A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  Aloud: “No, what Adrienne’s done is Adrienne’s fault, and they hadn’t had any contact for years. She’s got some twisted love-hate-desire thing going on with him, at least on her part; he hates her and he’s afraid of her. All he wanted was to be left alone and live something as close to a normal life as he could. I was part of that, I think. And she . . . wants . . . me because he did. I get this really creepy feeling that to her . . . messing . . . with me is like fucking him.”

  “I don’t know if I could be that objective. And, yes, the Doña tends to give you that creepy feeling, doesn’t she?”

  Soon they were moving up a pair of ruts through dense pasture and onto a ridge. The conversation went in spurts; the usual origin-story you exchanged with a new friend. Her small-town Pennsylvania coal-country roots, the struggle to get to New York and work her way through NYU, the way paintings had taken her to another world. His professional-class Minnesota background, physics a door into the nature of things. The way they’d been fifty miles apart for years and never even dreamed the other existed.

  “This rock is a good place to turn. It’s all chaparral for a bit after this—limestone slope. Good steep ground but not this late and not unless you’re up to it.”

  “Woof !” Ellen said, leaning over to get her breath under control.

  Her lungs seemed dry and inflexible for a few moments, and her skin heated by a flush like an interior sunlamp. The air was cooling, but that felt good.

  “I needed to run off the sugar, but I’m still more wiped than I thought.”

  Peter nodded. They trotted on a little more; the sun was to the left and a little ahead, making the bare branches ahead black outlines. She stopped again when they rounded a clump of oaks and found themselves facing a small group of white-face cattle, up to their bellies in the deep green grass.

  “They’re OK,” he said as he noticed her freeze.

  “They’re big. I like cows best already disassembled.”

  When they’d moved off she turned and said: “You got in trouble for something about the Power, didn’t you? That’s why . . . they . . . wanted you dead. Or someplace like this, fully under control.”

  Peter nodded. His handsome mobile face turned to the shadows in the east. “How much mathematics do you have?”

  “Hey, Art History BA, remember,” she said. “I can use TurboTax if I concentrate very, very hard. If it’s obscure technical terms in Renaissance Italian painting you want, I’m your gal.”

  He sat down on a stump. “OK, short form. The Power doesn’t come from inside the Shadowspawn brains. It can’t. Brains just don’t generate that much energy. What they do is modulate the Power, tapping it from a deep level. Like a transistor in a radar set. They step it up or down and shape it. But the energy comes from somewhere else. Follow me so far?”

  She nodded, and he continued: “What put me on to it was results on probabilistic analysis of—”

  “Whoa! Artsy math-aversion reflexes kickin’ in! Let’s get going, then. You know, what puzzles me is that we . . . our ancestors . . . were ever able to overthrow them.”

  He rose and they trotted slowly downward. “I suspect it’s because there just weren’t many in any given spot, back when humans were rare.”

  “A sort of lions versus zebra thing?”

  “Exactly. But now the upper limit’s vanished. And their numbers and their genetic purity have been increasing fast the last hundred years. It explains a lot. Think of the early legends . . . you know those?”

  She smiled at him, mopping at her face with the sleeve of her sweats. “Art History, remember? It’s obligatory to know the loves of Zeus and that sort of thing.”

  “You know how crazy the world seems in those myths? How . . . anything-can-happen? Dreamlike and arbitrary?”

  Her eyes went wide in alarm. “You mean it was like that?”

  “Around the Shadowspawn, yes. Probabilities start to blur into each other. The damned luck! They’re probably the reason we believe in luck in the first place. There’s no such thing, really—not as sort of a personal possession, or a muscle that’s stronger in some people than in others.”

  “Except for them it actually does work that way.”

  “Right. And it explains so much else, too.”

  “Like why the Greeks thought ghosts needed blood? And why so many gods demanded human sacrifices?”

  “Yeah, but more fundamental things as well. Why do humans want gods at all? Why do we believe in them without proof?”

