Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

by Anne Rice

  By nightfall that first evening, we had decided we wanted to sleep in a tower. And a pod took us up to the third floor of a hostelry where we engaged a tower apartment for a month. The thirtieth floor was the highest we could get.

  We rode up in an elevator--a silent pod that sped up the exterior of the building--and soon found ourselves walking into what seemed very grand chambers indeed. There was the moving-picture wall, desks with simple computerlike devices built into them involving complex symbols, individual bedrooms with large soft silk-covered beds, and outside walls that turned from richly colored opacity to sheer translucence when we waved our hands in a certain way.

  There were lavish baths and toilets made of the same lightweight plastic material as the walls. There were showers. There were machines for laundering clothing, and there was heated air and cooled air in this apartment and shining floors throughout. There were lights in the walls that one only had to touch to bring forth illumination.

  When I look back on it now, I realize that every single surface was a form of solar cell. Nothing that we saw or touched or used was not gathering energy. Clothing was made of solar cells. Even the tops of boots or sandals had solar cells and energy was somehow flowing from all of these collecting cells to some source--or it was being used to power everything in the immediate vicinity. I could never tell.

  Of course we were overwhelmed by the beauty and comforts we saw. And we were just beginning to trust that we might converse honestly with one another, and we had, oh, so much to say!

  We began our conversations very carefully, but within a few hours we were confessing emotionally to one another that we were half in love with Atalantaya and indeed with Earth and we didn't know what to make of that fact.

  Derek was the first to ask in a whisper what would become of us if we went outside of Atalantaya, and looked up at the bright star of Bravenna in the night sky and sang out that we could not fulfill our purpose and asked that we be removed and brought Home.

  Welf and Garekyn said at once that that was a really bad idea!

  We tabled any more conclusions for the moment and went out in search of what the streets had to offer.

  And indeed, we discovered that night that Atalantaya contained innumerable boulevards and lanes, some serpentine and others straight, in which all street-level doors led to businesses or restaurants, with actual dwellings invariably above. I never saw any street in Atalantaya that was for residences alone. I never saw any part of town without cafes and what we call grocery stores. We also came upon an old section of Atalantaya called the Wooden City adjacent to an even-older settlement called the Mud City, and these were just what they appeared to be--remnants of the first urban settlements on the island, from which the Great One had built the magic metropolis which now dwarfed them utterly in splendor. These old settlements were there for display, it seemed, and there were guides roaming through them explaining to the relaxed spectators how life had been in early Atalantaya.

  Of course from the very first day on we heard talk of the Great One, the Great Amel who had built Atalantaya, the Great Amel, Amel who made all things.

  We listened carefully to every bit of intelligence about Amel that was offered us, and we were confident the whole time that we were lost in the shuffle, lost in the human herd. After all, how could the ruler have picked us out of this great stream of brilliant humanity? We looked like Wilderness people newly arrived, and quickly adjusting, and we had done nothing to call attention to ourselves in any way.

  The first real startling glimpse of Amel came when we entered a Meditation Center on our street, just steps from our new home.

  We had seen these Meditation Centers everywhere in our wandering, as their facades were marked by relief sculptures of human beings sitting quietly with heads bowed and eyes closed. And we had come to be curious, naturally, about these figures and why they appeared so often flanking doors to the street. Were these Chambers of Suffering, we asked those around us. They laughed at the idea and told us, no, that there were no Chambers of Suffering in Atalantaya.

  Finally, when we were overwhelmed by all our experiences and tired, and ready to focus on something a little more challenging than wandering and asking and marveling, we saw a great many people walking towards the nearby Meditation Center, and we entered it along with them and found ourselves in a great dark domed room.

  It was fitted out with a horseshoe of ascending benches, what people call bleachers today or stadium seating. We took places at the very back and top, and found the seats were comfortably padded and that people were now filling the place, though many left spaces beside them so as to signal a need for privacy or distance.

  Soon all were sitting with their heads bowed and eyes closed, just as in the relief carvings on the exterior, and some were crying, quite visibly crying, but much more quietly than the Wilderness people did in their Chambers of Suffering.

  So it is the same thing, I thought. Exactly the same thing. It was more subdued but it was the same thing.

  At one point as we sat there waiting, trying to covertly study those around us and opposite us, the picture wall became illuminated and we saw for the first time the face of Amel. A deep-throated bell sounded somewhere, perhaps in the city outside, or within this building, I couldn't tell.

