Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  ‘Like it?’ enquired Enlil Maratovich, addressing me.

  I quickly averted my eyes.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Hanging like this.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘More than I thought I would. Is it because of the flow of, er, red liquid into the Tongue?’

  ‘Exactly. Whenever a vampire needs to gather his strength quickly and concentrate his energy, it is the best method.’

  He was right. With each passing second I felt better. The energy I had expended during the flight was restored. Hanging upside down was as comfortable as sitting in an easy chair near the fire.

  ‘You are going to learn a secret today,’ said Enlil Maratovich. ‘But I imagine you have quite a few questions stored up. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start with them?’

  ‘Well, could you tell us what our flight was?’ I asked.

  ‘It was a flight.’

  ‘I mean, was it all a dream? A special kind of trance? Or did it all happen for real? What would an onlooker have seen?’

  ‘The most important condition of that journey,’ replied Enlil Maratovich, ‘is that there should be no onlooker.’

  ‘That’s just what I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘We were flying past houses all the time, in fact I very nearly crashed into one. But Mithra told me that we could not be seen by anyone. How can that be?’

  ‘You’ve heard of stealth technology? This is something similar. Except that vampires absorb attention rather than radio waves.’

  ‘So would we have been visible to radar while we were in the air?’

  ‘To whose radar?’

  ‘Well, generally.’

  ‘The question has no meaning. Even if you had been visible to radar, the radar screen would not have been visible to anyone at the time.’

  ‘I wonder if we could change the subject?’ said Hera.

  ‘Agreed,’ replied Enlil Maratovich.

  ‘I’ve had an idea,’ continued Hera. ‘I think I know where the Tongue lived before it took up residence in people.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In that huge bat which, until a few minutes ago, I was.’

  Enlil Maratovich grunted approvingly.

  ‘Our name for her is “Mighty Bat”. That is how we usually refer to her in English. Be careful, though, not to call her “Mighty Mouse” when you talk to our American friends. They tend to take offence, and it’s not much help to explain that in Russian the same word does duty for both animals. That’s their culture, nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘Was my guess right?’ asked Hera.

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You cannot actually say that the Tongue lived in the Mighty Bat. A very long time ago, many millions of years, it was the Bat. At that time dinosaurs roamed the earth, and their red liquid was the Mighty Bat’s food. That is the origin of the phrase “The Cry of the Mighty Bat” … Think for a moment how amazing it is: when you bite a person today, you are giving him or her the very same command that aeons ago had the power to deprive a huge mountain of flesh of the will to resist. I simply cannot get my head round this incredible fact – it makes me want to fall to my knees and pray …’

  I wanted to ask to which deity Enlil Maratovich would offer up his prayers, but could not quite bring myself to. Instead I asked him:

  ‘Are there any fossil records of these enormous bats in the rocks? Have their skeletons survived?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They were too intelligent. They cremated their dead, as humans do nowadays. Another reason is that there were not very many of them, because they were at the top of the food pyramid.’

  ‘When did they reach this position?’ I asked.

  ‘Vampires were always at the apex of the food pyramid. They were the first intelligent civilisation on earth. It was not a civilisation that constructed a material culture – buildings, industry and so on. But that does not meant they were undeveloped – quite the reverse. From today’s standpoint they may be termed ecologically advanced.’

  ‘What happened to this civilisation?’

  ‘It was destroyed by a global catastrophe sixty-five million years ago when our planet was struck by the asteroid that resulted in the Gulf of Mexico. The land was swamped by giant tsunamis that washed away all living creatures. But the Mighty Bat managed to survive by taking to the air. You can still hear an echo of those days in the Bible: “And the earth was without form, and void. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”.’

  ‘Fabulous,’ I said, for no other reason than to say something.

  ‘Dust blackened the sky. It was cold and dark. In the space of just a few years almost the entire food chain perished. Dinosaurs became extinct. Dependent on their red liquid for sustenance, the Mighty Bat was also threatened by extinction. But vampires succeeded in extracting from themselves their own essence, in the form that today we call the “Tongue”. You can think of it as something like the self’s external memory card, the core of the brain, a kind of worm, ninety per cent of which consists of nerve cells. This receptacle for individual selfhood lodged in the crania of other creatures better adapted to the new conditions of life, and entered into a symbiotic relationship with them. I probably don’t need to go into the details?’

  ‘We already know that,’ I muttered. ‘What sort of creatures did they dwell in?’

  ‘For a long period we lived in large predators, such as the sabre-toothed tiger and other big cats. Our culture was at that time, well … ah … somewhat alarming. Heroic and violent, you might say. We were terrible, magnificent and cruel. But you cannot be magnificent and cruel for ever, and approximately half a million years ago there was a kind of a revolution in the world of vampires …’

  The term ‘revolution’ had frequently cropped up in Discourse, and could apparently mean almost anything you wanted it to. I thought of the most recent contexts in which I could remember it being used.

