Time's Dark Laughter Part 13

"What is it?" Ondine whispered to him.

"Nothing, I-just wanted a better view," Beauty whispered back. They got a cold look from the lady in the first row, and kept quiet again.

The singing stopped. Ugo stood beside the altar and said something to the Human, who turned his head wildly from side to side. Beauty relaxed a little now: he could see the man wasn't Joshua.

Suddenly Ugo plunged his razor-edged talons into the center of the Human's chest, and drew them haltingly down along the underside of the man's left fourth rib, opening his chest cavity like a ripe pod.

The man screamed and fainted, his breathing immediately becoming shallow. The children surrounded the altar. Ugo moaned in what looked to Beauty like an ecstasy of base desires, dipped his k.n.o.bbly hand into the Human's chest, then raised it slowly, the dying man's still-beating heart pumping desperately in the Vampire's palm.

Blood foamed over the lip of the thoracic cavity, although the heart still maintained connections to its major vessels. For some minutes, Ugo carried on what appeared to be a conversation with the valiantly contracting organ, then said a brief, reverent prayer, then bent down to take a large, ravenous bite from its meaty, pulsing apex. Blood rushed down his chin like a flood. The boy, Gol, took the next bite. Ugo and Gol took a succession of such mouthfuls, alternately, until they had eaten the entire heart. The bleeding stopped. No one moved. The ceremony was over.

Suddenly everyone was talking merrily-the children squealing and pus.h.i.+ng, the adults congratulating and toasting, the confirmation boy, flushed and triumphant, wriggling from under his father's hand so he could sneak off to play with his friends.

The sacrificial Human lay pale and gutted and still.

Beauty exited quietly with Ondine by the back door.

"Rousing service, don't you think?" Ondine smiled paternally as they walked back down the hallway.

"Quite," Beauty replied. He tried to say more, but couldn't.

"Come in, Sire. Osi-Sire is expecting you."

The ancient liveried butler showed Aba into Osi's suite and had him sit in a great, overstuffed chair. Behind him, in an alcove, a young girl played the zither-a quiet, cla.s.sical piece from the Orient. The lighting was amber, the time was evening. Osi glided in like a soft wind, draped in silks, smelling of perfume and tobacco and casein.

"Please, don't get up," he said touching Aba's shoulder, and lowered his ma.s.sive body into the chair opposite. He was wiping a blue stain from his hands with a chamois. "You must excuse me-I've been painting."

"Oh? What kind?" Aba asked.

Osi shrugged. "Just dabbling. Oils, for the most part." He dropped the blue-stained rag on the floor.

"I'd like to see one."

"Would you? Well, yes, in a bit, that would be nice. Something to drink, first, I think." He rang a crystal bell that sat on the marble table beside his chair, and almost immediately a naked boy-servant entered, carrying a tray with two gla.s.ses. He handed each Vampire a goblet, picked the crumpled paint rag off the floor, and left.

Aba sniffed the aroma of his drink: blood, brandy, and cinnamon, with a twist of orange peel.

Osi raised his gla.s.s. "To vein-glorious life," he toasted.

"Vein-glorious life." Aba lifted his gla.s.s in return.

They drank.

They ate a light dinner-raw lamb marinated in hemo-lyzed red blood cells, stripped veins in a delicate marrow-and-serum sauce-then retired to the study, where Osi's half-finished painting still rested in its easel. The picture portrayed a female Human weeping over the limp body of a man who was exsanguinating from a gash in his neck, their faces clouded by the shadow of a Vampire wing.

Aba was impressed. "You have a sensitive palette," he commented.

"I'm not insensitive to the implications of my existence-to the contradictions inherent in being 'civilized.'"

"They're contradictions that can be diminished, I think, by a truly civilized Vampire."

"Au contraire," Osi wagged his finger. "The more highly developed one's civilization-one's sense of civilization- the more acute these contradictions become . . . must become."

"How so?"

"When all Humans are consigned to being either the Queen's experimental subjects or Sired harem slaves, we will enter the period of our highest degree of civilization- yet the Human pain I tried to embody in my painting will a.s.sume its most concentrated form. The contradictions are not only obvious, they are inevitable."

'Then perhaps we should celebrate them," Aba replied.

"You're being sarcastic, but I forgive you. Sarcasm is the first step toward real introspection."

"Ah, the end of an evening is in sight when philosophy degenerates into aphorism."

"If it's degeneracy you perceive, it is-more correctly, right now-due to intellect, sodomized by digestion."

Aba laughed, strolled to the window, let his vision linger in the starry night outside. "Tell me, what is this new world your Queen is trying to create?"

