Blood Vivicanti (9780989878593) Page 2

  “He’s a violet specter now,” they reminded him in song.

  “His eyes glow red,” they chorused.

  Silent traveled for a long time through space. He saw many interesting planets and moons, but he never found Lowen.

  Life on the spaceship got very lonely.

  Silent became nostalgic after a while, he forgot about all the bad times he’d had on Khariton, and he remembered only the good songs in the Noise.

  He wondered how the Kharetie were doing and if they’d ever fixed some of the cracks in their society. He hoped they had changed the name of The Noise back to the Great Harmony.

  He visited a few galaxies that had about ten billion inhabitable planets and he visited the ones that had developed a world wide web and social media, so he could get the word out about Lowen’s ghost.

  Most of the inhabitants of the planets that he visited were very surprised to encounter an alien from another planet. They said in their language, “We thought we were alone in the universe!”

  But they were very disappointed when Silent had nothing important to say about the meaning of life.

  He communicated by drinking blood and sharing his own with planet inhabitants.

  A few didn’t mind at all since they already had similar practices.

  Most were frightened by him and they chased him away with torches and pitchforks.

  He learned little from the planets he visited.

  Several told him that they had never heard of Lowen’s ghost and they sent him on his way.

  Very few recalled having seen a violet specter with red glowing eyes. But the ones that did pointed him in the direction of a blue-green planet in a single sun solar system in a distant galaxy.

  “Be careful,” they warned. “The natives still think that touch screen devices are pretty nifty.”

  Silent followed Lowen’s trail to the Milky Way Galaxy. He parked his spaceship on Titan for a lovely view of Saturn’s rings.

  Then he landed on Earth and found Lowen in a few earth days.

  The ghost had been haunting an old plantation in New Orleans and he had also become the accidental star of a television show about ghost hunting. The eerie things he did spooked the television crew and boosted ratings.

  Silent wished that Lowen the ghost had a body to pierce and blood to drink because then it would have been much easier for them to communicate.

  Making signs with his hands, Silent tried to tell Lowen about the Great Harmony and the Noise, but the ghost was not a very good player at charades.

  Lowen entertained Silent for a spell in his haunted mansion. He served afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches. He planned to serve scones next, but he insisted that Silent had to leave after that.

  The television crew had just returned to start filming the new season and he had a lot of chains to rattle and doors to slam.

  The Government realized that a spaceship had landed on earth. So they sent the army to capture Silent.

  Tanks and important-looking jeeps parked outside the haunted mansion right when Lowen was taking a tray of scones out of the oven.

  A general in aviator sunglasses pointed and shouted. The tanks shelled the mansion. Not a splinter remained.

  Silent’s spaceship had protected him with an energy shield that had already endured much more impressive displays of power than earthling fireworks.

  Lowen had liked his haunted mansion very much and he was utterly enraged that it was now destroyed. The ghost started making plans to take over the world.

  But before Lowen could enact his plans, Silent decided it was time to leave, so his spaceship bound Lowen’s ghost in a repo-beam and pulled him into a compartment that the Kharetie had made especially for capturing ghosts.

  Silent was about to fly back to Khariton when he accidently heard a peculiar sound coming out of a small device that earthlings called “a radio.”

  Silent had grown up listening to the Noise and to ancient mythological tales about how the Great Harmony had once been paradise. But in his hearts, he had never truly believed anything like that was possible. Harmony was a fairy tale as far as he was concerned.

  So he was greatly surprised when the magical counterpoint in Bach’s Minuet in D Minor knocked him out cold.

  The Government considered this a happy accident. They tied up Silent and then they strapped him down to an operating table.

  They hauled him and his spaceship (with Lowen locked inside) to a place that they called “the Cellar.”

  The Government then turned off the music for interrogation.

  Silent tried to do what he had been programmed to do since his hatching: He tried to express himself by drinking their blood and by sharing some of his own. He longed to tell them all he knew about the Noise, about Lowen, about life on other planets, about everything.

  But the Government was now very concerned about no longer being the only intelligence in the universe. And they worried about the sudden collapse of a mystical force that they called “the economy.”

  Citizens of earth got wind of this commotion and panic broke out in the cities.

  The Government assured them that they were still alone in the cosmos and that the spaceship they heard about was an old satellite looking for life on other planets.

  “The alien,” the Government lied on national television, “was a space monkey.”

  The Government did not know that he was called Silent, so they labeled him as the “Red Man.”

  Next they brought in a team of scientists to euthanize and dissect the Red Man.

  One of those scientists was Wyn, before he ever became the first Blood Vivicanti. He was the lead scientist on Team A and his team would study the Red Man’s body and blood.

  The leader of Team B was a beautiful woman named Aemilia. She and her team would study the Red Man’s spaceship.

  The spaceship was locked in Cellar-6 while the Red Man was locked in Cellar-7, where Bach’s music blared through loud speakers to keep him perfectly motionless.

