Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (The Vampire Chronicles 12)

Kapetria's Tale

I

I CAME TO CONSCIOUSNESS about twelve thousand years ago. I could not see or move. I was listening to music, music that involved singing and the myriad sounds of complex musical instruments. Not till this modern age have I ever heard anything like this music, this blending of plaintive voices and rich chords and harmony. This music aroused in me a deep pleasure and also a deep longing. I felt something like sadness when I listened to it, a kind of emptiness, and I found myself searching for something, maybe some reso

lution of my longing as I followed the melodic threads. I think I cried. But it is hard to know whether I did.

All of us were nourished on this music. And to this day, we're hypersensitive to music.

The first thing I really knew was that I was finished, full grown, done, and a great success and the Parents were pleased. They opened the translucent cover of my bed, and helped me to my feet as other Parents did the very same thing for Welf, Garekyn, and Derek.

We found ourselves in a vast space that appeared to be in the treetops of an immense forest. But even as we looked, we saw the dark branches and green leaves dissolve to reveal walls alive with motion pictures, or portals to even greater forests outside with innumerable lighted dwellings or nests everywhere, high and low.

This was beautiful to us. Simply beautiful. And so were the Parents. And all of them were the Parents.

They appeared entirely normal, lovable, even charming, though they were quite different from us: very tall and thin, with large white faces and round glossy black eyes, and lipless mouths that smiled when they spoke. Their hands were lean and white and dry and perhaps twice the size of our hands. Whereas my hand here is six inches from the tip of the longest finger to the wrist, their hands were twelve inches there and their nails were pearlescent and sharp. They had five fingers on each hand.

Their legs were very long and lean and always slightly bent at the knee, and their feet were remarkably similar to their hands. They appeared to be wearing hooded mantles which were richly colored in layers, and similar bands of bright color covered their rounded torsos. Their backs were humped. And they moved gracefully and spoke softly in an Earth language, the language of the city of Atalantaya.

None of us realized at the outset that the Parents were covered with very tiny feathers, and wore no other clothing. We didn't realize that the humps on their backs were indeed folded wings. Or that their noses and mouths were in fact beaks, or that they were another species from us. This just didn't occur to us. They were the Parents. And the language of Atalantaya was the language we needed to know for our purpose.

The Parents had made us. We belonged to them and we made them happy. We were the People of the Purpose, they told us. And though their color patterns varied, they were otherwise interchangeable and numerous as they spoke to us and interacted with us on Bravenna. If they had individual names, they never revealed this to us. One might start speaking and another take up the thread and yet another after that, all rather seamlessly, so that no one individual ever stood out to us.

Now Bravenna was the world into which we'd awakened, a world that seemed vast, a world that was "Home," said the Parents, and the world where we would be prepared for our purpose.

As they helped us to dress in silken trousers and shirts, they praised us, stroked us, embraced us, and told us we were perfect for our purpose and that they loved us.

We were all then as you see us now. And they had a word for us which translates best as Replimoid. They would tell us over time that it was very easy for them to make Replimoids but some turned out better than others, and we were their finest work so far. We were given to understand that we were grown, just the way a human being is grown in the womb of its mother, only we were organically developed from a blending of all the cells in the life chain of the planet Earth, including those of plants, sea creatures, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. We were the result of blending and not the result of evolution. We had been made to resemble human beings in and out but we did not have the same neural circuitry.

For that reason we were unkillable in the normal ways that mammals could be killed and we were constantly renewable. Of course, they said nothing about propagation. Quite the opposite. They told us to enjoy coupling with the mammals of Earth as much as we wanted because we were sterile and would never engender any offspring. This turned out to be true. And we did enjoy coupling with humans, both men and women. And we enjoyed coupling with each other. Every factual thing told to us by the Parents might have been true. They warned us that different villages and groups of Earth had different rules about coupling. We must be careful and not run afoul of those rules. This too proved to be true.

I could go on with this matter of coupling--how we enjoyed orgiastic pleasure, how seductive it was for us, but this is only a minor point in the story I am telling. I will conclude by saying that Welf and I--for the most part--paired off early on, and Derek and Garekyn also paired off, most of the time. And for us, love and loyalty always enhanced the pleasure. We never developed much of a taste for coupling with complete strangers. And there is no doubt that erotic coupling strengthened our sense of belonging to one another.

