Whoever had a name to match their destiny? I thought of changing mine – to Fionnuala, perhaps, keening on the shores of Moyle, or Helen, stolen away like a robbed parcel. But it could, I realised, have been worse and at least I was called after a legendary sea-wave. So Cliodhna I have remained and the acquatic life in which I found myself thrust I have now embraced. Like earth and ocean I was born in violence, the physical form through the violence of an undrugged childbirth, my vampiric self through the violence of my brother’s unreflective lust. When the cooling of the universe brought electrons and protons together, expanses of time was needed for the adhesion of matter, the genesis of hydrogen and oxygen. Loss of heat and an ocean of time; without these things life could never have come about. Loss of blood-heat, and the atto-time vampires inhabit, I have become something extraordinary.
Having died in the water, I awoke in the water, and it has become my protection from the sun. I can recall the last time I feared water, I can recall the very evening, when my brother, his thirst for blood sated, flung my dying body into Galway Bay. When I first moved to the underwater I lived virtually alone and liked it. I was neither human nor demon, dead nor alive, so I might as well, I thought, be neither alone or in company. When I first left the land, Grainne Mhaol was still on the high seas, the first Queen Elizabeth of England was still young and copper-haired, and when I re-emerged, the acephalous ruins of the Pharaoh’s Empire and the syphillic descendents of the Empire’s former neophytes were labouring in the pit, each blindly dedicated to the comminution of the other. The justification for the war was the rhetoric of an enclosed metaphysics, but the execution of it had at first a terrifying grandeur. Now they have just become two boxers whose fists graft themselves to the other’s face at each blow and must be torn asunder till finally every organ is exposed and dry and the last synapse has flickered out. Every conceivable form of energy has been exhausted, even prisoners of war on treadmills the size of continents. Humans had even begun looking to the uncolonized planets, hoping insanely for refuge from insanity under the sulphur rains and on the boiling rocks of Venus. Since I have recognized that life in general, and my life in particular, cannot exist without water, I have felt better, knowing that I had retained some connexion with the mortals. But now the connection is drawing closer because the mortals are stepping silently to shores across Europe and the Americas, as they were known, and, with a last cautious glance, slipping under the water. So I am not travelling all these thousands of miles back to the scene of my desanguination just for merriment. Now that the humans, whom I once forcibly left, have come to my world, there is a job to do. There is nothing left now but the electricity generated by buckyballs.
The possibility of re-infecting myself with an emotional attachment to the place of my birth had not occurred to me, and it is some time before I realise the real reason that I spend the night walking the shores of Inis Mór, not the mainland. For two centuries I saw no humans unless I sought them out, then in the twentieth century humans began to investigate the oceans. At first – my sense of humour having been drained from my veins along with my blood – I shunned them, preferring to hide in caves and remind myself of how full of sour grapes and ashes was my life. By and by I began to watch them, fascinated by the machines they brought with them, by their way imitations of biology. Ships glided over my head, over the centuries, dropping sounding bells and sinkers, trying as best they could to create a map of the ocean floor. I hid in the sonar shadows, marvelling at all that the mortals missed. Occasionally, I admit, I teased them; as my body adapted to allow me to live in the ocean, I let them catch glimpses of me as I sped away leaving a trail of light behind me. After a century or two, I never thought of my past. But when I reach the edge of Ireland’s continental shelf I dream a dream I have not had in many years, and when I wake I know I have been crying. My tears are dense globes, sinking slowly through the salt water; I dreamed I could breathe again. A winter breath it was, when the veins of ice in the air crawl, crackling in the mouth, roughening the throat, stretching the warm lungs till they smart and flush. Then out. Great lungfuls of pure air, right from the open atmosphere, standing right up on a mountain side in the sunlight, with no protective mile of water above me. When I awoke I was still so thrilling with the feel of air in my body that desolation swamped my waking self. This dream has always made me sad, reminding me of what I have lost. But now, with humans barely able to breathe the air either, I weep for all of us. Treasure each breath, it may be your last. It is now, more surely than the from stars upon which I depend, I know I am almost reached my destination. As I swim towards Inis Mór I slip under a boat, and the bright light I can see from my safe shadows below show me movement, a girl, playing with the clean water. Sound travels more slowly through water than does light so it is moments before I hear her pulse. I flip over and dive. I am jealous but I only realise it after circling the rocky island during the night. My emotions are so limited now that I am sad long before I know what to call it. It is the last moments before dawn when I leave the oceanside. The moon is a fading scar, the horizon has that tremulous violet that is the last passage of the night. I slip into the water, safe from the sun. I no longer need air. I cannot bear light. I am outside time. I am made of earth held falsely together, waiting for a pointed stick to prise them apart. At least I still have water.
