BRIAN STABLEFORD

 

Quality Control

 

 

BRIAN STABLEFORD taught Sociology for twelve years at the University of Reading before becoming a full-time writer in 1988. He has published more than a hundred books, including over sixty novels, sixteen collections, seven anthologies and thirty non-fiction titles.

 

His vampire fiction includes the novels The Empire of Fear, Young Blood and Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity, as well as a number of short stories. He has also translated numerous works of French vampire fiction, including Paul Feval’s Vampire City and The Vampire Countess, Marie Nizet’s Captain Vampire and Ponson du Terrail’s The Vampire and the Devil’s Son.

 

Stableford’s recent titles include Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations and Prelude to Eternity. He has also completed a five-volume set of translations of the scientific marvel fiction of Maurice Renard, and a six-volume set of the scientific romances of J. H. Rosny the elder.

 

The author was the recipient of the 1999 Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for contributions to SF scholarship, and he has also been presented with the SFRA’s Pioneer Award (1996), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987).

 

 

Having observed the world and what’s happening to it, Dracula advances his plans to re-establish himself and his fellow vampires as the dominant species ...

 

~ * ~

 

BREWER HADN’T BEEN in the Goat and Compasses for nearly a year. He didn’t need to go into places like that nowadays; he always met his runners on safer ground. His legitimate business was booming and it didn’t seem politic to be frequently seen in a pub known to be favoured by dealers, pimps and other assorted riffraff. There were no big players on view now, though; it was only lunchtime.

 

He found Simple Simon propping up the bar, looking no fatter and no more prosperous than he ever did, but not looking like a boy on the brink of starvation either. Brewer still thought of Simon as a boy although he must have been well into his twenties by now. Clearly, he was still working—if not for Brewer then for someone else.

 

“Hello, Simon,” Brewer said, taking the youth by the elbow and leading him away from the bar to a booth in the corner. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it?”While Simon thought about how to answer that he went back to the bar and ordered a couple of pints.

 

When Brewer carried the tankards over to the booth and set them down Simon had the grace to look slightly guilty, but he didn’t look scared. Brewer had never mastered the delicate art of terrifying his pushers, preferring to represent himself as a man who was as gentle and trustworthy as his product. Sometimes, he regretted his laxity. There was always the chance that some under-terrorized imbecile would grass him up if the police put the screws on tight enough.

 

“It’s okay,” he said, staying in character. “No threats. I only want an explanation. You owe me that much, at least.”

 

“An explanation of what?” Simon asked, although he knew full well.

 

“An explanation of why you haven’t picked up your supplies lately. I know you too well to believe that you’ve decided to straighten up, so you’ve obviously found an alternative supplier. You don’t have to tell me who it is, but I need to know what it is you’re peddling. I thought I had the kind of product that wouldn’t easily be outdone. If my recipe book is out of date I really ought to catch up. It’s not the money, of course—it’s a matter of professional pride.”

 

“It’s not better,” the youth muttered. “Not really. It’s just different. New.”

 

“You’re telling me you’re a fashion victim? Some new designer product hits the street and you feel like you have to switch brands in case your mates think your habit’s passé?” Brewer tried hard to imply that it was unbelievable, but he knew that it was only too likely.

 

“It’s not like that,” Simon said, uncomfortably. “It’s just... people can be very persuasive.”

 

“You mean they threatened to break your legs if you didn’t ditch my stuff and start selling theirs?”

 

“Not exactly,” the boy muttered, unable to muster enough conviction to tell a convenient lie. The trouble with Simon was that he was vulnerable to the mildest forms of persuasion, provided he was approached in the right way.

 

“It’s okay,” Brewer lied, hoping that he didn’t sound too convincing. “It was bound to happen. It’s the hectic pace of technological innovation—not to mention the money that’s being poured into neurochemical research. I’m only one man, and I can’t be expected to create and supervise the psychotropic revolution by myself. There’s room for everyone in a boom market, no need for conflict. This is 1999, after all—we’re not Jurassic crack dealers, are we? I just need to know what’s going on. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t retail my products as well as theirs?”

 

Simon shrugged awkwardly. Plainly there was.

 

Brewer wondered whether it might have been optimistic to assume that his new rivals were men like him: civilized people with degrees, well-appointed laboratories and a serious interest in the next phase of human evolution. Maybe the old-time crack dealers were trying to get back into the game. If so, he shuddered to think what their quality control must be like. He stared over Simon’s shoulder and let his eyes wander while he wondered how much trouble he might be in.

 

His wandering gaze was suddenly arrested and held by a trim figure easing its way out of a booth on the far side of the room. His attention would have been caught even if he hadn’t recognized the face lurking behind the opaque sunglasses, but the shock of realizing who she was intensified his reaction considerably.

 

Simon looked around to see what Brewer was staring at, but turned back quickly, as if he were afraid to look upon such a startling profile.

 

“Does she come in here often?” Brewer asked.

 

“Sometimes. Still counts a few of the working girls as friends. They say her old man doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t keep tabs on her during the day.”

 

“Must be the laid-back type.” Brewer used the sneer to cover up an unexpected stab of jealousy. For nearly a year Brewer had supplied Jenny with happy pills in exchange for sex, but she had been using too many other things, and she had never quite come off the game. He had dumped her when she had gone far enough downhill not to be special any more. In his experience, nobody ever climbed back up that kind of hill once they’d started to roll, but Jenny now looked extra special—far better than she ever had before. That was difficult to believe, given that she must be at least Simon’s age, with the sweet succulence of innocence far behind her.

 

“So laid-back he’s creepy,” Simon said. “You want to go say hello?” He didn’t really think he was going to be let off that easily, but there was a distinct note of hope in his voice, doubtless encouraged by the intensity of Brewer’s stare. He wouldn’t have got off that easily, either, if the girl hadn’t got up from her seat at that very moment and started for the door, waving goodbye to her erstwhile friends—who looked after her with naked envy, but rather less hatred than might have been expected.

 

Brewer didn’t spare Simon another glance, but he said “I’ll be back” in his best Schwarzenegger drawl. He left the pint he’d hardly touched on the table.

 

~ * ~

 

It wasn’t difficult to catch up with Jenny; she wasn’t hurrying.

 

“Can I offer you a lift somewhere?” Brewer said, as he drew level with her.

 

She seemed genuinely surprised to see him. Perhaps she’d been too deep in conversation to see him enter the pub and perhaps she hadn’t glanced in his direction while she made for the door. She stopped and turned to look up into his eyes. Her own eyes were hidden by the dark glasses but he imagined them blue and clear, as radiant as her complexion.

 

“I don’t know, Bru,” she said, blithely. “Which way are you going?”

 

“Any way you like,” he said. “It’s my afternoon off.”

