The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (54 page)

Could it be true? Was it possible that these creatures, beings who were infinitely superior to the mortal world both in body and science, were duty bound to refrain from using physical aggression no matter what the consequences? It seemed to me the height of folly, but for once I sensed in the blue eyes of the Gallic gentleman that it was the unqualified truth. I had suspected previously that some unknown code of honor was prohibiting them from actually taking the virus from my hands, and now that notion was verified. What other explanation could there be for the fact that Lodovico stood by so helplessly as we escaped from Monsieur des Esseintes’s, and as I unrelentingly made my way back to London, back into the middle of their attack on Cletus? At any second on the train he could have reached out and snatched the virus, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he was constrained by belief, as constrained as the Hindu is not to violate his caste, as constrained as a martyr, who, with a word of renunciation, could save himself from the flames.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“Because the game is over,” des Esseintes replied. “We have tried and we have failed. We cannot start the game anew.”

On one hand I was exhilarated by my newfound knowledge. It made me feel I had some power. Here I was standing in their midst with the virus they wanted so desperately, and they were completely powerless to reach out and do a thing. On the other hand, I was outraged. They seemed to consider their intellectual game as somehow noble. In their distorted view of things they obviously perceived their terrifying shams and deceptions as completely sporting, as urbanely acceptable as a parlor game, or a round of chess. Had I not come to understand the vampire better, I might have viewed their sweetly reasonable perception as raw evil. As it was, I did not accept that all moralities were relative. I could never hold that it was somehow more ethical or moral in any way to drive a person insane than to shoot him with a pistol. But some distant part of me seemed to accept his words, or at least intuit that it was not raw evil that spoke, but a complex and ordered intelligence, albeit nonhuman, that, taken within the context of its own existence, was as calmly accepted as any clergyman’s faith.

The vampire apparently perceived my irresolution. “Stand witness, Monsieur le Docteur,” he said. “Ours is the way of the future. If there comes a day when humanity trafficks with a truly alien intelligence, evil will come not in their sword, but in the unconformity of their logic.”

Outside the sunset was beginning to lose its vermilion. The shadows of the slender Tuscan columns grew long within the room and the olive trees still fluttered soundlessly. Only one question remained.

“Why did you want me to destroy the virus?”

With this Lodovico languidly opened his eyes, as languid as the gilded tortoise at his feet, and their black thunder cut through us once again. Another quaver of power trembled through his limbs as he kept those unfathomable orbs upon us. “The answer to that,” he said, “lies in your daughter.”

On reflex I tightened my hands upon little Camille’s shoulders and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Ursula watched my every movement attentively I looked back at the Alexandrian scribe.

“That is what drew me to her in the first place. We have ways of knowing the future more accurately than you. We cannot predict the final role of the dice, but we can sketch a passable picture of coming events. For uncounted centuries we have been playing our game. We knew that the time was coming when we would lose our secret influence in the world. We knew that the fates had chosen you to be the unwitting instrument in this denouement, but we did not know how. When I learned that your child was an idiot savant I thought the unseen wheels had delivered me a sign.

“I have already told you why we wanted you to destroy your virus. I have told you many times. Because the world is blind and will use it for destructive purposes only. It is a sad truth, but it is a truth, indeed, that the knowledge of the human species far surpasses their wisdom. I do not know why fate has chosen this to be so, but it is so. It has been true since the first ape picked up the jawbone of an animal and swung it as a weapon. That is why we have done everything we have done. The engineer at Oxford had come up with the design for a dirigible that possessed the brushstrokes of genius, but it was a dangerous genius, a military genius. If he would have released it upon the world at this time the results would have been devastating. We had to stop him. You may be interested to know that your Dr. Chiswick had come very close to your own discovery. He had devised a way of creating endless biological mutations of the influenza virus. We had to put a stop to it before he achieved what you did achieve, the creation of a virus that completely lacks antigenicity.” With this last remark Lodovico underwent another faint seizure and in the flash of an eye his features were suddenly feminine.

