Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  The potential sacrifice-to-be stares at me mistrustfully, then sits down and begins to wash its left hind leg, which it stretches out in front of it. I examine it from a safe distance. It’s a generic short-haired black cat, slightly tattered about the edges and a bit skinny. There’s a kink in its tail as if it was broken once. Gradually the blob of darkness works its tongue into the gaps between its claws, and I realize there’s something odd about its paw. Cats don’t have opposable thumbs, do they? Unless there’s some medical condition . . .

  I shake my head, unlock the computer, and haul down a shiny new VM from our classified information repository. (It seems a bit excessive to create and download a whole new Windows Vista guest instance in order to open a new notepad document and type a few notes, but that’s how we’re supposed to roll these days.) I’m partway through typing up some notes on the DRESDEN RICE mess and Angleton’s advice pertaining thereto when there’s a knock on the door. “Come in!” I call. As the door opens, the cat looks up in sudden alarm and scrambles for cover under my desk. Oh great. It’s Andy. “Well?” he asks, with the expression of a friend who can’t quite bring himself to ask how the blind date he fixed up on a dare went.

  “Come in and sit down,” I suggest, “but watch your feet.”

  “Watch for”—Andy spots the litter tray—“what?”

  “It’s the stray that was hanging around the dumpsters; it followed me in.” Andy sits down. “I was going to take it to the Cat and Dog Home at lunchtime but Trish has unilaterally decided I’m adopting it.”

  “She probably thought you needed the humanizing touch,” Andy agrees as he sits down. There’s another knock on the door.

  “Yes?” I call.

  “Hello, Bob. Got a minute?” It’s Pete. He spots Andy: “Oh, hello.”

  I give up any thought of getting any actual work done, shut down and save the VM, and push my keyboard away. “You might as well both make yourselves at home. Pay no attention to the hairy squatter, it’s going to the Cat and Dog—”

  “Oh hello,” says Pete, kneeling and peering under my desk. “Aren’t you a fine one?”

  He is answered by a curious chirrup. I glance at Andy.

  “Has it been positively vetted?” he asks.

  “Very droll.” The vicar is allowing his index finger to be sniffed from the shadows.

  “I’m serious,” Andy adds. “Strange animals, lurking around our back door, waiting to be taken in—could it be bugged?”

  “What, you mean like the crazy CIA project from the sixties? Electric Kitty? No, Acoustic Kitty?”

  Andy shrugs. “Or like our paper clips. Destiny-entangle it with a littermate, keep littermate in a summoning grid, anything one cat hears the other cat hears also. You just have to figure out a way of making it sing.”

  “Well that’s a—”

  Pete stands up, holding a buzzing black furball. He looks at me accusingly. “You are not going to take Spooky here to a cat shelter! You are going to take—er—her home and give her the love and affection she so obviously deserves.” He scritches the little monster under its chin: it buzzes like a badly grounded transformer.

  I close my eyes for a moment and open my inner eye. I stare at Pete, and the thing in his arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t this one have thumbs?)

  I open my eyes again. “Andy, it’s just a cat, not a Black Chamber spy wearing a furry suit. Pete, we can talk about what to do with Spooky later.” (I can tell the name’s going to stick: What else do you call a stray cat that decides to adopt a secret intelligence agency?) “Drag up a pew and I’ll give you an update on the meeting.” Pete, despite his extremely probationary status, has got clearance for OPERA CAPE by default, if only because it would be impossible for him to mentor Alex without it, and Andy was in on the original Code Blue.

  “The DRESDEN RICE committee is supposed to formulate policy for dealing with, ah, PHANG syndrome as they’re calling it. From a human resources and health and safety perspective. First it was nobbled from the top down—the only person on it with OPERA CAPE clearance was yours truly, and it was over-endowed with WOMBATs.” (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.))) “So I complained to Lockhart”—Andy looks at me sharply, but Pete, bless his little cotton socks, shows no sign of awareness, being focussed entirely on fulfilling the hedonistic whims of a furry egomaniac with a brain the size of a walnut—“who said he’d investigate. Anyway, the upshot is that the DRESDEN RICE chair was replaced by someone who does indeed have OPERA CAPE clearance . . . Mhari.”

  “Mhari.” Andy frowns: it was a long time ago. “Wasn’t she your—”

  “Never mind that,” I say hastily, “the point is, they just handed Dracula the keys to the blood bank.”

  “Why would they do that?” Pete looks up, interested, to the apparent displeasure of his lap fungus. “For that matter, who are the ‘they’ you speak of?”

  “Management,” I say hastily, just as Andy says “Mahogany Row.” I send him a dark look.

  “What’s Mahogany Row?” asks Pete.

  “Management,” I say firmly. Andy looks as if he’s about to contradict me, then gets the message and shuts up. “So-called because back in Dansey House—which is currently a hole in the ground, thanks to the public-private partnership that’s years behind schedule on the refurbishment—the floor the executive offices were on had plush carpet and mahogany-paneled walls. Very old-school, high-end civil service.”

  This is actually only about 25 percent falsehood: Mahogany Row (the office floor) did have tropical hardwood paneling, and if the bastards from Ove Arup or Foster Associates or Wimpey or whoever have vandalized it some of us will be very annoyed. But describing Mahogany Row (the people) as “management” is a bit like calling a B-52 bomber an “air freight delivery vehicle.” They manage problems, yes. The rest of the organization exists to support them, certainly. But the way they manage problems resembles normal management practice the way a B-52’s cargo of free-fall thousand-pound bombs resembles a Post Office sorting room.

  Pete points a questioning index finger at the ceiling and makes a circling motion while raising an eyebrow.

  “What?” asks Andy.

  “You make it sound like the House of Bishops. Somewhat political and hands-off.”

  “They are, usually,” I explain. If they weren’t, there’d be glowing craters all over the landscape. “But in this case it really looks like a case of hands-on management, with some deliberate meddling.”

  “This Mary—”

  “Mhari.”

  “Mhari. What’s wrong with her? Apart from . . .”

  I shrug. “Apart from her being my long-ago psycho ex? She’s one of them, Pete. A PHANG, a Person of Hemophagic Autocombusting Nocturnal Glamour, or whatever the fuck the politically correct acronym stands for this morning. She’s a stakeholder in the whole process and she’s been given carte blanche to control the outcome of a committee process tasked with defining policy for Human Resources with specific reference to Workplace Health and Safety, employee special needs subject to the Equalities Act (2010), and other relevant legislation. What DRESDEN RICE comes up with has the potential to be set in stone—”

  “Stop!” I stop, startled by Pete’s interruption. He raises a hand. �
��Can you tell me what’s wrong with that? Because what I’m hearing is, if you had an equivalent committee looking into the needs of, say, an Orthodox Jew or a paraplegic in a wheelchair, you’d object to the group in question being represented on the committee—”

  Andy shakes his head, for which I’m profoundly grateful, because I seem to have stepped on a landmine in the fraught field of discrimination awareness, and it’s only a matter of time before someone unmasks me as a running dog of the oligoheteropatriarchy. (Which I will cop to, but it’s a hell of a handicap to play under when you’re participating in a game of privilege bingo.) “There’s a fundamental difference between a vampire and a regular human minority, Pete: normal people don’t have super-strength, mind control powers, and a thirst for blood.”

  “Also,” I add, “the committee seems to have been weighted from the outset with the aforementioned WOMBATs. Whose defining characteristic seems to be that they don’t believe in vampires. So someone upstairs put a vampire with rad mind control skillz in charge of a ship of fools who are blind to the problem this presents. Like, oh, the whole new variant K syndrome thing that led me to them in the first place.”

  “New variant what?”

