Blood Vivicanti (9780989878593) Read online

  THE BLOOD VIVICANTI

  Part 4

  The Origin Blood

  created by

  Becket & Anne Rice

  written by

  Becket

  The Blood Vivicanti

  Becket

  Copyright © 2014 Becket

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN: 0-9898785-9-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9898785-9-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the imagination of the creator(s) or are used fictitiously.

  Under copyright law, if you are not the copyright owner of this work, you are forbidden to reproduce, create derivative works based on this work, download, distribute copies of the work, decompile this work without Becket’s express written permission.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Copyright

  Becket’s note

  THE BLOOD VIVICANTI - Part 4

  Coming next in Part 5

  About the authors

  Credits

  BECKET’S NOTE

  In 2011, Anne Rice and I began talking about the development of a new breed of blood drinkers.

  The first ground rule was that they had to have an entirely different cosmology from her other supernatural stories.

  She and I spent many weeks emailing back and forth, sharing copious detailed notes. We had several energetic lunches and dinners, whence we discussed the foundation and framework of the story you’re about to read. We swapped ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of these new blood drinkers, ideas about the characters themselves as well as their back-stories, and more ideas about potential narrative devices.

  One of the amazing facets of Anne’s writing method is that she seems to devote almost as much time to selecting the right names for things as she does to carefully crafting the narrative. Both go hand in hand, I’ve learned from her. She’s taught me much. The right name is as important as le mot juste.

  But what name would we call our new blood drinkers?

  One day, after we’d spent weeks thinking about what to call this new breed, I came into her office as she thumped closed a Latin textbook. She beamed at me with her irresistible smile. She told me she knew what to call our blood drinkers. She had not chosen a Latin word, but had developed a new word from Latin phraseology.

  What was the new word she’d developed?

  “Vivicanti,” she said as her smile broadened.

  I loved the word instantly!

  “Our blood drinkers will be called,” Anne Rice announced: “The Blood Vivicanti.”

  Then it was my job to write the story.

  I am going to gather all your lovers and I will make them your enemies before I strip you naked in their eyes so that they will see your bare nakedness, because you gave them your children’s blood.

  —Ezekiel 16:36-37

  THE BLOOD VIVICANTI

  The Origin Blood

  The Red Man was the reason that Nell left me for dead.

  Lowen the Dark Man had sent her to do that. It was a part of his master plan. He wanted me out of the way so that Wyn and Theo would be distracted that night. Lowen wanted them out of the mansion and away from the Red Man.

  Lowen wanted the Red Man. He wanted to make more Blood Vivicanti. He wanted to become a Blood Vivicanti.

  But before I go on with the rest of that story, the larger picture must be illustrated. You should know who the Red Man was, and who Lowen was, and how they knew each other.

  You see: They’d met before.

  Lowen the Dark Man wasn’t always a man, but he was always dark – very dark.

  He lived a long time ago and he came from a galaxy far far away – yes, like Darth Vader.

  His skin had been blue and his eyes had been red. He had three lungs, two throats, and he loved the scent of the Pillars of Creation in a bottle.

  Lowen had lived and died on a planet called Khariton where humanoids were hatched from soft-shell eggs of amniotic fluids.

  Lowen’s egg was the rare kind that hardened and cracked before he hatched.

  He would have gracefully slid from his egg along with seven hundred other brothers and sisters who had been grown alongside him.

  But he was taken to a special hatchery where no parents would come to adopt him.

  Lowen remained an orphan his whole life.

  Growing up he was sometimes called the worst slur imaginable: “Broken egg.”

  The Kharetie used their three lungs and two throats for communicating with one another without pausing for breath. They communicated by singing. They sang nonstop, shifting throats and lungs, one for singing, the others for breathing and eating and drinking and kissing.

  The whole planet was swathed in what they called “the Great Harmony.” It was a song that had been going on day and night for over two thousand years, unendingly, since the Last Discord.

  The function of parenthood on Khariton was to teach their hatchlings how to sing because the purpose of each Kharetie life was to add a beautiful new color to the Great Harmony. It was an ancient testimony to good parenting.

  Cacophony was outlawed.

  Child abuse was lore. Some Kharetie historians sang their doubts about its existence on Khariton. And some scientists hypothesized that it could not even exist in the universe.

  Lowen was a scientist.

  No one had ever adopted him so he never had anyone to teach him how to add uniquely beautiful counterpoint to the Great Harmony.

  The Kharetie Institute for Broken Eggs taught him how to sing in unison. It never showed him how to harmonize.

