“I no more wish to be overrun by the Others than you do.” Samon said as Drye joined us. “Nor, I admit, am I as volatile as I once was. Maybe because I do not fear for my own life as I once did. I do not envy the Juveniles their weaknesses and uncertain place in the future of Vampire kind.”
“I cannot overlook our weakness relative to the Others.” Drye said. “You do not believe their Elders are among those who make raids on us. I do not think we have ever tested the true mettle of the Other Elders. I wonder at our place in the future if we cannot somehow deal them a decisive blow.”
“We may taste their mettle yet if we succeed here.” I said. “I am not sure I can imagine their rage and fury if we send one of their own back to them infected. I am not sure I wish to imagine it.”
“I do not want to imagine meeting a group of Elder Others.” Sonafi said, walking up. She had sensed the commotions and come out to join us.
“The truth is we have no idea what we might one day have to face.” Samon said. “That is why I am here. That is why we all must learn new habits. Learn to get along. We cannot afford dissension among the Community.”
“If only a few more could be convinced of that.” I said.
“The Resistance is many more than these you see here.” Drye said. He turned to the group. “Disperse. Feed. We will meet again tomorrow. Thank you for coming.”
“How many are there?” I asked as they vanished. Like receding water they stole away, sinuous and graceful even to my knowing eye. I thought that if the Vampire Community could really be rallied around, the Others might truly have something to be worried about. Our fractious natures the only thing holding us back from showing the Others a united front. Once united, there may be nothing we might not accomplish.
“We are all concerned.” Samon said. “It is to what degree the independent Elders can be convinced to participate that is the concern. Of the younger generations, all, or nearly all, are willing to participate. It is the fractious Elders whom we require assistance recruiting.”
“I don't suppose you had any part in recruiting all of these Juveniles.” I said to Samon.
“I asked nicely.” Samon lied with a smile that said a thousand words, but I would hardly condemn him his practices if it meant the Army of Vampires we would need, and the Juveniles were in the same peril which we were all in, even more so. They could do their part.
“I'm sure you did.” I said. “Little else would be required.” I could say this now without feeling as if I were belittling them to their faces, because they had all now gone. They had been convinced to participate with the Resistance, but when the day was done, they wasted no time in making themselves scarce. Now only I, Sonafi, Samon and Drye remained, eldest to youngest, if by any stretch of the imagination Drye could be considered young.
Drye was Persian. Born to a Human woman during the time when Persia ruled the known world. The Old World. Olive skinned as compared to my own brown. Brown and green eyes and the black beard of his peoples, but trimmed in an American style. A scholar during the period of his Human life, that what had caused our acquaintance, he had jumped at the opportunity I had offered him for eternal life. He was and always had been the kind of person who could not find enough hours in each day to do all the things which he wished to accomplish, and he had sailed across the reef of the thousand year mark as if it had not even passed by under his keel.
He was entirely different than Samon. I had always expected Samon to go rogue. I was surprised when he passed the thousand year mark and even more so today. I had never expected this maturing to occur. It showed me that there are mysteries yet left in this Universe. That there is endless variation and that Mother Nature could take care of Herself. Samon had come around three hundred and sixty degrees.
So you wish for my Marcel to go around and convince the other recalcitrant Elders of the necessity of joining with us in our fight against the Others?” Sonafi accused. I am Marcel.
I had not seen this coming. I saw it now. Samon and Drye were both very old Vampires, but there were many Elder even to them. I supposed this should be my duty. To send one or even both of them could very well be sending them to their deaths. These reclusive Elders would not appreciate being disturbed and might kill the lesser Vampires just for the temerity of seeking them out. Elder Vampires are not known for their kindnesses, not even to their own Elder brothers.
“That about sums it up.” Drye said. There are a great number of Vampires who are truly terrified to be in my presence, but Drye was not one of those. Beside the fact that we had been friends for long years before he had become a Vampire, I was the one who had changed him. He had never really understood my true power until he had become a Vampire himself, but by then the trust he had learned could not be overridden by the blaring alarms of his new Vampire senses. Drye has always trusted me.
“I thought you would not return to the Old Country?” Sonafi accused me mildly. She could see, of course, that I had already made up my mind. What choice was there? I was the Eldest. It fell to me because I was the only Vampire that could go to all of them and the necessity because we needed each and every one of them we could recruit. We had no idea what we would be up against when the Other Elders came to do what their own Juveniles had so long failed to do.
“I don't think a telephone call will be quite sufficient.” I said as way of answer.