  Wyn and Aemilia did not see one another much – not at first.

  The two Cellars were the most impressive laboratories that either had seen.

  There was computer equipment so advanced that it did not appear to be from planet Earth. There were hovering spheres of light as large as beach balls illuminating everything, there were cybernetic spiders making repairs and upgrades to a few computer terminals, and there was even a food replicator in a wall like a dumbwaiter.

  Google sponsorship was everywhere.

  Aemilia and Wyn met once a week over coffee to exchange notes. She talked about the egg-shaped spaceship and its robin’s egg blue color. He talked about the Red Man’s skin and his violet blood.

  Their meetings were short at first. But they grew longer in time. And coffee turned into dinner and dancing.

  Wyn and Aemilia talked about the things they had in common, like their favorite video games and books and their mutual hobby of collecting double dactyls and their love for triangle sandwiches.

  They married under a gazebo at Aemilia’s mansion.

  Wyn had come from poverty and scholarships.

  Aemilia’s late uncle had willed his fortune to her, his favorite niece. Her uncle had been an oil tycoon. He had swum in the planet’s diminishing fossil fuels and greenbacks.

  Now Aemilia was breaststroking in billions.

  There came a time when the Government urged Wyn to cut open the Red Man and gut out his offal like a fish.

  He spent hours trying to convince them that this was a bad idea and that it would be better to keep the Red Man alive for further study. He presented a good logical argument and he thought that he had won his case because in the end the Government decided to forestall the Red Man’s scientific evisceration.

  Wyn laughed later when he realized that his logical arguments had had no bearing whatsoever on the Government’s decision. It turned out that Aemilia had kept the Red Man alive by making a sizeable donation to the campaign fund of the politician spearheading this project.

  The project had been called: Operation Red Man.

  Wyn subsequently dubbed it: “Project Monkeyshines.”

  Bach’s music continued to blare through loud speakers while Wyn studied the Red Man’s physiology and Aemilia studied his spaceship.

  The Red Man’s body was utterly hairless and totally muscular. His red skin was smooth with natural oils.

  The music kept him perfectly motionless, except for his chest, which rose and fell with breath about once every thirty minutes, the way dolphins breathe.

  His eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, never shutting, never blinking, just staring.

  Wyn had grown a little tired of Bach’s music. More than once he tried to turn it off. But changing the music was impossible: It would have been easier for him to add his beaming visage to the carved portraits on Mount Rushmore.

  He was fascinated that music could make the Red Man powerless. Wyn called this phenomenon “auditory anesthetization.” He likened it to inhalational anesthetics – the way earth creatures can be rendered inert by the odor of certain vapors.

  People go unconscious by inhaling chloroform, he explained in a report. Predator bugs can be knocked out by one whiff of the bombardier beetle’s projectile flatulence.

  It seemed perfectly possible to him that creatures from other planets could go senseless by sound waves.

  Aemilia adored Bach’s music. She compared the loveliness of its “multidimensional sounds” to the orderliness of the Golden Ratio.

  She had been a great violinist, too. And she would play the violin to help her solve mysteries, the way Sherlock Holmes would do.

  Playing her violin now gave her a new idea.

  “We should study the Red Man and his spaceship to
gether,” she said to Wyn.

  It was a good idea. He wished he had thought of it first.

  Cellar-6 did not have loud speakers for playing Bach’s music, and they needed to keep the Red Man inert, so they moved his spaceship from there to Cellar-7.

  The Kharetie had programmed the spaceship to defend the Red Man against the harmful effects of combustibles, shock waves, and musical harmony.

  So the spaceship detected Bach’s music and extended an iridescent energy shield that bamboozled not only everyone there, but also the electrical field of every piece of equipment.

  Everything but the lights shut down.

  The music playing through the loud speakers silenced.

  The Red Man had been awake that whole time, but he had not understood the goings-on around him.

  He had heard every word that Wyn and Aemilia spoke, despite the fact that their utterances sounded like gibberish to his mind, addled by the beautiful music. Yet he had the vague impression that they were much kinder to him than most other earthlings had been. And he had the worrisome sense that the music might never turn off and he might never be able to return to his home beyond this sun and moon and peculiar constellations.

  So you can imagine his relief when the music stopped and he could think and feel and move once more.

  Wyn and Aemilia had never seen anything move as fast as him.

  Bullets and Tasers didn’t faze the Red Man at all as he leaped off the operating table and tried to hop into his spaceship.

  Wyn afterward remarked that the Red Man looked as lost and confused as a wild silverback in a circus, and just as deadly.

  In the end it was Aemilia who subdued the Red Man.

  She took up her violin and began playing a moving performance of Bach’s Sarabande in D Minor.

  The Red Man stopped almost instantly and stared at her in wonderment and awe. It seemed as though he had never heard anything so beautiful.

