SM Stirling
Page 5
, has anything
I’ve said or done given you the impression that we care about the greatest good of the greatest number? And as for running
the world—I said we rule it.” She uncurled her fingers for a moment, and held her hands as if framing her face like a picture with the thumbs beneath the chin. “Do I look
like a bureaucrat? To run the world would be to spend all our time at meetings, or reading reports, or standing in ridiculous costumes in front of faux-Egyptian temples bellowing platitudes to crowds of groveling worshippers, like a bad science-fiction film. And while you beg and plead and grovel charmingly, my sweet, it’s much more enjoyable on a personal one-to-one level. No, no, we rule by ruling the men who run the world. Run it for
us.” She turned both hands palm-up to her left, in a gesture like a visual behold
. “They do all the work.” The same gesture to the right. “We have all the fun. It’s the natural order.” Silence fell as the waiter returned with their desserts. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” Ellen said when he’d gone. “That’s why you’re telling me all this. You don’t care what I know, because nobody will hear.” Another laugh. “Oh, I may kill you someday, slowly and beautifully and cruelly. Or not, if you continue to amuse. But if you were to escape, per impossible
, who would you tell?” “I’d tell everybody! These days you can’t keep things secret.” “Would you start a Web site? www.MutantVampiresDrinkOurBlood.
com
? Why, seventy years ago a writer here in New Mexico stumbled on some of the truth, and wrote a book around it . . . and we let him
live to an implausibly old age. Though we made sure the publisher wouldn’t buy a sequel.” “Adrian would believe me,” Ellen said. “Yes, and you two could sit and tell each other about it. But I have no intention of losing you, chérie
, not when our relationship is just blooming.” “Why do you do that?” Ellen said. “Do what?” “Talk as if we were lovers. Talk as if you loved me. Talk about our relationship
.” “Ah, but we do
have a relationship. Granted, it’s a predator-prey relationship, but those are very important ecologically.” She took a spoonful of the dessert, ate it with slow relish, then tapped the spoon on the edge of the dish. “And I do love you. It’s a very much more complex form of the way that I love this crème brûlée. But nonetheless sincere. And the more often I taste of you, the more I love. You might call it a devouring passion. Have you never wondered why human beings sometimes feel that way? It’s because you all have a trace—sometimes more than a trace, like poor Jeffrey Dahmer—of our heredity. As if deer were part wolf, or antelope part tiger.” She reached into her handbag and took out a cigarette case, tapped a pale ivory-colored cylinder into a holder and bent over to light it from the candle. An off-white tendril rose, scented with rum and something else added to the tobacco. Even then, Ellen was shocked enough to blurt: “You can’t smoke here!” Heads were turning at nearby tables, but not towards them. A man sniffed and coughed, then shrugged and went back to his soufflé. Ellen had the sudden feeling that she was invisible, that if she stood and shouted and threw dishes nothing would happen. “Delicious one, I can do anything I want. Anywhere, at any time, to or with anyone. I could rip out the chef ’s throat if I wanted to . . . though that would be a criminal waste. You’d better get used to the concept.” She looked at her watch, then tucked seven hundred-dollar bills under a wineglass for the tip. “Time to go. Adrian should be charging in to your rescue about now. Let me see . . . yes, good shielding, but there’s that don’t-notice-this feeling.” “Adrian really
loves me,” Ellen said stubbornly as they rose; she draped the shawl casually around her hips. “Which is why you were running away from him in tears when we met?” Adrienne laughed. “Chérie
, remember that he has my instincts. He just won’t admit it.” “What did you do to my apartment?” “I set a trap. The equivalent of wiring a grenade to the door.” She shrugged. “He won’t be killed, I think, not if he deserves to be my brother. It’s not my plan that he die. Not yet, possibly never. Now, allons-y
!” A limousine was waiting outside. Beside the door was a young Asian man, dressed in dark windbreaker, black T-shirt and baggy pants and trainers. There was a button microphone in his ear with the slender thread of the pickup alongside his jaw, and one hand rested inside the coat. Ellen hesitated as he opened the door; the interior loomed dark, as if this was some threshold across which she could never return. A hand pushed firmly at her back, and the man said something in Chinese. Adrienne replied in the same language, her tone sharp. Then her head came up just as she put one foot inside the door; her eyes pointed eastward past the Cathedral, towards the apartment. “Oh. The clever boy has brought a friend with him. Yes, we’d better get going. After all, helping Adrian is going to take us quite a while.” “Helping him?” “Helping him with his identity confusions. You and I are going to help him . . . get down with his bad self.” Softly: “I want my brother back. My brother, my lover, my other self.”