 

“Nothing cooking back at the lab?” Her voice was gently teasing; there was no evidence of hard feelings regarding the way their previous acquaintance had drifted to its end.

 

“We only do the lawful stuff by day,” he told her. “Half the night too, most days. Difficult to find time for fun and games. The last civil service lab’s due to close next April—not cost-effective. Private contractors like me do all the statutory health and safety work these days, as well as all the forensic testing. Never been busier.”

 

“Health and safety work? Is that what you call it?”

 

It was more a veiled insult than a joke. He’d always offered products that were as safe and as healthy as he could contrive. He liked all his customers to stay fit and well—and happy too.

 

“Quality control is what I call it,” he said. “Making sure that the goods you buy at the supermarket, or over the pharmacist’s counter, are exactly what they’re supposed to be and as pure as scientific ingenuity can make them. It’s vital work in these corrupt times. There’s more money in faking designer drugs than there is in faking designer jeans or fine wines, and you know how paranoid people are about their food since last year’s pesticide plague. You look incredibly well, Jenny. I’d never have believed it. You must have kicked all your old habits.” He emphasized the word all very slightly.

 

“Every last one,” she said. “Where’s your car?”

 

“In the multi-storey. I never park illegally. Where do you want to go? Home?” He started walking again as he said it, pointing the way with a languid finger

 

“I guess.” She must have known that he was burning with curiosity, but she carefully didn’t say where home was. “Everything’s rosy with you, then?”

 

“Couldn’t be better,” he assured her, having no intention of telling her that some rival was taking a big bite out of his synthetics trade. “The revolution is bang on course. The great crusade continues.” He always took care to sound as if he wasn’t serious when he said things like that, but he was. He didn’t see himself as one more drug-peddler in the shark-infested soup; he really did believe that psychotropic chemistry would pave the way for the next step in human evolution. He’d tried to explain that to Jenny a dozen times and more, back in the old days.

 

“I know,” she said, perhaps implying that although she’d kicked the habits which had been destroying her she hadn’t given up on everything she bought on the street... or perhaps not.

 

“I hear you’re living with a laid-back creep,” he said, as they stepped into the lift that would take them up to level nine of the multi-storey. “Only comes out at night—some kind of vampire, maybe?”

 

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. In fact, she turned her head away, as if she didn’t want him to be able to read her reaction too accurately. As she moved her head the skin at the side of her neck stretched, and lifted an odd discolouration briefly into view above the collar of her neat black blouse. It looked like a lovebite, but Brewer only caught a momentary glimpse of it before she turned again and it disappeared.

 

“I’m with someone,” she admitted. “I’m not like I used to be, Bru. I learned to apply a little quality control of my own, just in time.”

 

This time the insult wasn’t even veiled.

 

“It’s okay,” Brewer said, uneasily. “I’m only curious, not jealous. We were never married, were we?”

 

“No,” she said, colourlessly. “We never were.”

 

When she got into the car—without pausing to admire it, although it certainly warranted a certain respect—she had to tell him where home was.

 

“Docklands?” he echoed, deliberately overdoing the contempt. “I thought even the yuppie dinosaurs had moved out of there. I suppose it’s handy for your old stamping grounds, though.”

 

“It’s quiet,” she said, as if that were explanation enough. Then she looked away, as if she wanted to punish him for wanting to hurt her feelings—but she didn’t try to get out of the car again, and she seemed perfectly relaxed as he zigzagged down to the barrier and out into the traffic.

 

He let the conversation lapse while he threaded his way through the crowded streets, pretending to concentrate hard but continually stealing sidelong glances at her at every junction. She gave him directions in an absurdly overabundant fashion, as if he couldn’t be trusted to find his way around the City Security Zone or through the road-works fringing the last of the Jubilee Line extension building-sites.

 

~ * ~

 

The place to which Jenny eventually guided him was, indeed quiet—which wasn’t surprising, given that it was one of those maximum security buildings with a fiendishly complicated entry system and no ground-floor windows.

 

“Are you going to invite me in for a coffee?” he asked, as she got out. She hesitated, with her hand on the door handle, as if waiting for some extra inducement. Thinking that he understood, he reached under the seat and released his secret stash. “I can sweeten it for us,” he said.

 

“You’re crazy, keeping that stuff in your car,” she said. “Especially a thief-magnet like this.”

 

“We scientific geniuses have ways of thief-proofing our homes and vehicles,” he said, airily. “We don’t need that kind of hi-tech fortress.” He nodded at the armoured entry-door with all its smart sensors.

 

She let go of the door handle without opening the door. “If you’re coming up for coffee,” she said, “you’d better put the car in the basement. And if you want it sweet, you can have all the sugar you need. Put that stuff back where it came from.”

 

He did as he was told. It would have suited him better if she’d been tempted, but he certainly wasn’t going to insist.

 

It was almost as difficult to get into the subterranean car park as it was to get through the building’s main door, and Jenny had to produce two different ID cards to open the doors of the lift which took them up to the apartments—all the way up, as it transpired. Jenny’s new man lived in the penthouse.

 

“The trouble with security,” Brewer observed, as they made their ascent, “is that it works both ways. If there were a fire, you’d never get out—and the fire brigade wouldn’t be able to get in to help you. Where I live it’s simple to get in and out, even though it’s not easy. My security systems are glorious in their subtlety.”

 

“Just like you,” she said, with telling sarcasm. Perhaps, he thought, she’d only invited him in to score a few points by showing him everything that she’d accomplished since he dumped her. On the other hand, living in a maximum-security love-nest with a guy that Simple Simon called a creep must have its downside. If she often went back to the Goat and Compasses to pass the time of day with whores whose beat she’d once shared she must be desperate for congenial company.

 

Brewer wasn’t surprised to find that Jenny’s boyfriend wasn’t home. He was, however, mildly surprised to discover what kind of place his home was. It wasn’t particularly plush, considering the rent one had to pay for that kind of situation and that kind of safety, and it was certainly no leftover yuppie’s style-trap. All the walls were lined with shelves and all the shelves were fully laden, ninety per cent with books and ten per cent with CDs: thousands of each. There was an alcove in the living-room fitted out as a workstation with a pair of widescreen PCs whose screensavers swirled different shades of blue and grey around one another in endless mirror-image sequences. Brewer took note of the laser-printer and the idle fax machine, but they weren’t interesting enough to warrant close study. The glass in the broad window was heavily smoked; even though the sun was shining the room was distinctly dim.

 

It would have taken hours to make a detailed study of all the book-titles, but a quick scan told him that they were all non-fiction, with no obvious specialism. The CDs were mostly audio or read-only, but there were at least fifty user-disks. If they weren’t just for show, that added up to an awful lot of gigabytes.

 

“Are you taking an Open University degree or something?” he asked, although he was painfully aware that it left much to be desired as a conversational gambit.

