He was glad to see that Dragulya looked to his left, at Michael Beheim, because he did not understand.
‘Oh yes,’ said Noell, with a sudden dash of spite. ‘Look to your arokin, to whom you have entrusted that history which tells how foul you are, despite the lies and legends which are woven into it. But I tell you now, Vlad Tepes, that Shigidi is coming, and he will come to you as readily as he comes to me!’
‘He is raving,’ said Michael Beheim, as casually as he could.
So Noell turned to Blondel, to whose credit he had noted one small gesture of kindness, and said: 'Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd.'
He was pleased to see that Blondel, and Blondel only, knew what that motto was, and what it meant. The Walachians had to look at the Gaulish minstrel, and wait for his translation. He paused before giving it, to tease them just a little, but eventually deigned to speak.
‘The Truth,’ said Blondel, ironically, ‘against the World.’
EPILOGUE
The de-ciphered text of a letter received by the Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth, Sir Kenelm Digby, in the summer of 1663.
My Lord,
You have asked for a full description of Noell Cordery’s end, which I made shift to witness at your command, and I will give it, though I think that its details can only bring you pain.
One the sixth day of June I went alone and incognito to the great square in the Vatican. There was a considerable crowd gathered, its people in a strange mood – some capering as with delight, others anxiously quiet. In the confusion I could not overhear much, but what was said was in much the same temper as the gossip of the streets whose currents I have previously reported to you. Few of the commoners here genuinely believe Cordery responsible for that plague which has lately come to Italy and Spain, though it is paradoxically accepted that he had something to do with the deaths of Vlad Dragulya and the Norman pretender. Cordery’s reputation as a magician has become very considerable, but the Roman Churchmen have taken every opportunity to assure their subjects that the power of his curse is now nullified.
When the waggon bearing the two men was brought into the square there was much cheering and jeering, and for some minutes the clamour was so great that no single voice could make itself heard. The monk, Quintus, looked about him all the while, but Cordery’s head was bowed. When I reached the closest distance which I could attain I was able to see that his lips were swollen, tinged as if with gangrene, and that his hands were wrecked, the nails having been tom away and small bones wrenched away with pliers. The monk, presumably because he was a vampire, bore no obvious marks of torture, but his tongue had been cut out before the cart set forth, to prevent his speaking to the crowd.
I saw Cordery’s head lift when the cart stopped, so that he might take in at a glance the high pyre, the platform, and the stake to which he would be secured. I swear, sir, that he laughed a little, but I think it more likely that he was partly maddened than entirely brave, for he had nothing of that desperate liveliness one sometimes sees in the men condemned to hang at Tyburn.
Cordery had to be carried up to the platform, being plainly unable to walk, though the monk was forced to climb the steps himself. They were chained to their respective stakes, loosely enough that they would be able to move their arms and legs, to make a display of fighting the flames, for these Romans love to see their victims dance.
The crowd became quiet while a Cardinal of the Holy Office read out a confession signed by Cordery, proclaiming that he was a subject of the devil, who had wrought great evil in the world, of which he now repented most sincerely. It ended with his thanks for those who had helped him to a true repentance, and the wish that he be not allowed to tarry in the world, lest he injure it further. This declaration was not so very impressive, for the Inquisitors never consider their job properly done unless a convicted heretic is persuaded to condemn himself out of his own mouth. This, it seems, Cordery could not be brought to do.
Afterwards, the light was set to the flames. I had not thought Cordery to be capable of much movement, but in fact the licking of the flames about his body made him writhe most horribly, and he released one awful scream of agony. The vampire, of course, remained still, with eyes to heaven upraised, beyond the reach of any pain.
The pyres burned quickly, for the wood was dry, and the bodies were soon consumed. When the flames sank lower it was still possible to see, held by the stakes, blackened and twisted forms: mere skeletons held together by shrivelled flesh. The noise had grown again by this time, to become tremendous, and it did not entirely slacken when the Cardinal tried for a second time to speak to the crowd. There were some there who wailed woefully that the wizard had hurt them while he screamed, by supernatural means, but there were soldiers moving in the crowd to silence such unruly claims.
I heard that there was another Englishman somewhere in the throng, but I was not told his name, which makes it impossible to think of seeking him out. I was told that this man said to another that when the Cardinal pointed to the blackened corpses, and shouted to the world that these were enemies of mankind, justly destroyed, one or other of the skulls turned creakily upon its shrunken neck, and said distinctly: 'Thou liest!' I think this an unlikely tale, but it is nevertheless bound to be oft-repeated, as such tales ever are, and I cannot say for certain that it is false.
Your most humble servant,
P
PART SIX
The World, the Flesh and the Devil
I that in heill was and gladness
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feblit with infirmitie:-
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
The state of man does change and vary,
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary,
Now dansand mirry, now like to die:-
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
(William Dunbar, Lament for the Common Man)
ONE
It was the thirteenth of June in the Year of Our Lord 1983. An early spell of warm weather had come to Nova Scotia and the window of Dr. Chadwick’s waiting-room was open to welcome a gentle sea-breeze, faintly scented with the odours of dying wrack and recently-landed fish.
