Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

by Anne Rice

  "All the violence you see amongst these mammals," said the Parents. "All of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. That is the basis of life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals--intelligent mammals--are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all the beings on the planet, or any planet in the 'Realm of Worlds.' "

  The Parents gave us to know that planets ruled by the intelligent descendants of reptiles or birds or insects were far more reasonable, peaceful, loving, and harmonious. Indeed, for the most part these species were seekers of harmony by nature, and had a very different attitude towards time than human mammals did, a very different attitude towards love, and towards the Maker.

  "Self-consciousness should never have developed in mammals," said the Parents. But at the same time as they told us these things, they also told us that our longing for love, our seeking of knowledge, our response to various patterns, our noticing of traits and similar structures, our excitement at realizing certain things--all of this had to do with our minds being made to resemble human mammalian minds.

  Derek in particular wanted to know why this was inherently "bad" and I think he surprised the Parents with some of his questions. They never reproved him or criticized him or any of us, though they did seem stunned at times, and at a loss for an answer.

  But they did give answers. "The mammalian mind is entirely shaped by emotional needs," they said, "by wild and intense feelings. And because of this it invents invisible personalities that do not exist and longs to communicate with such personalities. It attaches absurd and destructive attitudes towards feelings. Its idea of the 'Maker' has to do with emotions. Ideas of the Maker on planets on which reptiles, insects, and birds had developed into the ascendant species did not reflect anger or love or vengeance as did the human mammals' vision of the Maker.

  "It is almost impossible for these creatures to know peace or genuine love," said the Parents. "They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or a suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. And when they are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures."

  Finally came the day when we were tired of the film streams, of their repetitiveness, and we had become even a little callous to the endless suffering.

  The Parents brought us together, and told us we were to pray to the Maker. They invited us to bow our heads, clear our minds, and think only of the great creative force that had made all worlds, including those in the "Realm of Worlds," and to thank the Maker for the gift of life and the gift of witness to life.

  They made beautiful sense to us and we were glad to do it.

  They told us to thank the Maker for our having been grown for a special purpose, and to promise to the Maker that we would do our utmost to fulfill this purpose. The wretched mammalian human life-forms on Earth had to be destroyed and we were the ones chosen to do it.

  At this point, Welf spoke up and in a rather jocular manner asked if this Maker was real, and if he or she heard what we were saying, and whether all this thanks mattered.

  I was shocked, as it seemed inconsiderate or unkind to ask this of the Parents. But as usual the Parents were completely calm.

  "We do not know if the Maker exists," said the Parents. "But we believe that he has to exist and he is not really male or female. There are many worlds in the 'Realm of Worlds' where the ascendant beings are not male or female. We use the male referent for the Maker for you because you are male or female, and the male on the planet Earth dominates the female. We believe it is wise and right to give thanks to this Maker. We can see no harm in doing it."

  It was obvious to me that Welf thought this was hilariously funny, and Garekyn did not like it, and that Derek was coldly suspicious of it. For me, it was a matter of being courteous to the Parents. I wanted to know my purpose. I was eager to get on with it. I am by nature the most impatient of the People of the Purpose.

  We went back to the prayers. We bowed our heads, closed our eyes as instructed, cleared our minds, and thought of the Maker. And for the first time since our awakening we heard music again, singing, and it seemed all of Home was filled with this singing; and singing came from outside the dwelling, from the forest realm with all its other dwellings. I opened my eyes and saw a great gathering of Parents around us, Parents who had spread their multicolored feathered wings though they were standing still, and all were singing, and outside I saw ascending and descending Parents, gliding as it were with open wings, and they too were singing. The words these beings sang said something like "We sing of the Maker; we sing of life; we sing of the gift of life; we sing of the glory and the mystery of life; we sing of our gratitude for life; we sing of our gratitude that we have experienced and witnessed life in all its grandeur."

  Finally this came to an end. The huge room was indeed filled with more Parents than I had ever seen gathered in one place before, and the Parents who had been speaking to us resumed.

  "As we have told you," said the Parents, "Earth suffered a calamity. Millions of years ago its atmosphere was poisoned by a large asteroid that struck the planet, resulting in darkness and coldness that killed its abundant life in unthinkable numbers. As the result of that, the mammals of the planet arose and made the life you have come to know, a life of endless struggle, violence, and misery.

  "It is your purpose to go to Earth and to achieve an explosion there that will impact the atmosphere as greatly as the earlier catastrophe. And when you create this explosion, out of your shattered and dissolving bodies will come a toxin strong enough to reduce life on the planet down to single-cell structures once more.

