Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (43 page)

But at this she laughed. “Does that mean you agree, then? Yes?”

The City Corps was pleased as well. They generally let such liaisons as hers with Taras continue well over term, in the hopes of a human deciding to ‘turn’. Vampires, now collated as they had been for some twenty-seven years into the mortal Life-Way, were proving virtually hourly of more value, their practical scope and physical talents far exceeding those of the best of mankind. So, there was no difficulty, and indeed a legal civil ceremony took place, reminding Anka of an old-fashioned marriage, and followed by a party.

Nor was she afraid of what had come to be called D & R, (Death and Resurrection). She fell asleep inside the fortress circle of his arms, and woke into the dawn of dark without a solitary regret.

Tonight, that is
ship’s-
night, I alone look at Anka in the mirror.

I know her pretty well after all this time, that dark-eyed, youngish woman of 212. So why look? Because, it sometimes seems to me, on these long nights amid the Endless Night, that I have an actual
look of him.
Of Taras. I dyed my hair black once, to enhance this illusion. That was about seventeen years after we parted. But strangely — or logically perhaps — to me I seemed
less
like him, then. They say too, don’t they, people (even un-people?) who stay connected, come to resemble each other. Even people who don’t live together, as he and I never did. Yet are close, in
some
way together, a great while.

Down the corridors of the
Mirandusa
the other lovers are making their love. Different, we know, from the mere ecstatic delights of really good sex, the sort I get with Heth, and he with me. I’m fond of them, my Bee-Dees, it’s more than sustenance. We three have grown together too, I suppose, over the eight and a half years we’ve shared this peripatetic life. I remember once, one of the hull shields malfunctioned during a meteor storm. We worked with the machines, Corvyra, Heth and I, and got the thing patched up and saved our skins. And when it was all over the three of us ran together, thoughtless as water-drops on a pane, there in the control room, under the Main Comp’s big blue benign maternal eye, and held each other close. Only for a moment. But it marks out that hour for Corvyra and Heth, for me, too. We are our own type of family. I never had one before I knew them. And with Taras, evidently, with him— ‘God’ knows what unnamable entity we two formed. But those uncountable hours were marked indelibly. And it lasted. It lasted all of seventy-one years.

This cabin, mine, is the only room that ever sees me cry now. I’ll cry tonight.

Chasing the moons over the saucer-rim of a world, Planet 1, the Champion. The exhilaration of it — to fly — yes, fly, I’m flying — skimming the wide lake of black space with its shimmers and shallow skerries of rippling particles, gaseous flumes — down to the sunless seabed, with canyons deep as any philosopher’s abyss, and all of it now a fallow field that, with the coming of great Light, may — will — must blossom, bloom and grow. In a quadrennium, less, a fast-built home for humans, as they range forever outward through the stars.

But from here the stars aren’t suns. They’re friendly sprigs of neon hung in the night sky. And over there the big moon at full, and the smaller crescent that the planet’s shadow makes, even though the lunar fire is inside.

Where I’ve set down I stand, though my personally-engendered gravity already means I could run over the surface. I’ll be careful anyway, not to disturb the plantings.

Because I don’t breathe, there’s no waver to the vistas of space or landmass.

Despite the lack of breath, or air, a faint esoteric scent comes to me. The odor of an ancient past. The planet’s. My own.

I walk the world.

And through my mind my life spills, like a phantom of the planet’s ocean. My days, my years. And so I come again to Taras, and begin with and am
with
Taras, and at last, as it has to, the tide reaches its height, and brings to me that ultimate month we were together, when he told me we should part.

It wasn’t, he said, so tenderly and kindly, that he had ceased to love me, nor, he said, did he think I had yet grown tired of him. There was no other he wanted, or thought that
I
did. But this had been enough, he said. What,
what
did that mean — I cried to him. Enough?
Enough?
But he only repeated, in his wonderful dark voice, the same litany. We must leave each other and go our separate ways. We must do it before our union, our love — if I preferred that name — was stale. What we had had, still had, must never be spoiled by becoming
less.

I raged and begged. I mocked him. He said no more. I didn’t believe he had not found another he liked better than me. Much farther on, knowing him as I had, I
did
believe, however. There had been no replacement. Which made what happened worse. By the month’s finish I reckoned he had come around. I had arranged quite ordinarily to see him the next day, to which he seemed to agree. But when I went to his apartment, he was gone. It’s unachievable, to trace our kind, as you may be aware, if they legally refuse it. He did, it seems, so refuse. I never saw him, my Vampire lover, ever again. Except, you’ll guess, in my mind, the high tide of memory, by such and similar means.

If he lives still, or is dead, I don’t, I never shall, know.

And now—

Anka discovered the cave in the ravine wall almost inadvertently; her thoughts had been otherwise engaged. A warped black stalagmite pillar guarded the entrance.

Inside, lightglow arrested and astonished her.

With enormous care, she moved forward. The roof of the cave was quite high, and then the sides of it opened out. A sheer black chamber, bright at the centre with a chem-burner … reddish light.

There were other things in the cave, which plainly was being used as a sort of living room. A rock — a
chair?
(how had it been brought here?) on one side of the burner. A second chair waited back in the shadows. Moisture gleamed on the walls but the scent in the cave was wholesome and quite dry.

He stood behind the light. A tall silhouette.

