See that building across the street? No, no, that one, well, that was their building and it housed their laboratory, and they’d welcome my cooperation in offering them a few biopsies that would not cause the least pain—skin tissue, hair, blood, that kind of thing.

Then the story unraveled of how, in Mumbai last year, Seth had come into Fareed’s hospital room where Fareed lay dying, a brilliant research scientist and medical doctor in his prime, as the result of a plot on the part of his wife and a fellow medical researcher. Fareed, in a locked-in coma, had thought Seth a figment of his tortured imagination.

“And you know,” he told me in that rippling and exquisite Anglo-Indian accent, “I thought the first thing I would do was take revenge on my wife and her lover. They’d stolen everything from me, including my life. But I forgot those things almost instantly.”

Seth had been a healer in ancient times. When he spoke, his speech was accented too, but I couldn’t place it, and how could I, since he’d been brought into the Blood at the dawn of history?

He was what people call rawboned, with wondrously symmetrical bones to his face, and even his hands with their huge wristbones and knucklebones were interesting to me, as well as the fingernails, like glass of course, and then there was the way his cold face would fire with expression when he spoke, and the masklike smoothness imposed by the Blood would be banished.

“I brought Fareed into the Blood to be a physician,” Seth explained. “I can’t understand the science of these times. And I do not understand why there is no physician or scientific researcher amongst us.”

Now they had their laboratory complete with every conceivable machine that medical science had invented.

And I soon found myself in that building on those upper floors, following them through brightly lighted chamber after chamber, and marveling at the staff of young blood drinkers ready to make the MRI or the CAT scan, or draw my blood.

“But what are you going to do with this data?” I asked. “And how do you do all this, I mean, are you bringing over scientists into the Blood?”

“Have you never seriously thought of such a thing?” Fareed asked.

After the biopsies and vials of blood were taken, we were sitting in their rooftop garden, great banks of tempered glass separating us from the chill Pacific wind and the lights of downtown Los Angeles dazzling in the pretty mist.