Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

by Anne Rice

  You know most of my history. You know I have worked for years for Gregory's great company, and you can easily imagine how I sought to use his immense resources to study my own body and Welf's body to better grasp our own physical makeup, with its self-sustaining resilience and mysterious organization which had never been explained to us by those who made us.

  But be assured, I never cheated Gregory Duff Collingsworth. I helped develop medicines that added to his great wealth and benefited immensely by his profit-sharing programs, bonuses, and salary increases, building wealth of my own. I helped develop an artificial skin marketed by Collingsworth that has been of great help in treating burn victims. I've also contributed mightily to research on a rejuvenation drug that shows tremendous promise. I have developed sophisticated techniques for cloning that will contribute to the work in that area.

  But for all the hours I've worked alone and with Welf in the sanctum of laboratories under Gregory's roof, I have never discovered the actual formula for luracastria, or come close to reproducing a thermoplastic or polymer like it. I have not, contrary to your suspicions, ever grown a Replimoid whole and complete and animated, though I have certainly struggled towards this goal for many years. I have been unable to discover whether our bodies do in fact contain a toxin that can destroy the planet if we are destroyed. I do not know whether our bodies contain explosives of some unimaginable power that can reduce the world to its primal purity once more. My hope, of course, has been to develop my own technological complex of laboratories where I can take my own personal research to new heights. And whatever I have taken from Gregory, well, I hope I've somehow repaid.

  In the realm of astronomy, I have ascertained almost certainly that no asteroid comparable to Bravenna has been seen recently in the night sky. I've combed the legends of the planet and find no evidence that Bravenna or some substitute of Bravenna ever returned to Earth.

  As you must infer from what I've just said, I don't know what actually happened on Bravenna that last night as we watched from Atalantaya. I don't know whether Bravenna fired some advanced weaponry on the planet, or simply exploded showering the planet with meteors which precipitated cataclysmic floods, volcanoes, fires, and eventually a rising of the sea level and a deadly winter which locked the planet for centuries in ice and snow. I have read widely among those who speculate on just such an early cataclysm and I have studied this in light of the beautiful legends of the lost kingdom of Atlantis, and there is no doubt in my mind that Atlantis is Atalantaya, and that there is indeed confirmation of a catastrophe that brought her ruin--eventually raising the level of the seas and changing the weather all over the planet.

  I have discovered many things...but no discovery in all my years has ever been as important as my discovery of you, the blood drinkers, and your legends of Amel.

  I have no doubt that Amel lives inside you. I have no doubt that this is our Amel. But he is also your Amel. I know this, and I see what you are and how precious life is to you, as it is to us. And please do understand that we see you as a priceless form of life just as we see ourselves as a priceless form of life.

  And it is through you and your kindred that we have found one another again, and through Rhoshamandes's bloody blundering assault on Derek that we have the knowledge that we can increase our numbers without even understanding how or why. We are disposed to love you, to revere the things that we have in common, and we ask for your love.

  There are many things more I could say, many observations I could make. But I have told all the truth that matters here, all the truth that may matter to Amel. We've come to you at great risk to ourselves because of Amel. But also because you are our brothers and sisters in immortality; we see kindred in you. And we trust you'll see kindred in us. In those centuries when we opened our eyes on a primitive and harsh world, we found our loneliness as immortals all but unendurable. Derek suffered the same fate. And Garekyn was suffering it when he approached Trinity Gate. We are ready to need you, if you are ready to need us.

  I have told you everything, and now I see there are two hours perhaps left to the night before you have to leave us and we have to leave you. I'm yours for that time, and I hope forever, really. Ask me what you would; and I'll try to tell you the truth.

  20

  Lestat

  SHOCK. SILENCE. NO one moved or spoke. All eyes remained on Kapetria. Then I heard Armand's telepathic message. Mark the danger.

  Kapetria was right about there being two hours before sunrise. But I myself did not have the full two hours. I had at the most one hour and was very glad that the tale had been told in its entirety at one time.

  Was I suspicious, incredulous, as to all we'd heard? No.