“Don’t you see?” said a voice that once again lacked the sonorous Italian accent. It was a deep, but more womanly voice. The voice was oddly disjointed with the countenance, the rumbling eyes. It was Dr. von Neefe’s voice, or at least the voice of the personality that had pretended to be Dr. von Neefe. Its effect upon me was piercing. I was swept with a warmth, an almost bereaved longing, but at one and the same time I was repelled by my own feelings. It was as if it were the voice of a deceased loved one speaking through the body of a medium, or the voice of an oracle coming from the mouth of an entranced priest.

Even as I recoiled the ghost faded away.

“That is why I saw your little daughter as an omen, or portent,” Lodovico continued. “Camille is a creature who possesses a certain genius, a very special genius, but completely lacks all awareness or understanding of her own capabilities. And what is the entire human race if they are not creatures who possess genius, but are also bound by their own blindnesses and stupidities? Don’t you see, what is Camille if she is not the perfect metaphor for the human race? What are your scientists if they are not idiots savants?”

“That is the work of the vampire,” I chided scornfully, “to function as the benevolent overseers of the human race? To scour the newspapers and scientific periodicals and every time you come across an invention or discovery that you deem dangerous in the hands of we mere mortals, you bring your fist down?”

“Never the fist.”

“Your game, then. Your game!” I shook my head in disbelief. So that was why the vampire were always associated with centers of knowledge, why Lodovico had been drawn to the scholarly exploits of the Medici, why the medieval vampire of Europe had participated so benignly in the school of Notre-Dame. “How long has this been going on?” I demanded. “How long have the vampire considered themselves the grand inquisitors of human learning?”

“Since the Unknown Men decreed it,” Lodovico boomed. “I am going to tell you, Dottore, what I have told few other mortals. I am one of the Unknown Men. There are eight others. We are the undisclosed rulers, the hidden powers at the top of the secret hierarchy of the vampire. Together we possess the combined knowledge of this world.” He clutched the arms of his chair, and his dark eyes blazed. “For centuries we have pulled the secret strings of history. You seem to greet our work as mere censorship, but if you knew the gravity of the forces at play, if you knew what holocausts we have prevented, you would understand a glimmer of the sovereign reasoning behind our task. These forces have been discovered before. They were known by the ancients. They were preserved in the library of Alexandria, and that is why the library had to be destroyed. Your history books say the library was burned by the Arabs in A. D. 642. That is not true. It was destroyed by the Christian Patriarch, Theophilus, in A. D. 392. It was a simple matter for the vampire to convince Theophilus that the library contained the works of the devil.”

In an awesome flash my mind dredged up all that I knew about the fabled Alexandria. Not the Alexandria of today, but the Alexandria that Lodovico must have known, the Alexandria that remains only in a few crumbling catacombs and pillars and submerged beneath the Mediterranean. I recalled reading of a city whose splendor encompassed no less than four thousand palaces, four hundred baths, and four hundred theaters. In a dreadful vision I imagined its library, containing all the knowledge of the ancient world, in a roaring tower of smoke and flame against the Egyptian sky. A few short months ago I would not have believed that there was a conspiracy that had infiltrated our entire history and stretched back through the mists of time, but my skepticism had long since died. I had witnessed enough. I had seen the stones laid by their hands and I knew of their influence. I knew there was a second intelligent species on this earth, that they had mingled with popes and kings and infiltrated every level of our society. I knew that there was an entire other history of the world, and that that was what was being spoken to me now, merely a page of vampire history. What invoked my fury was that this was not an age-old dispute, a crime committed by his ancestors. It was a crime committed by this creature himself. No doubt it was he who had whispered the words that had set the library of Alexandria to flames.

“How could you!” I croaked. “How can you dare to say you value knowledge and then destroy it so carelessly?”

For the first time since I had known him des Esseintes gaped unbelievingly. Only another series of raps and clickings from the older vampire seemed to pacify his perplexity.

“He doesn’t know,” Lodovico muttered to him. Lodovico turned to me, shaking hia head slowly. “Nothing has been destroyed, Dottore. For the centuries of our work whenever it has been necessary for us to keep a certain discovery from being released upon the world, we have never allowed anything to be lost. The papers of the engineer at Oxford, Dr. Chiswick’s findings—copies of all of these things can be found here.” His voice lowered to a reverent hush. “Every word, every arcane fact from the library of Alexandria has been preserved.”

