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

I could see all this deeply affected Derek, and the Parents pointed out to us at that time that Derek had been made to feel things infinitely more strongly than the rest of us, in order to alert us to danger, or stress, or conflict in ways that our cooler nature did not allow us to perceive. After all, we weren't genuine mammals. We were carefully grown Replimoids, creatures wholly different from mammals.

We were always to travel together, to seek to be together and to protect Derek as best we could because Derek suffered in ways that we couldn't or wouldn't suffer. But Derek was

indispensable to the purpose--as they called it--and we would see this over time.

How many minutes or hours were involved in our coming to know these things, I'm not certain. But we were soon told that we would learn a great deal about Earth and its mammalian people from studying the endless moving-picture walls that filled Home or our dwelling.

We were invited to roam from room to room, or chamber to chamber, and sit comfortably here or there as we chose to watch the transmitted motion pictures coming in from the planet. And all the motion pictures playing out on the walls in our dwellings on Bravenna were of life on Earth.

For thousands of years, we were told, Bravenna had been sending Replimoids like us to set up and maintain the transmitting stations that gathered the film footage we were to watch at our leisure. There were transmitting stations everywhere on Earth where there were animals or humans to watch. And we would soon see revealed all aspects of earthly life simply by roaming Home at our leisure and selecting different film streams to watch according to our inclinations.

We began to do this, unattended, often sitting for hours on a comfortable couch to watch a stream of films originating in a jungle or woodland or a village of human beings. And when we tired of one stream we did seek another. In all the rooms through which we wandered there were Parents watching these films, Parents on the same couches that we enjoyed or sometimes up in the branches of trees that filled the room, or simply standing there transfixed by what they were watching.

We occasionally saw other creatures, creatures more nearly similar to us, though we didn't linger near these creatures and never were told what they were. I wish I could remember these creatures more clearly, but I can't. I have a sense, looking back, that they were a new wingless version of the Parents, with even tinier feathers, and a penchant for clothing such as we wore, and the people of Earth wore. But I could be wrong on this. Whatever they were, they were as drawn by the film streams as the Parents were and as we were.

The film streams deeply absorbed us. We saw endless footage as it were of animals hunting in nighttime jungles, or humans in small bands or packs roaming plains and mountains or living together in small hamlets of grass huts or villages. We saw great "close-up" images of birds building nests and feeding their young, of snakes devouring the eggs of birds, or of huge lizards foraging amid insect colonies for food.

But the film streams of human beings predominated. We witnessed humans coupling sexually in dimly lighted rooms or in secluded woodland hideaways, or arguing or fighting with one another. We watched families gathered at supper fires, and working at the making of clothes from skins, or gathering the wild wheat that grew on the plains from which they could make bread in their stone ovens. We saw bands of hunters surrounding and bringing down great animals that often killed one or more of the humans as they struggled to survive against a rain of spears or hatchets. We saw some humans in larger villages building and roofing better shelters for themselves and planting some simple foods, tubers, grasses, vines, and harvesting the food produced by these. We saw herders with their flocks of goats; we saw enclosures filled with pigs kept for food; we saw humans tending flocks of small birds for their eggs and their meat. In sum we saw humans at all the primitive stages of hunter-gatherer life, and the most primitive village life preceding what Earth knows today as the agricultural revolution.

We saw humans born and we saw humans die. And we saw humans doing many things we did not understand. Indeed, we passed through chambers of Home devoted entirely to streams of humans dying, where Parents watched rapt as loving people gathered around the dying one, comforting him or her and begging for some sort of spoken wisdom or advice or rules. It wasn't clear always what the human beings were saying to one another. If we watched any group long enough, we could easily penetrate the language, but sometimes there wasn't much language being spoken, only tears and groans and sighs. And the chambers were filled with these tears and groans and sighs.

Many things we saw puzzled us, but nothing really pained us more than all these deathbed scenes, or scenes of men dying in the hunt, or in battle, or scenes of babies dying at birth as mothers screamed in protest. And there were so many of these.

Now I had no idea as I watched this how such intimate images, from within huts or caves or forest enclosures, were being gathered. It didn't occur to me to ask. But it certainly came to be a significant question later. But to continue...

