Page 24 of Preaching to the Choir

Neera’s smile broadened minutely and she nodded.

“And two broods. The red and the green.”

“We call them the red and the black,” Neera explained. “The colouration in the black brood has shifted over the last few centuries, judging from the old sketches. Plus I suspect that one of my ancestors was too fond of chess. But yes, well done. And?”

“And they…” She riffled back through the book, finding that the oldest pages had actual old vellum fixed to them, layered over with a film of plastic to preserve it. The dates were in Roman numerals and she had to rack her brains to remember how they worked. “This isn’t old enough,” she said. “This can’t just have started… what, twelve hundred years ago? So how long…?”

“This is as far back as the family records go,” Neera said. “But you’re right. It must be in the hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.”

“Do they…?” It felt like the fatal question, that would snap the line of informational credit that Neera was for some reason extending to her. “Do they control you? Am I… speaking to a bug right now?”

Neera actually laughed. “They’re mindless. They’re animals. Not that they don’t have an effect on us, influence us in various ways, but we are ourselves. Is that what you thought, with poor Will?”

She nodded numbly.

“The only difference, when he came back to you, was that he knew the truth,” Neera said. She rolled her shoulders and settled herself down in the armchair that bulked out one corner of the study, gesturing at the desk chair. Elena glanced at the open door, tensed to run. But run where? She didn’t even know where to go, to get up to the surface, and then she’d be somewhere in that labyrinthine house, in the middle of the monster-infested grounds. And there would be Jeffrey, with his shotgun.

So she didn’t run, but nor did she sit. Options held open even when she probably didn’t have any options left.

“So,” she said, because technically she was still being examined, in viva, and if they were going to kill her, they’d at least have to acknowledge that she wasn’t just some dumb Yank arm candy Ross had brought back from the provinces. “There was some species of cicada that evolved God-knows-when to be parasitic on people. Or on something, and then it moved onto people. And it hides in them for… eighty-three years. A good prime number. Way to catch out the predators, all that. And when it”—she shuddered—“hatches out, it doesn’t just drink plant juice like the regular kind.”

“A more demanding growth period requires a higher protein diet,” Neera agreed mildly. Stakes in the woods. The deer.

“And then it… what? Implants its eggs in people, and the whole goddamn merry-go-round starts up again. Another eighty-three years?”

Neera nodded, fingers steepled beneath her chin, watching. “And?”

Elena felt a stab of panic. Apparently she hadn’t understood the assignment, or not well enough. There was another phrase to the equation. For a second she just stared, wide-eyed, caught out by the examiner. Someone didn’t do their homework.

“And… they…” And she saw it. Simple, really. The skeleton that underpinned absolutely everything that was going on at Enderby. “They aren’t parasites,” she said. “Or they were, but they became something else. Because eighty-three years is a long time to hide in a host. So you look after your host.” Thinking about the unnatural heartiness of Patrick or Godfrey—before their appalling demise, anyway. The burly solidity of all the Enderboughs beyond Ross’s generation. And then thinking beyond that.

“It’s in the voice,” she said, and Neera’s smile was impressed and genuine.

“A resonance,” she agreed. “The nymph slowly grows in the chest cavity. I can show you several thousand pages of writing about the various biochemical changes it makes to the human body, the enzymes it catalyses, the way it makes room for itself without endangering the host. The auditory physics of the chamber it builds, to produce a uniquely persuasive vocal instrument. I suspect that back in prehistory they infested major herbivores, perhaps: moose, mammoths. Made them strong and loud and more fit to breed. But when they shifted to humans… A peculiar biological serendipity. You really are very clever, Miss Mendes.”

“I still don’t believe it,” Elena confessed. She realised that she’d sat down during Neera’s last speech. Partly it was the civility of the situation, the weirdly polite way all of this was coming out. But partly it was that Neera had wanted her to, and that had communicated itself somehow, through the precisely modulated tones of the woman’s voice. “I mean, these days, surely that’s not enough. Everyone’s online and electronic and… emails…”

“And yet the very needlepoint of world influence remains face-to-face,” Neera noted, matter-of-factly. “Yes, all those bankers and ministers and senators and influencers. But follow the thread and someone they are in communication with gets their orders from someone who has met… someone. One of us, perhaps. The human race hasn’t really changed all that much.”

“But why hasn’t this got out?” Elena demanded. “I mean, you’re talking hundreds, thousands of years. Millions of people. Someone must have found out and not wanted to be part of it. Somebody snitched to the Pope. You can’t keep a secret like this.”

“History is full of powerful people who lived longer than you’d think, or survived things they shouldn’t,” Neera said casually. “Biblical figures, kings, holy leaders. And, of course, history coyly omits all the long-lived and powerful people who made sure that the historians didn’t sing their praises. And there are myths going back further than reliable historical records.”

Fairies. Elena thought of gossamer wings glimpsed between the trees. Vampires. Articulated beaks draining blood. “But…”

“And sometimes it does come out, despite everyone’s best efforts,” Neera admitted. “Find some time in history when there’s a purge of the nobility, a conspiracy, a witch hunt. The Affair of the Poisons, Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Báthory. There’s always someone on hand to ensure that what gets written down reflects the understandings of the age: the Devil, that sort of thing. And in modern ages where information moves so much more quickly and is so much harder to clamp down on? It turns out that when the world is drowning in the conspiracy theories of people who’ll believe anything, then nothing will truly be believed. Some part of our story has actually come out into the open three times in the last fifteen years, then just vanished into the soup again. You could go to CNN, and the BBC, and your social media site of choice right now, and it would do you literally no good. Even before we had a word in the relevant ears.”

“Not that I’m going to be given a chance, of course,” Elena said, finding her venom again.

Neera shrugged and settled herself more deeply into the chair, utterly unhurried, utterly unconcerned. After all, it wasn’t her who was under a sentence of death. And then she said, “That’s what they sent me down to talk to you about, of course.”

Elena blinked. Burn the book. Trash the study. Throw something. But she couldn’t. She felt trapped in a web of urbane manners. “What?” she managed. “If I promise very nicely to keep quiet you’ll let me walk away?” Not exactly stinging repartee but as much as she could manage right now.

“Nobody really walks away,” Neera said, soft but firm. “That is practically the Enderby motto, more than that nonsense they have above the door. We’re all in this, and nobody gets to escape. We take the prizes and we pay the price. We are symbionts and parasites both.” She laughed, the sound exploding from the quietness of her words and making Elena start back. “But you can walk further in, if you want.”

Elena blinked. “What? Why?”

“Why? Because you’re smart. And because the family has been keen on medical research and knowledge for the last four centuries, because we’re always working on our particular condition, and how we can shift its parameters to further benefit us.”