A Taint in the Blood (19 page)

Ellen thought, in what was almost a prayer:

And, as prayer sometimes was, it felt . . . very slightly reassuring.

Monica went on: “But then she fed—it’s very soothing when she feeds—and then she was, umm,
really
nice to me.”

She absently touched the Band-Aid at the base of her throat.

“You play tennis, don’t you?” Monica went on.

“Yes?” Ellen said, blinking at the non sequitur.

“There’s a ladies’ club that meets at the community center courts; I go after I finish up at the library most days. Care to play a few games this afternoon? I’m not very sore anymore, and the
Doña
can reach us there if she wants you for something. She’s reasonable about that. You only have to clear it with her if you’re out of town for more than a few hours. Besides, she was with Jamal last night.”

“Ah . . . why not?” Ellen said.

I
do
like playing tennis. Why not, indeed? They’re probably not good enough to give me much of a game, but you never know.

Just then an ambulance came up the street and stopped in front of Number Three. Two paramedics trotted inside pulling a gurney. Both women froze, then exhaled again as they came out with a living man on it.

Adrienne followed; she was dressed in black motorcycle leathers and boots, and made a beckoning gesture, leaning back against a massive low-slung machine with wide tires, arms crossed on her chest.

Like something alien
, Ellen thought; it took a slight mental effort to make herself walk to the driveway.
Like something alien and sleek and deadly. All of which are truer than God. Much truer.

“He’s just dazed, I think,” the mistress of Rancho Sangre said absently when they came up, looking after the emergency vehicle. “Possibly a mild concussion. Jamal is”—her voice dropped to a purr “—very
strong
. And very, very grumpy at breakfast sometimes. Of course, I’m not usually a morning person myself.”

“Well, he should know better than to
fight
you, Doña Adrienne,” Monica said disapprovingly. “Really, some people are just plain
rude
.”

Then she cleared her throat and touched the corner of her mouth for an instant.

“Ah, thanks,” Adrienne said, and used a thumb to wipe up the red trickle that ran down to her chin.

She licked it off, scrubbed her face with her sleeve and went on:

“No, it’s actually entertaining, at least for a while. Now, I’m going up to San Francisco. You’re not up to it, are you, Monica?”

“Ah . . . on the motorcycle?”

Adrienne nodded. Monica smiled and patted the air behind herself for an instant.

“It would hurt a lot,” she said, almost clinically. “Riding that
long
, I mean.”

“You wouldn’t be very mobile when we got to town, either, which would be tiresome. We wouldn’t want to shock Jean-Charles. Ellen, sluice off, pack yourself some underwear and socks and an extra T-shirt, and your toothbrush. We can do some shopping while I’m there.
Vite
!”

She jumped at the snap and hurried, flushing with annoyance at herself.

Fear burns itself out
, she thought.
I can’t be afraid of her every moment of the day. Not that I don’t
want
to, I just
can’t
, the way I couldn’t run for twenty-four hours a day either. But I can be
nervous
a lot longer, the way you can walk farther than you can run. I
do
wonder why we’re making this trip. Surely she’d want to stay here behind . . . oh, defenses or something? If I’m bait for Adrian.

When she returned Adrienne was astride the big red-black-and-yellow touring bike; it had a V-shaped logo on the front with the trident-and-black-sun inside it.

“What can I say, I’m
lucky
,” Adrienne said, and grinned beneath the raised visor of the full-face helmet. “There’s a spare padded jacket in the touring bag—that streamlined trunk thing behind the rear seat. You’d be chilly without that, even with me to break the airflow. And a spare helmet. Put ’em on, spread your thighs over the bitch seat of this vibrator on wheels, and let’s go!”

Just then Monica hurried up. “Some lunch!” she said, and tucked a plastic-wrapped parcel into one of the fared saddlebags beside the rear wheel. “In case you want to stop at someplace pretty and picnic!”

“Monica, you are a wonder,” Adrienne said and stood on the kick-starter.
“En avant.”

