“You grew up with television, Flynn,” she’d snarled at him, once, when his various inanities finally grew too immediate to ignore. “You grew up with indoor heating, refrigeration, medical care, the Bomb. When I was alive, there weren’t even roads. I went barefoot for seventeen years. Couldn’t read. Didn’t know there were continents. I wanted to take a crap, I’d up my skirts and squat in the streets. I never saw myself in a mirror, ‘till after I was already dead.”
And Flynn had nodded, lip pooched out, trying his level best to understand. Even though his best would never be good enough, no matter how much of his supposedly eternal life he spent trying to upgrade it.
But: That look, or its near cousin. The new note peeling away in a repressed, teeth-grinding growl, like old skin shedding. Eudo, struggling for control he’d lost long before this conversation started—but soldiering gamely on, nevertheless. As though he still had . . . faith . . . that he could eventually make her see things his way.
“If you threaten everything we’ve struggled so long to build, the Clave will be forced to intervene. Your cadre will suffer—not that you care, I suppose. But you . . . ” A pause. “They can have you exiled. Or even killed.”
A shrug. “They can try.”
Eudo stared down, studying the floor. Then said, quieter:
“I loved you, Elder. Does that mean nothing?”
To which Elder laughed out loud, right in his downcast face. And returned, with total simplicity—
“Doesn’t it?”
* * *
Poor Eudo, still mourning the cold and sudden undeath of his long-lost dream-dolly. Because it had all been just so much easier, back then, hadn’t it? So much more . . . fun.
Though—not quite for both of them, as Elder recalled.
(But then again, she certainly did still like to play with her toys, whenever there was nothing better to do.)
Still, it was only natural—as natural as anything vampiric could claim itself: Time-tested, the proven formula. Youngling to ancient, they’d all been in the same position, once or twice upon an age. Eudo too. Someone had probably dressed him up, steered him ‘round, told him where to go and made him say thank you for the privilege; back before the Crusades, before the Flood. Perhaps he’d “loved” that person, too. Or told himself he did.
Always assuming, that was—
—he’d actually had any choice in the matter.
Truth was, though . . . the truth was, this had been what Eudo had seen in her eyes, that day. The prescient shadow of this same impossible ambition glowing like lingering atomic residue, like a skeleton of dead light. Stars in her eyes, deep-buried, waiting to burn up and flare anew.
And wondering, at the same time—was it really so very hard to understand, the idea that she just wanted to go as far as she could possibly go? To pit herself against the void like an exercise in sheer willpower, the same way that all these dead bodies around her kept on acting as though they were still alive: Dancing, flirting, fucking, killing, just because they wanted to. Because . . . they could.
Hunger, after all, could only take you so far, no further. And there were so many appetites to choose from, once you allowed yourself to think outside the biosphere’s blue and fragile box—hungers which might prove to extend far beyond the agreed-upon version of reality, beyond the basic reach of flesh and blood itself.
Things were born in chaos, and they ended in chaos. And the only thing between chaos and chaos was velocity. So the only reason to go backwards, in Elder’s eyes—
—was because you’d already reached the end.
Of everything.
* * *
Fast-forward: Fast, faster, fastest. And then it was 2020 or thereabouts, yet more years having passed the same way they always did, quick as insects—hatching and molting, metamorphosing, mating and laying and dying in a single blink of that long-ago swollen Malibu moon. Three o’clock A.M. in what still stood of anti-pollution activist-bombed downtown Toronto, with Ulrike, Flynn and Elder marching straight into the fabled silk-hung heart of the Empress’ Noodle house itself, where Grandmother Yau Yan-er was rumored to be hosting a members-only Clave meeting somewhere upstairs. But since her restaurant had been traditionally recognized as neutral ground since the turn of the (last) century, the Dragon-born Lady could well afford to do exactly what she obviously chose to, instead: Make herself conspicuous by her absence, lurking in the opium-scented shadows with her thousand-year-old hands deep inside her brocade sleeves, while Elder used the quote-unquote “anonymous” invitation she’d received earlier that evening—a strangely familiar Mandarin chop, imprinted in scrupulously virus-clean blood on a gil
t-edged piece of silk-thread parchment—to get by that persistent knot of ghosts guarding the banquet room’s lacquer-red front door.
The sound of her cane against the inlaid parquet floor caught Eudo in mid-rant; he turned, wholly taken aback by such effrontery. Projecting, even from this distance—
Iesu Christo, these AMERICANS. So uncompromising. So insolent. So damned, damnably . . . proactive.
Yeah, well. Welcome to the New World, Fossil-Man.
To Elder’s own mild surprise, fifteen years of monitoring and vague, threat-laden menace had elapsed before Eudo’s Familiars finally took direct action. They’d started at the top, naturally enough; begun with Darnell, oldest of her NASA moles, whose ashes were (even now) blowing free in the lingering compression vortex created when his lab had gone up in smoke. But the rest of the team had already scattered according to drill, vowing to join Elder later—assuming, always, that she actually survived this meeting—at their alternate launch-site. A resentful bunch even by most vampire youngling standards, though gradually won over by the one-two combination suckerpunch of Darnell’s infectious enthusiasm and Elder’s undeniable logic: Having a “live” viewer on board the probe would be invaluable, in terms of potential information-gathering . . . especially one for whom the idea of a life-support system, under most circumstances, was a strictly optional luxury.
Flynn took west flank position, Ulrike the east. Elder leant on her cane between them, smiling a bit at the thought of how the red-tinged light of the paper lanterns must be making interesting patterns on her sleek, bald, shaved-for-liftoff scalp.