She sighed. “All right, but I still think we should back him down completely. We don’t need a new organ bought with prejudice money.”
“If it was just perceptional prejudice, yes. Then it’d affect a lot of people. But as long as it’s my being something he thinks I shouldn’t ‘fancy’ myself being, then it mainly just affects him and me. As I see it. Him and the people who think like him. There are a lot more fantasy perceivers than vampires. That we know about, anyway. Uh ... Mother Lizzie, could I make another Reconciliation? Right now?”
She eyed him seriously. “Under the circumstances, and just from what I’ve seen for myself, I’d say it looks more like you’ve just been wrestling with temptation than wallowing in sin. Understandable temptation, at that. How are you feeling now?”
He took stock of it and came up with an answer that surprised him. “Shaky. Otherwise, not too bad.”
“Think you could take Eucharist now?”
Swallowing over a lump of gratitude, he nodded.
While she went to the vestry for the tabernacle key, he knelt at the rail of the Eucharistic Chapel, dimly aware of Mr. Olson’s having knelt in the same place only minutes ago, but happily finding that fact of very little importance right now.
* * * *
Frictions between people don’t always wrap up neatly in real life. Which is why I don’t always resolve the conflicts in my stories.
* * * *
A COLD STAKE
(First published in Vampires, ed. by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg. HarperCollins, © 1991)
One key piece of internal evidence that points to this as Clement Czarny’s introductory appearance is that it makes much less of his determined “saintliness.” In the published original, he even describes himself as a “sometime” churchgoer. I have slightly changed that, but very little else.
“Eat your soup before it curdles,” said Aunt Cecilia. It was an old family joke.
But the young guest on the other side of the hollywreath centerpiece from Clement had apparently never heard it before. “Hyugk!” he choked—a disgusting sound. “Before it curdles?”
“Oh, crash it, Gary,” Trivy said with a toss of her short black curls. “Mom was just kipping Clemmie a little. Czarnina doesn’t curdle.” She pronounced it “chowneena,” more like a Mexican dog than a Central European delicacy.
“Please, Cousin Tivoly,” Clement told her, partly to change the subject, “now that I’m a university man, I’d rather you used my full name.”
“What the fever is this stuff?” Gary insisted.
Uncle Jan winked one of his slightly epicanthic eyes at the guest. “Chocolate soup.” Another old joke.
Gary glared at him. “Don’t baby me, M. O’Reilly! I’m taking the Test next month! This stuff’s got blood in it, doesn’t it?”
“Just duck’s blood,” Trivy snapped. “Honestly! If you aren’t a baby, don’t act like one.”
“Hyuggk! Look at it, all red and—”
“It isn’t red, it’s brown! And how come you don’t hyuk at hamburger? That’s got cow’s blood in it, doesn’t it?”
“Trivia!” said Aunt Cecilia, reverting to Tivoli’s childhood nickname, short for the antique game of Trivial Pursuit. “That will be enough. Remember, it’s Christmas. Older people than Gary have stopped liking czarnina when they heard the recipe. Here, Gary, let me get you something else.” Like the good hostess she was, Aunt Cele took Gary’s bowl and retreated into the kitchen.
Looking away from Gary, Clement fished a prune out of his own soup and took it whole into his mouth. Properly utilized, his fangs helped rather than hindered chewing the flesh of the fruit from around the pit. Aunt Cele always insisted that real czarnina demanded prunes with the pits still in them. Unpitted prunes were difficult to buy in this fourth decade of the twenty-first century, so Aunt Cele served czarnina only on Christmas and Easter.
“Yeah, I see why your cousin eats blood soup,” said Gary. “But how can he eat that ... whatever he’s chewing?”
“The same way you can,” said Trivy. “And it’s probably a prune. See?” Her gold-polished fingernails gleaming, she brought her spoon up with a prune from her own bowl.
Gary looked the other way and repeated, “Hyuk!”
“Guess he doesn’t like prunes, either,” Uncle Jan remarked mildly.
