Digital Knight

by Ryk E. Spoor

  I typed the data in, asking questions of him occasionally since I had to clarify certain points—he'd reeled that stuff off awfully fast. Finally I finished up. "Okay. How about those vampires like Klein? Is there a specific logic in the parody of your powers?"

  Verne's mouth tightened momentarily. "Oh, yes. Their creator was a magician of vast power, one who in essence was attempting himself to become a demon and perhaps something even greater in darkness. I was one of his major adversaries after the Fall of Atlantaea, because I attempted to establish a new civilization based on the old and had the power to do so. He intended to create his own empire, or so I believe, in order to use the strength of the human race to further his personal quest. In any case, I became a perennial thorn in his side; he could not corrupt the world or its spirit so long as I lived. Eventually he came up with this curse, which was all too effective.

  "The victims of the curse, the vampires, are parodies in all ways. Rather than a purification and extension of the true spirit, they are warped powers, turned against themselves to produce an abomination. They drink blood to represent their ties to destruction—spilling blood rather than accepting it freely. Their strength is the strength of self-hate and destruction, life turned upon itself. They shift shape to forms of nightmare because terror is their object." He gave a wintry smile. "I suspect their inability to enter a dwelling unbidden, besides being necessary in an overall parody, was also there for a purely practical reason; why permit your own quite mad and vicious creations to be able to enter your own home without permission? For they were all mad, at least for a time; just as becoming the Sh'ekatha cleanses the mind and spirit and gives you clarity and peace, at least in the beginning, so this dark mirrored version first turns the mind against itself and tests your will to live."

  Verne went on, detailing the vampiric abilities and weaknesses and their relationship to his own. After that, things got more complicated, as we started discussing other "powers" in the world, what they were like, and how they did what they did.

  After a while, I glanced at my watch. "Holy sheep! Verne, it's three in the morning!"

  He smiled. "So you want to make an early night of it, eh?"

  I grinned back, probably looking a bit dazed. "I probably should have. I had no idea how big a project this was going to become."

  "Remember, Jason, many of these things either do not exist any more, in all probability, or at the least are vanishingly rare. If you wanted to do a comprehensive catalog of the entirety of the paranormal, you would never finish in an ordinary human lifetime; however, the number of such things that can even function on Earth as it is today is so small that I believe we can probably finish your little database in a few months of once or twice a week discussion."

  "Well, that makes me feel some better. I think. But I'll let you know later. Tomorrow evening remind Kafan we will be going over what I'll be doing in my meeting with the Senator. "

  "I shall. Get some sleep, Jason."

  "Preferably after I get home, of course," I said, glancing at my car.

  He chuckled and held open the door as I left.

  44

  I shook the Senator's hand. She had a strong grip, and looked as dignified in person as in her publicity shots; I was pretty sure that her "stern schoolteacher" image worked in her favor not only at the polls, but on the Senate floor. "Senator, good to meet you."

  "A pleasure, Mr. Wood." She was unaccompanied—something which showed considerable trust on her part, or at least faith that her intelligence gathering people wouldn't miss something dangerous. "Now, I don't have an unlimited amount of time here, so let's not spend too much time on formalities; you call me Paula and I'll call you Jason and we'll just call things as we see them, all right?"

  I nodded. "Fine by me, Paula."

  "I'll start," she said. "As you know, I have received the test results for paternity, and they clearly demonstrate that your client is the biological parent of my children. If it comes to court, I won't even bother arguing with that.

  "However," she continued, "investigating your client's background has turned up some . . . confusing information. Without wasting each other's time going into the details, my investigators are of the opinion that some, or all, of his background was falsified, although they do inform me that his credentials, if forged, must have been faked by one of the very best intelligence services. My investigators also find Mr. Verne Domingo's background somewhat disquieting. I don't think I need point out that if this is indeed true, I would be extremely unlikely to agree to have my children taken away, even for short periods of time, by a man whose real name and background I don't even know."

  She had good investigators. I'd expected as much, but they were damn good to ferret out some of that stuff. I'd been pretty sure of the general thrust of what they'd find, though, and because of that I'd made my decisions about how to approach her. Convincing Verne and, especially, Kafan to go along with those had taken five hours of sometimes acrimonious debate last night. "You know, I pretty much thought you'd be saying something along those lines," I said finally. "I've discussed the situation with my client, and he's given me permission to tell you certain things, but before I do, I'd like to lead up to it in my own way. The situation is much more complex than you currently understand, and I'd like to give you the big picture."

  She gave me a formal nod.

  I stood up and went over to a small glass case at one end of the room, opening it with a key code. Reaching in, I picked up one of the objects inside and brought it over. "Do you know what this is? Careful—it's extremely sharp."

  The Senator examined the long, slender, sparkling thing—slightly curved, razor-sharp along the inside edge, coming to a needle-fine point at one end and about half an inch across at the opposite end. At first she seemed a bit puzzled, but then she glanced up suddenly. "Why, this must be . . ." she stumbled a bit over the next word, "a werewolf claw?"