 

“No,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen to put the kettle on. She had finally taken off her sunglasses, but he still hadn’t seen her eyes.

 

“Mind if I use your loo?” he asked, figuring that he would only get eaten away by curiosity if he didn’t.

 

“Into the hallway, second door on the right,” she answered, unsuspiciously.

 

The bathroom was ordinary enough. He turned the taps on while he opened the cabinet and began a scrupulous examination of everything stored there. His trained eye skated over the cosmetics and probed for something that didn’t look quite right, something revealing. He didn’t expect any illegals, or even anything particularly esoteric, but in his experience there were always clues in a bathroom cabinet for an expert eye to decode.

 

He grinned when he found three pill-bottles without proprietary or prescription labels lurking in a corner behind a flask of skin conditioner. When he shook the capsules out they didn’t have any indicative markings. He picked up three of each kind of capsule, slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket and turned the taps off.

 

By the time he came out he’d triggered Jenny’s urge to go. When she locked the door behind her he moved swiftly into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, just on the off chance.

 

This time the anomaly leaped right out at him. Three non-standard hooks had been installed in the left-hand wall and the grille below them had had two bars removed so that three fluid-filled bags could be hung there. Brewer didn’t like to judge by appearances but the straw-coloured fluid that filled the bags looked like blood-plasma—the real thing, not the standard synthetic substitute. He just had time to squeeze a sample into one of the specimen bottles he always carried with him before moving swiftly back to the living-room and taking up his coffee cup.

 

“Well,” he said to Jenny, as she came back into the room “you certainly landed on your feet. I’m glad. How did you kick the hard stuff—some kind of substitution programme?” Her eyes were blue and radiant, exactly as he’d expected, and they had a curious haunted look that was very attractive—as if they had seen far more than they had ever hoped or expected to.

 

“Willpower,” she said, shortly. “You don’t seem to have taken too much harm from sampling your own products—but you were always a moderate man. I suppose you’ve got plenty of girlfriends, just as lovely and every bit as eager as I was?”

 

“No one special,” he said.

 

“No one is,” she retorted. He wondered if it was a philosophical remark or yet another insult, to be understood as including an unspoken to you.

 

“Anyhow,” he told her, truthfully, “I don’t know anyone as lovely as you. You used to be pretty, all right, but now ... what’s your secret, Jenny? I bet those kids you were talking to in the pub would give a hell of a lot to know it.” He couldn’t help adding: “They must really hate you now.”

 

“It’s no secret, Bru,” she said. “It was just a matter of getting the shit out of my system. I’m okay now—absolutely clean. Nobody hates me. I don’t go back there to rub their noses in it. They know I only want to help.”

 

Saint Jennifer, reformed whore and would-be saviour of fallen women? he was tempted to say. All he actually said was: “Nobody’s absolutely clean.” He held up the coffee cup as he said it, to remind her that caffeine was an upper of sorts. The coffee was too strong for his own taste, and he noticed that she was drinking hers black, without sweeteners. She’d always liked it white before, with one or even two.

 

She didn’t dignify his stupid correction with a reply.

 

“The light in here is distinctly dismal,” Brewer observed, feeling that he’d somehow gone five points down in the game and hadn’t a clue how to start scoring on his own account. “I don’t wonder you feel the need to get out in the sun once in a while, even if you have to go back to your old haunts in search of a bit of company. Don’t you have new friends now? Or is your boyfriend the solitary type, outside of bed?”

 

“You’d probably get on with him well enough,” Jenny told him, wryly. “You have lots of interests in common.”

 

Brewer let his eyes travel over the loaded bookshelves. “He probably has interests in common with everyone who has interests,” he remarked. “He’s obviously a very interested man. Is that why you’re at a loose end? Is he out pursuing his interests?”

 

“He doesn’t have a lot of free time at the moment.”

 

“I know the feeling,” Brewer said. “Exactly what interests do he and I have in common?”

 

“Biotech,” she said, shortly. After a pause, she added: “Quality control.” Now she was being deliberately enigmatic. Her blue eyes were looking up at him from beneath slightly lowered brows. She was fishing for a reaction. Brewer wondered whether she expected him to be flattered by the news that she’d picked out a man like himself once she’d been consumed by conformity and decency—if she had been consumed by decency and conformity, and wasn’t just a better class of whore than she’d been before.

 

“Are you happy?” he asked.

 

“What kind of question is that?”

 

“Just a question.”

 

“Do you think I was happy before?” she asked, with some slight asperity. “Do you think I was happy when I knew you?”

 

“You were sometimes,” he said. “I was the one who gave you the happy pills, remember. I make a good product. You were happy enough when you were under the influence. I just wondered if you were happy now that you don’t even take sweeteners in your caffeine-loaded coffee.”

 

“What you’re wondering,” she said, “is why I invited you up here, and why I agreed to let you drive me home. You’re wondering whether you might possibly have got lucky, now that screwing me would count as getting lucky instead of trivial commerce.”

 

“I never thought of it like that,” Brewer said, as equably as he could.

 

“No, you didn’t. For me, trading sex for the stuff you had to sell was cutting out the middleman, but you really did think that it didn’t count as whoring if no actual money changed hands. I never quite understood that.”

 

“I liked you,” he said, truthfully. “You were pretty, and sweet. Are you pissed because I never asked you to let me take you away from all the rest of it? I might have, if I’d thought you’d say yes—but you were the one who was just cutting out the middleman.”

 

“I’m a lot prettier now,” she said, “but not nearly so sweet. I’m not so sure you’d like me now, once you got to know me.” The haunted note was sounding in her voice now.

 

“I’m sure,” Brewer told her. He intended it as a compliment, but she didn’t seem to take it that way.

 

“Because nothing else counts except the looks,” she countered. “Because getting to know me better couldn’t possibly change your mind, which you made up the instant you saw me in the Goat and Compasses. What were you doing there, anyway? I haven’t seen you in there before—not for at least a year.”

 

“Looking up an old friend,” he told her. “You remember Simon, don’t you? Simple Simon.”

 

“Oh, him” she said, as if the revelation explained everything.

 

“He’s no worse than the old friends you were looking up,” Brewer pointed out. “Maybe a cut above, depending how you compare things. Either way, he brought us together again. It really is good to see you, and I really am pleased that you got out of the gutter and started reaching for the stars. Sure you’re happy. Who wouldn’t be? So why did you let me drive you home instead of calling me a shit and kicking me in the balls? If I was just a paying customer before, why give me the time of day now? If you don’t want to pick up where we left off and I assume you don’t—you must have some little itch of curiosity needling you. You must at least be interested to know how I am.”

 

“I already asked you how you were,” she pointed out.

 

“So what else do you want to know?”

