Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  “Right.” Oscar carefully rearranges her clothing and switches arms. “She doesn’t seem well,” he adds, mildly concerned. “Did you notice that?”

  “The shaking? Yes.” Mhari assembles the cannula, sample tubes, and tourniquet in silent concentration. “I don’t see how it matters.”

  “That’s the second one I’ve seen,” Oscar says, almost absent-mindedly.

  “Second what?”

  “The second subject. With the shakes.”

  “There’s probably a bug doing the rounds,” Mhari reassures him as she slides the needle in, searching for a vein.

  She grits her teeth and suppresses a shudder of erotic longing as the first sample tube begins to fill with blue-tinged venous blood.

  “Does it make you wet?” Oscar asks abruptly.

  Mhari stares at him over their sleeping donor’s head, then glances in the direction of his crotch. It’s a moment she’s been anticipating for weeks, the crossing of a delicious Rubicon. “Does it give you a hard-on?” she replies. She meets his gaze directly, then smiles and pulls back her lips so that he can see what they conceal. The pulse in his throat is fast. What took you so long? she wonders. “It’s better than sex.” She shivers.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Oscar says slowly. “I haven’t compared it directly to sex with one of our kind. Have you noticed that humans are less interesting these days?”

  “Wait.” Mhari forces herself to focus on the syringe. “Actually, yes I have. Take this.” She swaps out the sample tube and passes him the full one. “Sorry. Where were we?” Do you mean to follow through or are you going to chicken out?

  “We were discussing . . .”

  He’s married. Probably hasn’t propositioned anyone in years. Scared of harassment lawsuits and the bill for the divorce settlement. Do I always have to do the heavy lifting? “My place or yours?”

  “I was thinking in terms of a hotel? But first”—he raises the tube—“a toast. To health, life, and wealth!”

  • • •

  AFTER THEY RELIEVE SARA THE CLEANER OF APPROXIMATELY 100ml of blood—a third of a unit, so little that she’ll barely notice it—Mhari and Oscar leave her sleeping soundly in Oscar’s chair and head for the car park. Discreet decorum is observed until they’re behind the tinted windows of Oscar’s Panamera. Then they lean shoulder-to-shoulder and exchange a kiss tainted with a new and breathtaking scent that makes them both shudder. From which moment it runs forward as if on rails.

  Oscar’s self-restraint is superhuman. He imposes it on Mhari, even though she’s shaking slightly with anticipation. He stays outwardly calm and collected as he drives into Mayfair, drops the keys in a valet’s hand, walks up to the front desk at Claridge’s, and says: “I’d like the best suite you’ve got for the night.” Mhari tumbles along in his wake, trying to hold herself together. I’m melting! she thinks. Something in the blood has gotten to her. Then the door on one of the Linley Suites closes behind them and he turns to face her, and the frenzied animals come out.

  About two hours later, tired and raw and sticky, Mhari comes to in the middle of the wreckage of a king-sized bed. She’s almost but not entirely naked—Oscar turned out to be a stockings man. He’s naked, too, lying on his back, snoring. She reaches out and wraps one hand possessively around his still-erect cock. She’s been working towards this moment for weeks: happily, it turned out to be much more fun than she’d expected. The snore turns to a groan and as he pulls away she notices that his penis is redder than the rest of his skin. Is that blood? she wonders. Or is he sore? She, too, aches: but she enjoyed getting there. She’s thirsty again, she realizes. “Hey, big boy.” She punches him gently in the side. “Wake up.”

  “Um. Uh.” He opens his eyes and stares at her. If she’d been dressed, his look would make her feel naked; as it is, it makes her feel stripped to the bone. It’s a predator’s expression, innocent and deadly. Then he spoils it by cracking a dazed schoolboy smile. “That was wild!” Mhari is about to glare at him in disappointment but he recovers his poise within a couple of seconds. “I would kill for a drink.” He rolls on his side. “And I need a shower. How about you?”

