Children of the Night

by Dan Simmons

  Dr. Aimslea stood from where he crouched near a toddler who seemed all ribs and extended belly. “This child is dead.” He turned to Fortuna again. “How in the hell can this happen? There can’t be that many cases of AIDS among the general population yet, can there? Or are these children of drug addicts?”

  I could see the other question in the doctor’s eyes: in a nation where the average family could not afford to buy food and where possession of a narcotic was punishable by death, how could there be so many children of drug users?

  “Come,” said Fortuna, and led the doctor and me out of that ward of death. Father O’Rourke remained, lifting and touching child after child.

  In the “healthy ward” downstairs, differing from the Sebeş orphanage only in size—there must have been a thousand or more children in the endless sea of steel cribs—nurses were moving stolidly from child to child, giving them glass bottles of what looked to be formulized milk, and then, as each child sucked noisily, injecting him or her with a syringe. Then the nurse would wipe the syringe with a rag she carried on her belt, re-insert it in a large vial from her tray, and inject the next child.

  “Mother of Christ,” whispered Dr. Aimslea. “You don’t have disposable syringes?”

  Fortuna made a gesture with his hands. “A capitalist luxury.”

  Aimslea’s face was so red that I thought capillaries were bursting there. “Then what about fucking autoclaves!”

  Fortuna shrugged and asked the nearest nurse something. She snapped a reply and went back to her injections. “She say, the autoclave is broken. Has been broken. Sent to Ministry of Health to be fixed,” translated Fortuna.

  “How long?” grated Aimslea.

  “It broken four years,” said Fortuna after calling the question to the busy woman. She had not bothered to turn around while replying. “She say, that was four years before it sent to the Ministry for repair last year.”

  Dr. Aimslea stepped closer to a six- or seven-year-old lying in his crib, sucking on his bottle. The formula looked like gray water. “And these are vitamin shots they’re administering?”

  “Oh, no,” said Fortuna. “Blood.”

  Dr. Aimslea froze, then turned slowly. “Blood?”

  “Yes, yes. Adult’s blood. It make little babies strong. Ministry of Health approve…they say it is very…how do you say…advanced medicine.” Aimslea took a step toward the nurse, then a step toward Fortuna, and then wheeled toward me as if he would kill either of the first two if he got close to them. “Adult’s blood, Trent. Jesus H. Christ. That was a theory that went out with gaslights and spats. My God, don’t they realize…” He suddenly turned back toward our guide. “Fortuna, where do they get this…adult blood?”

  “It donated…no, wrong word. Not donated, bought. Those peoples in big cities who have no money at all, they sell blood for babies. Fifteen lei each time.”

  Dr. Aimslea made a rough sound in his throat, a noise that soon turned to chuckles. He shaded his eyes with his hand and staggered backward, leaning against a tray filled with bottles of dark liquid. “Paid blood donors,” he whispered to himself. “Street people…drug addicts…prostitutes…and they administer it to infants in the state homes with reusable, nonsterile needles.” The chuckles continued, grew louder. Dr. Aimslea lowered himself to a sitting position on the dirty towels, the hand still over his eyes, laughter coming from deep in his throat. “How many…” he started to ask Fortuna. He cleared his throat and tried again. “How many did this Doctor Patrascu estimate were infected with AIDS?”

  Fortuna frowned as he tried to remember. “I think maybe he find eight hundred of the first two thousand. More higher number after that.”

  From beneath the visor of his hand, Dr. Aimslea said, “Forty percent. And how many…orphanage children…are there?”

  Our guide shrugged. “Ministry of Health say maybe two hundred thousands. I think more…maybe a million. Maybe more.”

  Dr. Aimslea did not look up or speak again. The deep chuckles grew louder and deeper, and I realized then that they were not chuckles at all, but sobs.

  Chapter Five

  SIX of us took the train north through late-afternoon light toward Sighişoara. Father O’Rourke stayed behind in the Sibiu orphanage. Fortuna had planned one stop in a small town along the way.

  “Mr. Trent, you like Copşa Mica,” he said. “It is for you we see it.”