Eoghan will certainly be surprised. The little bastard.
Eoghan has always been very clever indeed. He concealed the fact that he is a vampire, having lost his humanity along with his virginity to the strong-thighed daughter of a Carraroe fisherman; he staked her the next time he saw her. He took over our father’s merchant livelihood and feigned an illness that allowed him to avoid daylight. Physicians were a problem, as they were for King Midas, and the solution reached in much the same way. As the centuries passed and language developed a specialisation for every facet of existence, he became a photophobe. But transparent though his hands might virtually be, they never lost their surety of touch in business and Eoghan remains one of the richest men in Europe by dint of canny selling to both sides. While I am waiting for the sun to go down, I swim to Tor Bucky. It is many miles down, but the obscene skeleton it makes is visible, I would guess, almost from the surface.
The first pipes and bridges were things of ethereal beauty, I remember seeing images of them projected by the news channels onto the night sky. Timeless bones of steel and glass, rising from the land like mermaids, arching between sky and land like something from Plato, the crater snug in the centre like Atlantis. Oceanographers had known about the crater for over a century, and had long speculated that it had been the result of a meteorite crash, but it was nothing more than an oddity until a geologist and an oceanographer were chatting at a party and the one mentioned to the other the high instance of buckyballs in the crater at Sudbury Plain. The oceanographer took herself off to the floor of the Atlantic three miles from the coast, and a year later told the world that the Connemara crater was hopping with buckminsterfullerenes. Isn’t that grand, said Eoghan, bringing forth the Forte family’s claim to a big chunk of the sea and all that came out of it – wangled so that the proto-Eoghans could control first the docking of ships, vulture rights to shipwrecks, and fishing, but now a more stable molecule. He had no idea what to do with the discovery and instantly went into partnership with Fimac, that soi-disant benevolent corporation whose shadow falls behind every dodgy enterprise a sick mind could devise. Buckyballs and carbon tubes became the commonplace headlines of the Galway Herald and the Carraroe Tribune. Newspapers included animated images to show the changes in colour with doping but nothing about the experiments my brother was facilitating to investigate the commercial production of electricity by pushing water through buckytubes on an industrial scale. Clean electricity, they said, using the most stable molecule, our companion from the beginning of the world, and with the thickening of the air with pollutants, everyone eagerly said yes. The research began in earnest and when a another century had passed and Eoghan was pretending to be another generation of our family, the first building began on the floor of the Atlantic ocean. A chaotic metal whose molecules did not affect the tiny fullerenes provided the protective shell inside which an intricate network of carbon nanotubes were constantly assailed by the sea and, obedient to their chemical laws, they produced electricity which, unlike power derived from ocean storms, could be generated at will and without stop. And then of course the war had started, and the fighter ships that tore up the sky needed so much fuel that the earth was torn up in its turn to supply it. Like a bear whose bile is in demand, the land has its scars ruptured almost daily so that both the Majestic Empire and the United Resistance can keep their spybots in the air.
Time past and Eoghan became greedy; time passed some more and the enemies became more desparate. The earth was ripped and shattered as a car crash, war and greed and mortals piled on top of the earth like a lamprey, and sucked up oil and the fossils fuels like a vampire sucks blood. The sky from Connemara to as far as the eye could see across the Atlantic was a dead red, streaks of sick green marking the clouds of nitrogen. The transport bridges were no longer glass but low-grade unstable metals that scraped the sky like infected cuts. The pipes no longer rose from the ground and blended with the landscape; ditches had been gouged and the pipes laid as best they could fit; with no money spared to pay engineers, the ditches were never deep enough and so lay like cicatrice across the grey land. In some places the ditches were so tight that the pipes were stove in to fit. In other places, the ditches were too big, gaping like hand-me-down shoes, filled with the corpses of fish, drowned dogs, and derelict humans. Soon the water that had been dragged in to copulate with the buckyballs to produce electricity before being washed out again began to leak from the damaged pipes. The toxicity of industrial scale use of fullerenes laid waste to the land. The bleached earth and mutant animals might never have been my concern except that by the time it showed up on the land, it had already begun to poison my world.