  I sensed that Kapetria had presented everything truthfully. And I also knew that the tale had had a powerful impact on Amel. Throughout the telling, I had felt one subtle convulsion in Amel after another, and sometimes what amounted to a considerable disturbance, and I knew that the other vampires at the table, able to read my mind, had some dim sense of these responses as well.

  At the moment when Kapetria had described the explosion of Bravenna, I saw the same images that I'd seen repeatedly in my dreams. Others at the table had seen the same.

  And at that point, the point where Amel in Kapetria's story had cried out, I felt a searing and inexplicable pain in my head.

  That pain had leveled somewhat but it was still with me, and it produced a deep sense of alarm in me that I tried desperately to conceal from everyone else. I could not recall Amel ever causing physical pain in me. Yes, he'd tried to move my limbs more than once, and I'd felt a tingling and cramping in the limb. But that had not been pain. This was pain. And I knew perfectly well that the human brain had no pain receptors, and that brain tumors cause pain in humans because of the pressure they create on pain-sensing blood vessels and nerves inside the human brain.

  So how was my invisible friend causing this pain? I wasn't going to ask him because others at the table would know that I was asking him, and I just didn't want them to know what was going on.

  Amel gave me to know now--pain or no pain--that he wanted to ask Kapetria a question and to talk to her.

  But Fareed immediately started to ask her any number of questions about luracastria and generating Replimoids that I didn't understand. The others all seemed absorbed in this--a discussion of thermoplastic and genomes, of the absolutely remarkable strength of spider silk in the natural world, and so forth and so on. Kapetria clearly loved it, this pure scientific talk replete with abstractions of dizzying opacity, and I could see Seth loved it and to some extent so did David. Gregory too was enjoying it. But I wanted to speak.

  "Interrupt," said Amel, "and now." There was a sudden pain in my right hand, and then my hand jumped on the table. Kapetria stopped in midsentence and turned to me.

  "Amel wants to ask you a question," I said uneasily.

  She was riveted. "Please, what is he saying!" she asked. She seemed hardly able to contain herself. Derek, Welf, and Garekyn were equally eager to know.

  "There's something I have to tell you first," I said. "This spirit sometimes doesn't tell the truth."

  A searing pain behind my eyes nearly blinded me. I tried to lift my right hand to cover my eyes, and I couldn't. The pain intensified so that I found myself rising out of the chair, and pushing the chair backwards. I'd never known a pain inside my body of this intensity, and I was forced to close my eyes! I made some involuntary sound.

  "All right, you scoundrel!" I whispered. "Stop it, or I won't tell her the question! You understand?"

  The pain stopped, but only for about two seconds. It came back with renewed force. It was so intense my eyes closed again, and when I tried to reach once more for my head, my right hand was shot through and through with pain, pain ripping through every blood vessel and tendon. I could feel my nails drumming on the table, and when I struggled to open my eyes, I saw only a blinding light.

  Something touched my hand. I could hear people mo
ving. I felt a hand on my right arm. The pain continued, throbbing, as it seemed to swell behind my forehead and behind my eyes, and then I felt something being put in my hand. It was a pen.

  Someone was putting my fingers around the pen, while at the same time lifting my hand, and then putting it down on paper. My left hand was covering my face. I could hear the scratch marks as my right hand wrote or drew with the pen.

  Stop the pain, stop it, do you hear me, stop it!

  When it did stop, I was seated in the chair, and Marius was standing behind me and holding my shoulders in a way that was protective and comforting.

  The pad of paper was lying there in front of me. And just before Fareed took it and put it in front of Kapetria, I saw pictographs on it, crude, squiggly pictographs.

  Kapetria looked for a long moment at the paper and then up at me rather helplessly. "I never learned to read them!" she said. She seemed crestfallen.

  I heard a long painful sigh come from Amel.

  "Tell her she is not looking in the right place for the formula for luracastria. She should look inside herself."

  Marius surely had heard this. They all had. Armand sent a swift telepathic negation. If the others wanted to stop me from blurting it out, they might have said something. They didn't.

  I repeated Amel's words precisely as he had said them in my head.

  "Ah," she said. She sat back in her chair as if this were a eureka moment.

  A little tumult in my head. "I didn't mean to hurt you!" Amel said. Highly emotional. "I didn't!"