  "That's correct," I said. "I want you to think about what you're holding there, ma'am. That's nine and a half inches of diamond blade. The thing it came from had five of those on each hand, five on each foot, and stood taller than this room's roof if it straightened up. It could run as fast as a car given a straight distance to accelerate, was strong enough to tip a car over on its own, and had a mouth full of teeth just like those claws—a mouth that could open up wide enough to cut a man in half.

  "And it could look just like you or me, or anyone else on Earth."

  Senator MacLain gave a small shiver. She had a good imagination, I suspected. "I see. I do indeed, Mr. Wood. I assure you, that's one of the things that most impressed me about you—that you survived being chased by something like that."

  "More luck than anything else, Senator, believe me."

  She gave a refined, Katherine Hepburn–like sniff of doubt. "Jason, to quote a movie that my older son enjoys and that you are no doubt well acquainted with, 'In my experience, there's no such thing as luck.' Rather, I see people who are competent as making their own luck through making the right choices in bad moments."

  With a small laugh I ceded her point. "Okay, yes, I'm pretty good at thinking on my feet. But there's a few other points that some investigators have brought up which are relevant here—and yes, I'll be connecting it to your children in a few moments."

  She looked thoughtful. "Oh. Quite so. As I recall, one of the unresolved problems, even after the briefing, was exactly who had assisted you. Some of my colleagues were under the impression that it was some special task force of our own—and from reading the transcripts, I think it's very clear that this was in fact the impression that the testimony was intended to give. I always felt that there was more being hidden than told, however. Are you saying that my impression is correct?"

  Boy, she was a sharp one. Winthrope and her unknown employers had done a bang-up job on giving out the story without revealing anything they didn't absolutely have to, and the wording they'd used would have fooled almost anyone into thinking they'd been told
all they needed to know. Senator Paula MacLain, however, was not just anyone. "Your impression is bang-on, Paula." I said. "I had help, but it wasn't anything official."

  She waited.

  "The second question that some people have asked—and quite reasonably so—is basically 'well, if werewolves exist, does that mean there's other things like them out there?' The answer to that is 'damn straight.' "

  She had certainly seen where I had to be going with this, but her expression gave no sign of what her reaction was. She sat, waiting to see what I was going to put in front of her to evaluate.

  "The werewolves are just one of at least half a dozen or more types of beings we'd call 'mythical' or 'supernatural,' even though those words aren't accurate any more; after all, it's not mythical if you can actually prove it's there, and if they're part of the way the world works, are they really supernatural?" I shrugged. "Anyway, the Wolves are in some ways the nastiest of all of these things, near as I can tell, and they've got their own enemies. In point of fact, the reason they all came here to Morgantown was that they were hunting down one of their old adversaries, who was living in Morgantown under the name of Verne Domingo."

  Now her gaze was riveted on my face. Other than its intensity, there still wasn't any sign of what she was really thinking.

  I took a deep breath. "Verne Domingo is, himself, one of these other types of beings; the best, really quick way I can think of to describe what he is would be to say he's a vampire, but that's not accurate. It would give you some basic idea of his characteristics, though. Verne has . . . connections throughout the paranatural world. In a sense, he's one of its most respected citizens. While he certainly doesn't know everything about all of them, virtually every one of the beings that lives this kind of double life knows about him, even if they don't know precisely where he is.

  "Now, where this hooks up with Tai Lee Xiang is that Verne knew Tai Lee's family, years ago." Verne, Kafan, and I had decided that this "take" on the history would be the closest match to allow us to tell what we had to without bringing up certain contradictions which had led to other facts which none of us wanted to talk about. "They saw him as an ally and protector. Verne left for parts unknown and eventually they lost track of the ways to contact him. But the tradition of the protector was still passed down through the family line, along with the unique characteristics that separated this protector from the common man.

  "So when Tai Lee Xiang found himself in trouble that he didn't dare bring to the authorities, and in fact was being hunted by the authorities for killing a man who had held him and his family prisoner for years, he came to me to find this legendary protector. By that time, he'd reached the end of his resources and was willing to try anything to find his family or stop the people who were after him. With the publicity of the Wolf incidents, my name seemed the best possible choice; I knew there were Weird Things out there, and if anyone would be both willing to listen to his story and able to find someone from some pretty strange hints, it would be me." I grinned. "As it turned out, he was even luckier than he thought; I'd already met Verne, of course, so once he gave me the list of odd characteristics, I could just turn around and phone his family protector."

  She'd sat quietly throughout the whole story, gazing at me intensely as though I was on trial and she was the judge evaluating my testimony—which, now that I thought of it, was a fair assessment of the situation. Finally she leaned back slowly. "That is quite an impressive story, Jason. I would expect that much of this would be information your friend Mr. Domingo prefers to keep secret, since no mention of him has ever been made in connection to prior events in Morgantown. Why was it necessary that you tell me so much?"