  "But it is imperative that you be in the city of Atalantaya when you detonate this explosion. You must be within the dome and you must be in the presence of the Replimoid who built and rules Atalantaya. It is imperative that this being know who you are, whence you came, and what you are about to do. And then with utter resolution you must do it. Indeed, you will need all your intellect and skill to make the journey from where we plant you on Earth to the city of Atalantaya to confront the Great One of Atalantaya. If at any time before that final confrontation he suspects that you are Replimoids, if he suspects that you have come from Bravenna, he will seek to imprison you or destroy you. And he no doubt possesses the means to dissolve your bodies back to their basic chemical components, while removing the explosives and toxins in your bodies, and indeed he will use all the components to continue his unlawful rulership on the planet. You must take him by surprise. You must announce your purpose and explain it right before you fulfill it."

  I was pondering this. So were Welf and Garekyn, but Derek was plainly horrified. And how could anyone expect otherwise, because we knew full well what death was. We had been watching humans and animals die for days or weeks, or months, for all we knew.

  Derek cried out at once, "I don't want to die! Die? All of us will die? You mean Welf will die? You mean Kapetria will die? Garekyn will die? Why must that happen to us? What good will we be to you when we are dead? And where will we be when we are dead, the we inside of us, our minds, our...who we are!"

  The Parents were obviously completely stopped by Derek's words. If they'd heard such an outpouring from a Replimoid before, they gave no sign of it.

  Then the Parents began to answer.

  "You will not be anywhere, Derek, when you die," said the Parents. "You will be finished, and gone. There will be no Derek. There will be no more of any of you. That is what death is, Derek. We die too, we who developed you and created you. All creatures die. And that will be the end of you."

  Derek was in helpless tears. Welf and Garekyn couldn't comfort him. And I could see that they were none too happy with this revelation themselves. It had caused in me a sinking fe
eling I'd never known before.

  "Perhaps you can explain to us," I suggested, "how this will feel." They answered, "You will not feel anything. When you detonate the explosion, you will cease to be. That's all. There is no life beyond biological life. There is no life beyond visible life."

  It was clear the word "visible" had more meaning to them than their word for biological. And of course they were contradicting themselves. They'd told us of planets that had invisible life, or at least that is what I had inferred from what they'd told us.

  "Can you tell us," I asked, "why you made us such complex and intelligent beings if we are to die so soon?"

  "It's easy for us to make beings like you," said the Parents. "We do it all the time. There's nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for your purpose. We cannot send you down to Earth without emotions. You will be found out by the Great One of Atalantaya if we do that. You will never get into the city. No one gets into Atalantaya except at his invitation. Don't you think all those starving, struggling, violent savages of the forests and the fields would love to live in his Atalantaya? Wait and see what it is like. See what they suffer. Of course they would. But he controls who gets in, taking from the planet what he needs for his city, his paradise, his utopia--taking what he chooses and locking out all those so that his chosen ones can enjoy it. Wait and see. You must put an end to this. This is important! He has no authority to rule on Earth. This is important to the 'Realm of Worlds.' This is why you were made. You have been born for this purpose."

  "I don't want to do it," cried Derek. "I don't want to die. I want to stay alive. I want to keep thinking, being, feeling." He broke down in incoherent weeping and the Parents stepped forward and surrounded him and moved him away from us.

  At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to kill Derek then and there. I couldn't bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and do and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. I braced myself for unspeakable suffering. But they didn't kill Derek. They stroked him, comforted him, wiped away his tears, told him that it was a great thing that he was doing. And that indeed his death might not come for months, maybe even a year, and that he would have time to realize the importance of his purpose.

  As they spoke some of the other Parents began to sing, and underneath their singing I heard the familiar instruments sounding their echoing chords. Finally the Parents opened their wings, and began to rock back and forth with their singing, and we started singing along with them and so did Derek.

  "This is unity," said the Parents. "This is peace." They went on in their lofty repetitive style telling him that many living things had long lives but many had short lives; they spoke of how beautiful butterflies of Earth lived for a short time and how some little animals lived for a tenth of the time of a human mammal, and how human mammals lived for a tenth of the life span of the Parents. On and on they went with all of this.

  A great silent rain of flower petals began to descend, and they caught pink and yellow and blue petals in their hands and showed them to Derek and told him that the flowers from which they came lived only a day or two at most. Such was the way of the biological or visible life in the "Realm of Worlds."

  "But there is always hope that something invisible of us...of the 'we' in you and the other People of the Purpose...might survive," they said. "There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and up and away from Earth and into a realm ruled by the Maker. There is always that hope. All through the 'Realm of Worlds' creatures have such hope. Only on Earth perhaps does it take such an emotional turn, but it is universal."

  Derek had calmed down, and when they released him, Welf received him and held him firmly and Garekyn took up his station on the other side of Derek and did the same.

