By Blood We Live (76 page)

What do you say to that?

The angel's gotten up, straightened his red Zegna, picked up the case, and is ready to leave.

"By the way," he adds, "He says He forgives you anyway."

I nod, tired as hell. "I figured that."

"You're catching on."

"About time," I say.

"He said that too."

"And the whole 'balance' thing—"

"What do
you
think?"

Pure bullshit
is what I'm thinking.

"You got it," he says, reading my mind because, well, angels can do that.

Twenty-four hours later I'm back in Siena, shaved and showered, and she doesn't seem surprised to see me. She's been grieving—that's obvious. Red eyes. Perfect hair tussled, a mess. She's been debriefed by the angel—that I can tell—and I don't know whether she's got a problem with The Plan or not, or even whether there is a Plan. The angel may have been lying about that too. But when she says quietly, "Hello, Anthony," and gives me a shy smile, I
know
—and my heart starts flapping like that idiot bird.

Ken MacLeod's most recent novels are
The Execution Channel
and
The Night Sessions
, and a new book,
The Restoration Game
, is due out later this year. He is also the author of several other novels and short stories, including
The Sky Road
, which won the British Science Fiction Award. He is also the winner of the Prometheus Award, the Sidewise Award, and the Seiun Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards. He is currently serving as Writer in Residence for the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University.
 
This story, about a vampire who chooses cryonic preservation in the hope of a cure, first appeared in the science journal
Nature
, as part of their Futures series of short-short stories. MacLeod says that it was originally inspired by thinking about viruses that spread through changes they make in the host's behavior.

It's 2045 and I'm still a vampire. Damn.

The chap from Alcor UK is droning through his orientation lecture. New age of enlightenment, new industrial revolution, many changes, take some time to adjust, blah blah blah. I'm only half-listening, being too busy shifting my foot to keep it out of the beam of direct sunlight millimetering across the floor, and trying not to look at his neck.

I feel like saying:
I've only been dead forty years, for Chr—

For crying out loud. I saw the
first
age of enlightenment. I worked nights right through the original Industrial Revolution. I remember being naive enough to get excited about mesmerism, galvanism, spiritualism, socialism, Roentgen rays, rationalism, radium, Mendelism, Marconi, relativity, feminism, the Russian Revolution, the Bomb, nightclubs, feminism (again), Apollo 11, socialism (again), the fall of Saigon and the fall of the Wall.

The last dodgy nostrum I fell for was cryonics.

So don't give me this future shock shit, sunshine. The most disconcerting thing I've come across so far in 2045 is the latest ladies' fashion: the old sleeveless minidress. The ozone hole has been fixed, and folk are frolicking in the sun. I hug myself with bare arms, and slide the castored chair back another inch.

Under the heel of my left wrist, I feel the thud of my regenerated heart. It beats time to the artery visible under the tanned skin of the resurrection man's neck. The rest of my nature is unregenerate. I feel somewhat thwarted. This is not, this is definitely not, what I died for. And it seemed such a good idea at the time.

It always does.

By 1995 we thought we had a handle on the thing. It's a virus. In all respects but one, it's benign: it prevents aging, and stimulates regeneration of any tissue damage short of, well, a stake through the heart. But it has a very low infectivity, so it takes a lot of mingling of fluids to spread. Natural selection has worked that one hard. Hence the unfortunate impulses. And by 1995, I can tell you, I was getting pretty sick of them. I cashed in my six Scottish Widows life insurance policies (let's draw a veil over how I acquired them), signed up for cryonic preservation in the event of my death, and after a discreet ten years, met an unfortunate and bloody end at the hand of the coven senior, Kelvin.

"You'll thank me later," he said, just before he pushed home the point.

"See you in the future," I croaked.

The last thing I saw was his grin. That, and the pavement below the spiked railings beside the steps of my flat. A tragic accident. The coroner, I just learned, blamed it on the long skirt. Vampires, always the fashion victims.

I leave the orientation room, hang around until dusk under the pretext of catching up with the news, and go out and find a vintage clothes shop. I walk out in Victorian widow's weeds. They fit so well I suspect they were once mine.

"It didn't work," I tell Kelvin.

He sips his bloody mary and looks defensive.

"It did in a way," he says. "There are no viruses in your blood."

That word again. I look away. We're in some kind of goth club, which covers for the mode but doesn't improve my mood.

"So why do I still feel. . . hungry?"

"Have a
tapas,"
he says. "But seriously. . . the way we figure it, the virus has to have transcribed itself into our DNA. So the nanotech cell-repair just replicates it without a second thought."

"So we're stuck with it," I say. "Living in the dark and every so often
—"

"Not quite," he says. "Now it's been established that cryonics really does work, there's been a whole new interest in a very old idea. . ."

The coffin lid opens. Kelvin's looking down, as I expect. The real shock is the light, full-spectrum and warm. It feels like something my skin has missed for centuries. I sit up, naked, and bask for a moment.

The overhead lights reproduce the spectrum of Alpha Centauri, which is where we're going. The whole coven is here, all thirteen of them, happier and better fed than I've ever seen them. It's taken us a lot of planning, a lot of money, and a lot of lying to get here, but we're on our way.

"Welcome back," says Kevin. He grins around at the coven.

"Let's thaw one out for her," he says. "She must be hungry."

As far as I can see stretch rows and rows of cryonic coffins containing interstellar colonists in what they euphemistically call cold sleep. Thousands of them.

Enough to keep us going until we reach that kinder sun.

Robert J. Sawyer is the author of twenty novels, including
Hominids
, which won the Hugo Award,
The Terminal Experiment
, which won the Nebula Award, and
Mindscan
, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He has also won ten Aurora Awards, three Seiun Awards, and is the only three-time winner of Spain's prestigious UPC Award, which bestows the largest cash prize in all of science fiction.
 
