ribs. “Incoming collecting plate! Let’s roll.”

  • • •

  A PAIR OF VAMPIRES WITH CLIPBOARDS WALK INTO A BUTCHER’S shop . . .

  Actually, it’s not a shop: it’s a stall in the central hall at Smithfield Market. It’s a few minutes past four in the morning, and the wholesale market is already bustling with butchers, fishmongers, and restauranteurs filling up crates and pallets with the day’s meat produce. This is London’s main wholesale meat market—no longer a live cattle market surrounded by abattoirs, but nevertheless a bustling hive of early morning commerce. The vampires have swapped their suits for jeans and suspiciously new white coats, purchased for the occasion from a work outfitter’s: they slip effortlessly through the crowd of costermongers and their customers. But they have a dilemma.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asks Alex.

  “Blood. Fresh blood.”

  Alex’s sigh is intended to be withering but it’s so much water off Dick’s duck’s arse hairstyle. Dick is clearly in his element here: with his protuberant eyes and green plaid jacket he fits right into place in the meat market, in a way that makes Alex wonder if there isn’t something to the old legend of Fae changelings. Despite being predestined for a life as a butcher, the baby was swapped at birth to fill the empty crib of a banker . . . “Pig’s blood?” he asks. “Or sheep? Or cow juice?”

  “Don’t be daft, cow juice is milk—”

  “Look, let’s just fucking ask, okay? Excuse me, yes, you sir—”

  “Eh, what d’you—” The balding middle-aged bloke in the white coat and rubber boots turns a suspicious expression on Alex.

  Alex stares into his eyes and grabs his attention. “We need blood,” he says simply, holding out the aluminum drinking bottle from his bicycle. “Fresh blood. Preferably from a cow. Can you sell it to us?”

  “Wuh—Wuh—”

  Dick raises a grubby finger: “No questions, mate.”

  They have discovered that there is an interesting drawback to the mind control talent: it only works if you can supply a rationalization that the victim can make sense of. Tell a banker to get lost after a hard day’s work and they’ll tell themselves that it’s about time they ditched the high-stress job and went to live in a Buddhist monastery for a year. Tell an aspiring model in a club that you’re a rich investment banker and she wants to shag you, and her mind’s eye will fill with Ferraris. But a blunt assault on the senses, with no wheedling wedge to crack the doors of cognition apart, will result in some fight-back. Alex realizes this, and sends a quelling glance in Dick’s direction. “Heston Blumenthal sent us. We’re with his TV production company, and we’re sourcing material for a documentary on foods made with blood.”

  False enlightenment dawns on the victim’s face: “Oh. Awright, mate. Come wiv me, I’ll sortcha out!”

  Fifteen minutes later, Dick and Alex stagger out of the market, lumbered down with the weight of sloshing gallon containers of the red stuff—pig, sheep, cow, and goat. Alex walks with one arm crooked protectively around his pocket, within which nestles a filched 20ml medical sample tube filled with the most exotic of sanguinary products—venous blue human blood. (“Mr. Blumenthal specifically wants to try a recipe for Tiet canh that the Viet Cong are rumored to have made using their own blood while besieged by the Americans . . . yes, I know it’s disgusting: would a hundred quid help?”)

  “I can’t believe you tried to force him with no explanation.” Alex pauses to put down a gallon jug in order to wipe his forehead.

  Dick looks around nervously. “Hurry up! We can’t stop here; this is black pudding country!”

  Alex raises his jug again. “After you.”

&nb
sp; “It was much easier in the club,” Dick complains after a minute, as they round the street corner and head for where he’s left his car.

  “Did it occur to you that if you go to a club and chat someone up, there’s a good chance that they’re there to pull? Or to serve a minor reminder of their pull-ability on their boyfriend?” Alex has been thinking about this subject a lot lately.

  “Bah.” Dick raises his car key and pings the button to open the doors on his Porsche Boxster. “Hey, these won’t fit under the bonnet . . .”

  “So? Put ’em behind the seats.” Alex walks around to the passenger side and begins to load his jugs into the back of the sports car.

  “But if they leak—”

  “You’ll just get blood on the carpet. Right?”

  “Ah, fuck it. Okay, next stop: the office.”

  Alex glances out of the windscreen nervously. There are still a couple of hours to go until sunrise, but this is London, and the traffic is capricious and potentially deadly to vampires. “Hit it. I can’t wait to try this . . .”

  • • •

  LATER:

  “Aaaugh.”

  “Jesus fuck, that was disgusting!”

