Chapter 13

The temperature was in the mid-fifties and a stiff ocean breeze was blowing across the tarmac of Cambridge Aerodrome on the morning of March 24. There were a few high clouds drifting overhead but the sky was otherwise a brilliant shade of blue rarely seen in inland California. This was typical weather for southern Tasmania four days after the autumnal equinox. Ken and Meghan were both enjoying the combination of bright sunlight and brisk air. They wore blue jeans and light windbreakers over short-sleeved pullover shirts. They wore baseball caps upon their heads—Ken a San Francisco Giants cap and Meghan her old cap from when she'd played on the Register's softball team. It was clear to them, however, that Jo was not wild about the daylight conditions. She wore her heavy leather flight jacket and a pair of Isotoner gloves. She kept her dark pilot's sunglasses over her eyes and her brown UPS baseball cap pulled down as far as she could get away with. She made sure to keep her face out of the direct sunlight at all times.

Ken remembered what Jo had told them about the cognate and daylight. We are creatures of the night by design and function. Our vision, our skin, our metabolism, our very nervous systems, are all made to function in the dark. In daylight we cannot see as well. The brightness of a sunny day overwhelms our eyes, which are designed more to see in dim lighting. Direct sunlight on our skin is harmless, but painful—like little needles pricking you. Every time her face turned to that glowing orange ball in the eastern sky, she felt those needles. And yet she is standing there, looking over that Cessna like it's nothing.

This, of course, led to the real question of the hour. Would she be able to fly that Cessna during the daylight? Would she be able to see well enough and react well enough and think well enough to do what they were planning to do with it?

"It looks good," Jo told the owner of Hobart Aircraft Rentals, a wizened, mid-fifties man with an Australian accent so thick they could barely understand him. "Let's go fill out the paperwork and I'll start the pre-flight."

The man—Hubert Jameson was his name—was clearly reluctant to turn control of the eighty thousand dollar Cessna 172S over to her. He had already checked out her bonafides on his computer and verified that she was a certified, licensed commercial pilot with close to two thousand total hours—including more than two hundred hours in a Cessna 172 model during her initial flight training—but it was clear that her youthful appearance was giving him pause. "Now wait just a minute," he said to her. "Before we go signing names on official paperwork, tell me again what you're planning for this aircraft."

"We're going to fly over to Devonport and do some exploring around the north part of the island," Jo told him. "We're going to stay overnight at the Devonport Sea Lodge and then fly out in the morning to King Island. We'll have lunch there and look around a bit—my friends are really anxious to see the wind farm there—and then we're going to continue across the strait to Geelong and spend the night there. The next day we'll hop our way back here."

"Two trips across the strait?" Jameson said doubtfully.

"Yes," Jo said. "Is there a problem with that?"

"Girl, you ever flown across the Bass Strait before?" he asked.

Jo shook her head. "No," she said. "I understand it's windy at times though. I'm sure it's nothing I can't handle."

"Do you really have any idea what windy means in the strait?" Jameson asked her. "I'm not sure you do. It ain't no piece of piss, girl! It's not just the prevailing winds that rip through there day and night, it's the gusts that come and go with no warning. It'll bump and bounce you around something fierce!"

Jo simply shrugged, deliberately giving him the idea that she was unimpressed. "I took my flight training out of Schaumburg just outside of Chicago," she said. "I hardly think the winds in the strait can be any worse than they were over Lake Michigan."

"Lake Michigan?" Jameson scoffed contemptuously. "Nothing but a fart against a duck feather in comparison. Out in the strait's where the bloody Indian meets the bloody Pacific! The only place on Earth where the wind's more unpredictable is the Himalayas and the Cape itself!"

"The conditions are forecast calm for the next seventy-two hours," Jo told him. "Seas at less than two meters, winds at fifteen to twenty with gusts up to twenty-five at times."

"The forecast?" Jameson exclaimed. "Hooley Dooley! You can't trust a forecaster out here anymore than you can trust a polly not to put his old boy in your freckle!"

Jo scratched her head a little. "How's that?" she asked.

