The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (341 page)

“Through all your insolence, you wanted to know! You have been horribly insulting to me and to God continuously, but then so is everyone in your time. That’s nothing unusual, except with you there was tremendous genuine curiosity and wonder behind it. You saw the Savage Garden, rather than simply assuming a role there. So this has to do with why I have picked you.”

“All right,” I said with a sigh. It made sense. Of course I remembered Marius revealing himself to me. I remembered him saying the very things to which Memnoch referred. And I knew, too, that my intense love of David, and of Dora, revolved around very similar traits in both beings: an inquisitiveness which was fearless and willing to take the consequence of the answers!

“God, my Dora, is she all right?”

“Ah, it’s that sort of thing which surprises me, the ease with which you can be distracted. Just when I think I’ve really astonished you and I have you locked in, you step back and demand to be answered on your own terms. It’s not a violation of your curiosity, but it is a means of controlling the inquiry, so to speak.”

“Are you telling me that I must, for the moment, forget about Dora?”

“I’ll go you one better. There is nothing for you to worry about. Your friends, Armand and David, have found Dora, and are looking out for her, without revealing themselves to her.”

He smiled reassuringly, and gave a little doubtful, maybe scolding, shake of the head.

“And,” he said, “you must remember your precious Dora has tremendous physical and mental resources of her own. You may well have fulfilled what Roger asked of you. Her belief in God set her apart from others years ago; now what you’ve shown her has only intensified her commitment to all that she believes. I don’t want to talk anymore about Dora. I want to go on describing Creation.”

“Yes, please.”

“Now, where were we? There was God; and we were with Him. We had anthropomorphic shapes but we didn’t call them that because we had never seen our shapes in material form. We knew our limbs, our heads, our faces, our forms, and a species of movement which is purely celestial, but which organizes all parts of us in concert, fluidly. But we knew nothing of Matter or material form. Then God created the Universe and Time.

“Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled.

“God said to us, ‘Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.’ ”

“God said this.”

“Yes, to me and the other angels. Watch. And if you go back to scripture in various forms, you will find that one of the earliest terms used for us, the angels, is the Watchers.”

“Oh, yes, in Enoch and in many Hebrew texts.”

“Right. And look to the other religions of the world, whose symbols and language are less familiar to you, and you will see a cosmology of similar beings, an early race of godlike creatures who looked over or preceded human beings. It’s all garbled, but in a way—it’s all there. We were the witnesses of God’s Creation. We preceded it, and therefore did not witness our own. But we were there when He made the stars!”

“Are you saying that these other religions, that they contain the same validity as the religion to which we are obviously referring? We are speaking of God and Our Lord as though we were European Catholics—”

“It’s all garbled, in countless texts throughout the world. There are texts which are irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology; and there are texts that men know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but which can be rediscovered in time.”

“Ah, in time.”

“It’s all essentially the same story. But listen to my point of
view on it and you will have no difficulty reconciling it with your own points of reference, and the symbology which speaks more clearly to you.”

“But the validity of other religions! You’re saying that the being I saw in Heaven wasn’t Christ.”

“I
didn’t
say that. As a matter of fact, I said that He was God Incarnate. Wait till we get to that point!”

We had come out of the forest and stood now on what seemed the edge of a veldt. For the first time I caught sight of the humans whose scent had been distracting me—a very distant band of scantily clothed nomads moving steadily through the grass. There must have been thirty of them, perhaps less.

“And the Ice Age is yet to come,” I repeated. I turned round and round, trying to absorb and memorize the details of the enormous trees. But even as I did so, I realized the forest had changed.

“But look carefully at the human beings,” he said. “Look.” He pointed. “What do you see?”

I narrowed my eyes and called upon my vampiric powers to observe more closely. “Men and women, who look very similar to those of today. Yes, I would say this is
Homo sapiens sapiens
. I would say, they are our species.”

“Exactly. What do you notice about their faces?”

