by Gwynn White
Both Girard and Lila nodded, because that was exactly what everyone was told at some point in childhood, minus the flourishes.
“Well, I’m a scientist and that’s just stupid, but there might be some nugget of truth inside that explains a few things. First, we are aquatic. We know this obviously. And we know that the cave now called the Psychro cave was where at least some of us came from in early history. Luckily, we don’t have bones and decay easily, so there are no fossils to give us away, but the chemistry in that lower cave pool matches us a little too perfectly. And most of us aren’t very fond of the dark. It’s like an instinct on steroids, which points to a sightless or dark existence that we fear returning to. And we also know that we can no longer inhabit bodies of any animal other than human—”
“Wait,” Lila interjected. “What do you mean by no longer?”
Doran inclined his head, as if tempering his certainty a little. “This is where theory gets backed up into hypothesis territory. I have no concrete proof, but it’s logical and your brief about the ancient going into a hippopotamus fits in.”
“Then go on, by all means,” she said, smiling at him again. Was it just Girard, or did her eyes look a little glazed over and silly?
“I study marine organisms for a living, and there’s one thing that’s true for all of them. Evolution doesn’t stop. It may slow, but it never stops. Right now there are caves with fish that don’t have coloring and no longer grow eyes because there’s no point in it. They live in complete darkness. Remind you of anyone? Don’t answer, because we all know it does. That’s us, minus the fins.”
“You do know how to flatter,” Lila said. Her tone was so strange, Girard had to look at her twice. Was she actually being coy? She tilted her head at the professor. Yep, she was being coy. Was she under a spell as well? Girard sniffed the air as subtly as he could and found the source of their mutual fascination quickly enough. The professor either had an egg ready or was about to produce one.
Ah, that animal instinct, he thought, then focused on the lesson they were supposed to be taking in.
Doran’s cheeks had gone slightly pink. “I do? Never mind. I’m not the only vampire studying this, but we keep it quiet for obvious reasons. Between us, we’ve come up with a working theory of our evolution. What little genetic testing we’ve been able to do fits, but as with all evolutionary theories, we have to build bridges between rungs with logic.” He paused, took a sip of his soda, then asked, “And you really want to hear this? You’re not bored or insulted or anything?”
It was easy to understand Doran’s surprise that Guardians were listening and interested. He’d most likely spent most of his current life hiding what he did, always fearful of discovery. All the sudden, the ones he most feared were sitting here drinking diet soda and asking him to commit heresy.
Girard wanted the unvarnished truth, so he said, “We are what we are. Telling pretty tales doesn’t actually change the facts. Didn’t humans start out as little rats or something? That’s not pretty either, but they do okay with knowing that.”
“Not rats, but close enough. Well, here goes. Generally speaking, we’re the last ones on our branch of the evolutionary tree and our nearest common ancestor with everything else is a really long way back. We’ve got hints that there were others somewhat like us that once probably fairly common. All extinct now, of course, except us. Basically, it boils down to this one fact; we weren’t always parasites. You understand the difference between a parasite and a symbiont, right?”
Lila nodded. “Of course. A symbiont takes from a host, but also provides something the host needs. A parasite only takes.”
“Close enough. In our case, even though we keep the bodies alive for far longer than they would otherwise live, we’re still the ultimate parasite because the mind of the host is utterly destroyed by our presence. The body is there, and we even have their memories and knowledge, but the cohesive person that was once there is gone. Even though we take on much of their personality when we take their body, that person—the soul, if you’ll pardon the term—is entirely erased.”
Girard felt that same slightly guilty feeling he did anytime he thought about that part of his life. “Yes,” he said. “But some say that’s actually okay because the body is alive and wouldn’t be without us.”
“All true, and that’s where evolution makes a distinction. Evolution is about successful reproduction, not emotional health. In physical terms, vampires letting a body live longer makes our taking of bodies an extremely positive selection because of the results. Not because of our reproduction, because vampire reproduction isn’t part of the human equation, but because it allows for better human reproduction.”
Girard shook his head and said, “No. It’s true that some vampires do have human children, but that’s really uncommon. Most of us don’t reproduce well at all, particularly when we’re in male bodies.”
Doran grinned. “True, alas. But evolution isn’t only about a single individual. In our case, the community that a vampire-infected body lives in benefits greatly. As in, enormous benefits. So much so that it overrides the impact of that single individual’s reproduction. That vampire-human’s siblings—which are human in most cases—have more surviving children, the related individuals in their group do too, and even non-related humans who live around that vampire do better. All because the vampire-infected human is nearby. The vampire is resistant to disease, so it can take care of the human sick, which allows more to survive. It’s stronger, less prone to injury and healing faster when injured, so it can hunt for longer and get more prey for humans to eat. It lives longer, so it passes on more knowledge and creates more innovation. You see how that works?”
