"Gravitas," said Derek. He stood there looking down at her. "Marius has gravitas."
Kapetria smiled. "Yes, that's the old Roman word for what he possesses, isn't it?"
Derek nodded. He thought in a vague way of all the books he'd read in Spanish and English before that horrid monster, Roland, had captured him like a little bird between two cupped hands. He thought of all he'd learned when it just did not seem to matter, as he'd roamed all alone searching and dreaming of beings he thought he might never find again. Well, that was over now, and all that he'd read would come alive for him now, wouldn't it, in new and wondrous ways. He wanted to read the vampire pages as Kapetria always called them. He wanted to read poetry and history and all the books on the legend of Atlantis that she had described to him, the books she'd read and studied in Matilde's library in the town of Bolinas, California, where Kapetria and Welf had come to shore like lovers carved in stone. He wanted to go to all those places Kapetria had described to him where she had gone trying to find remnants of "the lost kingdom of Atlantis." And he wanted with all his heart to hear the voice of Amel. If only the Prince had let Derek hear that voice. If only there had been no pain.
He realized that Kapetria was smiling at him in the most affectionate way. The warmth, the sense of safety, the sense of being able to be happy again, swept over Derek. Kapetria stood and kissed him.
"Beautiful boy," she said.
She moved back to the window again and, lifting the curtain, looked out at the street once more. For a moment he thought she was going to weep. And he'd never seen Kapetria shed a tear. She turned to him with that loving expression that melted his heart.
"But why didn't you tell the Prince what Amel said?" He said the words as softly as he could. No human being could have heard. But the vampires, who knew what they heard?
"Amel will tell him," she said.
Why does she look so sad? She was still looking off again now in the direction of the Chateau.
"Come," she said suddenly. "We need to pack up now."
24
Fareed
HE SAT BEHIND his computer, in his apartment in the Chateau, and he listened to all that Marius had to say and that Lestat said. Seth was as usual perfectly quiet. He wanted to get to work on this new vial of blood. The blood he'd drawn from Lestat had been contaminated with vampiric blood. This was pure Replimoid blood, fresh and still warm.
"You have no idea what the message said?" asked Fareed.
"None," said Lestat. "But it was brief, whatever it was. And he pressed me to give it to her right after Roland died. He knew that Roland had died. He didn't tell me. He just gave me the message and I went into the library and wrote it down. I made a copy of it, of course."
He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Fareed, and then he turned his back and started pacing, making a slow circle in the middle of the carpet, with his hands clasped behind his back, looking remarkably, Fareed thought, like an eighteenth-century man. Maybe it was the hair tied back like a young Thomas Jefferson or a picture of Mozart. And the frock coat with the flared skirt.
Fareed went over the words. He went over them again and again and again. He tried to relate them to the phone messages which he had also gone over again and again and again. Seth was standing behind him looking down at the paper.
"I can't crack it," said Fareed.
"Neither can I," said Seth, "but it is interesting to see it transliterated that way. The pictographs were hopeless."
"So what do you think?" asked Fareed.
Lestat sighed and continued with his pacing. "I don't know. They're leaving and it's their prerogative to leave, and what will happen will happen. That's what my mind tells me. Now does my heart agree with my mind?"
He stopped and he had that blank look on his face which always meant that Amel was talking, but if this was true, that message too was a mystery. Because Lestat said nothing but began pacing again.
There was a sudden pounding on the door.
"Come in, please," said Seth.
It was Dr. Flannery Gilman and she had a sheaf of papers in her hands.
"I've been calling you and calling you," she said to Fareed, without greeting anyone, or even so much as a nod to Lestat.
Of all the doctors Fareed had brought into the Blood, this one he loved the most. And it was she who had helped him in the making of Viktor, the nearest thing that Fareed would ever have to a son. It was she who had enticed Lestat into the few brief moments of erotic passion that an infusion of hormones had allowed him and she who had carried Viktor, given birth to Viktor, nursed and cared for Viktor until finally the time had come when Viktor would be all right on his own.
