Paradise Tales (23 page)

“Just … just to check.
The
Albert Einstein?”

“Oh, I think so. It’s hard to tell. So many memories over so long a period. You should hire me. V.A.R.s make very good scientists, you know. Our brains go young again and in theory we have centuries of work in us.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “In life, I was so against quantum theory. It offended my ideas about God.” He smiles ruefully, charmingly. “That’s less of a problem for me now, God not being high on the Vampire Top Ten.”

My tongue is buzzing because I’m nervous. “Thhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhis is a biology lab.”

He nods approvingly. “You’re exploring radiation resistance in plants, particularly quinoa. Also the transfer of genetic material from quinoa to other plants, such as food crops. This is something I find very, very interesting. I’ve been doing work on it myself.” He hands trace something in the air. “Maybe I should grow a coat and hat of quinoa for myself.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Duh … do you have any qualifications?”

He nods. “The Nobel Prize.”

“Dooooooooooo…uh … you have any experience in biology?” I’m finding him very distracting.

The man is beautiful. Cuddly with button eyes. Albert Einstein, you’re a knockout, especially when you’re young, with cut, combed hair, no wrinkles and dressed all in black.

“I have a degree in biology now. Night courses.” Was that another joke? He smiles and shrugs. “I had good reason to learn biology.” I see no joke and I get no meaning.

“What, what reason?”

“Well! You wake up in a mortuary cold box and you realise that you are not breathing, but you are moving and thinking. You’re wondering: How will I explain this to the person who opens the drawer? How can I be dead and alive at the same time? It becomes a very interesting question.”

Then he adds, “I have solved it.” He looks like a little boy with a new toy.

Finally I get it. “Oh! Radiation! Sorry, of course, ultraviolet. You’re interested in resistance to sunlight. You really will be making quinoa into hats and coats.”

“Exactly,” he says. When he smiles, his eyebrows slant as if everything is life is a comforting joke.

He thanks me for scheduling such a late interview, and I suddenly realise I’m shaking hands with a predator. He leaves, walking out onto icy pavements wearing only odd socks. He’s forgotten his shoes.

Almost without realising it, I’ve given him the job.

Bar talk, early evening

If Albert Einstein applies for a job at your lab, you hire him, right?

You have to watch him, because he is very, very charming and polite. If I’m working late, he brings me a cup of coffee and asks me about the kids and Henny, and if we’re planning to have any more children. He just seems to love the idea of kids. You have to keep thinking: if this guy gets hungry…

Yeah, I’ll have another Carling, thanks.

Oh he’s bright, yeah, he’s a genius. Just the other day, he was explaining what ultraviolet does to vampire cells.

Sunlight breaks the sugar-phosphate backbone of a vampire’s DNA. It can make two thymine bases next to each other join up. They get these burn marks and the cancer tissue just goes wild, growing all over the place.

He says to me—and this is how he talks—“I haf two friends, zey look like potatoes!”

According to him, vampires are tumours, organised tumours in the shape of a human being. “But ze toomor has differhezeeated into zpezific tissues. Like all toomorz, it iz immortal.”

Legal Surveillance keeps CCTV footage on everybody, and I just have to watch his every day, which is terrible of me I know, but every day he does something wacky.

Albert Einstein, leaving his hand over a Bunsen burner. Albert Einstein getting his nose slammed by test tubes in a centrifuge. Genius at work.

He can’t feel it. Their nerves don’t quite work. Like lepers, but unlike lepers, they heal, and boy do they heal quickly. The next day, the burn is all gone. He says it’s because they can undifferentiate their tissue at will. So you can also think of them as a bunch of stem cells walking around.

Cheers thanks, it’s my round next.

He has hundreds of fans. They call him Einstein, Dark Lord of the Undead. They hang around the lab waiting for him.

They look normal enough so long as they don’t smile. Some of them don’t even move; they just stand for hours like they’re posing for a statue. Since they can’t feel any pain. They twist their heads up to look at the moon and leave them like that. If water melts and re-freezes on top of their heads, they just leave it there. Snow stays on their shoulders.

One of them waited outside all night in the cold with his bare hand on our front gates. He turned around and left his hand behind, stuck to the metal. The new shift came in and found it there and refused to open up.

OK, if you insist. Another Carling, cheers.

A couple of nights ago, Albert comes up to me, just as I’m leaving, and there must be fifty vampires in our parking lot. They’re all chanting “Albert, Albert.” He says, “I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t find this intimidating.”

So I say, yes, actually, it is very intimidating.

“Oh dear,” he says. “They have strict instructions to harm no one from the lab.”

So I say, “Uh. Do they always follow instructions?”

And he says, “They love me. I am their father. They cannot disobey.” And he smiles, but there are these two little pinprick fangs, and you think, ho boy, is there a lot of power there.

Vampires are so hierarchical. Every one of them has a title; everybody has some kind of line manager, and they sit around tracing who gave birth to who. And of course, all these vampires are all trying nowadays to make as many of themselves as they can so that they can have fans too. It’s like the old days when your salary was based on how many people worked for you, so you kept hiring more people?

Oh, it’s a terrible health and safety issue!

Some companies make V.A.R.s use separate entrances, even separate elevators, but my God, the expense! It was bad enough having to rebuild for wheelchair access.

We just give the day staff medication. Well, Janula holds the patents on anti-vampirals; if we can’t get treatment, who can?

