Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis Page 28

  Now Bravenna was the world into which we'd awakened, a world that seemed vast, a world that was "Home," said the Parents, and the world where we would be prepared for our purpose.

  As they helped us to dress in silken trousers and shirts, they praised us, stroked us, embraced us, and told us we were perfect for our purpose and that they loved us.

  We were all then as you see us now. And they had a word for us which translates best as Replimoid. They would tell us over time that it was very easy for them to make Replimoids but some turned out better than others, and we were their finest work so far. We were given to understand that we were grown, just the way a human being is grown in the womb of its mother, only we were organically developed from a blending of all the cells in the life chain of the planet Earth, including those of plants, sea creatures, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. We were the result of blending and not the result of evolution. We had been made to resemble human beings in and out but we did not have the same neural circuitry.

  For that reason we were unkillable in the normal ways that mammals could be killed and we were constantly renewable. Of course, they said nothing about propagation. Quite the opposite. They told us to enjoy coupling with the mammals of Earth as much as we wanted because we were sterile and would never engender any offspring. This turned out to be true. And we did enjoy coupling with humans, both men and women. And we enjoyed coupling with each other. Every factual thing told to us by the Parents might have been true. They warned us that different villages and groups of Earth had different rules about coupling. We must be careful and not run afoul of those rules. This too proved to be true.

  I could go on with this matter of coupling--how we enjoyed orgiastic pleasure, how seductive it was for us, but this is only a minor point in the story I am telling. I will conclude by saying that Welf and I--for the most part--paired off early on, and Derek and Garekyn also paired off, most of the time. And for us, love and loyalty always enhanced the pleasure. We never developed much of a taste for coupling with complete strangers. And there is no doubt that erotic coupling strengthened our sense of belonging to one another.

  Before I continue, let me try to give you some idea of the language of Atalantaya. It was highly repetitive, and could be very precise, and was usually spoken in a sort of rapid chanting. For example, when they lifted me out of my bed and pointed to the portals opening on the forest realm, the Parents said things like "Behold the world, our world, the beautiful world of Bravenna, the perfect world of Bravenna. Behold it. Behold this beauty. Behold the world of Bravenna in which you have been created. You are children of Bravenna. Behold the trees, behold the leaves, the light of the sun, behold your Parents. Love and obey your Parents. You are People of the Purpose, born for Atalantaya and one purpose."

  It was like that continuously and we knew it was the language of Atalantaya before we knew what Atalantaya was. Their name for Earth was something on the order of "the blue-and-green planet with the mammals in ascendency," with that entire packet of information contained in the word every time they spoke it. But "Earth" is just fine as a translation. And I think there was a number attached to their name for Earth, perhaps signifying one among many planets similar to Earth. Not certain. And no way to know their numbering system and they did not teach us arithmetic or mathematics. And they did not teach us any form of writing or reading at all.

  We had vast stores of knowledge in us, they told us, which would enable us to understand any sort of language quickly, and we would recognize the useful or medicinal properties of animals and plants in the world to which we were going. And we understood the stars when we came to see them, and how vast was the universe, and how vast the "Realm of Worlds," to which they referred. It was for the "Realm of Worlds" that we would execute our purpose. The "Realm of Worlds" was horrified by the ascent of mammals on Earth, and was sending us to correct what had happened there.

  Throughout the "Realm of Worlds," evolution had almost always favored other species, not mammals, and on Earth a dreadful thing had happened in that mammals had gained self-awareness and intelligence and now ruled the planet with tribes and packs and the great city of Atalantaya. To use Gabrielle's word, it was an abomination to the Parents, and to the "Realm of Worlds," and we were to go to Earth to infiltrate the mammals, and gain access to the domed city of Atalantaya.

  How much of what we understood was already known to us, as opposed to being told us--this is all confusing to me now. But there was never a time when I didn't know how much the Parents abhorred mammals, and the emotions of mammals.

  A great physical catastrophe had occurred on Earth and that was the only reason mammals had gained an advantage in the evolutionary process. This catastrophe was the result of several small worlds or asteroids colliding with Earth and poisoning the atmosphere so that reptiles and birds had died in great numbers while mammals survived, and grew to enormous and unwieldy size in the absence of reptiles and birds to prey on them. We, the People of the Purpose, as they called us, would work another catastrophe which would reduce the planet to an early stage where once again reptiles and birds would have a chance to overtake mammals in development.

  I don't think the Parents ever spoke of mammals or mammalian nature without expressing outrage and distaste. They warned us that mammals were aggressive, vicious, and dangerous. Male mammals abused female mammals. But we would be able to fool them easily into believing we were mammals. If we did find ourselves at their mercy, if they tortured us or sought to kill us, we would survive. Indeed, it was our solemn purpose to survive. Intense pain would produce unconsciousness in us over and over again; and this unconsciousness would aid in the healing we would experience from any injury or wound.

  We were not to be afraid of the pain that mammals could inflict. We were not to be afraid of them, loathsome and unpredictable and hateful as mammals were. And we were to remember in all our dealings with mammals that we ourselves were not really mammals and had this vastly different neural circuitry.

  However, we had been grown to be warm blooded and to have mammalian emotions. We had been grown to think and feel and experience the sensual world and the visible world as mammals do, through a filter of emotions.

  It had to be this way, the Parents explained, or we could not pass for mammals ourselves. Mammals were quick to recognize robots or mechanical beings who did not share their emotions. So we must understand that that is why we had been given human emotions.

  Now as all this was imparted to us or awakened from our stores of memory, we were shown a great wall with a living picture of the city of Atalantaya, a magnificent metropolis of towers of varying heights beneath an immense dome, the whole city anchored securely in the sparkling blue waters of an endless sea in brilliant sunlight. We saw countless small white craft journeying to and from this city of Atalantaya, and we saw vibrant evidence of life inside the city itself, with myriad tiny beings living in these splendid towers, and myriad tiny beings alighting from craft to enter the domed city.

  I remember thinking how beautiful Atalantaya was. But then everything I saw was beautiful to me. Derek also spoke out as to the beauty of Atalantaya.

  The Parents said, "It will be beautiful to us when it is melting and in flames and perishing." The Parents explained that the dome of Atalantaya blocked their ability to see what went on inside, and that the living pictures we were viewing had been taken within the dome by an earlier Replimoid some time ago.

  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.

  Sometime during this information orientation or instruction, we were taught how to eat and enjoy food, and this was a great discovery. We were told that we could survive quite well without food as we absorbed nutrients through our skin, but we could also utilize food and drink, and our bodies would dissolve every particle of it. We had no need to eliminate. Now this was important to understand, they said, because everything that happened on Earth had to do with eating and drinking, and the species of Earth not only craved food and drink, but could die quickly without it, and all creatures of Earth which we saw in the films excreted waste as the result of eating and drinking and this too had immense significance on Earth.