  “There are a couple of shots of blood in my bag. We can hit room service for food. Shower first?” She strips off her stockings and they move into the living room of the suite, ignore the dressing table set with a welcome bottle of Laurent-Perrier champagne, and head straight to the marble bathroom with its huge walk-in shower and whirlpool bath. There’s room for two in the shower. “That was something else going on,” she murmurs thoughtfully, as he rubs soapy water across her skin. She can feel every square millimeter; she’s acutely, preternaturally sensitive.

  “It’s the smell of”—he kisses her shoulder—“the red stuff.”

  Mhari shudders and closes her eyes. It’s true. If drinking blood is an erotic experience, then sex under the influence is like . . . She fails to think of a suitable simile. Coke doesn’t even come close. The impulse to push him against the wall and fuck him in the shower is almost overpowering, despite the aches. “It’s addictive,” she says finally.

  “Yes. Which is problematic.” The icy chill of his intellect is returning. There isn’t very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn’t get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control. He’s not one for casual workplace flings, which makes her triumph all the sweeter. “Because, yes, we need it. Which is a weakness.”

  “You’re thinking of the pawns.” She leans against him.

  “Yes. I’m not planning to ditch them,” he adds carefully. “Not yet.”

  “Not unless they become a liability.” She turns inside his arms and begins to massage his shoulders and spine with the soap. Their lips meet, briefly. “Am I a liability, Oscar?”

  “You’re not a pawn. A queen, maybe.” His penis—he’s forty and he hasn’t gone soft! Amazing!—pushes gently against the side of her thigh. “You understand the value of keeping secrets.” She wraps one hand around his balls, feeling them tighten as she strokes.

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” she says, before she can think to censor herself. Then she realizes something else. “Oh, that’s odd.”

  “What is?” He’s instantly alert, sensitive to her perturbation.

  “I’m not supposed to be able to talk about it.” She leans against him and kisses him greedily to shut him up, covering her faux pas. But it’s too much fun; one thing leads to another and she moans and bites his shoulder as he slides inside her again. Blood. But it tastes wrong. There’s nothing sexy about Oscar’s circulatory fluid. He’s biting her now, then pulling away, disappointed. They continue to fuck, but the magic is leaking out of it, swirling down the shower drain with a thin red trail of soap suds. It’s just ordinary mammalian humping, enjoyable but nothing to set her hair on fire and make her scream until the windows explode. And Oscar feels it, too, because after a minute he stops and slides away, slowly detumescing.

  Back in the bedroom, Mhari rummages through the discarded bedding for her handbag. The four remaining sample tubes are fine: she pulls a couple and holds one out to Oscar. As he takes it she pops the lid on her own and raises it. “Your—hang on, this is skunked.” Her nose wrinkles in disgust. She examines the tube closely: “It smells wrong.”

  Oscar unseals his and takes a sip. His expression of distaste speaks volumes. “Want to try the others?”

  It takes Mhari less than a minute to determine that all the other sample tubes are spoiled. Not clotted or rotten: whatever previously made the contents so enticing has vanished, leaving only rancid red meat-juice behind. “This hasn’t happened before,” she observes.

  “Well, we’ll just have to hit room service, won’t we?” Oscar towels himself dry. “For food and drink.” He watches with detached amusement as Mhari collects her scattered clothes. “Unless you’d like to dine out?”

  “I didn’t b
ring my glad rags; room service will do just fine.” She goes in search of the room service directory as Oscar begins to dress.

  Later, over Kobe steaks flown in from Osaka that morning (with discreet tubes of blood donated by the bellhop as a digestif), Oscar asks her the question she’s been worrying about. “What exactly aren’t you supposed to talk about?” he asks.