  “Gurrrrgh. Aaaugh.” (Spitting sounds.)

  “Have you finished there?”

  “Gimme a minute, I need to floss my teeth. Again. That was gross.”

  “How are we scoring?”

  “Nil for three. Pigs, don’t make me puke. Cows, essence of fragrant bullshit. Sheep, well . . . I kind of like mutton, but not like that, you know?”

  “And the black pudding . . .”

  “Tastes a lot better deep-fried, doesn’t it?”

  “You are not shitting me. Um. That leaves the goat, and the control sample. Um. Oh dear.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I don’t know. Are you thinking, goats are kind of like sheep with bad attitude? I’m not a fucking chupacabra, man. And maybe we should use the control sample just to be sure that, well, you know . . .”

  “Blood works?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, too.”

  “Okay. Let’s see, we get about two teaspoons each: human blood, two hours old.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Oh.” (Pause.) “Well, fuck me sideways.”

  “It just did, didn’t it? Oh man, I’ve got to sit down. I feel weak at the knees.”

  “Wow.”

  “You know what this means, of course.”

  “We just ruled out the main vertebrates, haven’t we? Of course, it might be because the donors are dead, but . . .”

  “You want us to go find ourselves a farm and suck on a live sheep?”

  “We could, but I’m not getting a good-idea vibe from that thought. Let’s put it on the to-do list.”

  “You can if you want to, but I’m getting a feeling that it’s got to be live human blood, all the way. How about you?”

  (Sigh.) “Well, fuck.”

  • • •

  “SUMMARY: THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED.”

  Mhari has the baton (actually a chrome-plated blue laser pointer), the stopwatch, and the whiteboard: she’s running this as a sprint review meeting for Oscar, who sits in the hemispheric Evil Overlord chair opposite the far end of the boardroom table.

  “Evan. What did you and Alex learn from JESUS STUFF?”

  Evan stands, glances down at his tablet. “We can enter churches. Crosses and religious symbols have no effect on us. I took holy communion without any ill effects. I was unable to acquire a sample of holy water, but I think we can reasonably expect it to have no effect. We tested a Church of England church, a Roman Catholic cathedral, a Reform Jewish synagogue, and a Jehovah’s Witness meeting room. If you want us to continue, Alex and I have identified a mosque and a Sikh temple, but we’ll need a pretext or disguise. Oh, and afterwards we ate out—Italian, with garlic bread as a starter.”

  He looks at Mhari expectantly. Mhari, for her part, takes a green Post-it note and plants it on the whiteboard, under the DONE column adjacent to the JESUS STUFF row. She smiles happily. “Strike one!” She turns to Janice. “What about BLOOD BANK?”

  “This is going to take a while. Short version: Oh God, yes, human blood. Unfortunately getting it isn’t going to be as easy as walking into a hematology lab and walking out with a six-pack. Blood is expensive enough that it’s ordered centrally on a named-patient basis. On the other hand, it turns out we don’t need much of it, and, oh my god, it’s lovely. Let me see . . .”

  Janice runs through her checklist and Mhari adds new Post-it notes in exciting shades of magenta and cyan to the whiteboard under the TO DO and TESTING columns. Finally Janice runs down, reserves of information sucked dry. Evan maintains a leathery silence throughout, punctuated by significant glances in the direction of Oscar, whose expression is one of distant longing, almost hunger. Mhari’s expression, too, is fixed. They’d shared the final sample tube, enough to confirm its importance.

  “Blood.” Mhari nods to herself. “Thank you, Janice. So I guess this means we’re back to hitting on the cleaning staff or getting creative with the, uh, mind control thing. John, Dick: did you get any endurance and scope metrics from your experiments?”

  “I’ll take this.” John gives Dick a warning look, but Dick merely slouches in his chair, an expression of feline bliss on his saggy face. (He is clearly sleep-deprived and unshaven.) “Dick pulled,” he announces. “Two nights running. In fact, on our first time out Dick walked straight past the bouncers at Vertigo 42 dressed as he is now”—a ripple of disbelief runs around the room—“then walked up to a Russian oligarch, out-stared his bodyguards, and asked the guy’s mistress, quote, ‘Hey, babe, how about we go and play Mr. Policeman Hides His Truncheon?’ Unquote. Yes, he scored.” John is visibly quivering with outrage at this affront to his imagination. “On the way out, he, um, he picked up an aspiring model as well.”