  I did not turn to look at him, but kept my gaze on the demolished villages we were passing. “More orphanages?” I said.

  “No, no. I mean, yes…there is orphanage in Copşa Mica, but we don’t go there. It is small town…six thousand peoples. But it is reason you come to our country, yes?”

  I did turn to stare. “Industry?”

  Fortuna laughed. “Ah, yes… Copşa Mica is most industrious. Like so many of our towns. And this one so close to Sighişoara, where Comrade Ceauşescu’s Dark Advisor was born.”

  “Dark Advisor,” I snapped. “What the hell are you saying? That Ceauşescu’s advisor was Vlad Ţepeş?” The guide did not answer.

  Sighişoara is a perfectly preserved medieval town where even the presence of the few autos on the narrow, cobblestoned streets seems an anachronism. The hills surrounding Sighişoara are studded with tumble-down towers and keeps, none of them as cinematic as the half-dozen intact castles in Transylvania which advertise themselves as Dracula’s castle for impressionable travelers with hard currency. But the old house on Piaţa Muzeului had truly been Vlad Dracula’s birthplace and home from 1431 to 1435. The last time I had seen it, many years earlier, the upstairs had been a restaurant and the basement a wine cellar.

  Fortuna stretched and went off in search of something to eat. Dr. Aimslea had overheard the conversation and dropped into the seat next to me. “Do you believe that man?” he whispered. “Now he’s ready to tell you ghost stories about Dracula. Christ!”

  I nodded and looked out at the mountains and valleys sliding by in gray monotone. There was a wildness here that I had not seen elsewhere in the world, and I have traveled in more nations than there are in the U.N. The mountainside, deep ravines, and trees seemed malformed, gnarled, like something struggling to escape from an Hieronymus Bosch painting.

  “I wish it were Dracula we had to deal with here,” continued the good doctor. “Think of it, Trent…if our contingent announced that Vlad the Impaler were alive and preying on people in Transylvania, well…hell…there’d be ten thousand reporters up here. Satellite trucks parked in Sibiu’s town square to bounce back InstaCam reports to every Channel 7 and Channel 4 hometown news market in America. One monster biting a few dozen people, and the world would be galvanized with interest…but as it is, tens of thousands of men and women dead, hundreds of thousands of children warehoused and facing…goddammit.”

  I nodded without turning. “The banality of evil,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “The banality of evil.” I turned and smiled grimly at the physician. “Dracula would be a story. The plight of hundreds of thousands of victims of political madness, bureaucracy, stupidity…this is just an…inconvenience.”

  We arrived at Copşa Mica just before nightfall, and I realized at once why it was “my” town. Wexler, Aimslea, and Paxley stayed on the train for the half-hour layover; only Carl Berry and I had business there. Fortuna led the way.

  The village—it was too small to call a town—lay in a broad valley between old mountains. There was snow on the hillsides, but the snow was black. The icicles which hung from the dark eaves of the buildings were black. Underfoot, the slush along the unpaved roads was a gray and black mixture, and over everything hung a visible pall of black air, as if a million microscopic moths were fluttering in the dying light. Men and women in black coats and shawls moved past us, dragging their heavy carts or leading children by the hand, and the faces of these people were soot black. As we approached the center of the village, I realized that the three of us were wading through a layer of ash and soot at least thre
e inches deep. I have seen active volcanoes in South America and elsewhere, and the ash and midnight skies were the same.

  “It is a…how do you say it…auto-tire plant,” said Radu Fortuna, gesturing toward the black industrial complex that filled the end of the valley like some grounded dragon. “It makes black powder for rubber products…works twenty-four hours a day. Sky is always like this…” He gestured proudly toward the black haze that settled down on everything.

  Carl Berry was coughing. “Good Lord, how can people live in this?”

  “They not live long,” said Fortuna. “Most old peoples, like you and me, they have lead poisoning. Little children have…what is word? Always coughing?”

  “Asthma,” said Berry.

  “Yes, little childrens have ashthma. Babies born with hearts which are…how do you say, badformed?”

