Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  “By working with blood-sucking fiends who drain the life out of people. Also, vampires.”

  A flicker of anger, instantly suppressed. “If you had any idea how much shit I’ve had to put up with—” She slams on the brakes. “Listen, I know we had some bad misunderstandings in the past. But that’s over, isn’t it? We’re both grown-ups now, aren’t we?” I nod. She continues: “Well good, because we have to work together on this. These—idiots—who don’t believe in vampires—”

  “‘Vampires don’t exist.’” I finger-quote as I say it.

  “No, listen to me, Bob, this is not the time for your passive-aggressive denial thing. I said yes to taking on this committee because, let’s just say, Dracula was a novel about syphilis, right? I’m not Lucy Westenra. Or Mina Harker, for that matter. And having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all.

  “You know, and I know, that my condition—that of me and my colleagues—is both a threat and an opportunity for this organization. I’d vastly prefer it to show up on the opportunity side of the balance sheet, because I know how the Laundry deals with liabilities. From my point of view it’s a simple utilitarian calculus. I need this committee to emit a set of sample guidelines for the care, feeding, and employment of PHANGs, and I don’t care whether most of the dead wood on the board have that ridiculous OPERA CAPE clearance—who comes up with these codewords anyway?—or not, as long as I’m safe from sunlight, don’t starve to death, and nobody wants to hunt me down and stick a cricket stump through my ribs. I’m not going to let you, or anybody else, get in the way of that.”

  She stares at me, level-headed, with such chilly self-assurance that I find myself nodding almost in spite of myself. “Also, I’d like to put it to you that the value proposition to this organization of having a team of vampires on call is not insignificant; I’m just surprised nobody’s thought of it already.”

  “Are you sure they haven’t?” I look right back at her with all three eyes. “If it wasn’t for this ubiquitous, um, conviction that people like you don’t exist, I’m sure they would have, by now . . .” I trail off.

  Seen through my regular ocular appendages, Mhari looks like a fine specimen of Modern Management Woman. She’s neatly groomed, somewhere on the handsome/striking scale rather than the pretty/beautiful one: a couple of notches below “jaw-dropper,” but still a head-turner (especially if you’re me). But, seen through my third eye—she glows. She’s an occult powerhouse. Not worm-riddled, but strong and healthy and full of a strange vitality that simply does not belong inside the body of a human being.

  She notices me staring—“Bob, what are you . . . ?”—then she meets my gaze with eyes that are clearly seeing more than light: “Bob? What have you done to yourself?”

  Well, trying to conceal the changes from her was always going to be a losing battle.

  I shrug. “You remember Angleton, don’t you?” She nods; a flicker of fear crosses her face. “These days I’m his personal assistant.” (Her sharp intake of breath is gratifying, but it comes at a high price. She’s a lot less likely to underestimate me now.) “I also work part-time for a couple of other departments. And along the way I got married.”

  “Oh, really?” She says lightly, but a little shakily: “Congratulations! So are there any little Bobs running around?”

  “Not exactly.” I flash on the memory of the recurring bad dream: an empty crib and a violinist with hollow eyes. “But enough social chitchat. You didn’t stay late after school just to catch up on the gossip, did you?”

  “No.” She shrugs, fetchingly—I can’t help my male gaze, dammit—and continues. “I’m going to write the findings, you’re going to help me, and we’re going to get everyone to sign off on a shiny new PHANG Integration Protocol. It’s going to run like clockwork and at the end of the day I get what I want and the organization acquires a protocol for dealing with a new type of asset.” A smile, a flash of teeth, an impish callback to long-ago intimacy. “You’re here because I wanted to make sure that you understand that you’re going to help me if you know what’s good for you, because I will not tolerate passive-aggressive resistance, let alone active subversion. If you don’t like it”—another shrug, and this time I’m certain she’s vamping deliberately to draw my attention to her boobs—“I’ll find a way to make you sorry. Are we clear?”

  “Clear,” I say. Then—I’m not too proud to admit it—I run like hell.