  “Oh. There was proof.”

  He nodded. “For a hundred thousand years we had gods, for ninety-six percent of the existence of the human race. And spirits and ghosts and survival after death—for some.”

  She shuddered, and he made a hands-in-the-air gesture.

  “You know the really ironic thing?” he said. “I think that if we could understand the Power, we could use it. I mean, everyone could. We’d need something like a very capable, very specifically tailored quantum computer. But all they’re interested in is keeping potential competition down.”

  She frowned. Running downhill was harder, or trickier, than going up, but her balance adjusted automatically.

  “Why don’t they do that themselves? Surely they’d be in the best position to investigate the Power.”

  Peter laughed, half-genuine amusement, half-bitterness. “What animal does Adrienne remind you of? Not a bitch, please. Really.”

  “A cat,” she said instantly. “I like cats, but they’re not tame. We can have them around because we’re stronger and smarter. The big ones we put in zoos or nature parks.”

  “Smart! We’re apes that became more like wolves. Shadowspawn are apes who became like wolves and then decided they’d rather become like cats instead. And what do cats do if you leave them to themselves?”

  “Hunt and play at hunting. Torture mice. Eat. Sleep. Groom themselves. Fight other cats for territory and mates. Screw.”

  “Exactly. I—”

  An engine sounded from around the curve of the track ahead, the whining burble-hum of a new electric-drive hybrid. They stopped in surprise as a TARDEC utility vehicle stopped, a low-slung boxy body of angled plates on four oversize wheels, the sort of thing you saw on news reports from dry dusty places where things went boom a lot. It didn’t bristle with weapons, but there were antennae and the man beside the driver was looking down at some sort of display screen. Another followed it.

  The riders looked like soldiers; at least they had body-armor, which Ellen could recognize from the news, and bulbous helmets with sensor visors ready to be flipped down, and each had an ear-mike with a little thread-microphone at one corner of their mouths. They carried odd foreign-looking assault rifles as well.

  Eight of them were Asian, but not quite like any she’d seen before. Short barrel-chested bandy-legged men, tough and stocky with the weathered skin of those who’d always been out-of-doors in all weathers; they swung down and spread out, going down on one knee facing outward. They were relaxed and alert, their eyes never stopping; their sense of tensile presence reminded her of good tennis players, even in their heavy boots and gear. Besides the usual military paraphernalia their belts held big inward-curving chopping knives.

  They don’t seem like a brute squad, she thought. Just . . . focused.

  The ninth was a white man, older but very fit, with gray threads in his clipped brown mustache, and very cold gray eyes. They met hers through the growing shadows . . .

  This one knows, she thought. He’s not one of them, but he knows. Maybe the others don’t, maybe they do, but he really knows who he’s working for. What he’s working for.

  “Hello, Dr. Boase,” he said; his voice was clipped upper-class British.

  “Captain Bates,” Peter replied neutrally.

  Then he turned his head to her: “I’m Harold Bates, head of site security here for Brézé Enterprises, Ms. Tarnowski. Were you heading in for the evening? It’s a biggish bit of wilderness to be out in, on foot and af
ter dark.”

  His voice was impeccably respectful. Ellen nodded when Peter said cautiously: “Yes, just heading home.”

  “Cheerio, then.”

  He switched to a fast-moving language, evidently the one the soldiers spoke, and the two runners stood aside as they climbed back into their vehicles and drove by.

  “Who are the soldiers for? It’s not as if they need guns to keep us from running away.”

  “They have enemies,” he said, and shook his head when she would have gone on. “Later.”

  Adrian! Be careful! she thought. Then: Would men with guns have any chance against . . . well, he must be able to do all that stuff too?

  It was full dark when they were at the head of the trail again where it joined the Lane, and chilly enough that she felt she’d be glad to get indoors; during the day this gentle climate was enough to make you forget it was only the middle of February. There weren’t any street-lamps along Lucy Lane, only little lights over the courtyard doors. That left the ambient level low enough that the frosting of stars and crescent moon were helpful. And a trickle came through an open window in Number One.