It always pleased me to watch a country build up under the sea. When I was a very young child I used to try to imagine the underside of a country, all those miles below sea-level until it joined the earth. Did every bit of it join up, I asked my father, who looked astonished, or might it break off? Would the eternal ocean, biding its time, wear away the joins, casting islands and continents so adrift that they might some day disappear or bump together? My father, believing as he must in the literal truth of the Bible, looked sternly at my mother who was obliged to reprove me for my curiousity. Since then it has been a comfort to me to see for myself the monolithic roots of a place, a massy link between the world that lies under the sun and that which lies under the water. My water world is not so protected that I cannot sense the shadow of the mortal world’s activities. In 1912 I had been swimming on the cold horizon of the northern oceans when a ship hit an iceberg and plummeted to its doom. I was far too many miles away to see it, and only heard a faint boom hours later, but I knew something had happened. The deep ocean changed the quality of its silence, phosphorescence dimmed instantly, even the whales stopped. We were like birds and gophers when a hawk flies over. I swim to the edge of Ireland, and investigate the remainder of its continental shelf, that anchor of my childish imagination and as I swim inland, I glide again under the boat, and find that having been plunged first into sorrow, empathy and then jealousy, I crash into one more clot of vestigial humanity.
How do I put this politely? Eoghan vampirized me while I was out under Spanish Arch, dressed in men’s clothes, engaged in my nightly squiring of Hannah Lynch, another merchant’s daughter. I am not sure what my mother or her circle would have done with a ichthyic vampire for a daughter, especially one who preferred girls. What I am trying to bring myself to say is that, devastated though I was when Hannah spurned me – not having expected the ichthyic, the vampire or even, I confess, the daughter – and sad though I was when Hannah finally died, I have not lived the life of an anchorite since then. Before I came home to the water I lived much as Eoghan did, though elsewhere, shunning the light, and sulkily coming out at night, in male attire. Later, of course, when the nanotubes had altered my physiology, and my expedited evolution obediently worked out the evolutionary advantage, it was a little more difficult. I favoured prostitutes as they were not in a position to complain about preferences for being fully clothed, the unexpectedly exposed patch of scaled skin, the occasional gelatinous touch and a tendency to light up at moments of passion – I was clean and I paid. The more treacherous the human world becomes, the more reluctant I am to take on that disguise and that really has only left one option – as I do draw the line at bestiality, however attractive the whale – of myself and my fins. But looking at the draped limbs and the silver drops thrown up from her casually kicking foot, I wanted nothing more than to shed my new skin and step, finless, lightless, naked as the girl herself, into the little bobbing boat. Foolishly, cautiously I approach the boat and am astonished that she almost immediately rises on her elbow, twitching her head to listen. Humans never see me and almost never sense me. I am not, of course, truly invisible. Animals see me and react to my presence, agitation spasming their skin like electricity, fish and certain plants are instantly elsewhere, in the same nanosecond that they register my trick of silver light. Almost from the first moment I rose choking from Galway Bay, humans became irrelevant to me, like a light switched off. It was many years later, when I realised that I am what I have always been but just in a different combination of flesh, that I also realised that the light switch had been on their side. I was no more than a flit through an open doorway. I dove down till I could not hear her.
The shore of Galway Bay is evening warm under my bare feet, and I stand for a moment at that place I love, the exact spot where the sea and the land meet and part, the exact spot where the sea, with its terrible eternity, will absorb the land, and the land will become the sea. Due to Eoghan’s diligence, however, there is little charm to be had here, at the sandy edge of the Atlantic, for he has shattered the land with the architecture needed to bring the electricity from the ocean to the Pharaoh’s Loyal Air Base in the centre of the city – and to surreptitiously siphon some of it away to the Rebel Air Base in Reykivijk. Good old Eoghan, sticking firmly by the family’s advantageous interpretation of political neutrality. I sigh, and step out towards the house where I was born.