  What a shock. I am not sure what I had expected to see but the face that appeared on the picture wall was that of a male, pale skinned as an albino, with substantial red hair and deep blue-green eyes, and very agreeable features. The man we saw as Amel in fact resembled you, Lestat, so closely that he might have been your cousin or even your brother. He had the same alert intense expression, the same easy smile when he spoke. And the same rather busy unkempt hair, and even the same square shape to his face and a similar symmetry to it. Of course, his pale skin in a uniformly dark-skinned world gave him an unearthly look, and something of an unearthly shimmer. We had glimpsed only a few albinos on our path to Atalantaya, a few others with red or golden hair, a few with pale eyes. And to see the rosy flush in his cheeks, and the expressive lines made visible by the lightness of his skin, all this was startling. But it was also a little repellent. That he spoke passionately and normally as a human being made him compelling.

  He greeted his audience as I would see him do often in the next few weeks and began to talk in a seemingly natural and spontaneous way.

  "Good evening, my fellow Atalantayans. This is Amel coming to you from the Creative Tower to remind everyone that the first Festival of Meats will be in three weeks, and when the gates open to the Wilderness people visiting for the first time, many will need shelter among you, or a helping hand in finding the public shelters. Please do extend your arms to your brothers and sisters from the Wilderness lands, and help us to enjoy a healthy and happy festival.

  "Now I welcome you to the Meditation Center, and I remind you all as I have so often that you are not being spied upon here in these halls or theaters, that what you say is not being recorded, that it is not for the benefit of anyone but yourselves, and that these places exist for you and you alone and what you would make of them."

  The face was gone as suddenly as it had appeared, and we were left breathless and silent with this first glimpse of the creature we had come to admonish and destroy, and wondering if it was true that we could share our thoughts with one another in this theater.

  I wish I had hours to describe what then happened, how pictograph writing appeared on the screen as a succession of human beings took the floor to discourse on the definition of evil and to recount their own personal triumphs or defeats.

  "Evil is that which goes against life," said the first speaker, apparently reading a statement in the pictographs on the screen. "Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil."

  This struck us as profoundly beautiful. We found ourselves nodding ju
st as others were nodding around the auditorium. We also pondered the pictographs. We had seen them in other places and thought them mere decoration. We each independently sought to memorize what was on the screen.

  After that, people spoke up about their personal sufferings, the loss of a mother, the loss of a child, a disappointment in the workplace, an innate and debilitating melancholy which they could not cure. They spoke of losing a lover or a spouse. Others listened in almost total silence. But people nodded; tears were shed. Finally people began to sing. For the first time the screen was changed, and flooded with new pictographs and the people chanted in their untutored voices, echoing the beautiful music we had heard before we were actually born.

  We joined in this singing, easily following the repetitive lyrics, though we could not yet read the writing. "Behold, we sing the song of life most beautiful; behold, we sing the song of the flowers of the field and the trees of the forest, and the splendor of Atalantaya and the splendor of a child's smile. Behold, we sing the song of harmony and unity. Behold, we sing the song of life itself."

  When we went back out into the streets, Derek walked up to a man and asked him, "Who rules Atalantaya? And how is it done?"

  The man said, "Well, no one really, at least not in the way that you ask. Amel is the Great One, but Amel does not necessarily rule." The man then talked on easily of councils and rulers, and representatives from this or that area of the city and from the Wilderness lands. "Amel's will is absolute, but he seldom asserts it, and usually only when there has been a ghastly crime committed, and even then he invites the councils high and low to review his decision."

  Derek wanted to ask more but I spirited him away.

  When we returned to our home in the tower, we talked frankly with one another for the first time. We took wine from our refrigeration compartments and shared it in the translucent drinking vessels that had come with our apartment, and we sat down on the couches of the gathering room, with no real light needed as we could see lighted towers all around us.

  Garekyn who has always been more aggressive than the rest of us, more prone to sharp questions as well as solutions, spoke up immediately.

  "If there are truly no stores of energy on this island," he asked, "if there are only places for using water and places for using the light of sun, how are we to make an explosion big enough to set off the fatal chain of explosions?"

  But Derek didn't wait for anyone to answer. "What is so evil about the people of this city," he asked, "that the Parents want all of them dead, all of them and the Wilderness people who have been sheltering us and helping us for the last three months--all to be reduced to primal dust or soup! How can the Parents believe this is right?"

  "Maybe we are not seeing deeply," Welf suggested. "We need to give ourselves time."

  We talked over everything that night, and then went back to simply living in Atalantaya and witnessing everything the city had to offer. Within days we realized that erotic coupling was free and easy in Atalantaya with none of the rules that had prevailed in the villages of the Wilderness lands. And that people were in the main highly protective of and friendly to little children even though these children were not their own. People formed families both large and small, and respect for the very elderly was what we call today the norm. Elderly people, in fact, had the greatest freedom to do just about anything they wanted to do. People rose and bowed to the elderly, offered them tables in crowded restaurants, fell silent when the elderly spoke, and stepped aside for them on the street.

  Life was busy in Atalantaya. People had places to go and things to do.

  Within a matter of days we witnessed the creation or growth of a tower, an experience none of us was ever to forget. Whatever the damage done to our memories, and our perspective, each of us has remembered the planting of that building and the spectacle of watching it grow.