  ‘Do you mean something like the Orange Revolution in Kiev? Or something more like the Volvo Revolution?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Enlil Maratovich uncertainly, ‘not quite. It was more akin to a religious conversion. As I mentioned, vampires set themselves the task of changing over from stock-raising to a form of dairy husbandry. They decided to create a milch animal for their needs. The result was the appearance of mankind.’

  ‘How did they do this?’

  ‘In the same way as humans bred dogs or sheep.’

  ‘By artificial selection?’

  ‘Yes. But not before a whole succession of genetic modifications had been carried out. And it was not the first such experiment. The Mighty Bat had already been responsible for the appearance of warm-blooded creatures, which were designed as vehicles for raising the temperature of red liquid to an optimum level. But the development of the human being represented a category leap to a new species.’

  ‘What species was the human being bred from?’ enquired Hera. ‘From primates?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where? And when?’

  ‘It took quite a long time. The final genetic modification occurred 180,000 years ago in Africa. That is where modern man came from.’

  ‘How was this artificial selection achieved?’ asked Hera. ‘I mean, when cattle are bred, the cows selected to breed from are those that produce a lot of milk. But what was the decisive criterion in this case?’

  ‘Vampires bred a creature with a special kind of mind.’

  ‘What different kinds of mind are there?’

  ‘Well,’ said Enlil Maratovich, ‘the story begins a long way back …’

  He yawned, and closed his eyes.

  A full minute of silence ensued. Apparently Enlil Maratovich had decided to begin his account not merely from a long way back, but from so far
that at first nothing was visible at all. I thought he must have gone to sleep, and looked over inquiringly at Hera. Hera shrugged her shoulders. Suddenly Enlil Maratovich opened his eyes and began to speak.

  ‘There is an old idea, often advanced in books of fantasy and the occult, that people merely imagine they move about on the surface of the globe and look out into illimitable space. In reality they live inside a hollow sphere, and the cosmos, which they believe they are observing, is no more than an optical illusion.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s an esoteric cosmogony of the Nazis. They even proposed building a rocket which would fly vertically upwards through the ice zone at the centre of the planet and annihilate America.’

  My erudition produced no effect at all on Enlil Maratovich.

  ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘it is a metaphor of great antiquity, which was known in the days of Atlantis. It embodies an insight which people in those times had no way of expressing other than metaphorically: we exist surrounded not by objects but by sensations generated by our sense organs. All that we perceive as stars, or fences, or burdock plants, is nothing but an arrangement of images produced by nervous stimuli. We are hermetically sealed inside our bodies, and what appears real to us is in fact our interpretation of electrical signals received by the brain. The simplest – though not quite correct – model of the mind, which we will employ for the sake of brevity, is known as the “Cartesian Theatre”. According to this model our sensory organs provide us with photographs of the external world, while we ourselves sit inside the hollow sphere, the walls of which are covered with these photographs. This enclosed spherical void is our world, from which we cannot escape however much we might wish to. Together the photographs constitute a picture of the world which, as it seems to us, exists outside us. Do you follow?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘The original mind acts like a mirror inside the sphere. It reflects the world and takes decisions accordingly. If the reflection is dark, it is time to sleep. If light, it is time to search for food. If the reflection is hot, time to move aside until it gets cooler, and vice versa. All actions are determined by reflexes and instincts. We call this type of mind Mind “A”. It functions solely as a reflection of the world. Understand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Now try to imagine a living creature which has two minds. As well as Mind “A” it has a Mind “B”, which has no connection at all with the photographs on the walls inside the sphere but produces its own visions from inside itself. From its depths there arises … an aura of abstract concepts, a sort of Northern Lights. Can you imagine that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now we are getting to the crucially important part. Imagine that Mind “B” is itself one of the objects perceived by Mind “A”, and the visions produced by Mind “B” are perceived by Mind “A” as equivalent to the photographs of the external world it is accustomed to reflecting. What Mind “B” has produced in its inmost hidden depths appears to Mind “A” as part of the outside world.’

  ‘I don’t follow that,’ I said.

  ‘That’s only how it seems to you. In fact, you both encounter the phenomenon many times a day.’

  ‘Could you give us an example?’ asked Hera.

  ‘I can. Imagine that you … well, let’s say you’re standing in the New Arbat in Moscow looking at two motor cars parked by the Casino. To look at they are both long and black, and almost identical. All right, one might be a touch sleeker and longer. With me so far?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hera.

  ‘When you notice differences in the shape of the boot and the headlights, the different sounds made by the engines and the design of the tyres, that is your Mind “A” at work. But when what you see is two Mercs, one of which is a glamorous, year-old, top of the range model, and the other a shitty pile of junk, the model Berezovsky would have used to go to meet General Lebed at the bathhouse five thousand years ago, which nowadays you can pick up for ten grand – that’s Mind “B” at work, an aspect of the Northern Lights it produces. But because it manifests itself as two black cars standing side by side, you assume that the product of Mind “B” is something that really exists in the outside world.’

  ‘You explain it very clearly,’ I said. ‘But it still does really exist in the outside world, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No. That can be easily proved. You can measure any Mind “A”-type difference between our two cars with a simple tape-measure. It won’t change in a hundred years. But the differences Mind “B” ascribes to the cars are not susceptible to any objective assessment or measurement. And no one in a hundred years’ time will be able to tell you for certain what they were.’

  ‘So how does it come about that different people, seeing these two cars, will come to the same conclusion about them?’ asked Hera. ‘I mean, that one of them is a glamorous must-have and the other a crap heap?’

  ‘The reason is that these two people both have a Mind “B” attuned to the same wavelength. This causes them to see an identical hallucination.’

  ‘Who creates the hallucination?’ I asked.

  ‘Mind “B” does. Or to be precise, a vast number of such minds all interacting with one another. This is what distinguishes people from animals. Apes and human beings both have Mind “A”. Only human beings have Mind “B”. It is the result of that selection engineered by the vampires of old.’

  ‘Why does a creature bred for milking need Mind “B”?’

  ‘I should have thought by now that would be clear to you. Isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Enlil Maratovich shot an inquiring glance at Hera.

  ‘Nor to me,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m even more confused.’

  ‘The reason is the same for both of you. You are still thinking like humans.’

  Hearing this rebuke once again, I reacted automatically, drawing my head deeper into my shoulders.

  ‘Please teach us to think in a new way,’ Hera muttered.

  Enlil Maratovich laughed.

  ‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘five thousand marketing specialists have been defecating inside your head for ten years, and you expect me to clean it all out in five minutes … Don’t be offended, though. I’m not blaming you. I was just like you myself. Do you think I don’t know what you both think about at night? I know exactly. You’re puzzled as to where or how vampires get hold of human red liquid. You think it might come from donor centres, or tortured infants, or underground laboratories, or some other such nonsense. Am I right?’

  ‘Approximately,’ I agreed.

  ‘If I wasn’t, you would be the only exception I’ve come across in forty years,’ said Enlil Maratovich. ‘And if you’d like to know, this universal blindness is the most mystifying thing I have ever encountered in my life. When you come to understand the truth of it you will think so too.’

  ‘What is this truth that we have to understand?’ asked Hera.

  ‘Let’s look at it logically, step by step. If the human being is a milk-producing animal, his principal business must be the production of food for vampires. So far, so good?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Now tell me, what is the main activity of human beings?’

  ‘Giving birth to children and raising them?’ suggested Hera.

  ‘An increasingly rare event in the civilised world. In any case, it is certainly not mankind’s main preoccupation. What is more important than anything else to a human being?’

  ‘Money?’ I hazarded.

  ‘At last. And what, exactly, is money?’

  ‘As if you didn’t know,’ I shrugged.

  Hanging upside down made this a rather peculiar manoeuvre.

  ‘Perhaps I do know. But do you?’

  ‘Somewhere or other I believe there are five … no, seven scientific definitions,’ I said.

  ‘I know what you a
re referring to. But your definitions all suffer from one fundamental flaw. They were all formulated with the same objective: to earn money trying to sell these definitions. That is like using a ruler to measure the length of itself …’

  ‘You mean all the definitions are incorrect?’

  ‘Not so much incorrect as that, when you analyse them in detail, they all say the same thing: money … is money. Which is equivalent to saying nothing at all. But at the same time,’ Enlil Maratovich raised his finger, that is to say pointed it towards the floor, ‘at the same time, people do have an inkling of the truth, but only subconsciously. Can you remember what the representatives of the toiling classes call their masters?’

  ‘Exploiters?’

  ‘Bloodsuckers,’ said Hera.

  I expected Enlil Maratovich to snub her, but on the contrary, he clapped his hands in approbation.

  ‘Yes! There’s my clever girl! Exactly that, drinkers of red liquid. Even though it would never occur to any of them to do so literally. Now do you see?’

  ‘You mean to say …’ began Hera, but Enlil Maratovich did not let her finish.

  ‘Yes. Just so. Vampires have long ceased to avail themselves of biological red liquid, in favour of a far more advanced medium of human vital energy. Money.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked.

  ‘Never more so. Think for yourself. What does human civilisation consist of? It’s nothing more than a gigantic production of money. The cities people build are pure money factories, and that is the reason people crowd into them in such excessive numbers.’

  ‘But much more than money is produced there,’ I protested. ‘In cities …’

  ‘There is something called “the economy” which is supposed to grow constantly,’ Enlil Maratovich broke in, ‘although it is never completely clear just what is growing or to what purpose. Because when you start to analyse it, you see that it largely consists of bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers and other speculators orally pleasuring each other all day. People have no idea what it is that keeps on growing, yet they spend all their time worrying whether the rate of growth is faster or slower than they suppose it should be. And then all of a sudden they find everything has gone pear-shaped, and a period of national mourning is decreed for the whole country. But then it starts to grow again. And all the while, nobody – especially those who actually live in the city – ever glimpses this mysterious growing object with which they are so concerned …’