The Mammoth Book of Dracula (74 page)

“I don’t need a gene map,” he told Johanna. “I just need everything we can get before nightfall.”

“What happens at nightfall?” she asked.

“I have to see a man about a disease,” he replied, as the phone at his elbow began to ring. He picked it up immediately, but it was only a message telling him where to go to collect a message from Talinn.

~ * ~

It was Jenny who answered when Brewer presented himself at the door of Marklow’s building, and Jenny who came to the apartment door when he’d negotiated his way through the various layers of security. The first thing she said to him was: “You’re a thief.”

“And you’re a whore,” he said, “but we’ve both been taken for a ride. Your boyfriend always knew I’d come looking for him. He didn’t move in on my operation to make a little extra money; he did it to attract my attention.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Bru,” she replied—but he wasn’t flattering himself. He knew that he’d already been pencilled in for recruitment when Jenny’s urge to show off and rub his nose in what he’d lost had kicked things off prematurely. Sooner or later, he’d have been invited up here, and presented with a offer he couldn’t refuse.

The man who called himself Anthony Marklow was standing by the window looking out over the river. He didn’t offer to shake hands and he didn’t offer Brewer a drink. Nor did Jenny; she just went to the sofa and threw herself down in an exaggeratedly careless manner she’d probably borrowed from some American super-soap. Brewer remained standing, so that he could meet Count Dracula face to face.

Brewer was reasonably certain by now that Marklow
was
Count Dracula—maybe not literally, but as near as made no difference. His friendly neighbourhood hackers hadn’t managed to prove the case—in fact, they’d been so embarrassed about their failure to come up with anything concrete regarding Marklow’s true identity that they’d forsaken half their fee, which had only left them enough stuff to stay high till 2020—but the void of information they’d exposed was far too deep to be any mere accident. The fact that computers had only been around for a couple of generations meant that, in theory, the early history of anyone over fifty could be utterly untraceable, but the absence of anyone behind the Marklow mask was far more pronounced than that.

“You said that you weren’t convinced when Jenny told you I was serious about the genetic revolution,” Brewer said, when the other transfixed him with those dark persuasive eyes, “but you
did
want to be convinced, didn’t you?”

“I was interested,” Marklow admitted. “It’s time for me to move my personal project on to a bigger stage, and it would be very convenient to have some expert help.”

“You took a big risk,” Brewer said. “Suppose I were to start looking for a cure? I could find one, you know, given time. Just because rickettsia are immune to conventional antibiotics doesn’t mean that they can’t be stopped. Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ‘em ...”

“And little bugs have littler bugs, and so
ad infinitum”
Marklow finished for him. “It
is
a problem. You’re just a small-time hack with delusions of grandeur but there are plenty of researchers out there with the equipment and the knowledge necessary to tailor a virus to attack the agent. I’ve been safe from harassment for a long time, but the race will soon be on again.”

‘“Again?” Brewer queried. He was pretty sure that he knew what Marklow meant, but he wanted confirmation.

What the vampire meant was there had been a time when he had been utterly ignorant of the nature of his own condition, quite incapable of controlling it. In those days, he must have been very vulnerable, even though the legions of would-be Van Helsings who’d have staked him, beheaded him or burned him undead had even less understanding than he had. Brewer still wanted to hear him confirm all that, and he also wanted to know what sort of timescale they were talking about. He wanted to know how long Count Dracula,
alias
Andrew Marklow, had been undead, because he wanted to know what kind of life-expectancy he and Jenny might now have—or might yet obtain, as the prototype was refined and perfected.

For the time being, though, Marklow had no intention of giving too much away. First, he wanted to hear what Brewer had to say—and if the expression in his eyes was anything to go by, what Brewer said was going to have to be good. The age of Jurassic crack-dealers might be long gone, but there were still plenty of individuals in the world who could and would kill without compunction, and without the least fear of reprisal.

