Prince Lestat

by Anne Rice

  Now this Seth had been a healer, true, though Gregory had forgotten it, or so the old stories of those times went. He had been a dreamer and a wanderer who traveled the cities of the two rivers searching for other healers from whom he sought to increase his knowledge, and he had not wanted to return to his mother's mystery-shrouded court in Egypt. Far from it. He'd been brought by force.

  Akasha had given Seth the Blood in a great and pompous ceremony within the royal palace. He must become for her, she said, the greatest leader the Queens Blood had ever known. But Seth had disappointed his mother and his sovereign, and had disappeared into the sands of the desert and the sands of oblivion never to be heard of by anyone ever again.

  Now it was Seth--Seth the healer--who walked with Fareed. It was Seth's powerful ancient blood that fired the veins of Fareed. Of course. The ancient healer had made the vampire doctor.

  Fareed was almost as tall as his maker and guardian, with flawless honey-brown skin and ink-black wavy hair. His eyes were green. Something like an Indian Bollywood idol, thought Gregory to himself, with that luxuriant hair and those glittering green eyes. Green eyes had been so very rare in ancient times. One could live a human lifetime back then and never gaze on a being who had blue or green eyes. Their pale-red hair and blue eyes had rendered the witches Mekare and Maharet all the more suspicious and fearsome to the Egyptians, and the beautiful northern slave, Gregory's beloved Sevraine, had been feared.

  As late as the Common Era, when Flavius, a Greek, had come to him, Gregory had been dazzled by the seeming miracle of that golden hair and those blue eyes.

  How formally, how courteously, Gregory and Seth had greeted one another. Why, Seth, my friend, it has been six thousand years!

  Even the Mother, Mekare, who now housed the demon, could not have burnt or destroyed this powerful doctor as long as Seth was at his side. And each night of their lives--Gregory came to know--Seth gave more of his ancient blood to Fareed.

  "Give yours to him and we will gladly do anything to help Flavius," said Seth, "for yours is pure as well."

  "Is it so very pure?" Gregory asked as he marveled.

  "Yes, my friend," said Seth. "We drank from the Mother. Those who drink from the Mother possess a power like no other."

  And the Vampire Lestat drank from the Mother as well, thought Gregory to himself. And so had Marius, the wanderer. The fledglings of Marius, Pandora, and Bianca, had drunk from the Mother. And so had Gregory's own Avicus and Zenobia, yes. And Khayman, poor Khayman, was he really a simpleton under the protection of the twins? He had drunk from the Mother as well. How many others had drunk directly from the Mother?

  Back in the luxurious bedroom of Fareed's high-rise living quarters and clinic, Gregory had taken this brilliant doctor into his arms and sunk his needlelike teeth into the man's soul and his dreams. I shall take your blood and you will drink of my blood and we will know each other and love each other and be brothers now for all time. Blood Kin.

  A beautiful being was Fareed. Like many a blood drinker, his morals had been forged in the crucible of his human experience, and they would not give way now to the blandishments of the Blood. He would be forever a servant of vampires, yes, but respecting of all living things, and never engage in that which would harm anyone unless somehow that being had fallen beneath the bar of his concern by being an unspeakable monster of some sort.

  What this meant was that Fareed could do no evil, not to vampires or to human beings. Whatever the course of his scientific discoveries they would never be perverted or abused.

  But of incorrigible, inveterate, unredeemable evildoers he had had enough in his life, and therefore he could and would pluck from the rampant vampire herd a real bad, no-count, filthy, degenerate bully from whom he could take a leg for Flavius to have grafted on as his own. Indeed, he had taken more than one such vampire body for his experiments. He was candid about that. No, he would never do this to a human, but to a cruel and relentlessly destructive vampire, yes, he could do it. And he did it to get Flavius the leg. A true and living leg that became part of Flavius's immortal body!

  Ah brave new world ...

  Those nights with Fareed and Seth had been like nothing Gregory had ever experienced, given over to endless scientific talks and visions and experiments. "If either of you gentleman wants to feel the passion of biological men once more, I can arrange this simply with hormonal injections," said Fareed, "and indeed would like very much if you would yield to me in this and allow me to harvest the seed from the experiments."