 

“How you really are. As you say, there’s just a slight itch of nostalgic curiosity. Do you know the one thing about you I missed, when you stopped coming round because I was too much of a wreck?”

 

It wouldn’t have been diplomatic to say the pills so Brewer said: “My acid wit?”

 

“Those little rhapsodies about the psychotropic revolution,” she said. “Not the acidly witty ones, the ones when you forgot yourself just a little, and actually half-meant what you were saying, about a world where biotechnology would save us from ourselves. It was all bullshit, of course, but it was nice that you believed in something, even if it wasn’t love or honesty or common decency. I was young then, of course. Too young. Do you still believe in it, just a little, or have you become just one more drug-peddler, dedicated to being rich and having a flash car with cunning anti-theft devices?”

 

“Oh, I still believe in it,” Brewer assured her. “I really and sincerely do. I only use the acid wit to cover up that fact. Always speak the truth in a sarcastic tone of voice, and no one will ever find you out.”

 

“No one?”

 

“Except you, of course. I let my guard down with you. I’m letting my guard down now, or hadn’t you noticed? It came crashing down the moment I saw you in the pub. I should be busy breaking Simple Simon’s legs, or persuading him that I might if he doesn’t shape up, but I never had the heart for that kind of crap, and the moment I saw you ... well, here we are. This is a terrible cup of coffee. How can you drink it black like that?” He put the cup down and moved closer to her, pretending that he was just pointing at her coffee cup.

 

“Our tastes change as we mature,” she told him. She must have known that he wasn’t moving closer to point to her coffee cup, but just for a moment she hesitated about backing away. He took that as a green light, but when he reached out for her she froze. He’d gone too fast.

 

“No, Bru,” she said. “It’s nothing like that. It really was just curiosity.”

 

He didn’t believe her. He took hold of her anyway, hoping that it might be the kind of stall that could still be overridden, although he knew that the odds were against him, for the time being. He tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t be kissed. He held her more firmly, but when she stopped struggling it wasn’t surrender.

 

“You’d have to rape me,” she said. “I don’t think you want to do that, do you?”

 

He let go of her immediately. It certainly wasn’t what he wanted, and it definitely wasn’t his style.

 

“There’s nothing I have to offer you any more, I suppose?” he said, not intending it to sound as bitchy as it did. “Nothing you want in return?”

 

She didn’t look angry, but she didn’t look apologetic either. “This was a mistake,” she said. “It was silly.”

 

“Not that silly,” he assured her. “Whatever you were looking for back there, you were more likely to find in me than in those tattered slags you were talking to. You still are. What were you looking for? Not just something to relieve the boredom, surely.”

 

“No,” she said, positively. “Not just that. And you’re right—maybe I should have come looking for you in the first place. But it’s nothing to do with sex, Bru, nor with the stuff you peddle as synthetic happiness. It’s something else. You’d better go now.”

 

“Why?” he riposted. “Is it time for your boyfriend to come out of his coffin? Oh, sorry—home from work, I mean. What exactly is it that he does?” He was almost tempted to make a crack about the plasma in the fridge, but he knew better. One of his golden rules was never to tell people he knew they had secrets until he’d figured out what the secrets were.

 

“I wouldn’t like to keep you away from your own work for too long,” she countered. “All those haemorrhoid creams and heartburn tablets have to be kept pure, don’t they? And there’s always more happiness to cook up while the plant’s lying idle. You always were a busy man—that’s why your sex life consisted of brief encounters with cheap whores.”

 

The insults were too far out of date to hurt. The new generation of pharmaceuticals was way past the haemorrhoid and heartburn phase.

 

“I knew the acid wit was what you’d missed most,” he came back, as heroically as he could. “You obviously missed it so much you stole the recipe.”

 

He left after that—as politely as he could, given the circumstances.

 

It wasn’t easy to get the car out of the basement, but he managed it eventually. He drove it home, possessed all the while by an icy calm.

 

He was sure that he’d see her again, even though he’d made such an unholy mess of things. He’d memorized the number inscribed on the phone in her hallway, and he knew she’d probably be on her own during working hours. Next time, he’d have a script ready, and he’d make up all the ground he’d lost.

 

He had to; it was a matter of pride.

 

~ * ~

 

Brewer made no attempt to put the pills or the plasma into analysis while his lab assistants were still on site. Even Johanna wouldn’t have known what he was doing, or why, and she knew better than to ask, but it was his habit to be discreet and he needed the equipment in the main lab to get the job done quickly. Johanna and Leroy weren’t in the least surprised that he was still there when they completed the last of their own assignments a mere two hours into time-and-a-half and dropped the results on his desk. They thought of him, half-admiringly and half-pityingly, as a workaholic night-bird.

 

He bid them both a cheery goodbye, and switched on all the privacy screens as soon as they were clear of the building.

 

Once he’d got the first set of analyses started his curiosity faded away into the methodical routines. It wasn’t until he was certain that it was a very exotic protein that a certain excitement began to force its way through his controlled state of mind. All proteins in the public domain were intrinsically boring; these days, one had to go a long way out of that domain to find anything really weird. This one was from way back in the wilderness.

 

When the first sample had cleared the initial stage of analysis he set the replicated samples of the second compound going, but he held off on the plasma lest he get into a tangle. The first rule of good lab practice was to take things in order.

 

As soon as Brewer had an amino-acid map of the first compound, and while he was still waiting for its 3-D configuration, he checked the newest edition of the encyclopedia. He knew that the unknown wouldn’t be on file—these days, nobody ever filed anything until they were sure it was worthless, and that usually took a long time—but he expected the book to throw up a few probable template-molecules based on common base-clusters. Practically all novel proteins were designed by computer programs which tried to juggle known activity-sites into more interesting or more economical configurations, so it was usually possible to guess what kind of base an innovation had started from and what kind of effect the designer might be trying to enhance.

 

It didn’t take him long to figure out that he wasn’t dealing with any of his usual fields. Whatever pill number one was supposed to do it hadn’t any obvious potential to mimic or interact with neurotransmitters or amygdalar encephalins. Nor had it any detectable kinship with the currently favoured avenues of research into cell-repair and tissue-rejuvenation. That probably meant that it had nothing to do with Jenny’s new look—but if it had, then it really must be something odd, something unexpected.

 

It didn’t take long to find out that the same was true of type two—by which time Brewer’s instincts were beginning to detect a suspiciously natural ambience.

 

Brewer was not at all enthused by the thought that the samples might be nothing more than lumps of raw-material churned out by DNA of unknown function that had been cloned from some obscure plant or bacterium in the faint hope that it might turn out to be interesting. Computerized design hadn’t quite driven the old pick-and-mix methods to extinction and there wasn’t a nation in the world that didn’t have its own mock-patriotic Ark project dedicated to gene-banking as many local species as could be identified, in the faint hope of preserving data that would otherwise be lost to the attrition of routine extinction.

