Prince Lestat (11 page)

“Correct,” said Jesse.

“But if she did this, she must know her own powers,” David continued. “And Maharet is there to be a check upon her every waking moment.”

“Perhaps.”

“So where is all this going?” I asked. I tried not to sound exasperated. I loved Maharet.

“I don’t think she will ever destroy herself and Mekare,” said Jesse. “But I don’t know. I do know she listens all the time to Benji’s broadcasts out of New York. She listens to them on her computer. She sits back and listens for hours. She listens to all those young blood drinkers who call Benji. She listens to everything that they have to say. If she were going to bring the tribe to an end, I think she would warn me. I simply don’t think she means to do it. But I think she agrees entirely with Benjamin. Things are in a very bad way. Things have changed. It wasn’t only your music, Lestat, or Akasha rising. It’s the age itself, it’s the accelerated rate of technological advancement. She said once, as I believe I told you, that all institutions which depended upon secrecy are now threatened. She said that no system based on arcana or esoteric knowledge would survive this age. No new revealed religion could take hold in it. And no group that depended upon occult purpose could endure. She predicted that there would be changes in the Talamasca. ‘Human beings won’t fundamentally change,’ she said. ‘They’ll adapt. And as they adapt they’ll explore all mysteries relentlessly until they have found the fundamentals behind each and every one.’ ”

“My thoughts on the matter exactly,” I offered.

“Well, she’s right,” said David. “There have been changes in the Talamasca, and that’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s why I sent out the call for you. I wouldn’t have dared to disturb Maharet when she
obviously did not want to be disturbed, but I have to confess I was hoping for news of her when you surfaced, and now I’m a bit stunned. What’s been happening with the Talamasca of late doesn’t mean so very much.”

“Well, what has been happening?” I asked. I wondered if I was becoming a nuisance. But without my goading them, these two would have lapsed into long periods of silence and meaningful stares, and frankly, I wanted information.

Information age. I guess I’m part of it, even if I can’t remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can’t retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.

“Well, the answer to all that,” Jesse said, responding to my thoughts, “is to use the technology regularly. Because we know now that our preternatural minds don’t give us any superior gift for all knowledge, only the same kinds of knowledge we understood when we were human.”

“Yes, right. That is certainly true,” I confessed. “I’d thought it was different, because I’d learned Latin and Greek so easily in the Blood. But you’re absolutely right. So on to the Talamasca. I assume they’ve digitized all their records by now?”

“Yes, they completed that process several years back,” said David. “Everything’s digitalized; and relics are in museum-quality environments under the Motherhouses in Amsterdam and in London. Every single relic has been photographed, recorded on video, described, studied, classified, etcetera. They had begun all that years ago when I was still Superior General.”

“Are you talking to them directly?” asked Jesse. She herself had never wanted to do that. Since she came into the Blood, she’d never sought to contact her old friends there. I’d brought David over. She had not. For a while, I’d harassed the Talamasca, baited them, engaged now and then with their members, but that was now a long time ago.

“No,” said David. “I don’t disturb them. But I have occasionally visited those old friends of mine on their deathbeds. I have felt an obligation to do that. And it’s simple enough for me to get into the Motherhouses and get into those sickrooms. I do that because I want to say goodbye to those old mortal friends, and also I know what they’re experiencing. Dying without so many answers. Dying without
ever having learned anything through the Talamasca that was transformative or transcendent. What I know now of the present state of the Talamasca I know from those encounters and from watching, simply watching and listening and prowling about, and picking at the thoughts of those who know someone is listening, but not who or what.” He sighed. He looked weary suddenly. His dark eyes were puckered and there was a tremor in his lips.

I saw his soul so clearly now in the new youthful body that it was as if the old David and the new David had completely fused for me. And indeed his old persona did shape the expression of his youthful face. A multitude of facial expressions had reshaped the piercing black eyes of this face. Even his old voice sounded now through the newer vocal cords as if he had retuned them and refined them merely by using them for all those softly spoken, unfailingly polite words.

