Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,96

that you will be swept up. That the world will somehow entice you back into it, so that you won’t live here with me, the superior Roman observer recluse, anymore, but go back, seeking mortal comforts of companionship and proximity to others, friendship with mortals, their recognition of you as one of them when you are not one of them!”

“Pandora, you talk gibberish.”

“Keep your proud secrets,” I said. “But I do fear for you, that I will admit.”

“Fear for me? And why?” he demanded.

“Because you don’t realize everything perishes, everything is artifice! That even logic and mathematics and justice have no ultimate meaning!”

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Oh, yes it is. Some night will come when you will see what I saw, when I first came to Antioch, before you’d found me, before this transformation which should have swept away everything in its path.

“You will see a darkness,” I went on, “a darkness so total that Nature never knows it anywhere on Earth at any time, in any place! Only the human soul can know it. And it goes on forever. And I pray that when you finally can no longer escape from it, when you realize it is all around you, that your logic and your reason give you some strength against it.”

He gave me the most respectful look. But he didn’t speak. I continued:

“Resignation will do you no good,” I said, “when such a time comes. Resignation requires will, and will requires decision, and decision requires belief, and belief requires that there is something to believe in! And all action or acceptance requires a concept of a witness! Well, there is nothing, and there are no witnesses! You don’t know that yet, but I do. I hope, when you find it out, someone can comfort you as you dress and groom those monstrous relics below the stairs! As you bring their flowers!” I was so angry. I went on:

“Look back on me when this moment comes—if not for forgiveness, look back on me as a model. For I have seen this, and I have survived. And it matters not that I stopped to listen to Paul preach of Christ, or that I weave flowers into crowns for the Queen, or that I dance like a fool under the moon in the garden before dawn, or that I . . . that I love you. It matters not. Because there is nothing. And no one to see. No one!” I sighed. It was time to finish.

“Go back to your history, this stack of lies that tries to link event to event with cause and effect, this preposterous faith that postulates that one thing follows from another. I tell you, it’s not so. But it is very Roman of you to think so.”

He sat silent looking up at me. I couldn’t tell what his thoughts were or what his heart felt. Then he asked:

“What would you have me do?” He had never looked more innocent.

Bitterly, I laughed. Did we not speak the same language? He heard not one word I had uttered. Yet he presented me not with a reply, but only with this simple question.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I want. Love me, Marius, love me, but leave me alone!” I cried out. I had not even thought. The words just came. “Leave me alone, so that I may seek my own comforts, my own means to remain alive, no matter how foolish or pointless these comforts appear to you. Leave me alone!”

He was wounded, so uncomprehending, looking so innocent still.

We had many similar arguments as the decades passed.

Sometimes he would come to me after; he would fall into long thoughtful talks about what he felt was happening with the Empire, how the Emperors were going mad and the Senate had no power, how the very progress of man was unique in Nature and something to be watched. How he would crave life, he thought, until there was no more life.

“Even if there is nothing left but desert waste,” he said, “I should want to be there, to see dune folding upon dune,” he went on. “If there was but one lamp left in all the world, I’d want to watch its flame. And so would you.”

But the terms of the battle, and its heat, never really changed.

At heart he thought I hated him for having been so unkind on the night I was given the Dark Blood. I told him this was childish. I could not convince him that my