"Never mind," Jameson said. "My point is, what are you gonna do if you're out over the strait and that wind suddenly kicks up to fifty with gusts of seventy-five? I've seen such a thing happen, you know."

Jo shrugged this off as well, or at least pretended to. Despite the impression she was trying to leave Jameson with, she and Ken had researched the Bass Strait quite extensively and knew that shifting, unpredictable winds was the most likely thing that could cause them to abort their mission or, even worse, to cause an actual impact into the strait instead of a simulated one. "I guess I'll just deal with that if it comes up," she said.

This was not the answer Jameson wanted to hear. "You understand, girl, that this is Tasmania you're in and not bloody New York Harbor? You go down over the strait and there'll be no handsome coast guard blokes flying over to you in a helicopter three minutes later, before your make-up has a chance to run. Our coast guard is volunteer and in this part of Oz they're spread mighty thin. Even if you survive the crash, you could be in the drink for more than an hour before they even get a boat within twenty K of you. That's more than enough time for the sharks or the swells to finish you off."

That's exactly why we picked this place, Ken thought, suppressing a nervous smile of satisfaction. And this, of course, led to the thought: Are we really going to try to pull this off? Do we really think this is going to work?

Jo was undoubtedly thinking the same thing, but she kept her poker face firmly attached. "I understand the risks," she told Jameson. "I understand them and accept them. So ... are you going to rent me the plane or what? Because we plan to put at least fifteen hours on it before we bring it back. I'm sure the gentleman who runs Cambridge Aircraft over there would be willing to collect our one twenty-five per hour if you're not."

It was this logic that served to sway Jameson. He finally agreed to entrust his aircraft to her. Ken followed him into the office to fill out the rental paperwork and put down the deposit with his credit card, which was funding the bulk of this trip and would hopefully be paid off when he and Meghan's estate was liquefied sometime over the next year.

"She quite the figjam, ain't she?" Jameson asked Ken as his printer began churning out the forms.

"Figjam?" Ken asked.

"Fuck I'm good, just ask me," Jameson translated.

"Ahhh, I see," Ken said, not smiling.

"Is she your daughter?" Jameson asked.

Ken smiled weakly. There had been a time, only five or six weeks earlier, when no one would have mistaken Jo for his daughter. Now, however, with the tumors growing merrily away on his liver and pancreas and the gradual but insidious degradation of his body, he seemed to have aged ten years or more. His face was gaunt and starting to show the first yellow tinges of jaundice. His stomach was starting to swell a little in the lower regions from the ascites. And the muscles in his arms, legs, chest and buttocks were shrinking, giving him the first hints of an undernourished heading for emaciation look. "No," he told Jameson, "she's not my daughter, just a close friend of the family. And don't worry about your plane. I've flown with her for about a thousand hours. She's a good pilot."

"You're a pilot as well?" Jameson asked—the obvious, unspoken question being: why aren't you flying the plane instead of her?

"I was," Ken said. "I had to give it up."

"Give it up?" Jameson asked, genuinely shocked. "Why in blazes would you do that?"

"It was a voluntary medical disqualification," Ken told him. "I have cancer."

Jameson's eyes widened and he took a step backward, as if it might be catching. "I see," he said slowly. "Well ... that's too bad."

Ken shrugged. "It is what it is," he replied.

Jameson developed the awkwardness of one who was troubled by the thought of talking to someone with a terminal illness (even though Ken had not actually told him it was terminal). The rest of the transaction was done quickly and without any unnecessary conversation. When it was complete, Jameson merely asked him to send Jo back in for a few more pieces of paperwork to sign and to log her flight plan.

"Will do," Ken agreed.

He walked back out to the tarmac, where Jo was going methodically through the pre-flight inspection checklist and Meghan was standing back, watching her nervously. "How's it going?" he asked.

"So far, so good," Jo replied as she ran her hands up and down the right wing strut and gave it a good pull to make sure it wasn't loose. "I'm glad he finally gave in though. I was just about to try opening my jacket for a little friendly persuasion."

"Would that have worked?" Meghan asked.

