“I was interested,” Marklow admitted. “It’s time for me to move my personal project on to a bigger stage, and it would be very convenient to have some expert help.”
“You took a big risk,” Brewer said. “Suppose I were to start looking for a cure? I could find one, you know, given time. Just because ricksettsia are immune to conventional antibiotics doesn’t mean that they can’t be stopped. Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ’em . . .”
“And little bugs have littler bugs, and so ad infinitum,” Marklow finished for him. “It is a problem. You’re just a small-time hack with delusions of grandeur but there are plenty of researchers out there with the equipment and the knowledge necessary to tailor a virus to attack the agent. I’ve been safe from harassment for a long time, but the race will soon be on again.”
“Again?” Brewer queried. He was pretty sure that he knew what Marklow meant, but he wanted confirmation.
What the vampire meant was there had been a time when he had been utterly ignorant of the nature of his own condition, quite incapable of controlling it. In those days, he must have been very vulnerable, even though the legions of would-be Van Helsings who’d have staked him, beheaded him or burned him undead had even less understanding than he had. Brewer still wanted to hear him confirm all that, and he also wanted to know what sort of timescale they were talking about. He wanted to know how long Count Dracula, alias Andrew Marklow, had been undead, because he wanted to know what kind of life-expectancy he and Jenny might now have—or might yet obtain, as the prototype was refined and perfected.
For the time being, though, Marklow had no intention of giving too much away. Fist, he wanted to hear what Brewer had to say—and if the expression in his eyes was anything to go by, what Brewer said was going to have to be good. The age of Jurassic crack-dealers might be long gone, but there were still plenty of individuals in the world who could and would kill without compunction, and without the least fear of reprisal.
“I took a little nap before I came out,” Brewer said, hoping that he sounded sufficiently relaxed. “I wanted to see what the dreams were like. I wasn’t convinced that anything could actually do that: play dreams inside a man’s head like tapes playing on a VCR. But that’s what animal dreams are like, isn’t it? In animals the arena of dreams is straightforwardly functional; it’s for practicing instinctive behaviors and connecting up the appropriate neurochemical payoffs. It’s for putting the pleasure into the necessities of life. For a few minutes I even wondered whether the whore might be right and it might actually be an ancestral memory of some kind, secreted into a vector by accident . . . but that still didn’t make sense. Bats and wolves aren’t related that way.”
Marklow nodded, but there was no sign of approval in his brooding stare.
“After that,” Brewer said, “I wondered about the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin—alien DNA strayed from a meteorite or a crashed UFO—but that was only because I’d watched too much television. The real answer was much simpler. I only had to remember the other disease which operates the same way—and works the trick even though it’s a mere virus, fifty genes short of a chromosome.”
He paused for dramatic effect. It was Jenny who obligingly said: “What other disease?”
“Rabies,” Brewer told her. “You see, the rabies virus isn’t very infectious. Even if it’s dumped straight into an open wound with a supportive supply of saliva it frequently fails to take, and in order to achieve that it has to bring about some pretty extreme behavior modifications in its victims. Hydrophobia, reckless aggression . . . a whole new set of meta-instincts. That’s the price of its survival. It’s a hell of a clumsy way to get by. Who’d have thought that a mechanism like that could have evolved twice? Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps the virus is just a spin-off from the rickettsia. Perhaps what you and I have is the Daddy rabies, and the one the mad dogs have is just the prodigal son.”
“I don’t have any kind of rabies,” she told him, frostily. She wasn’t nearly as outraged as Brewer had hoped she’d be.
“No,” Brewer said, “you don’t—not as long as you keep taking the palliatives. Even then . . . this is a carefully engineered strain, selected to keep the good effects while losing the bad ones. But Mr. Marklow has a kind of rabies—don’t you, Mr. Marklow? You have the original—the kind of rabies that our ancestors called vampirism.”