  Dick yawns, stretches his arms above his head, and shakes his head. “All it takes is imagining that I’m Austin Powers. Sheer animal magnetism. Hey, baby!” He looks smug. “They were looking for action: I just upped my visibility.”

  From brown dwarf to supernova by the look of it, Alex thinks. “Did you take them home?” he asks.

  “Do I look stupid? I took them to Claridge’s! On Mr. Petrov’s dime.” He grunts. “Bodyguards turning up on my doorstep the next morning: do not want.”

  Janice shakes her head. “It’s the fucking end times,” she husks. “Dick scoring.”

  “Anything else?” Mhari adds sharply.

  “Yeah.” John looks pensive. “I went back to check an hour later. They tried to keep it discreet, but there was a bit of a heated argument and the bouncers, the bodyguards, and Mr. Petrov all went home in ambulances. I don’t know exactly what Dick told them to do to each other when they got in his face, but this mind control mojo needs a light touch.”

  “I got the blood samples by telling the duty hematologist to draw the samples from her own left arm and give them to me,” Janice adds. “If I’d told her to cut her wrist, I’m not sure she wouldn’t have done it.”

  Mhari adds another green Post-it to the board, against BRAINWASHING. She turns back to the table. “Dick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stand on your head, please. In the corner. Right now.”

  Dick sits where he is and stares at her quizzically. “Make me.”

  “Go and—” Mhari’s eyes narrow. Then she glances at John.

  “We seem to be immune. I told Dick not to do it but he wasn’t listening . . .”

  “You were right, though: they were too bony. And they didn’t like each other at all. I could tell.”

  “Animal!”

  “Dyke.”

 
“That’s enough, children!” Mhari raises her voice and Dick and Janice succumb to an aggrieved, resentful silence. But Mhari is watching Oscar: his displeasure is muted for now, but evident. Now he stands and clears his throat.

  “Policy directive. We seem to have considerable scope for, ah, making friends and influencing people, people. And also for doing them damage. I don’t think that’s a good idea because, leaving all questions of morality aside, it’s likely to draw attention to us. And as for questions of morality—” Janice stares daggers at Dick. “What you did is borderline indistinguishable from date rape. So—”

  “Hey, they were on the pull!” Dick protests.

  “Nevertheless, I’ll thank you to not do that. Obviously there are exceptions—if someone tries to mug you on your way to work, for example, or starts asking questions about what the Scrum is doing this week—but you will avoid using this particular talent for trivial ends, or in public. Am I understood?” Everybody nods. Even Dick, although his expression is mutinous. “Are there any questions?”

  Janice’s hand goes up. “Blood,” she says simply.

  “We’ll get to it when we loop back to planning, after the retrospective. Are you okay with that?” He stares at her.

  “Copacetic,” she mutters bitterly.

  “Good.” Oscar sits down. “Back to you, Mhari . . .”

  “Okay!” Mhari beams at the Scrum. Her crimson lip gloss glistens beneath the spotlights. “Quickly, PROTECTIVE CLOTHING and LATEX MASKS. Direct sunlight burns us within seconds. I’m talking third-degree burns here, very nasty stuff. You do not want to shine a UV torch on your skin, either: we’re photosensitive. We can see in the dark, and I notice everyone’s got constricted pupils in office lighting conditions. On the other hand, we heal really fast. A one-millimeter deep cut in the skin actually heals in about an hour without scarring. Burns, similarly. That which does not kill us seems not to harm us too badly. And clothing—anything that blocks the sunlight—works fine.”

  Mhari takes a step back and raises her skirt to flash her left knee. “Look.” She’s wearing opaque black tights. “I stuck my leg in a sunbeam. After about a minute it was tingling and painful, but that’s all. I exposed the back of my wrist to the same sunbeam and had a first-degree burn, with blistering, after two seconds. So it doesn’t take much fabric.” She smoothes down her skirt, then picks up a carrier bag from beside her chair. “So then I went looking for an emergency kit, and I came up with this.” She reaches into the bag and pulls out a mass of black fabric. “This is a jilbab, with niqab—that’s the face-veil—and gloves. The only skin it doesn’t cover is the eyes.” She rummages in the bottom of the bag and pulls out a pair of wrap-around shades: “And that’s what these are for. It’s not much fun, but I walked about for a quarter of an hour in daylight yesterday and I only got burned on the bridge of my nose. I recommend we all get two of these, and keep one by our desk and one at home as emergency escape kits. Sorry, gents, I know it doesn’t go with your self-image, but look at it this way: blood-sucking bankers in burkhas could be next summer’s hot new fashion!”