“If she is interested, do you want her to get in touch with you?”
“Not really. I’d prefer to be done with it,” he said, not opening his eyes.
“What if she finds a cure?”
“If that happens, I’ll hear about it, sooner or later.”
The contents of the disc represented years of work looking for something that had finally eluded Calvin. By giving the disc to Mio, was he hoping to salvage something? Or could he simply open his hand and let go of a piece of himself, like dropping a book that no longer held his interest? His reasons for visiting may have been more complicated than he was letting on, but they may not have been. Either way, I found myself feeling there was something admirable in his actions; something larger in spirit than I had granted him a century ago in Sicily.
“I’ll give her the disc,” I said.
“Thank you. I’m glad that’s settled.”
“There’s something you might be able to settle for me, if you don’t mind.”
Calvin opened his eyes and waited.
“Miriam Moore,” I said.
Several seconds passed before his expression betrayed a hint of recognition. “The girl you were looking for?”
“Yes.”
“She was one of Yavorsky’s.”
“She’s dead, then?” I asked.
“About a year ago. What was she to you?”
“Just a piece in a puzzle. I didn’t know her.”
Calvin seemed to consider my words. “Is this something you often do?” he asked.
“Is what something I often do?”
“Meddle in the affairs of people?”
“When it serves my purposes. You do the same.”
“I know it’s none of my business. I’m just curious about how you get along in the world. From the looks of things—this house, for example, your relationship with Mio—you seem to be able to cope well enough. I’m impressed, to tell the truth. Very few vampires can pull it off.”
“You seem to do all right,” I said.
Calvin stood up and began pacing around the room. Several times he seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and continued pacing. This went on for a good ten minutes before he finally spoke again.
“Let me ask you a question, Shake. Why is it that you don’t associate with other vampires? And before you answer, let me say that we’re very similar in this regard. I may be even more reclusive than you are.”
The question wasn’t difficult. “I simply don’t like them,” I said. “The ones I’ve met, anyway. Their idiosyncrasies are too exaggerated. They’re repulsive as individuals and even worse in groups.”
Calvin nodded. “I feel pretty much the same way. I’ve often asked myself why congeniality or simple cooperation is so rare among us. There are exceptions, of course. You and Mio, for example. But the exceptions are just that. Exceptional. On the face of it, you wouldn’t think it would be any more difficult for vampires to get along than it is for people. But the fact is, we don’t.”
For a long time, I’d thought of my distaste for other vampires as an aspect of my own personality. It had only been in the last few decades that I’d begun to see it as a problem characteristic of vampires in general. “I’ve wondered about that myself,” I said. “Why vampires seem to be so relentlessly disobliging toward one another.”
“Relentlessly disobliging,” Calvin repeated. Then added, somehow managing to look sheepish, “In other words, they’re all rather like you, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose so.”
“Why do you think that is?”
I thought about the question, but didn’t see any obvious answer.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Calvin said. “We have a problem with power. I know I’m generalizing. But the fact is, vampires will almost always prefer to wield their own power rather than sublimate their desires to some group purpose. We all want to be on top, which ultimately means that we can’t trust or rely on one another.”
“Humans are pretty much the same,” I said.
“Yes, but there’s a crucial difference. There are billions of people on the planet. Most of them lack the power to dominate their own children, much less other adults. But because people are so numerous, the weaker ones can form alliances that give them powers they lack as individuals. These alliances have evolved into very complex networks of social and cultural forces that allow people to thrive in the absence of any real physical or psychological or intellectual efficacy. This is very straightforward for most people. They see that they are better off playing by some set of rules, no matter how arbitrary. They know they can’t buck the system, and they know they can’t take charge. So they do the smart thing and cooperate. They trade their independence for security and social status and all the other complex social rewards. They gather into groups to compensate for an underlying weakness that vampires don’t share. For us, it’s more natural to shun cooperation. We prefer to rely on ourselves. And that, as I suspect you understand very well, puts us in a tenuous position.”
“You mean in our relationships with people?” I asked.
“Exactly. We need human beings for more than their blood. We need them as a mirror. A vampire can’t survive in absolute solitude. Without a mirror, we lose self-awareness, and without self-awareness, we regress to an animal state.”
“Where life is nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes so succinctly put it.”
“Except in our case, it would be nasty, brutish and long.”
And there I was, back to the same question: Who to kill? If all I needed from people was a supply of blood, it wouldn’t make any difference who I took it from. But if I needed people for more than that, if I needed people in order to see who and what I was, then it was in my best interest to spare the lives of people who were, in some way, better mirrors. Unfortunately, even if