Having no breath to catch, her ribs involuntarily convulse as she
catches
it. Vacuum, for a split second, sucks at Anka’s lungs. She begins to double over, though already her Vampire stamina has corrected the silly physical mistake. And then from dark through light to dark he springs toward her, grips her — inexorable, gentle — in a hold that paralyses with its
knownness.

“How can you be here,” she mutters into the shoulder of his coat. “Have I gone mad?”

She can speak without breath. She has needed to.

“Oh, my love,” he says, in such a tired, sad,
gladdened
voice. “We — our kind — can go anywhere, do anything — didn’t I teach you that?”

Then she’s herself again, the older wiser Anka he warned her of and promised, in the time before he left her. She straightens and stares up into his face. The face of Taras.

He is real, sentient.
He
is older. Now his hair is iced silver, his face everywhere finely lined. He looks … like a beautiful, hale, thin, indomitable man, perhaps sixty-five, sixty-seven. His teeth, what else, are flawless. His black eyes clear as space itself inside a lens. And he has not let her go.

He says, “We’ll drink geneva. Then.”

“Then,” she answers. “Then.”

Their entity formed, body to body, mouth to mouth, there could be, and was, no margin or necessity for any explanation or debate, no other element but this love, this truth, vaster than a world, more infinite than time. Life after death.

I cry my heart out, as I was aware I should. They leave me to myself, my Blood-Donors. My work is in-date, the program on target. They’ve learnt, after a few hours I’ll be back to normal. This has happened before.

I loved him so much, Taras. I’ll always love him like that. A dead coal in my guts that flares up like an igniting sun, just as Simlon will, in seven more months.

No one can be blamed for their dreams. Particularly not us, the
Vampire
kind. Out here, in perpetual darkness where we never need to sleep
… our
dreams take on a specialized waking form. We
hear
them approach, like footsteps, but can’t hold them off. Conveyed by an
awake
consciousness, they have a potency, a
realness
as vital — more — than reality itself.
Our
dreams come
true.
While they last. And when they’re done, what’s left — is cobwebs. Dust.

Tonight we were lovers again, Taras and Anka. And I was alive as never otherwise I shall be, even if my body lasts forever.

This dream visits me quite often. I dread it. I welcome it. I pray to God it will come back.

But now, on and on, I shed my tears.

In Endless Night, the ghost of lost love shines so brightly it fades the stars. Such fire — is
beyond
the sun.

* * * * *

Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in North London, England. She didn’t learn to read until nearly 8, and started writing at 9. After schooling, she worked at a variety of jobs (badly), until DAW Books of America liberated her into full time professional writing by publishing her novel,
The BirthGrave.
Since then she has written almost 100 books, and almost 300 short stories. She has also written for TV and radio, and certain of her stories are still regularly broadcast. At present she is working on a new Paradys collection. She lives on the South East Coast with her husband, writer/artist/photographer John Kaiine, and The Cats.

The Slowing of the World

By Sandra Kasturi

The earth is cooling.

I know this because Aurore has told me, yet again, that it is happening. Even the climatologists are beginning to notice now, and there has been some mild talk, but not in any seriously scientific way. And soon it will be too late to do anything about it. Most people are still going on about global warming. Which, incidentally, Aurore tells me isn’t really going to be relevant any more. Not for a long time.

I’m new to the vampire game — I’ve been “Turned” (they use this term with amusement, having cribbed it from films), but the changes are slow ones. My blood is still mostly my own and my genitals haven’t entirely retreated and changed. When I think of the hunger I used to feel for Aurore, it seems distant. Pleasant, but far away, like a rewritten childhood memory, or some mild opiate-induced haze.

I notice the deepening chill for the first time in many springs. It takes longer than usual for the ice to retreat from the lake’s shore, snow stays on the foothills permanently, and the returning swallows don’t make it back until July. But these are small things. Maybe the scientists are worried, but if they are, they’re not telling anyone. And the vampires think in terms of millennia, epochs and eons. They’ve been a perpetual whisper on the crust of this planet since before the dinosaurs. Evolution, adaptation — it’s rote now, so easy, it’s a parlour trick.

Most of the Elders have retreated into the mountains, laid themselves ready for the Long Night. It started back in the 2060s, when things had gotten too hot, and there were too many of us. Too many of
them,
rather. Too many humans. I’m not one of them anymore, but the Change comes like a glacier, so sometimes I forget.

The humans were just making things hotter, and the birth rate was climbing even further. The Elders decided it was time to cool things down, cull the herd. They — we — need humans to live, but if there are too many — too many cars, too many hamburgers — it becomes dangerous for everyone, predators and prey. Too many shoes and Q-tips and Tupperware containers, too many vacationers in the Caribbean, too many paper clips and rock songs and lap dogs, and everything falls apart.

They’ve done it before, with the dinosaurs who were getting uppity, vicious and overly smart. With previous civilizations. They’ve done it with water, fire, with stars falling from the sky. But the ice is their favorite. Ice works best. It’s quiet, slow and soothing. It takes time, and they,
we,
like things that take time. We are more patient than trees, than dust.

The Long Night will start in the mountains. As the Elders’ bodies cool, the glaciers will make their slow way down, until humanity is contained in one small area. Our cities will be ironed to nothing, our pills and pornographies forgotten, our words and wisdom gone to smoke. Only then, when we —when they — are manageable again, will the ice retreat as the Elders wake.