"I'm torn," she said, "because I have no leave to discuss these things, but if I don't ..."
"Trust in me," David said reassuringly. He took her hand.
She sat on the edge of her chair, small shoulders hunched, her hair tumbled down around her in that veil of waves.
"As you both know," she said, "Maharet and Mekare have gone into hiding. This began some four years ago with the destruction of our sanctuary in Java. Well, Khayman is still with us, and I come and go as I please. And nothing's been said to forbid me from coming to you. But something's wrong, deeply wrong. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that our world may not continue ... unless something is done."
Our world. It was perfectly plain what she meant. Mekare was the host of the spirit that animated us. If Mekare were destroyed, we would all be destroyed as well. All blood drinkers the world over would be destroyed, including that riffraff out there encircling this hotel.
"There were early signs," Jesse said hesitatingly, "but I didn't notice them. Only in retrospect did I come to realize what was going on. You both know what the Great Family meant to Maharet. Lestat, you weren't with us when she told the story, but you knew and you wrote the entire account of this accurately. David, you know all of this as well. My aunt's human descendants have kept her alive through the millennia. In every generation she reinvented a human persona for herself so that she might care for the Great Family, care for the genealogical records, distribute the grants and the trusts, keep branches and clans in touch with one another. I grew up in this family. Long before I ever dreamed there was any secret surrounding my aunt Maharet, I knew what it was like to be part of it, the beauty of it, the richness of the heritage. And I knew even then what it meant to her. And I know well enough now that this was the vocation that maintained her sanity when everything else failed.
"Well, sometime before we left the Java compound, she'd succeeded in making the Great Family entirely independent of herself. She confessed to me that the process had taken years. The family's huge; branches exist in almost every country in the world; she'd spent most of the first decade of the new millennium sitting in law offices and bank offices and building libraries and archives so that the family would survive without her."
"But all this is quite understandable," said David. "She's tired, perhaps. Perhaps she wants a rest. And the world itself has changed so dramatically in the last thirty years, Jesse. What with computers now it is entirely possible to unite and strengthen the Great Family in a way that simply wasn't possible before."
"All that's true, David, but let's not forget what the Great Family meant to her. I didn't like to see the weariness. I didn't like to hear it in her voice. I asked her many times if she would keep watch as she'd always done, even though she no longer had to play an official role."
"Surely she will," David offered.
"She said no," Jesse responded. "She said that her time with the Great Family was over. And she reminded me that it was her interfering in my life, as she called it, her coming to me as my beloved aunt Maharet, that eventually resulted in my being inducted, as she put it, into our world."
All this was true obviously. It had been Maharet's custom to visit many of her mortal descendants. And she'd been particularly drawn to the young Jesse. And the young Jesse had been kept too long in the company of blood drinkers not to realize that something profoundly mysterious set these "people" apart from others. So Maharet was right.
"I didn't like it," Jesse continued. "I feared it, but when I pressed her, she said this had to be. She said we were living in an internet age when scrutiny made impossible the secrecy of the past."
"Well, I think she's right about that too," David said.
"She said that the information age was creating a crisis of unbelievable dimensions for any race or group or entity that had depended on secrecy. She said that people alive today were not realizing just how grave the crisis was."
"Once again, she's right about that too," said David.
I didn't want to admit it, but I agreed. The great international Roman Catholic Church was being brought to its knees by the internet or information age. And that was only one such institution.
Benji's incessant broadcasts, websites, and blogs; maverick blood drinkers with picture-capturing iPhones; satellite mobiles that were better than telepathy at reaching individuals at any time in any part of the world--all were revolutionary beyond imagining.
"She said the time was past when an immortal could shepherd a network of human beings as she'd done with the Great Family. She said the ancient records wouldn't even have survived modern investigation if she had not done what she did. Understand, she said, no one would ever really catch on as to who she was and what she'd done with the Great Family. That was a story for us to understand; human beings would always believe it was fictive nonsense even if they read it in Lestat's books. But sooner or later new and enterprising members of the family would begin researching with exhaustive depth. Had she not withdrawn and covered her tracks, the whole endeavor would have become mired in unanswerable questions. The Great Family itself would have been hurt. Well, she said, she'd taken care of it. It had taken six years, but she'd done it and now everything was finished and she could be at peace."
"At peace," David repeated respectfully.
"Yes, well, I sensed a deepening sadness in her, a melancholy."
"And at the same time," David offered, "she showed little interest in anything else."
"Precisely," said Jesse. "You are so exactly right. For hours on end, she's listened to Benji's broadcasts out of New York, Benji's complaining that the tribe was parentless, that blood drinkers were orphans, and she said time and again that Benji was correct."
"So she wasn't angry with him," I said.
"Never," said Jesse. "But I've never known her to be angry with anyone. I've known her only to be sad."
"And what about Mekare in all this?" I asked. "How has it been with Mekare since Akasha was killed? That's the question tormenting me most of the time though I don't particularly want to admit it. How goes it with the one who is the true Queen of the Damned?" I knew well enough that Mekare had from the beginning seemed unchangeable, uncommunicative, mute in soul as well as mute in body, a mysterious thing that obviously loved one person and one person only, her twin, Maharet.