“That they have distinct expressions that seem entirely modern, at least readable to a modern mind. Some are frowning; some are talking; one or two seem deep in thought. The shaggy-haired man lagging behind, he seems unhappy. And the woman, the woman with the huge breasts—are you sure she can’t see us?”

“She can’t. She’s merely looking in this direction. What differentiates her from the men?”

“Well, her breasts, clearly, and the fact that she is beardless. The men have beards. Her hair is longer of course, and well, she’s pretty; she’s delicate of bone; she’s feminine. She isn’t carrying an infant, but the others are. She must be the youngest, or one who hasn’t given birth.”

He nodded.

It did seem that she could see us. She was narrowing her gaze as I did mine. Her face was longish, oval, what an archaeologist would call Cro-Magnon; there was nothing apelike about her, or about her kin. She wasn’t fair, however; her skin was dark golden, rather like that of the Semitic or Arab peoples, like His skin in Heaven Above. Her dark hair lifted exquisitely in the wind as she turned and moved forward.

“These people are all naked.”

Memnoch gave a short laugh.

We moved back into the forest; the veldt vanished. The air was thick and moist and fragrant around us.

Towering over us were immense conifers and ferns. Never had I seen ferns of this size, their monstrous fronds bigger by far than the blades of banana trees, and as for the conifers, I could only compare them to the great, barbaric redwoods of the western California forests, trees which have always made me feel alone and afraid.

He continued to lead us, oblivious to this swarming tropical jungle through which we made our way. Things slithered past us; there were muted roars in the distance. The earth itself was layered over with green growth, velvety, ruckled, and sometimes seemingly with living rocks!

I was aware of a rather cool breeze suddenly, and glanced over my shoulder. The veldt and the humans were long gone. The shadowy ferns rose so thickly behind us that it took me a moment to realize that rain was falling from the sky, high above, striking the topmost greenery and only touching us with its soft, soothing sound.

There had been no humans in this forest ever, that was certain, but what manner of monsters were there, which might step from the shadows?

“Now,” Memnoch said, easily moving aside the dense foliage with his right arm as we continued to walk. “Let me get to the specifics, or what I have organized into the Thirteen Revelations of Evolution as the angels perceived them and discussed
them with God. Understand, throughout we will speak of this world only—planets, stars, other galaxies, these have nothing to do with our discussion.”

“You mean, we are the only life in the entire universe.”

“I mean my world and my heaven and my God are all that I know.”

“I see.”

“As I told you, we witnessed complex geological processes; we saw the mountains rise, we saw the seas created, we saw the continents shift. Our anthems of praise and wonder were endless. You cannot imagine the singing in Heaven; you heard a mere taste of it in a Heaven filled with human souls. Then we were only the celestial choirs, and each new development prompted its psalms and canticles. The sound was different. Not better, no, but not the same.

“Meantime, we were very busy, descending into the atmosphere of earth, oblivious to its composition, and losing ourselves in contemplation of various details. The minutiae of life involved a demand on our focus which did not exist in the celestial realm.”

“You mean everything there was large and clear.”

“Precisely and fully illuminated, the Love of God was in no way enhanced or enlarged or complicated by any question of tiny details.”

We had come now to a waterfall, thin, fierce, and descending into a bubbling pool. I stood for a moment, refreshed by the mist of water on my face and hands. Memnoch seemed to enjoy the same.

For the first time I realized his feet were bare. He let his foot slip into the water itself, and watched the water swirl around his toes. The nails of his toes were ivory, perfectly trimmed.

As he looked down into the churning, bubbling water, his wings became visible, rising straight up suddenly to great peaks above him, and I could see the moisture glittering as it coated the feathers. There was a commotion; the wings appeared
to close, exactly like those of a bird, and to fold back behind him, and then to disappear.

