The screen glowed at me balefully. I shut my eyes. Nothing was happening. My body went on breathing quietly, waiting for me to ask it to do something. “What do I do?”
“If you hit next,” Aimil said, “you go to the next message.”
I opened my eyes long enough to find the NEXT button. I could look at the keyboard. I glanced at the screen. The words there wriggled. I didn’t like it but it didn’t say “vampire” to me either. I hit NEXT.
More wriggly words. Ugh. Nothing else though. I hit NEXT.
And the next NEXT.
There was an odd building-up of internal pressure that I couldn’t quite put down either to trying to look while not looking at a comscreen that was longing to give me a lightning-bolt-thunder-roll odin-bloody headache or to the knowledge that I was surrounded by SOFs avidly waiting for me to do something. Or that I was waiting to pop into Incredible Hulk mode and try to eat somebody. So I could guess that my shady rapport, affinity, Global Navigational Pinpoint Precision Positioning Device (patent pending), or whatever, was acknowledging the presence of vampires somewhere out there behind the screen, but—so?
Next. Next. Next. I was sweating.
I realized what the pressure was. Expectation. I was getting close.
Close to what?
Next.
HERE.
I snapped my eyes closed and flung myself back in the chair, which rolled several feet away from the desk till it hit the corner of a table pushed against the wall. An unhandily stacked heap of paper spilled off onto the floor with a swoosh.
I got up, shakily, keeping my eyes averted from the screen. I could feel the beating of the HERE. I turned my head back and forth as if I was standing in a field looking for a landmark. No. Not there. I moved round a quarter turn, and waited to reorient the HERE. No. I moved another quarter turn…almost. An eighth turn back. No. An eighth turn forward, then another eighth. Yes. HERE.
I raised an arm. “That way. Now turn whatever it is off, because it’s making me sick.”
Aimil dived for it, and the screen went blank.
I sat down.
“Well, well, well,” said Pat. The satisfaction in his voice made me suddenly very angry, but I felt too tired and sick to tell him so. I closed my eyes.
I opened them again a minute later. Steam from a cup of hot tea was caressing my face. I accepted the cup. Caffeine was my friend. I wasn’t sure if I had any other friends in that room or not.
The Special Other Forces exist to control, defeat, neutralize, or exterminate all Other threat to humans. That was easy and straightforward, and as a human it sounded—had sounded—pretty good to me, although at the same time I’d had a problem with the politics of anything Other denned as bad, which seemed to be the unofficial SOF motto. Now I was learning that in fact SOF was—apparently— full of partbloods, maybe fullbloods, and presumably Weres, and was clandestinely sympathetic to the registry dodgers.
It should have cheered me up. If I was a partblood myself, I was a partblood among partbloods. I should be eager to cooperate with my own little group of SOFs.
Who hated vampires. All vampires. By definition. Who hated and targeted vampires because they believed that vampires were not merely making everybody’s lives more dangerous, but their own lives harder, their lives as good, socially well-adjusted and well-disposed part-demons or demons, as Weres who only needed a night off once a month. If it wasn’t for vampires (so Pat’s theory went) the humans would probably repeal the laws that automatically prevented anyone with Other blood from enjoying full human rights.
The theory was probably right.
Not to mention the less-than-a-hundred-years-before-we-all-go-under-the-dark thing.
It wasn’t only that seeing in the dark creeped me out because it came from a vampire. It was that it made me permanently, relentlessly, continuously conscious of being connected to…vampireness.
I do not know what I have given you tonight. I do not know what you have given me.
I was aware of it standing motionless outdoors at noon on a sunny day. Even the absence of shadow is a kind of shadow. You may not know that but I do. I did now. I wondered if this was anything like the dare-I-say usual realization of partbloodedness: knowing that you are—and are not—human, but angrily, frustratedly believing that this didn’t make you any less of a…
A what, exactly? A human? A person? An individual? A rational creature?
Remind me that you are a rational creature.
I wished I could ask somebody. But nobody was part vampire, it wasn’t possible. Whatever I was, that wasn’t it. Was it. Was it?
Drink your tea, Sunshine, and stop thinking. Thinking is not your strong suit.
There was something else that was bothering me about all this, but I couldn’t get that far yet. I didn’t have to. Where I was was far enough to feel nomad about.
“Feeling better?” said Pat.
“No,” I said.
“Do you know what you were pointing at?”
“No,” I said. I looked up, along the line I had indicated, and thought about which way the SOF building lay and where I thought I was in it. I’d probably been pointing west, something like west. That wasn’t a big help; west was where all the deserted factories were, where the worst of the urban bad spots were. Nobody lived out that way now; as the population slowly began to recover from the Voodoo Wars, rather than trying to reclaim any of that area, new malls and office blocks and housing developments were going up in the south and east and—also avoiding the lake and its bad spots—curling around eventually (avoiding druggie nirvana) up to the north. The reason anybody was trying to salvage Chesterfield was because it was south. In twenty or thirty years we and the next town to the south, Piscataweh, would probably be one big city. Unless we all went under the dark early.
The western end of New Arcadia isn’t entirely deserted; it has some rather murky small businesses scattered around and some clubs the police keep closing down that open again a day or a week later. Sometimes they reopen briefly somewhere else, sometimes they don’t bother to pretend to move. It is the western end of town where gangs of mostly human, mostly teenage boys go to play chicken and look for vampires. It is also a popular area for squatters, although the attrition by death rate is pretty severe. A lot of the murky small businesses that manage to hold on there cater to squatters who can’t afford to pay for housing, but if they want to stay alive have to pay for some warding. There are two kinds of cheap wards: the ones that don’t work, and the ones that mess with what for want of a better phrase I’m going to call black magic. Which gives you the idea. The homeless are better off sleeping in the gutters in Old Town, but I admit that for Old Town’s sake it’s a good thing most of them don’t.
It didn’t take a combox or a kick in the head to tell anyone in New Arcadia that if they were looking for suckers to look west.
“I was pointing west,” I said grudgingly. “Big deal.”
“We don’t know if it’s a big deal yet or not,” said Pat reasonably. “We won’t know till we drive you out there.”
“No,” I said.
“It might be, for example,” Pat continued unfazed, “that it isn’t the west of New Arcadia at all; it could be somewhere a lot farther away—Springfield, Lucknow, Manchester.” Manchester had a rep as a vampire city. “The globenet is the globenet; you never know where a specific piece of cosmail has come from.”