Girard could see it and the impact of it stunned him. Like so many vampires, he lived with that persistent guilt, that “why me” feeling when it came time to take a body, a sense of unfairness that he had what he had, but only when he stole another life. Doran’s few words turned everything around, toppled it, and then created a far more pleasant and useful structure. Lila’s hands were splayed on the battered wooden slats of the table, her lips a little parted, and her back ramrod straight. Clearly Girard wasn’t the only one being hit where he lived.
Shaking his head to clear the fog, Girard asked, “But I thought evolution was really reliant on the individual.” He paused and gestured to himself. “The original owner of this body had two children before I took him, so he had his offspring, but how does me taking him after that help humans? I mean, I’m completely out of the evolutionary loop at that point, right?”
Doran grinned again, so obviously excited to be sharing his opinions that he looked like he might burst. “Not quite. Let me ask you a question. What did you do with regards to that human after you took his body? I mean, his family. Anything?”
Girard screwed up his face a little at the question. A clean break was important when a new body was taken, particularly nowadays. That hadn’t always been the case though. Many vampires went right back home to the body’s family and lived as if nothing had happened. Today, well, all vampires knew to keep well away from social media and the old acquaintances of the body. That’s why Girard went looking for a body in New York for a vampire in Cincinnati. Distance was important.
“Keep in mind, this was sixty years ago,” he said, finally. At Doran’s nod, he continued. “I made sure the violin got back to his family—it was a pretty valuable piece. Then I set up a blind trust for the kids through a lawyer who told them it was from an anonymous donor who loved his music.” He finished with a shrug.
“See. That’s a positive impact on those kids and their kids and so on,” Doran said.
Lila frowned. “But what about people like me? My situation is probably what most of us face in reality. My body was a Jane Doe. No family to claim her or for me to help that I know of. How is that helpful?”
Doran gave her a sympathetic look, but pressed on in that same cheerful demeanor. “No, that’s no specific help and in y
our case, you live with the Guardians, so your help is more diffuse and wide ranging. In general, your profession keeps both vampires and humans safe, so you benefit them.”
“I’m not buying that,” she replied.
“Okay, try this. In any wolf pack, there are those who breed and those who don’t. Why should that be positive for evolution? It’s because even if there are three females who never have offspring, their group behavior means that related offspring will survive better. We’re the same way. Only, you know, not wolves.”
Girard got it, and he saw it the moment Lila did too. Doran drove the point home and said, “For us—at least before the modern era—it was no different than a group of wolves. Our longer and healthier lives gave everyone around us longer and healthier lives. It created a big and very positive selection pressure, particularly the living longer part. For example, in the human bible, they talk of people who lived to extreme ages that are impossible for a human body. Most people think those are exaggerations, but vampires keep a body alive for a long time, long enough to seem ridiculous to those who recorded early history. If the average lifespan was thirty-five years in the ancient world, yet a vampire infested human lived for one hundred and fifty, then we’re talking about a lot of knowledge and experience that got preserved and expanded. That knowledge and experience benefited the humans…all of them. Civilization advanced, discoveries were made and capitalized on, and better human survival rates were the big payoff, at least in terms of pure evolution.”
Lila nodded, her eyes a little unfocused. She was enraptured. Girard could see it and felt some of that himself. “So, even though we’re parasites, we’re not parasites because we benefit the whole species.”
“Exactly! And that leads me to what we were before that. It’s likely that we started out as a regular old aquatic parasite, but one that didn’t have a lot of negative impacts, which meant no one tried to get rid of us. As time marched on, we grew more entwined in neural systems, eventually influencing behavior. With more time, we probably acted as a second voice in a human head. You see the progression?”
With a nod, Girard said, “It makes perfect sense.”
Doran practically wiggled in his seat with excitement. His eyes were shining, but not from vampire tentacles in the backs of his eyes. “Here’s where it gets fun. Based on limited DNA results, we’re a lot like everything else in the world. We took a really long time to get to the point where we influenced humans, but the Quaternary extinction took us for a rapid ride on the evolutionary train like every species that survived that period. We got squeezed hard, many of our traits disappearing during the squeeze. Vampires were winnowed down into a single species with a very narrow range of survivable characteristics.”
Girard was getting lost again and wished he’d been more interested in heresy before today. He felt like he was moving further from the answer. “But how does that address the question? Or tie into lions and leeches?”
“I’m getting to that. So, we are what we are and we’re very tied to humans. Yet we can still reproduce outside a human body. In fact, our offspring have better survival rates if we have them outside a human body. Yet we don’t breed that way because those offspring will have no future at all.”
Lila pulled her hands back into her lap, no longer quite so enthralled with the sound of the professor’s voice. Her sister had been one such, though luckily, she was now dead. Girard touched her arm, then said, “This is a sensitive topic. Please try to keep it respectful.”
Doran must have realized then that he was in front of two vampires who might well know first-hand the terrible outcome of a birth outside a human body. He inclined his head and said, “I meant no disrespect. We all understand how awful that is, but it’s important.”