Sawyer's novel
Flashforward
is currently being adapted for television and is scheduled to air on ABC this fall. His latest novel project is the WWW trilogy, consisting of
Wake
,
Watch
, and
Wonder
. The first volume,
Wake
, was recently serialized in the pages of
Analog
and was released in hardcover in April.
 
Although Sawyer is best known for his science fiction, he's written a number of works that deal with fantastic themes, such as this story, which won the Aurora Award and first appeared in the anthology
Dark Destiny III
. But, as you might guess from the title, this one doesn't see Sawyer straying too far from his science fiction roots. . .

The lid was attached to the wooden crate with eighteen nails. The return address, in blue ink on the blond wood, said, "Sender: Dept. of Anatomy, P.U.M.C., Peking, China." The destination address, in larger letters, was:

Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews

The American Museum of Natural History

Central Park West at 79th Street

New York, N.Y. U.S.A.

The case was marked "Fragile!" and "REGISTERED" and
"Par Avion."
A brand had burned the words "Via Hongkong and by U.S. Air Service" into the wood.

Andrews had waited anxiously for this arrival. Between 1922 and 1930, he himself had led the now-famous Gobi Desert expeditions, searching for the Asian cradle of humanity. Although he'd brought back untold scientific riches—including the first-ever dinosaur eggs—Andrews had failed to discover a single ancient human remain.

But now a German scientist, Franz Weidenreich, had shipped to him a treasure trove from the Orient: the complete fossil remains of
Sinanthropus pekinensis
. In this very crate were the bones of Peking Man.

Andrews was actually salivating as he used a crowbar to pry off the lid. He'd waited so long for these, terrified that they wouldn't survive the journey, desperate to see what humanity's forefathers had looked like, anxious—

The lid came off. The contents were carefully packed in smaller cardboard boxes. He picked one up and moved over to his cluttered desk. He swept the books and papers to the floor, laid down the box, and opened it. Inside was a ball of rice paper, wrapped around a large object. Andrews carefully unwrapped the sheets, and—

White.

White?

No—no, it couldn't be.

But it was. It was a skull, certainly—but
not
a fossil skull. The material was bright white.

And it didn't weigh nearly enough.

A plaster cast. Not the original at all.

Andrews opened every box inside the wooden crate, his heart sinking as each new one yielded its contents. In total, there were fourteen skulls and eleven jawbones. The skulls were subhuman, with low foreheads, prominent brow ridges, flat faces, and the most unlikely looking perfect square teeth. Amazingly, each of the skull casts also showed clear artificial damage to the foramen magnum.

Oh, some work could indeed be done on these casts, no doubt. But where were the original fossils? With the Japanese having invaded China, surely they were too precious to be left in the Far East. What was Weidenreich up to?

Fire.

It was like a piece of the sun, brought down to earth. It kept the tribe warm at night, kept the saber-toothed cats away—and it did something wonderful to meat, making it softer and easier to chew, while at the same time restoring the warmth the flesh had had when still part of the prey.

Fire was the most precious thing the tribe owned. They'd had it for eleven summers now, ever since Bok the brave had brought out a burning stick from the burning forest. The glowing coals were always fanned, always kept alive.

And then, one night, the Stranger came—tall, thin, pale, with red-rimmed eyes that somehow seemed to glow from beneath his brow ridge.

The Stranger did the unthinkable, the unforgivable.

He doused the flames, throwing a gourd full of water on to the fire. The logs hissed, and steam rose up into the blackness. The children of the tribe began to cry; the adults quaked with fury. The Stranger turned and walked into the darkness. Two of the strongest hunters ran after him, but his long legs had apparently carried him quickly away.

The sounds of the forest grew closer—the chirps of insects, the rustling of small animals in the vegetation, and—

A flapping sound.

The Stranger was gone.

And the silhouette of a bat fluttered briefly in front of the waning moon.

Franz Weidenreich had been born in Germany in 1873. A completely bald, thickset man, he had made a name for himself as an expert in hematology and osteology. He was currently Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, but that was coming to an end, and now he was faced with the uncomfortable prospect of having to return to Nazi Germany—something, as a Jew, he desperately wanted to avoid.

And then word came of the sudden death of the Canadian paleontologist Davidson Black. Black had been at the Peking Union Medical College, studying the fragmentary remains of early man being recovered from the limestone quarry at Chou Kou Tien. Weidenreich, who once made a study of Neanderthal bones found in Germany, had read Black's papers in
Nature
and
Science
describing
Sinanthropus
.

But now, at fifty, Black was as dead as his fossil charges—an unexpected heart attack. And, to Weidenreich's delight, the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation wanted him to fill Black's post. China was a strange, foreboding place—and tensions between the Chinese and the Japanese were high—but it beat all hell out of returning to Hitler's Germany. . .

At night, most of the tribe huddled under the rocky overhang or crawled into the damp, smelly recesses of the limestone cave. Without the fire to keep animals away, someone had to stand watch each night, armed with a large branch and a pile of rocks for throwing. Last night, it had been Kart's turn. Everyone had slept well, for Kart was the strongest member of the tribe. They knew they were safe from whatever lurked in the darkness.

When daybreak came, the members of the tribe were astounded. Kart had fallen asleep. They found him lying in the dirt, next to the cold, black pit where their fire had once been. And on Kart's neck there were two small red-rimmed holes, staring up at them like the eyes of the Stranger. . .

During his work on hematology, Weidenreich had met a remarkable man named Brancusi—gaunt, pale, with disconcertingly sharp canine teeth. Brancusi suffered from a peculiar anemia, which Weidenreich had been unable to cure, and an almost pathological photophobia. Still, the gentleman was cultured and widely read, and Weidenreich had ever since maintained a correspondence with him.