The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Edmund Cordery, mechanician to the court of the Archduke Girard, tilted the small concave mirror on the brass device that rested on his workbench, catching the rays of the afternoon sun and deflecting the light through the system of lenses.

  He turned away and directed his son, Noell, to take his place. “Tell me if all is well,” he said tiredly. “I can hardly focus my eyes, let alone the instrument.”

  Noell closed his left eye and put his other to the microscope. He turned the wheel that adjusted the height of the stage. “It’s perfect,” he said. “What is it?”

  “The wing of a moth.” Edmund scanned the polished tabletop, checking that the other slides were in readiness for the demonstration. The prospect of Lady Carmilla’s visit filled him with a complex anxiety that he resented in himself. Even in the old days, she had not come to his laboratory often but to see her here—on his own territory, as it were—would be bound to awaken memories that were untouched by the glimpses that he caught of her in the public parts of the Tower and on ceremonial occasions.

  “The water slide isn’t ready,” Noell pointed out.

  Edmund shook his head. “I’ll make a fresh one when the time comes,” he said. “Living things are fragile, and the world that is in a water drop is all too easily destroyed.”

  He looked farther along the bench-top, and moved a crucible, placing it out of sight behind a row of jars. It was impossible—and unnecessary—to make the place tidy, but he felt it important to conserve some sense of order and control. To discourage himself from fidgeting, he went to the window and looked out at the sparkling Thames and the strange gray sheen on the slate roofs of the houses beyond. From this high vantage point, the people were tiny; he was higher even than the cross on the steeple of the church beside the Leathermarket. Edmund was not a devout man, but such was the agitation within him, yearning for expression in action, that the sight of the cross on the church made him cross himself, murmuring the ritual devotion. As soon as he had done it, he cursed himself for childishness.

  I am forty-four years old, he thought, and a mechanician. I am no longer the boy who was favored with the love of the lady, and there is no need for this stupid trepidation.

  He was being deliberately unfair to himself in this private scolding. It was not simply the fact that he had once been Carmilla’s lover that made him anxious. There was the microscope, and the ship from the Moorish country. He hoped that he would be able to judge by the lady’s reaction how much cause there really was for fear.

  The door opened then, and the lady entered. She half turned to indicate by a flutter of her hand that her attendant need not come in with her, and he withdrew, closing the door behind him. She was alone, with no friend or favorite in tow. She came across the room carefully, lifting the hem of her skirt a little, though the floor was not dusty. Her gaze flicked from side to side, to take note of the shelves, the beakers, the furnace, and the numerous tools of the mechanician’s craft. To a commoner, it would have seemed a threatening environment, redolent with unholiness, but her attitude was cool and controlled. She arrived to stand before the brass instrument that Edmund had recently completed, but did not look long at it before raising her eyes to look fully into Edmund’s face.

  “You look well, Master Cordery,” she said calmly. “But you are pale. You should not shut yourself in your rooms now that summer is come to Normandy.”

  Edmund bowed slightly, but met her gaze. She had not changed in the slightest degree, of course, since the days when he had been intimate with her. She was six hundred years old—hardly younger than the archduke—and the years were impotent as far as her appearance was concerned. Her complexion was much darker than his, her eyes a deep liquid brown, and her hair jet black. He had not stood so close to her for several years, and he could not help the tide of memories rising in his mind. For her, it would be different: his hair was gray now, his skin creased; he must seem an altogether different person. As he met her gaze, though, it seemed to him that she, too, was remembering, and not without fondness.

  “My lady,” he said, his voice quite steady, “may I present my son and apprentice, Noell.”

  Noell bowed more deeply than his father, blushing with embarrassment.

  The Lady Carmilla favored the youth with a smile. “He has the look of you, Master Cordery,” she said—a casual compliment. She returned her attention then to the instrument.

  “The designer was correct?” she asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” he replied. “The device is most ingenious. I would dearly like to meet the man who thought of it. A fine discovery—though it taxed the talents of my lens grinder severely. I think we might make a better one, with much care and skill; this is but a poor example, as one must expect from a first attempt.”

  The Lady Carmilla seated herself at the bench, and Edmund showed her how to apply her eye to the instrument, and how to adjust the focusing wheel and the mirror. She expressed surprise at the appearance of the magnified moth’s wing, and Edmund took her through the series of prepared slides, which included other parts of insects’ bodies, and sections through the stems and seeds of plants.

  “I need a sharper knife and a steadier hand, my lady,” he told her. “The device exposes the clumsiness of my cutting.”

  “Oh no, Master Cordery,” she assured him politely. “These are quite pretty enough. But we were told that more interesting things might be seen. Living things too small for ordinary sight.”

  Edmund bowed in apology and explained about the preparation of water slides. He made a new one, using a pipette to take a drop from a jar full of dirty river water. Patiently, he helped the lady search the slide for the tiny creatures that human eyes were not equipped to perceive. He showed her one that flowed as if it were semiliquid itself, and tinier ones that moved by means of cilia. She was quite captivated, and watched for some time, moving the slide very gently with her painted fingernails.

