by Tanith Lee
Beldek had already cleaned up, before they came.
Not much later, Beldek lit the pavilion and opened for business, but no-one else stopped by that night.
Beldek sat up in the tall echoing hills, watching the dawn borning and the Nightfair slink to ground.
Malvanda, had she been real, would not have been able to do this. Sunlight was anathema to Malvanda’s kind. Sunlight and mirrors and garlic-flowers, and thorns, and crucifixes and holy wafers, and running water. It just went to show.
Beldek leaned back on the still-cool slate, looking down the four by five miles of the valley.
Gorgeous Malvanda, Terran turn-on, Phesh tasha-mi, Venusian wet dream; Angel of Orgasm, kiss of death. Malvanda, the Beautiful Biting Machine. Malvanda the robot vampire.
He didn’t know her whole history. How some sick-minded talent had thought her up and put her together. Her place of origin was a mystery. But what she did. He knew that. A connoisseur’s sexual desideratum. The actual bite was controlled to a hair’s breadth by her keyboard. The teeth went in, naturally. She sucked out blood. That’s what they paid for, was it not? Money’s worth. Blood money. Only a little, of course. More would be dangerous. And the teeth left built-in coagulant behind them, zippering up the flesh all nice. Unimpaired, the client staggers forth, only a bit woozy. A bite woozy.
Some of them even came back, days, months, years later, for another turn.
It was harmless, unless you were sick, had some weakness …
Or unless Beldek tapped Malvanda’s right shoulder that particular way he had when she was with Chakki. Then another key snapped down its command through her wires and circuits. And Malvanda kept on biting, biting and sucking, like a bloody vacuum cleaner. Till all the blood was in Malvanda’s throat sac and spilling over and on the floor and everywhere. But Beldek had cleaned that away, and bathed her, and changed her gown, before Qire’s goonfriends arrived with their big plastic bag.
It had been fairly uncomplex to tidy his mistake, this time. But he must beware of mistakes from now on. Tomorrow, today, Beldek would work something out to make the Mansion door impregnable.
Even so, Beldek didn’t really mind too much. It had been a bonus, all that blood. Better than just the contents of the sac, which Chakki had, unfortunately for Chakki, seen Beldek drinking earlier.
Beldek sunned himself on the hills for several hours. He never browned in sunshine, but he liked it, it was good for him. His hair, the tone of Malvanda’s eyes, gleamed and began playfully to curl.
When he strolled back through the valley, the Fair was in its somnolent jackal-and-bone midday phase. Qire’s buggy was at the entry to the pavilion. Qire was inside, in the Mansion, pawing Malvanda over, and the furnishings, making sure everything had been left as the customers would wish to find it.
Beldek followed him in.
‘I should throw you out on your butt,’ said Qire.
‘Throw me,’ said Beldek. ‘I’ll have some interesting stories to tell.’
Qire glared.
‘Don’t think you can make anything outa what happened. It was your, for Christ’s sake, negligence.’
They both knew Qire would never fire him. Beldek was too handy at the job. And knew too much. And would be too difficult to dispose of.
Presently they went into the office and Qire handed Beldek a sheaf of large notes. ‘Any noise,’ said Qire, ‘something might happen you might not be happy about. And fix that damn door. She seems okay. She damaged at all?’
‘No. Still what your pamphlets say. The Night- Blooming Bella Donna of Eternal Gothic Fantasy.’
When Qire had gone, Beldek listened to symphonies on music crystals in the office.
It had always rather fascinated him, the way in which vampires, a myth no-one any longer believed, had become inextricably and dependently connected with sex. Actually, vampirism had nothing to do with sex. Beldek could have told them that. Just as it had nothing to do with sunlight or mirrors or crosses. It was simply and solely (though not soully) about basic nourishment.
Later, he set the program for the night. He had a premonition there would be a lot of custom. Somehow, without anyone knowing about it in any logical way, some enticing whiff of velvet morbidity would be blowing around the pavilion, luring them in like flies. The sac would have to be emptied many times tonight, in Beldek’s own special way, which was not the way the instruction manual advocated.