Now both were blood drinkers, Flannery and Viktor, and the only pair of blood drinkers in the whole world who were mother and son, other than Gabrielle and Lestat.
"You have to look at this, all of it, now," said Flannery. "You can bring it up on the screen if you want, but I've gone over this here and circled everything that's relevant. She lied to you. She deceived you."
"What do you mean? Who?" Lestat turned as if somebody had pulled him out of a dream.
"Fareed said go over every single requisition, order, list of purchases, everything for as far back as the records went. And I did it. I pulled everything she's ever ordered for any experiment, any project, any trial!"
Fareed went through the papers, eyes moving with preternatural speed over the printout, over Flannery's many felt-tip-pen circles, over her underlining, turning the pages rapidly, and then he carried the whole stack around the side of the table so that he could spread the pages out.
"What is it?" asked Seth.
"I see exactly what you're saying!" Fareed said. He looked up to his beloved mentor and then to Lestat. "All the way back to her first weeks at Collingsworth. But how did she get away with it? Oh, I'm beginning to see. Under the names of the assistants."
"And look at the notations for duplicate amounts," said Flannery. "Reorders, claims of stolen packages, or packages damaged or never received. I wager every single order was always received. Look at this, these orders for human growth hormone. What could she conceivably have been working on to use that amount of human growth hormone? Or this one, look at this one. This was all for the synthetic skin project. Why, that's enough to make skin for half of Europe."
"She was building a Replimoid body!" said Lestat. "And she lied about it."
"Go back over the film of her talking about it," said Flannery. "I've watched this same footage over and over again." She didn't wait for Fareed to respond. She sat down at the keyboard and brought up the film of Kapetria telling her story, zipping through it until Kapetria's voice poured out of the speakers of the computer.
Fareed came round to watch the film as Seth and Lestat gathered to his right and left:
There was Kapetria at the table as she had been last night.
"But for all the hours I've worked alone and with Welf in the sanctum of laboratories under Gregory's roof, I have never discovered the actual formula for luracastria, or come close to reproducing a thermoplastic or polymer like it. I have not, contrary to your suspicions, ever grown a Replimoid whole and complete and animated, though I have certainly struggled towards this goal for many years."
Flannery hit the button to go back.
"Now watch it again. See what she does? See how she touches her hair when she said the words. That's a tell, a giveaway, that she's lying. If you watch the whole tape again, you'll see exactly what I mean. There are three points where her voice changes in pitch and she makes that same gesture, smoothing back her hair."
"I have never discovered the actual formula for luracastria, or come close to reproducing a thermoplastic or polymer like it. I have not, contrary to your suspicions, ever grown a Replimoid whole and complete and animated, though I have certainly struggled towards this goal for many years."
"I see it," said Seth.
"Struggled with it?" asked Flannery. "She's been workin
g on it night and day, and she's close to completing a Replimoid! She's used enough chemicals to grow a family of Replimoids. She's established a reserve of such chemicals...."
Lestat turned and walked away. He started pacing again, making that same circle, or was it an oval now?
"Lestat, do you realize what Flannery is saying?" Fareed said. "How long before they're scheduled to leave?" He knew the answer. He didn't have to look at his watch. He knew full well that it was almost time for Lestat to retire to his crypt, and that meant that Fareed had little more than an hour himself.
"What can we do about it?" Lestat asked in a low voice. His head was bowed and he kept walking at exactly the same speed. His hands were clasped behind his back.
"She's making a body for Amel," said Flannery. "Lestat, you know that's what she's been doing." Flannery looked helplessly to Fareed. "Whatever her goal was before now, whether it was simply to make others, she's got that body almost ready. I know it. Give me another two hours with these printouts and I could chart her progress just through the orders."
