7: The Price of Immortality
Hubert sat in the park under the giant statue, reading his messages again and again. The words didn’t change.
He’d never really understood the statue. The Outsider, all thin limbs and pointed angles and strange silky hair expertly depicted in marble, posed heroically above the cheap park benches and unremarkable grass, staring up at the top of the dome. Well, at the stars through the dome, probably. It was certainly a strange thing to erect a statue of, and a strange pose – nobody really thought of the Outsiders as heroic. At best, they were remembered as well-meaning and desperate.
Well, the vampires probably remembered them differently. But the vampires didn’t choose the park décor.
The Progenitors had shown up on Earth, so the histories said, in a single spaceship, begging asylum. It had taken some time to get over the shock of aliens apparently existing, and then the fear of aliens apparently existing, and then time to figure out how to communicate with these aliens that were apparently existing, but as soon as they were able to the Outsiders had explained that their planet had undergone an unrecoverable ecological collapse and they had, since then, been searching for a place to live in peace. The universe is rather rich in planets but not particularly rich in temperate planets with moderate gravity and an oxygen-rich nitrogen atmosphere at Outsider-livable pressure, so they’d been very happy to find Earth, and had managed to smooth over all the natural objections and disagreements and red tape barring their settlement with a very simple gift.
Immortality.
The Outsiders had bought their asylum with a specific type of parasite that they all carried within them, something beyond human understanding but very capable of human infection. Something that, somehow, bred in the body and healed it and helped it to become… different… in some strange mixture of the body’s existing fundamental biology and the carrier’s subconscious idea of what it should be. Wariness of such a gift was strong, especially after the mental effects became clear, but not nearly as strong as the lure of eternal youth, and enough of the wealthy and powerful were bought off with it to happily give the Outsiders the land and resources they needed to settle peacefully. The Outsiders, specifically their parasites, required specific food sources that weren’t easy to grow on Earth, nor easy for the humans to study; it was unclear what exactly the Outsiders and the new ageless humans needed out of these plants, it certainly wasn’t any kind of physical protein, but whatever it was, was vital., and the crops grew slowly. Immortality was a limited resource.
This, naturally, led to tensions far, far higher than the mere arrival of the Outsiders. The immortal humans wanted their loved ones infected, the billions not wealthy of powerful enough to trade immortality for money or favours wanted to be infected, the old and the terminally ill wanted to be infected incredibly soon, and only the sudden discovery of an abundant existing miracle food source for the immortal humans could calm things down.
Of course, when that miracle food source turned out to be blood – specifically, human blood, and specifically human blood grown inside living human bodies and not laboratories, although nobody could figure out why – it did not calm things down. Multiple wars very likely would have broken out, if humanity wasn’t immediately distracted by a much larger problem.
The Exterminators appearing in the sky were clear evidence that the Outsiders hadn’t been completely honest. Their planet did not merely collapse under the weight of some unspecified, unrecoverable natural disaster; they were being hunted throughout the galaxy. And they had thought that their trip to Earth had been stealthy enough, that the Exterminators hadn’t followed them, wouldn’t find them.
They’d been wrong.
The Exterminators, for reasons that they never bothered explaining to the meaningless local fauna like humans, wanted the Outsiders dead at any cost, and they knew how to kill them. Specifically, they knew how to kill the parasite they carried, the parasite keeping them and the small population of immortal humans alive. As a first step in their extermination plan, they had done… something… to contaminate the Earth’s oceans and saturate the planet in blackwater.
Human science couldn’t detect the blackwater. The contamination was something in the water molecules themselves – the atoms themselves, in fact; separate the oxygen from the hydrogen and any new water molecule they became a part of would also be blackwater. But they showed up the same, physically. The light that passed through blackwater vapour showed up the same on detectors as light that passed through normal water vapour, but somehow, it killed the infection within the immortals.
This was a known Exterminator weapon, and the Outsiders’ parasite was engineered to break it down over time. But it quickly became apparent that the blackwater molecules themselves were toxic to humans.
Now on a doomed planet under the guns of the Exterminators ready to burn the whole surface, the Outsiders did the only thing they could to give themselves and their human saviours any chance at survival – they taught the humans how to build blackwater detectors, and prepared to flee the planet. But there was some extra space on their ship, some chance to perhaps save a handful from the near-inevitable human extinction due to blackwater so the Outsiders turned to their immortal human allies and asked them – who among you will come with us?
The fighting among the immortal humans was vicious, and brutal, but brief. In almost no time at all, all dissenters were dead, and the survivors were fully united behind a single answer – save out children. Take our children away from here. And the Outsiders packed their immortal allies onto their ship starting with the youngest, and continued until they ran out of room, taking every immortal human under the age of nineteen off the planet.
Nobody had understood, back then, that the link between the subconscious mind and the vampiric parasite was a two-way street. Nobody had understood the strength with which psychology could be inherited through such an infection. But ever since that day, every vampire had a very difficult time comprehending the existence of people on Earth younger than nineteen, and found it completely impossible to harm or infect them.
The Outsiders, whose ship was faster than the Exterminators, continued their flight across the galaxy; the Exterminators pursued. And the people left behind on Earth looked around at their deadly planet and decided that they might as well do their best to come up with some way to survive. And settlements were established with big domes to protect everyone from blackwater rain, and parks were built, and in the park tin which Hubert sat, a big statue of an Outsider looking heroic was built, for some very strange reason.
It was not, on the whole, a very heroic story.
He read his messages again.
“Hey, Grandpa.” Terry had approached without him even noticing; she sat on the bench beside him. “Hard day?”
“It’s fine. How did the thing with the vampire go?”
“Confusingly. She didn’t seem interested at all in the blackwater purification thing.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Hard to say. Maybe it’s a big government cover-up in the Scarlet City and she wanted to throw us off the trail! Or, more likely, the government down there doesn’t know anything and this random serial killer is acting alone and thinks this blackwater purification thing is important but hasn’t told anyone. Or, most likely.” She sighed. “The murder had nothing to do with any new technology, rumoured or real. Penelope just… had bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s a lone killer or if the government’s in on it,” Hubert said, “but it definitely is the blackwater decontamination rumour.” He showed the messages to Terry. “Two more were killed last night, in the same way. Both boys working under – and closely with – Penelope.”
“Oh, Grandpa. I’m sorry to hear that.” Her eyes sharpened. “Killed in the same way? A bite disguised by a slash, no noticeable amount of blood taken.”
“Looks like.”
“What’re their blood groups?”
“Huh? I’m… not sure. They’ve both been called out in the last few blood drives for the scarlet City, and you know there’s been a huge demand for type A blood for a while, so A-something would be my guess. But I don’t know.”
“I’ll look into it. If either of them are B, that would narrow down our list of suspects to just Type O vampires. That would be really handy.”
Hubert grinned. “I’m B positive. So if I turn up dead in – ”
“Don’t even joke about that!” She batted at his shoulder lightly with one hand. “I think I’ll take a trip out of town and chase up the rumour in person.”
“What? Absolutely not!”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why shouldn’t you go and look into something that people are killing to prot – ”
“That a vampire is killing to protect. If there were humans involved and willing to kill, a human would’ve done these murders, and they’re unmistakably vampire bites. Someone under nineteen is the perfect person to go. Besides, Dad already said yes.”
“He what?!”
“He’s been really excited about me working with the police on this.”
“Of course your father wants you to become a cop. Wait; you only just learned of the other murders just now. When did you ask…?”
“Last night. It’s all already planned.”
“Of course it is,” Hubert sighed. “Well, at least no vampire will get a chance to kill me. I’ll already have died from stress worrying about you.”
Derin Edala 