  "Glad to see you are as quick on the pickup as your reputation makes you, ma'am." I said. "Because Tai wasn't held in an ordinary location at all. He, and his children, were the subjects of genetic experimentation. Just by being involved in their lives, you're putting yourself in danger, because the people who did this want their 'subjects' back. Your being a senator has no doubt balked them and caused considerable concern in their ranks, but it will most certainly not have stopped them. Eventually they'll come for the kids.

  "So you have to know the truth about them—not just because it's your right to know about anything that might be endangering you and your family, but also because we just don't know what the ultimate results of the genetic tampering that was done to them will be. You might come home tomorrow to find one of them suffering from some disability or condition which simply isn't even recognizable by medical science."

  To my surprise, Paula MacLain didn't burst into a flurry of questions, and she didn't attempt to argue about what was going on. She looked a tiny bit more pale, and after an inquiring glance at me she lit a long cigarette and drew a slightly shaky breath. A few moments later, she dropped her gaze and considered the half-smoked cigarette. "Usually I take my time on these." She looked back up. "Jason, I appreciate your candor."

  I'm sure my startlement showed on my face. "Most people would have said something else, and 'candor' wouldn't be even close to the meaning, either."

  "Oh, it's a preposterous story, young man." she said. "Yet I'm old enough to know that sometimes life is preposterous. However, that isn't why I accept that most, if not all, of your story is true."

  Taking another drag from the cigarette, she continued. "I've been on many different committees over the years. I've seen a great deal of material handed around marked 'Top Secret' and heard all the 'in the interests of national security' speeches. And so I've been familiar with the sort of reports I get from my own investigators whenever someone else has been nosing around my life.

  "After I adopted Jackie and Tai, I started getting faint hints that someone was interested in my life again. The hints were terribly subtle, though, and whenever I hired someone to poke back, so to speak, they found nothing concrete. Just recently—about the time you first contacted me, in fact—these little hints became more frequent, and my best people came to the conclusion that whoever it was had to be top-level intelligence, and that there might be more than one group of them, all sniffing around my family. I tried using my own connections to find out what was going on, but got nothing.

  "At one point, Jackie became aware that I thought someone might be spying on us. That night, he tried to leave, taking his little brother with him. When I got him back, he tried to insist that he had to, but he simply wouldn't tell me why. But he's been worried ever since, and I've gotten the extremely strong impression from him that he is more worried about my safety than his own."

  I nodded. "That would fit."

  "It certainly would. Now, while I happen to believe you are telling me the truth, or as much of it as you think safe, I'd appreciate a bit more in the way of solid evidence. I've come here without any fiddling lawyers or bodyguards so that we could be honest and say what we want, and so I hope we can get this all out of the way."

  I glanced at the clock. "How much time do you have, Paula?"

  She smiled. "A bit more than I might have implied at the beginning. Start out with the other side under pressure, that's always been my motto. If you can manage to feed me, I daresay I can stay for the rest of the evening if necessary."

  Smiling back, I said, "I suppose I could manage that as we get around to dinnertime." I switched on the air filter—while I don't particularly mind smoke, some clients and friends do, and I always seem to forget at first. "Assuming that what I said is true, what would your position be with respect to Tai Lee Xiang? I'm sure you know he's already started a quite respectable carpentry and woodcarving business, so he's not a shiftless layabout, so to speak."

  "My position isn't markedly changed, Jason," she answered. "I don't care what dangers come with them, they're my children now, and anyone—mad scientists or otherwise—who tries to take them from me will, I assure you, lose their hands if they touch either Tai or Jackie. Their true father is another story, naturally. I have noticed genuine sadness in the boys on the few o
ccasions they've mentioned their father, so I know that he must have been at least able to inspire affection. This of course isn't sufficient to prove that he was, or could currently be, a good father to them, only that he wasn't such a monster or disciplinarian as to lose the love of his children. If I can be confident that he will be good for the children . . ." her face worked for a moment, " . . . well, Jason, we will work something out, I promise you. I lost my family once, you know."

  I nodded.

  "Then understand—I know what that feels like. If I know that Tai Lee Xiang is a good man, then I will not cause him the same kind of pain. He will see his children again. To do anything else would make me the monster, and while the thought of letting them leave me—perhaps for months at a time—hurts far more than you could imagine, I would rather bear that pain than think that I was taking another person's family away." She was back under control again, at what cost I really didn't know. "I hope that makes my position clear enough."

  "Perfectly clear. And I thank you, Paula. I'm sure we will be able to work something out." I glanced at my watch. "I think I can give you some more solid evidence, but not until later today."

  Seeming somewhat relieved to get away from what was a very emotional topic, she accepted a temporary shift away from the business conversation, and took up some of the time quizzing me about the Morgantown Incident—getting my version of the story, rather than the trimmed, edited, and perhaps not entirely accurate version the press releases had contained. By the time we were done with that, it was getting towards evening.

  "Well, Senator," I said, "If your reputation can survive the scandal of being seen out in a restaurant with a younger man, I think it's time to get you the food I promised."

  She laughed. "Mr. Wood, my reputation doesn't need protecting. And having seen pictures of the young lady you're currently dating, I suspect no one would believe any scandal about us anyway."