He was agitated. He was on the verge it seemed of wringing his hands. He looked at me intently, as if he would look into me and through me.
"And in short order," he said, "the Thirteenth Revelation of Evolution made itself known. Males mated with the loveliest of the females, and those who were most lithe, and smooth to touch, and tender of voice. And from those matings came males themselves who were as beautiful as the females. There came humans of different complexions; there came red hair and yellow hair as well as black hair and locks of brown and startling white; there came eyes of infinite variety—gray, brown, green, or blue. Gone was the man's brooding brow and hairy face and apish gait, and he, too, shone with the beauty of an angel just as did his female mate."
I was silent.
He turned away from me, but it seemed impersonal. It seemed he required of himself a pause, and a renewal of his own strength. I found myself staring at the high arched wings, drawn close together, their lower tips just above the ground where we stood, each feather still faintly iridescent. He turned around to face me, and unfolding out of the angelic shape, his face was a graceful shock.
"There they stood, male and female, He created them, and except for that, Lestat, except for—that one was male and one was female, they were made in the Image of God and of His Angels! It had come to this! To this! God split in Two! Angels split in Two!
"I don't know how long the other angels held me but finally they could no longer, and I went up to Heaven, ablaze with thoughts and doubts and speculations. I knew wrath. The cries of suffering mammals had taught me wrath. The screams and roars of wars amongst apelike beings had taught me wrath. Decay and death had taught me fear. Indeed all of God's Creation had taught all I needed to speed before him and say, " 'Is this what you wanted! Your own image divided into male and female! The spark of life now blazing huge when either dies, male or female! This grotesquerie; this impossible division; this monster! Was this the plan?'
"I was outraged. 1 considered it a disaster! I was in a fury. I flung out my arms, calling on God to reason with me, to forgive me, and save me with reassurance and wisdom, but nothing came from God.
Nothing. Not light. Not words. Not punishment. Not judgment.
"I realized I stood in Heaven surrounded by angels. All of them were watching and waiting.
"Nothing came from Almighty God but the most tranquil light. I was weeping. 'Look, tears such as their tears,' I said to the others, though of course my tears were nonmaterial. And as I wept, and as they watched me, I realized I wasn't weeping alone.
"Who was with me? I turned round and round looking at them: I saw all the choruses of angels, the Watchers, the Cherubim, the Seraphim, the Ophanim, all. Their faces were rapt and mysterious, and yet I heard a weeping!
" 'Where is the weeping coming from!' I cried.
"And then I knew. And they knew. We came together, wings folded, heads bowed, and we listened, and rising from the earth we heard the voices of those invisible spirits, those invisible individualities; it was they—the immaterial ones—who wept! And their crying reached to Heaven as the Light of God Shone on Eternal, without change upon us all.
" 'Come now and witness,' said Raphael. 'Come watch as we have been directed.'
" 'Yes, I have to see what this is!' I said, and down I went into the earth's air, and so did all of us, driving in a whirlwind these tiny wailing, weeping things that we could not even see!
"Then human cries distracted us! Human cries mingled with the cries of the invisible!
"Together, we drew in, condensed and still a multitude, invisibly surrounding a small camp of smooth and beautiful human beings.
"In their midst one young man lay dying, twisting in his last pain on the bed they'd made for him of grass and flowers. It was the bite of some deadly insect which had made his fever, all part of the cycle, as God would have told us had we asked.
"But the wailing of the invisible ones hovered over this dying victim.
And the lamentations of the human beings rose more terrible than I could endure.
"Again I wept.
" 'Be still, listen,' said Michael, the patient one.
"He directed us to look beyond the tiny camp, and the thrashing body of the feverish man, and to see in thin air the spirit voices gathering and crying!
"And with our eyes we saw these spirits for the first time! We saw them clustering and dispersing, wandering, rolling in and falling back, each retaining the vague shape in essence of a human being. Feeble, fuddled, lost, unsure of themselves, they swam in the very atmosphere, opening their arms now to the man who lay on the bier about to die. And die that man did."
Hush. Stillness.
Memnoch looked at me as if I must finish it.
"And a spirit rose from the dying man," I said. "The spark of life flared and did not go out, but became an invisible spirit with all the rest. The spirit of the man rose in the shape of the man and joined those spirits who had come to take it away."
"Yes!"
He gave a deep sigh and then threw out his arms. He sucked in his breath as if he meant to roar. He looked heavenward through the giant trees.
I stood paralyzed.
The forest sighed in its fullness around us. I could feel his trembling, I could feel the cry that hovered just inside him and might burst forth in some terrible clarion. But it only died away as he bowed his head.
The forest had changed again. The forest was our forest. These were oaks and the dark trees of our times; and the wildflowers, and the moss I knew, and the birds and tiny rodents who darted through the shadows.
I waited.
"The air was thick with these spirits," he said, "for once having seen them, once having detected their faint outline and their ceaseless voices, we could never again not see them, and like a wreath they surrounded the earth! The spirits of the dead, Lestat! The spirits of the human dead."
"Souls, Memnoch?"
"Souls."
"Souls had evolved from matter?"
"Yes. In His image. Souls, essences, invisible individualities, souls!"
I waited again in silence.
He gathered himself together.
"Come with me," he said. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. As he reached for mine, I felt his wing, distinctly for the first time, brush the length of my body, and it sent a shiver through me akin to fear, but not fear at all.
"Souls had come out of these human beings," he said. "They were whole and living, and hovered about the material bodies of the humans from whose tribe they had come.
"They could not see us; they could not see Heaven. Whom could they see but those who had buried them, those who had loved them in life, and were their progeny, and those who sprinkled the red ochre over their bodies before laying them carefully, to face the east, in graves lined with ornaments that had been their own!"
"And those humans who believed in them," I said, "those who worshipped the ancestors, did they feel their presence? Did they sense it? Did they suspect the ancestors were still there in spirit form?"
"Yes," he answered me.
I was too absorbed to say anything else.
It seemed my consciousness was flooded with the smell of the wood and all its dark colors, the endlessly rich variations of brown and gold and deep red that surrounded us. I peered up at the sky, at the shining light fractured and gray and sullen yet grand.
Yet all I could think and consider was the whirlwind, and the souls who had surrounded us in the whirlwind as though the air from the earth to Heaven were filled with human souls. Souls drifting forever and ever. Where does one go in such darkness? What does one seek? What can one know?
Was Memnoch laughing? It sounded small and mournful, private and full of pain. He was perhaps singing softly, as if the melody were a natural emanation of his thoughts. It came from his thinking as scent rises from flowers; song, the sound of angels.