 

The trouble with natural proteins, of course, was that they might be geared to functions which had no relevance at all to human beings, slotted into biochemical systems which had long been discarded by the higher animals—or, indeed, all animals of whatever height. The majority of exotic natural proteins sufficiently stable to be incorporated into pills were structural materials devoid of any real physiological significance. Brewer tried to console himself with the thought that nobody would keep those kinds of samples in his bathroom cabinet, but it wasn’t until he had the 3-D configurations, and could trace the pattern of active sites, that he became morally certain that he wasn’t dealing with any mere building-blocks for fibres or cell walls.

 

Unfortunately, it still wasn’t clear exactly what the relevant physiological activity might be. The proteins certainly weren’t psychotropics, and if they were cosmetics of some kind they were no common-or-garden patent-avoiders.

 

When he decided that it was time he put the plasma-like stuff into the system he had been studying his screen intently for at least twenty minutes, virtually oblivious to his surroundings. While he reached out to pick up the specimen bottle containing the straw-coloured liquid his eyes still lingered on the screen. It wasn’t until his groping hand failed to make contact with the bottle that he looked sideways, and then up.

 

There was no way to tell how long the invader had been standing there, not six feet away, watching him. Brewer had never been so startled in all his life—but he had never before been confronted by anything so nearly impossible. His electronic defences were, as he had assured Jenny, glorious in their subtlety. How glorious, therefore, must be the subtlety of the man who now stood before him, having hacked his way through the undergrowth of passwords and booby-traps?

 

There was nothing particularly striking about the invader himself, apart from his lustrously pale skin, his remarkably dark eyes and his astonishing aptitude for silence. He didn’t seem unusually menacing, although there was a peculiar glint in his near-black eyes which suggested that he might become menacing if crossed.

 

Brewer desperately wanted to say something that would save a little face, but he just wasn’t up to it. All he said, in the end, was: “Who the hell are you?” He was uncomfortably aware of the fact that it was a very tired cliche.

 

“You’ve seen me before, Mr Brewer,” the unwelcome visitor told him. “Several times, in fact.” He had a slight accent of some kind but it wasn’t readily identifiable.

 

Brewer stared hard at the invader’s face, certain that he would have remembered those coal-black eyes and that remarkable complexion. He had method enough left in him to realize that if that were so, those were exactly the features he must set aside, in order to concentrate on the rest. When he did that, he got a dim impression of where he had seen the man—but, not, alas, the least flicker of a name.

 

On the other hand, Brewer realized, given what he was doing and the way his uninvited guest had taken the trouble to sit around and wait for him to look up, there couldn’t be much doubt about the invader’s purpose in coming to call.

 

“Jenny said we had interests in common,” he said, knowing that there was far too much lost ground to catch up but feeling that he had to try. “You see so many people, though—all those seminars, all those cunningly contrived meetings where clients try to whip up competition in order to drive the tenders down. We were never formally introduced, were we? Funny how we can have so many mutual acquaintances, and not know one another at all.”

 

“I know you very well,” the stranger said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, one way and another.” There was suddenly something about his eyes that seemed profoundly unsettling, but there was as much sadness in it as threat.

 

Brewer, desperate to know exactly how much trouble he was in, tried to fathom the significance of one way and another. One way was obviously Jenny—but who was the other? The people Brewer met at conferences and the people he met in the course of his legitimate business had little or nothing to tell. He put two and two together and hoped he wasn’t making five.

 

“You’re the guy who’s been taking over my runners, aren’t you?” Brewer said, “Jenny put you on to them—to Simon and the others. Is that what she was doing in the Goat and Compasses today? Making deliveries?”

 

The stranger shook his head. “She doesn’t make deliveries,” he said. “She has nothing to do with that aspect of the business at all—except, of course, that she did give me the information which allowed me to make contact with some of your agents. I only needed a handful of names; the rest I did myself.”

 

“Did she tell you where to find me?” Brewer asked, warily. He wondered whether the accent might be German, or maybe Serbian.

 

The stranger shook his head. “That was Simon,” he said. “You embarrassed him. He told me you were after me—and why you suddenly stopped asking questions. Jenny doesn’t know that I know you were at the flat, any more than she knows about the things you took. It was careless of me to leave them lying around, but I simply didn’t realize that you might be able to walk through my security systems as easily as I could walk through yours.”

 

That was a scoring point; without Jenny’s help, Brewer would never have been able to worm his way into the stranger’s flat, and they both knew it.

 

“Fate seems to have been determined to throw us together,” Brewer observed. “Did you pick up my ex-girlfriend solely in order to find out about my distribution system, or did she just happen to give you the idea of making a little extra money that way?”

 

“What do you make of the proteins?” the other asked, pointedly ignoring the question. “How much have you figured out?”

 

What Brewer had figured out was that the one advantage left to him might well be that the other man couldn’t possibly know how little he knew, so he wasn’t about to tell him.

 

“Jenny’s looking very well,” Brewer commented, instead. “Rather better than you are, I think—which presumably means that you’re testing your freshly-hatched miracles on her before applying them to yourself. Sensible enough, I suppose, but not entirely sporting. No wonder Simon thinks you’re a creep. You’ll want to do a few more runs before you’re certain, of course. Better safe than sorry.” That was the best he could do without admitting that he hadn’t a clue what the proteins were for, or where they might have come from.

 

“We’re not enemies, Mr Brewer,” said the man with the disturbing eyes. “We’re not even rivals—not really.”

 

Brewer didn’t understand that move either. Was the stranger trying to make a deal? If so, he thought, the best thing to do was play along with it. “Sure,” he replied. “We’re both on the same side: the side of the psychotropic revolution. Marked down by destiny to be the midwives of the Ubermenschen.”

 

“Jenny told me all about that,” the stranger admitted. “She told me that you were sincere but I wasn’t convinced.”

 

“Is that why you’re here—to be convinced?” Brewer couldn’t believe it was as simple as that.

 

“Not exactly,” said the dark-eyed man. “I came out of curiosity. While I’m here, though, I suppose I ought to recover the things you stole, and obliterate all the records of your analyses.” He stressed the word all very faintly, perhaps to remind Brewer that memories were records too.

 

“I can understand that,” Brewer said. “I’m irredeemably curious myself.”

 

The stranger hesitated, as if he were hovering on the brink of some make-or-break decision. Then, making up his mind, he set the specimen bottle down on the bench beside him and took something out of his pocket.

 

Brewer recognized the device immediately. It was a sterile pack containing a disposable drug-delivery device: what the tabloids had taken to calling a “smart syringe” since it had become the darling of all the hardcore mainliners. The instrument wasn’t so very smart, but it was subtle; its bioconductors could deliver drugs to underlying tissues without ripping up the superficial tissues. Deeper probes did tend to break a few capillaries, but they only left a little round mark like a bruise—or a lovebite.

