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"What happened to your brothers?" I asked.

He smiled bitterly and shook his head. He looked like a human being of maybe twenty-five years. Prime of life as it was then. We were from the same design in that regard.

"Who knows what became of them?" Maxym replied. "They lacked the fortitude to choose." He looked at me intently and I found myself uncomfortable with his hostile expression. "They fled Atalantaya," he said. "Perhaps the Bravennans destroyed them. How should I know? That was long ago, before the great dome rose over Atalantaya. People came and went, came and went. There was something craven in them. They were afraid of Amel, afraid of Bravenna, afraid of me. We've heard nothing of them since."

Amel looked off as Maxym spoke. I think Amel had heard all this before. He looked faintly sad, but perhaps he was simply thinking of other things.

"And you don't feel part of this magnificent Atalantaya?" asked Garekyn. "You chose for Amel, but do not feel part of all this?" No answer. "We've been in love with Atalantaya since we arrived," he went on. "And we were in love with Earth before."

Now Maxym gazed from his lofty spiritual height on Garekyn and said with amazing force, "Amel doesn't give these people enough! Amel has never understood. If there is a Maker beyond these skies, then our highest calling is to do the will of that Maker, to open ourselves, our hearts, our souls, as Amel is always saying, to the Maker who will guide us to be what he wants us to be."

Amel turned and glared at Maxym as if he'd had enough. "And what if there is no Maker?" he asked. "When have you ever seen the slightest proof of any Maker?"

"The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness," said Maxym, "and we are to seek his will in what we see in the creation, in the green grass, in the trees, in the stars above. Not build great edifices of our own to tempt the wrath of the Maker with our presumption and ingratitude."

They went on arguing, just Maxym and Amel, Maxym pushing at Amel with his assertions ever harder. Maxym believed life was too easy in Atalantaya. Maxym believed its people were lazy and selfish. Maxym believed Amel had fostered a population of pampered beings who never became true adults. Maxym believed in the superiority of those who struggled in the Wilderness lands.

"When will you realize," Maxym asked, "that Earth doesn't need luracastria and all the dazzling personal enrichment you have used to corrupt the population! When will you realize that you have taken upon yourself an authority that you do not have?" Maxym's eyes were large and dark brown and searching and accusatory. "You have robbed these people of ambition. You have robbed them of the capacity for deep concerns. You have robbed them of the opportunity to grow in spirit."

I sat listening to all this, realizing something quite remarkable--that Amel apparently allowed this being to live here in his service, though they violently disagreed on these vital distinctions, and therefore Amel must have had some use for Maxym that we could not fully understand.

At the end of a particularly nasty exchange, perhaps one of the most heated I'd ever witnessed between any two beings, Maxym rose to his feet, hurled his wineglass at the faraway translucent wall and stormed towards the doors. Then turning back he declared with fierce unnatural volume, a volume no ordinary mam

mal could modulate, "You will see. You will see in the end that in your hatred of Bravenna, in your endless defiance of the Parents, you have led the inhabitants of this planet to reject that which may well be what the Maker has always wanted--penance, and self-abnegation, and self-denial. You have cast doubt on the inherent value of denying oneself, starving oneself, disciplining oneself to know things spiritual that cannot be learned in the midst of endless feasting and drinking and dancing and surrendering to one's appetite to couple day in and day out!"

Amel sat calmly facing him, with one arm on the back of the couch, and now it was Amel who gazed on Maxym as if from afar. "Maxym, Maxym, you make Makers where there are no Makers, and endow them with powers where there is no power, and all to assuage your endless guilt!" He sighed. His voice remained level. "Bravenna has never punished you for your defection," he said. "I have never punished you for your assault on me. And so you devise a Maker to punish you, some great awesome being beyond Bravenna, to make you miserable. You break my heart."