For a few moments I did not understand the implications of his remark. Then it hit me. The parchments in his library, the wax tablets and animal-skin scrolls. He had been quite correct when he had said the library was his most valuable possession. It would be quite impossible to place any sort of estimate on a collection that contained all the volumes of the library of Alexandria. What unknown masterpieces did it contain? What priceless classics lost to the human world?

In anticipation of my thoughts Lodovico said, “Polybius wrote forty volumes of history. The human world knows of only five.”

I could not believe it. He seemed to be gloating.

“Among my volumes I possess the eighty-three missing dramas of Aeschylus, and the one hundred six lost plays of Sophocles.”

Everything began to make sense, the dodos and the lost Leonardos. The alchemical inventions and the endless bottles of unknown chemicals. The villa was a museum of the lost. It was a fragile and sealed repository of all the treasures the vampire had looted from history I was infuriated.

“In God’s name, Jiow can you justify keeping these things from the human world, keeping them for yourself?”

“Most of them would have been lost if I had not saved them. You seem painfully unaware that the keeping of books and paintings in one’s household was scarcely a common practice until deep into the seventeenth century.”

“But the library and the inventions, these things you stole!”

Even des Esseintes was shocked at my verbal attack against the magister, the most ancient of his kind. He glared at me.

“I will admit, Dottore, that there were some selfish motives involved,” Lodovico said with a rise in his voice. “We need the human race. As Monsieur des Esseintes has pointed out, you are our ancestors, as important to us as all the evolutionary links that have led to
Homo sapiens
have been to you. The only difference is that your evolutionary links are in the past, while ours are concurrent with us, two separate but interlocked species evolving at different rates. We cannot reproduce. We need you. We need your massive numbers, for only one in ten thousand possesses the genius our forefathers have demanded of the vampire. Our need goes beyond mere reproduction. We are all part of a delicate balance, an incredibly complex interconnectedness that extends from our food chains to the rudiments and building blocks of our reality.

“Not the least important strand of this web is our sociopolitical survival. Throughout the centuries the thousands and thousands of dangerous and abominable things we have kept from the human race, we have kept because we did not want them used against us. Even your deadly
Camillus influenzae
, which would not harm us, we wanted you to destroy because if it were ever released the mayhem that would result in the collapse of human civilization would affect our lives as well. We share your cities with you just as certain insects share the homes of ants. We want them to keep running.” He raised his hands. “But you must realize, humanity is as much to benefit by our censorship as the vampire. We were only protecting you from yourselves.”

I was livid. Thousands and thousands of things? Even if I disregarded all of the pain and torment they had caused through their endless manipulations, the untold and uncounted deaths of hundreds and hundreds of unknown scientists and scholars. Even if I overlooked the madness of a logic that suggested there were certain blameless ways of destroying the life and work of an individual, I could never condone the blasphemy of their assault on the freedom of learning and discovery.

“It is wrong!” I shrieked. “Even if you have the unabashed gall to say you were protecting us from the horror we would cause ourselves, it is itself a terrible crime against humanity pompously to keep this knowledge for yourself!”

“There are things you are not ready for. One does not give a child a gun.”

“But wouldn’t it be better to teach a child to use a gun safely than simply to take it away from him?”

“It depends on the gun.”

To my astonishment I noticed that somehow Niccolo had stolen into the room while we had been arguing and was sitting in a chair near the window. Furthermore, the sight of him, of his fragile and beatific countenance, comforted me oddly. I still harbored a great deal of resentment for him, but my hurt was abating. I was beginning to realize the full meaning of the control Lodovico must have over him. I abruptly turned to Ursula, wondering if seeing the angel again had as weighty an effect on her as it did on me. To my continued amazement she seemed not at all interested in the young boy who had once touched her emotions so deeply. Instead, she still kept her eyes trained on me, or more specifically on my hands, which I rested on Camille’s shoulders.