CHAPTER FIVE “S
till nothing definite?” Harvey Ledbetter said. “No,” Adrian said. He worked his shoulders; all that tension there would get him would be a headache. Cold. I must be cold. Do
not think of what Ellen is suffering. My
feelings will not rescue her, only my strengths, my abilities, my wits. Think only of chances, strategies. They rode the escalator nearly alone; Albuquerque’s airport was a hub, but not a big one, and air travel hadn’t picked up fully again anyway with the economy still limping. There were more people arriving than catching departing flights at nine in the evening, as well. “No,” he went on. “I can’t just guess. Not with someone like Adrienne involved.” “Yeah, that screws the probabilities well and good. Just west
, eh?” “Just west.” “Hell of a lot of territory in that direction. You want to do the honors at Security, or shall I?” Harvey said, as they walked past the shuttered bookstores and by-generous-definition restaurants. 9:45 San Francisco
blinked at them from the Departures screen. On time. “Oh, I’ll do it,” Adrian said. “I’m bored, anyway.” Harvey put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “She’s counting on you getting frazzled,” he said gently. “Yes. So I won’t. I shall not be comfortable or easy, either.” Not as easy as you, my friend,
he thought; he could feel the other’s cool hunter’s patience. You do not know Ellen. It is not that you do not care, but this is one more encounter in a long war. And you have gotten that which you wished; you have forced me back into this doomed fight. He didn’t resent that—not much. If you could read the truth of men’s emotions without effort, you learned to make allowances that those who could take comfort from illusion and ignorance did not. Or else you had no friends. But
Adrienne must also have desired this. And that is very much a concern. They heaved their carry-on luggage onto the conveyor belt as they came to the head of the airport security line, amid the smell and feel of tension and boredom and throttled anger. Harvey walked jauntily into the glass enclosure. Adrian put the knuckles of his fists together and let the simple electronic nervous system of the machines vibrate in his consciousness. That was hardly a Wreaking at all, no need for glyphs or the diamond-shard syllables of Mhabrogast that cut your mind bloody from the inside. He didn’t have to touch anything but electrons in semiconductors, and when your brain held a decryption center intended to break the unique codes inside a human skull, computers were child’s play. The metallic taste put his teeth on edge for a moment, but the scanner showed nothing except the simple form of a man, and harmless underwear and magazines in their carry-ons. The same for him . . . They collected their gear, stepped into their shoes and walked out through the slowly revolving door into the main concourse; behind him someone’s mind muttered: Kill them all, kill them all— With a vivid image of a nuclear fireball cracking above a city, the blast-wave throwing aside buildings like confetti and t
urning bodies to shadows against walls . . . “Whoa!” Harvey said. “Someone really
doesn’t like goin’ through the mill!” The Sunport had a great bronze statue where the concourse met the two wings of gates; a shaman twice man-height running full tilt, with an eagle headdress and a live eagle or an eagle spirit just at the edge of his outstretched fingers. Two decades of travelers had known it as Chief Trips and Falls
or Shaman Destroys Endangered Species.
