Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,7

a coherence which is possible on the page though not in life.

But again, I didn’t know I meant to pick up this pen of yours at all. We were talking:

“Pandora, if anyone does not know you’re a woman, then he is a fool,” you said.

“How angry Marius would be with me for being pleased by that,” I said. “Oh, no. Rather he would seize it as a strong point in favor of his position. I left him, left him without a word, the last time we were together—that was before Lestat went on his little escapade of running around in a human body, and long before he encountered Memnoch the Devil—I left Marius, and suddenly I wish I could reach him! I wish I could talk with him as you and I are talking now.”

You looked so troubled for me, and with reason. On some level, you must have known that I had not evinced this much enthusiasm over anything in many a dreary year.

“Would you write your story for me, Pandora?” you asked suddenly.

I was totally surprised.

“Write it in these notebooks?” you pressed. “Write about the time when you were alive, the time when you and Marius came together, write what you will of Marius. But it’s your story that I most want.”

I was stunned.

“Why in the world would you want this of me?” You didn’t answer.

“David, surely you’ve not returned to that order of human beings, the Talamasca, they know too much—”

You put up your hand.

“No, and I will never; and if there was ever any doubt of it, I learnt it once and for all in the archives kept by Maharet.”

“She allowed you to see her archives, the books she’s saved over the course of time?”

“Yes, it was remarkable, you know . . . a storehouse of tablets, scrolls, parchments—books and poems from cultures of which the world knows nothing, I think. Books lost from time. Of course she forbade me to reveal anything I found or speak in detail of our meeting. She said it was too rash tampering with things, and she confirmed your fear that I might go to the Talamasca—my old mortal psychic friends. I have not. I will not. But it is a very easy vow to keep.”

“Why so?”

“Pandora, when I saw all those old writings—I knew I was no longer human. I knew that the history lying there to be collected was no longer mine! I am not one of these!” Your eyes swept the room. “Of course you must have heard this a thousand times from fledgling vampires! But you see, I had a fervent faith that philosophy and reason would make a bridge for me by which I could go and come in both worlds. Well, there is no bridge. It’s gone.”

Your sadness shimmered about you, flashing in your young eyes and in the softness of your new flesh.

“So you know that,” I said. I didn’t plan the words. But out they came. “You know.” I gave a soft bitter laugh.

“Indeed I do. I knew when I held documents from your time, so many from your time, Imperial Rome, and other crumbling bits of inscribed rock I couldn’t even hope to place. I knew. I didn’t care about them, Pandora! I care about what we are, what we are now.”

“How remarkable,” I said. “You don’t know how much I admire you, or how attractive is your disposition to me.”

“I am happy to hear this,” you said. Then you leaned forward towards me: “I don’t say we do not carry our human souls with us, our history; of course we do.

“I remember once a long time ago, Armand told me that he asked Lestat, ‘How will I ever understand the human race?’ Lestat said, ‘Read or see all the plays of Shakespeare and you will know all you ever need to know about the human race.’ Armand did it. He devoured the poems, he sat through the plays, he watched the brilliant new films with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo DiCaprio. And when Armand and I last spoke together, this is what he said of his education:

“ ‘Lestat was right. He gave me not books but a passage into understanding. This man Shakespeare writes,’—and I quote both Armand and Shakespeare now as Armand spoke it, as I will to you—as if it came from my heart:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty