In the end, she said, “Well, Delilah could wrap Samson around her little finger, why shouldn’t I boss a vampire around?”
That almost set them off again, but Titus sobered. “Inea, I had no intention of taking your blood-or anyone else’s. I’ve been well-fed, compared to Abbot. I’ll be all right until my supplies arrive.”
“There’s no way to know how long that’ll be. You’ll have to take some blood. What had you planned to do?”
He thrust himself out of the chair and caught himself against the edge of the sink, wanting to run, wanting to accept, and wanting to appear in perfect command. The truth was like bile in his mouth. “I didn’t think about how I’d survive.”
He turned to watch the bewildered shock flicker across her features. “Inea, you’re going to have to grasp something else that may be even harder than the idea that Abbot has the right, under luren Law, to kill Mirelle. I will not take the living blood of a human. I don’t want it.”
“That’s not true. I’ve seen the look in your eyes, over a bleeding wound.”
“So? I’m mortal. I’m subject to temptation. I thought Id explained this before. Haven’t you grasped yet what it is that deters me when I am tempted?”
“How could I? I’m not even sure what’s so tempting. Cloned blood is genetically identical to real blood. If it’s infused with ectoplasm, it ought to be really identical. All this fuss makes me wonder if maybe there isn’t something-unique-in giving blood directly to a vampire. Maybe I’d enjoy it!”
He surged across the floor and plucked her out of the chair by the shoulders, shaking her. “Don’t you dare-!”
The hurt shock that flashed through her knifed across his anger and he froze, horrified at himself. He enfolded her in his arms, burying his face in her hair and rocking her back and forth as he moaned, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
How could he explain to her the ghastly trap he had dug himself out of when he’d left Abbot? He pushed her away, caught her eyes, and repeated what he’d told her so many times. “Inea, it’s addictive. I don’t know if I’d have the strength to break away again. I could do worse to you than Abbot has done to Mirelle and feel just as little remorse over it. I’ve done that, under Abbot’s direction. I lived that way, Inea, and I won’t go back to it. I won’t. Can you understand that?”
“You’re scared,” she said. “That I can understand. Maybe I’ll come to-”
The door signal interrupted her, and only then did Titus feel H’lim’s familiar presence. But not Abbot’s. Not the four guards. “Oh, my God!” He dashed to the door, flung it open, grabbed H’lim by the elbow and yanked him inside, shutting the door and leaning against it. It was the middle of the night for the station. Hall traffic was light, but not wholly absent.
“H’lim, you fool!” hissed Titus.
“I won’t stay long,” he answered with equanimity. From under his capacious lab coat he produced a fat Thermos. “I was trying to explain before you left, that I think I’ve got orl blood you can manage to take. Abbot can’t use it, but I talked him into accepting your gift.”
Titus let him shove the Thermos into his numb hands. What about your guards-the recorders? Carol will-“
“They’ll never know I was gone!”
“H’lim!”
“I’m going. Don’t worry.” With one hand on the door, he Paused to say over his shoulder, “I just wanted you to know, I’m around to count you Fourth Father. And I’ll be proud to introduce y to my First Father.”
Then he was gone.
Titus sank into a kitchen chair, his knees too weak to support him even in the lunar gravity. The Thermos clutched to his chest, he bowed his head over it and blinked away unaccountable tears. I must be as close to the edge as Abbot is.
Inea lifted the Thermos from his grasp. With her help, he choked down the alien substance and kept it down, and by morning, he had regained his equilibrium and soaked up some of Inea’s optimism and determination with her ectoplasm and her love.
Chapter twenty
Over the next few days, Titus survived on what H’lim provided, though he sometimes vomited up most of what he swallowed. Mirelle’s improvement was evidence that Abbot wasn’t at her again, not yet.
Abbot was as horrified as Titus that H’lim had eluded them and the guards to bring Titus blood. H’lim argued, “I made sure it was safe enough. Filial duty takes precedence.”
“You could have called me,” Titus repeated doggedly, and H’lim insisted Titus had even less business stalking the halls in such condition than H’lim had, and besides they couldn’t trust the monitored vidcom channels. For Titus it was a new experience, having someone worry about him. In the end, Titus understood that the restrictions were chafing on H’lim, and this had been his way of asserting himself as well as seeking that peculiar gratification Titus had discovered while providing for Abbot. And H’lim hadn’t been caught. He hadn’t made any of the mistakes he’d made the first time. He’d learned a lot about humans.
But after that, Titus, Abbot, and Inea clung closer to H’lim.
Inea, having fewer obligations than the department heads, had the longest duty hours alone with the alien. But he never gave any trouble. They seemed to be developing a kind of friendship as Inea became ever more fascinated with the evolution of the orl and luren.
During this time, two ships penetrated the blockade dropping bundles of supplies near the station. Soon the probe construction was resumed, and rations were increased, though there was no blood aboard for Titus. He understood security must be ferocious, and though his spirits sank, he didn’t blame Cofinie for the failure.
After that single W.S. triumph, the frenzy of the orbital clashes increased. Colby instituted a more vigorous regimen of decompression drills. At rumors that a blockader ship blown up in Earth atmosphere had been slated to bomb Project Station, she ordered more lower levels equipped as survival bunkers.
With the new hardware in place in the probe, programmers began installing the software, both guidance and message. They installed extra shielding on the assumption that the probe would launch through a dense veil of heavy particles. During this phase, Abbot spent much of his time at the probe hangar. When Titus planted one of Inea’s bugs on the vehicle, guards caught him loitering and Colby ordered him not to go out there after his targeting program was in place. “You’re too valuable to lose, and that hangar is the primary target on this station.”
With the installation of Titus’s program, his crew’s job was over. They were exhausted but still tense because they they could have done better, given time. Titus sent them to rest. “You’ve got to be back here on Launch Day, fresh and ready to work. We have to track the probe, probably without backup from Earth.” Every day, news came of another attack on W.S. orbital control installations and even University observatories.
Now it often fell to Titus to escort H’lim at meetings of the joint Cognitive Sciences and Telecom committee that was designing Earth’s message. And one thing stood out, even above the achievement of a broadcast signal intelligible across such a gulf of space and culture: H’lim was gradually winning the humans over. They had begun to trust him. And as that trust grew, the factionalism on the station precipitated by the war began to melt away. There was a feeling that only those on the station had any grasp of what was out there in the galaxy, and of how Earth could benefit from it all.
Titus’s distrust of H’lim, however, was not assuaged by seeing how he manipulated humans without even using Influence-or how he’d learned to do that in such a short time. One other thing bothered Titus: H’lim had no difficulty understanding the war. His strange, backhanded grasp of English never got in the way on that topic. He had the concepts down pat.