Eoghan is too old to be surprised. Even if he felt the shock of discovering that the young man he had vampirised under Spanish Arch a millenium ago was in fact his sister, his face, encrusted with age and greed and lonliness, could not show it.
“And how is it you think you know this?” he says wearily. There has been a campaign against the use of nanotechnology to support the war, against the use of buckyballs, in favour of discovering the consequences before taking action – the last one almost a human taboo, it seems to me.
“How is it that you think you can prove this?”
He uses our father’s study as his office. The walls are still lined with bookshelves, none of which my father or Eoghan have read. The rise in acid in the air is slowly eating away the leather covers, and leaving bleached streaks on the oak shelves. The floor has had to be replaced with concrete to save Eoghan falling through the skeletal floorboards, and the windows, enlarged in the 1920’s, have been coated to protect him from the sun so the light in the room has a glowing quality, as though it were made of neon, with a definite tinge of violet. Forte House was made of local stone, built on the corpse of a Norman tower, and was altered only when the comfort or safety of my brother required it, so the kitchen, where there are only his servants to work, is the same cold block of sixteenth-century rudiments, while his sitting room has every luxury and protection this century can offer to the rich.
I told him about the corpse I had found, floating off the coast of Greece. He had been a male human, he had been dead a while, but there was enough of him left for me to be astonished – the first human I had ever seen who had done what I had done. I began looking for them, then, the humans who were trying to save themselves from the war and from the hostility of the overground by altering their genetic coding so that they could live underwater. These humans lived closer to the shores of what had been their civilisation so they were the first to be affected by the surge in concentration of waterbourne fullerenes. It was other humans who noticed first, of course, when their loved ones could no longer recognise them or their livers began to fail. I noticed the whales and the dolphins more than I noticed the humans – changes in behaviour, rejected calves whose mothers did not know them, their songs becoming more chaotic. The humans began to get together to discuss it and I, thinking bloody humans are the only ones who could take something as stable and useful as a fullerene and kill the fucking planet with it, went along. By this time they had adapted so many marine characteristics that my appearance really only provoked envy. I avoided mentioning my diet. A year or so of research and of careful sneaking about and disguising myself while reading over the shoulders of humans on trains or breaking into their houses to watch television while they snored, and we narrowed it down to my loving brother Eoghan and his money-pot, the single largest source of nanotoxins in the aquatic world.
I can smell the dawn. The black air swells with noise as soon as the first atoms of light spill over the horizon into the sea. By the time the cauterizing smell of light reaches me, I have taken refuge in the tunnels under the house, astonished that I recall them, nursing my fury at Eoghan.
Cities distress me. Urban-born – however tiny the urbs – I have always preferred cities and the relief they hold in their meeting places and talking places, their entertainments and demands for interaction, growth, dissent. For a city to exist it must have a population and to be among the throng is hardly bearable for me now. Their heartbeats boom in my ears, with no pulse to attune to I can hear their blood gush and tumble, smell it in their skin. When I ceased to be human, with a span of eternity before me, time slowed down. Taking up a life in the final depths of the ocean, time is barely perceptible except genetically – as we shift our atoms to make the best use of our environment – or as an evolutionary imperative – as we watch the turtles migrate, the salmon fling themselves upstream, the eels thrusting blindly to the Sargasso sea. I have never killed a whale, though I could take a baby from the pod. I like whales. They are large and slow and I feel that they, of any mammal, exist in the same timescale as do I. They move across oceans like a human stepping across the road to a neighbour, they talk and sing and warn. Not for them the conscious display of consumption, compound conjugations and brilliance wasted in the creation of a pretty matchbox. A swoop, a note and a thousand years of comprehension perseveres. It is simplicity sustains them. But among the humans, the air crackles with the speed of their neurons. I can hear the information surging like a forest fire through billions of synapses, chemicals thundering as they transmute, speech pouring out through the city streets, and those dreadful, terrible silences, pinpricks in the throbbing fabric, when a human ceases. I like to know that they are there, even if I am only a mote of light in the corner of their eye, but I am deafened by their presence. The tunnels beneath Forte House are cold and dark and silent but in them I hear a heartbeat.