Gradually we came to chambers where the film streams focused entirely on quarrels, men and women pushing and shoving one another, or even physically fighting with weapons, scenes where women were severely beaten by men, or gangs of women severely beat their male oppressors.

Whenever we asked questions, the Parents, roused from their own absorption in the films, would give us brief answers. "Well, this is life in this village, you see, as it had gone on for centuries, and this is how they settle their disputes, because human mammals are violent, emotional, and often behave no better than the panthers or elephants or bears in the jungles."

One thing we came to note very soon was that tribes all over Earth constructed special places for weeping and crying and hugging one another and talking of their sorrows. Often this was done around small crude stone pyramids or in special clearings. Sometimes people formed circles in this place and sang in unison of their losses and disappointments.

We found much of this very painful to watch and Derek found it unbearable.

Some tribes had built more elaborate pyramids and some more elaborate circles of stones where they wept and cried out, and it soon came clear that some groups were addressing all their pleas and cries to some invisible person or force whom we could not see.

The Parents told us this was normal, for human mammals to imagine that the great Maker of the "Realm of Worlds" was hearing their cries, and might intervene to do something to relieve their pain.

"Is there such a Maker?" Derek asked. The Parents said that there was a Maker but that no one knew what the Maker knew. They urged us to keep watching.

We found finer and more beautifully constructed pyramids. Sometimes fires were built on the flattened tops of these pyramids. On some there were wooden statues of great beings. In one place there were stone statues atop a pyramid, and in another a grove of stone statues. In other places there were only crude mounds of earth. But always the gatherings were the same, of people weeping, crying, imploring, moaning, and it seemed the emotions were visceral and visible.

Human mammals of Earth also danced and sang and feasted in their villages. They fought little wars and brought back slave prisoners of war, and sometimes they cruelly executed unruly prisoners. They bred these slaves, and used them for the hardest of the work that had to be done to gather food and build shelters.

The Parents told us it wasn't necessary for us to understand all we were seeing.

But what we must understand was how hard life was on Earth, and how the rampant emotions of mammals led them to fight one another, to commit murder and rape, as the strong bullied the weak, and powerful individual mammals sought to gain power.

But that certainly wasn't all we saw. We saw a great deal more that did not involve unhappiness. We saw human mammals embracing, sleeping in large groups in their huts, snuggled together, just as we snuggled together on the couches as we watched; we saw what were obviously feasts of great celebration. And we heard laughter, a great deal of laughter, perhaps more laughter and singing than weeping.

And over and over again, in film streams we saw the distant city of Atalantaya, as these simple human mammals saw it, and we saw what seemed to us other very small domed enclosures that appeared similar to Atalantaya. All along the coasts close to Atalantaya there were such domed settlements. It was from these that crafts sped across the sea to Atalantaya. We could make out the towers inside these domes, just as mammals on Earth could make them out, but we were reminded that the domes blocked the intimate surveillance of the Parents.

Whenever we grew tired of all this, we coul

d sleep. There were plenty of soft couches for sleep and we enjoyed sleeping. It was like being back in the beds in which we were made, and we loved to sleep in one another's arms. And we could look out of the portals onto the larger forested world of Bravenna.

Gradually we came to realize that the Parents were winged beings, and that from the humps on their backs the most magnificent feathered wings could unfold with which they could fly high into the forest world of Bravenna beyond where our eyes could follow them. And we could look down into the fathomless depths of the forest world and see them flying beneath us. The Parents said they loved to fly though for aeons it had no longer been necessary. The Parents flew now for pleasure, and to dream the dreams known to them only when they were flying. But we didn't need to know more about them, they explained, as we had been made for a purpose to be fulfilled on a planet to which they never went and on which they never had lived, and on which they couldn't live.

"There are many worlds like Earth in the 'Realm of Worlds,' " they said. "And there are many very different worlds, such as the worlds like Bravenna where everything is comfortable for us. But you have been made to survive on Earth." The Parents also made mention of worlds outside the "Realm of Worlds," worlds on which life existed, but in forms invisible to the Parents. The definition of the "Realm of Worlds" was that it included the worlds on which life was visible. That was all they ever said about this question of invisible life.