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

The clothing ranged from carefully made jackets and trousers and well-fitted dresses to loose tunics long and short, and formless robes. Some people were scantily clad just as the Wilderness people had been, but gone were the shaggy heads and long beards and strong natural odors of the Wilderness people, as these people were clean and groomed and striding along with a fierce self-confidence that startled us and confused us and momentarily brought us to a halt.

These people included women and men in what might have been equal proportion, and numerous children, and people cleaning the streets with sleek wandlike machines that appeared to be devouring dust and dirt and falling leaves. The fruit for the picking was everywhere, just as it had been in the Wilderness really, and out of the doors of cafes and dining places came the scent of delicious concoctions which we found ourselves craving right away.

As soon as we were seated in one of these places, a spacious eatery with a huge back garden, we discovered that everything offered was made from vegetables and fruit, eggs, and wild grasses or grain, and that meat was only eaten in Atalantaya during the Wilderness Festivals, or the Festival of Meats, that took place six times a year. Fish, however, was abundant. Fresh fish was sold at the docks in the early morning and then before noon and then before evening. We could have any number of kinds of fish, prepared roasted, or broiled, and even sometimes raw. We could have shellfish also, and sea grasses and other delicacies which I realize now included caviar.

That was fine with us. We loved the food we consumed, which was much more artfully prepared than the feasts we'd had in the villages, and that first meal is engraved on my memory for all the nuts offered us in bowls, and the vegetables both fried and baked, and the cooked grain mixed with raisins and sliced onions and bits of spices and herbs. There was something sacramental about the presentation but it seemed at the same time to be pedestrian to all those coming and going and taking their places at the tables and arguing and chatting with one another as they ate and drank. What I realized much later on was that it was competitive consumer presentation of food just as competing restaurants offer today.

Each restaurant had its own dovecote or henhouse for eggs, usually in a garden in back where fruit trees grew in abundance as they did everywhere. We'd stumbled into only one of many choices, and it took a pittance of our gold to pay for it, in change for which we received a lot of Atalantaya coin, in fact so much coin that we had to buy purses to hold it, which involved our very next stop in a clothing store.

But let me get back to what we actually saw in the city. If I go from point to point like this, it will take far too long.

As we emerged and began wandering, we soon encountered numerous moving staircases, and tracks on which people were carried about as on electric walkways today. Some of these tracks circled as high as three stories around various towers, carrying people up to doorways dozens of feet above the street.

And everything we saw, positively everything, seemed to be made from lightweight, flexible material of varying strengths as if this were a whole world made of plastic.

Though people walked everywhere, there were lightweight pods--of a glistening white material--also traveling the thoroughfares of the city, and as I recall, all of them looked similar, varying only in size. Some pods held only one person. Most held up to four. Though I myself never obtained or rented or borrowed one of these pods, it seemed anybody could do that, and that the pods actually drove themselves. In retrospect I think the pods were relatively new to Atalantaya and just catching on. I never learned any more about them.

As for the buildings themselves, they were fabulously translucent, but when you tried to see inside them you found that sometimes you could not. People had plenty of privacy in their shops, rooms, or offices, because with the wave of a hand, a wall could become utterly transparent or opaque, and we saw all around us walls changing in these ways.

Of course we found moving-picture places, dimly lighted salons into which we could enter to watch film streaming on walls, just as we'd seen it on Bravenna. But these films were not of ordinary life. It took only a few moments for us to gather that what we were seeing were artful and fictional depictions, in other words dramas in which people acted out parts.

If I had one regret of my time spent in Atalantaya, it is that I did not take enough time to understand the nature of these films, the values that these stories embodied or reflected, and the overall differences between one film and another. This was a burgeoning art form. I should have come to know it. Welf wanted to know it also and was forever urging us in the first weeks to go into the film houses and study the films. There were also stage plays, shows involving shadows only, and puppet shows. Garekyn had some interest in all this too. But the films and plays frightened Derek and he didn't like them; he could not quite grasp what the artifice sought to achieve.

"Why would someone pretend to have a fight with someone else?" he asked. Of course we could have come to understand this level of

cultural expression if we'd taken the time. But we were too attracted by other mysteries such as: What were the walls made of? Why did people constantly talk to their own hands or wrists, and where were the energy stores of which the Parents had spoken and how was this energy actually used?