Just before it got dark and he lit up the lights to match the exploding ignition of the Fair, Beldek looked in on Malvanda. She had been returned to her shadowy alcove above the marble stair, and was waiting there for the first client to come in and gaspingly watch her descend. Beldek climbed the steps and brushed her platinum hair, and refilled the perfumery glands behind her ears.
He cared nothing for the sentient races that were his prey. But for the beautiful biting machine, he felt a certain malign affection. Why not? After a century or so of insecure monotonous, and frequently inadequate hit-and-miss hunting, which left little space for other pursuits, the Nightfair had provided Beldek the softest option on twenty worlds. Now Malvanda saw to everything. She paid his bills. She kept him fed.
BEYOND THE SUN
Imagine a night that lasts for one whole year – or longer. Think what you could achieve in a year-long night –
That was what the recruiting flyer said, and their promise wasn’t a lie. While of course, when the sun finally constantly rises, you’re far away already. Even, if you play the roster carefully, straight into your next long nighttime.
Heth once said, in one of his more lucid moments, ‘It’s like a chessboard, isn’t it, where the white squares don’t come on until you’ve won.’
But I guess I’ve already won, me, and my kind. Present perfect, and the future beautifully dark. It’s only the past that can’t be improved. Because, I suppose, the more symmetrically faultless our lives become, the more dangerously unwieldy grow the things that already happened, and the memories that can’t be made to fit.
We look at Anka in the mirror, Heth and I. He seems happy, satiated. I, Anka, look – what word? Satisfied? Heth’s one of my two Blood-Donors aboard this ship. He loves to give of himself and blissfully comes, over and over (a pleasant possibility bred into him), as I draw my meal from his smooth veins. His blood tastes good, as ever. And he’s a good-looking guy. The best wine, in a charming champagne flute.
‘That was great,’ he murmurs, sleepy now. He will need a full nine hours’ slumber, but that’s only sensible.
‘Thank you, darling,’ say I. ‘What would I do without you?’
‘Starve?’ he dreamily asks. Oh, a snippy moment then.
One can never tell with Heth. Amber skin and ice-blond hair, blue, blue eyes, the colour of the sort of morning sky I haven’t seen, except on DV-dex, for almost 200 years.
Corvyra, my other Bee-Dee, isn’t at all like him. Sex doesn’t come into the equation. We use a slender crystal tube fixed in her alabaster arm. Her hair is a much darker blue than Heth’s eyes – more just post-dusk – my sort of time. She has a cat’s green eyes. She tastes of fresh oranges; breakfast in a wonderful hotel. We talk about clothes and books and politics as I leisurely drink her. She requires only an hour’s rest after sessions. But it all works out okay, or so it appears, for all of us. We’ve been together on seven trips now, eight and a half years, we three. And the ship, too, of course, the Mirandusa. What a lot of numbers. One more: Simlon 12. The new sun.
It’s not even born yet. And I, the sun-hater, the one whose tribe carry the pure gene of sun-hatred, I’m the creator who will wake this sun, as I always do.
Once, only God woke suns – with a word or a breath or a sigh.
I, and my kind, do it with a building program and a finger on a button. The last, while we watch (and cower) in protected darkness.
And Anka said, Let there be light.
Or, the button says it.
After topping up from Heth, I go out to do my space-walking
, and then to check Planet 3, down below. Unlike the still unborn sun, the individual worlds of this system-in-waiting don’t have names yet. Though Corvyra has nicknamed them Champion (1), Cuddles (2 – the planet that may not take) and Fatgirl (3). Fatgirl, fairly obviously, is the largest, and reads as the most Earth-type and lush specimen. There are other little chunks and balls and slivers circling about. Not to mention the pair of handsome moons already mecho-chemically lit. They have a duration of 300-400 Earth years, after which, if wanted, they and the others can be set up, and/or rekindled. But Simlon, like every sun that gets started, will last for millennia. The general consensus has it that these solarities will all exceed the span of the original Earth sun, which by now, as we know, is fading fast.
