“And there the trail ends.”
“There the trail ends.”
He drank more of the Scotch.
“Paul—”
“Want to hear my news? My news is that you were dead-on right about the wisdom of forcing a meeting with Langley. We are decommissioned, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Decommissioned? Now?”
“With their usual uncanny timing. It’s almost enough to make you a conspiracy theorist.”
She took the glass from him and drained it. “Okay, we have a vampire and no support. And no son. He went to New York to seek his fortune.”
“Christ, I’m so damn sorry about this morning.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I—goddammit! When did he leave?”
“About noon. I took him to the train.”
“You took him to the train? You did this?”
“You want him to throw his underwear into a backpack and hitch to the city? And get sucked up in that?”
“I want him here!”
“Oh, yeah, like that’s gonna happen now. You blew that, Dad.”
He tried to take the Scotch from her, but she wouldn’t let it go. “Do you know where he is?”
“He’s got an apartment. One of those short-term furnished deals, until he can find something more permanent.”
“He’s quitting school?”
“Maybe he’ll get a place at Stuyvesant or one of the private schools, finish out the year that way.”
“That sounds kind of reasonable.” But Paul would hate it, hate not being able to watch him, to be sure each day that he was still clean, to feel his presence in the house late at night.
“It is kind of reasonable. It’s more than kind of reasonable, because he is a reasonable, brilliant, and in fact a glorious young human being, whose life you so compassionately and intelligently saved.”
He wanted to be in her arms, and she felt it, and drew him there. She held him, and he held her, for the little couple was right now being tossed here and there in dark water, and they knew it, and the shore was very far away, and they knew that, too.
Chapter Six
The Voyage of the Seven Stars
Water hissed restlessly outside the wall, and the idea of being trapped in water had always been great among Lilith’s fears. The slow, infinitely painful loss of consciousness, the gradual, dying dream as you rotted or were devoured…for her, drowning was the worst of all nightmares.
She’d been running, it seemed, forever, but now she was here, in this ship so vast that it dwarfed every machine she had ever seen. She lay along a line of pipes, high up in the workings of the thing, listening and watching, and feeling as if it was an echo from another dimension, the slow rising and falling that told her the ship was at sea.
She’d slept here, and she ached in her bones. She had also dreamed, and it was curious, this dream. Looking back, it seemed more vivid than reality, her frightened passage into the bower of the plum-blossom tree. But what was reality—this impossible life she had lived, an existence that had lasted so long that it had become its own meaning and its own end? When she looked back across the gulf of her life, she felt that she was plying infinite water. And yet, there was the voice in her dream, calling her, telling her that it was but an hour she would be gone.
She choked, twisting and turning in her wretched hiding place. This sense of being unable ever to leave was horribly claustrophobic. Being trapped in eternal life and being trapped in a coffin were much the same thing. She wanted to be dead, but was terrified of being undead. She was cold and scared and hungry and more alone than God. Cairo had been a catastrophe, a scrambling maelstrom of desperate escapes. The shot that had made her lungs bubble and burn was almost healed, but the one that had thrown her right arm forward and sent a bolt of searing torment down all the way to her hip would need more mending.
She had learned in the past few days that the car ran faster than any horse, the gun threw darts of lead, and human beings now had rich, haunting eyes. She had also learned that the Egyptians were far more numerous than before, and far more organized. When she closed her eyes, she heard their calm, quick voices, always so much closer than she thought possible.
Not a Keeper was left alive in Cairo, not one, and she was now on this journey into the unknown, wet, filthy, dressed in rags, and more lost than she had been even on the first day she had awakened here, confused and frightened, by the banks of a pellucid sea, mourning for her lost Adam.
She would have wept, but she had done enough of that. Now, she must think. She must learn how to elude the monstrous dogs they had trained to hunt her, how to live and eat in this world turned upside down, how to find other Keepers—if there were any left anywhere—and if not, then by the holy world of her birth, what would she do?
A voice, speaking in Arabic, said, “We’re redirected, you know that.” Another voice said, “That’s the hell. I got my wife, she doesn’t know.”
She no longer considered human beings simple little creatures. They had grown powerful and terrible and extraordinarily dangerous, and extraordinarily—well—conscious. The humans of today were vastly different even from the ones she had encountered even as recently as a hundred years ago. They were intricately formed, delicate spirits, every bit as richly endowed with self and awareness as the Keepers who had drawn them up out of the earth. And she, God curse her, had to eat them for the only food that she could digest. Now, though, their blood tasted sour and hung in her gut. The worst was the child. Before the child, she had not seen this. But the child—the little girl—her eyes. And the eyes of the one she had been unable to take—they were with her still, staring back from the half-light of pipes and cables that surrounded her. She squirmed and twisted on the pipes. She was suffocating in her own being.
They’d nearly captured her along the Nile, again in what she’d thought was pharaoh’s palace, again on the roofs of a great building filled with habitations. Oh, they had come close, close and closer, sometimes even putting their hands on her. She’d run with the cats, gone down in the sewers with the black rats, climbed to heights, hidden beneath beds and tables and boxes, disguised herself in a head cloth snatched from a shop, and run, run, run.
