xiv
I probably should have explained something earlier, but most people know it already. By this time, the majority of prostitution around the world was run by vampires. Sure, there were still nickel and dime girls out there with a breath and a heartbeat, but the business was a vampire business. So a lot of cathouses also doubled as chophouses, and vice versa.
It’s not like it happened overnight. The girls performed both services, I imagine, long before they came out to the public. I think they had the pornography market cornered too, but that’s harder to tell. It was something about them being girls – vampires are exclusively female, as far as I know – and their ability to maintain or even slightly change their appearance by intent alone. Of course, it helped that they didn’t get or pass diseases, beside that one main one. They certainly didn’t have any religious hang-ups. And I’m sure it worked out nicely that they had a clientele who would give up a pint or two of the red stuff for a discounted night in bed and wouldn’t blab about it afterward.
But then they were discovered, or made themselves public, or some combination of the two, right about when the Stephenson Lens was invented. I’ve heard that the Stephenson Lens was what uncovered them, and I’ve heard that the vampires themselves made the Lens. Either way, they were public.
For a few months the world reeled from the shock. Some people thought they should be kicked out of whatever country they were in, but the girls had their fingers in too many businesses, and in too many politicians’ pockets. Some people thought there should be a war, an extermination, and in a few countries there have been, or still are. Around here there were killings on both sides before it all settled down.
But this country has always prided itself on the capacity to absorb any kind of newcomer. Vampires had already learned to live sociably with people long ago, and they already had a pretty strong lobby at the capital and the money to back it up. They managed to legalize prostitution in every state, and my guess is that they were behind the social acceptance of suicide as well. They had a neat little package – a niche in society that even the uptight moralites could wink at. After all, vampires weren’t really human any more, anyway – they didn’t reincarnate like the rest of us. Who cares what they did to their bodies? God wouldn’t be interested in their souls.