"Break your heart!" cried Maxym. He came close again and then did something that struck me as most unwise. He came up behind the couch and leaned over Amel menacingly. But Amel did not respond. Now, had any being come this close to me, and leaned over me in this manner, I would have moved away. But Amel sat there, staring off, as if this were nothing threatening to him and only barely interesting. "What heart do you have to break?" Maxym asked. "What are you but a Replimoid, the same as I? You have no heart. And you have no soul."

So there it was, the distinction that Derek had alluded to when we had gathered here before--the obvious question perhaps as to whether a thing developed and bred on Bravenna could have an "I" to it, a "me" to it that was as authentic as the "I" or "me" of human beings.

Suddenly Amel stood and faced Maxym. "I was born on this planet," he said. "I was born on this planet!" he repeated, slightly raising his voice. The red flared in his cheeks. "I am of this planet, and you forget that, and I tell you anything that is sentient, self-conscious, possessing a sense of fairness, a sense of right and wrong, has a soul. You have a soul! These beings here, Kapetria and Welf and Garekyn, and Derek--they have souls."

Maxym shook his head as if he were genuinely disappointed. He turned his attention to me. "Follow him, will you? Work for him, will you? I tell you, someday the Maker will bring him and the offspring of his pride and greed to ruin!"

And then off he went out the double doors without closing them and down the golden corridor, his heavy steps echoing off the walls.

With a wave of his hand, Amel made the doors close.

"Well, you see for yourself why there are likely not many other converted Replimoids amongst us," he said, "especially not of the complex kind. Bravenna poisons what it creates. Maxym is poisoned. He lives as one who is poisoned, unable to taste, to feel, to see, dying every day that he lives because he insists upon dying."

"Why do you keep him as part of your family?" asked Derek. He was genuinely puzzled. I wanted to know this as well.

"Because I love him," said Amel with a sad smile. "And he is immortal as I am immortal. I love you for the same reason. I have had lovers. I have had wives. I have lost them all. I can't share this immortality of mine with anyone." He sighed. "But there's more to it," he said. "I would rather have him here in Atalantaya shaking his fist at me, than out in the Wilderness lands fomenting his worship of the Maker among the tribes." He shrugged. "But someday, he will no doubt wander out into the Wilderness--and he will find infinitely more appreciation for his fear-inspiring ideas than he ever finds among us."

I want to pause here. I want to ask you all--Lestat, David, Marius, all of you: do you have any idea why I have given time and space here to this Maxym? You know what is about to happen to Atalantaya, and you know what happened to us. All of us. You likely can easily surmise what happened to Amel. Well, I'll tell you why I have told you this story. Because I suspect this Replimoid, Maxym, too survived the destruction that was soon visited on all of us. But not bodily as we did. I suspect that he exists as surely as Amel exists, and that his name is now Memnoch, who creates astral traps for unwary souls.

I have no proof of this. It's theory. But this is what I believe. And if this is so, I want to examine this creature when he's incarnated for what I can learn--not from his particle body but for the invisible and subatomic neural circuitry that controls it, just as Amel's neural circuitry sustains all of you.

But we can talk about this in detail later. Suffice it to say that in all your writings, the Vampire Chronicles, no two spirits command the same attention as Memnoch and Amel, and I do want to explore very much this spirit Memnoch, though my first goal is of course to understand and learn about Amel, to know the subatomic anatomy of Amel.

And when we do come to examine this subatomic anatomy, we will be examining the anatomy of a soul.

But let me return to that night, that night of all nights!

As the hours passed, Amel confided in us his theory once more that all sentient beings generate souls, and souls have their own intricate anatomy and organization which gives off an energy, an energy that Amel believed was irresistible to Bravennans who had been harvesting the misery and suffering of the planet for thousands of years.

"I have often wondered," he said, "if they have found a way to harvest souls. Imagine, if you will, what this would mean for these monsters who thrive off the energy of the invisible part of us, if when the lives of men and women are finished here, Bravenna takes their souls."