The yowling of the dogs they had begun to use came to her ears again, and she sucked in a hard, scared breath, listened. Only the humming of the ship, the deeper throbbing…only her mind weaving strands of fear.
It had been night when she’d found this vessel—seen it as distant lights in stately motion across the desert. Her speed had been what had saved her. To make man easier to catch, the Keepers had bred against his natural speed, and thus could outrun him and outleap him by enough of a margin to always win against him…but things like cars had not entered the equation, had they, or guns?
Behind her had been the dogs, ahead an expanse of dark night desert, and then the lights. She’d run and leaped and found herself on a throbbing pavement of metal. In a moment, she’d realized that it was in motion. Looking down the cliff she had just jumped, she had seen swirling water. She had been forced then to conclude what seemed to be impossible: this immense thing was not only in motion, it was on the water. In some sense, it was a ship.
Not even in the bright fragmentary memories of home was there anything like this. Home was blond fields waving beneath a blue sun; home was a cliffside and the vast ocean, and tall, pale sails above a slim quick ship.
She felt tears going down the dirty grooves in her face, of fear and relief and so many other things. She’d never thought much of home before. This was home, this place she had come to call “Ur-th.” Like all words in Prime, it bore many meanings. Ur was a foundation, place of thriving, also cave and a womb. Woman bore ur between her loins; a cottage was ur, so also a homeland and a school. But the th ending suggested the feeling at once of going away and of having come from far away, loneliness and a sense of loss. It was a sigh, th, that began with a hard edge and then whispered itself to silence
.
Ur-th was a home, but also a place that was lost.
She took in a breath and said in her deepest heart, “I hate them.” Or rather, wished that she could.
For eons, the Keepers had counted about 12 million human beings in the keepings. Two hundred years ago, Menes the Counter had been of the opinion that there were 300 million. Now, she thought that there must be an almost uncountable number of them in the world, the majority concentrated in great Egypt and, above all, the teeming labyrinth of Cairo.
She listened. The space she was in had been silent of man now for some time. She stirred herself and leaned over the pipes, looking up and down the bright orange catwalk twenty feet below her. There was not a shadow to be seen. She had to move about, to understand where she was. She knew the ship was sailing, she could hear the water. So maybe there was some second city in the world, perhaps a distant colony of Cairo, and maybe this thing was going there. She remembered the layout of the oceans of the world, and the great glacier that covered the northern part of the planet, making it cold and uninhabitable. So this other nest would be to the south, or along the centerline of the planet. Of course, there was much land still to the north, and Keepers in it, she knew that. But the human population was sparse there. The weather was too harsh for large concentrations of human population. They were hairless, after all. That made them cold-averse.
She slid across the pipes and dropped down. Stretching so far in each direction that she could hardly see their end were great black tanks with huge red lids. She thought that there must be whole worlds concealed in those tanks. Any one of them was large enough to contain an entire temple or palace or a great tomb.
She strode along the catwalk, her tattered cloak flying out behind her, the black and filthy ruins of her gown clinging to her lean form. She took breaths, as deep as she could. The air was fetid with the stink of petroleum. In its various forms, this chemical was everywhere among men—in their wagons, in their stoves, and now, in this vast thing. They seemed to have found many, many uses for it.
“It’s the Bayonne Depot,” a voice said, echoing flatly in the humming silence.
“Oh, New York. Lala, you know.”
“What do I know?”
“Of the girls.”
“Perhaps.”
She had to crawl over the catwalk railing and drop down into the area beneath. But she could not allow herself to fall that far, not those hundreds of feet down alongside one of the great tanks, into the thick, black water she saw there. She hung with her fingers onto the grating of the catwalk itself, hoping that they somehow wouldn’t come too close to this point, or wouldn’t see her fingertips if they did.
They began shining torches of directed light down into the canyon below the catwalk. “It’s a slow pump.”
“If we have leaks here—”
“Work to do. Let’s see, here, this is Position 2001.240. Input that.”
They were working with a small box, tapping it with a twig. Its glowing face altered with each tap. She had not the faintest idea what they were doing. They came closer to her, again shone their torch into the depths.
“That’s normal, the level there.”
“Ah. God is good.”
“God is good.”
Now they were just above her, and the beam of the torch shone not a foot from her shoulder.
“Also.”
As they moved on, she listened to their voices dwindling. She’d smelled their human smell as they passed, an odor that had once intoxicated her but that now filled her with very complex emotions, none of which had anything to do with food. She waited until she could hear them no more, then began pulling herself back up onto the catwalk. Her legs kicked air, and her shoulder and chest sent white-hot comets of pain through her whole body. Despite her massive effort at self-control, the pain made her produce a sound, the hissing of air through clenched teeth. With a final, great effort she drew her arms tight, rising until her face was even with the top rail of the fence that protected the catwalk. She pulled herself over and stood bent and gasping, her head bowed. A hand groped for the rail, grabbed it, and hung on. The catwalk swayed, and with it the whole vast space, and the sounds of the machinery slipped into an echoing distance, a moment later to be replaced by the banging of her heart, the ripped whistle of her breath. All too slowly, she came back to the world around her, of stench and brute light and cold iron.