“I had the disease which your ancestors called vampirism,” Marklow riposted. “Now, I only have a modified form of it which is much more like the strain with which the subjects of my field-trial have been infected. You might say that I’d been cured, provided that you weren’t too fussy about the definition of the word cure. I’ve traded an awkward but valuable infection for its civilized cousin, which is equally valuable but far less awkward.”
“How much less awkward?” Brewer wanted to know.
“Did you bring the results of your analyses?” the ex-vampire countered.
Brewer pulled a sheaf of papers out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was only a dozen sheets of A4 but there was a lot of data packed into the dozen sheets and he’d summarized his conclusions very tersely.
While Marklow looked at the data Brewer studied Jenny, searching for the slightest indication of an unfortunate side effect. The mark on her neck told him that she still needed booster shots—that even if it were shot right into the carotid artery the rickettsia still had difficulty taking up permanent residence in the brain and its associated structures—but that wasn’t bad news. If he were to carry forward Marklow’s grand scheme for the remaking of human nature he could certainly maintain his supplies of the rickettsia, given that he had a readily available culture-medium.
“That’s good,” Marklow said, when he’d scanned the familiar information and read the judgmental comments. “Your staff evidently make up an effective team, and you obviously trust them. How much of the whole picture have you let them see?”
“They know that there’s a whole new approach to rejuvenative technology and life-extension—and they have enough of a basis to start their own research along the same lines, individually or in alliance. They don’t know that the new approach is really an old approach. They know I got the data from somewhere else but they think it was one more commission. They don’t know that it was a gift from Count Dracula. They don’t know that one of the blood-bags was mine, so they don’t know I’m a carrier. How much less awkward?”
Marklow smiled. It wasn’t a particularly predatory smile. “I no longer have any real compulsion to bite or stab my fellow creatures and apply my slavering lips to the wounds,” he said. “The dreams still frighten me a little—I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to take the innocent pleasure in them that my new generation of converts can—but they’re no longer a curse that I have to fight with every last vestige of my strength.”
He paused briefly. The expression in his eyes was unfathomable but his voice was gentle and regretful. “I did have to fight it, you know,” he said, sounding as if he genuinely wanted to be believed. “It was the price of survival in the modern world. I had to remain hidden, unknown . . . I had to become a figure of legend, a mere superstition. I saw what happened to others of my kind who couldn’t master their appetites. There are a thousand ways to die, you see, even for . . . someone like me. We did our best to spread rumors to the contrary, but our rumors always had to compete with theirs. The confusion worked to our benefit, in some ways, but not in others . . .
“I’ve been alone for a long time, but I knew that science would save me. I knew that there would be a revolution some day that would allow me to transcend my monstrousness and become a true immortal. I knew that when that happened, I could rejoin the human race and become its benefactor, changing evil into good. I knew that there would come a time when I could look for company again—for congenial company.”
Brewer wasn’t sure whether the adjective referred to Jenny, or to him, or to both of them, but he couldn’t resist the temptatio
n to feign misunderstanding. “I guess a cohort of whores is about as congenialas you can get,” he said, “if you’re that way inclined.”
He cast a calculatedly negligent glance in Jenny’s direction, and saw that he had wounded her, but Marklow remained unmoved. If the ex-vampire was as old as Brewer suspected, he was probably unmovable. He’d probably been undead for a very long time—but at least he’d had nightmares all the while. There had been a taint of Hell in his unholy existence, and might be still, even in a world which was on the verge of conquering all the Hells of old: disease, death, pain and misery.
“Where should I have looked for volunteers?” Marklow asked, in all apparent earnest. “Prisons? Cardboard City?”
“Old people’s homes?” Brewer countered, not at all earnestly. “Not sufficiently unobtrusive, I suppose. You do plan to remain unobtrusive, I suppose, even when you start serious marketing. The rich will want to keep it to themselves, of course. They appreciate confidentiality. Vampires, the lot of them—they think of mere human beings as cattle. That’s why you thought of me when you wondered how best to expand your operation, I suppose. You think I’m a kind of vampire too, because I sell illegal happy pills to pimps and whores, kids and hackers.”