"Has there been no change in her over these years?" I pushed.
Jesse didn't respond. She looked at me in silence and then her face broke. I thought she'd break down completely but she pulled herself up.
She looked at David. David sat back on the sofa, and took a deep breath. "Mekare has never shown any sign of understanding what in fact happened to her," David said. "Oh, in the beginning, Maharet had hopes."
"If there's a true mind there," said Jesse, "no one can reach it. How long it took for my aunt to resign herself to this I can't say."
I wasn't surprised, but I was horrified. And anytime in my life I'd been in contact with Mekare, I'd been uneasy, as if dealing with something that looked human but was in no way human anymore. Now, all blood drinkers truly are human; they never cease being human. They may talk of being more or less human, but they are human, with human thoughts, desires, human speech. Mekare's face had never been more expressive than that of an animal, as mysterious and unreachable as the face of an animal, a thing that seems intelligent yet is not intelligent in the way we are at all.
"Oh, she knows she's with her sister and she shows love to her sister," said David, "but beyond that, if any thought, any coherent verbal thought, has ever emanated from Mekare, I've never heard it, and neither has Jesse. And neither has Maharet as far as I ever knew."
"But she remains docile, manageable," I said. "She always seemed that way, utterly compliant. Isn't that so?"
Neither replied. Jesse was looking uneasily at David and then she turned to me as if just hearing my question. "It certainly did seem that way," she said. "In the beginning, Maharet would spend nights, weeks even, talking with her, walking with h
er, taking her about the jungle compound. She sang to her, played music for her, sat her down before the television screens, playing films for her, brilliant colorful films full of sunlight. I don't know if you remember how large it was, the compound with all those salons, or how much of an enclosed area it provided for solitary walks. They were always together. Maharet was obviously doing everything in her power to draw Mekare out."
I did remember those massive overarching screened enclosures, with the jungle exploding against the steel mesh. Orchids, the wild screeching South American birds with their long blue and yellow feathers, the vines dripping pink or yellow blossoms. Had there not been tiny Brazilian monkeys chattering in the upper branches? Maharet had imported every small colorful tropical creature or plant imaginable. It had been marvelous to roam the paths discovering secretive and picturesque stone grottoes, streams, and little waterfalls--to be in the wilderness and yet somehow safe from it at the same time.
"But I knew early on," said Jesse, "that Maharet was disappointed, almost brutally disappointed, only of course she'd never say. All those long centuries searching for Mekare, certain that Mekare could be alive somewhere, and then Mekare appearing to fulfill her curse against Akasha, and then this."
"I can imagine it," I said. I remembered Mekare's masklike face, those eyes as empty as the paperweight eyes of a French doll.
Jesse went on, a frown creasing her smooth forehead, her reddish-blond eyebrows catching the light.
"There was never a mention, never a declaration or a decision. But the long hours of talking stopped. No more reading aloud, or music, or films. And after that there was simple physical affection, the two walking arm in arm, or Maharet at her reading with Mekare sitting motionless on a bench nearby."
And of course, I thought to myself, the horrifying thought that this thing, this motionless, thoughtless being, contained the Sacred Core. But then was it so bad? Was it so bad for the host of the Sacred Core to be without thought, without dreams, without ambition, without designs?
Akasha, when she had risen from her throne, had been a monster. "I would be the Queen of Heaven," she'd said to me as she slew mortals, and urged me to do the same. And I, the consort, had done her bidding all too easily, to my everlasting shame. What a price I'd paid for the powerful Blood she'd given me, and the instructions. No wonder I kept to my refuge now. When I looked back over my myriad adventures sometimes all I saw was shame.
Maharet had rightfully described her sister as the Queen of the Damned.
I stood up and went to the window. I had to stop. Too many voices out there in the night. Benji in faraway New York was already broadcasting of the appearance of Lestat in Paris, with David Talbot and Jesse Reeves. His amplified voice poured forth from countless devices out there, warning the fledglings: "Children of the Night, leave them alone. For your own safety, leave them alone. They will hear my voice. They will hear me begging them to speak to us. Give them time. For your own safety, leave them alone."
I went back to the couch. David was patiently waiting, and so was Jesse. Surely their preternatural hearing was as acute as mine.
"And then there was the time when Marius came to her," said Jesse, looking at me eagerly.
I nodded for her to continue.
"You know these things. Marius came wanting Maharet's permission to put an end to Santino, the vampire who'd done so much to harm him over the centuries, the vampire who brought the Children of Satan against him in Venice."
David nodded, and so did I. I shrugged.
"She had hated that she was asked to sit in judgment, that Marius wanted her to convene a court of sorts, to give permission for what he wanted to do. She refused permission to Marius to harm Santino, not because she didn't believe he should but because she did not want to be the judge. And she did not want a murder beneath her roof."
"That was clear," said David.
Marius had recounted this story in his memoir. Or somebody had recounted it. The memoir might have been polished up by David for all I knew. Probably was. Pandora and Armand had been present for this court or tribunal when Marius had come before Maharet with his request, wanting vengeance on Santino but forswearing it if Maharet would not give her blessing. And somebody had brought Santino there, but who precisely had done that? Maharet?