“I took a little nap before I came out,” Brewer said, hoping that he sounded sufficiently relaxed. “I wanted to see what the dreams were like. I wasn’t convinced that anything could actually do that: play dreams inside a man’s head like tapes playing on a VCR. But that’s what animal dreams are like, isn’t it? In animals the arena of dreams is straightforwardly functional; it’s for practising instinctive behaviours and connecting up the appropriate neurochemical payoffs. It’s for putting the pleasure into the necessities of life. For a few minutes I even wondered whether the whore might be right and it might actually be an ancestral memory of some kind, secreted into a vector by accident... but that still didn’t make sense. Bats and wolves aren’t related that way.”

Marklow nodded, but there was no sign of approval in his brooding stare.

“After that,” Brewer said, “I wondered about the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin—alien DNA strayed from a meteorite or a crashed UFO—but that was only because I’d watched too much television. The real answer was much simpler. I only had to remember the
other
disease which operates the same way—and works the trick even though it’s a mere virus, fifty genes short of a chromosome.”

He paused for dramatic effect. It was Jenny who obligingly said: “What
other
disease?”

“Rabies,” Brewer told her. “You see, the rabies virus isn’t very infectious. Even if it’s dumped straight into an open wound with a supportive supply of saliva it frequently fails to take, and in order to achieve
that
it has to bring about some pretty extreme behaviour modifications in its victims. Hydrophobia, reckless aggression ... a whole new set of meta-instincts. That’s the price of its survival. It’s a hell of a clumsy way to get by. Who’d have thought that a mechanism like that could have evolved
twice?
Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps the virus is just a spin-off from the rickettsia. Perhaps what you and I have is the Daddy rabies, and the one the mad dogs have is just the prodigal son.”

“I don’t have any kind of rabies,” she told him, frostily. She wasn’t nearly as outraged as Brewer had hoped she’d be.

“No,” Brewer said, “you don’t—not as long as you keep taking the palliatives. Even then... this is a carefully engineered strain, selected to keep the good effects while losing the bad ones. But Mr Marklow has a kind of rabies—don’t you, Mr Marklow? You have the original—the kind of rabies that our ancestors called vampirism.”

“I
had
the disease which
your
ancestors called vampirism,” Marklow riposted. “Now, I only have a modified form of it which is much more like the strain with which the subjects of my field-trial have been infected. You might say that I’d been cured, provided that you weren’t too fussy about the definition of the word
cure.
I’ve traded an awkward but valuable infection for its civilized cousin, which is equally valuable but far less awkward.”

“How much less awkward?” Brewer wanted to know.

“Did you bring the results of your analyses?” the ex-vampire countered.

Brewer pulled a sheaf of papers out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was only a dozen sheets of A4 but there was a lot of data packed into the dozen sheets and he’d summarized his conclusions very tersely.

While Marklow looked at the data Brewer studied Jenny, searching for the slightest indication of an unfortunate side effect. The mark on her neck told him that she still needed booster shots—that even if it were shot right into the carotid artery the rickettsia still had difficulty taking up permanent residence in the brain and its associated structures—but that wasn’t bad news. If he were to carry forward Marklow’s grand scheme for the remaking of human nature he could certainly maintain his supplies of the rickettsia, given that he had a readily available culture-medium.

“That’s good,” Marklow said, when he’d scanned the familiar information and read the judgmental comments. “Your staff evidently make up an effective team, and you obviously trust them. How much of the whole picture have you let them see?”

“They know that there’s a whole new approach to rejuvenative technology and life-extension—and they have enough of a basis to start their own research along the same lines, individually or in alliance. They don’t know that the new approach is really an old approach. They know I got the data from somewhere else but they think it was one more commission. They don’t know that it was a gift from Count Dracula. They don’t know that one of the blood-bags was mine, so they don’t know I’m a carrier.
How much less awkward?”

