Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

by Anne Rice

Amel rose from the desk and came towards us with his hand out to greet us. He was simply dressed in loose shimmering red pants and shirt, and he was smiling.

  "Bravenna has sent you to lure me outside of Atalantaya, am I not right?" he asked.

  We were speechless.

  "Sit down here," he said, gesturing to the dark-colored couches and chairs. We did exactly that. I took my place in the middle of the couch on the left side of the group, and Amel took his place on the couch directly opposite me on the right. At that very moment the sun in the western sky moved into position to blind us through the transparent wall. Amel, with the simple gesture, caused the wall to darken just enough to take away the burning glare yet leave abundant soft light.

  Garekyn sat down on my right and Welf and Derek on my left.

  "I knew what you were the minute you arrived," said Amel. "What do they call you now, Replimammoids still? Or do they have a new name?"

  "Replimoids," I explained. "Short version of the same term?"

  He nodded and gave a cheerful punctuating laugh. "Ah, the Parents," he said. "And I suppose they told you that I was a renegade Replimoid and that you've been sent here to trick me somehow into coming outside of the dome with some absurd story of a little catastrophe necessitating my presence and my presence alone. What is it this time? Talk of a discovery of a cave filled with ancient writings? Or of a wise man too old to journey to Atalantaya who must see the Great One before he closes his eyes? Or is it a case of illness in the village that is so unique and ominous that I, myself, must attend to it to save the entire Wilderness from pestilence? Or has a brutal tyrant set up a cruel regime in some small hamlet somewhere, who has agreed to surrender and give up his blood-soaked reign if I personally come to take his confession myself?"

  We gave him no answer, but we were, one and all, as we know now, astonished. He went on talking. He seemed to enjoy talking, opening up, surprising us, and paralyzing us with his revelations.

  "Look, I've known who you are from the moment you arrived on the planet," he said. "I don't know how the transmitters of Bravenna work, or how they broadcast film streams to their home planet and throughout the 'Realm of Worlds.' If I did, I'd hunt down every transmitter and destroy it." He smiled and shook his head. He seemed absolutely honest and authentic. "But I can tap into their film streams," he said. "I can monitor them and marvel at their lust for collected images of suffering and pain, and I did indeed see you arrive and begin your journey across the Wilderness lands. Would you like to know why I allowed you to proceed?"

  "Please," I said, "if you would, tell us."

  "I wanted you to see the planet for yourselves," he said. "I wanted you to see human beings for themselves, or human mammals as the Parents so devoutly love to call them. I wanted you to see what prevails. And of course, I wanted you to find your own way to Atalantaya, to see how easy it is for anyone from the Wilderness lands to come here."

  "I see," I answered. "Are we to infer from what you've said that the Parents have lied to us?"

  "Kapetria," he said, laughing again, "that is an understatement. Haven't you concluded for yourselves that they lied to you?" He sighed and collapsed against the back of the couch, his eyes moving over the translucent ceiling.

  "Do I take this slowly?" he asked. "Or do I come out with it all at once?" He sat up and putting his elbows on his knees he looked me directly in the eye. "What did they tell you to do, exactly? No, wait, let me take another guess, now that I've met you and I see how sophisticated you are, how refined you are compared to most of their earlier clumsier emissaries. Are you to persuade me to return to Bravenna with you for a conference? Are they eager to support life on the planet now and stop trying to kill it and manipulate it and use it?" His face was flushed red.

  "All right," I said. "I will tell you exactly what they told us." I glanced to my companions. No one spoke against this idea. Derek was smiling as if he found this moment supremely interesting and satisfying.

  "Well then?" said Amel.

  "They told us to ask you to come outside the dome, yes, and to tell you that they want to see you and speak to you outside the dome. But they also told us you would never do it. And therefore that our purpose is to stand before you together, to tell you that you have disobeyed and failed the Parents, and that you are being punished and the world is being returned to a primal cellular level so that life can develop all over again. This is to correct the ascent of mammals on this planet, and return the planet to a point from which a reptilian or avian species, or presumably even an insect species, can attain self-consciousness and become responsible beings."