  She approached him as she played.

  He stood perfectly still, not budging an inch. He towered over her. His biceps were larger than her head.

  The Kharetie did not design the Red Man to have any tear ducts. But he wished that they had: Listening to her play the violin filled his whole body with an urge to express his self in the most sublime way possible.

  The Red Man fell to the ground in a kind of stupor, his eyes still open, still staring ahead of where he’d collapsed.

  Aemilia played on, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  A replenishment of soldiers from Cellar-11 lifted the Red Man and strapped him back down to the operating table with leather belts and shoestrings and anything else they could find.

  The power of Aemilia’s playing kept the Red Man in that strange state of waking sleep. She had moved on to Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3. The piece had a slight pause in the change between the adagio and the fuga. She hadn’t thought about the consequences.

  In that very brief musicless second, the Red Man gestured toward his egg-shaped spaceship, trying to teletouch the automatic pilot’s program, in the hope of returning the ship and Lowen back to Khariton.

  But Aemilia was too quick for him. She started playing once again. The Red Man’s teletouch faltered right before he slumped back into senselessness. But his efforts accidently opened Lowen’s cell.

  Lowen’s ghost escaped. He was really upset now, seething with that rare primeval urge on Khariton to break an egg.

  Soldiers pushed the spaceship back into Cellar-6, power immediately restored in Cellar-7, and the music started back up too.

  Bach’s music once again blared through the loud speakers. Aemilia ended her song. It kept the Red Man perfectly motionless.

  But the music had no effect on Lowen’s ghost.

  No earthling had ever before seen a violet ghost with red glowing eyes, so Wyn and Aemilia now gaped at Lowen in amazement.

  Then the ghost hurled himself at the nearest living, breathing soul, which happened to be Aemilia, with the violin still at her chin, the bow still in her hand.

  There was a second before Lowen shoved out her soul to make room for his own. She spent her last breath meeting eyes with Wyn and giving him a farewell smile. It was as if she knew what was about to happen to her.

  Then she was gone.

  Lowen was all that remained inside the shell of her once benevolent frame.

  Lowen possessed Aemilia completely. He was so furious now that the heat of his anger burned through her. She decapitated thirteen soldiers before she made her escape.

  The next day her face could be found on the FBI’s ten most wanted list.

  The Government held Wyn in custody for questioning.

  He convinced them to let him continue his scientific research on the Red Man. He hoped that the Red Man would help him find his wife and the ghost.

  He worked night and day without rest.

  He lived on coffee and chocolate.

  Wyn discovered that the Red Man’s blood possessed an abundance of something very similar to Human Leukocyte Antigens. This inspired Wyn’s theory that a peripheral blood stem cell transplant might help him find Lowen and save Aemilia.

  He didn’t tell the Government about this theory. He tested it by performing a Dr. Jekyll experiment on himself.

  He stimulated the production of stem cells in the Red Man, transferred them from the Red Man’s circulating blood into his own, and they thrived inside his own circulatory system, dividing and producing red cells, white cells and platelets at a tremendous rate.

  He didn’t become Mr. Hyde, however.

  But in a day the Red Man’s peripheral blood stem cells did replace all of Wyn’s entirely. Once that happened, Wyn’s body began manufacturing Kharetie blood through his system.

  Then his body mutated.

  Wyn now possessed greater strength, speed, memory, and senses, as well as an urgent need to consume blood.

  He also grew a Probiscus – his bee stinger – on the tip of his tongue.

  He was very surprised when he came to work the next day with a new distaste for coffee and a peculiar ability to hear the slow movement of the tectonic plate beneath his feet.

  He called the Red Man’s glowing violet blood: The Origin Blood.

  Lowen the ghost was also very surprised when he possessed Aemilia’s body. He had never guessed anything like that was possible. He’d never tried it before.

  For a long time, he had been very content drifting here and there, watching the strange way people lived their lives, never enjoying game shows, yet always adoring new musicals.

  But lately he had been feeling a kind of ennui, as if he had experienced everything there was in the world, and wondering if perhaps he should fly up to the moon.

  But possessing Aemilia was a rush! It was giddying and it made him laugh with delight. It reinvigorated his love for life after death.

  He went everywhere in Aemilia’s body. He bought a ticket to the zoo and fed the giraffes, he played hopscotch, he plunged into a cool pool on a hot midday summer, he had sausage links and sunny-side-up eggs and toast with both sides buttered, and he did much more – all the things that he’d been watching others do for years, yet could not do, being the ghost who had cracked the Great Harmony.

  Aemilia’s body grew old and tired and fat and wrinkled very quickly.

  Lowen did not like this at all. So he left her body and went to look for another.

  All that remained of her was found in a New York dumpster, one shoe missing, discarded like a used cloth, all wrung out and dried up, a husk of the woman she had been in life.