"No need," said Lestat. "He gave her what she needed to know last night. I saw him do it. I saw it in the blood when I was holding her in my arms. I saw it all." Back and forth he walked.
"And you're going to let her leave here?" asked Flannery.
Fareed looked at Seth. Seth stood back away from the computer table, his eyes still fixed on the screen. Flannery had paused the image of Kapetria at the table, with her hand lifted to her hair.
"Flannery, my darling," said Lestat. "There is simply nothing we can do." He stopped and looked up and flashed one of his finest smiles on Flannery. "Whatever will happen...will happen."
"Not if you stop them!" cried Flannery. "Not if you lock them up. Why, you have more than enough help here to lock them up no matter if there are twenty of them now or twenty-four or thirty!"
"Darling," said Lestat. "What good would it do? And how would we live with it, a colony of Replimoids in our cellars forever, multiplying unceasingly, and never allowed to see the light of day again? Or do we chain them to the walls so they don't multiply? Didn't we execute Roland for just such a crime?"
"There has to be something we can do."
"There isn't, and we can't, and we won't," said Lestat. He stood there, hands still clasped behind his back, and his face went blank again, and then assumed its regular meditative expression, his eyes moving almost aimlessly over the walls of the room.
"Has Amel translated the message for you?" Seth asked.
Lestat nodded.
He looked directly at Seth but he was speaking to them all.
"This is the message," Lestat said. " 'You cannot hurt him. I love him. You cannot hurt them. I love them. You must find a way to do it without hurting him or them. Or it will not be done.' "
Fareed took a deep breath.
"That is exactly the message," Lestat said. He appeared so marvelously calm, so astonishingly calm.
"Maybe there's some way," said Seth. But then he stopped.
No one knew or understood better than Seth just where they were in their research and what they could or could not do.
"There has to be some way to reason with her," said Flannery. "To slow her down, to force her to realize that this cannot be attempted without guarantees...."
"She'll do what she can to set him free," said Lestat. "And she'll do everything that she can to abide by his wishes. I know, because if I were her, that's what I would do, but if I couldn't abide by his wishes, I'd still do everything in my power to incarnate him and re-create him and set him free."
In a small voice, Flannery quoted the old Dylan Thomas poem, " 'Do not go gentle into that good night,...Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' "
Lestat smiled sadly.
The doors opened and in came Thorne and Cyril.
"You know that gang of weird ones is gone, don't you?" said Cyril with his usual brashness, addressing the Prince as if no one else in the world existed. "They just pulled out in two cars. They breed like rodents! There must have been twenty of them! You want us to go after them? I thought they weren't supposed to leave until daylight. There'll probably be thirty of them before they get to the outer gates."
"No," said Lestat. "Let them go."
Fareed looked at Seth. Seth was staring at the Prince, but behind Seth's dark eyes the wheels were turning.
"Sleep well, beloveds," said Lestat. "I'm calling it a night...or a day."
The Prince and the bodyguards left the room.
Fareed stared at the large vial of blood. He'd have to refrigerate it for now and take it to Paris when the sun set. A great surge of anger rose in him, anger that surprised him and confused him, because he was seldom angry with anyone in the Dark World to which he now so totally belonged. But he knew that Lestat, and all the tribe, were in great danger, and he was terrified that he would not hit upon any way to help in time.
Part III
THE
SILVER
CORD
25
Lestat
SEVEN NIGHTS HAD passed. How the discussion raged. Of course Benji issued only the blandest of official announcements on the radio broadcast. Peace had been made with Garekyn Zweck Brovotkin and the other Replimoids and no blood drinker anywhere in the world was to harm these creatures. The Replimoids had sworn never to bring harm to the vampires, or betray their secrets. Life was to go on as before. But the world of the Undead knew what was happening. The endless telepathic emanations had circled the globe.
All the blood drinkers gathered beneath the roof of the Chateau knew precisely what was happening, and groups came forth demanding that we defend ourselves against this new enemy that might try to seize the Core from within the Prince and thereby annihilate the tribe. Cyril and Thorne asked why we didn't fight.