Before I continue, let me try to give you some idea of the language of Atalantaya. It was highly repetitive, and could be very precise, and was usually spoken in a sort of rapid chanting. For example, when they lifted me out of my bed and pointed to the portals opening on the forest realm, the Parents said things like "Behold the world, our world, the beautiful world of Bravenna, the perfect world of Bravenna. Behold it. Behold this beauty. Behold the world of Bravenna in which you have been created. You are children of Bravenna. Behold the trees, behold the leaves, the light of the sun, behold your Parents. Love and obey your Parents. You are People of the Purpose, born for Atalantaya and one purpose."

It was like that continuously and we knew it was the language of Atalantaya before we knew what Atalantaya was. Their name for Earth was something on the order of "the blue-and-green planet with the mammals in ascendency," with that entire packet of information contained in the word every time they spoke it. But "Earth" is just fine as a translation. And I think there was a number attached to their name for Earth, perhaps signifying one among many planets similar to Earth. Not certain. And no way to know their numbering system and they did not teach us arithmetic or mathematics. And they did not teach us any form of writing or reading at all.

We had vast stores of knowledge in us, they told us, which would enable us to understand any sort of language quickly, and we would recognize the useful or medicinal properties of animals and plants in the world to which we were going. And we understood the stars when we came to see them, and how vast was the universe, and how vast the "Realm of Worlds," to which they referred. It was for the "Realm of Worlds" that we would execute our purpose. The "Realm of Worlds" was horrified by the ascent of mammals on Earth, and was sending us to correct what had happened there.

Throughout the "Realm of Worlds," evolution had almost always favored other species, not mammals, and on Earth a dreadful thing had happened in that mammals had gained self-awareness and intelligence and now ruled the planet with tribes and packs and the great city of Atalantaya. To use Gabrielle's word, it was an abomination to the Parents, and to the "Realm of Worlds," and we were to go to Earth to infiltrate the mammals, and gain access to the domed city of Atalantaya.

How much of what we understood was already known to us, as opposed to being told us--this is all confusing to me now. But there was never a time when I didn't know how much the Parents abhorred mammals, and the emotions of mammals.

A great physical catastrophe had occurred on Earth and that was the only reason mammals had gained an advantage in the evolutionary process. This catastrophe was the result of several small worlds or asteroids colliding with Earth and poisoning the atmosphere so that reptiles and birds had died in great numbers while mammals survived, and grew to enormous and unwieldy size in the absence of reptiles and birds to prey on them. We, the People of the Purpose, as they called us, would work another catastrophe which would reduce the planet to an early stage where once again reptiles and birds would have a chance to overtake mammals in development.

I don't think the Parents ever spoke of mammals or mammalian nature without expressing outrage and distaste. They warned us that mammals were aggressive, vicious, and dangerous. Male mammals abused female mammals. But we would be able to fool them easily into believing we were mammals. If we did find ourselves at their mercy, if they tortured us or sought to kill us, we would survive. Indeed, it was our solemn purpose to survive. Intense pain would produce unconsciousness in us over and over again; and this unconsciousness would aid in the healing we would experience from any injury or wound.

We were not to be afraid of the pain that mammals could inflict. We were not to be afraid of them, loathsome and unpredictable and hateful as mammals were. And we were to remember in all our dealings with mammals that we ourselves were not really mammals and had this vastly different neural circuitry.

However, we had been grown to be warm blooded and to have mammalian emotions. We had been grown to think and feel and experience the sensual world and the visible world as mammals do, through a filter of emotions.

It had to be this way, the Parents explained, or we could not pass for mammals ourselves. Mammals were quick to recognize robots or mechanical beings who did not share their emotions. So we must understand that that is why we had been given human emotions.

Now as all this was imparted to us or awakened from our stores of memory, we were shown a great wall with a living picture of the city of Atalantaya, a magnificent metropolis of towers of varying heights beneath an immense dome, the whole city anchored securely in the sparkling blue waters of an endless sea in brilliant sunlight. We saw countless small white craft journeying to and from this city of Atalantaya, and we saw vibrant evidence of life inside the city itself, with myriad tiny beings living in these splendid towers, and myriad tiny beings alighting from craft to enter the domed city.

I remember thinking how beautiful Atalantaya was. But then everything I saw was beautiful to me. Derek also spoke out as to the beauty of Atalantaya.

The Parents said, "It will be beautiful to us when it is melting and in flames and perishing." The Parents explained that the dome of Atalantaya blocked their ability to see what went on inside, and that the living pictures we were viewing had been taken within the dome by an earlier Replimoid some time ago.