Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  “How am I to know that this is not some trap?” the tomb’s occupant asks, a trifle querulously.

  “Don’t be silly!” Old George finally snaps. “How long have we known each other?”

  “Sixty-eight years too long, if you ask me.” There is a pause in the conversation. “Never mind. If they’re truly ascended but ignorant they will be easy prey. If they’re not ignorant—well, we shall deal with that contingency if it arises. But mark my words, George, I resent this. Why can’t you send your bloody-handed catspaw to take care of them?”

  “Because she’s about as subtle as a battalion of Cossacks and, as I intimated, they have already come to the attention of the people you hide among.”

  “Bah. So you decided to dump your problem in my lap.”

  “It’s our problem, old enemy. We have the same stake in its speedy resolution.”

  “Be that as it may . . . there’ll be a price. You’re asking me to risk my own skin.”

  “D’you think I don’t know that? Think of a price. Then name it. This lack of trust is unbecoming!”

  There is silence, for a while. Then: “Your lady executioner. Lend her to me.”

  Old George tenses. “I think you misapprehend the degree of control I exert over her.”

  “Really? You created her, didn’t you?” The other’s tone is light, almost mocking.

  “Yes, but she’s not mine to command,” George admits.

  “What? She’s not a minion? Did you turn—”

  “Certainly not! But her utility depends upon her retaining the illusion of free will. And upon certain other delicate conditioning. She’s like a very sharp Japanese sword with no guard—if your fingers slip—”

  “Yes-yes, you’ll cut yourself, I understand. Ahem. Why, may I ask, did you create such an uncontrollable and dangerous tool?”

  “Because, like you, I am a creature out of time and a fish out of water. This is not our century. We live among strangers who have replaced the people we knew in our youth. For my first century, buried in my research, I barely noticed the changes—but after the Great War it became clear that I could no longer move unnoticed among the common herd. (Nor, I imagine, can you.) So I have made it a habit to forge a new tool every decade or two, taking the bright metal of youth and hardening and shaping it: she is merely my latest and deadliest.”

  “By tool, you mean predator.”

  “Yes, of course. And she is very good at it, isn’t she?”

  “You know I am immune to her particular methodology. Your black widow.”

  “Yes. But you are not the type of prey this hunter is trained for.”

  “Whereas our current irritant is, for the most part. So lend her to me!”

  “Not unless you tell me why you want her. As I said, she’s as subtle as a battalion of Cossacks.”

  “Yes. You did say that. That’s why I want her.”

  “You need a decoy?”

  (There is a pause.) “Yes.”

  “Very well, then. I shall send you her file. But I must caution you. Firstly, if you break her you will provide me with a suitable replacement. Secondly, I have installed a safety catch: you will not be able to use her against me. And finally . . . remember that this blade has no guard.”

  “I assure you I shall heed those warnings. Good-bye, George. May we not meet again for a very long time.”

  Old George freezes in place for a few seconds, staring at the doorway. Then he darts forward, limbs blurring in motion, and grabs something from behind the lintel before he ducks aside and rolls, presenting the Kevlar-lined back of his coat to the opening.

  The explosion he half-expects fails to happen. After a few seconds he stands and dusts himself down, before examining the contents of his palm. Exposed wires and a compact speaker gleam in the bloody after-midnight glow reflecting from the clouds.

  George nods at the empty tomb, acknowledging his old enemy’s willingness to learn new tricks. A decade or two ago it would have been a bomb on a wire; now it’s a remote speaker, doubtless on a line to a mobile phone buried in the bushes. He turns and strides back the way he came.

  His rival is satisfyingly canny. Younger and weaker than George, but more flexible and willing to experiment with new techniques, he has once more declined to present his throat to his elder’s knife. At the same time he has offered his cooperation. Which means there is a truce, at least for the now.

  The law states that whenever two vampires meet, only one shall live. The youngsters in the bank are ignorant of the law; but ignorance is no defense. And soon they will learn about it the hard way.