"It's debatable," Jo replied. "It's daylight and I'm well fed. It's also windy out here and he's more than fifty years old. Not exactly ideal conditions."

Meghan nodded, filing that information away and then going back to staring at the aircraft. After a moment, Ken decided to stare at it too. It was a standard, reasonably late-model of the most common single-engine aircraft ever built, the staple of flight schools and private aviation worldwide. It was the same basic model of airplane that Ken had learned to fly in when he was a seventeen year old high school junior paying for flight lessons with money saved from fast food jobs and newspaper routes in Grants Pass, Oregon. But this one was different. This one, if all went well, was an aircraft that he knew was never going to return to its home base. It was the aircraft that would carry him, Meghan and Jo on the first leg of their journey to a brand new life.

It had been twenty-four days now since they'd made their decision. In the end, it had come down to a very simple algorithm. Ken was going to die. He didn't want to die. Meghan didn't want Ken to die. Meghan did not want to live without Ken. Since there was a way for them to both continue to live together, they had to take it. Even the implied but never mentioned consequences for both of them if they refused did not enter their calculations. Life was precious, their life together more so. They would see what life as vampires held for them. After all, if they found it not to their liking, if they found they could not adjust their morality enough to guiltlessly feed from members of the human race, there was always "Taking the Next Step". Any cognate was free to take that step whenever they wished.

"We'll do it," Meghan told Jo shortly after sunset two days after the offer had been officially extended to them.

"You will?" Jo asked, her eyes shining and hopeful, her lip quivering with emotion.

"Yes," Meghan said. "We will."

"Both of you?" Jo asked, as if waiting for some sort of disclaimer to be thrown in.

No disclaimer was forthcoming. "Both of us," Ken confirmed. "It's the only way we would do it."

A moment later Jo was crying tears of joy and showering both of them with hugs and kisses. "This is the happiest day of my life," she told them. "Of both my lives! I'll only be happier when I see you take your first feedings!"

By that time, Jo's commotion had brought the other members of the cognate clan (as Ken and Meghan had taken to referring to the them when discussing things privately) into the room: Gertie, Harold, Dick, Marty, and Ralph—all of whom had gone out once or twice a night to feed but had never left Ken and Meghan completely alone, not even for a minute.

"Did we hear correctly?" Gertie asked, although it was obviously she already knew they had.

"You did," Ken said. "We have decided to join you."

And then Gertie started weeping tears of joy and showering them with hugs and kisses. "Welcome to the family," she told them. "After two hundred years, I'm finally going to be a grandmother."

"I don't feel old enough to be a grandfather," Harold said, "but I guess I'll learn to live with it." And he gave each of them a hug and kiss on the cheek as well.

This reference—the fact that Ken and Meghan would be Harold and Gertie's cognate grandchildren—caused Ken and Meghan to share a look with each other, a look regarding one of the more startling revelations of cognate culture they'd been told about over the past two days: How the relationship between Jo and themselves would change after the propagation. It was something they were still trying to wrap their minds around.

This revelation had taken place the previous night during the dinner table discussion period after the dishes had been cleared away. It was as they were sipping weak white wine spritzers and talking about the ins and outs, pros and cons of bloodsucking.

"There's something you haven't asked about yet," Jo told them. "Something that, in the interest of full disclosure, I feel I really need to explain to you."

"What's that?" asked Meghan, who was still reeling from the story Dick had just told them regarding a human couple he had lived with and maintained a sexual relationship with for more than three years during the chaotic years immediately after the French Revolution.

"As I said," Jo said, "it never came up, but haven't you wondered about how me and Mom and Dad met and how they ended up becoming my cognate parents?"

"Uh ... well, I haven't thought too much about it," Meghan admitted.

"Yes," Ken agreed. "I just assumed they were a nice cognate couple who kind of adopted you when you were human and decided to make it official."

"Yes," Meghan said. "That's what I figured too. It seems to make sense since those who become cognate tend to be those who cannot or do not have children. I mean, it's only natural, right?"

"Well ... not exactly," Jo said.

"What do you mean?" Meghan asked. "You told us you met them in San Diego in ... what was it? 1950?"

