Tomorrow Sucks Part 23

Along one wall of her room was a bookcase that reached from floor to ceiling.

She went to the wall and searched among the t.i.tles. Following one row with her finger, she stopped on The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, by Montagu Sommers. She tossed it on the bed and went to the bureau and opened the top drawer. She searched a while among the lipstick cases, pill bottles, and mismatched socks. It wasn't there. She pulled open the next drawer and sorted around the underwear until she found the little wooden jewelry box. Inside the box, tangled in a ma.s.s of neck chains and a string of pearls, she found the object of her search, a tiny silver cross, given to her when she was a little girl by her grandmother. She had never worn it, but she put it around her neck now. Then she began to undress. Removing her white nylon pants, she put on her flannel nightgown, rearranged the blankets, and settled into her nest to read. Eventually she fell mid-paragraph into a restless sleep.

The use of the cross as a religious symbol predates Christianity, going back as far as neolithic times. It was usually a glyph for the axe or hammer and, as such, signified power. To the Teutonic tribes of northern Europe, it represented the hammer of Thor. In the Shamanistic tradition of Eurasia it was Skaldi's hammer, the sun's hammer. To the Varkela, children of the night, the sun was viewed as an ancient enemy. For them the idea of a bright, sunny day had the same connotation as we might attribute to the phrase "dark of the moon." The sun hammer was regarded as a bad omen, as is echoed in the Varkela curses: "May the sun hammer smite thee," or "May the sun strike you blind." As a Christian symbol, the cross was supposed to ward off the devil, and so by converse logic the Varkela were regarded as "demonkind" because they avoided it.

That evening Myrna went early to the hospital. She went to the intensive care unit and inquired about the progress of her patient.

"He had a code 99 this morning, cardiac arrest," Rose reported. "They had to resuscitate him. Lucky they caught him when they did or he would have been gone."

Nervously Myrna entered the room and stood inside the doorway watching thefigure on the bed. In her lab coat pocket she fingered her silver crucifix. He was sitting up in bed and he smiled when he recognized her.

"A person could get killed in a place like this," he said. "This morning when I was almost asleep, they came in and jolted me right out of it with that horrible shock machine."

"You're lucky," she said. "They could have decided you were dead and sent you to pathology for an autopsy. Then you would be all cut up and placed in little bottles by now."

"I see this age has its share of barbarous customs," he said.

Myrna took a step into the room, fumbling with the object in her pocket.

"You're a vampire, aren't you?" she said, stopping at what she hoped was a safe distance from the bed.

"I'm not a corpse come back to life, if that's what you mean," he said. "But I am Varkela, which is probably the source of all those silly legends."

Vaylance eyed her pocket mistrustfully, thinking it must contain a small hand pistol. When outbloods began using the word "vampire" it usually meant trouble, and only a fool would stick around trying to argue about technical differences.

Therefore he was quite relieved when she took a small crucifix out of her pocket and extended her arm triumphantly in his direction.

Aha, he thought, someone comes to smite me down with the sun's hammer. He decided to have a little fun with her. Shrinking down in the bedclothes and feigning terror, he watched as she advanced in somnambulistic grandeur. When she was within range and the little cross dangled in front of his nose, he reached out and took it from her hand. An impudent grin spread across his face.

"Thank you," he said, "but as you can see, I already have one," and he pulled at the chain around his neck, bringing his own hand-carved cross into view.

Crestfallen, Myrna sat down on the bed, her mouth gaping.

"Little blood-thief," he said, "if you only knew how funny you looked just then."

"But I thought..." she began.

"I can be a Christian like anyone else," he said.

She didn't seem to hear him. She was still recovering from the shock.

"h.e.l.lo," he waved a hand in front of her face. "You of all people don't have to be afraid of me. A wolf-minded girl can defend herself. I won't bite you or whatever it is you are afraid of."

He was glad when he saw the wolvish look return to her eyes, but now she regarded him with such a stern expression that he stopped smiling. She was angry with him.

"I suppose you think this is a soup kitchen, where you can come for a free meal,"she said. "I work hard to crossmatch blood for sick people. I'll have you know blood costs sixty dollars a pint, if you're interested. If you're hungry, go find someone who's healthy and bite them on the neck!"

He felt ashamed to have taken blood without payment.

"You don't need to haggle the price of blood with me," he said. "I know it comes dear, and I will find some way to repay, but right now I need your help."