  “I”—I can talk, Mhari realizes, surprised—“before the Bank, I worked for a, a rather secret division of the civil service. I was”—allowed to leave, classified as a liability—“allowed to transition to the private sector, but they have these, uh, brainwashing-like capabilities that operate like our ability to, you know, that make it impossible to talk about what you did there without their permission, and I was, obviously, not able to talk about them . . . before.” Her head’s spinning. I shouldn’t be able to say this stuff, she tells herself. How can I say this stuff? The geas, does vampirism defeat it?

  “What?” Oscar looks puzzled. “What sort of stuff did they do?”

  Her fork pauses, a blood-tinted slice of rare steak impaled upon the moment of the present. “They’re the branch of the secret intelligence services that deals with occult threats. Like us.”

  “They’re the—” Oscar stops. “No. I’m not going to say you’re crazy.” He chuckles briefly, then a dyspeptic frown steals all sign of amusement from his face. “We’re fucking vampires, of course there’s going to be a government department. It’s in the rules.” He peers at her intently. “What did you do for this agency?”

  “Admin and management. HR dogsbody.” She resumes eating, feeling her pulse slow towards normality again. “I saw, uh, something I shouldn’t have. When I was at university. They’ve got a habit of picking up witnesses and finding make-work for them to keep them under observation for a while. Sometimes for life. I was there for three or four years. God it was tedious. Eventually they figured I wasn’t a practitioner and they could let me go under a compulsion to keep my trap shut. They even sorted out a bunch of job interviews for me—there’s a standard exit procedure.”

  “You said, practitioner. You mean we’re muggles? Something like that?”

  Oscar and Pippa have spawned, so they’ve clearly been exposed to the Harry Potter virus along the way. Mhari frowns minutely. “It doesn’t work quite like that.” She thinks for a moment. “There’s not a huge gap between what their practitioners do and what our pigs get up to. They have a saying, magic is a branch of applied mathematics.” Her eyes widen as she drops her fork. “Oh. Shit. Excuse me.” She covers her mouth.

  “Oh shit indeed.” Oscar takes a deep breath. “Well, that changes a lot of things. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “Because I couldn’t! I didn’t know I could talk about it!” Her barely exaggerated distress is sufficiently obvious that Oscar feels compelled to do the gentlemanly thing, offering her a linen napkin to use as a tissue. She dabs at her eyes, then pushes her plate away. “I don’t feel hungry. I feel stupid.”

  “Our ability to control ordinary people’s minds doesn’t affect one another,” Oscar notes. “If this organization’s grip on you works the same way—”

  “That would explain everything.” She reaches for her tube of sang de sommelier and knocks it back in a desperate shot. “Oh! This stuff helps me think. Isn’t that stupid? It makes everything clearer.” She stares at Oscar across the ruins of dinner. “I’ve been trying to steer you away from doing anything that I thought would attract their attention, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to come for us sooner or later. I’ve been working on a plan, but being able to tell you about them will make things much easier.” She takes a deep breath. “What we did with the board. Think of it as a dress rehearsal. The stakes next time will be much sharper . . .”

  “Then we’ll just have to be ready for them, won’t we? At least we’ll be forewarned and forearmed when your Men in Black pay us a call.” Oscar very deliberately raises the other tube to his lips, uncaps it, and swallows. He shudders very slightly as he puts it down and focusses on her. “But first—”

  They don’t even make it to the bedroom this time.

  • • •

  SARA’S BODY RECLINES IN OSCAR’S CHAIR, SLOWLY COOLING, for nearly three hours after his and Mhari’s departure. That’s how long it takes for her supervisor, annoyed by her failure to report back, to go searching for her. Eva, the supervisor, is so wrapped up in her own timekeeping concerns that she angrily hectors Sara’s body for nearly thirty seconds before she becomes concerned at the corpse’s lack of response and tries to wake her.

  The ambulance crew arrive to take her away at one in the morning. The cleaning services duty manager arrives to give the upset supervisor a talking-to half an hour after that, but he reluctantly concedes that there’s more to this business than meets the eye. The cleaning services company has no alternative but to recognize that three employees have died on the job this month, in this particular client’s office, working nights. And while once is happenstance, and twice might be coincidence, three times is sick building syndrome.