  Now this was my own summary but I thought it was accurate.

  "I see," he said, "and how are you going to punish me and reduce Earth to primal rocks and boiling water?"

  "Through a great explosion," I said. "We are to detonate it, causing Atalantaya to catch fire and explode, and from our disintegrating bodies will come a toxin, a plague that will kill all complex life-forms. The Parents assumed there were stores of explosive materials on the island of Atalantaya. They said that when we detonated, the explosion would detonate those stores."

  "And you believe that these powerful explosive materials are in your bodies?" he asked. "That the toxin is in your bodies?"

  "This is what they told us. They told us to come here, get inside the dome, get an audience with you, and then detonate. As I've explained, they did allow that if we could persuade you to come out of the dome and talk to them, that maybe this disaster could be averted. But frankly, I'm not sure they were telling the truth with this. They assume that you won't leave the protection of the dome, and they have emphasized that we were created for this one purpose--destroying you and life on Earth as it is now--and they expect us to fulfill this purpose."

  He fell silent. He appeared to be brooding. And overall, he gave the impression of an emotional and sensitive being, not any sort of cool or detached genius. In fact, throughout this conversation he was seeming more like Derek than any other one among us. He was seeming hot blooded and distinctly mammalian. I couldn't help but wonder about the mixture of elements given him by the Parents.

  Suddenly he rose to his feet and motioned for us to follow him. "I want to show you something," he said. And when we were all facing the inner wall to the left side of the entrance of the room he made a motion which caused the wall to light up, revealing four strange images. I recognized them immediately as images of us which appeared to show our exterior features and interior features. I could tell this by the outlines, the hair, the female morphology and the male morphology but the images were not pictures so much as vibrant and alive color paintings which showed a complex network of veins or threads all through the interior of our bodies, and small innumerable organs, perhaps, which I couldn't recognize as human. The tiny organs were threaded all through our torsos and our limbs. In some places the weblike circuitry of veins and threads was much denser--in our hands, in our feet, in our necks, and in our heads.

  Now understand. We all had a rough idea of what composed a human being. We knew this from the information implanted in us: we knew humans like all mammals had hearts, lungs, reproductive organs, circulatory systems, brains, eyes, et cetera.

  But we could see from these images that we did not possess these organs. Indeed, there were no brains in our heads according to these strange images. And I knew what a brain was, obviously, and I knew therefore that our consciousness command centers had to be a unique type.

  "These are scans taken of your bodies," Amel said. "These were taken when you passed through the entrance to the ferryboat to Atalantaya. They are not of the highest quality. I can provide you with much more detailed scans of your interior workings if you want them. But this is what you are. Replimoids indeed. Now do you see anywhere in these scans anything that indicates your bodies contain toxins or explosives?"

  "No, but we don't know what we are looking at or what a toxin or explosive looks like," I said. "We could be seeded with these elem
ents in ways that don't show up on your scans. Perhaps there are seeds in us of explosives that are so tiny the eye can't see them."

  "Well, that's true," Amel acknowledged. Then with a wave of his hand he brought up another image that was clearly an image of himself, inside and out. And he possessed the organs of a human being. I recognized his red hair, his greenish-blue eyes, his pale skin, and I studied the interior of his body.

  Now this was the first time I'd seen such a scan of a human, yes, but I saw all that I expected to see in a human: heart, lungs, veins, and the brain in the skull behind the eyes.

  "So they didn't make you," I said. "You're not a Replimoid."

  "No, I'm not," he said. "But I am apparently the first human being they ever forcibly and stealthily and immorally removed from this planet. And what I became in their hands is the enhanced creature you see before you, ever resilient and self-renewing, and seemingly immortal." Once again, his face was flushed, and he was clearly angry.

