17: A Golden Future
Previous ————– Next
“We’re not going to kill anyone,” Madame corrected. “Starvation will kill many of them, and of course they’ll kill each other. Not only will their increased population be a problem, but they’re greatly depleting their own food supply to make it. And when they turn to the Zeroes’ food supply in desperation, we Abbies and quite certainly you Bees will of course defend the Zeroes’ rights, and the Zeroes themselves tend to have difficulty with the concept of proportional response, poor things. And however that all shakes out… well, when a population is small enough, it doesn’t take all that many accidents before it doesn’t exist at all.”
“In the wake of such a tragedy, we’ll push for laws to prevent a new Taipay population being established,” Taira said. “I expect that they’ll go through easily; the Bees will hardly protest having full control of the city outside Abby territories to themselves. Even if they don’t pass, it won’t matter, since we Abbies only need to legislate for our own kind that no more Taipay children can be made, and to prevent the immigration of any Taipays. And then we’ll have a stable three-tier system with proper unity.”
“And how do I know the Bees aren’t next?” Lissa asked her, just to see the look of shock and hurt on her face.
“We have no intention of removing the middle tier entirely,” Madame said. “That would just result in a lot more work for us, most of it things that we don’t want to do. In fact, the population drop is in itself going to be tiresome; we’ll want to approve a Bee increase to replace all the Taipays as quickly as possible, but we will naturally have to wait for the human population to adapt to avoid starvation.”
“And how can you be so sure that they will adapt?”
“They’ll have to,” Taira said. “They have a strange reluctance to discriminate by blood type, but our two cities are in symbiosis. Their entire job is to provide us with blood so that we can provide them with water. Anyone up there consuming water but unable to provide blood is dead weight, and while a small population of non-donors is tolerable, once the Taipay population is permanently eliminated a very large proportion of their population is functionally useless to the city’s primary mission. They can feed us Abbies, of course, but we only need so much blood and we have no intention of increasing our population in any major way until the Bees have replaced all the ’Pays. So they’ll whine and drag their feet about it, but the humans want our population as high as possible so that we can purify water at a faster rate. When the ’Pays are gone for good, the humans will adapt themselves to to our needs.”
“After your genocide,” Lissa said.
“You’re missing the bigger picture,” Madame said. “Yes, this was will be horrible and brutal, but it will be the last one, do you understand? After this, peace and stability will be permanent in the Scarlet City. A golden future.”
Lissa wondered whether that’s what everybody told themselves before they committed horrible atrocities. Ignoring Madame, she glared at Taira. “I can’t believe that you came up with this.”
“I didn’t,” Taira said.
“We’ve been generally entertaining these sorts of ideas before you and dear Taira ever came tot he Scarlet City,” Madame said, “but it was only very recently that we decided the time was right to seriously put such plans into action. Taira’s incredible perception betrayed her and she found out what was happening before we were ready. It was a real pity; we were all quite sad to lose such a promising young politician, but she surprised us all by throwing her own support behind the plan.”
“She surprised you?”
“The young are generally very naive and reluctant to make big decisions. But she got right in and allayed everyone’s doubts my making several good suggestions for refining and improving our plan, setting herself up to play the duped politician and suggesting Herron Industries as our vector. She only had one condition for her cooperation.”
“What was her – ?” But Lissa didn’t have to ask; she looked at Taira and knew. “You made them choose to kill the ’Pays instead of the Bees.”
“I told you,” Taira said, “that I would protect you, didn’t I?”
“Either would’ve worked perfectly fine for the rest of us,” Madame said. “I’d be losing some dearies with either one, as would most of us. We were prepared to go with whoever was easiest to goad into increasing their numbers. But Taira was incredibly insistent that the Bees survive. Which they will. You should be happy, Lissa; your sister has bought your people a lot of safety and power, once all of this is over.”
Lissa had spent enough time around politicians, and around Madame, to know how the next bi was supposed to go. The stakes and the threats had been laid out; it was clear that Lissa couldn’t stop the Taipay increase, which was already in progress by now, and that the Abbies could kill her to protect their plan if they had to, with Taira her only (insufficient) protection. It had been made clear that there was no point in resistance, and she’d been offered an explanation to soothe her conscience (it’s for the greater good of peace and stability and all that, and surely you’re happy at how much your own people will benefit), and now it was time to buy her off. Lissa was supposed to say something like, “Well what safety and power is in it for me, specifically?”, and then she and Madame would start to negotiate for her cooperation. And then she’d be a co-conspirator, kept meek by salving her pride with the idea that she was a part of things, that she was cleverly playing the system and getting her own needs out of it, rather than being a pawn.
Just like they’d done to Taira.