  "Are you saying that a living seed can come forth from us again?" asked Flavius.

  "Yes," answered Fareed. "I have achieved this in one case, but the case was not ordinary." He had indeed infused an eighteenth-century vampire with these powerful hormones and the vampire's seed had indeed fathered a son. But it had not been simple. Indeed the magic connection had been made in a dish, and the son was more a clone than an offspring, birthed through a biological mother.

  Gregory was stunned. So was Flavius.

  But what shocked Gregory to the core was not that this had worked, this bit of cellular razzle-dazzle, but that it had worked with a vampire that Gregory had been stalking the world over. Fareed struggled to keep the vampire's identity secret. But when next Gregory drew the doctor to himself to drink his blood and give his own in return, he reached for deeply buried images and answers and brought them to himself.

  Yes, the great rock singer-poet Lestat de Lioncourt had fathered a son.

  Then on a bright screen in a dark room Fareed finally revealed to him images of this young human boy, the "spitting image" of his father down to the smallest particular, containing the full packet of his father's DNA.

  "And Lestat knows this?" asked Gregory. "And he has acknowledged this boy?" He realized how ridiculous these words sounded as soon as he'd uttered them, and he knew the answer as well.

  Lestat, wherever he was, knew nothing of the existence of young Viktor.

  "I don't think Lestat guessed for a moment," said Fareed, "that I would attempt such a thing."

  Seth sat in the shadows beside his beloved Fareed as all this was discussed, his narrow angular face impassive, but surely he and Gregory were thinking the same thing. Seth, the Mother's human son, had once been the most sought-after hostage by her enemies; that's why the great Queen had sent for him and given him the Blood, to keep him from her enemies who might have tortured him unendingly to demand concessions or surrender from her.

  Could not this same fate befall this human boy?

  "But what if his enemies have already destroyed Lestat?" asked Flavius. "No one has heard one word from him for so long."

  "He's alive, I know he is," said Gregory. Fareed and Seth had not responded.

  That had been years ago, that meeting.

  The boy must now be eighteen or nineteen years old, a man for all practical purposes, and nearly the same age his father had been when Magnus raped him and made him a vampire.

  Before Gregory and Flavius had taken their leave, Seth had assured them both that he had no ancient grudge against the twins for the slaying of his mother.

  "The twins know we're here," said Seth. "They have to know. And they don't care. That's the secret of the reigning Queen of the Damned. She does not care and her sister does not care. Well, I care. I care about everything under the sun and the moon, and that's why I made Fareed. But I don't care about revenge against the twins or about ever seeing them eye to eye. This is of no importance to me."

  Seth had been right of course that Maharet knew, but Gregory had not known it at the time. He had not learned it until much later. And Seth had been merely speculating then. He and Fareed and Maharet had not yet met.

  "I understand, I so understand," said Gregory softly. "But have you never wanted, yourself, to take the demon out of Mekare and into your own body? Have you never felt that simple urge, to dispatch her in exactly the same way that she dispatched the Mother?"

  "You mean my mother," said S
eth. "And no. Why would I want the demon in me? What, you think as her son, I see myself as Akasha's heir to this demon?" He was plainly disgusted.

  "Not so much that," said Gregory, politely backing off. "But so that the threat of our annihilation doesn't belong to another. So that you have the fount safe within yourself."

  "And why would it be safer with me than anyone else?" asked Seth. "Have you ever wanted to take the Sacred Core into your body?"

  They had been in the large drawing room of Fareed's personal quarters when they had this last discussion. The chill Los Angeles night had warranted a fire, and they were gathered by the hearth in leather chairs. Flavius had this new and functioning leg laid across a leather ottoman, gazing at it from time to time in wonder. Beneath his gray wool trousers, only his sock-covered foot was visible. From time to time he flexed the toes as if to convince himself he possessed this limb fully and completely.

  Gregory pondered that question.