  "All right, I understand," I said aloud. "And we can write. But we ought to find a way to write that doesn't cause me pain!"

  I was exhausted as if I'd been running and running and had to fall down on the ground. And then I felt the moisture, which had to be blood in my eyes.

  Kapetria was staring at me in alarm.

  Marius offered me a handkerchief before I could find mine. And there was blood on it as I blotted my eyes.

  "Amel, don't do this again!" Kapetria said. "You are in a parasitical relationship with Lestat's brain, Amel. You can injure it."

  "Laughter," I said. "He's laughing." Then he let loose with a long stream of the ancient language, the language we'd heard ourselves on Benji's broadcast. "Stop," I said. "I can't repeat it this fast. Stop!"

  Now we're great mimics, all of us, and have savant abilities when it comes to singing and replicating music, so I tried to give in to these talents and began speaking the strange syllables he was speaking, punctuating what he was saying to me with my repetitions, until finally he began to pause at the right moments. Suddenly he ran on with such fury I simply couldn't follow.

  There came a blast of the pain again, and this time before it blinded me I saw what I hadn't seen before--that it was hitting the youngest of us at the table, who was David, who'd been made less than thirty years ago by me. Then the pain took over. And realizing what must be happening to my Rose and to Viktor wherever they were and to Louis, and all the others who didn't have thousands of years in the Blood, I collapsed.

  I knew I was lying on the floor and I didn't care.

  Kapetria was talking, on and on, the same way he'd been talking, in that tongue. She was talking to him in me and he was answering but I couldn't tell her the answers.

  Suddenly he was screaming at me, screaming. And I was screaming back.

  If you don't stop, I can't do anything! This pain is unendurable!

  Gone. Merely the little convulsions behind my eyes and at the base of my neck. I stared up at the ceiling, at the brilliant painted images ringing the plaster medallion of the chandelier, at the gold-tinged clouds up there, and the smiling face of the putti gathered in the far corners. It seemed there was nothing to worry about, no need for haste or for alarm. Just this strange kind of bliss.

  Her blood, her blood, open the channel and I can talk to her....

  Marius helped me up. Seth was on the other side of me, his firm hand on the back of my neck. I stood on my feet. The lights seemed impossibly dim and I knew this was wrong, really wrong, no one had dimmed the lights. Yet the pulsing wreath of the chandelier, with its myriad baubles of crystal, was glowing through a cloud of golden vapor. Kapetria looked up at me. Her breasts were touching my chest. Not a female. Not a true female anything. But something free of male/female, something wondrous.

  "Drink," Amel said to me.

  I took her in my arms and turned her so that my back was to the long table, though I knew my mother was behind Kapetria and she saw this seemingly obscene intimacy as I touched Kapetria's throat with my fangs and then let them push through her soft hot skin, such beautiful dark bronze skin, and I felt the blood fill my mouth--extraordinary blood.

  Atalantaya. High noon. A sky as endlessly blue as the sea and Amel talking to Kapetria as they walked together, this evil twin of mine, with his shoulder-length red hair and green eyes and supple smile, the musical ancient tongue running on, and now its words were shining with meaning, from your own skin and your own blood, these elements, without which, impossible, every Replimoid, this synthesis, accelerating the protein and strengthening and locking in the properties of--. The two in a great airy laboratory together, and something sparkling and marvelous as liquid glass sprouting and growing from a tiny egg in Amel's cupped hands, and stretching its shining tentacles up and up in the light that streamed in through the clear windows...chain reaction inevitable, invasion and transformation of the substance and...A body on an oval bed, a body like the body of a human being only smaller. The precise chemical balance, nutrients, out of my body, out of those enhancements of me...He held her in his arms, his red hair falling in his face as he kissed her, his fingers tightening on her arms....

  Yea gods, what blood, such rich, irresistible blood, with so many tiny hearts throbbing to make up the resounding throb of one heart that wasn't a heart at all. I was bathed in the blood; the sweet blood was a fountain, and every cell in me was satisfied and upheld by the blood.

  I awoke. Her friends held her as if she were the dead Christ in the arms of His Mother and John and Joseph of Arimathea, with the others from the wall like so many angels. She lay back upon this safety net of arms and hands.