  It was Amel himself who arrived at the garden site as everybody called it and stepped out of a large smooth traveling pod with the "seed" of the building in his hands. It looked like an egg. The time was dawn, just before sunrise, and musicians surrounded the garden with drums, cymbals, and horns. A huge crowd had gathered for this, and we'd been hearing about it for days. Now we saw that people were coming from everywhere to witness this, and that they crowded the windows and the balconies of the towers around us.

  A huge cheer went up when Amel stood in the center of the garden and looked up and around himself to acknowledge the crowd. Indeed, it was a roar.

  Then he turned to the tilled earth and appeared to inspect it, though I suspected he'd known it was ready before he came. When the first sun rays hit the garden soil, Amel laid the "seed" or the luminous white egg on the ground. He handled this thing as though it were fragile, but I wonder. Perhaps this was reverence. Perhaps he had hoards of such seeds or eggs stored away.

  Whatever the case, almost immediately the egg or seed, in the clear rays of the sun, began to vibrate and then to break open at which point the musicians began to play and the whole crowd began to sing.

  This truly was the music we had heard before our birth. This had to be its origin! The seed now exploded in great translucent shoots and stalks and what might have been leaves. Amel stepped back, and indeed everyone stepped out of the garden patch and allowed the building to grow.

  Translucent stalks, shoots, leaves, whatever they were, gave off a crackling noise that I could scarcely hear for all the singing, and before our very eyes, a giant tower sprang into being and grew out and up and up until a fully detailed building rose before us, sprouting windows and balconies as it grew. Through the crystalline clarity of its walls we could see its shining floors, doorways, inner chambers blossoming and enlarging, and so many myriad details being realized that it was dizzying and impossible to watch the development of any one aspect, the tower soon rising hundreds of feet above us, rivaling the towers around it, the singing and the music of the instruments not reaching their highest volume until a great skyscraper existed there, complete, it seemed, in all its exterior and interior detail. Down through the earth, I figured, went its foundational roots, the earth being churned around them, and the air was filled with the scent of soil and water until at last this great soaring tower, as tall as the others around it, was settled, ceased to tremble or vibrate, and stood still and firm in the sparkling sunlight.

  People cheered and screamed and we rushed around to one side, hoping to catch a glimpse of Amel again as he returned to his pod and drove away. He was a man roughly the size of Garekyn, roughly your build, Lestat, with a similar dexterity and grace.

  Of course we knew that the music and the chanting had nothing to do with the magic of what happened, but I thought it a marvelous idea, as it made all who were assembled there feel as if they had participated in the building's birth.

  We had a multitude of questions for those around us, and the people we asked were agreeable to explaining.

  "The building is made of luracastria," said one. "Everything in Atalantaya is made of luracastria--buildings, sidewalks, driving pods, elevator pods, even clothing. Cups and goblets and plates are made of luracastria. Our world depends on luracastria and the proper handling of it; without luracastria, Atalantaya would be like the old Wooden City or the old Mud City. Luracastria is the basis of life."

  As for what luracastria really was, all I could ascertain was that it was a chemical, and it was a chemical discovered, developed, and perfected by Amel. Amel worked tirelessly on improving luracastria and finding new ways in which it could be used. Luracastria could create other chemical formulas, I was told, luracastria could even heal a wound, restore a broken bone, as well as transform silk and animal skins into stronger and more resilient new entities.

  Based on what I know now, I have come to believe that luracastria was like what we call a polymer, similar to innumerable polymers that occur in nature and to substances we see in nature such as spider silk, which is a protein fiber, and silkworm silk, which is a protein fiber as well. I could g
ive you a long complex scientific explanation from a twenty-first-century vantage point of what luracastria likely was, but it would be purely speculative. I have never in the laboratories at Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals been able to duplicate luracastria.

  I spent a good deal of time asking Atalantayans in the early days about luracastria but even those who worked in the laboratories where it was developed, or the factories in which it was created, did not seem to really understand what it was. All agreed that Amel knew how to make it, that he was the one who had achieved and perfected the formula and was always expanding its use. The dome over Atalantaya was made of this thick and unimaginably strong polymer and so were the threads of the clothes we wore which I had thought mistakenly to be natural silk.

  Indeed, the whole network of energy harvesting and fiber-optic communication of Atalantaya depended on the bold use of luracastria, and everyone I spoke to seemed to regard it as cheap. Whenever the subject came near to energy again, they reaffirmed that there were no energy stores per se on the island, or anywhere in their world as far as they knew. Store energy? they asked. What could that mean? Energy flows. The sun and the water provided the energy, and the way in which this energy was extracted and transferred and used, well, they couldn't explain it. And frankly, they didn't see any need to explain it. I could go see the water plants and the solar energy plants if I wanted. They welcomed visitors.