Michael Southerne sat in the waiting-room, on a low plastic-upholstered sofa, with his lame leg stretched uncomfortably in front of him. He was clutching his walking stick in his right hand, his knuckles whitened by the tension. His pale eyes were restless, and his gaze fluttered along the array of electron-micrographs which decorated the wall to his left.
There was a freeze-dried fracture-section of a liver cell, resembling a cratered lunar landscape. There was a great shoal of spermatozoa, with red rings identifying the transformed Y-chromosome sperms which were the agents of emortality. There was a gigantic nucleus in the process of division, its tangled skeins of chromosomal material treading the paces of the dance of life. These few candid poses before the magical camera which saw to the very heart of Creation told a marvellous story of nature’s ingenuity and man’s power of discovery.
Michael felt that the receptionist was watching him covertly, though when he turned to face her she was always looking down at her work. Her typewriter was switched off, and she was studying some papers, but her attention was seemingly divided, probably because his presence made her uncomfortable.
She was not a finished woman, only a commoner like himself. She was probably no more than twenty years old, but that would make her all the more sensitive to the stigmata of his deformity. She was still, for the time being, a creature of frail flesh, and must hate to be reminded of its frailty. She surely knew how he had come by his injuries, and must be uncomfortably aware that the same thing might happen to her every time she crossed a road or got into a car. That, of course, was not the true horror of his fate. The true horror, for Michael Southerne
, was that he could not put away his frail flesh to become a finished man.
He had applied for early transformation, not so much because of his damaged leg (which still allowed him to walk, after a fashion) or because of the constant pain (which the morphia controlled), but because the traumatised tissues in his repaired ankle had lately produced a cancerous tumour. Though the surgeons had quickly removed it, the probability was high that other tumours would form, and the cancer might eventually spread to other tissues. In these circumstances, premature finishing had been deemed entirely proper, and he had taken the course of treatment.
It had failed.
It was no wonder, Michael thought, that the receptionist was discomfited by his presence. In a world of physical perfection he was crippled and ill; In a world of the undying, he was condemned.
There might, of course, be hope for him yet. Chadwick was the leading genetic scientist in Nova Scotia, perhaps the best which the entire Atlantean continent had to offer. If there was any help to be found, it would be found here. But Michael knew more than most about the recent triumphs and limitations of the science of life. His own father was one of Darwin’s protegés: a pioneer of the deciphering of the genetic code; one of the excavators of that marvellous dust which had come to earth as the great meteor of Adamawara.
It had been during the few brief moments when he spoke to his father on the transatlantic telephone, and was distant witness to his alarm, when it had really come home to him what an awful predicament he was in. To die at nineteen or twenty, in a world whose oldest inhabitants had been born in the time of Christ, suddenly seemed the cruellest of imaginable fates. Had he only known that he must remain unfinished, how much better care he would have taken of his perishable body!
There was no comfort at all in the knowledge that had it not been for the accident, he might easily have lived to see the day when genetic science would discover a cure for Cordery’s syndrome, and eliminate the perversely stubborn residue of common mortality from the human world. Indeed, the fact that he, of all people, should have been badly hurt in a road accident now seemed a particularly vicious irony.
Michael was roused from his uneasy reverie by the sound of a buzzer beneath the receptionist’s desk. She smiled brightly as she told him to go in. She could even bear to watch his clumsiness as he hauled himself to his feet, forced to prop up his weight with the stick before he could hobble to the inner sanctum.
Chadwick rose and came to the door as Michael entered, and put out a hand to help him, but Michael evaded it He made his uncomfortable way to the chair by the desk, and eased himself into it.
Chadwick took his own seat, and picked up the file which lay on the desk before him. He opened it – a gesture more symbolic than utilitarian, for there could be no further need to refer to it.
‘When will your father be here?’ he asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ Michael told him. ‘He flies out of Heathrow this evening.’
‘Would you prefer him to explain all this to you? He could do it as well as I, and you might find it more … relaxing.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Michael. ‘I’m sure that he would find it nerve-wracking, and that would make it more difficult for me. I know that you can’t offer me much help – only an explanation of what it is that’s wrong – but I’d like to have that if I may, so that I can meet my father on more equal terms, so that we both know what it is we’re talking about.’
‘I see,’ said Chadwick, sounding as if he didn’t see at all. ‘Well, perhaps you could help a little by telling me what you already know about the biology of emortality.’
‘Not a great deal. Despite my parentage, I’m very much a layman in these matters. I hadn’t planned on going into medicine, or genetic science. I hadn’t any particular career plans at all, in fact. Now it seems that I won’t need any.’