Clement swallowed the pulp, removed the pit from his mouth, and said, “I can eat and drink the same things everybody else does, M. Gary. When good manners call for it.” In fact, he got very little nourishment from blood when it had been thoroughly cooked. He simply liked the flavor of “chocolate soup.”
“If you’re going to ’em’ me,” the boy grumbled, “then please use my family name. In case you forgot, it’s Wilson. Like one of the old presidents. They tell me yours is Batory. Like the Transylvanian countess.”
“Like the great king of Poland,” Trivy said, as if King Stefan hadn’t been an earlier branch of the same family tree.
“Umpf,” Gary Wilson replied. “Okay, Trivia O’Reilly, if we’re onto kings and queens, why was Joan of Arc’s death better than Anne Boleyn’s?”
Trivy said, “Joan of Arc wasn’t a queen.”
“Anne Boleyn was. And she had six fingers on one of her hands.”
Uncle Jan put in, “They’re really teaching you kids the history in middle school these days!”
“We’d rather call it Junior College,” Gary said proudly. He had to be twelve, if he was taking the Test next month. He looked a little small for his age. Or maybe that was because Trivy, at thirteen, was a little large for hers, thanks to her big-boned mother.
“Joan of Arc was burned at the stake,” said Trivy, “and Anne Boleyn had her head chopped off, and M. Quizwiz here probably learned it from screen cartoons.”
“I didn’t ask how they died. I assumed you knew that much. I asked why Anne Boleyn’s death was better than Joan of Arc’s. Give up? Because a cold chop beats a hot stake!” Gary looked straight at Clement while he said it.
“I think you got that turned around, M. Wilson,” Clement replied. “Don’t you mean, ‘a hot steak beats a cold chop’?” The pun on “steak” and “stake” was built into the joke, but the university man hoped—and doubted—he had only imagined the subtler wordplay on a large stake and a small one, on “chop” and “strike,” and possibly on “cold” and “cold blood.”
“Yeah,” said Gary Wilson, still staring at Clement. “Yeah, what did I say?”
Happily, just then Aunt Cele returned with a steaming bowl of the chicken noodle soup she kept on hand to microwave for company who decided they didn’t want czarnina.
The rest of the meal proceeded more in keeping with the holiday spirit, as Trivy showed herself ready to join the grown-ups in heading off Gary’s bad manners. But tension continued beneath the surface, as at every glance across the table Clement found young Wilson staring at him.
A stiff-looking boy. Clean—as if scrubbed with plastimesh—and neat enough, no dirt beneath the fingernails, yellow hair mown too short to get out of order. In fact, his hair looked almost like a fuzzy halo on some little, bald saint. His tunic was good quality, but ripping a little near the collar. His eyes were definitely his worst feature: ice-blue, slightly bloodshot, and with dark, puffy bags beneath them.
How had Trivy come to befriend this young floater well enough to invite him for Christmas Day and overnight?
Unless that surly temper was aimed entirely at Clement himself ...
Come on, now! A mere child? Even the elementary psychology textbooks were beginning to admit that children, although legally classified as fantasy perceivers under the Reformed Constitution, were actually the clearest reality perceivers of all. And reality perceivers could rarely if ever see vampires. Vampires did not fit into the legal definition of Standard Reality. Trivy herself had never been able to see her cous
in’s true nature, neither before nor after passing her first Perception Test last year with a score of ninety-six percent Reality.
All the same, Gary Wilson was old enough to have developed strong fantasy perception. And he had called the czarnina red when it was, in fact and to all Standard Reality perception, the color of good milk chocolate.
* * * *
Clement helped Aunt Cele load the dishcleaner while Uncle Jan and the kids booted up the living room. When the dish-loaders joined them, the holographic fire was casting out its electric warmth, the punchbowl was getting ready to steam on its cordless heater, and Trivy and Gary were seated at opposite sides of an upright screengame, one of this year’s presents.