  “K syndrome; it’s a kind of dementia that ritual magicians are prone to,” Andy explains. “What Bob found was a new one, let’s call it V syndrome. It doesn’t affect the PHANGs themselves: it affects their victims. Looks a lot like Kuru or Mad Cow Disease, only it kills within weeks.”

  “Oh dear”—Pete’s hand moves instinctively to his throat—“God.”

  “They still eat and drink normal food,” I add. “I’ve seen them in the staff canteen, complaining about the mac and cheese just like everyone else. So it seems to be more like the transitive-hemophagic-curse model of vampirism than the blood-drinking-zombie story. The trouble is, we don’t know yet if everyone they feed on develops V syndrome. And we don’t know whether they can live without human blood, or use some acceptable substitute, or whatever. Or how often they need to feed. If it turns out to be optional, well, that’d be like the question of celibacy in the priesthood, wouldn’t it?” Pete nods thoughtfully. Sandy, his wife, is due to pop in about two months’ time. “But if they have to feed or die, and the victims also die, what the hell are we going to do with them?”

  “That’s a sharp dilemma.” Pete pauses. “Maybe find donors who are terminally ill . . .” He shakes his head, looking pained.

  “Now do you see why putting a PHANG in charge of OPERA CAPE is a bad idea?” I ask. “Someone—I really hope it’s not me—is going to have to make some hard decisions sooner or later. Value judgments that factor in who does the dying and who does the living, and whether the moral calculus makes maintaining vampires worthwhile to the organization.

  “But there’s something worse.” I self-censor the obvious next sentence: that Angleton as good as told me that Mhari got shoved onto the committee to expose her. Neither Andy nor Pete need to know that. I continue: “It occurs to me that there is something very smelly about the number of people who have been telling me that vampires don’t exist—here, in an agency devoted to the occult.”

  Andy’s eyes widen. “You’re wondering if we’ve been infiltrated.” I can tell he’s rattled: he instinctively reaches for his e-cigarette.

  “Yes.” I try to smile reassuringly, but the twitching tic in my cheek probably undermines the effect. “I might be jumping at shadows”—I really don’t want to tell him what Angleton told me, because that kind of knowledge is dangerous—“but it’s good to be sure, isn’t it? So I’m officially declaring this the first meeting of the, um . . . Let’s find an unassigned codeword.” Clickety-click. “Ah, GREEN LIME is free, so we’ll use that. Yes, this is the GREEN LIME committee. Circulation: restricted, no reporting. Budget: bill to Bob Howard, discretionary funding authorization pending approval. Initial membership: Bob Howard, Andy Newstrom, Peter Wilson, and, uh, Spooky the Office Cat. Remit: to examine archival resources for evidence supporting the hypothesis that one or more PHANGs have been operating within the Laundry and working to conceal signs of their own existence, and if so, to identify the blood-sucking mole. Hopefully we’ll draw a blank, but if not, it’ll give me some ammunition when I escalate it to the next level.

  “You’re drafted. So how about we work up a plan of action, then hit the archives?”

  13.

  VAMPIRIC MANEUVERS IN THE DARK

  “HI, HONEY, I’M HOME!”

  I needn’t have bothered calling: the house is dark and cold, the heating turned down. I pick up the two crates and trudge inside. One of them complains vocally, the other reeks silently. That one can live under the stairs. The loud one I carry into the kitchen, where it moans like a particularly deranged ghost as I hang my coat and gloves up in the hall. Then I turn the lights on, fiddle with the thermostat, and let Spooky out of her carrier.

  “Waaow?”