Adrian smiled grimly at it; there was less charm to legends when you knew their sources. Or to religions, come to that. “Do you know why I really hate drinking human blood?” Adrian said. He forced himself not to snarl and turn his mind into a lethal razor as a man bumped into him, walking with his head in a copy of the New York Times
. Election Will Be Close; Democrats Confident
, read the headline. Knowing who was really in charge also took the interest out of politics, for the most part. “Moral qualms?” Harvey asked. “No. It is no crime to abstract a little from the Red Cross; people donate it to help others, and they are helping me
, and I give them a lot of money. What I hate is the way it makes everyone smell more appetizing
. I really
should not be around people.” They turned into one of the washrooms on the B concourse, went into adjacent stalls for privacy and opened their carry-ons across the toilet seats. Adrian checked the magazine, snapped it back into his Glock and holstered it. The knife he slipped into loops on the other side of his jacket; wearing it across the small of the back wasn’t comfortable in an aircraft seat, even a first-class one. The hypodermics with their solution of silver and radioactive waste went cautiously into steel-and-lead-lined tubes sewn into a pocket. A load of that would kill him just as permanently and irrevocably as the wickedest member of the Council of Shadows. The chalks and markers were, ironically, the most dangerous part of his equipment and the ones he could
let the authorities see. Or perhaps it is my mind that is dangerous. Yes, without doubt, for the glyphs only focus it. Perhaps the Mhabrogast too, though there I am less certain. “Ol’ buddy,” Harvey said meditatively—there was a chunk
sound as he checked and closed his massive coach gun. “How many people do you figure could mind-fuck the scanner the way you did?” “Oh, anyone the Council would recognize as Shadowspawn,” he said absently. “Half the sworn members of the Brotherhood; you could, it would just be harder, eh? Plenty of independents who think they are magicians or witches or psychics or whatever.” Harvey chuckled as they exited the washroom; Adrian wrinkled his nose as the smells of urine and disinfectant fell away. A hypersensitive sense of smell was another of the disadvantages of his heritage. Not as bad as the cravings, but it added its mite of discomfort. Of course, dogs and wolves and leopards are more sensitive still, but they seem to mind it less. I wonder why? “Makes you confident about how Homeland Security’s got your ass, don’t it?” Harvey went on. Adrian laughed as well. “Harvey, what do you think would happen to a hijacker who tried to take over an aircraft with one of us
onboard?” “It happened. I looked it up last year, had the same thought when we were pulling our team out of Bucharest after we turned Gheorghe Brâncuşi’s hideaway into a tanning salon. It was in 1972, flight out of Beirut. A Shadowspawn enforcer working for Ibrahim al-Larnaki. That was before he took over Abdul the Damned’s Council seat.” “What happened?” “They hushed up the bodies, the usual. Tell you the truth, I think they got what they deserved. And it isn’t often I think people deserve what a bored Shadowspawn mook does when he’s turned loose with time to be inventive.” Adrian gave a sour snort. “Have you ever tallied the arguments against . . . what’s the current term? Intelligent Design?” “Can’t say as I’ve bothered since I got over a Baptist upbringing. And I was about fifteen when that happened—decided that anything that said I shouldn’t get into Julie-May McBell’s pants behind the bleachers after the football game was bound
to be wrong about everything else, too. Lost my faith with her legs wrapped around me and a bare tit in my hand. But tell me.” “Here’s the Power, OK? With enough of it, you can work wonders.” “Yeah. How’s that show it wasn’t intelligently designed?” “Because—by sheer accident, by a fucking evolutionary kludge
—the genes which let you use the Power are tightly linked to traits which make you into a solitary megalomaniac serial-killing monster who has to drink human blood and finds the taste of pain addictive. If that isn’t proof of the randomness of evolution, what is?” Harvey chuckled. “But it could be evidence for Malevolent
Design on the part of the Big Fellah, right? Monsters with the powers of gods?” Adrian opened his mouth, then closed it. After a moment he said: “And most of the time I think I’m