I need to add, at this point, that all through the crowds in the streets were Wilderness people like us, and many of them were asking questions, just as we wanted to do, so there seemed to be no risk. About one-fourth of the crowd in any lane or street through which we wandered seemed to be Wilderness people, coming to enjoy and "see" Atalantaya--"Behold Atalantaya, the beauty of Atalantaya, behold the talking clothes, the talking bracelets, behold the dome, behold the wonders!"--so we blended in.

Well, the talking clothes and talking bracelets were of course communication devices united by a wireless network, and analogous to today's cell phones. These were built into garments and certain kinds of jewelry, even rings, and people were not talking to their hands.

Within an hour of our arrival, we had bought talking bracelets for ourselves and we had our numbers and our names entered into the great network, and we could call one another, we were told, from anywhere in Atalantaya, and we need not shout as we were doing when we experimented with these things, we needed only to talk in a "soft voice" as the device would adjust the volume.

When I asked how these things worked, I received detailed and vague answers, both of which were usually beyond the understanding for which I'd been equipped. Essentially, what I came to understand was that all sounds had waves, and waves conducted communications, and the energy that made this possible was abundant and came from the roofs and walls of the towers as well as the surface of the streets, and even from the material of the immense citywide dome.

What they were not saying, because it was so obvious, was that sunshine provided the energy of Atalantaya and there were no actual energy stores.

I couldn't begin to guess what this actually meant. But in the entire time I was there it was the only explanation given me for virtually everything, and indeed on some overcast days, days when the marine clouds hung so thick above the dome that the city was grayish and even cool, some communications were slightly dimmed. Everybody expected this and didn't care. In fact, they loved it when rain pounded down on the dome and giant waves splashed on the bulwarks of the city, and there was much talk about how water as well was used in Atalantaya, and salt was extracted from seawater so that it was healthy for the fruit and nut trees that grew everywhere, and the vines that grew on walls and in gardens filled with gourds and pumpkins, and squashes and melons and vegetables for which I never learned names. Water fed the innumerable fountains of Atalantaya in gardens and groves and in nooks and crannies off the sidewalks everywhere. The people uttered expressions like "Sing the song of water!" equal to people today saying, "How beautiful the rain is."

By nightfall that first evening, we had decided we wanted to sleep in a tower. And a pod took us up to the third floor of a hostelry where we engaged a tower apartment for a month. The thirtieth floor was the highest we could get.

We rode up in an elevator--a silent pod that sped up the exterior of the building--and soon found ourselves walking into what seemed very grand chambers indeed. There was the moving-picture wall, desks with simple computerlike devices built into them involving complex symbols, individual bedrooms with large soft silk-covered beds, and outside walls that turned from richly colored opacity to sheer translucence when we waved our hands in a certain way.

There were lavish baths and toilets made of the same lightweight plastic material as the walls. There were showers. There were machines for laundering clothing, and there was heated air and cooled air in this apartment and shining floors throughout. There were lights in the walls that one only had to touch to bring forth illumination.

When I look back on it now, I realize that every single surface was a form of solar cell. Nothing that we saw or touched or used was not gathering energy. Clothing was made of solar cells. Even the tops of boots or sandals had solar cells and energy was somehow flowing from all of these collecting cells to some source--or it was being used to power everything in the immediate vicinity. I could never tell.

Of course we were overwhelmed by the beauty and comforts we saw. And we were just beginning to trust that we might converse honestly with one another, and we had, oh, so much to say!

We began our conversations very carefully, but within a few hours we were confessing emotionally to one another that we were half in love with Atalantaya and indeed with Earth and we didn't know what to make of that fact.

Derek was the first to ask in a whisper what would become of us if we went outside of Atalantaya, and looked up at the bright star of Bravenna in the night sky and sang out that we could not fulfill our purpose and asked that we be removed and brought Home.

Welf and Garekyn said at once that that was a really bad idea!

We tabled any more conclusions for the moment and went out in search of what the streets had to offer.

And indeed, we discovered that night that Atalantaya contained innumerable boulevards and lanes, some serpentine and others straight, in which all street-level doors led to businesses or restaurants, with actual dwellings invariably above. I never saw any street in Atalantaya that was for residences alone. I never saw any part of town without cafes and what we call grocery stores. We also came upon an old section of Atalantaya called the Wooden City adjacent to an even-older settlement called the Mud City, and these were just what they appeared to be--remnants of the first urban settlements on the island, from which the Great One had built the magic metropolis which now dwarfed them utterly in splendor. These old settlements were there for display, it seemed, and there were guides roaming through them explaining to the relaxed spectators how life had been in early Atalantaya.