Settling into his favorite armchair by the fireplace, Clement put his feet up, eyed the thermal jug that waited on the coffee table, and gave a contented sigh. Uncle Jan was playing solitaire with a manual deck, Aunt Cele had already started strumming carols on her acoustic guitar, the oldfashioned genuine fringed-plastic tree was glowing with battery candles and angelclouds. Trivy was maneuvering Inspector Marchpane’s Keystoners into a winning position, Gary Wilson was out of sight on the other side of the gamescreen manipulating Clouseau’s Gendarmes, the thermal jug held a warmed-just-to-steaming pint of the rich fluid that was Clement’s true nourishment, and, for the moment, all was Christmas.
It stayed so until the traditional toast to the New Millennium, now seeing its fortieth Yuletide. Then, a moment after they lowered their cups, Uncle Jan made the obligatory comment that somebody, no doubt, was making sometime this evening in every gathering throughout the continent, what was left of it. Maybe throughout the world. “Well, it was just eleven years ago today.”
“It” being the Christmas Earthquake of 2029, which had dumped Lower California into the Pacific Ocean.
The summer before that disaster, Clement had been promised a trip to the Original Disneyland for his tenth birthday. By the time that birthday arrived, the fabulous lost playland had lain beneath the waves for two and a half years, never seen except by divers and merpeople ...
Gary Wilson’s voice cut into Clement’s thoughts: “Yeah, and it was the fantasy perceivers who brought on the Quake, wasn’t it?”
Clement’s eyes and mouth both snapped open. “Fantasy perceivers, M. Wilson, are not and never were any more immoral than reality perceivers!”
Trivy, Aunt Cele, and Uncle Jan were all scolding young Wilson at the same time, so there was no telling whose words he understood, if any. But he looked completely unabashed. Staring straight back at Clement, he almost shouted,
“Yeah! Everybody knows it! Fanciers and bloodsuckers and people like him!”
“Take it back!” shouted Trivy.
“No! It’s true! Everybody knows—”
“I was seven years old when California sank!” Clement found his voice trembling. “The accident that made me what I am didn’t happen until I was eleven—”
“Look at him, sitting there drinking blood—”
“Gary Wilson Wilson!” Aunt Cele raised her voice above everybody else’s. “Shut up!”
“I’m your guest! You can’t tell me to shut up! Look at him! You can’t even see him in the mirror—”
“You can’t see him in the mirror, maybe!” said Trivy.
“Look at his bloody fangs!”
Clement turned and strode out. Not trusting himself to speak. Snatching his cape from its peg in the hallway and slamming the door behind him.
The outside temperature was just cold enough to keep the snow from melting. He let his cape flap open as he stalked the old, straight sidewalks, wishing it was true that his kind could change into bats and fly through the night at will.
Maybe some vampires could. Clement Batory Czarny had had to figure a lot of things out for himself, testing and proving the old legends scrap by scrap to find how they applied to him.
Tonight it took him two kilometers of sidewalk, mainly shoveled or heated or sanded but with here and there an isolated slick patch gleaming in the light from Christmas-decorated windows, before his temper cooled enough to begin examining his own behavior. It was a very secret self-examination he made. Wilson had obviously been the one to blame—Fundamentalist young firebrand—and never would Clement have admitted to anybody outside the Reconciliation Room that his own reaction might have been less than reasonable.
In fact, if he hadn’t left when he did, he might have gone for Gary Wilson’s neck. A thing he had never yet done in his life. A thing he had sworn never to do to any unwilling or immature party. A thing, truth be told, that he wasn’t entirely sure how to go about doing to anybody.
Maybe he should have his fangs ground down, if he could ever find a dentist capable of perceiving them. It was not as if he really used them, and he seemed to be accidentally biting his own lip oftener than other people did. Some human blood he needed every day, but three drops were enough to make a perfectly nutritious meal out of a pint from any red-blooded animal. At a pinch, he could even recycle three drops of his own blood for the purpose, though too many nights of that diet and he began to feel the effects of malnutrition.
But he might want his fangs someday ... in planewreck, shipwreck, or some other survival situation ... or for some willing-and-eager girlfriend (whom he would never, God forbid! drain to the point of anemia) ...