"A world of peace and achievement, nothing less," said Osi. His voice grew quiet with feeling. "All Humans placed either hi harem or laboratory. All other animals kept in huge preserves where they can roam freely, without fear or constraint. The world culture a partners.h.i.+p between the clever, pa.s.sionless Neuroman and the wise yet sensual Vampire. A model world, by all accounts."

"It has a certain allure," Aba maintained. "Yet it is, at inception, coercive."

"And what is not coercive, Aba-Sire? Does not the sun coerce the Nightowl into hiding? Are we not merely giving direction and purpose to the coercion that is Nature's hand?"

Aba turned and looked into Osi's compelling eyes, trying to plumb their depths. "It's all very well to philosophize great issues. It's moment to moment that I have trouble reconciling. Sating l.u.s.ts I can't control, at the expense of lives I can't help but empathize with-"

"Sire Aba, you must never deny who you are. Accept your genetic imperative: Vampires need Humanoid blood to live. There is no shame hi ecology. We're all integral parts of the carbon cycle."

"Natural cycles and nutritional requirements do not give free license. We should be creatures of reason, not compulsion."

"To be sure. Nonetheless, all creatures live because something else dies. This tension is the pa.s.sion of life. For every Human that dies to your palate, a fish goes into a Human stomach. And how many leaves of clover die screaming every day to the sinister munchings of the Rabbits?"

"We all eat to live. Just so." Aba shrugged. "Perhaps my problem is that I commune too much with my supper."

Osi chuckled. "It is, finally, a question of ident.i.ty. I know who I am. I know being a Vampire is neither good nor bad-it just is. There are good and bad Vampires, to be sure-that is a question for individual will and conscience. But once you're made that decision, you must delight in what you are-else what is the point in being?"

"And how to delight in the suffering we cause?"

"This isn't, of course, to say we shouldn't sympathize with the Human condition-though I would caution you never to forget: it was Humans made us. We are a product of their technology and their dreamwork. We're then" creations. Well, they made their own bed, and by my blood, the Vampire need not a.s.sume a drop of guilt for that." His voice rose toward the end, imbued with feeling. The outburst embarra.s.sed him, though, and he sipped at his drink to quiet himself.

Aba felt Osi's chagrin, and kept silent a moment to give the air time to recompose itself. Looking out the window again, he said softly, "It's the strength of my l.u.s.t I can't abide."

"Rejoice in your l.u.s.ts, Sire. They are your destiny."

Aba tapped his temple with the long nail of his index ringer. "This is my destiny," he smiled, more rueful than triumphant.

Osi's gaze fell on the almost suede softness of his young guest's wings. Impulsively, he reached out and touched the warm, downy leather along the shaft of Aba's tall, maul strut, then withdrew his hand quickly, as if caught in the act.

Aba smiled uncertainly. He took two slow steps in the general direction of the door.

Osi rang a silver bell near the easel. "There, I've been rattling on too much. If you leave now, I shall feel quite humiliated."

"No, please, I must leave, really. It's very late, I think."

A harem girl entered, naked except for the hundred emeralds and single diamond sewn, in fluid design, into her skin. She knelt between them, her neck bared. Osi said to Aba: "Won't you stay a little longer? Just for a nightcap."

Aba licked his teeth. "No. Thank you. You've been most gracious, Osi-Sire." He averted his eyes.

"Well, then, the pleasure has been mine. Go in good blood."

"Go in good blood, Osi-Sire."

They bared their necks to each other, and Aba left.

Osi stood leaning against the closed door. His hand trembled slightly. "Who is this pretty Sire that makes me hold my breath?" he whispered.

The harem girl crept forward and wrapped herself around Osi's leg. "Would that I could hold it for you, Sire, to leave your hands free to pursue other matters."

He stroked her head. "He is not unconscious of me-yet how cool he remained. I confess, Denise, I am quite taken."

Denise pulled herself up and opened the Vampire's robes. "Then stand erect where you are, Osi-Sire, and you'll soon be twice-taken."

He closed his eyes to her caress as, across his field of vision, the fluttering of soft leather wings turned the velvet blackness red.

CHAPTER 11: In Which There Are Two Daring Escapes.

OLLIE sat in the dark corner of a Bookery cave, teasing melancholy strains from his bamboo flute.

Jasmine sat twenty feet away, alone beside a small fire. She brooded.

Addie crouched at a low table near one entrance, setting the record. In the next room, Michael and Ellen nattered at each other about some obscure footnote in a recently unearthed, revised edition. All the other Books were either in conference or out scouting; or scribbling in the Great Lexicon; or tending the Bookery winery on the first level; or sleeping, or reading, or eating.