“What’s happened,” he said, “is that the mystery of the Elders and the origins of the Order have been buried in a new way.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jesse.

David looked at me. “You’re familiar with this. We never knew our origins really. You know that. We always knew the Order had been founded in the mid–eighth century, and we knew there was unaccountable wealth somewhere which financed our existence and our research. We knew the Elders governed the Order but we didn’t know who they were or where they were. We had our hard-and-fast rules: observe but do not interfere, study but do not ever seek to use the power of a witch or a vampire for one’s own gain, that sort of thing.”

“And this is changing?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “The Order’s as healthy and virtuous as ever. If anything they’re thriving. There are more young scholars coming in today who know Latin and Greek than before, more young archaeologists—like Jesse—who are finding the Order attractive. The secrecy has been preserved, in spite of your charming books, Lestat, and all the publicity you so generously heaped on the Talamasca, and as far as I know there have been few scandals in recent years. In fact none whatsoever.”

“So what’s the big problem?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it a problem,” said David. “I’d call it a deepening of the secrecy in a new and interesting way. Sometime in the last six months newly appointed Elders started introducing themselves to their colleagues and welcoming communication with them.”

“You mean Elders actually chosen from the ranks,” said Jesse with a bit of an ironic smile.

“Precisely.

“Now in the past,” David went on, “we were always told that the Elders came from the ranks, but once they were chosen they became anonymous except to other Elders, and their location was never revealed to anyone. In olden times they communicated by letter, sending their own couriers to deliver and retrieve all correspondence. In the twentieth century, they moved to fax communication and computer communication, but again, they themselves remained anonymous and their location unknown.

“Of course the mystery was this; no one ever knew personally any member called to be an Elder. No one ever encountered personally anyone who claimed to be an Elder. So it was strictly a matter of faith that the Elders were chosen from the ranks, and as early as the Renaissance, as you know, members of the Talamasca had suspicions about the Elders, and were profoundly uncomfortable with not knowing who they really were or how they passed their power on to succeeding generations.”

“Yes, I remember all this,” I said. “Of course. Marius talked about it in his memoir. Even Raymond Gallant, his friend in the Talamasca, had asked Marius what he knew about the origins of the Talamasca, as if he, Raymond, were uneasy with not knowing more.”

“Correct,” said Jesse.

“Well, now it seems everybody knows who the new Elders are,” said David, “and where their meetings will take place, and all are invited to communicate with these new Elders on a daily basis. But obviously, the mystery of the Elders before this time remains. Who were they? How were they chosen? Where did they reside? And why are they handing off power now to known members?”

“Sounds like what Maharet’s done with the Great Family,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“But you never seriously thought they were immortals, did you?” asked Jesse. “I never did. I simply accepted the need for secrecy. I was told the Talamasca was an authoritarian order when I joined. I was told it was like the Church of Rome, in that its authority was absolute. Never expect to know who the Elders are or where they are or how they know what they know.”

“I’ve always thought they were immortals,” said David.

Jesse was shocked and a little amused. “David, you’re serious?”

“Yes,” said David. “I’ve thought all my life that immortals founded the Order to spy on and record the goings-on of other immortals—spirits, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, whatever. And of course we were to spy on all those mortals who can communicate with immortals.”

I was reflecting. “So the Order’s collected all this data over the centuries, while the central mystery—the origins—remains unexplored.”

“Exactly. And if anything this change moves us farther away from the central mystery,” said David. “Within a few generations the entire mystery might well be forgotten. Our shadowy past will be no more intriguing than the shadowy past of any other ancient institution.”

“That does seem to be what they want,” I said. “They’re bowing out before any serious investigation is mounted, either within or without the Order, to find out who they are. Another decision prompted by the information age? Maharet was right.”

“What if there’s a deeper reason?” David asked. “What if the Order was indeed founded by immortals, and what if these immortals are no longer interested in pursuing the knowledge they wanted so badly? What if they’ve abandoned their quest? Or what if they’ve found out what they wanted to know all along?”