  • • •

  I THINK I’M READY FOR IT—FOR THE USUAL AFTER-MISSION crash and subsequent messy, shaky, calm-down—when Mo awakens, screaming and choking for breath, in the middle of the night. But this time I couldn’t be more wrong.

  This is the pattern of our domestic life: that we keep each other sane. Mo and I both run errands for the Laundry.

  I tend to be sent to investigate problems and work out what’s going wrong: Why are there too many concrete cows in Milton Keynes, why a livery stable on a farm in Sussex is ordering fifty kilos of offal a day from the local abattoir, that sort of thing. Yes, these jobs sometimes blow up in my face and give me nightmares for years afterwards, but that’s all part of the rich tapestry of life.

  But Mo’s job is different: she gets sent to troubleshoot problems that have already exploded.

  Normally she divides her working week between lecturing in mathematics at one of London University’s better-known colleges, and practicing with her violin. But once in a while she’s called upon to pick up the violin, go somewhere, and fiddle until blood trickles from her fingertips. She does not play happy highland jigs. That damned instrument—and the word “damned” is an accurate description, not an expletive—is one of the organization’s nastier assets. They placed it in her custody nearly a decade ago because she had an aptitude for the violin as an instrument (it used to be her hobby: when she was in her teens she briefly considered attending a music academy, but mathematics and philosophy won the toss), and she understands the eldritch mathematics used to describe the harmonics it is capable of achieving. Not many people can use an Erich Zahn instrument effectively. And even fewer can do it for any length of time without ending up in a padded cell.

  So: after I get some food down her throat (not to mention half a bottle of wine) I run a bath for her, and make small-talk about office gossip. She’s pretty tired so after she dries herself off and starts yawning I accompany her to the bedroom. She gets into bed and at first leans the violin case against her side of the mattress, but then rolls over and lifts the thing onto the duvet and curls around it, for all the world as if it’s a teddy bear. I turn out the lights and wrap myself around her, spooning protectively, and within a couple of minutes she begins to snore.

  I lie awake for a while. It’s not that I’m not tired, but the violin is creeping me out. I can sense it, bony and hard-edged and hot. When I close my eyes I can’t help seeing with that other, inner eye. With my eyes closed, I can see through Mo—human, warm, breathing softly, occasionally shifting against me—and through the case to the bony horror within. It’s red and raw and pulses slowly, and I swear the thing is looking right back at me. It’s not like sharing a bed with a teddy bear—more like a rabid attack dog who tolerates my presence only because the owner it is obsessively in thrall to is lying unconscious between us.

  The violin doesn’t like me. The violin has never liked me. I think the only reason it puts up with me is because of what I do for Mo. And if I ever stop doing it . . .

  “Aaagh! Can’t! Can’t! . . .”

  Mo sits bolt-upright in bed, making choking noises and wheezing.

  Somehow, despite the presence of the instrument, I managed to drift off to sleep. As she wakes up in the grip of her night terror she yanks the bedd
ing away from both of us, and I thrash around, turning away from her as I try to pull myself back from the edge of deep dream-sleep. I am naturally scared witless by the choking thing and I make a couple of grabs for the bedside light before I succeed in turning it on to push back the darkness. Then I sit up and put an arm round her shoulders. She’s stopped choking but she’s breathing frantically fast, and I can feel her pulse hammering.

  “Mo?” I say inanely: “Are you all right? Mo!”

  After a moment she manages to nod. I stroke her spine and upper back, shoulder blades and ribs: she’s as tense as a tow-rope under load, still breathing too fast. I keep stroking and rubbing, and after a minute she suddenly twists her upper body and wraps her left arm around me, burying her face in the cleft between my shoulder and the side of my neck. Then the sobbing starts.

  (I notice with distaste that she is still holding onto the violin case’s handle with her right hand twisted behind her, but I don’t dare try to detach it from her grip at this point.)

