Now they had their laboratory complete with every conceivable machine that medical science had invented.
And I soon found myself in that building on those upper floors, following them through brightly lighted chamber after chamber, and marveling at the staff of young blood drinkers ready to make the MRI or the CAT scan, or draw my blood.
"But what are you going to do with this data?" I asked. "And how do you do all this, I mean, are you bringing over scientists into the Blood?"
"Have you never seriously thought of such a thing?" Fareed asked.
After the biopsies and vials of blood were taken, we were sitting in their rooftop garden, great banks of tempered glass separating us from the chill Pacific wind and the lights of downtown Los Angeles dazzling in the pretty mist.
"I don't understand," said Fareed, "a world in which the most outspoken and high-profile blood drinkers are all romantics, poets, who bring into the Blood only those whom they love for emotional reasons. Oh, I do so appreciate your writing, you understand, every word of it. Your books are scripture for the Undead. Seth gave them to me at once, told me to learn them. But have you never thought to bring over those whom you actually need?"
I admitted I was afraid of the very idea, as afraid as a mortal might have been of designing offspring genetically to enter certain branches of the arts or certain professions.
"But we are not human," said Fareed, who was immediately embarrassed by how obvious and foolish it sounded. He actually blushed.
"What if another bloody tyrant arises?" I asked. "Someone to make Akasha look like a schoolgirl with her fantasies of world domination? You do realize everything I wrote about her was true, do you not? She would have transformed the world if we hadn't stopped her, made herself into a goddess."
Fareed was speechless and then glanced at Seth with the most anxious expression on his face. But Seth was only regarding me with intense interest. He reached over with one of his enormous hands and gently laid it on Fareed's right hand.
"This is all well and good," he said to Fareed. "Please, Lestat, continue."
"Well, suppose such a tyrant rose amongst us again," I said, "and suppose that tyrant brought into the Blood the technicians and soldiers he needed to implement some true takeover. With Akasha, it was all primitive, her scheme, with a 'revealed religion' at the core that would have set the world back, but suppose with laboratories like this, a tyrant could create a vampire race of weapons makers, makers of mind-altering drugs, makers of bombs, planes, whatever is needed to wreak havoc on the existing technological world. What then? Yes, you are right, those of us who are known to everyone today are romantics. We are. We are poets. But we are individuals, with an immense faith in the individual and a love of the individual."
I broke off. I sounded far too much like someone who actually believed in something. Lestat, the dreamer. What did I believe? That we were an accursed race, and that we ought to be exterminated.
Seth picked up the thought, and at once responded. His voice was deep, slow, sharpened by that indefinable Eastern accent. "Why do you believe these things of us, you who have rejected the revealed religions of your world so thoroughly? What are we? We are mutations. But all evolution is driven, surely, by mutations. I don't claim to understand it, but was it not true what you wrote, about how Akasha was destroyed, and how the Core, the fount, whatever you call it, the root that animates us was transferred into the body and brain of Mekare?"
"Yes, it was all true," I said. "And they are out there, those two, and they are of the retiring kind, I assure you, and if they think we have any right to exist as a species, they've never made it known to the rest of us. If they find out about this laboratory they will destroy it--perhaps."
I hastened to add that I wasn't certain about that at all.
"Why would they do that when we can offer them so much?" asked Fareed. "For I can fashion immortal eyes for Maharet, the blind one, so that she no longer must use human eyes, ever changing them as they die in her eye sockets? It is a very simple matter to me to make these immortal eyes with the proper blood protocols. And the mute Mekare, I could determine whether there is any brain left to her which will ever fully awaken."
I must have smiled bitterly. "What a vision."
"Lestat, don't you want to know what your cells are made of?" he asked. "Don't you want to know what chemicals are in the blood that's keeping senescence in your body completely at bay?"
"Senescence?" I didn't know quite what the word meant. We are dead things, I was thinking. You are a physician for the dead.
"Ah, but Lestat," Fareed said. "We're not dead things. That's poetry, and it's old poetry, and it will not endure. Only good poetry endures. We're very much alive, all of us. Your body's a complex organism playing host to another predatory organism that is somehow transforming it little by little year by year for some distinct evolutionary purpose. Don't you want to know what that is?"
These words changed everything for me. They were light dawning, because I saw then a whole realm of possibility that I'd never seen before. Of course he might do things like that. Of course.
He talked on and on then, scientifically and I suppose brilliantly, but his terminology became thicker and more foreign. Try as I might, I'd never been able to fathom modern science at all. No amount of preternatural intelligence allowed me to really absorb medical texts. I had only the layman's smattering of the words he was using--DNA, mitochondria, viruses, eukaryotic cell tissue, senescence, genome, atoms, quarks, whatever. I pored over the books of those who wrote for the popular audience, and retained little or nothing but respect and humility and a deepening sense of my own wretchedness at being outside of life when life itself involved such magnificent revelations.
He sensed it was useless.
"Come, let me show you a very small part of what I can do," said Fareed.
And down we went into the laboratories again. Almost all the blood drinkers were gone, but I caught the faint scent of a human. Maybe more than one human.
He offered me a tantalizing possibility. Did I want to feel erotic passion, the same way I'd known it when I was a young man of twenty in Paris, before I died? Well, he could help me achieve this. And if he did, I would produce semen, and he would like to take a sample of that.
I was stunned. Of course, I wasn't about to turn this down. "Well, just how are we going to collect this semen?" I asked, laughing, and even blushing in spite of myself. "Even when I was alive, I preferred to carry out all my erotic experiments with others."
He offered me a choice. Behind a glass wall there sat, on a large soft bed, a young human female, clad only in a white flannel sleeping shirt, reading a thick hardcover book under a dim lamp. She couldn't see us through the one-way glass. She couldn't hear us. I figured her to be perhaps thirty-five or -six, which was quite young for these times, though it would not have been two hundred years ago, and I had to confess to myself, she looked familiar to me. Her hair was thick and long and wavy and distinctly blond though rather dark blond, and she had deep-set blue eyes that were a little too pale perhaps to be beautiful, and well-balanced features and a rather innocent-looking but generous mouth.
The room was like a stage set with its blue toile wallpaper and bedding, and frilly shaded lamps, and even a picture on the wall that one might find in a common bedroom, of an old nineteenth-century English village street. Geese and a creek and a bridge. Only the medical texts on the bedside table and the heavy book in the woman's hands seemed out of place.