  They were about to walk by when a shriek of raw pain stopped her in her tracks. Peter took her arm and tried to urge her along. Then she heard pleading. Monica’s voice, high-pitched and urgent:

  “Oh, Addi, don’t. Don’t! Please! Not there—ow! That hurts. It hurts so bad! ”

  Another scream, then a delighted laugh, and a low moan broken with choked-off muffled sobs: “Ow . . . ow . . . oh, owwwww . . . ow . . . ow . . .”

  The noise fell behind her. They stopped outside Number Five.

  “I guess this wasn’t a milk-and-cookies sort of evening,” Peter said quietly. Then: “And Monica keeps forgiving!”

  He was quivering; she could feel that. She touched his arm.

  “This is just so totally awful, isn’t it?” she said quietly.

  He nodded. She took his arm again and it felt rigid. Then he began to shake; she hesitated, then pulled his head down on her shoulder. The sobs were soundless, but the tears soaked through the fabric of the sweat suit. His arms came up to embrace her clumsily. After a moment he straightened and wiped at his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  “Thank you,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for what, Pete? Look, I’m not hitting on you either, but I don’t want to spend the evening with a pillow over my head. Come on in and have dinner and we’ll talk about something else. Maybe watch a movie. OK?”

  He nodded wordless gratitude.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Where—Adrian!”

  Ellen was in a hospital room; greenish beige walls, linoleum floor, ceiling tracks for curtains. The air smelled of disinfectant and pain and lousy food. The smell that had been ground into her soul during her father’s long dying as the accompaniment to guilt and anger and relief. Adrian was lying in a cheap hospital gown, the sort that fastened down the back with ties. It looked shockingly incongruous on his beautifully balanced, lean-muscled body, which she’d only seen either elegantly dressed or naked.

  There were bandages on his arm and another large dressing on his thigh, which was held up in a rest. A tangle of tubes dripped plasma and saline into his veins.

  “Adrian!” she said again.

  His eyes turned towards her and blinked. “Oh . . . sorry . . . Ellie,” he said in a slow, blurred voice. “Let . . . me . . . do something about . . . this.”

  The world seemed to flux somehow. Before she could decide what was happening they were both standing on a beach. It was wide white sand, with a wind whipping up little gusts around their ankles and waves coming in from the east knee-high, hissing almost to their feet. A brown pelican flapped by over the water, intent on its own concerns, and gulls eyed bits of flotsam.

  Adrian was in chinos and a loose shirt of beige natural cotton, barefoot, tanned darker than she remembered him last. Ellen looked down at herself; so was she, and she was in a bikini and straw hat. The air was warm and moist, blowing from the ocean and into the low scrub and occasional palm tree inland with an intense salt cleanliness.

  “This is that place we went on the coast in South Texas,” she said slowly. “Last spring. Just after we got together.”

  He shrugged. “I can change it if you like. It was a happy time, for me.”

  His accent was a little stronger. She’d never inquired about it before; he didn’t like to talk about his past.

  “For me too. You grew up in France, didn’t you?” she said now.

  “Partly, some time every year as a child, and my foster-parents were French. California, for the rest, until they . . . died. Then all over the world. Texas, more than any single place.”

  A hand went over his tousled black hair. “Where are you now? That is important.”

  “I’m . . . asleep in my . . . in a place Adrienne put me. I’m alone in the bed, too.”

  “Good.” He relaxed a little. “We may have enough time, then. This link is stronger than I thought.”

  She blinked. “I remember now! I remember the last time you brought me to a place like this! I didn’t forget, but I didn’t think of it until now!”

  Adrian nodded. “And I really am in a hospital bed,” he said. “In San Francisco. Two men with knives tried to kill me. Shadowspawn . . . perhaps indirectly set on me by my sister.”

  “What happened?” she asked anxiously.

