All Offers Can Be Refused
Owen was standing before his digital map of the world when Lucy led Carlisle Cullen into the office. She gave Owen a quick nod and withdrew the way she had come, closing the door behind her.
Owen pointed to a cluster of three dots in Northern Virginia. "One of the white dots is you," Owen explained. "The red dot's Lucy."
Carlisle approached the giant monitor, but said nothing.
"You were a hunter," Owen remarked. "White dots, red dots. Should I have other colors on my map? Are there more than two kinds of vampires?"
"I don't know," Carlisle replied. "It was never common knowledge that there were shape-shifters distinct from werewolves. Yet those shape-shifters exist."
Owen turned to face Carlisle. The vampire was every bit as handsome and composed as Owen had been led to expect. "If I understand the inclinations of your old friend," Owen said, "if Aro had my problem he would seek someone with the power to sense supernatural creatures. He would use that person's ability to discover how many types of vampires there are in the world. Am I right?"
"Probably."
"Then that's where you begin in understanding me, Dr. Cullen. I have no desire to find a 'power' that will solve my problem. Can I answer my question without a power? That's the real issue in my mind. Weak, ignorant, groping in the dark - can I still somehow determine if there are other types of vampires? That's what will make me a real hunter."
"I've known plenty of hunters," Carlisle replied. "It's no life worth living, no matter how good you are at it."
"Oh, I'm miserable enough," Owen granted. "A hunter pursues a tiger into the jungle. The man tracks the tiger, lives with the tiger, worships the tiger. He becomes one with the tiger, and loves it even as he cuts out its heart. When the tiger dies, the hunter dies with it. Why, then, does he kill it? Because it is a tiger."
"That's not why I hunted."
Owen pondered this for a moment. "They say the Roundheads were right but repulsive," he observed. "Is that a fair summary of your father?"
"I suppose."
"It is not a fair summary of me. I am repulsive, but I'm not right. Meaning I'm no better than my prey, and I know it. Proud, arrogant, empty, yes. But not self-righteous. I'm not a good man killing bad vampires. I'm a bad man killing bad vampires."
"What if some vampires aren't bad?"
"You'd think that would be the key question," Owen said, moving toward his desk. "But it's not. If humans possess an innate right to life, it certainly doesn't spring from the goodness of our hearts. We don't deserve to live because we're good. We deserve to live even though we're not. It is a foundational element of the human condition. And as you're not human..." Owen shrugged and sat down.
"Let's assume what you're saying is true," Carlisle replied, taking a chair opposite Owen. "A right to life is part of being human. It does not automatically follow that humans are the only creatures to possess such a right."
Owen's eyes sparkled. "Am I dreaming, or have I finally met a vampire with some smattering of intelligence? Where should I set the bar, Dr. Cullen? Must I make you prove that vampires also have a right to life before I decide to spare the Olympic Coven? That could be a pretty high bar to reach. And given that humans are your natural food source, I'd have to think the whole effort would contain some sort of wicked-nasty self-contradiction."
"I do think we have a right to life," Carlisle maintained, "or I'd not have created my family in the first place. And we love each other deeply, even if you think that's not possible."
"Oh, I have no doubt vampires can love. Be assured of that. But nazis love, too. We still do right when we kill them."
Owen pulled out a protein bar and began nibbling it, rocking in his swivel chair ever so slightly. He sipped from a water bottle. "I think I like you, Dr. Cullen. It's a pity we have to be enemies. I feel I could learn so much from you."
"It is my desire that we be friends, not enemies."
"Perhaps. Perhaps for now. But I'll let you in on a little secret: I see the future much better than your daughter Alice does. Let me tell what I see. I see a future in which biometric sensors are so advanced and so ubiquitous that vampires will no longer be able to mix in human society. I see a future with combat machines so fast and so lethal that stone vampires become easy kills. Most importantly, I see a future in which vampires realize what the future is going to look like, and decide to do something to prevent that future.