Marklow smiled. It wasn’t a particularly predatory smile. “I no longer have any real compulsion to bite or stab my fellow creatures and apply my slavering lips to the wounds,” he said. “The dreams still frighten me a little— I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to take the innocent pleasure in them that my new generation of converts can—but they’re no longer a curse that I have to fight with every last vestige of my strength.”

He paused briefly. The expression in his eyes was unfathomable but his voice was gentle and regretful. “I did have to fight it, you know,” he said, sounding as if he genuinely wanted to be believed. “It was the price of survival in the modern world. I had to remain hidden, unknown ... I had to become a figure of legend, a mere superstition. I saw what happened to others of my kind who couldn’t master their appetites. There are a thousand ways to die, you see, even for ... someone like me. We did our best to spread rumours to the contrary, but our rumours always had to compete with
theirs.
The confusion worked to our benefit, in some ways, but not in others ...

“I’ve been alone for a long time, but I knew that science would save me. I knew that there would be a revolution some day that would allow me to transcend my monstrousness and become a true immortal. I knew that when that happened, I could rejoin the human race and become its benefactor, changing evil into good. I knew that there would come a time when I could look for company again—for
congenial
company.”

Brewer wasn’t sure whether the adjective referred to Jenny, or to him, or to both of them, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to feign misunderstanding. “I guess a cohort of whores is about as congenial as you can get,” he said, “if you’re that way inclined.”

He cast a calculatedly negligent glance in Jenny’s direction, and saw that he had wounded her, but Marlow remained unmoved. If the ex-vampire was as old as Brewer suspected, he was probably unmovable. He’d probably been undead for a very long time—but at least he’d had nightmares all the while. There had been a taint of Hell in his unholy existence, and might be still, even in a world which was on the verge of conquering all the Hells of old: disease, death, pain and misery.

“Where should I have looked for volunteers?” Marklow asked, in all apparent earnest. “Prisons? Cardboard City?”

“Old people’s homes?” Brewer countered, not at all earnestly. “Not sufficiently unobtrusive, I suppose. You do plan to remain unobtrusive, I suppose, even when you start serious marketing. The rich will want to keep it to themselves, of course. They appreciate confidentiality. Vampires, the lot of them—they think of mere human beings as cattle. That’s why you thought of me when you wondered how best to expand your operation, I suppose. You think I’m a kind of vampire too, because I sell illegal happy pills to pimps and whores, kids and hackers.”

“You’re not any
real
kind of vampire yet,” Marklow responded, mildly. “You’ll have to work at it. It sometimes takes half a dozen shots before the rickettsias are permanently established. But once they’re set, they’re set for life—and that could be a
long
time.”

“How long?” Brewer wanted to know.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Count Dracula told him. “We’re dealing with a new strain, after all.”

“How good was the old strain?” Brewer persisted.

“I don’t know,” Marklow replied, “the oldest men I ever knew had forgotten long ago how old they were. Arithmetic hadn’t been invented when they were young. Nor had writing—but fire had. Fire and wooden spears. By the time writing was invented the war was almost lost. The rickettsia almost went the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, and the thousand other species neolithic man hounded to extinction. Mercifully, it survived. Mercifully, I survived with it. Now, the new era is dawning. Soon, I won’t have to hide any more. Together, you and I and all of Jenny’s friends ... we shall be the midwives of the
Ubermenschen,
as you so tactfully put it.”

Brewer could see that Jenny felt uncomfortable. She knew that an important boundary had been crossed when Marklow first allowed the word “vampire” to cross his lips. He was exposed now, and so was she. She was afraid—but Marklow wasn’t. He had grown out of fear long ago. He still retained the ability to terrify, but he couldn’t identify with those he terrified. He gave the impression of knowing more about his victims than they knew themselves, but he didn’t. He thought that he was still, essentially, a man—but he didn’t know
human
beings at all. Perhaps it had been a mistake for him to try so hard to become harmless, to become a saint instead of a devil.