  He gestured for us to return to the couches, and then he spoke aloud to someone or something we couldn't see and asked for wine and food for all of us. We sat quietly looking at him as he sat there reflecting, waiting, as emotional as before.

  Whisper-quiet servants came and set a long broad table before us, and then laid out bowls of fruit, and of the sweet vegetables people eat raw, and some fresh-baked bread, very thin, and hot--like the naan in Indian restaurants today. And a clear wine was poured into the usual luracastria goblets.

  "Go ahead, please. Eat and drink," said Amel. He appeared sad. He himself sat back and folded his arms as if he was not hungry or had too much on his mind to eat. His curly red hair fell down over his eyes and he brushed it back with annoyance.

  I'm not sure any of us enjoyed a morsel of food, but it was considered courteous to eat in this world when a host offered food and drink, and so we did. I found the wine flavorful but safely weak. I took only sips. I wanted to keep my mind absolutely clear. I was pondering the scans we'd seen, going over in my memory the images. No brain visible, no heart visible in our bodies, and what were the tiny organs threaded all through our arms and legs and neck and head? Where were our brains? Why did I hear a heartbeat from myself? Why did I hear the heartbeat of Welf or Garekyn or Derek? Where was the physical command center of our intelligence and our bodily systems? Why were the networks of seed and vein so much denser in our hands and feet, in our necks, in our heads?

  Finally Amel began to speak again. "I was born in the far north, in the cold lands, where snow is frequent and people wear heavy skins just to survive. My tribe was much paler than the people of the southern climes." He paused and took a deep breath as though all this caused him pain. "But even for a pale tribe I was a mutant, a green-eyed red-haired child in a world of dark hair and dark eyes, and my skin looked sickly. In our tribe, I inspired fear and distrust. And so my parents, after many painful mishaps had befallen me, decided to sacrifice me to the gods they believed in. They decided this when I was twelve years old. They laid me on an open altar in the forest and left me there, bound and helpless. In time wolves or bears would come, or the wildcats. I had been drugged and did not care too much. I was frankly glad to be out of the world where I was constantly ridiculed and persecuted. It was then that the Bravennans removed me from the planet. I spent years on Bravenna growing to my full height, and being educated by the Parents and being altered into the being I am now. But! Understand this!"

  He sat forward and looked into my eyes again. "Understand this," he repeated. "Everything good in me came from my birth as a human being, my childhood among human beings, my parents on Earth, my teachers on Earth, the wise and the kind of my village, the children brave enough to befriend me and pity me--and not so much from the superstitious and fearful notions of my tribe, but from the underlying morality of the tribe!" He pressed his lips together. Again we saw anger and emotion. "It is from nurture, mammalian nurture, that all human beings derive their sense of what it is to be loved, to be cared for, to feel this world as a good place, to feel life as something good. And it is from mammalian nurture that they derive their crucial sense of fairness."

  Fairness. How many times had I shared my amazement with the others on how all the human beings we encountered seemed to have an innate sense of fairness?

  "Are you following me?" Amel asked. This time he looked to each and every one of us. "Do you see what I am saying? Do you think the Parents care about what gives life value for the people of this planet? Do you think they really mean their pious nonsense about reptilian and avian ascendant species being superior? Did they tell you all their pious ideas about the gentleness and wisdom of reptilian ascendant species or the patience of avian species? Did they discourse forever on the evils of hot-blooded mammals? They are puppet masters! Do you know what that means? Have you seen the puppet shows in the city?"

  We all nodded because we had.

  "They are liars!"

  Suddenly Garekyn couldn't contain himself any longer. "But why would they lie?" he asked. "Why would they seek to control human beings as if humans were puppets? What's the point if not to return the planet to a primal state for the good?"

  "The good of what?" Amel said. He pounded his right fist on his knee. "What good? But they're lying about wanting to do this." He sighed and threw up his hands. "I cannot prove this to you without destroying one of you, but I wager there are no explosive devices or toxins in your bodies! They have lied to you."