CHAPTER 6
I am a Vampire of sedentary habit of long standing. I enjoy reading, writing, the study of mathematics and physics and the other old conundrums of existence, so it was with great reluctance that I began the next evening to pack away all of my old, treasured belongings. Besides having to travel to the Old World to seek out those Eldest of Vampires, most of whom still made their homes there, in the comforts of those old traditions, resting comfortably within their networks of Human caretakers, a vocation for some Human families passed down from one generation to the next, Sonafi and I had yet to find new residence and make our move to it. Once the Others learned of our location it was never safe to return there again. That's not to say we had not returned to such places, but it was always a risk. I packed with regret, yet resolve, preparing for a hitherto unknown phase of my life; taking the fight to the Others, rather than the old business as usual, of waiting, hiding and hoping.
“A Vampire should not have to hide behind the veil of his weaker Human counterparts.” I said. “When the smokescreen the Humans provide us is dispelled by their awakening consciousness, we will have no place to hide anywhere upon this world. They will hunt us down like rabid dogs. Brid is absolutely correct. The fight has to be taken to them.”
“You sound as if you are trying to convince yourself.” Sonafi said, pausing in her own packing to study a small curio she held in her hand. It was the small statuette of a female goddess of fertility. Belly enlarged. Many tens of thousands of years old and an artifact she had possessed a very long time. I could see that she was considering the necessity of carrying it onward. It was old and undoubtedly of immense dollar value, but even more so its value to her as a personal familiar than its financial worth. Money was never a problem for a Vampire, but space to put such things could be. I could see that this move was going to be a hard one for her, more so than maybe any we had ever before made. We had many new modern things which had to be made room for.
“Maybe I am.” I admitted, watching to see where she was going to put that little goddess statuette she was holding so lovingly. She had once possessed thousands of such little curios, a collection worth in dollars what many a country could be purchased for, but we have had to pick up our lives and leave in the middle of the night with whatever could be carried away before the dawn so many times that we had now come to the point where Sonafi could hold in her hand a treasure which she had gathered to herself above others, to carry onward while others were left behind, and contemplate leaving it behind now, tugged at my heart-strings in a way that I could not really describe. That she could contemplate leaving behind such a t
reasure only because we had no stability in this world. The idea that to keep such items now was pointless and irrelevant because sooner or later a day would come when there would not be time to gather it up before we had to flee. “You should keep that.” I said.
Sonafi looked at me strangely and then back down at the little goddess, an artifact of such antiquity that authenticating its true origins would be completely beyond the capabilities of even man's vaunted new scientific ability. The little goddess was the stone carving of a craftsman who was the member of a tribe of pre-Humans whose genes could not be counted among those of present day humanity. One of the many branches of the Human tree pruned from the trunk before it reached the modern, conglomerate era.
“I have had this ever so long.” Sonafi admitted.
“How many times has that statuette been one of the first things you saved?” I asked. “How could you consider leaving it now?”
“I have so few of these old things anymore,” Sonafi answered, picking up several sheets of bubble wrap to protectively begin to wrap the curio, “but I suppose you are right. I should not give it up. One day things might be different.”
“Anyway,” Sonafi added, “why are you worried about my little curios?”
“I just didn't want to see you give up on your little things.” I said. “You know they can never be replaced, and I know how much they mean to you.”
“How did you manage to turn this conversation around onto me?” Sonafi said with a mirthless smile. “We were talking about you. You were trying to convince yourself of the necessity of returning to the Old Country.”
“Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.” I said. “The truth is, I was trying to forget. Not necessarily the people’s hatred, but the things I have done to those people. I was a monster beyond reckoning then and the things I did make the worst of the worst to come after seem humanitarian by comparison, so if those peoples have long racial memories, it is only because I traumatized them so severely.”
“You could not have known better.” Sonafi said, now quickly wrapping her curios, a blur of movement a Human would not have been able to follow. “I would have been even worse. I do not understand how you found the room within your heart to forgive them at all. A child, even a Vampire child, forced to live alone, no friend anywhere on an entire world. I am only surprised you were able to attain sanity. I am sure I would not have been able to do so.”
That drew a genuine smile from me, for the manic twist of her lips she had used to emphasize her last statement. When she had been changed into a Vampire, when I had changed her from a Human lover to my lifelong companion, she had undergone a transformation of such magnitude that for long years I had to struggle with the notion of having to put her down myself or facing the certain hue and cry of an outraged populace. We moved a lot in those early centuries we were together, as Sonafi committed outrageous, excessive acts of violence every place we lived. She was a being nearly completely possessed by her wanton desires, and it was only after she had sated her nightly hunger that she would return to semi normalcy, but only a shadow of the way in which she had lived her Human life.
Then she would cry. Beg me to kill her. She was both hot and cold. While caught within the frenzy of the hunger, she was uncaring and brutal, a killer with no remorse, but when sated, her hunger abated, she was the kind, caring being whom I had fallen in love with, against all odds, in the first place. With her thirst slaked, her non-Human half quiescent, its need met, she could feel those things which Humans hold to be dear, which were otherwise completely overwhelmed during her periods of great hunger.