 

“Need a fix?” Brewer asked, uneasily.

 

With a dexterity that might have been admirable in other circumstances the stranger took the cap off the specimen bottle one-handed and carefully transferred the fluid to the barrel of the device.

 

“Keep your hands on the bench,” the stranger instructed him.

 

Brewer instantly raised his hands from the bench and came to his feet. He wasn’t being stubborn or heroic—it was just a reflex, animated by fear. He swung his fist, the way he’d seen a hundred men actors swing theirs in a hundred action-movies.

 

The dark-eyed man pivoted on his heel, and moved so fast that Brewer couldn’t keep track of him. It might have been the blindness of Brewer’s panic, but the speed of the man seemed supernatural. Brewer found himself reeling backwards, clutching his stomach. It hurt horribly, but he hadn’t yet had the wind knocked out of him and he was able to lunge forward again, as if to tackle the other around the knees.

 

The second assault was no more effective than the first. The unseen blow to his head hurt even worse than the smack in the belly. It didn’t leave Brewer unconscious, but it knocked him down and it knocked him silly. He was on all fours, wondering whether he could get up again, when he felt a foot in the small of his back, forcing him further down. He pressed upwards against the force, but he couldn’t resist it. Once he was flat on the ground, with an irresistible weight bearing down on him, he felt the pressure-pad of the smart syringe at his neck.

 

The contact lasted at least twenty seconds, but there was nothing Brewer could do to break it. It didn’t hurt—that, after all, was the whole point of smart syringes.

 

Brewer was slightly surprised that he was still conscious when the instrument was withdrawn, although there was no earthly reason to suppose that the straw-coloured liquid might have been an anaesthetic. By the time the weight was removed from his back the pain in his head was easily bearable, but he still felt nauseous. He thought it best to stay down until he was sure he could stand up straight. He was dimly conscious of the dark-eyed man moving to the bench where the pills were.

 

Eventually, he picked himself up, and met the stare of those remarkable eyes. “Thanks,” he said, putting on the bravest face he could. “I thought I’d lost my chance to analyse the stuff.”

 

“You’ve got every chance,” the dark-eyed man assured him. “But there really isn’t any hurry. Not now. You know where to find me when you’re fully prepared for a rational discussion.”

 

Having said that, the stranger simply turned away, walked to the door of the lab, and went out. It shouldn’t have been easy to exit the building without the proper codes, but Brewer didn’t suppose the unwelcome visitor would get into any difficulties.

 

A quick check told him that the remaining pills were gone and that the data displayed on his screen had all been dumped. It wasn’t a thorough job, though; he probably had enough traces left in the equipment to do another run, and he ought to be able to recover the ghosted data from the hard disk. The dark-eyed man didn’t seem to care what Brewer had found out, or what he still might find out. Brewer wondered exactly what the mysterious stranger had meant by “fully prepared”. It couldn’t be a simple matter of attitude.

 

Brewer used an ordinary hypodermic to extract some blood from the discoloured patch at the side of his neck, but he didn’t start any kind of immediate analysis; he stuck it in the refrigerator and hurried out into the night. He didn’t stop until he reached a payphone.

 

He used a generic phonecard of the kind anyone could buy at the checkout in any supermarket but he was careful to route the call through Talinn; the people whose help he needed preferred to deal with careful customers.

 

~ * ~

 

It was so late by the time Brewer got back on the road that Simple Simon was at home, sleeping the sleep of the unintimidated. Unsurprisingly, he was alone. His door had three good locks on it and his window had two, but the glass was so old it hadn’t been proofed against solvents, so Brewer was able to get in without disturbing his host and conduct a rapid but thorough search.

 

He found Simon’s supply easily enough, buried beneath the youth’s collection of business cards. It was a collection like any other; Simon stripped telephone booths the way younger kids stripped foreign stamps from used envelopes. Brewer pocketed all but a few of the pills. Then he positioned himself by the side of Simon’s bed.

 

He filled a common-or-garden hypodermic syringe that he hadn’t bothered to sterilize, and pressed it suggestively to Simon’s throat while switching on the bedside lamp. He wished that he’d made more effort to cultivate the expertise of intimidation. No matter how hard one tried to be businesslike, it seemed, there was something about the drug business that resisted rational reform.

 

“Don’t jump, Simon,” he advised, as the boy’s eyes flew open. “Quite apart from the fact that you’d impale your Adam’s apple, you’d get a shot of something very nasty indeed.”

 

Simon spluttered and twitched a bit, but he got the message.

 

“What is this?” he complained.

 

“Tell me about Jenny’s boyfriend, Simon,” Brewer said. “Tell me everything you know, and tell it fast.”

 

“What’s in the syringe?” Simon wanted to know.

 

“Just something to set your nerves jangling. It won’t do any permanent damage, but it’ll make every kind of sensory experience excruciatingly painful for at least twenty-four hours. If you don’t want to live through the most godawful day imaginable, tell me about the guy who’s fitting you out with your new supplies. Tell me everything, and pray that it might be enough.”

 

Simon had been about to protest that he didn’t know anything at all but he changed his mind. “He’s a chemist, just like you,” he said, as if that might make the news more welcome. “Analyses stuff for the government, or anybody else who pays ... he says his name’s Anthony Marklow, but I don’t think he’s even English. His stuff’s not better, just different. I’m not about to stop using yours, believe me. It’s just...”

 

“Marklow, Simon. Tell me about Marklow. What’s Jenny been doing for him? Is she selling stuff to the whores—or giving it away? What is it?”

 

“I don’t know! What’s the matter with you? What was all that stuff about not being a gangster, hey? What was all that stuff about room for everybody in a boom market?”

 

“This isn’t about economic competition, Simon. It’s about something more serious. Marklow’s not just hawking happy pills. He’s doing something else, and I need to know what it is. Now, Simon. What’s he doing as well as cutting into my trade?”

 

“How the fuck should I know?” the youth wailed, with patent sincerity. “I just... you’ll have to ask the girls. Jenny talks to the girls, not to me. If she gives them something, they sure as hell don’t tell me.”

 

With the forefinger of his free hand Brewer pulled his collar down and pointed to the side of his neck, where there was a blue mark that would soon turn purple, and then brown. Simon’s frightened eyes followed the gesture with mesmeric concentration.

 

“Have you seen anyone sporting marks like this?” Brewer asked.

 

“Sure,” Simon told him. “I thought it was funny—the doc doesn’t usually shoot stuff into a person’s neck, and you wouldn’t think the girls would do it to themselves. Why ... ?” He stopped, evidently wondering how the mark on Brewer’s neck had got there but not daring to ask.

