by Anne Rice
And the earth was indeed round. Not a mile of it remained uncharted, unowned, or unnamed. No part of it lay beyond communication because the mysterious waves of telephones, radios, and televisions could be bounced off satellites in space and back to earth again at any locale. Sometimes the television pictures and voices were of people and actions taking place at the very moment they were being transmitted: known as live TV.
Chemistry had reached unprecedented heights, achieving through extraction, purification, analysis, and new combinations all manner of new substances, materials, drugs. The very process of combining had been transformed so that there was now physical change, chemical change, chain reaction, chemical reaction, and fusion, to name but a few. Materials had been broken down and made into new materials and the process was without limit.
Science had surpassed the alchemist's dreams.
Diamonds had found their way into the bits of drills, yet people still wore them as ornaments and they commanded millions of dollars, which was, apparently a preferred currency, American dollars, though the world was full of currencies and languages, and people from Hong Kong spoke to people in New York merely by pressing a few buttons. The catalog of synthetic materials and subsequent products had evolved beyond the memory or understanding of the common man so that almost nobody could define for you the ingredients of the nylon shirt he wore, or the plastic calculator in his pocket.
Of course some conclusions--even for me--were inevitable. A car or plane dependent on the combustion of fossil fuel can explode rather than move forward. Bombs can be sent without pilots from one country to another to destroy even the biggest cities with the highest buildings. Hardly anywhere in the world did the sea not taste just a little of gasoline.
New York was very far north of the equator, that was obvious, and one could say it was the capital, in this time, in the Western world.
The Western world. This is where I have found myself. And what is the Western world? Apparently, the Western world was the direct cultural legacy of the Hellenism of Alexander the Great, its concepts of justice and purity infinitely amplified and complicated but never really subverted by Christianity of varying kinds--from crude screaming mystic acceptance of Jesus to dense theological sects which still argue over the nature of the Trinity, that is, whether or not there are three persons in one God. Scarcely a single part of the Western world had not been enriched and invigorated by an immensely creative and relentlessly spiritual Judaism. Jewish scientists, philosophers, doctors, merchants, and musicians were among the most celebrated of the era.
The drive to excel was taken for granted, as it was in Babylon. Even by those in despair.
Natural law and law arrived at by reason had become common values, revealed law and inherited law on the other hand had become suspect and subjected to argument, and all human fives now were "created equal." That is, the life of a worker in the fields was as precious as the life of the titular Queen of England or her elected Prime Minister.
Technically, legally, there were no slaves.
Few were certain as to the meaning of life, as few today as there had been in those times when I was alive.
Once in the scriptorium as a human boy I had read in Sumerian the lament: "Who has ever known the will of heaven?" Any man or woman in the streets of New York today might have spoken the same words.
This Western world, this legacy of Hellenism, infused with ever evolving Judaism and Christianity, had flourished most dramatically in northern climes of the planet both in Europe and in America, harnessing somehow the tenacity and the ferocity of those taller, shaggier, and often fairer dwellers of the woodlands and the steppes, who did not learn to be humans in Eden, but rather in lands where summer was always followed by the brutality of cold and snow.
All the Western world, including its most tropical outposts, lived now as if winter might at any moment descend, isolate, even destroy.
From towns near the northern polar ice cap all the way down to the tip of the jungles of Peru, people thrived in enclaves designed and sustained by machine, microchip, and microbiology, surrounded by surpluses of energy, fuel, finery, and food.
Nobody ever wanted to run out of anything ever again, and this included information.
Storage. Archives. Information banks. Hard disk, floppy disk, backup tape, hard copy--everything worth anything was somehow duplicated in one form or another and stored.
It was basically the same theory that had created the archives of tablets in Babylon which I had once studied. Not difficult to understand.
But in spite of all these dazzling advances, amid which Esther Belkin had somehow drawn me to her like a magnet, and seemed even now to draw my consciousness to her, there existed still "the Old World."
Follow the stream into the marshes, into the mountains, into the desert.
"The East" was what they called it, or the Third World, or the Undeveloped Countries, or the Backward Countries, or the Primitive Areas--and it covered continents still where the bedouin in timeless white garments walked his camel through the sandstorm, happy as ever to live amid sun-bright desolation. Only now he might carry with him a battery-operated television set, and a can of a fire-making chemical called Sterno so that when he pitched his tent, he could listen to the Koran read over the television as his food was heated without the use of wood or coal.
In the rice paddies, in the fields of India, in the marshes of Iraq, in the villages the world over, men and women stooped to gather the crop as they had since the dawn of time.
Huge modern urban outposts had arisen amid the millions of Asia, yet the vast majority of tribes, fanners, weavers, vendors, mothers, priests, beggars, and children remained beyond the reach of Western invention, abundance, medicine, and sanitation.
Sanitation was key.
Sanitation involved the chemical purification of human waste and industrial waste, the purification of drinking water and water for bathing--the nullification of filth in all forms and the maintenance of an environment in which one could be born, give birth, grow up, and die--in maximum security against human or industrial or chemical contamination of any kind.
Nothing mattered as much as sanitation. Plagues had vanished from the earth due to sanitation.