  We sit there awkwardly for some time, holding each other while she sobs her heart out by dead of night. I feel helpless, and it’s awful: I’m hugging my wife, vibrant, alive, and lovely; but she’s in pain and I can do nothing to help relieve her agony except to be here, waiting for the memory abscess to burst and release whatever festering vileness has been poisoning her dreams. It feels wrong. And we’re being watched all the time by the jealous attack dog on the bed behind her, chewing on the stump of its tail, thinking mad thoughts, waiting for me to let down my guard or for Mo to lose her temper with me.

  Finally Mo sighs, then sniffs, then sniffs yet again. “It was an exorcism,” she tells me.

  I cautiously reach behind me for the bedside table, hunting with my fingertips for a box of tissues—I miss, and they go spilling across the floor. “Do you want to blow your nose?” I ask. Yes, it was an exorcism. Clearly the exorcism went badly. I realize with a sense of further foreboding that the Iranian secret police wouldn’t have requested foreign assistance for anything they could deal with using their own resources, but I don’t say that. She’ll tell me when it’s time.

  “Kleenex.” Sniff. Her death-grip on my back relaxes. “Do we still have that single malt I like, the special Glenmorangie one? Would you be a dear and fetch it?”

  “Will you be all right?”

  She nods. I get a good look at her: her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy and her nose is dripping like a three-year-old who’s just been told that Santa doesn’t exist. But she’s awake, and getting a handle on whatever it was that woke her up. Which doesn’t bode well for getting back to sleep.

  • • •

  ELSEWHERE IN LONDON ANOTHER WOMAN WAKES ALONE IN A cold and empty bed, to hear a telephone ringing elsewhere in her apartment.

  She’s a light sleeper, and the ringtone in question belongs to a land line that her employer provided. Its demands are never to be ignored. The bell rings: she salivates. And on this occasion finds herself already fully awake and halfway down the hall, pistol in hand, before the third ring.

  The phone manages another ring before she gets to it, in the living room. “Speaking,” she says tensely. Only one man has the number for this line, and a black box routes all random robocallers into a maze of twisty little voice mail boxes lest they annoy her; consequently, it only rings when her employer has a task for her.

  “Marianne, your employer gave me your number.”

  The adrenalin spike triggered by these words makes her shudder from the tips of her toes to the ends of her blonde ponytail. She carefully places the pistol on the sideboard beside the phone base station, then clenches her fist. “Really?”

  “Yes.” The midnight caller sounds slightly amused. Going by the tone of voice, he’s male—although there are devices for obscuring that. “George mentioned some instructions he gave you for this contingency.”

  The woman who calls herself Marianne shudders again, then repeats her long-memorized line: “What time of night do you call this?”

  “The witching hour.” Which is the correct counter-phrase.

  “I’m not a witch.” Which is a statement of fact, and not a password.

  “I know. George told me all about you. How many vampires have you taken this year?”

  Marianne raises her right hand to her mouth and bites the top joint of her thumb, quite hard. “Only one.” Quiet frustration. “Are you a vampire? Are you looking for a date?” She lives in hope. Although any sane vampire who knows what she is will think twice before flirting with her.

  “Let’s just say I’m playing matchmaker.” He sounds drily amused. She clutches the phone tightly, trying not to get her hopes up despite the thrill of anticipation. “I have a number of candidates in mind for you, if you’d like to meet them. At least five, possibly more.”

  “Oh! Yes.” She almost goes weak at the knees. “Yes, of course!” It sounds better than she could possibly have imagined; what’s the catch? “Why so many?”

  “An, ah, nest has come to our attention. George is otherwise occupied, so . . .”

  She puts two and two together. “You’re his old playmate, aren’t you? The one that got away!” She manages to suppress a girlish squeal of delight. “The one he keeps grumbling about!”

  “He grumbles about me? I had no idea. I’m flattered! But that’s as may be. George agreed to loan your services to me in pursuit of this, ah, common goal. You can confirm this, by the way. Call him up. Set your mind at ease.”

  “I’m always at ease!”

  “I’m delighted to hear it. Anyway. To the task in hand: we will have to work closely together. I can assist you in isolating the targets, but the actual, ah—”

  “Kiss.”