  Her mocking laughter follows me out the door.

  • • •

  THERE IS A CERTAIN DRAB CORRIDOR IN THE NEW ANNEX.

  Most of the doors opening off it are small, windowless rooms used for document storage. At the far end from civilization there is a fire door, beyond which there is an emergency stairwell with whitewashed brick walls, illuminated by grimy tungsten bulbs like something out of a 1960s noir movie. Halfway down the stairs there is a landing with an unmarked door. Casual explorers usually assume it’s where the night shift rest up during daylight hours and give it a miss; there are few regular visitors.

  After blowing out of the DRESDEN RICE meeting with Mhari’s threat fresh in mind I go straight there and knock three times.

  “Enter, boy!”

  Boy. I’ve lately concluded that in Angleton’s public schoolmaster usage it reflects a certain distant affection. In any case it’s better than some of the other things he could call me. (Dinner, for instance.) So I place my hand on the doorknob, which is stuffed full of so many lethal defensive wards that it positively hums, and push.

  If the corridor was ’60s noir then Angleton’s windowless den is ’40s pulp horror, if the mad scientist’s lab was designed to accommodate a mad library science professor. The walls are lined from floor-to-ceiling with oak index card drawers, varnished so heavily they are almost black; the floor is dominated by a hulking green-topped metal table, topped by something that looks like a microfilm reader engaging in intimate congress with a stenotypist. It’s actually a 1940s Memex, an opto-mechanical hypertext information storage machine. When it was new it cost about as much as a strategic bomber. This is the only working example I am aware of, and it has been so heavily customized by the enchantments applied to it by its long-term user that it is certainly unique.

  Angleton sits behind the Memex, a gaunt figure with pale, almost translucent skin and deep-set, burning eyes. He’s speed-reading something on screen, a set of vernier dials pinched between thumb and forefinger as he taps out Baudot code with his other hand. I wait for a minute. Finally he pauses, shoves the huge viewing apparatus back on its hydraulic arm, and looks at me. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You didn’t come here to ask if I take one lump or two in my tea, boy. Something’s come up. Spill it, or go away: I have things to do and important people to brief.”

  I pull out the visitor’s chair (wooden, with a leather seat that’s as hard as a board) and sit. “It’s the DRESDEN RICE committee. Someone, quite possibly Lockhart, is using it to fuck with me.”

  Angleton looks at me. This feels a lot like being a bug on a microscope slide, pinned under searchlights for scrutiny by a vast, inhuman intelligence. “Inhuman” is actually quite accurate, because Angleton isn’t entirely human: for one thing his current body is at least a century old, and for another thing, the mind occupying it isn’t the one it came with. There exists a class of entity that have been known since antiquity as hungry ghosts. One of them—the being known as the Eater of Souls—has a rep for being able to take over bodies and go walkabout, among other things. Several decades ago some of my less scrupulous predecessors deliberately summoned it and bound it into a human body; luckily for them, the aforementioned hungry ghost decided that its long-term interests aligned with those of the organization. (He went native. In a boarding-school staff room.) Which is why these days he can be found lurking in a basement office, reading dusty microfilm records and monstering for
mer interns like me.

  “Boy,” the Eater of Souls asks, “what makes you think it’s about you?”

  “But I—” I stop. “Let’s see.” I force myself to rewind to the beginning. “I started poking into data mining epidemiology stats under the pretext of running a ten-percenter. You know Lockhart’s been steering me towards running my own operations? I don’t think anyone prodded me in that particular direction, but one thing leads to another and before you know it, there’s a Code Blue. At the other end of which I run into a rather dubious off-site operation being stage-managed by, er, Ms. Murphy—”

  “I know about your history.” Angleton looks bored, rather than disapproving: he probably puts it down to human foibles. “Continue.”

  “Are you cleared for BLUE DANDELION and OPERA CAPE?” I ask. It never hurts to check.

  “Don’t be silly, Bob, everyone knows vampires don’t exist.” Angleton snarks like no other person I’ve ever met.

