“ ‘Your kind and mine had common ancestors,’ he said. He did not elaborate, and I felt slightly frustrated, wondering whether the inadequacy of the answer was deliberate dissimulation.
“ ‘Are you, then, the children of the vampires of legend?’ I asked. ‘Were your distant ancestors the reanimated corpses of wicked men, returned from the grave to feed upon their brethren?’
“ ‘No,’ he said, flatly. ‘Not that. When do you come from, Copplestone? What moment? What place?’
“ ‘Where are we?’ I countered. The question was prompted because the flying machine had begun to descend again. ‘Where have you brought me?’
“He did not answer. As the machine settled I felt the bonds which had restrained me flowing away. A ramp extended, so that I might let myself down to the ground. The disembodied head had disappeared, and when I reached out my hand I found that there was nothing there but a blank wall.”
“I stepped down from the flying-machine, ready to meet the true masters of this alien future in the flesh.”
IX
Copplestone stopped speaking, more haggard and drawn than he had been before. The doctor had risen, and was at his side. “It’s too much, Ned,” he said, softly. “You cannot go on – not tonight, at any rate.”
“I must,” said Copplestone. “Don’t you see that? I must!”
The professor was clearly distressed. My companions moved uncomfortably in their chairs. Most of them must have been convinced that Copplestone was deranged, but I thought differently. What if it were true? I thought. What if there is truth in this – perhaps polluted by fear and fancy, but truth nevertheless? I, at least, did not want the professor to stop. I wanted to hear the story’s conclusion.
“Tomorrow is another day,” said W*****, firmly.
Copplestone laughed bitterly, but the laugh dissolved into a cough. “I know that,” he whispered. “I must go on. There is so much to explain. I will try to be brief, in the interests of saving my strength.”
I wondered whether he really feared that the inhabitants of the far future might be able to reach back through time and snuff out his life like a candle-flame. Why would they want to, even if they could? Did he think that this was the one and only chance he would have to communicate the secrets he had learned? Could he possibly be arrogant enough to suppose that the entire future of the human race might depend on what he said to us tonight – that destiny itself might be set aside if he could only empower us to act, and save the human race from the fate which awaited it? Whatever the reason, he was determined not to bring his discourse to a close while he still had the strength to speak.
“The sun had set,” he continued, “and twilight had all but faded from the sky. The perch to which the bird-machine had brought me was high on the side of a mountain, and I looked out over a huge plain, covered from horizon to horizon by a vast city. All of its streets and most of its buildings were richly illuminated, and the tallest buildings loomed up above the streets with an awesome grandeur. In the largest buildings light shone within thousands of windows, brighter by far than the diffuse illumination which had leavened the gloom of the barn where the overmen of old bled their human cattle, although it had the same curious blue-violet tint, which my eyes still found uncomfortable.
“I could see tiny flying-machines moving between the buildings. The streets were laid out with remarkable precision, in a vast rectangular grid. Traffic flowed along each and every street in an endless stream, but it was difficult to see any details of the vehicles even though each one lit its own way with twin violet beams. At each intersection the passage of the vehicles was restricted by changing lights which shifted from turquoise to vivid blue to pale violet and back again, in endless succession.
“ ‘Copplestone?’ said a voice behind me, and I turned.
“There were two of them; one male and one female. Their faces resembled the disembodied head which had questioned me during the flight, but these were real individuals of flesh and blood. They were dressed entirely in black, the male in a suit which displayed his contours as closely as my white ‘clothing’ displayed mine, the female in a narrow ankle-length skirt. That touch of quasi-human femininity struck me as a remarkable oddity, and I had to wonder yet again whether it was not the sort of detail which betrayed the influence of my own imagination – evidence that this was, at least in part, a dream.
