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Kang laughed. “No, he has always preferred women.” A sly smile lifted a corner of his mouth.
I gasped. “You were a woman?!” I grinned as he nodded. “Were you smokin’ hot?”
He let out a snort of mock disdain. “Of course I was. I’d hardly take the form of a hag.”
More questions burned to be asked, but I made myself focus. “Okay. So you and Sulemain were doing the lust and thrust, and you force-evolved him. Then something went wrong, big time. Am I right?”
Old grief filled his eyes. “Sulemain was a soldier, accustomed to killing when necessary. Yet he was also a good man—a tender and considerate lover with the capacity for great compassion and loyalty. We’d been together nearly seventy years before I forced the change, and I’ve regretted it for over a millennium.” He massaged the center of his forehead as if trying to physically ease the pain of an old memory. “Sulemain’s entire personality changed. Almost overnight, he developed a hair-trigger temper and a greatly increased capacity for violence. Not bloodlust or berserker . . . but cold-blooded and aggressive, terrifying to be around, even for me.” He met my eyes. “I couldn’t be with him anymore, although I have always monitored from a distance. It took centuries for the hyperaggression to fade such that he regained a measure of his old humanity.”
That explained a lot. “When you pretended to fall asleep again, he went off on Dr. Nikas and punched a wall.”
“That incident was a pale shadow of his former belligerence. It was after Sulemain rescued Ariston from the mob that change for the better began. Ariston was . . . is . . . a wellspring of calm. For everyone.”
I smiled. “I’ve felt the effect about a zillion times.”
“Ariston helped Sulemain regain balance, became a touchstone for the man Sulemain needed to be.”
“Did you force-evolve Dr. Nikas, too?”
He shook his head. “After the disastrous result with Sulemain, I vowed never to force completion again. Ariston matured naturally after about two and a half centuries as a zombie.”
“Is that about when most zombies do the maturing thing?”
“Most zombies never mature,” he said to my surprise. “It takes the perfect match of person and parasite. There’s no way to predict, but yes, if it happens, it’s usually after a couple hundred years.”
“If a zombie doesn’t mature, what then? Do we just go on living like we are?”
“The relatively few zombies who manage to avoid death by accident or injury can potentially live several hundred years before they lose the ability to repair damage. At that point, they begin to swiftly age and die within a year or so.”
Huh. And here I’d been thinking I was immortal. “Several hundred years isn’t a bad haul.”
“Not at all.” Kang shrugged. “For that matter, I’m sure that even an evolved zombie has a limit to his life span, though clearly it’s longer than twenty-two hundred years plus change.”
“I can’t even imagine living that long.”
“It hasn’t always been glamorous,” he said, face an unreadable mask.
Two thousand years. How much tragedy had he seen? “How many mature zombies are there in the world?”
“A dozen, maybe less.” He shrugged. “Who knows? There aren’t all that many zombies in the first place, and only a scant few of them mature—with no known rhyme or reason
. Through the years, I’ve encountered six others. None as old as I am, and none younger than Ariston.”
“Kristi Charish has a theory that the zombie parasite controls its own population. Maybe it applies to mature zombies, too.”
His eyes narrowed. “The doctor who wants to be queen dictator?”
“That’s the one.” My mouth tightened. “Over a year ago, she was trying to create zoldiers—zombie soldiers. I was kidnapped to be used as her test subject. She had one of her men shoot Philip Reinhardt, then gave me the choice of making Philip a zombie or watching him die. I couldn’t let him die, so I turned him.” I rubbed my arms. “The very next day they brought in another ‘volunteer’ and shot him, but the instinct wasn’t there for me like it had been for Philip, and that man died in my arms.”
“Because it doesn’t work like that. A variable amount of time is required between turnings—weeks to months—which is why you couldn’t save that second man.”
“Found that out the hard way. Kristi told me it was because of a population control mechanism with the parasite, due to brains being a limited resource. I suppose that explains why there are so few zombies.”
Kang regarded me with calm, ancient eyes. “Is that truly what controls our population?”
I made myself consider the question. Even if each zombie made only one new zombie every six months, the population would triple each year. Given our long lifespan, after a thousand years or so, we should have zombies stacked halfway to the moon—which obviously wasn’t the case.
“It’s not the parasite controlling the population,” I finally said. “It’s us. We choose when to make a new zombie.” In fact, as long as I’d been with the Tribe, the only two new zombies created were Philip and Andrew Saber—both by me. “We’re not indiscriminate. We know about the limited food supply. We know that more zombies means more chance of being outed and killed. For self-preservation, we don’t go around making zombie babies every time we can, but only when we need or want to.”