"1951," Jo said. "And that is where I met them. Only ... the relationship we shared with each other when I was human was not a parental one; it was a romantic relationship."

"Romantic?" Meghan said. "You mean ... uh..."

"Romantic," Jo repeated. "And sexual. It was, in fact, a loving relationship very much like the relationship I share with you and Ken now."

"We have told you how we cognate often develop extended romantic relationships with individuals or couples of humans," Gertie said.

"Yess," Ken said slowly. And they had. That was what had led to the story Dick had just told about his affair with the eighteenth century French couple.

"Our relationship with Josephine started out as one such relationship," Gertie said. "I, like Josephine, like you yourself, Meghan, am bisexual."

"Bisexual?" Meghan said, once again wide-eyed and open mouthed. "Do you mean ... you were always bisexual?"

Gertie chuckled. "Since the time I started to grow breasts," she said.

Meghan was blushing now. "Sorry," she said. "It's just that I ... you know ... it's hard to think that there were bisexuals back in the eighteen hundreds in England."

"Yes," Ken agreed. "I mean, I intellectually know that there must have been, it just doesn't ... you know ... go along with the image."

"I assure you," Gertie said, "we've been around as long as there have been men and women having sexual intercourse with each other. In any case, my overriding sexual orientation has always been toward men, but I'm more than marginally attracted to women as well. I was never able to act upon my desire to indulge in female flesh until after my rebirth as a cognate, and even then, I very rarely engaged in anything other than single, fleeting encounters with women. On those occasions it was more than that—say, once every decade or so—it was generally nothing more than a one or two week tryst with someone I found especially alluring. Quite frankly, I never saw myself as someone capable of actually falling in love with another woman, particularly not a human woman." She looked at Jo nostalgically, lovingly. "I was wrong."

Ken was still unable to grasp what it was she was trying to tell them. It seemed like he was missing a link or two in the chain of logic.

Meghan was apparently having the same difficulty. "I'm not sure I'm following you here," she said. "You're saying you and Jo were ... that you started out as ... as..."

"As lovers," Jo said.

"Lovers," Meghan said, as if it were a new word. "Okay. But now ... now you're mother and daughter?"

"And father," said Harold.

"Right," Meghan said, chewing her lip a little. "You started as lovers and ... and now you're the father, Gertie's the mother, and Jo is the daughter. What am I missing here?"

"You're not missing anything," Jo said. "It's just a new concept for you. Cognate relationships evolve from friendship to lovers to reproduction, just like human relationships are supposed to. The only difference is that we don't have the factor of growing another being inside of our bodies. The birth of a new cognate is conceived within the bounds of love, just as reproduction of sentient beings should be, and it is conceived through sexuality, again, as they should be, only in our case the human part of the equation evolves from human lover to cognate child once the rebirth and transformation is complete."

Ken's head was spinning. There was something about this that just seemed incestuous in a way. "So you're saying ... that you, Jo, used to have sex with Gertie and Harold?"

"Yes," Jo said. "We were lovers for four years before I was reborn."

"And ... did you used to call them by their first names?" Meghan asked.

"Yes," Jo said with a playful smirk. "Along with some other more intimate names."

"Josephine," Gertie said warningly, although with a playful smirk of her own.

Meghan ignored this—or tried to anyway. "So ... so ... after they propagated you ... you started calling them Mom and Dad."

"I did," Jo said, "because once I was reborn, they were my mom and dad. My very blood was a product of theirs, my very existence as a cognate was because of them."

"And ... and..." Meghan swallowed, clearly uncomfortable with the discussion. "And once you became cognate and they became your ... your parents, you ... stopped having sex with them?"

Jo nodded. "Yes," she said. "It is a necessary part of the evolution and it is integral to the continuation of civilized cognate society."

"And," said Gertie, "once you have been through the propagation process and taken your first feeding, it will feel like a parent-child relationship—for all parties concerned. It is difficult to explain to you now, since you've yet to go through the process, but that is how it happens."