He began to explain to her about the war in 1845, about his work in the medical tent, and about his dearest friend Dr. Rimsky who lay dying in another time. He watched her face for signs of comprehension. At first she raised a cynical eyebrow at his outpouring, but he rushed onward with his story, hoping to convince her by his urgency if not with logic. Soon her skepticism was replaced by doubt. She began to ask questions and to demand explanations on certain points. Eager to sway her his way, he supplied detail upon detail. Finally, as the torrent of his rhetoric abated, he thought he saw just the barest glimmer of belief in her eyes.

When he finished, Myrna was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You know, you're not such a bad sort, and I'm half persuaded that you're telling the truth, but you make a horrible first impression. If you wanted my help, why didn't you ask me, instead of going through all that stupid 'come to me' business? You scared me half to death."

"I'm sorry about that," he said. "I was only thinking of myself. You see, I have not shared blood-love with anyone for a long time and your response was so typically Varkela, that I forgot for a moment that you are an outblood and do not understand. Most of humankind cannot resist the 'call' and will come to us when summoned, but those who resist, the wolf-minded ones, are those we prefer to mate with, for they usually have some Varkela ancestry. But there are also wolf-minded outbloods here and there, and we also marry with them, because full-blood Varkela women are subject to an illness, and thus are very rare."

"It must be a s.e.x-linked genetic defect," said Myrna.

"A what?"

"Never mind," she said. "Listen, if I'm going to help you, we're going to have to get you out of this place. Otherwise they'll keep trying to start your heart every morning, and you'll never get any rest."

"That's not the only thing," said Vaylance. "These doctors think I'm human. They are planning to transfuse me again tonight to raise my what-you-call-it."

"Hematocrit."

"Right. But I'm Varkela and don't need as much. It would be a waste of good blood and might even make me ill."

"I saw your chart and your 'crit is only eighteen. No doctor is going to sign your release," she said. "I can get your clothes from admitting and you can come and stay at my place for a while, but I don't know how to smuggle you past the nurses'

station.""That's no problem to me," he said, and so saying, he concentrated for a few minutes, and his image faded from view. Then he was back again. "I would have done it sooner, but I had no place to go."

"I have to go to work now," said Myrna, checking her watch. "But if you can slip past the nurses and meet me down at the lab, I'll have your things. I can teach you about transfusion, and maybe we can rig up a sort of crossmatch that would work back in 1845."

About 2:30 a.m. Ernie, the security guard, came by the lab to tell Myrna that one of the patients was missing from the ICU and that she should keep an eye out for him. After he left, Vaylance materialized behind the filing cabinet.

"I wish I knew that trick," said Myrna. "I'd vanish every time my supervisor came around with a stool specimen to a.n.a.lyze."

"It's merely an illusion of the dreamwalk," he said. "One shouldn't do it too often.

It expends a frightful lot of energy."

Myrna seated Vaylance at the lab bench and prepared to teach him immuno-hematology.

"The four major blood groups, A, B, AB, and O, are probably what you are able to distinguish by taste," she said. "We differentiate them by adding typing sera to the blood specimen." She showed him how the blue serum precipitated group A; the yellow, group B. For type AB, both the blue and yellow serum precipitated and for type O, neither of them did.

"The next thing you have to worry about are antibodies," she said. "A person with type A has Anti-B antibodies in his or her serum; this is why you can't give type-B blood to a type-A person. A type-B person has Anti-A; therefore, you can't give type-A to a B person. A type-O person has both Anti-A and Anti-B; therefore, you can't give type A or B to an O person; but type O is sometimes called the "universal donor" because you can give it to type A, B, and AB persons because they don't have an Anti-O in their serum."

"Now you've cot me really confused," said Vaylance. "I'll never be able to remember all that."

"You won't have to," said Myrna, "because I am going to teach you a simple crossmatch technique, which should rule out some of the dangers." She then took two different blood specimens and separated the serum from the cells. Next, using a porcelain slide, she mixed the donor cells with the patient serum on one side, and the patient cells with the donor serum on the other.

"If either mixture reacts, then you know that the donor is the wrong blood type, or that he has an antibody against the patient, malting an incompatible crossmatch."

She showed Vaylance now to let the blood clot and take off the serum, and how to mix serum and cells on the slide to make what she called a "major" and a "minor"

crossmatch."It's not perfect," said Myrna, "but it will pick out a few antibodies and prevent errors in typing."