  “Malformed,” said Berry.

  I stopped a hundred yards from the black fences and black walls of the plant. The village behind us was a sketch of blacks against grays. Even the lamplight did not truly penetrate the soot-blackened windows. “Why is this ‘my town,’ Fortuna?” I said.

  He held his hand out toward the factory. The lines in his palm were already black with soot, the cuff of his white shirt a dark gray. “Ceauşescu gone now. Factory no longer have to turn out rubber things for East Germany, Poland, U.S.S.R…you want? Make things your company want? No…how do you say…no environmental impactment states, no regulations against making things the way you want, throwing away things where you want. So, you want?”

  I stood there in the black snow for a long moment and might have stood there longer if the train had not shrieked its two-minute warning. “Perhaps,” I said. “Just perhaps.”

  We trudged back through ash.

  Chapter Six

  DONNA Wexler, Dr. Aimslea, Carl Berry, and our Professor Emeritus, Dr. Leonard Paxley, took the waiting VIP van back to Bucharest from Sighişoara. I stayed behind. The morning was dark, with heavy clouds that moved up the valley and shrouded the surrounding ridges in shifting haze. The city walls with their eleven stone towers seemed to blend their gray stones with the gray skies, sealing the medieval town under a solid dome of gloom. After a late breakfast, I filled my Thermos, left the old town square, and climbed the old steps to the house on Piaţa Muzeului. The iron doors to the wine cellar were closed, the narrow doors to the first floor sealed with heavy shutters. An old man sitting on a bench across the street told me that the restaurant had been closed for several years, that the state had considered turning the house into a museum but then decided that foreign guests would not pay hard currency to see a run-down house…not even one where Vlad Dracula had lived five centuries before. The tourists preferred the large old castles a hundred miles closer to Bucharest; castles which had been erected centuries after Vlad Ţepeş had abdicated.

  I went back across the street, waited until the old man had fed his pigeons and left, and then I tugged off the heavy bar holding the shutters in place. The panes on the doors were as black as the soul of Copşa Mica. The doors were locked, but I scratched at the centuries-old glass.

  Fortuna opened the door and led me in. Most of the tables and chairs had been stacked on a rough bar, cobwebs running from them to the smoke-blackened rafters, but Fortuna had pulled one table down and set it in the middle of the stone floor. He dusted off the two chairs before we sat.

  “Did you enjoy the tour?” he asked in Romanian.

  “Da,” I said, and continued in the same language, “but I felt that you overdid it a bit.”

  Fortuna shrugged. He went behind the bar, dusted off two pewter tankards, and brought them back to the table.

  I cleared my throat. “Would you have recognized me at the airport as a member of the Family if you had not known me?” I said.

  My erstwhile guide showed his grin. “Of course.”

  I frowned at this. “How? I have no accent and I have lived as an American for many years.”

  “Your manners,” said Fortuna, letting the Romanian word roll off his tongue. “Your manners are much too good for an American.”

  I sighed. Fortuna reached below the table and brought forth a wineskin, but I made a gesture and lifted the Thermos from my overcoat pocket. I poured for both of us and Radu Fortuna nodded, as serious as I had seen him during the past three days. We toasted.

  “Skoal,” I said. The drink was very good, fresh, still at body temperature and nowhere near that point of coagulation where a certain bitterness sets in.

  Fortuna drained his tankard, wiped his mustache, and nodded his appreciation. “Your company will buy the plant in Copşa Mica?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And the other plants…in other Copşa Micas?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Or our consortium will underwrite European investment in it.”

  Fortuna smiled. “The investors in the Family will be happy. It will be twenty-five years before this country will be able to afford the luxury of worrying about the environment…and the people’s health.”

  “Ten years,” I said. “Environmental awareness is contagious.”

  Fortuna made a gesture with his hands and shoulders…a peculiarly Transylvanian gesture which I had not seen in years.

  “Speaking of contagious,” I said, “the orphanage situation seems insane.”