 

“How many?” Brewer wanted to know.

 

“I’ve seen three,” Simon said, implying that there might be dozens or hundreds more. “Why the neck?”

 

“Maybe he doesn’t have time to get them to roll their sleeves up,” Brewer replied, drawing the point of the syringe an inch or two away from Simon’s throat. A more likely explanation was that the target was the carotid artery, which would feed the drug straight into the brain—except that his brain still seemed to be working normally. He wasn’t high and he wasn’t dopey; whatever had been shot into his flesh hadn’t been a psychotropic. Maybe the hit had been aimed at one of the brain’s associated bodies. If so, the pituitary had to be the favourite with the pineal close behind. The pituitary was the master gland, the dispatcher controlling the hormonal couriers which kept the body in order. The pineal still carried an aura of Cartesian mystery that had intrigued a legion of modern investigators.

 

Simon freed one of his naked arms from the duvet and reached out to push Brewer’s hypodermic even further away. Brewer let him do it; if the boy had known anything more about Marklow he’d have spilled it.

 

“How long has Jenny looked the way she does now?” Brewer asked.

 

“Don’t know,” Simon replied, yet again. “She started coming around three, maybe four months ago. Every three weeks or so. Like I say, she doesn’t talk to me. Just to the girls. I didn’t know she was with the creepy guy, at first. I saw him pick her up one night. I’ve seen them together a couple of times since, always after dark. I thought...” He trailed off, as if no longer certain of what he had thought.

 

“Why creepy, Simon? What’s so creepy about him?” Brewer realized as he posed the question that it might be important. “Creepy” wasn’t the kind of word people like Simon usually bandied about; it was a whole generation out of date.

 

“Short for creepy-crawly,” Simon said. “It’s those eyes—the way they can make you feel, like spiders running down your spine. He makes out he’s being generous—free samples, nice prices—but there’s something behind it all. Not exactly a threat, not like you’d better deal or else... more like I know you better than you know yourself. What would you call him?”

 

Brewer thought about the impossibly dark, impossibly empty but unsettling eyes. “I don’t know,” he confessed. He thought about Jenny’s miraculously blue eyes and marvellously clear skin, and added: “Whatever he’s come up with, it cuts deeper than happy pills or dream machines.”

 

“I could try to get some for you,” Simon said. He was obviously anxious to make up for petty treasons past now that he knew what Brewer was capable of, violence-wise.

 

“You’re too late,” Brewer told him, grimly. “I already got my free sample.” He went to the drawer where Simon kept his collection and grabbed a handful of the advertising cards. He threw them at Simon, then went back for a second handful.

 

“I want a number, Simon,” he said. “I want to meet a girl with a bruise just like mine but older—a lot older.”

 

Simon was about to protest that he hadn’t any idea which girl went with which card, but he thought better of it. He was a dedicated hobbyist, after all; he had a collector’s pride. It took him a couple of minutes, but he found what he was looking for. Brewer took it.

 

“You’d better get that great gaping hole in your window fixed,” Brewer told the boy. “There’s a terrible draught in here.”

 

~ * ~

 

When his staff turned up the following morning Brewer told them to drop everything else and concentrate on a rush job. They didn’t ask any questions; they would assume that it was an industrial espionage job beyond the pale of legality but it wasn’t the first time they’d done that kind of work and it wouldn’t be the last. They went to it with a will; it was a welcome break from the usual routine.

 

It only took Brewer fifteen minutes to recover the data Jenny’s boyfriend had erased. As soon as he had it he passed it on to Johanna. “If you can figure out what they’re for,” he said. “You win a nice prize. You won’t find anything like them in the patent files, but there has to be something, somewhere, which will give us a clue. A protein is a protein is a protein.”

 

“Any clues?” Johanna asked.

 

“They might be something to do with tissue rejuvenation, but not in any of the conventional approaches.”

 

She raised her eyebrows at that and glanced at the little bladder-packs on his desk, which were full of rich red blood. He nodded. “Same sort of filing,” he said. “Field tests are already under way. That’s why we have a lot of catching up to do. The compounds you’re looking at are probably supportive; I’m going after the chap they support.”

 

That was another clue and she acknowledged it with a nod. She knew that a “chap”, in this context, was probably a virus vector—something that had to be kept in a suspension containing living tissue.

 

If Johanna saw the mark on Brewer’s neck she didn’t give it a second glance; she probably thought he’d spent the night with a girl. He had, of course, spent the last few hours of darkness with a sleepy whore, but she hadn’t been in the least amorous. She’d been very expensive, but not by virtue of her business acumen; her reluctance to talk had been perfectly genuine—but she was, after all, a whore. It had only been a matter of fixing the right price.

 

The whore hadn’t known Marklow’s name. She’d only seen him three times. He’d been very polite, she said, but there was something about those eyes—as if they could look right into you and see the blood coursing through your veins. Jenny had persuaded her to take part in the “secret experiment”, using her own improved appearance as a lure. The drug had been pitched to her as a cosmetic treatment, not as any kind of elixir of life: plastic surgery without the knife.

 

“A couple of days after the first shot I got itchy,” the whore had told him. “Jenny told me to expect that, and not to scratch, but I couldn’t help scratching a bit. It keeps coming back, especially on sunny days, and I have to wear sunglasses all day except when it’s cloudy, but I’ve got more used to it and the pills help. I feel a bit nauseous too, mostly in the mornings—like I was pregnant. Lost weight nice and steady, but that’s partly the high-protein diet. I don’t mind the itching, really—it’s like I can feel it working. It is working.”

 

“Nothing else?” Brewer had asked, insistently.

 

“Only the dreams,” she told him. “Jenny warned me about those, too, but I like them. They’re fun.”

 

“What kind of dreams?”

 

“Vampire dreams. Nightmares, some might say, but they don’t scare me.”

 

“Vampire dreams? What’s that supposed to mean?” Somehow, he’d wished he could be more surprised by the introduction of that word.

 

“Sometimes, I dream I’m a bat—well, not a bat, exactly, but something like a bat. Flying by night, seeing but not seeing. Other times, I’m more like a wolf. You should see the moon! Huge and red as blood. It’s great. The hunt, the kill, lapping up the blood. If that’s how animals feel, I want to come back as a lion. Jenny says it’s just the diet, but I reckon it’s memories of other lives coming to the surface. Why else would we all have the same dreams? These shrinks who take you back to Roman times and ancient Egypt are full of crap. We were animals for billions of years, you know, before we ever became human. Race memory, isn’t that what they call it?”