Most of the rest of the night they talked about blood and transfusions and antibodies. She asked him how drinking the blood could raise his hematocrit, and he explained that the blood didn't go into his stomach, but that most went through valves in his hollow teeth and directly into his bloodstream. The serum antibodies were apparently filtered out somewhere in the process. She theorized that he probably had a deficiency of rubriblasts in his bone marrow, which caused the blood-need he felt from time to time. She was surprised to discover that a 'Vampire'

needed only two pints of blood in the course of a month and could subsist on small amounts taken from many, healthy, sleeping donors. Vaylance revealed that he had two kinds of saliva: from the lower gland, a rapid clotting agent, and from the upper gland, an anticoagulant. Myrna was fascinated and asked if she could take samples.

"You're as bad as Dr. Rimsky," said Vaylance. "He experiments with my spit on men, rats, and horses. I've spent hours drooling into bottles for the furtherance of science."

Vaylance noticed that during their long conversation, she seemed to avoid any topics of a personal nature. There was a certain aloofness or distance that she tried to maintain. And he was reminded of how he had been after Favarka's death, the withdrawal from life and the inward nursing of pain. He was not sure how to broach the subject. So he decided on the bold, blunt approach.

"Have you ever loved anyone, Myrna?" he asked.

She pondered this for a long time and then answered: "Yes, once a long time ago."

"And he hurt you?" asked Vaylance gently.

"How did you know?"

"I don't know, I just sense it," he said.

There was a long silence, punctuated by the clicking of the peristaltic pump on the autoa.n.a.lyser and the ringing of a distant telephone.

Finally he said, "And you've never allowed yourself to love anyone since." It was a statement of fact, not a question.

"Does that show too?" she asked defensively.

"It does," he said. "Don't you know that if you refuse to love, the wound may heal over on the surface, but inside an abscess grows, poisoning you from within?"

"Love is an illusion," said Myrna. "Two people come together to satisfy their own needs. The secret lies in not caring too much. That way you don't get hurt when they leave you."

He knew that this cynical answer was just her defense against deeper feelings, but.i.t angered him, moving him to say: "But in that way you defeat your own purpose. You hurt people and use them and drive them away. Don't you see that if you continue in that way, you will become more of a vampire than I am?"

He saw a flash of anger in her eyes, and then she looked away, biting her lower lip. He saw that his words had had an effect: she wept silently.

Well and good, he thought, she will learn to care again. He reached out and put an arm around her shoulders.

"Heal thee, heal thee," he said after the custom of his people.

When she had dried her eyes and regained some of her composure, she said, "It's not fair of you to knock down a person's defenses like that."

"It's fair if my intentions are honorable, which they are," he said.

She had to laugh at "honorable intentions."

"Now I really believe you are from the nineteenth century," she said. "Welcome to the age of noncommitment, Vaylance."

At 8:00 a.m. Myrna took him home with her. At first he balked at the "horseless carriage," her Volkswagen Superbeetle, but she finally persuaded him to get into the metal contraption. At her apartment she prepared him a place to sleep on cushions on the living room floor. Then she went to take her own daytime rest.

She awoke to hear music. He had found her old guitar and returned it to resemble some instrument familiar to him. He strummed a minor chord and sang in his own language. It had the sound of cold wind howling across open plains.

"What is that you're singing?" she asked.

He translated for her:

"The dun mare has died, Little sister of the wind She wanders the pasture of the spirit world.

I hear her neiqh sometimes When the north wind blows."

It moved her to confess to him. "I have a horse."

"Really?" he said. "You must take me out to meet him tonight before I leave. But first I want to hear you sing for me."

She didn't like to think of his leaving. The more she got to know him, the more she felt he was the sort of man that she had always hoped to meet. She took theguitar from him and returned it, and played an old Scottish ballad, a favorite of hers called "The Waters of Tyne."

"Oh, I cannot see my love if I would dee.

The waters of Tyne stand between him and me.

And here I must sit with a tear in my ee, All sighin' and sobbin' my true love to see."

Except that when she sang it her tongue stumbled so that it came out "the waters of time."

She took him out to the stable where she kept Shanty, her horse. Crickets were singing in the warm night, when they arrived, and Shanty trotted up to the fence to greet them, pushing his nose into Myrna's pocket to bee for sugar. Vaylance scratched Shanty's neck and then bent, sliding his hand down a foreleg to check the hoof.

"You'd better be careful. He's fussy about his feet," warned Myrna. She thought of the farrier, whom Shanty had chased out of the barn. The man refused to go near Shanty now unless the horse was hobbled.

Shanty, however, made no trouble, and at a softspoken word picked up his feet and allowed them to be examined.

"He isn't usually like this with strangers," said Myrna. "He's really taken to you."