  "Until the night Mekare slew the Queen I had no idea any force on Earth could take the Sacred Core from Akasha and move it into anyone," he confessed.

  "But now you do know," said Seth. "Have you, yourself, thought of trying to steal it?"

  Gregory had to confess the thought had never occurred to him, not in any form. Indeed, when he reviewed the scene in his mind--which he had not witnessed, which he had seen only in telepathic flashes from remote points, which he had read described in Lestat's books--he saw it as mythic.

  "I still don't know how they achieved it," he said. "And no, I would never attempt such a thing and I would not want to have the Sacred Core within me."

  He thought for a long moment, allowing his thoughts to be totally readable by the others, though only Fareed and Flavius, it seemed, could read them.

  He was a mystery to Seth, and Seth was a mystery to him--common enough to the early generation.

  "Why would anyone want to be the host of the Sacred Core?" Gregory asked.

  Seth didn't immediately answer. Then in a quiet distinct voice he spoke.

  "You suspect me of conniving, don't you? You think our work here is reducible to some simple plot to gain power over the source."

  "No, that's not true," Gregory said. He'd been astonished. He might have been insulted, but it wasn't his way ever to be insulted.

  Seth was staring at him, staring at him as if he loathed Gregory. And Gregory realized that he was at a significant turning point.

  He could loathe Seth now as well, if he chose to do it. He could fear him, give in to jealousy of his age and power.

  He didn't want to do this.

  He had thought sadly then of how he had dreamed of encounters such as this, dreaming of making himself known to the great Maharet simply to talk to her, talk and talk and talk, the way he was always talking to his beloved little family who never really understood what he was talking about.

  He had looked away.

  He would not despise Seth. And he would not seek to intimidate him. If he had learned one thing from his long time in this world, it was that he could intimidate others beyond his wildest intentions to do it.

  When a statue talks to you, a statue that can breathe and move, it's faintly horrible.

  But with Fareed and Seth, Gregory had wanted something warm, something vital.

  "I want us to be brothers," he had said to Seth in a low voice. "I wish there were a good word for brothers and sisters the world over, something more specific than 'kindred.' But you are my kindred, both of you. I've exchanged blood with you, and that makes you my special kindred. But we are all kindred."

  He had stared helplessly at the ornamental fireplace. Black-veined marble. French gilt. Flashing gold andirons. He let his preternatural hearing rise; he heard the voices beyond the glass, the voices of millions, in soft undulating waves, punctuated by the music of cries, prayers, laughter.

  Fareed began to talk then, talk of his immediate work and how Flavius would now have to use this "living" leg he had affixed so skillfully. And on he went about the fine points of the long surgery during which the leg had been attached, about the nature of the Blood, how it behaved so distinctly from human blood.

  He used a multitude of Latin words which Gregory could not understand.

  "But what is this thing, Amel?" Gregory said suddenly. "Oh, forgive me that I don't know what all these words mean. But what is this animating force inside us? How has it changed the blood to the Blood?"

  Fareed seemed enjoyably absorbed in the question as he responded.

  "This thing, this monster, Amel ... it's made up of nanoparticles, how can I describe it, made up of cells infinitely smaller than the tiniest eukaryote cells known to us, but cells, you understand--it has a cellular life, dimensions, boundaries, some sort of nervous system, a brain or nucleus of some sort that governs its physicality and its etheric properties. It once had intelligence if we are to believe the witches. It once possessed a voice."

  "You mean you can see these cells under a microscope?" Gregory asked.

  "Not at all," said Fareed. "I can't. I know its properties by how they behave. When a creature is made into a vampire, it's as if a tentacle of this monster invades the new organism, hooking itself into the brain of the human being and then slowly beginning to transform it. Senescence is stopped forever. And then the alchemical blood of the creature works on the human blood, slowly absorbing it and then transforming what it does not absorb. It works on all the biological tissue; it becomes the sole source of cell development and change within the host. Are you following me?"

  "Well, yes, I think I've always understood that," said Gregory. "Now it needs more human blood to continue its work."