  The small man nodded. Dim light from the door behind me lighted his brow. Beyond him there was only blackness. “We do not have the luxury of your American plasma or private bloodbanks. The state had to provide a reservoir.”

  “But the AIDS…” I began.

  “Will be contained,” said Fortuna. “Thanks to the humanitarian impulses of your Doctor Aimslea and Father O’Rourke. In the next few months your American television will air ‘specials’ on 60 Minutes and 20/20 and whatever other programs you have created since I visited last. Americans are sentimental. There will be a public outcry. Aid will flow from all those groups and from rich people who have nothing better to do with their time. Families will adopt, pay a fortune for sick children to be flown to the States, and local television stations will interview mothers weeping with happiness.”

  I nodded.

  “Your American health workers…and British…and West German…will flock to the Carpathians, and the Bucegis, and the Făgăraş…and we will ‘discover’ many other orphanages and hospitals, many other of these isolation wards. Within two years it will be contained.”

  I nodded again. “But they’re liable to take a sizable amount of your…reservoir…with them,” I said softly.

  Fortuna smiled and shrugged again. “There are more. Always more. Even you know that in your land of teenage runaways and missing children’s photos on milk cartons, no?”

  I finished my drink, got up, and paced toward the light. “Those days are over,” I said. “Survival equals moderation. All of the Family must learn that someday.” I turned back toward Fortuna and my voice held more anger than I had expected. “Otherwise, what? The contagion again? A growth of the family more rapid than cancer, more virulent than AIDS? Contained, we are in balance. Left to…propagate…there will be only the hunters with no prey, as doomed to starvation as those rabbits on Easter Island years ago.”

  Fortuna held up both hands, palms outward. “We must not argue. We know that. It is why Ceauşescu had to go. It is why we overthrew him. It is why you advised him not to go into his tunnels, to reach the triggers that would have brought Bucharest down.”

  For a moment I could only stare at the little man. When I spoke, my voice was very tired. “You will obey me then? After all these years?”

  Fortuna’s eyes were very bright. “Oh, yes.”

  “And you know why I returned?”

  Fortuna rose, walked to the dark hall where a darker stairway waited. He gestured upward and led the way into the dark, my guide one final time.

  The bedroom had been one of the larger storerooms above the tourist restaurant. Five centuries ago it had been a bedroom. My be
droom.

  Others were waiting there, members of the Family whom I had not seen for decades or centuries. They were dressed in the dark robes we used only for the most sacred Family ceremonies.

  The bed was waiting. My portrait hung above it: the one painted during my imprisonment in Visegrad in 1465. I paused a moment to stare at the image—a Hungarian nobleman stared back, a sable collar topped by gold brocade, gold buttons closing the mantle, a silk cap in the style of the times ringed by nine rows of pearls, the whole headpiece held in place by a star-shaped brooch with a large topaz in its center. The face was both intimately familiar and shockingly strange: nose long and aquiline, green eyes so large as to appear grotesque, thick eyebrows and thicker mustache, an oversized underlip on a prognathous shelf of jaw and cheek…altogether an arrogant and disturbing visage.

  Fortuna had recognized me. Despite the years, despite the ravages of age and revisions of surgery, despite everything.

  “Father,” whispered one of the old men standing near the window.

  I blinked tiredly at him. I could not quite remember his name…one of my Dobrin brothers’ cousins perhaps. I had last seen him during the ceremony before I migrated to America more than a century and a half earlier.

  He came forward and touched my hand gingerly. I nodded, removed the ring from my pocket, and set it on my finger.

  The men in the room knelt. I could hear the creaking and popping of ancient joints.

  The Dobrin cousin rose and lifted a heavy medallion into the light.

  I knew the medallion. It represented the Order of the Dragon, a secret society first formed in 1387 and reorganized in 1408. The gold medallion on the gold chain was in the shape of a dragon: a dragon curled into a circle, jaws open, legs outstretched, wings raised, its tail curled around to its head and the entire form entwined with a double cross. On the cross were the Order’s two mottos: “O quam misericors est Deus” (Oh, how merciful is God) and “Justus et Pius” (Just and Faithful).