In the "West" sanitation was taken for granted; in the "East" sanitation was viewed with suspicion, or people were simply too numerous to be made to conform to the inevitable habits required by it.
Disease was rampant in the jungles; in the marshes; in the deep pockets of vast cities or in the wilderness where the peasants, the workers, the fellaheen, still lived as they always had.
Hunger. There was plenty and there was hunger. There was food thrown away in the streets of New York and there were those starving in Asia on television programs. It was a matter of distribution.
Indeed, that there was as much organization amid all of this change was the modern mystery--that so much could happen and that so much could remain the same.
Everywhere were dramatic contrasts which could both confuse and delight the eye. The holy men of India walked naked beside the roaring automobiles in the teeming streets of Calcutta. People in Haiti lay on the ground starving to death as they watched planes fly overhead.
The River Nile flowed into the metropolis of Cairo, where the buildings of steel and glass stand as high as in Manhattan, yet the streets were thronged by men and women in loose, airy cotton robes of white or black, as pure as the garments worn by the Israelites when Pharaoh let the people go.
The pyramids of Giza remained as always, only the air surrounding them was thick with the emission of automobiles, and the modern city crawled almost to their feet.
Within a stone's throw of air-conditioned office buildings there lingered pockets of jungle where men knew nothing of Yahweh, Allah, Jesus, or Shiva, or of iron, copper, gold, or bronze. They hunted with wooden spears and poison from reptiles, only now and then stupefied by the sight of big mechanical bulldozers mowing down the forest which was their world.
A flock of goats in the mountains of Judea still looked exactly like a flock of goats in the time of Cyrus the Persian. Shepherds tending sheep outside the city of Bethlehem looked exactly as they had when Jeremiah the Prophet raved.
Though East and West communicated and interacted continuously, each somehow held out against the other. Desert sheiks, rich from the oil discovered beneath their sands, still wore their headdress and robes as they drove about in automobiles. Vast numbers of the world's women still lived indoors almost entirely and only entered a public street if their faces were veiled.
In New York City, capital of the West and city of choice of the more clever and more powerful, the common person was utterly confident and utterly ignorant of "science" at the same time.
What individual anywhere in the world knew the real meaning of binary code, semiconductor, triodes, electrolyte, or laser beam?
In the upper echelons a technological elite with the powers of a priesthood dealt in perfect faith with the invisible: ions, neutrinos, gamma rays, ultraviolet light, and black holes in space.
Icons shone bright for me in my awakening, bright as the eyes of Esther when she died.
"Servant of the Bones, listen," she might as well have said. "Servant of the Bones, come, see."
All the material world was mine to behold, to know, without haste or alarm, as I slumbered, grieving for her, and angry, angry with her killers.
In invisibility and silence, I saw a man parked at Fifty-sixth and Fifth speaking on a tiny phone in his car, in the German language, to an employee of his in the city of Vienna.
One woman in a building in the city of Atlanta in the country of America talked for twenty-four hours before a camera about the weather all over the globe.
Esther Belkin, my lost one, was mourned by thousands who had never known her, her story broadcast to every country which could receive the Cable News Network, or, as it was mostly known, CNN. Members of the international Temple of the Mind of God, to which she herself had not belonged, mourned for her.
Her stepfather, Gregory Belkin, a robust man of substantial height, the Temple's founder, wept before cameras and spoke of cults, terrorists, and plots. "Why do they want to hurt us!" he said. His eyes were clear and brilliantly black, his hair close cut but thick as hers had been, and his skin was almost the perfect color of honey in sunlight.
The mother of the murdered Esther fled the public eye. White-clad nurses ushered Mrs. Belkin past screaming reporters. With the long unkempt hair of a girl, and thin beseeching hands, she looked little older than her daughter.
Law officers and elected officials condemned the violence of the times.
And the times were universally violent. In fact, violence came now like any other commodity, in all sizes and forms.
Robbery, rape, and battery were routine, if not rampant, beneath a canopy of civilization and peace. Small organized wars were in constant progress. People were fighting to the death in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in the Ukraine. Souls of the newly dead wreathed the earth like smoke.
The market for weapons was black, white, chaotic, endless. Struggling little countries vied with larger and more powerful nations to buy up legally or illegally the armaments and explosives of crumbling empires. Powerful nations sought to stop the proliferation of missiles, hand grenades, bullets, and canisters of poison gas, while they themselves continued to develop nuclear bombs which could destroy the earth.
Drugs were critical to people. Everyone talked of drugs.
Drugs cured. Drugs killed. Drugs helped. Drugs hurt.
There were so many kinds of drugs and for so many purposes that no one being could grasp the significance of the sheer multiplicity itself.
In one New York hospital alone, the size of the inventory of drags which saved lives daily through inoculation, injection, intravenous feed, or oral ingestion was almost beyond human count. Yet a computer system kept perfect track of it.
Worldwide, criminal overlords fought for the trade in illegal drags--the wherewithal to develop, distribute, and market cocaine and heroin--chemicals with no other purpose than to make people feel an addictive euphoria or calm.