“You’re not any real kind of vampire yet,” Marklow responded, mildly. “You’ll have to work at it. It sometimes takes half a dozen shots before the rickettsias are permanently established. But once they’re set, they’re set for life—and that could be a long time.”
“How long?” Brewer wanted to know.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Count Dracula told him. “We’re dealing with a new strain, after all.”
“How good was the old strain?” Brewer persisted.
“I don’t know,” Marklow replied. “the oldest men I ever knew had forgotten long ago how old they were. Arithmetic hadn’t been invented when they were young. Nor had writing—but fire had. Fire and wooden spears. By the time writing was invented the war was almost lost. The rickettsia almost went the way of the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and the thousand other species Neolithic man hounded to extinction. Mercifully, it survived. Mercifully, I survived with it. Now, the new era is dawning. Soon, I won’t have to hide any more. Together, you and I and all of Jenny’s friends . . . we shall be the midwives of the Übermenschen, as you so tactfully put it.” Brewer could see that Jenny felt uncomfortable. She knew that an important boundary had been crossed when Marklow first allowed the word “vampire” to cross his lips. He was exposed now, and so was she. She was afraid—but Marklow wasn’t. He had grown out of fear long ago. He still retained the ability to terrify, but he couldn’t identify with those he terrified. He gave the impression of knowing more about his victims than they knew themselves, but he didn’t. He thought that he was still, essentially, a man—but he didn’t know human beings at all. Perhaps it had been a mistake for him to try so hard to become harmless, to become a saint instead of a devil. “Togetherness,” Brewer told him, sardonically, “is a wonderful thing.”
Bang on cue, the doorbell rang. Not the bell that rang when someone was downstairs, outside the reinforced doors of the building, but the discreet chime which signaled that someone was at the door of the apartment.
Marklow knew as well as Brewer did that anyone with the skill to get that far without being detected didn’t need to sound the chime—that the gesture was a kind of mockery.
“Don’t get up,” Brewer said to Jenny. “I think that’s for me.”
Brewer had instructed the man with the rifle not to take any chances; he had seen how quickly Marklow could move and how powerfully he could hit out. The marksman fired as soon as he was sure of his shot, and Marklow slumped to the floor.
It was the shock of the impact that had felled him but the ex-vampire’s attempt to rise to his feet was all in vain. The tranquilizer dart would have sent a horse to sleep, or even a tiger.
“Look after him,” Brewer said, as the collection squad went to pick up the body. “He’s an endangered species. Make sure you put him in a nice strong cage—and be careful when he wakes up. I dare say he can still bite, when the mood takes him.”
Jenny had got up from the settee. She still looked like a minor character in some Hollywood super-soap, but now she seemed to think that her face was in close-up and that her features had better start running the gamut of the emotions, at least from Alarm to Anxiety.
Brewer held the door open for the man from the ministry. “Jenny, this is Mr. Smith,” he said, over his shoulder. “He wants you to give him a complete list of all the friends you introduced to Mr. Marklow. It probably won’t matter much if it isn’t quite complete, but you’d gain a good deal of moral credit if it were—and from here on in it would be a good idea not to be overdrawn at the moral credit bank. I told your boyfriend the truth when I said that I could design a cure for what you have, given time and a big enough budget. If you want to hang on to your indigenous rickettsias you’ll have to make yourself useful.”
Mr. Smith didn’t smile. Brewer hadn’t expected him to. Men from the ministry—any ministry—lost their smiling reflexes once they’d been in the job for a while.
“You bastard,” Jenny said. “You sold us out!”