Outside the airlock I drift free, pause and gaze about me. Beautiful. Can you ever tire of such a sight? The limitless heaven of space, deepest black, or luminously translucent with galactic swarms or holo-gas clouds, the inflammatory litter of distant stars – other suns, natural or man-and-machine created.
After a while I drift on, around the bulk of Mirandusa. She’s in good shape, just a minor repair finishing up on her left-frontal hull. I assess the outer work-machines. One is corroding slightly, so I send it back in and tap Main Comp for a replacement.
Far off something glitters as it dives through airlessness like a flung knife. Some meteor. You often see them. A little eye blinks in the ship’s side, registering that the passer-by is harmless.
Before I joined the Space Corps I worked in various nocturnal jobs – night-gardens, aviation; I had, back then, another motive to govern my life. Afterwards … space opened its glamorous arms to me instead. And here I am.
Time to go down now to Planet 3.
It’s much easier, as they found out all those centuries ago, for my kind to do this. We don’t need jet-boosters, or separate navigation, or suits of any sort, beyond the minimum of sensible protection. We don’t need oxygen. We can levitate – or ‘fly’, as the earliest of our detractors described it. And since we can negate gravity for ourselves, we can also personally institute it. To lift away, select and use the correct direction, and once there anchor without fuss, is that very same thing they caught us doing back on Earth in the Dark Ages, when we took off like bats across the sky, or walked upside-down from castle towers to the ground. As for the oxygen, when they were wont to find us in our graves and coffins, we didn’t breathe then – we ‘lay like the dead’. Our sort only breathe to take nourishment from oxygenated air, just as we drink oxygen from the clarity of human blood. But we can shut off respiration without difficulty, or ill-effect. Especially when supplied by a rich diet. We do need the power of a ship, however. No-one wants to walk or fly that kind of distance. Anyhow, we can’t travel faster than light. Despite the stories.
But you know all this.
Or not, I suppose. There’s still a lot of ignorance about us. More no doubt since so many of us became employed by the Space Corps, and left Earth behind forever, to make our lives in endlessly long and lovely sleepless Night.
The basement apartment on Czechoslovus Street was half a mile down, remnant of an old bomb-shelter from the ’20s. In summer, it grew boiling hot. The stone walls ran with pale green water, like exquisite sweat.
He looked up, when the young woman entered.
And she stopped, and stared back at him with enlarged dark eyes. She was scared, scared to death. She knew what he was, this – man? Did you call a male Vampire a man? Perhaps once. And since the RUSA Alliance of ’35, such a variety of mixed ethnic types … They said he was part Rus, part German, part Canad-François.
He was called Taras. No second name was to be used.
There was one window, a fake with softly grey-lighted glass. In this austere if silvery glow she took in his black hair and lens-dark eyes. He had wonderful musician’s hands, and a slightly crooked nose.
‘It was kind of you to visit,’ he said. ‘Anka – do I have your name correctly?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded thin to her own ears.
‘Please sit down, the red chair’s quite comfortable. Or do you prefer the green chair? Some of my guests …’ he hesitated.
She said, brazen with nerves, ‘They don’t like the red chair because it’s the colour of blood.’
‘It isn’t, nevertheless,’ he flatly answered. ‘Have you ever seen blood? I mean looked at it? There’s no colour on Earth quite like it, Anka. But please, I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Would you like a drink?’
‘Water,’ she said.
‘Water.’ He lowered his eyes and smiled slightly. ‘You all want water.’ He added with a strange and unsuitable urbanity, ‘As if you can wash your insides clean of what I’ll do. As if it will stain. It won’t, Anka. I swear it.’
Anka sat in the red chair. She crossed her legs so the short skirt – short was the fashion that summer – rode up. He glanced, no more. ‘I’ll have a geneva then, thank you.’
Then he laughed. This was a fantastic laugh, like that of a very young man. But he was, she had been told, about 190 years of age. He looked barely forty. Lean and strong, elegant. Yet … old too, in there behind the polarised dark of his eyes.