  "My coffin," I said, "put me in my coffin!" When had I said those words before. "Put me in my coffin!" And Louis had not done it, and Claudia had not done it. In came the knife. Only this time I was being helped. Marius and David had ahold of me and were taking me out of the room.

  "Rose, Viktor, what's happened to them? Where is Louis?"

  We hurried down the curving stone stairs, and through the broad passage towards yet another stairway, and into the bowels of the mountain. The music from the ballroom sounded like a Walpurgisnacht nightmare. I pictured monsters and demons and bats and witches colliding with one another. "Get me away from that music."

  Someone picked me up, lifting me so that I fell over his shoulder. When the doors of the crypt opened I smelled the incense and recognized the soothing light. Down, yes, down, into the silk, on the silken bed.

  Fareed knelt beside me. He pinched the skin on the back of my left hand and plunged the long thin silver needle of a syringe into the pinched flesh. I didn't feel it but then I felt the blood leaving me. Such remarkable blood.

  "Why are you doing that?" I asked.

  "Because I want her blood," he said. "As much of it as I can get."

  He must have had more than one syringe. He turned my hand over and tapped on my wrist. I shut my eyes.

  After a long moment, I opened my eyes.

  I lay there like a dead man on display at a wake. Dim flickering light. Marble walls. A border of acanthus leaves running along the four sides of the rectangular ceiling of this little chamber. Stars painted in the deep blue of the ceiling.

  Beside me sat Seth, still and quiet, on the long marble bench, his narrow dark face solemn as he regarded me.

  "What have I done?" I whispered. "What have I revealed?"

  "She was murmuring things, murmurin
g to them and to us," said Fareed. "She said it was the luracastria which links us all, it's a great web of subatomic luracastria but it's alive...."

  Quiet. Fareed was gone. They were all gone.

  I lay alone in the semidarkness. A candle burned on the marble shelf by my coffin. I was dizzy and sick.

  "...and so it comes," I said, "from inside his brain, and the soul, the astral self of him that survives is the subtle form--nano-particles of luracastria--of that immortal brain of his, and nano-luracastria is its single most important surviving ingredient or element."

  Yes. Yes, that's it. To alter me and to make me immortal as a Replimoid they used a string of synthesized elements which I extracted and studied and reworked and finally saw and knew and broke down and made into luracastria, all these elements originally of Earth, made by me into luracastria, behold the chemicals, behold luracastria, beautiful luracastria, injected back into myself, luracastria, into me, behold luracastria, sing the song of luracastria in me, a new synthesis, and when the chemical stores in the Creative Tower went up in flames and smoke, behold the flames and smoke, when the rolling explosions went off one after another and the walls poured down like syrup into the flaming water, I went up in flames, broken apart...hands, arms, and legs and head all blasted apart, I could still see it, behold all the parts of me swallowed by flames, the tiniest parts of me sizzling and turning black and my torso blown into fragments, engulfed in flames, but the "I" of me went up and up and up and when my skull exploded "I" was free.

  21

  Lestat

  I WAS REMEMBERING THE way that Marius had described to me the emptied body of King Enkil after Queen Akasha had awakened and drained him of all blood, that the body had lain there like something made of glass, empty and translucent. And that is what Mekare's body had become, something translucent like plastic.

  And so is this what is happening to us, that this subatomic luracastria is slowly invading and transforming every cell in our bodies while those cells retain their self-replicating nature and we are slowly becoming luracastria?

  The sun had set two hours ago. I sat in my private bedchamber with Rose in my arms, Rose with her drowsy head against my chest. And Viktor my son beside me. Rose was so new she looked human in all respects, even to her ruddy skin, and she felt soft all over, soft and sweet, as she lay against me, her raven hair veiling her face, and her long soft gown of burgundy silk cleaving to her beautifully shaped limbs. My son was worn and weary from last night's pain. He sat erect, his arms clasped between his knees, his blue eyes fixed on some faraway point, his short clipped yellow hair shimmering in the light of the wall sconces, regal even in his dark olive cargo shirt and pants, his face so like mine yet wholly different, more finely proportioned, his mouth smooth though his eyes were narrow and his expression was one of anger.