Armand and Marius had a dreadful quarrel in which Armand demanded that the Replimoids be hunted down and annihilated, and Marius accused Armand of having the savage and ignorant soul of a child.
The ancient ones discussed it amongst themselves endlessly, except for Fareed, Seth, and Flannery, who went off to Paris to work ceaselessly to find some solution to the problems we faced. Fareed was of the opinion that my precious evil twin, Amel, could be removed some night somehow into a neutral container of some sort, a tank of ever-circulating vampiric blood, until such time as the Replimoids surfaced again. But he admitted that as of now, he was utterly incapable of achieving this feat.
And what good would that do anyway when Kapetria sought to put the brain inside a Replimoid body, a body of flesh and blood that could walk in the light of the sun? Wouldn't the mysterious nano-particle tentacles be severed then? Or would we all burn up, even the eldest of us, within a space of weeks as the mysterious engine that animated us exercised its new prerogatives? And what was to stop him, except our keeping him a prisoner forever in some chemical device?
Again and again, the ancient ones sought to calm the young ones, and all who came from far and wide to find out what was truly happening or not happening, and what they might do.
One thing was now achieved. We had a fairly good fix on our numbers. It was merely an estimate but I thought it was a sound estimate. We could not be more than about two thousand worldwide. Such a small tribe. Fareed had completed the calculations that he had begun last year--putting together all accounts of the infamous Burnings when Amel was on the rampage, and calculations as to how many any one coven house had claimed as occupants, and calculations as to how many coven houses there had been in the world. He had recorded the identity and particulars of each new blood drinker arriving among us. And he had taken the blood of the blood drinker too for his laboratory. And he had questioned each blood drinker as to what other blood drinkers he'd encountered throughout his life.
It was over my head, the graphs and the mathematical talk. But I sensed the figure itself was accurate, and now we were seeing not a flood of new faces at Court but the same people coming back who'd been here when we'd fir
st opened our doors.
But what did it matter if two thousand of us perished or fifteen thousand? Were we soon to be a legend and nothing else? Would the human Talamasca, now severed from Gremt and Teskhamen and Hesketh, ever know what became of the fabled vampires they'd studied for centuries?--ever know why they perished or that a new tribe of immortals had now come together, the Replimoids, to increase exponentially if they chose?
And that exponential increase is what we tried to explain to those who kept saying, Destroy them! Burn them. Wipe them out.
"That has never been an option," said Marius night after night as he addressed the company in the ballroom. "Even when they came to us, there were others hidden somewhere, likely multiplying beyond reckoning. While the embassy of Replimoids was with us, it multiplied. We know of nothing that limits their individual or collective ability to replicate. For all we know there are hundreds of them now, and possibly thousands. So whom are we to hunt down, and seek to destroy?"
Marius didn't attempt to defend our conviction that we could not morally exterminate the Replimoids. But we, the inner circle, never wavered in this regard. Besides, they had done nothing yet. They had not even made a threat against us. And if and when they did, could we not protect ourselves?
Our vaults were so strong, it would require explosives in mass quantity to disrupt them during the daylight hours; and it was inconceivable that the Replimoid tribe, so distinctive physically, would come here with the strength of a battalion to breach the castle doors and crypts. The villagers would panic at the first sounds of explosives. They'd summon the forces of the mortal world from far and wide.
Whatever they were, and whatever they were destined to be, the Replimoids surely were fearing exposure just as we had always feared it; and though we had triumphed in hiding in plain sight in a world convinced we were fictional, the Replimoids, once captured, imprisoned, and examined, simply did not have our formidable gifts to help them escape from mortal bonds and literally burn up all traces of their cell matter that might remain in mortal hands.
"Why don't we expose them?" asked the young ones. "Why don't we turn the forces of the world loose on them?"