“The male spoke again, in a voice redolent with wonderment: ‘Are you truly Copplestone?’ He was speaking English, and the words came from his own lips without the aid of any translation-machine, but he pronounced the words as if he were uncertain whether they could possibly mean anything. To him, I was as much a creature of myth as the satyrs and the centaur had been to me. In a world which was to him a long-lost antiquity I had appeared, and disappeared, and there had been no way of knowing whether I would ever return – and yet, there had been hope enough that I might to warrant keeping some kind of watch, even for millennia. And there were overmen with leisure and interest enough to have learned to speak a long-dead language, in order to immerse themselves more fully in the study of a long-dead culture. The female came closer, and reached out a delicate hand to touch my forehead. It was as if she wanted to make sure that I had substance enough to be touched.
“I felt quite calm. All my fear had ebbed away, and I was perfectly composed. Later, I wondered whether I might perhaps have been mesmerized, but at the time I simply accepted my condition as natural, and I cannot say that I saw anything at all in her catlike eyes to make me suspect that her gaze might be making my soul captive. The man led me inside the house as soon as his consort stepped back. Its walls were all curved, without a single corner to be seen, and its tiled roofs were like conical turrets. They took me into a room lit by violet light, but dimmed the light so that it would not hurt my eyes. There were no screens on the walls here, and no control-panels – only furniture of a fairly commonplace kind, and a strange device like a fountain enclosed in a globe of glass, where some dark fluid circulated in an agitated manner. Because of the peculiar lighting I could not judge its colour, but they they took me to stand before it, and told me frankly what it was.
“ ‘We no longer need living beings to manufacture our sustenance,’ said the male. ‘We are masters of all flesh now, and could alter ourselves if we wished it, so that we might eat any and every food – but we are what we are, and this is the nourishment for which nature and history shaped us.” He let some out into a goblet, and drank it, so that I should be certain what he meant, and what he was. There was no renewal of my former horror. I knew what kind of a world I was in, and I understood. My hosts indicated that I should seat myself on a low sofa, and I complied. They apologized for the awkwardness of the conversation which I had had with the disembodied head, explaining that it was a simulacrum, whose capacity for action was limited. They went on to explain a great deal more.
“I learned that the spies set to watch for me were tiny machines of a patient kind, which represented no considerable investment of effort. Even so, it was an effort which only a handful of persons out of the billions who dwelt on the earth thought worthwhile, and the machines had been designed in such a way that I might be brought to people who might be able to speak with me, rather than taking me to some public place where I might be paraded before crowds and exhibited as the marvel I undoubtedly was.
“They explained to me very earnestly that my species had long ago given way to a higher and better one, according to the dictates of the ineluctible laws of evolution, and was now known only by fragmentary relics. They assured me, however, that there had been no war of conquest, in which their kind had risen up against and defeated mine. According to their account, the human race had destroyed its own civilization, and all-but-obliterated its own heritage in a long series of increasingly destructive wars. Everything mankind had built had been destroyed, in the space of little more than a century. Their grasp of our chronology was vague, but they believed that the chain of disasters began
in the twentieth century and was complete by the end of the twenty-first. After that, they said, there were no calendars left to chronicle the disastrous decline of once-civilized men into utter barbarity. According to their judgement, the intellectual flowering of our race had been hardly less brief than the life of a mayfly; their civilization, by contrast, had lasted for more than ten thousand years.
“I accepted this news with equanimity, and did not doubt then that I was being told the truth. What they were saying did not seem in the least incredible while I bathed in that purple light, listening to the susurrus of the blood which swirled in the ornamental fountain.
“ ‘You cannot begin to understand,’ the male told me, “how incredible it is that we are conversing with a ghost from the remotest antiquity. No one now believes in the reality of ghosts; we have long since cast such superstitions aside. It will be difficult to persuade our contemporaries that your appearance here is not some kind of cunning deception on our part. The machines we use nowadays are so very clever in manufacturing appearances that there is no proof we could offer that you really are what you seem to be. Indeed, we are acutely aware of the possibility that you are a hoax perpetrated upon us by malicious acquaintances.”