Cults. Cults were a matter of public obsession and fear. Cults were apparently unsanctioned religious organizations, that is, organizations to which people belonged, swearing allegiance generally to a leader of whose morals and purposes others were unsure. Cults could rise, seemingly from nothing, around the figure of one man--Gregory Belkin. Or cults could break off from large organized religions to form fanatical enclaves of their own.
Cults existed for peace and war.
Around the death of Esther Belkin swarmed the argument over cults.
Again and again, her face flashed on television screens.
She herself, a member of nothing, was related to everything--those who were anti-government, those who were anti-God, those who were anti-wealth.
Had her father's cult members actually killed Esther?
She herself had once been heard in private to remark that the Temple of the Mind of God had too much money, too much power, too many houses worldwide. Or had it been the enemies of Gregory Belkin and his Temple who sought through the death of Esther to hurt the father, to warn him and his powerful cohorts that his organization had become too big, and too dangerous, but to whom?
Cults could be liberal, radical, reactionary, old-fashioned.
Cults could do terrible things.
I drifted, I watched, I listened; I knew what people knew.
It was a world of empires, nations, countries, and gangs; and the smallest gang could dominate the television screens of the entire world with one well-planned explosion. The news would talk all day about the leader of fifty as easily as it might about the leader of millions.
Enemies were the beneficiaries of the same democratic and competitive scrutiny as victims.
The faces of the Evals--Billy Joel, Doby, and Hayden--rose to the fore, blazing as bright as Esther's on the television screens for brief seconds. Had these men who killed Esther Belkin belonged to a secret movement? People spoke of backwoods "survivalists" with barbed-wire fences and vicious dogs, who suspected all kinds of authority. Conspiracy. It might be anywhere in any form.
And then there were the Apocalyptic Christians, having more cause than ever before to say that Judgment Day was at hand.
Had the Eval brothers come from such organizations?
Gregory Belkin, the stepfather of Esther, spoke in a soft compelling voice of plots to hurt all God-fearing peoples. The innocence of Esther was significant and cried out to heaven. Terrorists, diamonds, fanatics--these words encircled the brief flicker of Esther's face and name.
The news in all forms--printed, broadcast, computerized on internets--was continuous, alarming, prophetic, fatalistic, detailed, ludicrous by intention and by accident in turns.
As I said, any ghost could have grasped these things.
The question with me was why was I thinking of anything? Why wake from my deep sleep, just short of death, always just short of death, and find myself walking amongst Billy Joel, Hayden, and Doby Eval--a sudden horrified witness to their crime?
Whatever the case, I had for the moment lost my taste for merely drifting, for merely existing, for merely hating.
I wanted to pay attention. I wanted to make full use of my mind unfettered by flesh and cast into eternity, a mind that had been gaining strength with each new awakening, taking back into the darkness with it not merely experience but emotion, and possibly a certain resolve.
Inevitably, it was a Master who would put all of this in order through his responses, his reactions, the vitality of his will.
But a very specific question tormented me. Yes, I was back and I wanted to be back. But had not I done things to ensure that I would never be brought back again?
If I wanted to, I think I could remember what I'd done. Forget the world and all its pomp and racket for a moment. I was Azriel. Azriel could remember what he'd done.
If I wanted to, I could remember more dead Magi than those I've already described here. I could smell again the camp of the Monguls, leather, elephants, scented oil--flicker of lights beneath the sagging silk, the chessboard overturned and tiny carved figures made of gold and silver rolling on a flowered carpet.
Cries of men. Destroy it, it's a demon, drive it back into the bones!
A series of windows in Baghdad looking out over a battle. Back into the bones! Fiend from Hell. A castle near Prague. A stone-cold room high in the Alps. And maybe even more--even after the vivid enchanting gaslight on the flowered wallpaper of the sorcerer's room in Paris.
This servant serves no more!
Yes, I'd proved to myself and them that I could slay any conjurer.
So where was the sly, covert consciousness which had brought me here to this presentation of power?
Oh, I could like to aver that I loathed being conscious again and forswore all life and everything that goes with it, but I couldn't really do that. I couldn't forget Esther's eyes, or the beautiful glass on Fifth Avenue, or the moment when the heat came through the soles of my shoes, and when the man, the kindly unknowing man had put his arm around me!
I was curious and free! In an orbit, I was bound to these bizarre events. But no Lord directed me.
Esther knew me but she hadn't called. Had it been someone on behalf of Esther, someone whom I had already tragically failed?
Two nights passed in real time before I realized I was once again awake, and moving through the air: the angel of might, the angel of evil, who knows?
This is what I saw:
16
This was a nearby city, in view of the other. The car moving through the rain was the car that had carried Esther to the place where the Evals surrounded her with their picks. Other cars traveled with it, filled with guards whose eyes roved dark and deserted buildings.
The procession was furtive yet full of authority.
Through the rain, I could actually see the shining towers of the street on which she had died. Grand as Alexandria, or Constantinople, this rock-hard capital of the Western world, New York--in its greedy nuclear splendor. Yet its soaring buildings reminded me of the weapons carried by the Evals. Hard and very sharp.