It was Marius who'd said somebody has to rule. It was Marius who had raised the entire issue of authority. What were we to expect from someone who came into the Blood during the age of the great Pax Romana? Marius had forever been the rational Roman, the believer in reason and law and order.
And then it had been another blood drinker, Thorne, an ancient fledgling of Maharet, an old Norseman, red-haired, romantic, newly emerged from the blessed solitude of the earth, who had destroyed Santino for reasons of his own. An ugly violent scene it had been with Santino burnt by Thorne right before Maharet's eyes. Maharet had wept. Her outrage had not been that of a queen so much as the mistress of a household defiled. And Thorne had followed this act of disobedience and defiance by offering Maharet a precious gift: his preternatural eyes.
Maharet had been blind all her long life as a blood drinker. Blinded by Akasha before she came into the Blood, she'd used the eyes of her mortal victims; but they had never endured very long. Thorne had given her his vampire eyes. He'd asked the mute and impassive Mekare to take his eyes from him and give them to her sister. And that Mekare had done. Thorne had remained in the compound after that for all anyone ever knew, a prisoner of the twins, blind, suffering, maybe content.
When I'd read that account in Marius's memoir, I'd thought back on Fareed's promise to achieve permanent preternatural eyes for Maharet. Had he ever had the opportunity?
"That broke something inside of her," said Jesse, "that awful trial. Not Thorne's rebellion, you understand. She loved and forgave Thorne. She kept Thorne with us after. But simply the fact of Marius appealing to her, saying that there had to be a law amongst us, that somebody had to have authority. That broke her. That made it all too plain that she was no sovereign for the Undead."
This had never occurred to me. I had assumed that one so old and so powerful had simply gone on, pursuing a path well beyond our various disputes.
"I think it was after that that she began to obliterate all contact with the Great Family, and I saw her slipping ever deeper into her own silence."
"But she'd summoned young ones from time to time, didn't she?" I asked. "And David, you were still coming and going...."
"Yes, she did continue to invite others to the archives," said David. "She was especially tolerant of me. But I think I disappointed in those early years too. There were times when I could not bear the archives, and all the secret knowledge there that the outside world would never see. She knew how I felt. She knew that reading of lost cities and empires only made me feel less human, less vital, less purposeful. She saw all that. She knew."
"But she told me once we go through cycles, all of us," I protested. "I'm in a bad cycle now. That's why I so wanted to talk to her for a little while. I thought she was the great expert on cycles of despair and cycles of confidence. I thought she had to be. I thought she was the strongest of us all."
"She's a fallible being ultimately," said David, "just as you or I. Very likely her gift for survival depends on her limitations. Isn't that always the way it is?"
"How the Hell do I know!" I said crossly, but he only smiled as if he was on to my bad behavior and had always been. He waved it away and looked to Jesse.
"Yes, she did bring young ones to the compound," Jesse said, picking up the thread. "But only a few. Then four years ago something completely unexpected happened."
She took a deep breath, and sat back again, putting the sole of her boot up against the coffee table. Small delicate brown leather boot.
David was waiting, and from the world beyond I heard the voice of Benji broadcasting out of New York: "If you don't want disaster, I tell you leave them alone. Play my voice. Let my voice plead with them to come to us,
to speak to us, yes, but do not approach them. You know their power. You know what they can do."
I closed my mind to the voices.
"All right," said Jesse as if she'd won an exhausting argument with herself. She sat up straight again, crossing her legs rather gracefully, and stretching her left arm along the back of the chair. "This was four years ago, as I said. And she'd been visited by a very strange blood drinker, perhaps the strangest blood drinker I'd ever encountered or heard of, and he took her completely by surprise. His name was Fareed Bhansali, and if you can believe it, he is a physician and a research scientist. This was something that Maharet had in particular always feared--a scientist blood drinker, a blood drinker who might use knowledge that she viewed as magical to take power in the world."
I was about to protest that I knew Fareed, had known him well, though we'd only met once, when I perceived that she understood this, understood it from my thoughts, and David was signaling that he knew Fareed as well. Very well. The story of Seth and Fareed was out there.
"But Fareed Bhansali would never seek to use power unwisely or wrongly," David said. "I've met him, sat with him, talked to him, talked to Seth, his mentor." ("Mentor," it seemed, had become interchangeable with the word "maker," which was fine with me.)
"Well, that's what she came to discover soon enough. He told her he could easily restore Thorne's eyes to Thorne and provide her with eyes from a blood drinker that would last her for eternity. He said he could implant these new eyes for her with surgical delicacy so that they would endure forever. He explained that he knew how to override the Blood in us and stop its relentless war on change long enough to make the alterations in tissue required for a true wedding of nerves and biological threads." Jesse sighed. "I didn't understand most of it. I don't think Maharet did either. But he was brilliant, undeniably brilliant. He explained he was a true physician for our kind. He said he'd recently attached a full-functioning vampiric leg to an ancient vampire named Flavius who had lost the limb before he was ever brought into the Blood."
"Of course, Flavius," said David. "Pandora's Flavius, her Athenian slave. But this is marvelous."