“ ‘I am real,’ I said, oddly helpless in the face of his apparent need for reassurance.
“ ‘Can you possibly imagine,’ he said, very softly, ‘how little has survived into our world from yours? It is not merely the passage of time which has erased the record of your civilization but the extremes of destruction achieved by your own wars. We know only a little more about your nineteenth century than we do about periods two or three thousand years earlier. We have less than a thousand texts written in the language we are now speaking, and almost all of them are incomplete.’
“I could not help but think of Shelley’s poem about the ancient emperor whose shattered statue rested half-buried in a sea of sand, vainly bidding its discoverers to look upon his works and despair.
“ ‘What are you?’ I whispered. ‘How did it come about that your kind became lords of the earth, feeding on the blood of men like me?’
“He was enthusiastic to persuade me that I ought not to think of his ancestors as evil creatures. Had men not been domesticated, he said, the race would have become extinct. He told me that there still remained a possibility that our ultimate descendants might once again become sentient, in a future as remote from his present as his era was from mine. If that came to pass, he said, those new men would reckon his kind the saviours of mankind, not its destroyers.
“ ‘It is the law of life,’ said the female. ‘New species emerge, achieve dominance, and are superseded in their turn.’
“ ‘As you, too, will be superseded,’ I said, with neither irony nor bitterness.
“She shook her head. ‘Not so,’ she said. ‘There is an end to the sequence, when a species becomes master of its own evolution, by obtaining direct technical control over the hereditary material. Your species came close to attaining such control, but destroyed the civilization it had built before it was able to make use of what it had learned. I do not mean to insult you, but our kind is better than yours: we are more rational, less violent. We are not warlike, and we have less capacity for hatred than your kind had. What we have built we have kept. Our mastery of the earth’s biosphere is so complete that we can never be replaced. As you have seen, we have long since ceased to be dependent on the foodstuffs supplied to us by men, and we have adapted ourselves so that we are able to walk abroad in daylight quite comfortably – although we naturally prefer the night.’
“They went on to tell me about the origins of their own kind. They admitted that their remote ancestors were predators who fed on the blood of mammals, including humans, but denied that they were vampires of the kind which featured so luridly in human folklore. Theirs, they said, was a natural species which lived invisibly on the margins of human society by virtue of their powers of mimicry. When I objected that their eyes would make it impossible for them to pass for men, even in the darkness which they favoured over daylight, they assured me that they could alter far more than the shape and colour of their pupils. The female had not seemed to me to be unusually pretty or unusually ugly by human standards, because there was little in her face which could command my attention save for her peculiar complexion and her disconcerting eyes, but now she exerted herself to become more attractive – by human standards, that is. Her cheekbones shifted, and the lines of her face became more distinct; her eyebrows grew darker and her eyelashes longer. The changes were subtle, but quite devastating.
“She laughed delightedly when she saw my reaction. ‘So I can do it!’ she said, as though she had not dared to believe it. ‘What an atavism I am! Is this truly the lure that my foremothers used for the seduction of human brutes?’ She began to change again, this time far more ambitiously. I watched emotionlessly as her skin coarsened and became hairy. Her nose was elogated into a snout, her hands changed into paws and her legs shrivelled. She completed the transformation into the likeness of a huge wolf, but began to change back almost immediately. As soon as her face was once again capable of bearing a smile she grinned very broadly. She was pleased with herself.
“I took the appropriate inference readily enough; I understood what various means her remote ancestors had used to capture their prey, and why the only record of their existence which existed in the nineteenth century was a mere whisper of legend, heavily polluted by nightmarish fantasy.
“I understood the awful truth – and the hideous danger which lurked unseen in my own world.”
X
“ ‘So your ancestors were not merely vampires but also werewolves,’ I said to them. ‘It is a wonder that you did not rule the world long before my own day. Or were the rumours of your invulnerability greatly exaggerated?’