The big V-twin engine roared into life, but then the sound faded to an oddly muted drone. The inside of the helmet seemed to
adjust
itself slightly, pressing more tightly against her ears.

“Automatic selective sound-damping,” Adrienne said, tapping her ear; the voice came through faultlessly from the mike in the helmet’s chin-bar. “Customized experimental military system, filters things like engine noise. I just
love
modern technology!”

Ellen mounted; the touring machine had actual if sketchy seats, enough to cradle the butt and hips at least, and her back was against a padded rest. The Shadowspawn’s torso pressed her, and she could just see over her helmet.

“Arms around my waist,” Adrienne said. “It’s the closest you’ll get to a seat belt.”

She obeyed hesitantly, feeling the other’s back pushing against her breasts and belly through the down jacket’s fabric, and the taut muscle beneath the leather as she gripped.

“It’s a bit late to be shy,
chérie
,” Adrienne observed. “Hang on!”

“Eeek!”

She did, gripping convulsively as the big machine seemed to hang on its spinning, smoking rear wheel for an instant, then came down and caromed out of the little lane like a wet melon seed squeezed between two fingers.

“Whooooop! Whooooop!” Adrienne caroled.

The cycle leaned far over as they cut right, dodging a delivery truck. Speed built to a blur, and the wind tugged at her head. She hugged desperately, hands joining below the other’s ribs as they headed south. After a few moments that was for sheer warmth as well as safety. The air caught at her jacket and made it flutter sharply, like an awning in a high breeze, a continuous crackling sound; the vibration sank into her bones, with the deeper note of the machine beneath.

“We’re on Highway 46 here,” Adrienne said as they turned west. “Pretty country, but it’s even nicer when we hit the coast.”

The only parts of California Ellen had seen before had been the Bay area and LA. This
was
pretty, in a way different from both the forested East and the austere piñon-and-juniper high desert around Santa Fe.

Here rolling green hills rose out of the occasional patch of flat land, like a rumpled padded quilt on an unmade bed. Tongues of oakwood and trees she couldn’t identify rose up the notches in the high ground, with sheep grazing in ridge-top meadows. Vineyards pruned and stumpy for winter made geometry across the lower slopes with the first yellow traces of wild mustard beneath, and blazing orchards of cherry and almond were slashes of color against the green. The smells were fresh and moist and the air grew a little warmer as the sun rose; now and then there was an overwhelming sweetness of blossom or a pungent waft from livestock.

Adrienne drove the near-empty road and through the little hamlets with a hard decisive snap that was somehow never jerky, overtaking whatever came her way with a surge that pressed her back against the passenger and Ellen back against the rest. Uneasily, she remembered that Adrian handled the sports cars he loved in very much the same fearless way, as if he were pushing his own nerve and muscle down the controls into the machine.

She peered over the other’s shoulder at the all-glass screen controls; they were doing ten miles above the speed limit, on this winding roadway.

“Customized engine,” Adrienne said after a while. “Four-stroke fifty-degree V-Twin with 1731 cc displacement. Single overhead camshafts with four valves per cylinder, self-adjusting cam chains, hydraulic lifters. But they jiggered the compression ratio for me and the frame’s special alloy, lighter than the standard. I think I’ll give Jose one for his birthday; he loves it.”

I don’t speak Mechanic,
Ellen thought.

Then her mind stuttered slightly. It was
impossible
to censor the way you talked to yourself!

“You sound like some of my elders.” Adrienne laughed; there was a hard edge to it, but Ellen didn’t think it was directed at her. “A lot of them don’t like machinery either. At least machinery that doesn’t involve shoveling coal into a boiler.”

“The ones who make the middle-management demonic career path hell?” she asked.

“But yes!”

She took one hand off the handlebars to gesture for an instant, and Ellen felt the muscles in her thighs and stomach clench in sudden terror. Was that a wobble in the front wheel?