"Do you understand what I'm saying, Dr. Cullen? At the current rate of technological progress, vampires will be wiped out within the next two hundred years. Vampires will realize this within fifty years. And then vampires will try to halt mankind's technological progress before it's too late. That means in about fifty years, your species is going to try to destroy modern civilization. You'll hit the human race with some apocalypse that wipes out three quarters of the world's population and puts our technology back to the 1700's. You'll wait four hundred years, and you'll do it again. And you'll keep doing it, cycle after cycle, because it'll be the only way your species can survive.
"So instead of talking about whether or not vampires have a right to life, let's talk about something much more fundamental. Will vampires allow human technology to advance to the point where we can effortlessly identify and eliminate every member of your species at the moment of our choosing? Or will you do whatever you have to to keep from ending up in such vulnerable, helpless circumstances?"
Owen stopped to observe Carlisle's reaction. He could tell this little speech had taken his guest aback, that although the doctor might understand exponential growth in a petri dish, he had never applied that understanding to the accelerating growth of humanity's scientific knowledge. He had never grasped what that exponential function meant for the future of his kind.
Owen had to give Carlisle credit, though. Based upon his expressions, the doctor was putting the pieces together in an awful hurry. Owen imagined Carlisle drawing the curve in his mind: man's technology developing ever more quickly till, without even trying to, man got himself to the point where he need never fear a vampire again. Vampires had to stop that growth curve while they still could. And they had to do it soon.
"Do vampires have a right to life?" Owen asked. "Do humans have a right to grow our tech base till we seem like gods, even to you? This is what you have to do, Dr. Cullen, if you want your family to live. You have to help secure mankind's technological ascendency. You have to help us get to the point where you can no longer hurt us. Choose sides with humanity, Doctor, against your own kind, and I will treat you like a human being."
"How do I do that?"
Owen produced a sheaf of papers and passed them to Carlisle. "I understand you're the treaty-making sort," Owen said. "Here are my terms. The Olympic Coven must maintain its exclusively animal diet. It must submit to permanent government monitoring. No more humans may be turned, not for any reason. You will initiate and oversee a research project tasked with eliminating venom from vampires, the success of which would enable us to spay/neuter vampires and prevent them from reproducing. Your coven will also assist my agency in the hunting of all remaining vampires on earth. Each vampire will be given the choice of entering into this treaty, or being killed for persistence in its human diet."
"Is that all?" Carlisle asked, his voice grim.
"Probably not. If I'm going to let the most powerful coven on earth survive, Dr. Cullen, I've got to feel it in my bones. It's got to feel appropriate, fitting, sensible. In the dark hours of the night, when the ghosts haunt me, I have to feel I'm doing the proper thing to. Make it click inside me so completely that you alive actually helps me sleep better."
"How do I do that?"
"I have no idea. That's part of the challenge. You've got to convince me you've joined the human side, certainly. But you've got to do more. You've got to make your survival matter to me. And you have to figure out how to do it."
"Eliminating our venom may not be possible," Carlisle said.
"You don't need it to hunt."
"It's not that. The substance is integral to our physiology."
"Well, that's a problem," Owen said. "Even if your coven never eats a human, the mere fact that you're capable of producing others who might makes you a threat. I have to know your family will never create another vampire. And as I understand it, you're the key offender in this regard. Perhaps I'm asking more than you're capable of. Perhaps the only way this ends is with all of us dead."
"You're not really giving me a choice," Carlisle complained.
"There you are mistaken, Doctor. Motives and reasons undergird every choice, or it wouldn't be a real choice. I'm giving you strong incentives to make the choice I want you to make. So what? It's still a real choice you are making. Plenty of other vampires in the same circumstances would make different choices. Some would have eaten me by now. Some would never have come at all. But here you are, sitting in my office, refraining from killing me no matter how severely I goad you." Owen rose and extended his hand.
Carlisle hesitated for a moment, then shook. Lucy reentered the office.
"You're an intriguing figure, Dr. Cullen," Owen said, "a trait that helps you more than you realize. Keep intriguing me and we'll see where this goes. I hate killing interesting people."