  "But what is the point of the lie?" asked Welf.

  "To foment trouble!" he said. "So that you would come here and seek desperately to lure me out of the dome and into exposure to their monitors! This is just the latest ploy! They want to take me prisoner, and stop the manufacture of luracastria!"

  "But why?" Welf pressed.

  "Don't you see what I've done? I've built a city here!" Amel used his word for city, of course, but the word meant huge, complex, infinitely more than a village. It meant metropolis. "And," he said holding up his finger for our attention. "I have sheltered innumerable human beings in this city from the prying transmitters of Bravenna! And I am building outposts along the coasts all over the world protected by luracastria. True, there are only a handful now, but eventually there will be thousands! You've seen our great luracastria plants, you've seen our plants for cleansing the water, and for using it for energy. You've seen our solar plants. We can make a world on which they cannot spy, a world protected from their conniving, a world on which they cannot build more of their plans to foment violence and suffering on the planet! They don't want a better ascendant species here. They want more war, battle, violent struggle, human against human!"

  "I knew it," said Derek in a small voice.

  "But why do they want that?" demanded Welf again.

  "Be respectful," I whispered to him.

  "No, let him ask," said Amel. "Let him ask his questions. I will answer. I will always answer! I like it that he asks, that all of you ask and speak up and express your souls!"

  This was the first time we'd heard the word "soul"--that is, one concise word containing multimeanings of the same concept.

  "What is a soul?" asked Derek.

  "Your soul is your inner being, your thinking, reasoning, loving, choosing inner being!" said Amel. "Your capacity to stand up for what is right. Your capacity to fight against what is wrong. Your capacity to choose even to die for what you believe is right. That's your soul." He shook his head. He wasn't satisfied. "It is the irreducible part of you that combines conscience, and deep feeling."

  "I see," I said. "And you believe that we have souls? We? The Replimoids?"

  "Yes," he said. "Absolutely. I know you do! I've watched you. Even if I'd never seen you before, I would have detected your souls here in this room. But why do you even ask?"

  "Because we were made for one purpose," I said. "We weren't birthed from human beings like you were. We were grown on Bravenna." I could see he wasn't understanding me. "I suppose I would have expected you to tel
l us that we had no souls! I suppose I expected that you would tell us we were tools especially made to appear human, but that we were not human."

  "Who said you had to be human to have a soul?" he asked. "Look, I've been on this planet for thousands of years. Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-consciousness. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness. When they endowed you with self-consciousness, when they bred you out of Earth elements to the point where self-consciousness emerged in you, they put you on the road to having a soul. When you began to think and feel, a soul was formed within you as the result of your thinking and feeling."

  "I see what you're saying." I looked at Derek, Derek who was so often moved to tears, Derek who knew fear the way the rest of us did not, Derek who had always given himself so much more than the rest of us to the joys of music, or feasting, or drinking, or dancing. But I saw that we all had souls. It was the "I" of each one of us, the "we" of us, the "who we are" part.

  I looked at Amel searchingly. "But why is this important, that we have souls, that you have a soul, that anyone has a soul? I can see that perhaps animals even have souls, the sheep, the goats, the faithful dogs of the villages, even these have partial souls perhaps....But why does it matter exactly?"

  "Because it's why I can't destroy one of you to show you there are no toxins in your bodies," he said. "Your soul is an expression of the precious quality of life that makes me refuse to destroy it!" He paused and then continued, staring intently at me, though of course he was speaking to all of us. "You are not 'made things' without a soul, limited by your very nature to one purpose," he said. "You are beings of conscience and feeling and the will to respond to what you know to be right. And if I killed one of you to make my point, it would be an immense cruelty to you, and you would never forgive me for it, and you would grieve for your lost brother, for his loss of the gift of life!"

  "You're right, yes, I see," I said. "But let's return to what you were saying, about the Parents and what they want, and why they would lie, and why they would seek to control humans as if humans were puppets!"