Of course I had not been able to kill her. That was a very long time ago and I must admit to having tolerated, at that time, a lower standard than I allowed now and even more so from Sonafi than I allowed others who perpetuated such things. It had not been so very long before that (when you consider the entire expanse of my long lived life) that I had been doing the very same things myself. I had of course understood what she was going through, and when so many of the Vampires I created went through very similar periods, I had then no hope that it could be any different. It was a part of Vampire make-up that has been slowly, but too slowly, changing. Yet most Vampires can be convinced to curb their more atrocious, obvious acts, if it is a matter of their own lives which are at stake.
I held the Community to a higher standard now than I did then- at least to the best of my ability. Humans have become civilized and organized. They take murder very seriously these days, at least here in the United States, though there remain places where it is still the law of the jungle, where it is eat or be eaten, and those passerby who witness these things are only glad it was not they who lay in the dust, and who hurry on about their business without a second thought. If I did not hold us so, we would soon be exposed. Other Elders did the same, in the various other locales where Vampires thrive, in their own ways. I have not been able to concern myself with how others have managed their microcosms of the Community, however, having my hands full with those who are here around me, and I am sure there are extremes of excess, barbarism and cruelty, but I am only one and I cannot be all places at all times. I have very much had my hands full here, especially since the Community has been growing.
“You did not ask for what I did to you.” I said quietly, remembering how it had been. She could not understand why I was so secretive. Why things could not be normal between us.
'Why must we only meet at night?' She had asked.
'Why must we be so secretive?'
'Why won't you come and meet my family?'
She had endless questions. A more inquisitive Human I had never before met. Her inquisitiveness was what drew me to her in the first place. Humans were still mostly Human then, the addition of the Others DNA still in its earliest stages, yet she was brilliant beyond the norm of mainstream humanity. In that period Humans were for the most part creeping, filthy, barbaric animals, even with their new intelligence and growing consciousness, but she was in a class all to herself. It was not a thing I truly understood then, but she was, like myself, the beginning of a new breed of Human. The thing that must be remembered is that the changes the Others have engendered, the changes they are still making, have occurred over so vast a timeline, that the small incremental year to year changes are almost invisible to the casual observer. Like evolution itself, small changes that help a species survive will be spread out into the species as a whole, as those who bear these changes are rewarded with a higher ability to survive, propagate, and send their specific genetics on down the evolutionary line. The Others continued to add little changes to the line that created a Natural Selection of the Fittest through unnatural means even to this day, though the dynamics of what is occurring now are vastly changed over what they were in the beginning. The process has now come near to fruition.
“The life I have been given, the life you gave me, has been a good one.” Sonafi said. “I have not forgotten what I put you through when I was changed. Or what I begged of you for so long. I could not stand myself then. My overwhelming urges and the way I would feel after… but I could not bring myself to suicide, either. I wished it so many times, but my hand would not bend to my will.”
“We are very nearly incapable of suicide.” I said simply. I had known all along what Sonafi felt. Her fear and loathing of her own self. Of the things she did. Things she could not stop herself from doing when the hunger was upon her. How she hated herself in her times of lucidity. That there was nothing she could do about it. “Our will to live is too strong. It is why so many of us go rogue. A Vampire assisted suicide.”
“I did not think life could ever be worth living, but you proved me wrong. One time I am grateful to have been proved wrong.” Sonafi said. “I would now fight ferociously, do anything, to maintain this life. I have found it to be very rewarding and worthwhile. It is hard to believe I thought so differently once.”
“I don't think any have ever claimed that it is easy to be a Vampire. Our role may be the
biggest one ever cast for a sentient being. Maybe it was meant to temper us. Prepare us for something bigger. Whatever Divinity presides over this our existence has made bigger plans for us. That is my belief. He but prepares us for His purpose.”
Sonafi did not say anything. Her hands were busy with her packing and her eyes avoided mine. I could only sigh. This was the way she got any time I mentioned the subject of God. She had lost all belief in the possibility of her own salvation, God accepting her after the things she had done, that she refused now to discuss it. I believed that God would forgive. That He would not hold against us those things we had not been able to control. She could not believe so, however. The things she had done weighed too heavily on her conscience. I let the subject rest.
“I do not think I will like being stripped of my telepathy.” I said, referring to Brid's device. “I don't even want to imagine what it will be like.”
“Very much like losing our eyesight, in its own way, I should suppose. We'll all have to wear them if we want to make the surprise complete.” Sonafi said, rejoining the conversation just as if there had been no lapse. She had become adept at tuning out anything to do with God, but then able to tune right back in afterward when the topic changed, as I always immediately did so. I supposed it was her respectful way of dealing with my periodic entreaties to open her mind to the possibility that she was not irrevocably dammed. I had become used to it, but of a sudden she had given me something else to think about.
The Vampire-Alien Chronicles Page 6