  I do a double take. “You don’t think—ah, ignore me. Okay, I got seconded to OPERA CAPE because someone needs to keep an eye on it and it might be a good way of getting . . . oh.”

  “Yes, Bob. Perhaps you should have asked Gerald?”

  “You mean he’s behind Mhari taking over the committee. This is the BLUE DANDELION thing, isn’t it? Forcing her to interact with me so that I can bait her?”

  “Well, you didn’t think she could hijack it all by herself, did you?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I feel thick; I’m slow on the uptake sometimes.”

  “It’s true, though,” Angleton says, in portentous tones, “that everyone knows vampires don’t exist.”

  “Yes, but—” I stop.

  “Yes, indeed.” Angleton grins cadaverously.

  I look at him. “Some people would say . . .”

  “Don’t be silly, boy. I’m not a vampire: I don’t drink blood and combust in sunlight. And neither do you!”

  “But there’s more than one origin to the myth, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.” Angleton briefly touches his Memex. “If I’ve been trying to teach you anything it’s to always look for the gaps, boy. The blind spots. The nightmares that lurk in the holes nobody peers into.”

  My mind’s spinning. “Are you suggesting that there is a reason why everybody around here knows vampires don’t exist? Like, perhaps, a person infected with PHANG who, shall we say, is thoroughly embedded within the organization and makes a point of suppressing knowledge of their existence?”

  “I couldn’t possibly say.” Angleton leans back and contemplates the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. “What do you think?”

  “Well, let’s see. If such a person exists, they’re obviously very secretive and a very powerful ritual magician. It’s not you or me, obviously, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Presumably they’ve been working here for a long time to get their geas bedded in so deeply. Long enough that you can’t identify them directly.” (I suddenly realize something.) “And, um. The arrival of a bunch of newbie vamps– sorry, PHANG cases, with no sense of secrecy, would presumably put their nose out of joint because it would risk blowing their cover. Whatever the reason for maintaining it might be. Um. The K syndrome analog? If they have to feed periodically, then, um, that would imply killing people. On an ongoing basis. Obviously if they’re official then Mahogany Row would have something to do with keeping them supplied”—I really don’t like where this train of thought is leading me, but Angleton is nodding along from time to time, listening silently, which leads me to believe I’m on the right trail, however gruesome and body-strewn it might be—“with victims.”

  “Not that common, actually,” Angleton volunteers at last. “The frequency of vampirism has historically been low. The sane ones usually kill themselves as soon as the implications sink in, and the insane ones are, shall we say, not well adapted for survival in the human society they are dependent on.”

  “So they do exist! Officially.”

  “We may be on the verge of an unprecedented outbreak, Bob. A side effect of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: with the stars in alignment and the potentiation of all magical powers, it’s becoming increasingly easy for the V-parasites to break through and acquire new hosts.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeshua ben Yusuf won’t save you, boy, for that you need to be fast and smart and move in daylight. Vampirism may be contagious, but it is memetically so, rather than genetic: before you can acquire it you need to be a practiced logician, if not a practitioner in your own rights. You and I are, of course, immune to that particular cognitive parasite—we have our own abnormality. But I assume you are aware of the Black pre-prints? Areas of research that are discouraged due to the high frequency of spontaneous human combustion among people who think too hard about certain questions? One might wonder why a group of quantitative analysts were pointed in the direction of those particular algorithms, and by whom. If someone was considering the possibility of raising an army of vampirism-augmented sorcerers, perhaps they might start by conducting experiments on a limited scale . . . It is in any event a complex jigsaw and if you wish to assemble it fully you will first need to locate the source of that troublesome and ubiquitous disbelief that pervades our organization.”

  “You’re telling me that the Scrum are probably pawns in a game of vamp versus vamp?”

  “No, Bob, you deduced that for yourself. You may or may not be correct. I do not know. However, I would strongly advise you to investigate further.”

  “So, er . . . who is he?”

  Angleton crosses his arms. He looks annoyed. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” I stare at him in disbelief.

