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"Nonsense, you would have gone into one of the others sooner or later."

"No," he said. "Wasn't working. It was your courage the first time and the last time. It was always your courage, and your patience and your insistence that solutions could be found, that great conflicting forces could somehow be reconciled."

"You're giving me way too much credit," I said. "But we have a destiny, you and I!" I started to weep again. I wiped angrily at my eyes and put the violet sunglasses back on. "I can't think of anything else right now but you and what you're experiencing, what the future holds for you."

He sat silent, gazing at me.

"Give my love to them, even the ones that hate me," he said. "What did you do to Rhoshamandes for what he did in helping Kapetria?"

"What do you think?" I said. "I did nothing, of course."

He laughed softly under his breath. He shook his head. "Lestat, you know," he said, "that Rhoshamandes is a danger to you."

"So everyone says," I replied, "but I've lived with danger for so long. I don't want to talk about him now. I don't want to waste a moment here even thinking about him."

A silence fell between us, and then I said,

"You know the kind of power you have." I spoke hesitantly. "You know what you and the other Replimoids could do to this world." I gestured to the street, to the buildings, to the people, with my right hand. "You know what you could do for the earthbound dead and the spirits--."

"We are the People of the Purpose!" he said. "You must remember this always. And the purpose is never to harm life in any way. Now there is not a creature on this planet who ever really lives such a purpose, no, we know that. But we will try! We will try as surely as any colony of people dedicated to the support of life has ever tried."

It must have been a full hour that we talked.

He told me about the books he'd been reading, and asked me questions about things he said he didn't understand. But how do you explain to a person why Late Antiquity embraced wholeheartedly the Christian rejection of the biological and material world? How do you explain such personalities as Saint Augustine or Pelagius? Or Giordano Bruno? How do you account for the fact that the ancient Romans could stamp coins but never invented a printing press? Why did it take so long to invent the stirrup or the barrel? Or the bicycle? How to explain why French and English are so different when the languages evolved so close to each other? We confessed we were both at a loss to account for the dark cynicism of so many humans living in a modern world so full of wondrous progress.

"They can't know history as we know it," I said.

We talked of the Bravennans and whether or not they still actively monitored this world, whether or not their film feeds were still flowing. We talked of the mystery of other aliens coming to the planet.

He and the People of the Purpose had the very same speculations as human beings, that alien visitors might actually be walking among us, far more skillfully disguised than we could imagine.

He spoke of his own great and small discoveries, a new luracastria derivative, a synthetic hormone that he thought could lead to increasing the human life span in some individuals for ten years beyond the allotment of their genetic clock.

"Don't fear me," he said finally. "Never fear me. What I will do, I will do with respect for what all these beings achieved on their own. After all, they built this paradise without an Amel, didn't they? Human beings built it, this world of Western Europe and America and England and all the countries of the West."

"You haven't been to the East yet," I said. "You haven't seen China or Japan or the Levant. There is so much to learn there as well."

Finally the Replimoid women were there at the curb again with the door of the car open.

He jumped to his feet and came around the table and took me in his arms. "Ah, that this too, too solid flesh must never melt!" he said.

I took his face in my hands and kissed him.

"Amel," I whispered in his ear. "My love."

He turned away abruptly, as if it were the only way that he could make the break, and he headed towards the waiting car. At the curb, he stopped. We looked at one another, oblivious to the traffic, the noise, the crowds.

He came back to me and we embraced completely. We were wrapped in each other's arms. And the scent of his blood overwhelmed me.

I bit down into my tongue and let my mouth fill with blood. Then I kissed him full on his mouth and opened his lips and let the blood pass into him. I felt him stiffen, shiver, and I heard an ecstatic moan come from deep inside his chest.

"Drink," he whispered.

And I did. Holding him tight to me, I drove my teeth into his throat. All the mortal world would see was a man kissing another man, but I tapped into the blood, the rich and flavorful Replimoid blood, and the world dissolved.

The images came in a rush like the song of a full symphony orchestra, images of him in myriad moments of his new existence too numerous for me to absorb, riotous images filled with his laughter and the mingling of voices, music, the roar of engines, explosions, wind and rain, and I saw towers, towers of exquisite beauty and structures of unimaginable complexity and great dense urban landscapes of fantastical scope, and it was not Atalantaya I was seeing, it was cities of this world, now, our time, cities that existed and cities yet unknown but envisioned, and--it was innocent blood.

Innocent blood filling me, innocent blood pumped by his heart into my heart.