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"Oh, he's made of material all right," she said. "Ghosts, spirits, whatever they are, they are all made of material." She looked at Gremt, Gremt who sat there impassively studying her with his perfect replica of a classical Greek face and body. "Are you not made of material?" she asked. "I'm not speaking of your physical body, I'm speaking of the core of your being, where your consciousness resides."

"Yes, it is made of a subtle material," Gremt said in a soft voice. "I came to realize this a long time ago. But what is that subtle material? What are its properties? Why did I come into being? These things we don't know, because we can't see or measure or test the subtle material."

"I have my theories," she said. "But Amel is made of subtle material for certain, a subtle material that implants and develops in every new host offered to him, and ideally, he would have disconnected his mind from this host in time, diminishing eventually in size until he became comfortable in one small group of hosts, or even in one alone. But it didn't happen. It's like all the spectacular mutations of this planet--infinitely complex, involving accident and will, and blunder and discovery."

"I see what you're saying," said Fareed.

"What surprises me is that you haven't been focused on this from the beginning," said Kapetria. "I don't say this as a criticism. I offer it as an observation. Why haven't you and your team of doctors been seeking to break the link of each individual vampire with Amel?"

"I can't see a way to do it," said Fareed. He appeared slightly defensive. "Of course I realize the importance of this, that we could free each individual from the host."

"Seems to me," said Kapetria, "that that might be one of the crucial areas for your research."

"Do you realize how many areas of research we're facing?" asked Gregory. "Do you realize what a revolution is involved here for us--that we now have doctors and scientists studying our own physicality?"

"Yes, Herr Collingsworth, but these strange invisible connections to Amel are so obviously vulnerable," said Kapetria, "and so obviously a mistake, a failure--." She addressed Fareed. "And another thing, why have you not been focused on some way to take the Amel neural circuitry out of one host and transfer it to another without injuring either one?"

"Because I don't know how!" Fareed said. "What do you think I'm doing in my laboratories, simply playing around with--."

"No, no, no, forgive me," said Kapetria. "I'm not saying what I mean to say. What I mean to say is..." She hesitated and then fell into her thoughts, her right hand curled under her chin.

"How would you do this?" asked Seth in a soft voice. "How would you propose moving the neural circuitry of Amel from one brain to another, when we can't even see this neural circuitry, not even in the most sensitive scans?"

"Stop," said Derek. "Just stop!" He glared at Kapetria angrily. His lower lip was trembling and a glassy film had come down over his eyes. "Stop right now!" he said.

She was clearly taken aback. She turned to him and asked in a small solicitous voice, "What's the matter?"

"Tell them," said Derek. He glared at me, at Fareed, and at Marius. "Tell them!"

Kapetria laid her right hand gently on his left hand. "Tell them what, Derek?" she asked tenderly.

"Tell them what may happen if they seek to harm us," said Derek. He stared directly at Seth, then at Gremt. His right hand was shaking as if palsied. His eyes flashed over all those across from him and then at me. "Tell them what might happen if they try to destroy us. They think they have us at their mercy here. I know they do. Well, they don't."

"You're in no danger of us trying to hurt you!" Marius said. "No one here wants to hurt you. No one here wants to be hurt by you, either."

"No, no danger at all here," I said. "We would never attempt to destroy you. That's the last thing we want. We felt that inviting you here like this would convince you of our trust."

"No, there isn't the slightest danger," said Seth.

"We can't be destroyed," said Derek. His voice was uneven. He was clearly struggling in ways that hadn't been easy to see before. "We can't be destroyed unless you want to destroy everything in this world that is of value to you." He clutched at Kapetria's hand and held it tight. "You tell them."

Kapetria was obviously unprepared for all of this but she seemed neither angry nor offended. She studied Derek for a long moment. Her eyelashes were thick and beautifully black and her beauty overall was distracting me as beauty so often does. If her beauty was incidental, if it wasn't rooted in something profound inside of her, well, it could be mighty misleading, I thought.

"What Derek says is probably true," Kapetria said. "If you hurt us, you risk hurting countless others. You risk hurting the world. I'm not trying to sound dramatically apocalyptic. Our bodies may contain elements that, once released, might destroy the whole world. Derek is not exaggerating. But why don't I tell you the whole story?"

Every being present registered this, but the hard expression on Armand's face did not change. He looked at me. Faint telepathic whisper: Containment, from which they can't escape.

"Yes, please," said Seth to Kapetria. "The whole story. We're getting ahead of ourselves here. We need to know--."

Welf, the silent one, nodded, those big drowsy eyes of his flashing for a moment, and his full sensuous mouth yielding to a small agreeable smile.

"It's only seven o'clock now," Kapetria said. "I can tell you everything before sunrise, if you're ready to listen, and by the end you'll understand what Derek means. We cannot be physically destroyed without considerable harm being done to everyone here and people who are not here. And by the end we will be prepared to go forward together."

"I think this would be splendid," said Marius. "This is what we want. I'm moved by your trust, that you want to tell us everything."

I noted a quick glance from Gregory and Teskhamen responding in a subtle way as well. They weren't as sure as Marius about all this. But I was.

Gremt looked quietly and unobtrusively stricken as if he were lost. I wished I could say something to him to comfort him--to tell him that he was as much a part of us here as anyone else was--but I wanted to hear Kapetria's story now as well.