  “I am not omnipotent, boy. Or omniscient. We are discussing the possible existence of a very powerful sorcerer, immune from K syndrome and probably more than a century old, who has encrusted our organizational premises with an obfuscatory geas going back decades. They predate my arrival and probably know enough about me to stay out of my way.” His expression of irritation deepens.

  “Okay, so let’s say there is a long-term PHANG in the Laundry, and you don’t know who he is—surely at least you have a suspect in mind?” (Yes, he. If we’re talking about someone older than Angleton, we’re talking about a prewar sorcerer. Pre–First World War.)

  Angleton shakes his head. “I have suspicions. But I don’t want to share them with you; they might lead you down a blind alley.”

  “If you insist.” I pause. “So we have this invisible blood-sucking mole within the organization. But there’s also another long-term PHANG outside the big tent, and he’s lately set up the Scrum to, to start a fight with our PHANG?” Angleton nods. “But they must have been doing this on and off for decades!”

  “Correct, Bob. We are discussing some of the world’s deadliest magician-assassins; if you meet our in-house monster you should be at pains not to underestimate him, however meek and mild he might seem. They play their vicious games using a range of proxies. The Scrum are proxies. You or I might be proxies, without ever knowing it. You might consider investigating where the suggestion to look for K syndrome clusters using the NHS data warehouse originated—but I expect he’s covered his traces well.

  “The key facts are that he works with what he knows, and because he is embedded in the Laundry, what he knows is us. So: let us suppose that our in-house monster became aware that his long-term adversary was beginning a series of experiments intended to eventually give him an army of tractable vampire minions. (My understanding is that such attempts have hitherto always failed, because viable vampires are anything but tractable.) In response, our man inserted Ms. Murphy into the adversary’s experiment, and arranged for you to find her: a stroke of pure genius. One might even speculate that he planned it as a move to steal his rival’s toy-box, the baby PHANGs. But now the adversary can’t help but realize he’s being played—and sooner or later he’l
l retaliate. Either by throwing his toys on the floor, or by upsetting the game board.”

  “Wait, what—” My head’s spinning.

  Angleton turns back to his Memex. “Get out of here, boy, I’ve got a job to do. Call me if you need my help, but not until you’re in over your head.”

  I stand up. “Be like that!” I vent. The Eater of Souls doesn’t dignify my tantrum with his attention. I leave.

  • • •

  IT IS ONLY AS I PUT MY HAND ON MY OFFICE DOOR’S HANDLE that I realize I’ve forgotten something, and I’m too late to cancel the arm movement that pushes down and shoves the door partway open before I complete it.

  Someone—presumably Trish—has installed feline conveniences.

  There is an object on the floor that resembles an animal carrier at first, except it’s got a plastic swing-door on the front. After a moment I realize it’s a covered litter tray. There are a couple of plastic bowls at the other side of the room, one containing water and the other half-full with dry brown kibble. It looks like breakfast cereal but smells revolting. Or maybe (a horrible thought) the smell’s coming from the litter tray. I head for my desk and see a receipt on my computer keyboard as I sit down—

  “WAAAOW!”

  An air raid siren goes off under my arse. I jackknife forward, and a bolt of black furry lightning hurtles out from under me and lands in the corner by the door, its back arched and tail fluffed out like a bog-brush. It gives me the evil eye as I hyperventilate, then slowly lower myself back down onto my chair seat.

  “That’s all right, pay no attention to me, just make yourself at home,” I tell the self-propelled whoopee cushion, then audit the itemized receipt with a sinking heart. Judging from the bottom line, cats fall somewhere between a new Porsche and a used Lamborghini in running costs, and I’ve got a nasty suspicion that I’m not going to be able to expense this claim. I mean, I might be able to concoct an experimental protocol that involves hosting one all-black specimen of Felis catus in the lap of luxury before sacrificing it on a summoning grid—but I suspect that would annoy Trish, and one should always avoid pissing off the departmental secretary.