Gregory Bear - Blood Music

“Good. Done with your breakfast?”

Three more before noon. He couldn’t believe it.

Candice was sore when she left. “I feel like I’ve just trained a year for the pentathlon,” she said as she stood at the door, coat in hand. “Do you want me to come back tonight? I mean, to visit?” She looked anxious. “I couldn’t make love any more. I think you’ve brought on my period early.”

“Please,” he said, reaching for her hand. “That would be nice.” They shook hands rather formally and Candice walked out into the spring sunshine. Vergil stood at the door for a while, alternately smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.

Vergil’s taste in food began to change a week into his relationship with Candice. Until then, he had stubbornly pursued sweets and starches, fatty meats and bread and butter. His favorite food was a garbage pizza; there was a parlor nearby that cheerfully loaded pineapple and prosciutto on top of the anchovies and olives.

Candice suggested he cut down his intake of grease and fat—she called it “that oily shit”—and increase his greens and grains. His body seemed to agree.

The amount of food he ate also declined. He reached satiety faster. His waistline diminished perceptibly. He felt restless around the apartment.

Along with his changing tastebuds came a change in his attitude toward love. Nothing unexpected there; Vergil was savvy enough about psychology to realize that all he really needed was a fulfilling relationship to correct his nervous misogyny. Candice provided that.

Some nights he spent exercising. His feet didn’t hurt quite so much. Everything was turning around. The world was a better place. His back pains gradually faded, even from memory. They were not missed.

Vergil attributed much of this to Candice, just as adolescent rumor attributed the improvement of bad skin conditions to the loss of virginity.

Occasionally the relationship became stormy. Candice found him insufferable when he tried to explain his work. He approached the topic with barely concealed anger and seldom bothered to simplify technicalities. He almost confessed about injecting himself with the lymphocytes but stopped when it became obvious she was already thoroughly bored. “Just let me know when you find a cheap cure for herpes,” she said. “We can make a bundle from the Christian Action League just to keep it off the market.”

While he no longer worried about venereal disease—Can-dice had been up front about that and convinced him she was clean—he did break out in a rash one evening, a peculiar and irritating series of white bumps across his stomach. They went away by I morning and did not return.

Vergil lay in bed with the smooth white-sheeted form breathing softly next to him, fanny like a snow-covered hill, back unveiled as if she wore a seductive low-cut evening gown. They had finished making love three hours ago and he was still awake, thinking that he had made love to Candice more times in the past two weeks than he had with all other women in his life.

This caught his fancy. He had always been interested in statistics. In an experiment, figures charted success or failure, just as in a business. He was now beginning to feel that his “affair” (how strange that word was in his mind!) with Candice was moving over the line into success. Repeatability was the hallmark of a good experiment, and this experiment had—

And so on, endless night ruminations somewhat less productive than dreamless sleep.

Candice astonished him. Women had always astonished Vergil, who had had so little opportunity to know them; but he suspected Candice was more astonishing than the norm. He could not fathom her attitude. She seldom initiated love-making now, but participated with sufficient enthusiasm. He saw her as a cat searching for a new house, and once finding it, settling down to purr, with little care for the next day.

Neither Vergil’s passion nor his life-plan allowed for that kind of sated indifference.

He was reluctant to think of Candice as being his intellectual inferior. She was reasonably witty at times, and observant, and fun to be around. But she wasn’t concerned with the same things he was. Candice believed in the surface values of life—appearances, rituals, what other people were thinking and doing. Vergil cared little what other people thought, so long as they didn’t actively interfere with his plans.

Candice accepted and experienced. Vergil sparked and observed.

He was deeply envious. He would have enjoyed a respite from the constant grinding of thoughts and plans and worries, the processing of information to glean some new insight. Being like Candice would be a vacation.

Candice, on the other hand, undoubtedly thought of him as a mover and shaker. She led her own life with few plans, without much thought, and with no scruples whatsoever… no bites of conscience, no second thoughts. When it had become clear that this mover and shaker was unemployed, and not likely to be employed again soon, her confidence had remained strangely unshaken. Perhaps, like a cat, she had little comprehension of these things.

So she slept, and he ruminated, going back and forth over what had happened at Genetron; chewing at the implications, the admittedly weird behavior of injecting his lymphocytes back into his bloodstream, his inability to focus on what he was going to do next.

Vergil stared up at the dark ceiling, then scrunched his eyes to observe the phosphene patterns. He reached up with both hands, brushing Candice’s bottom, and pressed his index fingers against the outer orb of each of his eyelids to heighten the effect. Tonight, however, he could not entertain himself with psychedelic eyelid movies. Nothing came but warm darkness, punctuated by flashes as distant and vague as reports from another continent.

Beyond rumination, isolated from childhood tricks and still wide awake, Vergil settled into watchfulness, watching nothing, and thought with no object–

really trying to avoid

–waiting until morning.

trying to avoid

thoughts of all things lost

and all recently gained that could be

lost he isn’t ready

and still he moves and shakes

losing

On the Sunday morning of the third week:

Candice handed him a hot cup of coffee. He stared at it for a moment. Something was wrong with the cup and her hand. He fumbled for his glasses to put them on but they hurt his eyes worse. “Thanks,” he mumbled, taking the cup and lurching up in bed against the pillow, spilling a bit of the hot brown liquid across the sheets.

“What are you going to do today?” she asked. (Look for work? implied, but Candice never stressed responsibility, and never asked questions about his means.)

“Look for work, I suppose,” he said. He squinted through his glasses again, holding them by one flopping temple piece.

“I,” she said, “am going to take ad copy down to the Light and shop at that little vegetable stand down the street. Then I am going to fix dinner by myself and eat it alone.”

Vergil looked at her, puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He put the glasses aside. “Why alone?”

“Because I think you’re beginning to take me for granted. I don’t like that. I can feel you accepting me.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” she said patiently. She had dressed and combed her hair, which now hung long and shining across her shoulders. “I just don’t want to lose the spice.”

“Spice?”

“Look, every relationship needs a scratch of the kitten now and then. I’m beginning to think of you as an available puppy-dog, and that’s not good.”

“No,” said Vergil. He sounded distracted.

“Didn’t sleep last night?” she asked.