She’d almost fainted, that was what had happened. She took a deep breath, held it, then slowly released the air. Another, then another. Slowly and tentatively, she raised her head.
She found herself looking directly into the eyes of a young male. He smiled. Then he reached out and grabbed her wrist.
“You stink, do you know that? You smell like a filthy sewer.”
She stared at him.
“Come on, or I’ll toss you in the bilge. You think the captain will not put you off at Alex if he knows of you? He will, most certainly. You must be my friend. Do you want to do that, or go off at Alex?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did you get that accent? You sound like an idiot. Are you? Well, all the better if you’re stupid. You’ll probably enjoy us all the more.”
He pulled her along while she frantically cast about for ways to escape him. But what good would it do? He’d only tell the others. She could kill him, and maybe she had to. She must not become the captive of man. Above all things, that must not happen.
Perhaps she should throw him off the catwalk, make them think he’d had an accident. Unless, of course, he somehow survived his fall. The way her luck had been running, that’s what would happen. He tugged at her and she cried out, shocked by the flaring pain that shot up her arm. What if she couldn’t overpower him, if she was still insufficiently mended?
The catwalk ended in steel stairs that led up into another unknown area. “You go ahead,” he said. She started up the stairs. When she had gotten to the top, she lifted her leg and kicked backward. Her heel connected with his forehead, and he went flying out into the air. His cry echoed in the huge space. In the distance, there was a clang. It reverberated as if a bell had been struck, and then died away into the all-present thrumming. Looking after him, she saw from the broken wreck just visible in the gloom far below that she need have no concern that he had survived.
However, they would notice that he was missing. She’d learned that disappearances now counted among the humans for a great deal. No longer did they take such things for granted. Now there would be a search. They would find him. She hoped they would conclude that he had fallen as the result of a slip. In the meantime, though, she had to find a better place to hide. The direction he had been taking her was no good, it was where the other humans stayed. Perhaps down among the works of the thing there would be more concealment.
But what if they had dogs? Then she could not hide. She could not escape from dogs. They would rend her limbs, rip them off, leaving her helpless. Then their masters would tear her chest open and make a blood eagle of her. She moved quickly along catwalks, down narrow stairways, descending into the darkest places she could find. She came then into a room filled with pipes and stinking powerfully of oil. There was no scent of man here. But also it was a miserable place, with nowhere to lie down and try to heal except among more of the accursed pipes. She went on, hurrying like a ghost up and down catwalks, along passageways, until she found a quiet, dark area. At the end of the corridor was a gray metal door with a round handle. She twisted it, then found that it was to be pulled.
Frozen air came out into the thick heat, making clouds arise around her. Beyond the door was a freezing cold cave, with the carcasses of cattle and pigs hung on hooks. So this was the place where the human food was kept. Originally, they had been gatherers of berries and fruits, but her greedy children had bred them to eat meat, so that they would become bigger and juicier, and do it faster.
She could not stay in this cold, so she went out and back down the hallway. Here she noticed
a hatch, which she climbed into. A well-lighted stairway wound upward at least fifty feet. She went to the top and through another door. Absolute silence here. She found a room with a table in it and an array of silver knives and hooks and other sharp implements behind glass. Above the table was what she now recognized as an electric light, huge, designed to cast the whole thing into brilliant illumination—to light the table top. Against one wall were iron tanks of some sort. There were dark green gowns hung on hooks, and strange cloth face masks.
Was it perhaps a ritual chamber, where they sacrificed themselves to their imaginary gods?
She had no way to tell when the humans would return here, so she could not stay. She went through a door marked “Morgue” and found there three coffins, each resting in a table with lips around it, designed to keep it from sliding off. She opened one, and then another, and then the third. They had room enough for her, and they were confined enough to be warmed by her own body warmth. She could sleep in one of them, maybe for a long time, maybe even for the two or three days needed for her body to heal itself.
After feeding, you required sleep, but these past few days she’d gotten only snatches. She needed the long, helpless sleep that was the only kind that would truly rejuvenate her. The Sleep, her people called it, the deep, enriching excursion to the edge of death that kept them perpetually young.
The humans would not come here except to put their dead friend in the first of the three coffins. She went to the one at the rear of the room, opened it, and got in. Wrapping her cloak around herself, she pulled the lid closed, leaving a corner of leather out so that there would be some circulation of air. She didn’t need much. In fact, a grave made an excellent hiding place for a sleeping Keeper.
Body warmth began to make her cozy, and for the first time in what seemed like eternity itself, she felt safe and at least a little comfortable. Her tongue was dry and her throat was swollen. She needed water, but the problem would have to keep until later.
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 12