  He looked healthy, body glowing like a fine slender racehorse, every muscle moving distinctly under the olive skin. But that meant nothing here, wherever.

  “They died. I lived, due to a friend named Harvey Ledbetter who arrived most opportunely. I was badly wounded, I am afraid, but I will recover. I’m very sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It will delay me.”

  Ellen smiled at him, and got a shy answering expression. “Thanks, Adrian.”

  “It’s nothing. Let’s walk up the beach, and you tell me what has happened with you.”

  She did; he winced now and then. “You’re with some sort of . . . Resistance movement, aren’t you? The doctor called you terrorists.”

  Adrian smiled crookedly. “Not entirely without justification, from a renfield’s point of view. The Brotherhood is not squeamish about collateral damage, particularly to servants of the Council of Shadows.”

  “Then it’s all true, what she told me?”

  “True enough, if you allow for viewpoint.”

  She stopped and looked searchingly into his eyes. “You . . . aren’t like the other Shadowspawn?”

  “I was raised to think of myself as human. It isn’t easy. That is why I have been so much alone. And . . . your type of human . . . aren’t instinct machines, and neither are we Shadowspawn. Some humans are good and some less so, according to the choices they make. I shouldn’t be able to blame everything on my genes either. Shadowspawn do blame their genes, but that’s an excuse. The fact of the matter is they were raised to evil, and they embrace it.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his. “You should curse my name,” he said.

  “Adrian, you just fought two men with knives for me and got cut up. You could have been an all-powerful monster. Judging from the way Adrienne acts, it’s fun. You decided to be a human being. An asshole sometimes, but who isn’t? I’m just getting my mind wrapped around this stuff but that part is pretty clear.”

  They laughed. “And now you know where I am. I’m—”

  She paused, frowning. Her mind felt perfectly clear; clearer than it had been for days, unhazed by fear and tension. But she couldn’t say where she was.

  “I don’t think I know, exactly,” she said slowly. “Somewhere in central California . . .”

  “You know,” Adrian said grimly. “You’ve been blocked from saying it. It’s a Wreaking on your memory and volition. Small, subtle, but it would be dangerous to break it—with me weakened, certainly. You’d only notice it if you tried to tell someone wh
o didn’t know.”

  “But that should be a clue!” she said hopefully.

  They walked again, holding hands this time. The cool salt water ran over their bare feet, and the wet sand made for good footing. Curlews bobbed and probed in the shallows with their absurdly thin curved beaks, crying wheet-wheet-wheet.

  “Not as much of a clue as I’d like,” Adrian said. “Ellie, it’s easy to fox records with the Power. The Brotherhood are looking in their records, and those are far more complete.”

  “You’ve been fighting with the, the Brotherhood?” she asked, squeezing his hand. “Against the Shadowspawn?”

  Now he looked out to sea. “I did. For twenty-five years—”

  “Thanks for telling me your real age!”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “I’m teasing, dummy!”

  “Oh. Thank you for that. I . . . retired a few years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was futile. I was the strongest Wreaker the Brotherhood ever had, but there was only one of me. The others were far weaker; and the Council has all the resources of the earth at its call, the governments and the police and the armies and the security forces. All I could do was kill—some who deserved it, many who did not. It didn’t change anything.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “To use this Power for big stuff, don’t you need—”

  “Blood. From the Red Cross, and handsomely paid for.”

  “Oh,” she said with relief.

  He grimaced. “God, it tastes terrible. And the things it does to my digestion, and the headaches . . . I can’t even completely cure those with the Power, because that would require more of it. That was another reason to retire. On my mountain, or here, I could . . . grapple with the cravings, the drives. Learn a degree of peace.”

  “Your sister . . . seems to enjoy the taste.”

  “She’s drinking live hot blood, and primed with strong emotions. It’s . . . a powerful drug. Dead blood is an entirely different story.”

  She squeezed his hand again. “I hope you can get me out soon,” she said. “Jesus, it’s . . . creepy here. The people all act as if it were normal. Even the ones she hurts.”