  “Yes, the kiss is entirely up to you. The first couple should be easy enough to steal, but thereafter we will have to make them come to us.”

  “You’ll bring them to me,” she says breathily, her heart pounding.

  “I can’t do that if you try to, ah, kiss me,” he says. “But I am old and ugly and these are virile young bucks from the City . . .”

  She takes a deep breath. “For five or six dates in a row I’ll happily do what you want.” It’s been so long, she silently adds.

  “Excellent.” Her caller purrs. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Click.

  The line goes dead. She replaces the receiver, then stares at it wistfully. There’s an unaccustomed warmth in her belly, a tremulous hope emerging. Whoever her caller is, Old George would not have lightly given him her number, which means this is certainly the real thing.

  She is a fetishist of the type known to the very few people who study such recondite, occult perversions as a Fang Fucker. Old George found her and carefully trained and polished her; it is her delight and her pleasure to serve whenever he sends her on a date. But the past year has been a cold and lonely one, a famine of the flesh. She has been haunted by the nagging fear that her employer has tired of her, that she’s doomed to the same future as an aging call girl whose clientele have dried up.

  But now . . .

  A nest. At least five! Be still my beating heart.

  • • •

  LEAVING MO SOBBING IN THE BEDROOM, I HEAD DOWNSTAIRS, grab a couple of tumblers, and rummage around the bottle rack for the single malt in question. (The bottle’s still about half-full: neither of us is fond of drinking alone, which is a good thing.) I find a spare box of tissues on the kitchen worktop and hook it on a little finger, then take the stairs back up to the bedroom two at a time—but I needn’t have bothered; Mo is moist but composed, if a bit fragile-looking.

  “Here,” I say, shaking the box of tissues loose over her lap: “I’ll pour.” I put the glasses down, uncork the bottle, and serve up a couple of uneven double-fingers of whisky. Mo gets the marginally taller tumbler once she finishes dabbing at her eyes—the bloody violin is leaning against her bedsi
de table and she’s let go of it, hallelujah—and I get back into bed beside her and plump up the pillows so we’ve got something to lean against. “You don’t have to talk about it unless you want to.”

  She sips thoughtfully at the amber liquid. Her hair’s a mess of twisted locks, almost in dreads: still coppery-red, although much of that comes from a bottle these days. Evidently wearing a headscarf disagrees with it, and she hasn’t had the time or energy to untangle it. “Maybe some good will come of it,” she says quietly. “They’ll have to stop the mass executions.”

  “The—” I bite my tongue. Then I take an incautiously large sip from my own glass. Gears crunch in my head: she’s back from Iran. In the past few years, since the Arab Spring and the Green uprising that failed, the always-dependably-draconian regime has been going mad. So mad that our own Conservative government (catch phrase: hang ’em and flog ’em), who have hitherto been enthusiastically rendering all due assistance to the Iranian heroin traffic interdiction cops through the usual international police intelligence channels, have been backing away and muttering about not going too far, chaps. “What happened?” I ask, queasily curious.

  “CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN strikes again.” Mo sips at her whisky, clutching the tumbler in both hands to steady it. And my heart sinks.

  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the end of the world, more or less. Magic is a side effect of computation, and we’re building too damn many microprocessors into too damn many toys these days—worse, we can’t stop; civilization will fall apart if we don’t have singing Christmas cards and intelligent gas meters, apparently. But there are other sources of computation. Human brains are computing machines par excellence, and the more of them there are, the more thaumaturgic processor cycles we produce. The whole thing is a runaway positive-feedback loop; while the demographic transition to a low birth/low death rate means we’re near the top of the population roller coaster, it’s going to take us a long time to get rid of all those surplus brains and the microprocessors they depend on, and in the meantime, the ultrastructure of reality is becoming extra-porous. Magic is getting easier to practice and more powerful, and the things that live behind the walls of the universe are becoming intrigued by the smell of thinking fodder that wafts its way towards them. The stars are coming right, reality is coming apart at the seams, and we’ll all go together when we go.