When he finally felt calm enough to apologize like a grown man, if his aunt and uncle absolutely insisted on it, he started back. Cutting across several lawns, an alley, and the new neighborhood park, he approached the house from behind.
Trivy’s annual “igloo” sat snug in the backyard, a dark blob faintly outlined by the light that filtered through the mock stained glass Nativity decal in the kitchen window. In his pre-university years, Clement had sometimes helped Uncle Jan and Trivy build the igloo, when he happened to be visiting at the time of a suitable snowfall. Many were the hours he had spent with his little cousin in the domelike enclosure, telling stories, singing songs, playing checkers, sipping hot drinks from their thermoses ... One year they had even tried making shadow animals, twisting their gloved hands between the light of Uncle Jan’s battery lantern and the snowball wall. Trivy claimed to see Clement’s shadow, as she claimed to see his mirror reflection.
Drawing closer, he sensed that there was a light inside the igloo now, almost completely muffled by the walls. It must be a not-too-powerful flashlight. He approached the dome’s low crawlway with soft steps ...
And froze, hearing the voices inside.
Trivy and M. Gary Wilson.
The vampire edged closer to listen.
“It was plain hot eggnog,” Trivy was saying. “Just exactly the same stuff the rest of us were drinking!”
“It was blood!”
“You’re full of glitches! Mom just puts his in a different jug so he’ll perceive it as—”
“Dammit, you’re all fanciers! It was blood! I could see it right through his cup—”
“Hoo, boy! He had a milkglass cup, just like the rest of us. Who’s the fantasy perceiver now?”
“I am not! You take that back, Trivia Tanaka O’Reilly!”
“Fancier, fancier, fancier!”
“Am not, am not, am not! Us Wilsons see it like it is!”
“Fancier, fancier, fan—”
“Us Wilsons have always seen it like it is! Grandpa Wilson, he saw the Quake coming!”
“Him and about a million scientists!”
“Just like Sodom and Gomorrah! And if these dam’ fanciers don’t repent and change their lives—”
“Make up your glitchy mind! Is Clemmie a fancier or just a real vampire?”
“He’s a ... He’s a fancier vampire! And that makes him twice as evil and wicked and Satanic—”
Heart thundering, fists clenched until the fingernails bit into his palms through the gloves, Clement turned and lef
t, no longer worrying whether his footsteps made any noise or not in the lightly crusted snow.
Yes, he needed his fangs! To show people what he was, so that they knew what to feed him. To keep him safe for human company.
Except that reality perceivers couldn’t see his fangs. Would they feel the bite?
Oh, yes, they’d feel the bite. If only as they felt an animal bite.
It took a percentage of fantasy perception to see his fangs. To see that he was drinking blood when other people were drinking eggnog. To see his lack of shadow and reflection. Most people’s minds simply supplied Clement’s mirror image and never understood that their eyes weren’t registering it. The same with his shadow.
But virtually everyone had some mix of fantasy perception. Scores of one hundred percent on the Standard Reality Perception Test were so rare as to be laughable. Eighty-five percent was enough to allow anyone to register as a reality perceiver. Trivy boasted ninety-six percent reality perception, and she saw his reflection, saw his shadow, saw the blood in his jug as eggnog ... Had she ever really glimpsed his fangs?
Therefore, it took the right kind of fantasy perception to see Clement Czarny’s true nature.
No! It took the right kind of reality perception. One hundred and one percent reality perception—a secret, hidden percentage point beyond the grasp of Standard Reality.
But virtually the entire population lived, had always lived, in some percentage of fantasy perception. For centuries it had been shrugged off as just the thing that made different people see things differently. And taste things, and smell things ... “Different strokes for different folks,” “Different people, different preferences,” “Marching to the beat of a different drummer” ...
So to blame the Christmas Quake on fantasy perception—on the fanciers, as if they, all of them, and they alone were the immoral dirt of society—was monstrous! Even though he could, legally, have registered as a realizer, Clement shook with rage on behalf of all the hundreds of thousands of maligned fanciers. Made into scapegoats by the self-righteous of the continent, prigs like Gary Wilson and his grandfather ...
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 118