Oh spare me! You can’t catch being Mexican or gay, it’s entirely different. This is a disease; you can’t have a political argument with a disease. Even if they don’t feed on us, they’re constantly shedding viral loads.

Of course corporations love them! They don’t need pensions and they are really useful for 24 x 7, which is why Janula hires so many of them. I mean these … things … they have lifetimes! They get one degree after another, have all that experience. I mean how would you justify NOT hiring someone with a Nobel Prize? If you don’t hire them, they call the Commission down on your head for discrimination! You practically have to get into an argument to hire a real person!

As a member of a threatened population, I can tell you: they really will miss us when we’re gone.

I mean what are they going to eat, right?

Here’s to the ozone hole.

Just between you and me: I hate those creeps.

Preliminary hearing

When did I first notice that Albert Einstein was doing something outside his job description?

Well, your Honour, as I’ve said, he did work in a very odd way. I think the court has seen some of the CCTV footage? I think the worst was when he knocked the on-switch of the dry-ice fire extinguisher and was deep-frozen.

Sorry, your Honour. No, I did not notice anything to indicate he was working on other research until I got a call from our Legal Surveillance team. They said that they had found about 100 frozen human embryos, and they didn’t know what they were. I was completely mystified. Janula Micromed does not do any research on human embryos as a matter of policy. We don’t even do any research using animals. All of our research is on plants.

Einstein just admitted it. He said, “Oh, I was doing that.” He took responsibility, and told everybody that I had nothing to do with it. He said that he didn’t want to me to get into any trouble.

Yes, of course I knew we had legal obligations in this area. I said Albert, you can’t do that, unlicensed human cloning is illegal.

Yes, I did ask him what he was using them for, and he said, to test if the quinoa plant might in some way prevent radiation damage to humans.

No, your Honour, I didn’t realise the implications of that statement at the time. I don’t usually think of V.A.R.s as human beings. And I had absolutely no idea that genetic modification had taken place in the embryos themselves. I thought he meant he was working on fabric made from quinoa or some kind of treatment and perhaps wanted to use the embryos to test that.

We did have a huge problem about what to do with the embryos. Legal Surveillance was very concerned about future grant funding or licensing if we let anybody else have them. In any case, the original donors had made it plain that the embryos should not be used for any other research, so we couldn’t. I should just say how helpful Professor Einstein was. He had permissions from the original donors for a range of options. For example, ah, we had the permission to put the embryos out for adoption and normal pregnancy, but only if the donors were allowed to know who the surrogate parents were. The difficulty was that we did not have 100 adoption opportunities. It was the Professor who then got us the clearance for ordinary burial.

Our PR partners loved the idea. We had an internment ceremony at St. James’ Cemetery near Parliament Street. It was very moving. Even the evangelical watchdog bodies found that it was an appropriate thing to do and sent representatives.

Yes, that was unfortunate, the attempt to stake Professor Einstein, and I make no apologies in that regard for helping him to escape.

Well, now that you mention it, he had the donor permissions for the burial ready in advance, that’s true.

I suppose there is a possibility that he planned it, yes.

No, we had no idea that all the donours were all Virally Affected Revenants.

Partly it’s because nobody has even been able to take a tissue sample successfully from a V.A.R. The sample immediately reverts to something like an undifferentiated tumour. It becomes a not very useful biopsy sample in a petri dish. So it never occurred to us that someone would have cracked cloning vampires. It was light-years beyond what we believed to be possible.

I got a call at home about 3:00 a.m. It was from our PR Department. In some distress. They, they just said that they were getting reports of human embryos moving along the Bloor St. Viaduct. Snapping at people, yes.

I have no idea how the embryos came to be there. But I imagine that they rose from the dead. Undead embryos are not something we’ve had to deal with before, in fact, at Janula Micromed.

Of course, we were very concerned. I should point out that immediately, at once, Janula Micromed stepped up to the plate. I myself and members of the PR and Legal sections went out at once to try to round up the little devils. We called out pest-control agencies to help with the cleanup, we paid for public-service announcements. From the beginning we offered anyone who had been in the Viaduct area free anti-vampiral drugs.

Too lenient with Professor Einstein? Well, he is a very distinguished man, and…

We fired him, of course. As soon as we found out about the illicit cloning. I said, I’m terribly sorry Herr Professor Doctor Dark Lord Einstein, but you will have to leave the premises.

He thanked me for giving him a job.

Yes, I have to suppose that he planned … planned for the embryos to rise from the dead.

You, you, you, you will have to talk to someone other than myself about the the the the legal side of uhhhhh any damages.

How many of the embryos did we collect? I’m not entirely sure. You’d have to talk to the people in charge of the cleanup operation, but I think it was very few. Yes, there’s a possibility that some of them are still out there. But, uh, in their state of immaturity and helplessness if they stayed out in the Canadian sun, they in all likelihood are now dead.

No, no, no, I meant to say Re-dead. Actually still. Unmoving. Burnt to a crisp.

Incompetent? I, I, I wouldn’t say I’d been incompetent, no. I, I, I would say that I treated Albert Einstein with great respect and kindness.

Undue kindness? Yes.

I apologise for repeating everything you say, your Honour. Bad habit. When I’m nervous.

Have you ever known a vampire? A vampire who needed something from you?