  "And what's the goal of its work?" asked Flavius.

  "To make us into perfect hosts for itself," said Fareed.

  "And to drink blood, always to drink more blood," said Gregory. "To drive us to drink more blood. I remember how the Queen cried out in those early months. The thirst was unbearable. It wanted more blood. The red-haired witches told her that before they'd been given the Blood. 'It wants more blood.' "

  "But I don't think that is its main goal," said Fareed. "Nor has it ever been. But I'm not sure that it is conscious of a goal! That is what I want to know more than anything. Is it self-conscious? Is it a conscious being living inside the body of Mekare?"

  "But in the very beginning," Gregory said, "the spirits of the world told the twin witches that Amel, once fused with the Queen, was not conscious. They said, 'Amel is no more.' They said Amel was lost now inside the Mother."

  Fareed laughed to himself and looked into the fire.

  "I was there," said Gregory. "I remember it, when the twins said these things."

  "Well, of course you were, but what amazes me is that after all the generations you've seen rise and fall, you still believe those spirits actually spoke to the witches."

  "I know they did."

  "Do you?" asked Fareed.

  "Yes," said Gregory. "I do know."

  "Well, you may be right and the spirits may be right, and the thing is mindless and subsumed, but I cannot help but wonder. I tell you, there are no discarnate entities. This thing, Amel, is not a discarnate entity but something of immense size and intricate organization, something that has now so thoroughly mutated its host and those connected to her...." And suddenly his language ascended again into a vocabulary as opaque to Gregory as the syllables uttered by dolphins or birds.

  Gregory tried to pierce the language with the finest abilities of his own mind, to see the pictures, shapes behind it. Design. But he saw something that resembled the stars in the night sky and their infinite and purely accidental patterns.

  Fareed continued.

  "... I suspect these creatures, which we have for thousands of years called spirits or ghosts, these creatures draw their nourishment from the atmosphere, and just how they perceive us is impossible to know. There is a beauty to it, I suspect, a beauty as there is to all of nature, and they are part of nature...."

>   "Beauty," Gregory said. "I believe there is beauty in all things. I believe that. But I must find the beauty and coherence in science or I'll never learn, never understand."

  "Listen to me," said Fareed gently. "I was brought over because this is my field, my language, my realm, all this. You need not ever fully understand it. You can't understand any more than Lestat or Marius or Maharet can understand it, or millions of people out there who have no capacity to absorb scientific knowledge or use it any way other than the simplest and most practical...."

  "I am that crippled here," said Gregory, nodding.

  "But trust in me," said Fareed. "Trust in me that I study for us, what I can study that no human scientist can possibly study, and don't think they haven't tried, they have."

  "Oh, I know," said Gregory. He thought back on those long-ago nights in 1985, after Lestat's famous San Francisco rock concert, of the scientists who gathered up what they could of those burnt remains all over the parking lots surrounding the concert hall.

  He'd watched that with the coldest detachment.

  But nothing, absolutely nothing, had come of it, any more than anything ever came of the vampires who were now and then captured by scientists, imprisoned in labs, and studied until they made their spectacular escapes, or were spectacularly rescued. Nothing came of it. Except that now the world was inhabited by some thirty or forty frantic men and women of science who claimed there were real vampires out there and they had seen them with their own eyes--outcasts from their profession whom the world branded lunatics.

  Time was when Gregory left the security of his Geneva penthouse to rescue any misbegotten little vampire who'd ended up in a laboratory prison under fluorescent lights gazed on by government officials. He'd hastened to break them out, destroy whatever evidence had been collected. But now he scarcely bothered. It didn't matter.

  Vampires didn't exist and everybody knew that. All the amusing popular novels, television series, and motion pictures about vampires served to reinforce the common wisdom.

  Besides, captured vampires almost always escaped. They were plenty strong. If caught in confusion and weakness, they collected themselves, bided their time, seduced their captives with cooperative speech, then shattered skulls, burnt laboratories, and scampered back off into the great and unending shadow world of the Undead, leaving behind not a scintilla of evidence that they had ever been lab rats.