She wondered idly what Madame would offer her. A key role in Herron Industries, probably,, which would need to be transferred to Bee control the instant the Abbies had a legal excuse to do so, lest access to the luxury goods they made be interrupted and the Abbies have to suffer a few weeks without them. Putting Lissa in charge of that would be a grand payment, in terms of the extra status and power it gave her, and also keep her too busy protecting herself and trying to manage the company to interfere with anything the Abbies were doing, and – most critically from an Abby point of view – foist a lot of complicated and boring work onto her, Lissa, so the Abbies didn’t have to do it. Yeah. That was probably it.
There was no real point in finding out, though. If Madame had approached her a couple of hours ago, she’d be trapped… but Taira and Madame were here far too late.
Taira was watching her suspiciously. “You’re taking all of this very well.”
Lissa nodded. “Whose idea was it to frame me for murder and set up the whole hostage-against-Taira thing?”
“Mine,” Madame said. “You seemed a potentially useful weapon if we could aim you correctly, but you were far too clever to be allowed to keep pulling on that thread. It seemed a simple way to distract you with a plausible explanation for the things you’d found to be out of place, as well as keeping your eyes on the murder situation, which you could hardly make any worse than it already was.”
“What even was the point in that?”
“We were trying to set something up with the humans that we could use to encourage their remaining type A’s to leave after the population increase, but it relied on there being no suspicion of vampire involvement. So that was cocked up with the first murder. It doesn’t matter any more.”
“Told you, should’ve hired a human assassin,” Taira said again. “Them talking is less likely than one of ours biting.”
“I thought my dear daughter could handle it.”
“I should thank you,” Lissa said, “for making me an investigator on that case. It’s certainly nice to have status where people listened to me for a change, even if they were just humans.”
Madama and Taira relaxed a little, like they could finally see where this was going. Lissa could practically see the thoughts in their faces. Ah, she’s angling to a position where she can boss people around. That fits in perfectly, we can give her that.
“It also gave me something that most vampires never get, at least until they’re quite old. To discourage the youngsters from keeping ties too close to their human families, I would guess.”
A little more confusion in their postures now, but no real alarm. Okay, she wants some kind of exotic luxury. Let’s hear it.
“Since it’s so important to keep both sides up to date on the case and all. Along with the status to make the human police listen to me, your officers also gave me an external phone code to call the human city – specifically, one to call the human police department.” She grinned at the shock on both of their faces. “What? Did you think that Taira was the only person I called from that meeting room?”
———————————–
Hubert sat back in his chair, sipped his nicest tea, and watched the scene unfold on his television.
The whole think was turning out to be surprisingly anticlimactic. The city was in lockdown, the alarms blaring outside, and the newscasters doing their best to hype up the drama and threat of the rogue vampires and their plan to forcibly convert people, but in practice, hardly any of them seemed to have gotten into the city before the gates were closed and most of those that had had peacefully gone home once the lockdown alarm sounded, so rather than an invading army of monsters, it was just footage of the Children’s Militia mopping up stray invaders before they could get their teeth into any type A or O people stupid enough to defy curfew.
The seriousness of the situation had each children’s unit headed by an adult security commander, all type B or AB, and even they looked bored. As Hubert watched, a vampire leapt out of a row of hedges at one such commander, only for a boy of about eight years old to step forward and strike it across the side of the head, shattering their jaw. The vampire, naturally cowardly without its bite, fled, and before the commander could even give the command, three older kids gave chase, moving with perfect coordination like they’d done this a hundred times before. The vampire’s bite could’ve put the commander in the hospital before the incompatible blood drove it away, but nobody looked at all bothered by the close call. They were treating the whole thing like a training exercise.
While the newscasters made the situation sound as dangerous as they could, Hubert wondered if the invaders had managed to make any new type A vampires at all. Maybe a few. Once the news had explained what was actually going on, some of the type A people being courted by vampires must have realised that they were about to lose their chance at immortality, and probably gone out in search of vampires on purpose. Some of them might have found one. Hubert had no doubt that they’d have exact numbers tomorrow when the news talked about all those innocent people horribly accosted before they could get into a safe building, or whatever. They were already doing their best with the interviews of random type A people sprinkled throughout the unexciting Children’s Militia footage, all talking about being courted by their vampires. It was utterly unremarkable except for the sheer number of them; it seemed like half the adult type A population was being pushed into vampirism and nobody had noticed. Which made sense; it was a relatively private affair, and it wasn’t like Lakeview kept track of the blood type proportions of converts. That was the Scarlet City’s job.
Well, it had been. Hubert suspected that that might change in the future.
He went to turn the TV off, but hesitated as it started showing more of the Children’s Militia on patrol. They might show Terry. He didn’t often get a chance to watch her work.
So far as a vampire lockdown went, the whole thing was decidedly undramatic, at least in Lakeview. Bt Hubert couldn’t help thinking of the vampire woman he’d met in his office, and of Benny, and wondering what merry hell was unfolding in the Scarlet City.
Previous ————– Next
Derin Edala 