Brewer put on a show of being deeply wounded. “I sold you out! You were the one who told your new boyfriend all about my covert operations. You sold him my . . . business associates. You even sold him your old friends, as bankrupt stock at a knockdown price. Then he wanders into my top-security lab, calm as you please, beats me up and shoots me full of bugs—bugs whose not-so-remote ancestors have had him chewing bloody holes in anything and everything warm-blooded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Did he really think that was the right way to win me over—or was it your idea? You never did understand human nature, and he must have forgotten everything he learned when he was human himself. Not entirely surprising, I suppose, given that his disease made him closer kin to mad dogs and vampire bats. The only element of social intercourse he mastered was the art of staying hidden, masked by a legend that had become a joke . . . and in the end he even forgot that.”
Jenny looked back at him with eyes that were almost as piercing, almost as threatening, as Anthony Marklow’s—but they were still baby blue in color, and she hadn’t quite enough presence to carry off the act. She wasn’t a real vampire, after all. She only had bad dreams.
“I thought you meant it,” she said, feebly. “I really thought you meant all that stuff about being at the cutting edge of the next revolution—about the quest for immortality, the transcendence of all inherited limitations.”
“I did mean it,” he told her. “I still do. What do you think I’m doing here? It’s a question of quality control. Did you think I could entrust this kind of work, and the rewards that are likely to flow from it, to someone like him? He’s a fucking vampire, for God’s sake!” Jenny’s burning gaze flickered from Brewer to the unsmiling Mr. Smith and back again, as if to say: What’s he? What kind of quality control does he represent?
What she actually said was: “Anthony would have cut you in. He’d have made you an equal partner. The establishment won’t even cut you in. As soon as I tell this creep what he wants to know, you and I will be surplus to requirements. They’ll have it all.”
“You watch too much television,” Brewer told her. “The government isn’t a conspiracy set up to control us. I voted for the government. I sure as hell never voted for Count Dracula. And your slang’s out of date. Nobody except Simple Simon calls people creeps any more—and Simon’s so sad he gets off on collecting the business cards from public phone booths.”
“You couldn’t stand it, could you?” she retorted. “You just couldn’t stand seeing me like this. People you throw away are supposed to stay thrown away, aren’t they, Bru? They aren’t supposed to find someone better, to get their lives back on track. You did this because you’re jealous—bitter and twisted and jealous.”
Brewer had to check Mr. Smith’s
face to make sure that he hadn’t cracked a smirk. Mr. Smith was being very patient, even by the standards customarily observed by the establishment’s bureaucrats.
“We have to leave, Jenny,” Brewer said, quietly. “There are people waiting outside. They have to search the place, collect all this.” He waved a negligent hand at the books and CDs.
“They have no right,” she whispered—but she didn’t press the point. How could she? She knew as well as Brewer did that Anthony Marklow was guilty of any number of crimes, recent as well as ancient. She wasn’t innocent herself—not according to the ’98 protocols. In fact, she was a dangerous felon, not to mention a willing carrier of an illegally engineered organism.
Brewer waited for her to fall into step with the man from the ministry and then he followed them, at a respectful distance.
He was confident that Jenny was wrong about him being a fool to trust the legitimate authorities. After all, he really had voted for them—and he’d taken care to post twenty copies of his twelve A-4 sheets to secret repositories all over the world, routed via Talinn and Tokyo, Ratzeburg and Palermo. Given that the net was still in its frontier phase, the chances of his new colleagues being able to locate and destroy them all were pretty slim.
He wished that he’d made more progress in the art of being intimidating, but he knew that even if he’d been a real gangster he couldn’t possibly have come to a different decision. Even gangsters couldn’t be entirely immune to the duties of citizenship; they were as dependent as anyone else on the solidarity and stability of the social order. The way he’d chosen would lead to wealth, and hence to power, as surely as any other—and by way of a bonus he’d have a special kind of fame thrown in.
From now until the end of time he’d be known as the man who’d finally put an end to the evil career of Count Dracula: the man who’d exposed the last undead vampire in the West for what he truly was.
A reputation like that would surely be enough to make eternal life worth living.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 51