  Eventually she asked: “Have you looked at other fluids?”

  “What kind of fluids?” he asked, though the question was quite clear to him and disturbed him.

  She was not prepared to mince words with him. “Blood, Master Cordery,” she said very softly. Her past acquaintance with him had taught her respect for his intelligence, and he half regretted it.

  “Blood clots very quickly,” he told her. “I could not produce a satisfactory slide. It would take unusual skill.”

  “I’m sure that it would,” she replied.

  “Noell has made drawings of many of the things we have looked at,” said Edmund. “Would you like to see them?”

  She accepted the change of subject, and indicated that she would. She moved to Noell’s station and began sorting through the drawings, occasionally looking up at the boy to compliment him on his work. Edmund stood by, remembering how sensitive he once had been to her moods and desires, trying hard to work out now exactly what she was thinking. Something in one of her contemplative glances at Noell sent an icy pang of dread into Edmund’s gut, and he found his more important fears momentarily displaced by what might have been anxiety for his son, or simply jealousy. He cursed himself again for his weakness.

  “May I take these to show the archduke?” asked the Lady Carmilla, addressing the question to Noell rather than to his father. The boy nodded, still too embarrassed to construct a proper reply. She took a selection of the drawings and rolled them into a scroll. She stood and faced Edmund again.

  “We are most interested in this apparatus,” she informed him. “We must consider carefully whether to provide you with new assistants, to encourage development of the appropriate skills. In the meantime, you may return to your ordinary work. I will send someone for the instrument, so that the archduke can inspect it at his leisure. Your son draws very well, and must be encouraged. You and he may visit me in my chambers on Monday next; we will dine at seven o’clock, and you may tell me about all your recent work.”

  Edmund bowed to signal his acquiescence—it was, of course, a c
ommand rather than an invitation. He moved before her to the door in order to hold it open for her. The two exchanged another brief glance as she went past him.

  When she had gone, it was as though something taut unwound inside him, leaving him relaxed and emptied. He felt strangely cool and distant as he considered the possibility—stronger now—that his life was in peril.

  * * *

  When the twilight had faded, Edmund lit a single candle on the bench and sat staring into the flame while he drank dark wine from a flask. He did not look up when Noell came into the room, but when the boy brought another stool close to his and sat down upon it, he offered the flask. Noell took it, but sipped rather gingerly.

  “I’m old enough to drink now?” he commented dryly.

  “You’re old enough,” Edmund assured him. “But beware of excess, and never drink alone. Conventional fatherly advice, I believe.”

  Noell reached across the bench so that he could stroke the barrel of the microscope with slender fingers.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asked.

  Edmund sighed. “You’re old enough for that, too, I suppose?”

  “I think you ought to tell me.”

  Edmund looked at the brass instrument and said: “It were better to keep things like this dark secret. Some human mechanician, I daresay, eager to please the vampire lords and ladies, showed off his cleverness as proud as a peacock. Thoughtless. Inevitable, though, now that all this play with lenses has become fashionable.”

  “You’ll be glad of eyeglasses when your sight begins to fail,” Noell told him. “In any case, I can’t see the danger in this new toy.”

  Edmund smiled. “New toys,” he mused. “Clocks to tell the time, mills to grind the corn, lenses to aid human sight. Produced by human craftsmen for the delight of their masters. I think we’ve finally succeeded in proving to the vampires just how very clever we are—and how much more there is to know than we know already.”

  “You think the vampires are beginning to fear us?”

  Edmund gulped wine from the flask and passed it again to his son. “Their rule is founded in fear and superstition,” he said quietly. “They’re long-lived, suffer only mild attacks of diseases that are fatal to us, and have marvelous powers of regeneration. But they’re not immortal, and they’re vastly outnumbered by humans. Terror keeps them safe, but terror is based in ignorance, and behind their haughtiness and arrogance, there’s a gnawing fear of what might happen if humans ever lost their supernatural reverence for vampirekind. It’s very difficult for them to die, but they don’t fear death any the less for that.”

  “There’ve been rebellions against vampire rule. They’ve always failed.”

  Edmund nodded to concede the point. “There are three million people in Grand Normandy,” he said, “and less than five thousand vampires. There are only forty thousand vampires in the entire imperium of Gaul, and about the same number in the imperium of Byzantium—no telling how many there may be in the khanate of Walachia and Cathay, but not so very many more. In Africa the vampires must be outnumbered three or four thousand to one. If people no longer saw them as demons and demi-gods, as unconquerable forces of evil, their empire would be fragile. The centuries through which they live give them wisdom, but longevity seems to be inimical to creative thought—they learn, but they don’t invent. Humans remain the true masters of art and science, which are forces of change. They’ve tried to control that—to turn it to their advantage—but it remains a thorn in their side.”

  “But they do have power,” insisted Noell. “They are vampires.”