  He was perfectly content singing in unison with the Great Harmony until he met someone who showed him that counterpoint in life was possible.

  Lowen had never harmonized with anyone and he was immediately smitten with the gorgeous way his voice could blend with another. They sang for hours and hours between the test tubes and microscopes of his laboratory.

  Sometimes their voices sang in unison, but most times they sang in harmony, each remaining an individual voice, yet both becoming one new song.

  It was an experience he never forgot because it was his first.

  Their song ended and they went their separate ways.

  His partner started harmonizing with someone else, they sang together for the rest of their lives in the Great Harmony, and they taught twelve other hatchlings how to sing too.

  Lowen never found anyone else to harmonize with, not like his first harmony. It increased his general malaise and he started calling himself a “broken egg.”

  The day came for him when he was finally allowed to add his voice to the Great Harmony. By then he was so angry at being so alone that he opened his mouth and widened his two throats and inhaled a large breath into his three lungs.

  Then he sang out one note of discord into the Great Harmony. Within it was an opera of his frustration with life.

  No one had ever before heard anything like his note of discord.

  The Kharetie around him stopped singing and they blinked in shock.

  “He has cracked the Great Harmony,” a lone voice said.

  No one had been arrested in the past two millennia. So it was a bit awkward when Lowen was taken into custody. The Kharetie sang his Miranda rights in a duet because they kept forgetting the words.

  They brought him to ruins like Angkor Wat that were rumored to be an ancient Kharetie jail. It had become a dusty place, and cold too, and the sheets covering over the furniture looked like ghosts.

  Over the ruins of the ancient Kharetie courthouse was a lovely development of townhouses.

  Fortunately, one particularly dogged Kharetie arche
ologist managed to unearth a judge’s seat and a gavel.

  Then they had a trial.

  Everyone felt silly and uncomfortable. Innocent Kharetie citizens begged to get out of jury duty. Lawyers on both sides kept singing out, “objection!” because it had been a very long time since the prosecution of the last criminal.

  The judge slammed his gavel down on his bench and told the court that Lowen was guilty of a capital offense. He liked the sound of his gavel slamming down. So he made the sound again and again.

  Lowen had brought discord to the long-lived Great Harmony. His punishment was death.

  There was a long debate in the Great Harmony about how Lowen should be executed. Some sang how he should be thrown off a tall cliff while others sang how he should be launched into outer space.

  This incident was the first time many Kharetie had ever heard a minor chord. And it came to be known in the Great Harmony as The Debate Anthem. Several Kharetie got so enraged that they came close to committing a capital offense too.

  The final decision was that Lowen should die by a lethal injection of music.

  They brought him into a new room. It was bright and white and smelled of lemony cleaning supplies. The executioners put earbuds into Lowen’s ears and they turned up the volume of the Great Harmony.

  Lowen died within minutes.

  The official cause of death was acute stereo overdose.

  But something remained after Lowen’s death. It was a violet specter that had claws and a wide mouth and red glowing eyes.

  It was Lowen’s ghost.

  He haunted the execution room for a while, but he liked seeing new and exciting things, so he floated outside and soared through parks, he glided through offices and drifted through musicals.

  The sight of his ghost scared several Kharetie so badly that they stopped singing and hid under their beds.

  Lowen had always heard a lot of good things about his planet, but he had never moved out of his city.

  So his ghost went exploring. He flew over lands and oceans. He sat and listened to the cultural differences in the Great Harmony. He photo-bombed a few tourists.

  A new song was added in the Great Harmony called, The Cacophonous Ghost.

  The Association of Ghost Hunters formed and they chased Lowen all over Khariton, searching for him in spooky houses and eggshell graveyards.

  But when they didn’t find him, they lied and sang false songs about seeing a violet specter with red glowing eyes. To backup their songs, they fabricated realistic photographs of a very scary ghost.

  A year passed, and then another, and then a few more years passed after that, and Lowen grew bored of the Great Harmony, because it never changed. It was generally the same song, no matter where he went on the planet.

  So he yawned and floated up beyond the harmonious atmosphere and he flew past planets and stars. He sailed alongside comets and he navigated through clouds of space dust. He saw the Horseshoe Nebula at a distance and he thought it was very lovely. So he glided over for a visit and discovered the beauty of the Milky Way.

  In the meantime, the Kharetie were really upset with Lowen.

  The note of his discord was a novelty to many, like the tune of a catchy song. It got stuck in the head of many hatchlings. They grew up with a note of discord on their mind.

  Lowen’s note echoed throughout the Great Harmony for many more years.

