machine.
She peered over the other’s shoulder at the all-glass screen controls; they were doing ten miles above the speed limit, on this winding roadway.
“Customized engine,” Adrienne said after a while. “Four-stroke fifty-degree V-Twin with 1731 cc displacement. Single overhead camshafts with four valves per cylinder, self-adjusting cam chains, hydraulic lifters. But they jiggered the compression ratio for me and the frame’s special alloy, lighter than the standard. I think I’ll give Jose one for his birthday; he loves it.”
I don’t speak Mechanic, Ellen thought.
Then her mind stuttered slightly. It was impossible to censor the way you talked to yourself! “You sound like some of my elders.” Adrienne laughed; there was a hard edge to it, but Ellen didn’t think it was directed at her. “A lot of them don’t like machinery either. At least machinery that doesn’t involve shoveling coal into a boiler.”
“The ones who make the middle-management demonic career path hell?” she asked.
“But yes!”
She took one hand off the handlebars to gesture for an instant, and Ellen felt the muscles in her thighs and stomach clench in sudden terror. Was that a wobble in the front wheel? “Also, their attitudes. Few people change much past their twenties. In this my breed and yours are not so different. Perhaps in the Old Stone Age this was of no consequence; one millennium was much like another. But now matters are different, and that, my sweet, is a matter which concerns you.”
“Why? You’d all want to… drink my blood, wouldn’t you? Torture me and mess with me?”
“Yes. But they rule the world, remember? And not just at dinner-time.”
“Oh.”
Ellen winced. That explains a number of things.
“Imagine again; the ruling elders grew up in the time of the First World War, more or less-a little older than my parents. That was when Shadowspawn powerful enough to survive death became more than a very few. Their parents were Victorians, born before Bismarck’s men shelled Paris.”
Ellen gave a sly chuckle. “Sexist assholes?”
“Oh, you have no idea. Exactly two women on the Council, in this day and age!”
“How many on the Council altogether?”
“Thirteen, naturally! Though that is not the worst of it. They have nineteenth-century habits of thought. They do not think of interlink-ages and unintended consequences and feedback cycles. This matter of you humans overbreeding and ruining the world, for example.”
“You’re environmentalists?” she said incredulously.
“If you plan to live… well, exist… for ten thousand years or more, you really do not have much choice, my sweet. But les vieux, they also just hate the modern world, many of them. It is not the place in which they grew. They do not understand it; they feel alien in this century, alien to the buildings and the clothes and the music, the very fabric of life. They want the changes to stop. Hence their solution to the problem is… far too drastic.”
“Drastic?”
“They plan to destroy human civilization. Let only a few hundred million survive, as peasants.”
Eeerk! Ellen thought; for a moment she forgot the rushing passage of the roadway.
That’s insane, it’s got to be insane even by… vampire-monster-sadist-werewolf-Saruman-on-steroids standards! “Precisely. Quelle connerie! I like the modern world. Well, much of it. Yes, yes, there are too many humans; they must be trimmed back, faster than our pressure on governments to promote birth control can accomplish-”
“That was you?”
“Of course. Do you think the Chinese would have given up hope of sons on their own? And our sabotage of the economy-”
“That was you guys too?”
“Ch?rie, you thought it was by accident that all over the world so many intelligent people made the same mistakes at the same time? Yes, these measures are inadequate. We must intervene more directly. But I do not want only a few peasants to survive. Peasants are boring!”
Her voice rose. “I like fast cars, and motorcycles, and my jet! I like towns where the streets are not rivers of shit! I like movies and the Web and digital music libraries and BlackBerries and video-on-demand! I like a good selection of lucies, ones who do not have lice and who can carry on an intelligent conversation and have interesting, sensitive minds to torment and degrade! I adore the Louvre, and the Getty, and the Hermitage and the Rijksmuseum and good restaurants and fashion shows in Paris or Milan and Ch?teau Lafite Rothschild and the London theater!”
The voice rose again. “Idiots! Izidingidwane! Baka tare! Fossilized imbeciles! Cretans!?rb?iw?! ”
By then they were moving north on Highway 1, the narrow two-lane coastal strip. The torrent of multilingual insults melded into a sheer howl of rage, not deafening only because the headphones damped it. Acceleration rammed the Shadowspawn’s dense compact torso back into her, and the engine was loud even through the helmet as the wheel screamed against the earth. Everything blurred around them as the cycle surged forward.
“No!” Ellen screamed herself. “You’ll kill us both, nonononono!”
They took the curve lying over so far that her left knee nearly brushed the pavement. A minivan loomed up in front of them, and the motorcycle skimmed between it and the rocky cliff-face of the roadway, close enough that she could have reached out and touched either one, if her arms hadn’t been locked around the other’s waist. A swerve outward and another leaning turn, with asphalt rushing by so close to the right that she could see every crack from deferred maintenance. She couldn’t even close her eyes or look away as death loomed up in the form of a rust-eaten Honda Civic with three horrified faces staring through the glass.
A screech, a skid, a rooster-tail of sparks and they were off the road and off the earth. Thud and they landed again, the gas suspension on the rear wheel clanging as the piston met the stops, then corkscrewing down a rough slope of grass and sand towards the beach and the ocean. Adrienne standing, crouched to throw her weight from side to side to keep the massive touring bike from overturning. Swerving in a sideways break that threw white plumes twice head-height from both wheels as they scrubbed off velocity.
It came to a halt, and silence crashed in as Adrienne killed the engine, kicked down the stand and leaped to the ground. She danced around the cycle screeching exultantly, tearing off her helmet to let her black mane fly in the wind off the blue, blue Pacific, punching her fists in the air.
“Whooop! Whooop! I am supreme! Now that is the way to burn off tensions!”
Ellen half-fell, half-crawled, half-dragged herself off, swaying as her knees threatened to buckle, dropping the helmet at her feet as she gasped in cool salt air. It felt icy on the sweat that drenched her face.
“I nearly peed myself! I nearly peed myself!”
She clutched at her stomach, fighting nausea for a long moment, staggering a few steps away and back.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!”
Adrienne was laughing, eyes blazing and spots of red in her cheeks. Ellen braced her hands on the seat of the motorcycle, straining to control her breathing.
“You could have killed us ten times over!” she said, voice trembling.
“Only five, if you count the ones where I had to use the Power to shift probabilities. The rest? Matchless skill and reflexes like a leopard, ma douce. Oh, if only you could see your face! And your mind, it’s like an eye that has stared into the sun!”
“Stop laughing at me!”
Adrienne did. The smile died away, and the gold-flecked brown eyes locked with hers. She sank down with her back against a rock that jutted up through the sand of the beach and patted her lap.
“Come and lie across my knees like this,” she said, her voice husky with a growling undertone. “That was an effort. Now I’m a little hungry again.”
Run, Ellen’s mind whispered suddenly.
The fear of crashing into rock and metal and feeling her bones crackle like overstressed bamboo suddenly gave way to something older and more primal. A hundred thousand years of instinct spoke:
Run. Hunter, predator, walking death, it smells your blood, runrunrunRUN!
The Shadowspawn laughed. “I’m twice as fast as you and half again as strong,” she said, in that deadly velvet tone. “I’d chase you down in ten yards. Or I could just use the Power and make your pants fall and trip you. That