Once in the water, my evolution began quite quickly and though I do not really understand I assume that it was because I hovered between many worlds and that concomitantly I hovered between many possibilities. I could live as Eoghan lived, feverishly trying to pretend to belong in the human world, passing as a human. I could take my revenge upon the world, terrorizing it, feeding upon it, making it sorry it had hurt my feelings. I crept out one night, rising dripping from the Corrib River, and ran off with a young girl. She was about fifteen, I guessed. I grabbed her and was instantly gone, I threw her up against a wall and ripped the shawl from her neck, in full display, while she stared at me. I could hear her poor heart fluttering, trying to beat quietly, to save its own life. I banged my head on the stone wall.
“Sorry,” I said, “I thought you were something else.”
I trailed back to the river, cursing myself, and slid under the water to feed instead upon fish. I found the water saved me from darkness – I could see the sun, watch it waft through green water without harming me. I began to live in the waterworld properly, not as a prison but as glorious an opportunity as America was to the rattle-boned survivors of famine and coffin-ship. I have no heart beat, and while it is disappointing not to be able to sigh with love, an inability to breathe suddenly becomes the key to a whole world of water, where I could swim for days, as deep down as I liked, among the sorts of life forms even now the humans have never seen. After some decades, I began to change. Years I spent crushing down the yearning for human blood. I take animal blood, a shark, a seal. They cannot see me properly, like mammals on land. Their blood is unpleasant, a taste I forced myself to aquire, and it suffices. I prepare myself to meet humans, reminding myself of our distant kinship, refusing to consider the possibility of feeling the skin pop under my teeth, feel that sudden surge of exhilarating determination, the single-pointed desire for attainment, conquest, immersion as the first salty sweet jet of blood spatters my mouth.
But if a human comes upon me without warning I cannot always control my response. I hear the pulse echo in the cold tunnel and am instantly hovering behind the source, straining to feel the unflinching artery flutter against my tongue. I dive behind a corner just in time, and am reduced to slicing my hand on a rock and pressing the slow red ooze to my lips. It is the girl from the boat.
Like gems in the palm of a hand, the water surrounds me. Like air to mortals, the water sustains me; like hope to mortals, water held me above the riptide of despair and kept me from the dark caves of death when all my life, for all eternity, seemed beyond endurance. It has been centuries since I had revenge in my heart for the brother who drank my blood and dropped me into the water. The waves near the surface are all edged with pale gold, the water is bright and clear and blue as the sky was above the clouds, before you reached the eternal darkness. With the savaging of their world above ground, humans have begun to come to my world and the vastnesses of the expanse and depth, of the timespan that has led to these underwater mountains, this flora and fauna, humbles them. My world is as close as these humans will ever get to experiencing the unspeakable expanse of the universe. They adapt, they oblige and they step away from the world that bred them. They retain the humility that made them admit that they could no longer understand, control or participate in the world that was nominally theirs and they evolve without hesitation so that they can become part of a better one. By doing so they have made me become part of them, because they have become part of me, we are once again “us.” It is gratitude for this that drives me back to Eoghan’s room. I had wanted to rescue the humans from the nanotoxins while allowing them to continue their accelarated evolution into mariners, but I realise that I will fail. He has dismissed me. As the passing of time has removed the glow from his skin, it has also removed any ability to dissemble. He has told me the absolute truth. He intends to live forever, he may cling to the physical edges of the upper world but he has adapted to the mutation of his civilisation just as much as I have adapted to the physical world of the sea. He has every new technology to his wizened hand, he is engaged, at a discreet distance, in every major economic enterprise in what is left of the world. He does not care what the consequences are, because whatever they are, he will survive them. He will walk across a valley of bones, stride through the smoking landscape, but he will survive it. Even when I say and you the only one left in the world, Eoghan shrugs. This is a man who has staked every vampire he sired. I cannot rescue the humans, we have to rescue each other. He wants no links with either world, but I am a link, whether he likes it or not.