“Imagine now,” he said, “the legions of angels, the multitudes of all ranks—and there are ranks—coming down to this earth to fall in love with something as simple as the bubbling water we see before us or the changing color of sunlight as it pierces the gases surrounding the planet itself.”

“Was it more interesting than Heaven?”

“Yes. One has to say yes. Of course, on reentry, one feels complete satisfaction in Heaven, especially if God is pleased; but the longing returns, the innate curiosity, thoughts seemed to collect inside our minds. We became aware of having a mind in this fashion, but let me move on to the Thirteen Revelations.

“The First Revelation was the change of inorganic molecules to organic molecules … from rock to tiny living molecule, so to speak. Forget this forest. It didn’t exist then. But look to the pool. It was in pools such as this, caught in the hands of the mountain, warm, and busy, and full of gases from the furnaces of the earth, that such things started—the first organic molecules appeared.

“A clamour rose to Heaven. ‘Lord, look what Matter has done.’ And the Almighty gave His usual beaming smile of approval. ‘Wait and Watch,’ He said again, and as we watched, there came the Second Revelation: Molecules commenced to organize themselves into three forms of Material: cells, enzymes, and genes. Indeed, no sooner had the one-celled form of such things appeared than the multicellular forms began to appear; and what we had divined with the first organic molecules was now fully apparent; some spark of life animated these things; they had a crude form of purpose, and it was as if we could see that spark of life and recognize it as a tiny, tiny evidence of the essence of life which we in abundance possessed!

“In sum, the world was full of commotion of a new kind altogether; and as we watched these tiny multicelled beings drift
through water, collecting to form the most primitive algae, or fungi, we saw these green living things then take hold upon the land itself! Out of the water climbed the slime which had clung for millions of years to its shores. And from these creeping green things sprang the ferns and the conifers which you see around us, rising finally until they attained massive size.

“Now angels have size. We could walk beneath these things on the green-covered world. Again, listen, if you will, in your imagination, to the anthems of praise that rose to heaven; listen if you will to the joy of God, perceiving all this through His own Intellect and through the choruses and tales and prayers of his angels!

“Angels began to spread out all over the earth; they began to delight in certain places; some preferred the mountains; others the deep valleys, some the waters, some the forest of green shadow and shade.”

“So they became like the water spirits,” I said, “or the spirits of the woods—all the spirits that men later came to worship.”

“Precisely. But you jump way ahead!

“My response to these very first Two Revelations was like that of many of my legions; as quickly as we sensed a spark of life emanating from these multicelled plant organisms, we also began to sense the death of that spark, as one organism devoured another, or overran it and took its food from it; indeed we saw multiplicity and destruction!

“What had been mere change before—exchange of energy and matter—now took on a new dimension. We began to see the beginning of the Third Revelation. Only it did not come home to us until the first animal organisms distinguished themselves from plants.

“As we watched their sharp, determined movement, with their seemingly greater variety of choices, we sensed that the spark of life they evinced was
indeed very similar
to the life inside ourselves. And what was happening to these creatures? To these tiny animals and to plants?

“They died, that’s what was happening. They were born, lived and died, and began to decay. And that was the Third Revelation of Evolution: Death and Decay.”

Memnoch’s face became the darkest I’d ever seen it. It retained the innocence, and the wonder, but it was clouded with something terrible that seemed a mixture of fear and disappointment; maybe it was only the naive wonder that perceives a horrible conclusion.

“The Third Revelation was Death and Decay,” I said. “And you found yourself repelled by it.”

“Not repelled! I just assumed it had to be a mistake! I went soaring to heaven! ‘Look,’ I said to God, ‘these tiny things can cease to live, the spark can go out—as it could never go out of You or us, and then what is left behind them in matter rots.’ I wasn’t the only angel who went flying into the face of God with this great cry.

“But I think my anthems of wonder were more colored by suspicion and fear. Fear had been born in my heart. I didn’t know it, but it had come to me with the perception of decay and death; and the perception felt punitive to my mind.”