Lila nodded, so he forged on, trying to cram what he’d spent decades secretly decoding into two fresh minds who had hardly thought twice about the subject. What with the heresy and all.
“The peculiar and specific conditions on successful vampire births are because our evolution is entwined so tightly with humans that we are, in essence, human. That’s the part of us that was kept once the last epoch was over. Outside a human body—without being born into a human—we’re almost mindless, without the organizing physical structures that guide our mental development. Being put into a human after being born in the water does not change that outcome. All that does is make a crazy human who acts like a beast. We have to be born into a human to be who we are. In essence, we’re human and we’re no good at being anything else, which leads me to animals. Are you okay for me to go on?”
Lila took a deep breath, then nodded that she was fine. She probably wasn’t though.
“Let’s put it simply. If a modern vampire went into a warthog and survived the transfer, eventually becoming a suitably successful warthog, but then was killed by a lion, the vampire inside might try to go into the lion. If it did and survived, it would be a terrible lion, because—just like we’re humans—that vampire would be a warthog at its core. That vampire lion is unlikely to survive or be of any use to its pride because it’s really a warthog that simply looks like a lion. Older versions of vampires—and there appear to have been many kinds—seem to have been limited to a few species just like we’re limited to humans. But, limited to a few species is a lot different than being limited to one.”
A vision of vampire history hit Girard like a punch to the solar plexus. It made absolutely perfect sense. It was true that, in extremis, a vampire might try to go into an animal rather than die, but if it did, that animal would almost certainly reject it. If not, it usually didn’t survive long. Girard had never successfully recovered a vampire that had gone into an animal. Not once. No one had that he knew of. It was, in essence, an impossible feat.
Girard held up a finger to pause the professor and said, “And because the animal kingdom was so often ruled by early and violent death and exists without human organization, those lines of vampires died out during that big extinction period.”
Doran nodded, his smile grim. “Exactly. There are small signs in our DNA that indicate we were once less discriminate in our taking of bodies. A gene common to early felines and another few that are present only in extinct marine mammals…that sort of thing. But nothing new, nothing modern. Everything else is a human-vampire mixture. And our base nature if we’re born in what should be our original natural environment lends credence to the idea that we’ve evolved beyond being anything except human. That said, we must have been able to shift bodies from species to species at some point, given that old DNA. And there’s one more twist.”
With a shake of his head, Girard said, “Let us have it. Might as well take it all at once.”
“Evolution tends to favor the current model, eventually winnowing out the previous versions of a species. Basically, current humans replaced Neanderthals and other early hominids, right? We don’t have all three running around. They exist only in the DNA of current humans. Even now, many humans get excited to find just a percent or two of Neanderthal DNA in them. With me so far?”
Girard wasn’t exactly sure where the professor was going, but at least it made sense. He nodded and motioned for him to continue.
“Right! Well, the key to that is lifespan. Things are born, they live, then they die. There is a fairly narrow range of time in which a generation exists based on average lifespan. That clears out the old models for the new. But—”
Understanding now, Girard broke in. “But not us. We have no set life span. If one individual lives long enough, they can be entirely different from the modern members of their species!”
“Bingo,” Doran said, pointing at Girard with a grin on his face. “Meaning it is entirely possible that a vampire still capable of switching bodies…and who knows what else…still exists today. Given the violence of nature before civilization really took hold, I can’t even imagine what other differences that vampire might have.”
Lila’s brow furrowed and she looked down, clearly trying
to work this into history. “So, how old would a vampire have to be to be able to shift into a hippo and then back into a human with no problem?”
Doran considered the question. Before answering, his fingers twitched on the table surface as if he were conducting a mental inventory or deciding if something were safe to share. He peered at them, then sighed and said, “The two most recent traces of vampire DNA inside an animal in the archives are from a saber-tooth tiger’s canine tooth and the skin of a mammoth, and not one of those last mammoth’s either.”
Girard stopped him there. “How old?”
Doran shook his head, but his eyes lit up in scientific wonder. “Ten thousand years. At least. Probably a lot older, though. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re looking at the shift from the Pleistocene to the Holocene epochs, and that was almost twelve-thousand years ago. Basically, you may have discovered the vampire version of a living saber tooth tiger or mammoth. Think about that for a second.”
Lila sat back so abruptly she almost fell off the bench seat. “Holy shit.”
“Indeed,” Girard said.
12
With a night to kill before their return flight to upstate New York and the Guardian compound, Girard and Lila checked into a local hotel to catch some sleep. It was comfortable and clean, with soft sheets and a restaurant they both enjoyed, but once the lights were out, sleep wouldn’t come for either of them. Girard could hear it in the way Lila breathed on the other bed. She was churning all this information over the same way he was and it wasn’t going to let either of them go off into dreamland.
“Lila, we should just give up on the sleeping and talk.”
Her low laugh came from the darkness. “I can’t wrap my head around that number. Ten thousand years? I mean, who can live that long and stand it?”