Meghan was scratching her head, her face a mixture of confusion and anxiety. "So ... just for clarity here," she said. "You're telling us that if Jo turns us into cognate ... that we will no longer be able to be ... uh ... intimate with her?"

"You will not," Jo replied, now showing an expression of sadness of her own. "You will no longer feel sexual love for me at that point..." She glanced at her mother. "Not overtly anyway. Our love will grow and deepen considerably as we will be bonded on the genetic level, but ... but the love will be that of a strong parent-child relationship, not of intimate lovers."

"So you'll be our ... our..."

"I will be your mother," Jo said. "You will refer to me as 'Mom' or 'Mother' and I will call you by your full first names. We will kiss and hug each other quite frequently, but we will not be intimate with each other."

Meghan had a tear running down her cheek now. "I ... I ... don't think I like the thought of that," she said, her lip quivering.

"I know," Jo said. "I don't like the thought of it just now either. Right now, I love both of you as sexual beings, as objects of intimacy. All I can tell you is that this may seem like a sad thing, but it really is not once the propagation is complete. The depth of the parent-child bond we will share will outweigh the loss of intimacy by a factor of ten. I am closer to Mom and Dad now than I ever was as a human lover to them. It will be the same for us."

"What about our memories of our relationship with each other?" Ken asked. "Some of the fondest memories of my life involve ... well ... to be honest, they involve some of the steamier encounters between you, Meghan and I. The first time we made love, for instance, the time in the South Lake Tahoe hotel room, the time we went up into the VIP booth at Raley Field and ... well, you know..."

"Yes," Jo said, a naughty twinkle in her eye. "I know."

Even Megan gave a little giggle at that one.

"So ... what I'm asking," Ken continued, "is will those memories turn shameful once we start thinking of you as our mother?"

"A good question," Jo said. "The answer is a little complex and hard to put into words, however. In short, you will retain those memories and if you have a well-adjusted personality and sense of perspective, it will not bother you to think that the woman you know now as your mother was a star performer in that memory. When that happened, you see, I was not your mother. As long as you do not obsess about it, there should be no problem. For instance, I still remember the first time that Gertie and I made love. It is one of my fondest memories. I still remember the first time that Harry, Gertie's husband, kissed me in passion while Gertie suckled my breasts. That too is a fond memory."

"Yes," Gertie said with a smile. "Mine as well."

Harold nodded. "It was quite the night," he agreed.

"But now, while the thought of doing those things with Mom and Dad is somewhat shameful and taboo, they weren't Mom and Dad then, they were my lovers. Your brain will be able to make the distinction."

"Every cognate goes through this," Gertie said. "Once you are reborn, your mind will draw a line in the timeline of your memories. On one side of this line will be your pre-cognate memories and on the other your post-cognate memories. The two will not intermingle."

Ken and Meghan were silent, both trying to absorb all of this.

"Does that make sense?" Jo asked.

"Kind of," Meghan said softly. "There is one other thing though."

"What's that?" asked Jo.

"If you become our mother ... does that mean that Ken and I ... that we'll be ... uh ... brother and sister?"

Ken blanched and suddenly felt ill. He hadn't even thought about that. "Oh my god," he whispered, suddenly horrified.

But Jo was smiling. "No," she said with a chuckle. "It doesn't work like that. You'll still be husband and wife and you'll still have the sexual hots for each other. And ... lucky you ... you'll get to experience cognate lovemaking without having to wait for a suitable cognate partner."

Ken looked at his wife and saw a gleam of interest in her eyes.

Gertie saw it as well. She giggled a little. "There are some true advantages to coming into the fold as a married couple," she said.

The pre-flight was done and the engine was turning, imparting a comforting hum throughout the aircraft. Jo sat in the left front seat, her hands on the controls, her feet on the rudder pedals. Ken sat in the right front seat, his hands in his lap. Meghan sat directly behind Ken, her hands nervously gripping the back of Ken's seat, her seatbelt pulled uncomfortably tight across her middle. She was not, however, quite as nervous as she could have been. She trusted Jo's piloting skills as much as she trusted Ken's and she had been in up in an aircraft very similar to this one eight different times in the very recent past. This trip would be a little different though. She would actually have to suffer through the landing this time—something that had not been required of her on those other flights.

