Page 124

Lestat

I AWOKE ABOUT A half hour before they came. Amel was with me, as far as I could tell. Soon I heard their voices. The doors of the vault were opened and Louis came with Fareed and Kapetria, the two scientists attired completely in white and with their valises, no doubt filled with marvelous medical gadgets and vials of chemical wonders. Both of them had stethoscopes around their necks. Seth was nearby.

Rose and Viktor were there too. This was Kapetria's idea and Fareed had agreed.

It had been decided that if after my heart was stopped, either Rose or Viktor showed signs of actually "dying" in some way--shriveling, deteriorating, transforming in any way indicating irreversible death--then my heart would be restarted at once.

It had also been agreed that if all the vampires of the world merely remained unconscious for the duration, likely the "Great Disconnection" would be a failure, and they'd all still be connected when my heart was started again.

"The Great Disconnection," I said. "I like it. I'll love it, if it works."

Rose and Viktor understood. They sat down to wait it out on the stairway outside the vault.

Louis closed the lid of my coffin and seated himself there. He was close enough to me that I could take his hand and I did.

A memory came back to me, a memory of the first time I ever saw him in New Orleans. He'd been staggering through the streets drunk, a rough-cut version of what he was now. Suddenly the veil collapsed between that time and this and it was all playing back for me as if someone else had a hand on the button and I saw him after the transformation standing in the swamp, the water almost up to his knees as he marveled at everything around him, including the moon snagged in the moss-hung branches of the cypress trees, and I could smell the fetid green water again.

I let out a long sigh.

"You're here, aren't you?" I asked Amel.

"Of course, I'm here and I'm not going anywhere," he said.

Fareed stood over me, testing the syringe in some way, making it spurt in silvery little droplets. When he bent down to put the needle into my chest, I shut my eyes.

The most remarkable thing happened. I wasn't there in the vault at all. I was someplace else entirely.

It was midday and the sun was pouring down through the dome. The light was so bright and pure and equatorial that it was almost impossible to see that the dome was there.

"This is your office?" I asked.

He sat behind the desk. His red hair was very much like my hair, but it was a real true red, not coppery or auburn, but deep red with golden highlights to it, and his eyebrows were darker and distinct and his eyes were most certainly green.

He had a longer nose than I had, and a long full mouth, the lower lip bigger than the upper lip, but the upper lip was perfectly shaped, and his jaw was square. And having said all that, what can I say about the brilliance of his smile and the boyish look to him overall? He'd been finished, like I had, on the very verge of manhood, with the requisite shoulders, but the face had the stamp of a boy's curiosity and optimism.

"Yes, it's my office," he said. "I'm so glad you've come."

"Oh, you're not going to start crying on me, are you?" I asked.

"Not if you don't want me to. But look outside. Just look. This is Atalantaya! This is all mine!"

It was quite impos

sible to describe. Imagine you're stranded on the sixty-third floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan and all you can see around you are other buildings like it, but everything is made of glass. Imagine the light skittering on all those glass surfaces, and then imagine that you can see into the buildings and see all the living beings at work in them, at desks, tables, machines, or just stranded on balconies in groups of two or three or more, talking to one another, all the busy life of the city all around you, and some of the towers climbing so high you can't quite see the top from where you're sitting and others below you have verdant gardens on their roofs, and you see fruit trees, and flowers, and vines spilling down over the balustrades, vines with purple blossoms, purple as wisteria, and you see in one garden, just one particular garden, a group of children in a circle with their arms out embracing one another as they skip and dance--Lock arms and detonate--and as they pull the circle this way and that. But it holds as a circle. Because circles don't have to be round.

"But I thought this was the tallest building. Oh, I see, the buildings are changing shape, the buildings are moving."

"That's just because I want you to see everything at the same time."

"I can see the clouds beyond the dome. Does the dome increase the heat of the sun?"

"Of course. But it's all balanced. Everything is balanced. That's what I want you to see."

He sat back in his chair with his feet up to one side on the desk. He wore shiny clothes, clothes that shimmered as the building shimmered, a collared shirt with breast pockets like the shirts we have today, and soft creaseless pants, and sandals on his feet.

I must have been standing in front of the desk, because he was smiling up at me, positively beaming. He had just the smallest cleft in his chin, and that and the curve of his cheeks made him look so new, so young. He actually had dimples in his cheeks. Dimples.

"You can't imagine what it was like in the beginning," he said. "So many steps to come to this point. And what do you think might have happened if we'd never been interrupted, if they'd never come and tried to destroy us? What do you think the world would have been like?"