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

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.

This attitude was not too different from the attitudes of people today--in this very time--in which the entire world is dependent on energy technologies which the vast majority do not understand.

But I will tell you what was different.

This earlier world was an innocent world that had never known centuries of military developments or the agricultural or industrial revolutions that all today on Earth take for granted as inevitable precursors to technological advancement; and therefore these people did not labor under the immense weight of cultural or political or moral traditions from such revolutions.

Much of what I saw and heard I couldn't understand until I came awake in the twentieth century and saw the blessed affluent world of the West in this time, in which people carry enormous cultural burdens from earlier economic periods without even being aware of it. Take for example that hundreds of millions today still subscribe to an authoritarian religion inspired almost entirely by an early Mesopotamian agricultural revolution and the development of the monarchical city state that arose from it and fostered it.

Again, these ancient people were innocent of such things. They had gone from being hunter-gatherers to living in a technological paradise.

Another practical matter.

The engulfing public services of Atalantaya, the technologies of Atalantaya--were supported by a tax on every single financial exchange. But the tax was small and people had trouble understanding my questions when I asked about such things. The tax was simply part of life. And the abundance of goods and services available to everyone seemed to completely preempt any individual interest in acquiring personal wealth.

Now, there is one thing more I wish to recount before I move on to Amel. And that is simply the Festival of Meats, which gave pleasure to the city like nothing else I'd ever seen.

As I've indicated, there were six such festivals a year, and they were often referred to simply as Wilderness Festivals. They were the only time that the people of Atalantaya could eat the roasted or boiled flesh of lamb, sheep, goats, or the small fowl of that time that were similar to the chickens of today. It was also the time when fresh cheeses and cream were abundant in Atalantaya. The Festival lasted five days.

As the time drew near for it, parks and gardens everywhere were refurbished and made ready, and restaurants and cafes set extra tables and chairs outside their doors. Then the Wilderness people came flooding in, with their meats and milk and cheese to sell to the restaurants and cookshops and giant public kitchens--and suddenly the scent of roast meat was everywhere and people everywhere were buying from the makeshift booths and movable displays of the Wilderness people who offered all sorts of other goods for sale too: animal skins, feathered fans and headbands, and baskets, exotic plants in crude pots, spectacular birds in artful cages, and trained dogs of many breeds and sizes and even some domesticated cats.

In essence all the fruits of the Wilderness lands could be brought in for sale during the Festival--not just meats. And many a Wilderness family had a special tea or broth to offer, and even homemade intoxicating drinks and wines. And homemade concoctions of hallucinogenic herbs or mushrooms.

Atalantaya swarmed with the Wilderness people, and every merchant of Atalantaya was busy trading, buying crafts and skins, and selling luracastric clothing, furnishings, and gadgets to the Wilderness people as well.

Of course the talking bracelets and computers were of no use outside Atalantaya. But there were many other luracastric items for sale--from goblets and plates to spools of luracastric thread to gadgets we could not understand. Mirrors were a huge sale item, and Wilderness people apparently sold as much gold and copper jewelry from their villages as they bought from the more sophisticated jewelers and metalworkers of the city.

It was something to behold. And it was here I saw for the first time, in abundance, bound multipaged books made of luracastria, and scrolls of luracastria, and inks for writing on luracastria, and metal and feather pens. But these were highly expensive and only a very few people from the Wilderness had any interest in them. And these people, some of them, the ones who bought the books or pens, appeared to be people of authority in some capacity or at least people who commanded great respect. Looking back on it, I wonder if they were not eccentric scholars of the Wilderness or even shamans. Whatever the case, there were not very many of them.