There was no other traffic, air or ground, moving at Cambridge Aerodrome at this particular moment. Jo was given immediate clearance to takeoff. She pulled onto the field's only runway and paused for a few seconds, quickly running through her takeoff checklist.

"Are we ready?" she asked.

Ken and Meghan both agreed they were ready.

"Off we go then," Jo said. She slowly pushed the throttle forward and the engine began to roar. The plane rolled down the runway, steadily picking up speed. At 66 knots, she pulled back on the control stick. The nose lifted up and they broke contact with the ground. The ride smoothed out and the plane began to claw its way upward, wobbling a little in the gusty wind. By the time it reached one thousand feet, the airport grounds were behind them. Jo turned right, following the field's egress pattern, and two minutes later they were over the outlying suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania, still climbing. At twenty-five hundred feet, they were out of the field's airspace. Jo engaged the autopilot, which had been programmed to bring them up to eight thousand feet of altitude and follow the GPS course to their destination: the small town of Devonport on the northern coast of Tasmania, 113 nautical miles away.

The flight took one hour and sixteen minutes from takeoff to touchdown. Even though he wasn't controlling the aircraft, even though there was a lot of uncertainty and doubt looming over the next forty-eight hours, Ken couldn't help but enjoy himself. He had been born to fly, after all, and flying in a Cessna 172 at eight thousand feet over Tasmania was the very essence of what drew humans to fly. The flight into Hobart from Sydney the day before had been aboard a Qantas Airlines 737 and the approach to the runway had been from the seaward side of the island, giving very little opportunity to glimpse the landscape. Now, however, they were flying directly over the island at an altitude that was, at times, less than three thousand feet above the terrain. The island was composed mostly of rugged hill country covered with thick green foliage. There were occasional flat spots where farming was being done, occasional tree-dotted meadows, a fair amount of narrow rivers and moderate sized lakes, including one that was surrounded with steep, rocky cliffs. Every few minutes there would be a glimpse of a road, twisting and turning its way through and around the hills, and every once in a while Ken caught a glimpse of small airstrips, a few isolated buildings, the odd water tower, a set of power lines, or, even more rarely, a communications tower. But these sporadic hints of human intrusion only served to contrast the vast overriding emptiness of Tasmania—an emptiness that Ken had only experienced once before: over the isolated wilderness of northern Alaska.

About thirty-five miles from their destination, the land began to slope downward a bit, putting more altitude between the plane and the ground. A strip of grayish-blue became visible on the horizon, a strip that expanded minute by minute until it was recognizable as the turbulent water of the Bass Strait, the 150 mile wide channel between Tasmania and the southeastern coast of mainland Australia. Ken stared at this sight more intently than anything else, feeling chills of fear and anticipation.

"That's the strait, isn't it?" Meghan asked from behind him.

"That's it," Ken said. "The place where we're going to die."

Even Jo seemed awed by this first viewing of what the world would assume to be their watery grave. "And the place that will give us rebirth," she said.

They continued on and soon they were over the small town of Devonport, population twenty-two some odd thousand, a town that was considered the gateway to the Tasmanian wilderness. Jo descended over the town and then out over the water of the strait itself. The moment they went feet wet, the plane began to rock and bounce in the gusty wind. Ken looked down as Jo banked to the right to enter the airport's ingress pattern. From twenty-eight hundred feet up, he could see choppy waves roiling and converging in multiple directions. He could see thousands of whitecaps scattered densely throughout his field of view in no discernable pattern. Even this close to shore it was as unforgiving a seascape as he'd ever laid eyes upon.

"It looks nasty down there," he commented.

"Yes," Jo agreed. "Just like it's supposed to look."

Six minutes later, they touched down on the asphalt runway and taxied over to the general aviation terminal. While Jo and Meghan went about unloading and securing the plane, Ken walked over to the main passenger terminal. In there was an establishment called Sanders Rents. What Sanders rented was jeeps. Ken had a reservation for one, made on the internet a week before.