  A memo is prepared for circulation the next day. And gears begin to turn . . .

  7.

  CODE BLUE

  MO IS STILL AWAY ON BUSINESS THE NEXT MORNING. I GO IN TO work early and run into Pete, who has a list of questions three times as long as my left arm (the good one), mostly about what I’d do with MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY if it was clogging up my to-do list.

  “It’s well past its sell-by date,” he complains over his morning coffee. “I mean, it’s embarrassing! They may be valuable cultural artifacts from the 1970s but there’s no AM radio network to plug those sixteen rpm record players into anymore. The posters . . . no. And don’t get me started on the pamphlet! It’s straight out of the Jack Chick school of government communications—if I showed up at synod with a scheme to get bums on pews that relied on that type of paternalist nanny-knows-best approach, I’d, well, I’d be taken aside for tea, biscuits, and a serious talking-to about the history of marketing communications since the Mad Men era.”

  “Well fine,” I say, interrupting him in full flow. “Can you write a report explaining what’s wrong with it? Main conclusions on the first page, plus supplementary stuff and footnotes?”

  “Um, I don’t see why not! Why?”

  “Because it’d be a good starting point.” I take a sip of my coffee: it’s still too hot to drink, and I burn the roof of my mouth. “Do that first, then we can sit down and brainstorm what a public education campaign ought to look like in the era of WikiLeaks and Reddit. Oh, and Arsebook for the unwashed masses.” (Like most other Laundry employees, I shun Facebook: their wheedling attempts to encourage personal disclosure are, shall we say, inimical to the core values of this organization.) “Stuff like, oh, adding ‘how to tell if your neighbors are zombies’ to the NHS Direct website, how to improvise a field-expedient basilisk gun from a pair of webcams, and so on. Disguised as background material for a role-playing game in case it leaks prematurely and we need plausible deniability—”

  The phone rings. It’s Dr. Wills, and she’s very unhappy.

  Unhappy?

  No, she’s livid.

  “Mr. Howard!” she snaps. “I don’t know what you’re bloody playing with over there but I’ve just spent the past twelve hours digging through medical records and if this is your fault it’s a disaster, and if it isn’t your fault we’ve got a major-incident grade emergency on our hands—”

  “Wait,” I choke out, “we’re talking about the, the report I brought round yesterday?”

  “What else would we be talking about?”

  My jaw flaps uselessly. See, it’s the sudden cognitive whiplash that does it. One moment you’re cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you’re in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard
engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emergency if you’re not primed to expect it, and so far this morning I’ve been trying to think my way into Pete’s problem space, which is really just a training-wheels situation. Pete, for his part, is looking at me as if my head’s begun spinning round spouting ectoplasm and he’s wondering if an exorcism is called for. I wave a hand at him, then try to get a grip on myself. Dr. Wills is still talking when I finally get my voice back. “What exactly have you turned up?” I ask.

  “Bodies. Are you people responsible for them?”

  “No, I just went looking on a hunch.” I take a deep breath. “How many of that cluster were false positives?”

  “None of them. I think you’d better come round here right now, Mr. Howard. We’re going to need to know everything you know if we’re going to contain this outbreak.”

  I make a snap decision. “I’ll be round within two hours. With backup. Please don’t go public until we’ve spoken, for any reason at all.”

  Then I hang up, and quickly dial another number, the duty officer’s desk line.

  “Bob Howard speaking. As a result of information I have just received, I am declaring Code Blue, Code Blue, Code Blue. This is not a drill.” I have never said those words before, in the decade-plus I’ve worked for the Laundry. “I need the emergency first response team to meet me in Briefing Room 201 in fifteen minutes. I’m heading up there right now, and I will be going off-site in an hour. Bye.” I hang up.

  “What does Code Blue mean?” Pete asks curiously.