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

"I knew it," said Derek in a small voice.

"But why do they want that?" demanded Welf again.

"Be respectful," I whispered to him.

"No, let him ask," said Amel. "Let him ask his questions. I will answer. I will always answer! I like it that he asks, that all of you ask and speak up and express your souls!"

This was the first time we'd heard the word "soul"--that is, one concise word containing multimeanings of the same concept.

"What is a soul?" asked Derek.

"Your soul is your inner being, your thinking, reasoning, loving, choosing inner being!" said Amel. "Your capacity to stand up for what is right. Your capacity to fight against what is wrong. Your capacity to choose even to die for what you believe is right. That's your soul." He shook his head. He wasn't satisfied. "It is the irreducible part of you that combines conscience, and deep feeling."

"I see," I said. "And you believe that we have souls? We? The Replimoids?"

"Yes," he said. "Absolutely. I know you do! I've watched you. Even if I'd never seen you before, I would have detected your souls here in this room. But why do you even ask?"

"Because we were made for one purpose," I said. "We weren't birthed from human beings like you were. We were grown on Bravenna." I could see he wasn't understanding me. "I suppose I would have expected you to tel

l us that we had no souls! I suppose I expected that you would tell us we were tools especially made to appear human, but that we were not human."

"Who said you had to be human to have a soul?" he asked. "Look, I've been on this planet for thousands of years. Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-consciousness. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness. When they endowed you with self-consciousness, when they bred you out of Earth elements to the point where self-consciousness emerged in you, they put you on the road to having a soul. When you began to think and feel, a soul was formed within you as the result of your thinking and feeling."

"I see what you're saying." I looked at Derek, Derek who was so often moved to tears, Derek who knew fear the way the rest of us did not, Derek who had always given himself so much more than the rest of us to the joys of music, or feasting, or drinking, or dancing. But I saw that we all had souls. It was the "I" of each one of us, the "we" of us, the "who we are" part.

I looked at Amel searchingly. "But why is this important, that we have souls, that you have a soul, that anyone has a soul? I can see that perhaps animals even have souls, the sheep, the goats, the faithful dogs of the villages, even these have partial souls perhaps....But why does it matter exactly?"

"Because it's why I can't destroy one of you to show you there are no toxins in your bodies," he said. "Your soul is an expression of the precious quality of life that makes me refuse to destroy it!" He paused and then continued, staring intently at me, though of course he was speaking to all of us. "You are not 'made things' without a soul, limited by your very nature to one purpose," he said. "You are beings of conscience and feeling and the will to respond to what you know to be right. And if I killed one of you to make my point, it would be an immense cruelty to you, and you would never forgive me for it, and you would grieve for your lost brother, for his loss of the gift of life!"

"You're right, yes, I see," I said. "But let's return to what you were saying, about the Parents and what they want, and why they would lie, and why they would seek to control humans as if humans were puppets!"

"Yes, that is the crucial issue here," said Garekyn. "Why would they make us, grow us, instill knowledge in us, and let these souls develop or emanate from us, and then send us here on a dishonest mission?"

"They want trouble, to make trouble. They want you to foment conflict. They hoped very likely that you'd be captured in the villages and revealed to be non-human, and that you would all be brought here with much fanfare to be executed by me in defiance of them and their machinations. Or they wanted you to attempt to kill me, and maybe even to damage the great dome of Atalantaya! They wanted conflict, trouble. Who knows? Look what happened when they returned me to the planet!"

"But what did happen?" I asked.

"They sent me down here, equipped with immense knowledge and godlike strength, to enslave the tribes, to install transmission stations for them far and wide so that their streaming could take place. And I was told that when this mission was complete, I was then to loose a plague on the planet that would kill huge numbers of the population. 'This is desirable for the world's improvement,' they told me. But they knew, positively knew, I'd never do it. They knew that I'd come to love my fellow human beings, I'd come through working with them and living with them and ruling over them to see their inherent virtues, their values, to let my soul warm to their souls! And they knew I'd refuse to loose the plague, and that I'd start to do things in direct contradiction to their orders, and thereby make conflict, make new things happen!"

"I see what you're saying," I said. "And I see the similarity between your mission and our mission, and I can see why they might have known full well that you wouldn't fulfill your purpose and we wouldn't fulfill ours. But why? Why do they want to 'make new things happen,' as you put it?"

"Yes, what is the point?" asked Garekyn.

Amel waited. He was looking at each of us in turn and then his eyes settled on Derek.

"Ooooh, I see," said Derek. "The Chambers of Suffering! The films, the streams! They are feeding off the suffering of the planet!"

The most brilliant smile spread over Amel's face.

I was astonished. It seemed obvious, then too obvious, and then undeniably obvious!

"They feed off it!" Derek went on. "They want to watch this...people weeping and screaming in grief and pain! This is why their film feeds are filled with scenes of people dying and those around them in agony as they die, agony worse than that of the dying!"

"Yes," said Amel. "I believe that is exactly what is happening! And they value this planet all the more for its mammalian ascendant species because no creature in the universe suffers like a hot-blooded self-aware mammal."

"But this is an unspeakable lie!" I whispered. I shook my head. I didn't want to believe it, but I couldn't not believe it.

"When I came back here to this planet," said Amel, "war was as common as peace, and tribes fought tribes and murdered and raped, and sacrificed their own children and their enemies to their gods, and the planet was covered in blood-soaked altars and blood-soaked groves where men sought to placate the storms and the snows and the fire of the volcano or the rages of the sea with bloodshed and death and pain! And they loved it! The Bravennans loved it, and their transmitting stations which I myself installed all over this planet in places I can no longer find or recognize--these are their means of receiving this suffering, receiving it and devouring it!"