  Edmund shrugged. “Their longevity is real—their powers of regeneration, too. But is it really their magic that makes them so? I don’t know for sure what merit there is in their incantations and rituals, and I don’t think even they know—they cling to their rites because they dare not abandon them, but where the power that makes humans into vampires really comes from, no one knows. From the devil? I think not. I don’t believe in the devil—I think it’s something in the blood. I think vampirism may be a kind of disease—but a disease that makes men stronger instead of weaker, insulates them against death instead of killing them. If that is the case—do you see now why the Lady Carmilla asked whether I had looked at blood beneath the microscope?”

  Noell stared at the instrument for twenty seconds or so, mulling over the idea. Then he laughed.

  “If we could all become vampires,” he said lightly, “we’d have to suck one another’s blood.”

  Edmund couldn’t bring himself to look for such ironies. For him, the possibilities inherent in discovering the secrets of vampire nature were much more immediate, and utterly bleak.

  “It’s not true that they need to suck the blood of humans,” he told the boy. “It’s not nourishment. It gives them … a kind of pleasure that we can’t understand. And it’s part of the mystique that makes them so terrible … and hence so powerful.” He stopped, feeling embarrassed. He did not know how much Noell knew about his sources of information. He and his wife never talked about the days of his affair with the Lady Carmilla, but there was no way to keep gossip and rumor from reaching the boy’s ears.

  Noell took the flask again, and this time took a deeper draft from it. “I’ve heard,” he said distantly, “that humans find pleasure, too … in their blood being drunk.”

  “No,” replied Edmund calmly. “That’s untrue. Unless one counts the small pleasure of sacrifice. The pleasure that a human man takes from a vampire lady is the same pleasure that he takes from a human lover. It might be different for the girls who entertain vampire men, but I suspect it’s just the excitement of hoping that they may become vampires themselves.”

  Noell hesitated, and would probably have dropped the subject, but Edmund realized suddenly that he did not want the subject dropped. The boy had a right to know, and perhaps might one day need to know.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Edmund corrected himself. “When the Lady Carmilla used to taste my blood, it did give me pleasure, in a way. It pleased me because it pleased her. There is an excitement in loving a vampire lady, which makes it different from loving an ordinary woman … even though the chance that a vampire lady’s lover may himself become a vampire is so remote as to be inconsiderable.”

  Noell blushed, not knowing how to react to this acceptance into his father’s confidence. Finally he decided that it was best to pretend a purely academic interest.

  “Why are there so many more vampire women than men?” he asked.

  “No one knows for sure,” Edmund said. “No humans, at any rate. I can tell you what I believe, from hearsay and from reasoning, but you must understand that it is a dangerous thing to think about, let alone to speak about.”

  Noell nodded.

  “The vampires keep their history secret,” said Edmund, “and they try to control the writing of human history, but the following facts are probably true. Vampirism came to western Europe in the fifth century, with the vampire-led horde of Attila. Attila must have known well enough how to make more vampires—he converted both Aëtius, who became ruler of the imperium of Gaul, and Theodosius II, the emperor of the east who was later murdered. Of all the vampires that now exist, the vast majority must be converts. I have heard reports of vampire children born to vampire ladies, but it must be an extremely rare occurrence. Vampire men seem to be much less virile than human men—it is said that they couple very rarely. Nevertheless, they frequently take human consorts, and these consorts often become vampires. Vampires usually claim that this is a gift, bestowed deliberately by magic, but I am not so sure they can control the process. I think the semen of vampire men carries some kind of seed that communicates vampirism much as the semen of humans makes women pregnant—and just as haphazardly. That’s why the male lovers of vampire ladies don’t become vampires.”

  Noell considered this, and then asked: “Then where do vampire lords come from?”

  “They’re converted by other male vampires,” Edmun
d said. “Just as Attila converted Aëtius and Theodosius.” He did not elaborate, but waited to see whether Noell understood the implication. An expression of disgust crossed the boy’s face and Edmund did not know whether to be glad or sorry that his son could follow the argument through.

  “Because it doesn’t always happen,” Edmund went on, “it’s easy for the vampires to pretend that they have some special magic. But some women never become pregnant, though they lie with their husbands for years. It is said, though, that a human may also become a vampire by drinking vampire’s blood—if he knows the appropriate magic spell. That’s a rumor the vampires don’t like, and they exact terrible penalties if anyone is caught trying the experiment. The ladies of our own court, of course, are for the most part onetime lovers of the archduke or his cousins. It would be indelicate to speculate about the conversion of the archduke, though he is certainly acquainted with Aëtius.”

  Noell reached out a hand, palm downward, and made a few passes above the candle flame, making it flicker from side to side. He stared at the microscope.

  “Have you looked at blood?” he asked.

  “I have,” replied Edmund. “And semen. Human blood, of course—and human semen.”

  “And?”

  Edmund shook his head. “They’re certainly not homogeneous fluids,” he said, “but the instrument isn’t good enough for really detailed inspection. There are small corpuscles—the ones in semen have long, writhing tails—but there’s more … much more … to be seen, if I had the chance. By tomorrow this instrument will be gone—I don’t think I’ll be given the chance to build another.”

  “You’re surely not in danger! You’re an important man—and your loyalty has never been in question. People think of you as being almost a vampire yourself. A black magician. The kitchen girls are afraid of me because I’m your son—they cross themselves when they see me.”