 

Brewer hadn’t bothered to inform her that neither bats nor wolves were numbered among the human race’s remoter ancestors. He had agreed with her that shrinks practising past-life regression were full of crap, but hadn’t added that in his opinion her own theory was by no means empty of it. He’d been too busy thinking about the dreams. They were the oddest thing of all—and thus, perhaps, the most significant. He remembered the haunted look in Jenny’s blue eyes. One reason why she’d taken him home was to make him see how well she’d done since he dumped her, but there had been another. Whatever had been done to her had made her anxious, and a little bit lonely.

 

Was that, he wondered, the effect of her vampire dreams?

 

Brewer hadn’t felt any itching yet, but he wasn’t in any hurry and he didn’t intend to go out in daylight until he had the problem cracked, at least insofar as it could be cracked by the equipment in the lab. Nor was he intending to sleep, let alone to dream. He was a chemist, after all; he had ways of avoiding the need for sleep at least for a couple of days.

 

He knew that he couldn’t go back to Andrew Marklow without a deal to make, and he wasn’t sure yet what kind of deal there was to be made. A promise of silence wasn’t enough, for him or for Marklow. Marklow wasn’t afraid that he’d go to the authorities—and not just because he figured Brewer couldn’t do that without imperilling his own illicit operation. Marklow wasn’t afraid, period. Brewer admired that, but it also made him anxious. Despite his chemical expertise, he’d never come close to mastering the art of not being afraid.

 

As things turned out, it didn’t take a genius to locate the stranger in the blood samples. The “chap” wasn’t a virus at all; he was something much bigger. If he’d had a cell wall he’d have qualified as a bog-standard bacterium but he didn’t. The only label Brewer knew that might apply to him was rickettsia.

 

The only rickettsia Brewer knew, even by repute, was the one which caused Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but when he went to the on-line encyclopedia he found that there were a hundred more on record—none of which bore any very intimate resemblance to the one that had now taken up residence somewhere in the vicinity of his brain, and was presumably reproducing like crazy as well as retuning his endocrinal orchestra.

 

There were, Brewer noted, two significant properties that rickettsias had. Having no cell walls, they were immune to antibiotics. By the same token, however, they were very difficult to transfer from host to host. That was why Rocky Mountain spotted fever, although incurable, hadn’t ever managed to cause an epidemic. People who caught it had it for life—which hadn’t been very long in the days before doctors developed palliatives for the nastier symptoms—but they didn’t usually pass it on to others. Even their spouses weren’t significantly endangered; it wasn’t an STD. Theory said you could only get infected through a open cut—or, of course, a hypodermic syringe, dumb or smart.

 

Brewer hesitated for a few minutes before giving the information he had gleaned to Johanna and Leroy, but he figured that the time for keeping things strictly to himself was past. Until he had been infected himself there’d been no urgency at all. Now that he had found out that what he had was exactly the same as what the whore had—and presumably, therefore, exactly what Jenny had—the urgency was somewhat less than it might have been, but time was still pressing. He needed all the reliable help he could get.

 

“If you want a DNA-profile of something that big,” Johanna pointed out, “it’ll take us weeks. Maybe months. Even if it’s a variant of one of the recorded species we’d have to start from scratch. Nobody’s ever sequenced a rickettsia—or if they have, they haven’t published. Do you think the pill-proteins are products of the rickettsial genes?”

 

“No,” said Brewer. “I suspect that the pill-proteins are meant to alleviate some of the symptoms of the rickettsial infection.” If that was true, it wasn’t good news. It meant that he needed the pills himself if he were to enjoy the benign effects of his minuscule passengers without suffering the downside of their presence in his system.

 

“Infection?” Johanna echoed, anxiously. It was one of the words that always sounded alarm bells in a lab like this, even when nothing was cooking but everyday commercial products sent for routine checking.

 

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “You can only catch it through an open cut, and it’s difficult even then. This one’s supposed to be benign, but there has to be a catch.”

 

“There’s a catch all right,” she said—but she was only talking about the ‘98 protocols regarding the legality of engineering human-infective agents. Nobody expected them to hold, even in the medium term. Everybody in the business knew someone, somewhere, who was working in the confident expectation that the new millennium would bring in a whole new set of rules and regulations, elastic enough to license anything provided only that it were done discreetly. Andrew Marklow might be ahead of his time, but not that far ahead of it.

 

The only problem, Brewer thought, was that breaking into other people’s labs and shooting human-infective agents into their carotid arteries couldn’t meet anyone’s definition of “discretion”.

 

“I don’t need a gene map,” he told Johanna. “I just need everything we can get before nightfall.”

 

“What happens at nightfall?” she asked.

 

“I have to see a man about a disease,” he replied, as the phone at his elbow began to ring. He picked it up immediately, but it was only a message telling him where to go to collect a message from Talinn.

 

~ * ~

 

It was Jenny who answered when Brewer presented himself at the door of Marklow’s building, and Jenny who came to the apartment door when he’d negotiated his way through the various layers of security. The first thing she said to him was: “You’re a thief.”

 

“And you’re a whore,” he said, “but we’ve both been taken for a ride. Your boyfriend always knew I’d come looking for him. He didn’t move in on my operation to make a little extra money; he did it to attract my attention.”

 

“Don’t flatter yourself, Bru,” she replied—but he wasn’t flattering himself. He knew that he’d already been pencilled in for recruitment when Jenny’s urge to show off and rub his nose in what he’d lost had kicked things off prematurely. Sooner or later, he’d have been invited up here, and presented with a offer he couldn’t refuse.

 

The man who called himself Anthony Marklow was standing by the window looking out over the river. He didn’t offer to shake hands and he didn’t offer Brewer a drink. Nor did Jenny; she just went to the sofa and threw herself down in an exaggeratedly careless manner she’d probably borrowed from some American super-soap. Brewer remained standing, so that he could meet Count Dracula face to face.

 

Brewer was reasonably certain by now that Marklow was Count Dracula—maybe not literally, but as near as made no difference. His friendly neighbourhood hackers hadn’t managed to prove the case—in fact, they’d been so embarrassed about their failure to come up with anything concrete regarding Marklow’s true identity that they’d forsaken half their fee, which had only left them enough stuff to stay high till 2020—but the void of information they’d exposed was far too deep to be any mere accident. The fact that computers had only been around for a couple of generations meant that, in theory, the early history of anyone over fifty could be utterly untraceable, but the absence of anyone behind the Marklow mask was far more pronounced than that.

 

“You said that you weren’t convinced when Jenny told you I was serious about the genetic revolution,” Brewer said, when the other transfixed him with those dark persuasive eyes, “but you did want to be convinced, didn’t you?”

 

“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 rickettsia 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. First, 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 practising instinctive behaviours 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 behaviour 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 rumours to the contrary, but our rumours 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 temptation to feign misunderstanding. “I guess a cohort of whores is about as congenial as 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 Marlow 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 sabre-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 Ubermenschen, 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 signalled 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 tranquillizer-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 colour, 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.

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

~ * ~