It was part of her Citizen Service, to be here. Others took up assistant teaching or nursing, or police work, or training-and-enactment in the Military Corps. But those options all entailed one full year stint. While to do this, help maintain the Vampire population – who were turning out to be so useful – was only a matter of three months with, if properly performed, a guaranteed financial increment.
Anka had not been afraid. She had believed this work was straightforward. By then no Vampire would harm you, for if such a thing occurred, they were subject to the force of a computerised and infallible law, equally paramount and non-negotiable. Any trespass would result in what was known as Expungement.
Why then this terror that assailed her the moment she was shown the image of Taras on a screen? And why too had she not backed out? There were always three choices of client. Why was she here? She was just 19.
He brought her the geneva and she drank it in a gulp. He sat down again, facing her.
‘Well,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s get on.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Anka, I don’t want you if you’re frightened.’
‘Oh, aren’t any of your – visitors ever nervous?’
‘Yes, but there’s a difference between uncertainty and terror.’
‘I’m not terrified.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, rising, ‘for calling. Don’t worry, I’ll be tactful with the agency. Nothing to concern you.’
She too flung up from her chair. ‘No! I’m not going anywhere.’ Her heart raced, she felt her face scald with passion – was it anger or panic? She heard herself cry in a wild pleading voice, ‘Don’t send me away –’
And then he laughed once more, a laugh quite unlike the first, soft and dark and very low. ‘My God,’ said Taras, ‘you’re in love with me. I didn’t know I could still do that.’
‘What?’ But her mind was caught up on his use of the term ‘God’, now generally obsolete. Her mind could not get past the odd ‘God’ word. And so she began to feel what the rest of her was really saying. Anka wilted, now white as the electra-light inside the silver window.
And Taras came to her and took her in his arms and held her gently, inescapably, pressed the length of his body, and through the blackness of his shirt she felt the slow steady immortal thunder of his own almighty heart.
‘My love,’ he said into her hair, against her lips as he kissed them, ‘I don’t deserve such a beautiful gift, after so many years. My love,’ he said. ‘My Anka.’
While he drank directly from her neck, she started only vaguely at the initial deflowering sting. She was already falling down and down through the illimitable haven of him, of Taras. As if through the star-streamed heaven of space. Never so lost, never so found. Safe in abandon. Like death. Better even than sex (even the glorious sex
they two would also partner in), this psychic orgasm of consensual surrender.
There’s a painting you can see in the Venezi-Gifford Gallery, New Kroy, or else reproduced here and there in various art books or dealers’ on-screen catalogues. It’s called Planting Out the Sheaves, and is a cute enough take on old Earth-west farming techniques, as applied to the ‘seeding’ of about-to-be-solar-system planets. (I hope that’s helpful, and not patronising, to suggest it might assist you to get some idea of how I work out here, how it looks, vertically levitate-flying across the wide open plains and soaring mountainsides, attended by my flock of clever machines. Some of the little robots and autohands are well-reproduced in this painting, particularly the tiny drivers that prepare the ground ahead and below. The male figure on the canvas, the painted Vampire overseer-farmer, of course, is romanticised to an ultimate degree. He looks like a cross between some gorgeous Earth Pre-Raphaelite saint and one of their 21st Century superheroes, and his golden hair flows behind him as he strides the midnight airlessness, mysteriously lit by chemo-mech moons.)
I travel usually about three metres above the surface. Sometimes I go up a bit higher, or dip down, more closely to inspect what the machines are doing. Occasionally I call them off one area, or send them to another they’ve missed. Robotics isn’t perfect, even now. Perhaps a good thing, or would any of us have a job out here at all? Probably. There’s still enough human life in most of our genes to assess terrain and feasibility with – as they now call it – psycho-voyance. (Human intuition, I believe that means.)
Planet 3 is vast. The cliffs and mountains are colossal, evidence of thinned atmosphere even in the era of the first sun. Waterless seabeds, and the gigantic arteries of dead rivers, fissure its surface. The moons softly shine on all this; when they vanish to the planet’s far side, the stars render light. But I can see in total darkness.