a cynic and a pessimist!” They came to the desk at B5. Adrian put on his charming smile; he also let his accent thicken until it was as strong as his sister’s. For some reason most people in this country found a bit of Parisian soothing and impressive from a handsome young man, unless you met a chauvinist at a time of international tension. “Mademoiselle, you have two vacant first-class seats to San Francisco, is it not? For standby passengers Adrian Brézé and Harvey Ledbetter.” The harried woman had dark circles under her eyes; he could pick up a little of her weary resentment at the cascade of demands that were always more than she could meet, a life spent trying to do three people’s work. She glanced down at the computer: “I don’t think—why, I do! Here’s your boarding passes. We’re boarding first class and Gold Pass customers right now.” “And we aren’t the droids you’re looking for anyway,” Harvey muttered as they went into the boarding tunnel. “So move along, now.” “Shut
up, Harv. It’s easier—” “—if nobody notices anything’s screwy, yeah.” As they settled into their seats he went on: “Damn, I wish I could always travel this easy. Brotherhood makes us fly coach these days, would you believe it? And no jumping the queue.” Adrian looked out the window at the moonlit slopes of the Sandias, still with a tiny dusting of snow on their gullied peaks. They wheeled as the engines of the Boeing whined and the plane began to roll, the night-lights of the airport a galaxy of colors. “It’s cheating,” he said. “I can’t afford to give in to temptations. I know what’s at the bottom of the slippery slope. Yes, a vodka sour, miss, s’il vous plaît
.” “Buddy, you are too good for this wicked world.” “No. Ellen is, and now she’s in a world a lot worse.” Decision firmed. “Watch my back, Harv.” He let the seat back and arranged himself in as close to the hands-crossed-on-shoulders trance position as he could inconspicuously. “You sure about that?” “Judgment call. But we need information if we’re not going to waste time. If they’re landing in this continent, they’ll be where they’re going by now. I’ll try and grab-link as soon as she’s asleep; I can tell that
easily enough.” A Word, and his mind drifted down through layers of darkness. “I driiiink youurrr miiiiilkshake
,” Adrienne’s voice crooned in her ear. Ellen gave an involuntary gasp of terror as the teeth touched her throat. Then Adrienne whirled her away. “No, not yet. Not this time.” Instead she turned and leapt, like a black-haired cat. The young Chinese man who’d played guard in the limousine went down with a startled scream; Adrienne’s face was locked into the angle of throat and shoulder. Ellen swallowed and turned her eyes away at the liquid sounds and the scrabbling. She lurched as the big Airbus CJ sped into its takeoff run. When she made herself look again the metallic coppery-iron-salt scent was strong. Adrienne raised her head, blood wet on her chin and her eyes glittering with joy. God, this is hell. It’s absolute hell!
Ellen thought. Adrienne laughed, her teeth red and one hand on the young man’s throat. “Yes, it is. Nor are you out of it,” she said as she rose. “Theresa, take care of David. I’m going to freshen up.” “Well, give me a hand, lucy,” the briskly efficient middle-aged Latina said. Ellen did. The Asian man—David
, she reminded herself—was
half-conscious, a limp weight as they lifted him into one of the recliners. His slack grin made her a little queasy, but he came back to himself as the older woman taped a bandage to his neck, went into the kitchenette and then came back and handed him a mug of what smelled like chicken broth. “Tsk,” she said. “The maintenance staff will complain about the upholstery, again. Gracias
, lucy. Would you like a drink? The bar is available to us.” “You’re welcome,” Ellen said uneasily. “Yes, a Bloody Mary.” That produced a chuckle, and she flushed a little. “But . . . my name is Ellen, not Lucy.” She sank into a chair, uneasily conscious of how grubby her white silk dress was becoming. That was absurd under the circumstances—there was a spray of blood droplets across the hem now too—but the crisp business suit Theresa wore had that effect. So did the ambience of the jet; there was a compartment forward that was probably a bedroom, a central lounge-dining-office area, and the galley and a shower-bathroom at the rear. It was all pale and elegant, curved lines and blond wood and slightly nubby fabrics. The noise of the engines was very faint, and if it hadn’t been for the windows and curved ceiling she wouldn’t have thought it was an aircraft at all. Theresa reminded Ellen of the attendants who hovered around the very highest echelon of clients at the gallery. The ones who were sent back later to deliver checks with a lot of zeroes in them. She handed Ellen the drink and sank onto a sofa, sipping her own; it looked like something with tequila. David’s laugh was a little weak still. He felt gingerly at his throat. She noticed a cuff-bracelet on his hand, and a small gold bangle, obsidian and jet, a rayed sun black-on-black with a jagged-looking trident spearing up through it. He must have lost about a pint. No more than you give at the donor’s clinic. Even counting—