  "Now," said the Parents. "It is time for you to know and understand the story of the Great One of Atalantaya who is named Amel, and how he came to do such evil on the planet."

  Derek had gone completely calm, but not, I knew, because he was mollified or convinced or elevated to some new level of understanding. He was simply exhausted. And I kept in my heart a deep contempt for the Parents that they had so brutally and insensitively told us that we had been made to die on this purposeful journey. I kept in my heart a scorn for them that they had understood the pain they would inflict on Derek and on us with their cold explanations. I felt a deep suspicion of their prayers, of their talk of the Maker.

  I did not want to die either. I did not want my eyes to close on the beauty and complexity I saw all around me. Indeed, they had told us at the very beginning of our lives that we were unkillable, and now they had let us know that they had planned all along to kill us. And what could be the meaning of all their talk of suffering on the planet, of violence, of cruelty, of viciousness?

  But I knew better than to voice any of this. I knew exactly what they would say. "You are caught up in these emotions because you're a Replimoid. You are thinking and feeling like a human mammal." But I knew from all the film streams I'd watched that everything on the planet Earth wanted to live, not just the human mammals. I remained quiet. And they began to talk of Amel, the Great One.

  II

  "Years ago," they said, "we developed and grew Amel just as we developed and grew each of you. But we gave him infinitely more knowledge than we have given you. Indeed, we shared with him all of the valuable knowledge of Bravenna as if he were one of us. And this was to equip him to survive on the planet and fulfill a specific mission.

  "Mammalian primates had already developed, packs and gangs of brutal loathsome hairy beings who killed and fought and even ate one another's flesh. These repulsive beings held horrific and absurd ideas, that gods lived in the sea and in the forests, and in the mountains and in the fire and in the thunderstorms of Earth. And they would sacrifice their own children to these gods, slaughtering them on bloodstained altars.

  "All through the 'Realm of Worlds' there was horror at this mammalian ascendency on Earth and the horrors produced by it, the blood, the violence, the cruelty.

  "We sent Amel, the finest creature we could possibly make, to put an end to this. We equipped him with a plague that would strike down these violent beings, and give some chance to other ascending creatures.

  "He was further sent by us to restore and repair all of the many transmitting stations all over the planet that had become idle due to slow erosion or storms or volcanoes or earthquakes with which this planet is tormented heavily as you have seen. We did not design him as we designed you to pass for a mammalian primate. On the contrary, we designed him to be perceived as a god.

  "We had long noticed that certain mutations in the hairy primates of Earth could present pale-skinned and blue-or green-eyed primate mammals. And that the tribes in which such mutants were born regarded such creatures with fear and awe, worshipping them as gods or destroying them as evil.

  "We made Amel a being of pale skin and green eyes and red hair as a consequence. And we knew that these traits, coupled with his vast intelligence and ability to speak all languages, and his keen ability to provide the tribes with useful information for healing and the making of tools and such--all this would produce awe in the primitive tribes who would then fear and obey him.

  "He could therefore use the labor of these tribes to restore the transmitting stations where they had failed, and he could use them to set up new stations for the recording of the changes in atmosphere and water that would follow the releasing of the plague we had given him.

  "This being, Amel, was the most powerful and versatile Replimoid we've ever made. He represented the finest of our knowledge on all levels, and he knew all that we knew. He understood that he was to repair as
many transmitting stations as he could before releasing the plague at a predetermined time, and that he would keep working on the transmitting stations even after the plague was released and for as long as there existed savage human mammals to help him.

  "We believed wrongly that he understood and valued his purpose, that being of the highest mind, and that being in full control of his primate emotions, he would perform the tasks we wanted and establish a base on Earth from which he could communicate with us as to the planet's future development. We equipped him to enjoy pleasure unendingly with the female or male primates of the planet. We equipped him to enjoy food and drink, and warmth, and the exceptional beauty of Earth. We stinted on nothing to give him the greatest gifts we had to bestow and to make his life on Earth not only endurable but wondrous. And with the healing gifts we had given him, he would be able to inoculate some females of the species to endure with him for many years and keep him company, and some males to breed with these females to provide him with future females."

  The Parents went silent.

  "Think on this," one of them said. And then another, "Think on it to understand the depth of his perfidy and betrayal."

  We did as they asked, of course. We stood silent, waiting, pondering, reflecting. But in my heart of hearts my sympathies lay with Amel, our Replimoid brother, not with the winged beings telling this story.

  "Amel deceived us," said the Parents. "Not only did he not restore the film-streaming stations as we had instructed him to do, but he actually destroyed all of those whose locations we had given to him for repair. One by one he broke, dismantled them, and he had demolished the majority before we came to realize what he was doing.