“ ‘Not greatly,’ said the male. ‘The shapeshifting abilities our ancestors had were associated with considerable powers of self-repair and immunity to most diseases, but . . . how well do you understand the mechanisms of evolution?’
“ ‘I understand the theory of natural selection very well,’ I told him.
“ ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you will understand that in the economics of evolution there is a correlation between lifespan and reproductive fecundity. Most natural species invest almost all of their energy in profligate reproduction, because it is easier for an organism to lay a thousand eggs than to preserve a few individuals against the destructive pressures of the environment; nevertheless, evolution eventually produced organisms which exploited the reproductive advantages of parental care, and had by necessity to become more long-lived and more cunning. You will understand why humans must invest a far greater proportion of their energy in self-repair and self-preservation than most lower organisms – and why the species destined to replace mankind was even longer-lived, and produced even fewer offspring. For hundreds of thousands of years, while humans lived as hunter-gatherers, their total numbers were stable, and the number of my ancestors steadily increased. But when humans underwent the spectacular population explosion which followed the discovery of agriculture, my ancestors were ill-equipped by nature to keep up. It was not until the catastrophic fall of the fragile human empire that they were enabled to emerge from hiding and claim their birthright.’
“I immediately realized that I had acquired information which might be of incalculable value, provided only that the future which I had contrived to see was a future of contingency rather than a future of destiny. If I could warn my fellow men of the fate which awaited them and prompt them to take action, their reduction to the hideously ignominious status which I had glimpsed during my first expedition might yet be avoided.
“ ‘I know what you are thinking,’ said the female. ‘But I urge you to remember that were it not for my kind, yours would have become extinct. You must abandon all thought of alerting your fellows to the presence in their midst of my kind. At best, they would think you mad; at worst, you mig
ht ensure the extinction of all intelligent life on earth.’
“ ‘And our kind did triumph,’ added the male, ‘for are we not here?’ He, evidently, believed that his was the future of destiny – but how could he believe otherwise, even if his world were no more than a phantom of contingency? He could hardly be expected to accept the possibility that he and the cosmos which contained him were mere figments of my imagination, although that seemed plausible enough to me.
“ ‘You must understand,’ said the female, ‘that the only hope for the future of your species rests with ours. We are masters of nature now, and it is in our power to make of mankind what we will. What you saw today in the forest is but one more chapter in a continuing story, and there may yet be a new ascent of man to sentience and civilization.’
“Why, I wondered, was she so anxious to make this point? For the first time, I wondered whether I might have been mesmerized, and whether my two generous hosts might be exerting themselves to impress some kind of command upon my dulled mind.
“ ‘No!’ I said. ‘I will not . . .’ But I felt myself slipping away from that peculiar discussion into darkness.
“ ‘No!’ cried the male. ‘You must not go! There is so much more we have to say, so much more we need to learn . . . Stay, I beg you!’ He did not seem to realize that I had no control over the duration of my expedition.
“I awoke, and found Dr W***** beside me, anxiously assisting me to wakefulness. I was, I fear, in a parlous state . . .”
It seemed that the memory of that parlous state was sufficient to recall it, for even as Copplestone spoke he began to perspire very freely, and the tremor in his hands grew into a convulsion which shook his whole body. Although he tried with all his might to remain where he was, he slid from his chair on to the carpet. The doctor and the curly-haired young man both sprang to his aid, but they could not straighten him out, let alone deliver him from the fit. So completely had the professor’s narrative captivated me that I could not help but wonder whether this might be the wrath of the unborn inhabitants of an unmade future, recoiling from the uncertain mists of time to strike at the man who threatened the very possibility of their existence. In that instant, I desired with all my heart to be part of a crucial moment in the history of this world and the million futures which might conceivably proceed from it. I longed to forget my own petty embarrassments and heartaches.
The Best New Horror 7 Page 62