“What could that possibly be?” Jesse asked. “Why, we know no more about ghosts, witches, and vampires than we ever did.”

“That’s not true,” David said. “What have we been discussing here? Think.”

“Too many unknowns,” I said. “Too many suppositions. The Talamasca has an amazing history, no doubt about that, but I don’t see why it couldn’t have been founded by scholars and maintained by them, and what any of this proves. On the surface of it, the Elders have simply changed their method of interacting with the members.”

“I don’t like it,” said Jesse softly. She appeared to shiver. She rubbed the backs of her arms with her long white fingers. “I don’t like it at all.”

“Has Maharet ever told you anything about the Talamasca, anything entirely personal that she alone knew?” asked David.

“You know she hasn’t,” Jesse responded. “She knows all about them; she thinks they’re benign. But no, she’s confided nothing. She’s not terribly interested in the Talamasca. She never has been. You know that. David, you asked her these questions yourself.”

“There were legends,” said David, “legends we never discussed. That we were founded to track the vampires of the Earth, and all
the rest of the research was essentially unimportant, that the Elders themselves were vampires.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said, “but then you lived with all the talk, I didn’t.”

“It used to be said that when you died within the Order, the Elders came to you right before death and revealed themselves. But who started that old tale I never knew. And as I kept watch with one dying colleague after another in my time, I came to know this wasn’t true. People died with many unresolved questions about their life’s work, and its value.” David looked at me. “When we first met, Lestat, I was a disillusioned and burnt-out old man. You remember that. I wasn’t sure all my work studying the supernatural had come to anything.”

“Whatever the case, the mystery remains unresolved,” I said. “And maybe I should try to find the answer. Because I think this new development does have something to do with the crisis our kind is facing.” But I broke off, uncertain of what more I could say.

They sat there in silence.

“If it’s all connected, I don’t like it,” I muttered. “All this is too apocalyptic,” I said. “I can live with the notion that this world is a Savage Garden, that things are born and die for random reasons, that suffering is irrelevant to the great brutal cycle of life. I can live with all that. But I don’t think I can live with great overarching connections between things as enduring as the Great Family and the Talamasca and the evolution of our tribe.…”

Fact was, I simply couldn’t put it all together. So why act like the idea of it was frightening me? I wanted to put it all together, didn’t I?

“Oh, well, then you do admit there is a crisis,” David said with a trace of a smile.

I sighed. “All right. There’s a crisis. What I don’t understand is why, exactly. Oh, I know, I know. I woke up the Undead world with my songs and videos. And Akasha awoke and went on a rampage. All right. I get it. But why are all those mavericks everywhere now? They weren’t before. And what’s the impact of these ancient ones rising, and why do we need a Queen of the Damned in the first place? So Mekare and Maharet don’t care to rule. So what? Akasha never ruled. Why didn’t things simply lapse back to the way they’d always been?”

“Because the whole world was changing,” said David impatiently.
“Lestat, don’t you see, what you did in ‘coming out’ as a vampire to the public was part of the zeitgeist. No, it didn’t change the mortal world in any way, of course not, but how can you underestimate the effects of your books, your words, all of it on all the blood drinkers in existence? You gave the inchoate masses out there an origin story, a terminology, and a personal poetry! Of course this waked old ones. Of course this invigorated and charged apathetic ones. Of course this roused from torpor wanderers who’d given up on their own kind. Of course this emboldened mavericks to make other mavericks using the famous Dark Trick, Dark Gift, Dark Blood, etcetera!”

None of this was said with contempt, no, but it was said with a kind of scholar’s fury.

“And yes, I did my part, I know that,” David continued. “I published the stories of Armand, Pandora, and finally Marius. But the point I’m trying to make is this: you gave a legacy and a definition to a population of shrinking, self-loathing predators who had never dared to claim any such collective identity for themselves. So yes, it changed everything. It had to.”