“Also, their
attitudes
. Few people change much past their twenties. In this my breed and yours are not so different. Perhaps in the Old Stone Age this was of no consequence; one millennium was much like another. But now matters are different, and that, my sweet, is a matter which concerns
you
.”

“Why? You’d all want to . . . drink my blood, wouldn’t you? Torture me and mess with me?”

“Yes. But
they
rule the world, remember? And not just at dinner-time.”

“Oh.”

Ellen winced.
That explains a number of things.

“Imagine again; the ruling elders grew up in the time of the First World War, more or less—a little older than
my
parents. That was when Shadowspawn powerful enough to survive death became more than a very few.
Their
parents were Victorians, born before Bismarck’s men shelled Paris.”

Ellen gave a sly chuckle. “Sexist assholes?”

“Oh, you have
no
idea. Exactly
two
women on the Council, in this day and age!”

“How many on the Council altogether?”

“Thirteen, naturally! Though that is not the worst of it. They have nineteenth-century habits of
thought
. They do not think of interlink-ages and unintended consequences and feedback cycles. This matter of you humans overbreeding and ruining the world, for example.”

“You’re
environmentalists
?” she said incredulously.

“If you plan to live . . . well, exist . . . for ten thousand years or more, you really do not have much choice, my sweet. But
les vieux
, they also just
hate
the modern world, many of them. It is not the place in which they grew. They do not understand it; they feel
alien
in this century, alien to the buildings and the clothes and the music, the very fabric of life. They want the changes to
stop
. Hence their solution to the problem is . . . far too drastic.”

“Drastic?”

“They plan to destroy human civilization. Let only a few hundred million survive, as peasants.”

Eeerk!
Ellen thought; for a moment she forgot the rushing passage of the roadway.

“Precisely.
Quelle connerie!
I
like
the modern world. Well, much of it. Yes, yes, there are too many humans; they must be trimmed back, faster than our pressure on governments to promote birth control can accomplish—”

“That was
you
?”

“Of course. Do you think the Chinese would have given up hope of sons on their own? And our sabotage of the economy—”

“That was you guys too?”

“
Chérie
, you thought it was
by accident
that all over the world so many intelligent people made the same mistakes at the same time? Yes, these measures are inadequate. We must intervene more directly. But I do
not
want only a few peasants to survive. Peasants are
boring
!”

Her voice rose. “I like fast cars, and motorcycles, and my jet! I like towns where the streets are
not
rivers of shit! I like movies and the Web and digital music libraries and BlackBerries and video-on-demand! I like a good selection of lucies, ones who do
not
have lice and who can carry on an intelligent conversation and have interesting, sensitive minds to torment and degrade! I adore the Louvre, and the Getty, and the Hermitage and the Rijksmuseum and good restaurants and fashion shows in Paris or Milan and Château Lafite Rothschild and the London theater!”

The voice rose again. “Idiots!
Izidingidwane! Baka tare!
Fossilized imbeciles!
Cretans! Èrbǎiwǔ!
”

By then they were moving north on Highway 1, the narrow two-lane coastal strip. The torrent of multilingual insults melded into a sheer howl of rage, not deafening only because the headphones damped it. Acceleration rammed the Shadowspawn’s dense compact torso back into her, and the engine was loud even through the helmet as the wheel screamed against the earth. Everything blurred around them as the cycle surged forward.

“No!” Ellen screamed herself. “You’ll kill us both,
nonononono!
^”

They took the curve lying over so far that her left knee nearly brushed the pavement. A minivan loomed up in front of them, and the motorcycle skimmed between it and the rocky cliff-face of the roadway, close enough that she could have reached out and touched either one, if her arms hadn’t been locked around the other’s waist. A swerve outward and another leaning turn, with asphalt rushing by so close to the right that she could see every crack from deferred maintenance. She couldn’t even close her eyes or look away as death loomed up in the form of a rust-eaten Honda Civic with three horrified faces staring through the glass.