  I remember to close the kitchen door just before the little fuzzball wanders out into the hall, then set my backpack down and start unloading supplies: food bowl, water bowl, kibble. There’s a thudding sound behind me: I whip round in a hurry and am confronted by a mad, black-eyed stare from atop the kitchen table. “Hey, cat, what are you doing there? Get down—”

  Spooky levitates as if a poltergeist has just grabbed her. She comes down on top of the kitchen unit, a good two meters away, then leaps again, for the precarious gap between the top of the storage unit and the ceiling.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake—” I pause. Why the hell am I talking to a cat? I wonder, resolving to ignore her. She’ll come down when she’s hungry or needs the litter tray or something. It’s been a long day and I do not find it relaxing to chase an antigravity-enabled predator with a butterfly net. So I finish unpacking provisions instead, listen to the radiators gurgling away as our ancient central heating system struggles to emit a trickle of hot water, then haul out my battered netbook to spend some quality time anonymously stalking my relatives on Facebook.

  After about half an hour I realize there’s an unaccustomed warmth on my lap. And it’s buzzing. This perplexes me for a few seconds, until I realize what it is. Dammit, I’ve caught lap fungus! I carefully reach down with a fingertip, which Spooky sniffs, then attempts to pick her nose on. Then, while I’m trying to work out how to make a dash for the kitchen sink without being lacerated, I hear the front door opening.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home?”

  It’s Mo, of course. The joke may be threadbare but it’s not entirely worn out yet. But I instinctively move to stand up, at which point Spooky startles and emulates a rapidly deflating party balloon in terms of high-speed movement and random three-dimensional handbrake turns. She ends up crouched on top of the smoke extractor over the cooker, glowering at me as if I’m to blame.

  “In here,” I call, standing and walking over to switch the kettle on. The kitchen door opens.

  “What a day—” Mo freezes, violin case in hand. “What’s that?” she demands, bristling.

  Oh dear. “Mo, meet Spooky. She’s the stray who’s been hanging out around the dumpsters at work; she followed me indoors today, and I was going to take her to the Cat and Dog Home but—”

  “Oh for—” Mo plants her violin case on the kitchen table, removes her glasses, and rubs her eyes tiredly. (No eye shadow, I note, just old-fashioned exhaustion.) “It can’t stay here, it’s probably got fleas.”

  “Not anymore.” Spooky has a shiny new flea collar. “Anyway, she doesn’t have to stay, but I couldn’t leave her in the New Annex overnight—the cleaners would eat her.”

  “You didn’t think to put her back outside?”

  “The forecast said frost tonight.” The kettle boils right then, so I busy my hands with the making of a pot of tea, leaving my brain free to chew over whether I’m simply making excuses or, or, or.

  “Well, you’re on litter tray duty. Not my problem. And if it craps
in my shoes it can look forward to a promising future as a violin string.”

  Spooky stares at Mo with enormous black eyes, pupils fully dilated. She looks as if she understands exactly what Mo is saying, and likes none of it. “Well okay,” I say. “But if you’re so worried, how about we just spread a tarp or one of those gigantic plastic IKEA shopping bags over your precious footwear?”

  “Feh. It’s my house, the lodgers are the ones who should go out of their way not to make waves.” She sits down and I suppress a sigh of relief.

  “Bad day?” I ask.

  “Terrible. First, I had two hours of instrument practice cancelled because of a problem with the anechoic damping in Practice Room Two—there was too much leakage. Turns out a dripping pipe in the ceiling had soaked some of the panels. Then I had another shitty committee meeting I shouldn’t really talk about, all to do with the fallout from Vakilabad. Our people in the FO are going to deliver a strongly worded complaint, threaten to withhold cooperation if they don’t promise to tell us the entire truth when they ask for assistance in future. There might even be some finger-wagging.” (Which seems only reasonable to me.) “Seems that what’s gotten up certain people’s collective nose isn’t what the Pasdaran wanted me to do, but the way they went about it. I’m afraid I had a little snit.”

  Her eyes are puffy, I realize. And she usually spends a few minutes on cosmetic basics before interdepartmental sessions, suggesting— “Oh, Mo.”

  She waves it off. “I didn’t break down or get excessively emotional—in the meeting. I did raise my voice a little. Had to remind them I’m not a fucking human waste disposal machine. Crashed and burned afterwards.”