  The more the Kharetie heard it, the more they listened to it. And the more they listened to it, the more they thought it sounded like very good counterpoint.

  Groupies formed. Lowenpalooza was big. The media sang an antiphon, coining the phrase: “Lowenmania.”

  Kharetie leaders did not like Lowen’s discord one bit. So they convened and formed a second law that outlawed Lowen’s note.

  But the more they enforced this law, the more the Kharetie huddled together in speakeasies and listened to it over and over and over again, sometimes singing it twenty and thirty times a night.

  They made a dance to it and they danced till Khariton’s sun rose.

  Kharetie lawmakers revived the Kharetie police department.

  Flatfoots started patrolling the streets. Detectives started sleuthing the location of Kharetie music cartels.

  Law enforcement agencies raided dives and they arrested gang leaders and they stapled wanted posters to telephone poles, advertising big rewards for the whereabouts of notorious criminals in possession of Lowen’s note of discord.

  Soon the first cup of coffee was invented on Khariton.

  Following after this was the invention of the first doughnut.

  It wasn’t long before more Kharetie wrote new songs of discord and sung them in the Great Harmony.

  Kharetie police arrested Kharetie citizens for the manufacturing and distribution of “Discord.”

  Riot songs broke out.

  Lowen’s crack in the Kharetie society fissured and then there were many more cracks. The term “broken egg” was no longer derogatory and many Kharetie grew up wanting to be broken eggs too.

  Broke music was invented and it had a lot of distortion that most of the middle age Kharetie didn’t like to hear in their gated communities. They complained that it was too loud at night since they had to wake up early the next morning to sing their unique songs in the Great Harmony, which had very large cracks in it by then that were lengthening and widening daily.

  Hatchlings no longer listened to parents and the purpose of Kharetie life no longer meant adding a voice to the Great Harmony.

  By this time, the song of the Great Harmony had adapted and changed so much that the theme of Kharetie life was based on conforming to the standard set by tradition.

  The structure of the music began to weaken.

  Only older Kharetie and eccentrics possessed the rare ability to make logical counterpoint.

  Continents divided and formed into countries with governments that squabbled tunefully about territory and natural resources. They wrote wordy constitutions. They wove flags.

  There was a world war or two.

  All the songs in the Great Harmony were in minor keys and many Kharetie soon forgot what a major chord sounded like.

  Life on Khariton was no longer called the Great Harmony.

  It was officially renamed as “the Noise.”

  The Noise was the only issue they could harmonize about.

  The name Lowen became a curse word.

  Kharetie mothers washed their hatchlings’s mouth out with soap whenever they caught them saying things like, “You’re a piece of Lowen,” or “I was so Lowen-faced last night,” or “Lowen!”

  The soap industry thrived.

  Peace came to the Noise after a lot of violet blood was shed.

  Leaders across Khariton formed the Political Chorus. They sang about the legend of Lowen and they wondered how he had created such devastation to the fabled Great Harmony.

  They came to the conclusion that he must have invented his note of discord in his scientific laboratory, and they hoped he’d also concocted an antidote.

  The Political Chorus put it to a vote and the two-thirds majority won: They would develop a space program, create big space rockets, and they would search space for Lowen’s ghost.

  The only problem was that no one really wanted to leave the planet. Some liked the Noise while others hoped for the return of the Great Harmony, and no one had any luggage for a long trip.

  So their best scientists decided to hatch a new kind of Kharetie, one that would leave the Great Harmony, travel through space, find the ghost of Lowen, and bring him back to Khariton to fix the cracks in their society.

  This new kind of Kharetie would really stand out. Instead of blue skin, he would have red. Instead of red eyes, he would have yellow.

  His Kharetie name would be “Silent” because they would not give him a voice.

  They didn’t want any more voices adding to the Noise.

  They designed him to keep all his memories inside his blood, so that he would
never forget his way home – “because space is very big,” sang one song in the Noise.

  They also designed him to communicate through blood too. He would drink blood to know what was on someone’s mind. He would share his thoughts through his blood too.

  They implanted a needle on the tip of his tongue because biting for blood seemed too barbaric to them. The needle would inject his listener with an aphrodisiac so that they would really enjoy everything he had to share.

  The scientists then hatched Silent and they told him he was different and that he could never add anything to the Great Harmony.

  Silent never felt welcomed on the planet and he developed a great desire to leave.

  Kharetie engineers built a spaceship for him. It was robin’s egg blue. It was in the shape of an egg too.

  The Kharetie packed a lunch of blood bags for him. Then they sent him into outer space to look for Lowen’s ghost.