Jasmine brooded over the fact that she couldn't find a way out of this mora.s.s. There was so much internecine bickering among the Books and Pluggers that she couldn't rely on them for anything. They had been waiting two days now for the Pluggers to make a decision, and as far as Jasmine was concerned, it might have been two years. Furthermore, she had little hope of finding the connecting tunnel without help, and the news of electric screens covering all the other openings was particularly frustrating. Josh was in the castle, Paula had said. Every hour brought him closer to Final Decontamination.

It was the caves. Jasmine didn't know exactly how, but she felt them: sinister, suffocating, miring. Evil, almost. As if, in their endless, shadowed inturnings, the tunnels had devised a power for stifling lesser wills, smothering all hope. She felt it almost as an external consciousness, engulfing-or, perhaps, seducing-them.

She looked at Ollie, absorbed in his somber melody. His feelings were too distorted for her to a.n.a.lyze, his mask too thick.

Footsteps approached from another entrance. A shadow jumped, then lay still between Jasmine and the fire. She looked up at the figure who stood before her.

"Rose," she whispered.

"h.e.l.lo, Jasmine," said Rose.

In the corner, the music stopped. Ollie stood, dropping his flute, with a clatter, onto the stone. He ran over, paused; and for a long second, they looked into each other's eyes. Then they fell together in a powerful embrace that took away their breaths and held at bay their demons. They had been prisoners together five years before, herded south by Vampires and Accidents, tortured, humiliated, and intimidated. This was a bond of fire that would never break.

When finally they pulled apart, they were weak with c.u.mulative tension. Jasmine stood, and also hugged Rose, somewhat less desperately.

"Rose," Jasmine said again.

"Yes, it's good to see you, too," she answered.

"Tell us what's happened." Jasmine's voice was tender.

All three sat before the fire. "I'm a Plugger now," Rose began. "Nine p.r.o.ngs. I pulled the cap off my outlet back in the Saddlebacks, so I can receive again now."

"Receive what?" Ollie asked. So many emotions skittered through the boy's heart, he was near collapse. Joy at seeing Rose, who had helped him so much to endure their first ordeal together; fear at her tone; hope and despair about Joshua's plight; rage at such a world- "I could never explain to any of you what it was like, what it felt to be ... plugged in. How I hate that expression. Plugging is like being something else, it's like . . . stepping up another level."

"But-receive what?" Ollie repeated.

"Maybe if you just told us how you got here . . ." Jasmine suggested. She, too, picked up something in the tone of Rose's voice that was different, edgy.

"Why, I walked," Rose said, a bit surprised. "Blackwind showed me the way."

"And Josh? What of Josh?"

Rose looked down before answering. "I showed him the way." She shuddered imperceptibly, trying to hold all the loose ends of her life in one hand. "It's so good to see you again," she looked from one to the other. "I'm so glad you're here."

"Does Beauty know you're here?" Jasmine asked.

Rose squeezed away the brief but searing pain with a long blink of the eye. "Beauty will come. He'll know where I've gone."

"You didn't tell him."

"He would have talked me out of it."

"What about Josh?" Ollie intruded. "Where's Josh?"

"Josh listened to me, but he couldn't understand. I told him everything, but it's not something you can explain. So I took off his helmet while he slept."

Ollie sank like a deflated toy. "You took it."

"I knew that without that helmet to protect him from the Queen's transmissions, he'd begin having spells again. Remember: it was I who fas.h.i.+oned that helmet for Josh in the first place, I who realized the wire screen would s.h.i.+eld him from the Queen's call. Mine to give, and mine to taker back."

"But why? What did you gain?"

"I knew that without the helmet, he would have his spells, he would be drawn to the City. There they will operate on him, and he, too, will get plugged in. He'll have the experience I had, h.e.l.l understand, he'll . . . then we'll free him, and we'll get control of the cables and connections, and then we can plug in to each other, and be one, or two, or light, or lightless, or . . ."

Jasmine and Ollie looked at her as if she had gone over the edge. Rose stopped, laughed a short desperate laugh. "That's why we're here," she said breathily, "to get our connections back, and Josh, too-to get him back, he's The Serpent, you know, and now he'll be a Plugger too, so we can all have communion with The Serpent, we can-"

"What are you talking about?" yelled Ollie. The outburst stopped her as hard as if he had hit her. Even Addie looked up briefly from her writing in the corner, then re- turned to it. "This is Josh you're talking about, not some cult myth!" His voice crescendoed. "What are you talking about?"