Chadwick seemed embarrassed by his tone. The doctor’s black hair was shorter than was fashionable, and had an odd streak of grey in it, which was something very rarely seen in finished men. It made him look very venerable, though he could hardly have been more than ten years finished – forty or forty-five years old, in strictly chronological terms. ‘Yes,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need,’ said Michael distantly. ‘My fault. I’m not answering your question, am I? I know what everyone knows. The DNA responsible for the finishing is one of several chromasomids which, thanks to the recent work of my father and others, we now know to have been carried to earth by the Adamawara meteor, about thirteen thousand years ago. Several of the chromasomids can attach themselves – by means of a biochemical link which is not entirely clear – to the Y chromosomes of humans and a few other mammalian species. They can only do it, though, when the Y chromosome is isolated from its partnering X in a spermatozoan.
‘There are other chromasomids too, which do bizarre things in association with very primitive organisms; a few have transformed protozoa or fungi into parasites capable of infecting people, as in the case of the disease which used to be called the silver death. It’s the ones which combine directly with the human Y chromosome which are most interesting, especially the one which is responsible for emortality.
‘Emortality is the result of a benign ‘disease’ which promotes cellular self-repair and obliterates the effects of aging. All the transformed sperms become incapable of fertilising ova in the normal way, but they can still colonise the tissues of a man or a woman when taken into the bloodstream. It matters relatively little how they get into the blood – direct application to an open cut and intravenous injection work perfectly well, though I believe the European vampires, who believed that it was all a kind of magic, passed it on by unorthodox sexual intercourse.
‘Once having colonised the host body, the transformed sperms undergo some kind of crucial change which enables them to produce packets of DNA – including replicates of themselves – wrapped up in a protein coat. These metaviruses resemble ordinary viruses, and can infect other cells within the body, but they don’t carry their own DNA into the nucleus of the infected cells. Instead they set up a kind of independent construction unit in the place where protein manufacture goes on. There they operate to make the cell better able to repair itself, and resistant to damage, infection or the chemical changes associated with aging. This means that the body, once ‘finished’, can repair all of its cells very efficiently. Side-effects are various: obvious changes in skin-tone, hair and eye-colour, and of course the drastic slowing down of sperm-production in males and the prevention of ovulation in females. Is that about it?’
Chadwick managed a wan smile. ‘Shorn of a little of the jargon, that’s about it. I don’t want to complicate the picture with too much talk of vagrant cytogenes and augmented ribosomes, though you’d probably be able to understand me. There are only a couple of essential features of the system which are relevant to your case.
‘Finishing, in this sense of the word, is a double-vector process. The DNA which enables human beings to be remade as sterile emortals has to take a complicated route to its sites of operation. The first vector is a Y chromosome, with which it fuses to become a passenger in a transformed sperm. That carries it into the body, where it must transfer to the second vector, becoming part of the metavirus which distributes it through the tissues where it will do its work.
‘Even then, the system isn’t complete. The finishing DNA, once set up as part of a cytogenetic complex, produces a number of enzymes, including the one which is commonly called the vampire enzyme. We’re still not sure whether this enzyme has a useful role to play in promoting emortality, but we think that it does. One of its side-effects is to prevent the manufacture of a protein molecule present in the bloodstream of common men and women, which is essential, albeit in very tiny quantities, to the feedback system regulating the production of hormones like thyroxin and adrenalin.
‘A finished person can only be sustained if he or she has some regular external supply of that molecule. The only reliable recou
rse which our ancestors had was to drink or otherwise transfuse a little of the blood of common men and women on a daily basis, which is why emortals used to be called vampires. The equivalent molecule in most other mammals – sheep, cattle, and the like – is sufficiently different to be useless; only chimpanzees and gorillas are closely enough related to us to make their blood a viable substitute. Nowadays, of course, we extract the relevant molecule on a commercial scale from blood donated by humans and by chimpanzees, though we hope to move over in the near future to manufacturing techniques based in genetic engineering.
‘I don’t know exactly why the system has these peculiar properties. Nobody does, though your father may be able to offer some speculations, on the basis of his investigations of the other alien DNA found in the environments surrounding the Adamawaran crater. What’s important with respect to your problem is that there are three ways in which the process of transformation can break down, two connected with the vectors and one with the operation of the established cytogene. All three can be causes of Cordery’s syndrome – effective immunity to emortality.
‘Sometimes a body will react against the transformed Y-chromosome sperms, so that they can’t easily implant in the tissues. We’ve found that we can usually overcome that eventually, by trying one tissue after another until we find one less likely to react. In these cases, once colonisation has been achieved, the rest of the process is unimpeded.
‘In the second set of cases, the host’s immune system produces antibodies which successfully act against the metavirus particles which ought ultimately to become cytogenes, preventing them from penetrating cells or drastically slowing down their colonisation of the body. The metaviruses are very delicate, of course, and are entirely host-specific. This too can now be overcome, though not without difficulty, by removing tissue containing implanted sperms, growing it in vitro, and exposing it to light irradiation. The great majority of the any metavirus particles produced are simply denatured, but a few remain viable, with mutated protein coats which are immune to the antibodies. This can be a laborious business, and a lot of patients have died while we were still trying to bring it off, but sheer persistence tends to pay off eventually.
Empire of Fear Page 50