I dive deep to escape the afternoon sun, and I tread water there till dark. I sometimes still fantasize about dolphins and seals, basking, leaping into the sunny air, but I know of course the payment; the agony, the dust, becoming a passing skin on the surface of the ocean, like a human scattered upon a sacred river. I am very angry with Eoghan and I recall the first time I swam in an ocean storm. I realise now, almost three hundred years later, that it was then I decided to embrace the ocean, rather than sulking on the edge of the land. The storm was in the very depths of the sea, mountainous waves and a driving, elemental force that made me think of hydrogen atoms smashing, of a blinding heat at the creation of the universe. And sex, of course; predicable, I am sorry to say, but probably unavoidable. What I had not expected was that it reminded me of when I was vampirized. I had felt cold, and light, and immobile but everything around me crashed and roared and I watched it become something other than it was. Everything I ever would have learned and everything I would have become all happened at once, my heart and brain aged, reached its peak, upon the instant. My whole being was torn apart by the gravitational pull of my new nature, and my old self and my new self spun about each other, our paths became elliptical and finally they crashed, again and again, until the new, old nature, absorbed entirely the old, young nature. When the dark came, I broke the surface, and tread water for a while, staring first at the dead red sky, then the poisonous lights of Galway. I slip back beneath the slick water and swim towards shore, too angry still to notice that the girl in the boat is following me.
Neither of us have noticed her entry into the room, which considering that we are both vampires and have not fed in days, gives an idea of the rage we evoked in each other. We noticed nothing, shouting at each other, until I threw a statue at him which he deflected with a casual fury, and we both noticed the girl dance backwards to avoid the flying chunks of marble. Eoghan and I turned, both in full display. Our throats are engorged, our breath has an aggressive, feline hiss. The inside of my mouth puffs out like an adder, and my fangs have sprung from my jawbone. Both of us are facing her, fangs stretching forward like striking snakes, our throats defensively coloured red, purple and gold, our eyes stretched and black. The vampire is dominant, close to the surface, and the human is cowering in the dark. Eoghan turns his head to follow her scent. His eyes are the eyes of a vampire. I can see her as more than a pattern of scent and heat. I see the shifting temperature patterns, but I also see her heart beat, and I see her eyes. She is staring at me, her navy eyes wide but, astonishingly, unshocked. She looks rapturous, staring at our throats. The temperature suddenly rises below her skin, her pulse booms in my ear. My throat begins to fade and my eyes to contract with the very human thought That girl is horny. But when Eoghan, glistening, lunges for her, instantly on her, I am instantly between them with a long shard of marble like a rapier in my brother’s heart. There is a vacuum in the air, an indescribable noise, and nothing. Vampires do turn to dust but the difference between our time and that of a human means that their residue is already scattered like stardust into the universe by the time a human can perceive their absence. Our death is as close as we get to procreation.
The sun keeps me under the water and the weight of the water keeps her in the sun. I dress in my brother’s clothes to continue the fiction of his life, then descend under Forte House, under the water, to sabotage my own efforts. She and I meet in the tremulous blue time when light and dark are mingled, on the shore, where earth and sea grind together. I keep my patience and she keeps to herself her glowing joy at witnessing evolution before her eyes, refraining, finally, from asking us to demonstrate the manifestation of the biological imperative to survive. The humans who come to Forte House can still weep for their lost loves and rail against the spinning of the world, even make a record of their thoughts and plans without ever knowing if they will be seen. I find this as alien she finds our phosphorescence, but now they can divide up the ocean with me, agreeing without hesitation to investigate vast acreages, agreeing to meet again over expanses of time, as though it were only hours. We follow the whales and the mariners who migrate, the whale-shouldering paths wired now into our brains, collecting what we need. I and the marine humans make the plans – who can remove the nanotoxins but leave the water capable of permitting our evolution? Who can provide us with the materials we need to repair Tor Bucky, the arches and pipes? How do we dispose of the mutant corpses – could we re-assembled the wreckages of spybots and send the corpses hurtling into space? What will happen when we stop supplying the carbon electricity to either side? I think I am the only one who wonders if it is too late and I will not say this aloud, because it is too terrifying. I can live forever, the concept of there being a too late is as suffocating as eternal damnation.
I say nothing, because they have made me no longer just me. I know that even if the earth is ever fit to walk on again, I would not leave the ocean, even if there are already so many nanotoxins that it is too late for me and I will end my days in chaotic song, spiralling down to the sea bed. These mortals have chosen that which was forced upon me and we are all returned to the ocean, leaving the upper world to recover as best it can. I am not bound to it, and now the mortals are bound to me because we all find a beauty in the grey cracked earth as much as we did in the purple mountains and the standing stones, because none of it can touch the immutable splendour of the vicissitudinous world that has adopted us.
