Empire V (13 page)

In addition to this extra-sensitive feeling of presence, I was aware of something I had never previously experienced. I existed in more than just the present. Immediate reality was also permeated with flashing images of possible futures, which modified and renewed themselves with every breath I took. I could choose between different versions of events that were about to happen. I cannot think of a good analogy to explain the process except perhaps the liquid crystal gunsight through which a fighter pilot sees the world outside his aircraft, able simultaneously to assess the different sources of information he requires. This gunsight was my own consciousness.

I sensed the presence of other people. There were two in the flat above mine. Three more were on my floor, and two on the floor below. Physically I could have approached any of them with a few leaps and flaps of my wings, but I had no desire to do so. I wanted to get out to the fresh air, which I could easily do by leaving the flat through the window, or the door, or …

I could not believe that this was really possible, but instinct persuaded me it was. My mind plotted out for me something like a green dotted line disappearing into the depths of the fireplace and then turning upwards, away out into the future. I aligned myself with this dotted line; in front of my eyes flashed the bars of the grate, then the bricks, then the soot inside the chimney and some kind of metal clamp. Then I saw the lead flashing of the roof, and the evening sky.

Only in a dream would it be possible to move with such airy fluidity. I knew I should fly westwards, where I would be met. It was easy to change direction: all I had to do was bank my body in the air and head off accordingly.

I could feel birds and insects hanging in the ether. They appeared after the whistling breaths my lungs automatically expelled after each flap of my wings. Each out-breath refreshed my view of the world, much as a windscreen-wiper clears the smeary haze left by wind and rain. Beneath me were houses, cars, people, but I knew no one could see me. No longer was I afraid that I had died; my earlier fear now appeared to me absurd. On the other hand, in the real world I would never have been able to exit my house through the chimney. Ergo, I was dreaming.

But in the world where I now found myself there was at least one other being who was sharing my dream with me. I realised this because of a distant cry, which exactly matched my own. It immediately rendered the world clearer and brighter, as if another sun had appeared to illuminate it. Someone similar to myself was approaching. I flew towards him, and was soon flying alongside.

What the vampire in flight most reminded me of was a pig with webbed wings. They did not sprout from the back, as images in churches depict devils and angels, but were stretched between the front paws and the rear paws. Where they joined the body they were covered with short black hair. The front paws were very long and their enormous fingers, webbed with skin, spread out to make the fan that formed a large section of the wing.

‘Welcome,' said the creature.

‘Good evening,' I responded.

‘Don't you recognise me?' asked the creature. ‘I'm Mithra.'

We conversed not with voices but in another medium. It was not telepathy, because I had no idea what Mithra was thinking. We exchanged phrases made up of words, but without uttering sounds. It was more like subtitles being transmitted directly into the mind.

‘How was your flight?' enquired Mithra, casting a sidelong glance from olive-like eyes set deep in their sockets behind thickets of fur.

‘Fine. Can we be seen from people's windows?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Watch out!' Mithra swerved to the right to avoid the corner of a Gazprom tower. I barely managed to replicate his manoeuvre. Once I was sure there were no further obstacles ahead, I repeated my question.

‘How is it we can't be seen?'

‘Ask Enlil,' replied Mithra. ‘He'll explain it to you.'

That told me where we were going.

It was already getting dark. Soon we left the city behind; below us appeared and disappeared dark patches of forest, then we lost height and plunged into a thick mist. Before long I could no longer see anything with my eyes, not even Mithra who was flying just a few metres in front of me. However, I had no difficulty in orientating myself.

After leaving behind us a road with cars passing along it, for a long time nothing was below us except trees, mostly pines. Then there were fences and country houses of various different shapes and sizes. I was not apprehending them by vision, but was in a way touching them, except that the tactile sensation came not from my limbs or my fingers but, strangely, from the cries I was uttering. Similar sounds were coming from Mithra flying beside me, and they reinforced my spatial perception with stereoscopic confidence. I could ‘see' every tile on a roof, every pine needle, every pebble on the ground. But I had no sense of colour, nor any visual information reaching me through my eyes, as a result of which the world appeared to me as a uniformly grey computer model, a three-dimensional simulacrum of itself.

‘Where are we?' I asked Mithra.

‘Round about Rublevka.'

‘Of course. That's where the responsible elites live … Where else? … And what's this thick fog we seem to be in? I've never experienced anything like it.'

Mithra didn't answer. And suddenly, for the second time that day, I was seized by the icy grip of terror.

I could sense a hole in the ground. It was directly on our flight path.

Had I been looking at the ground with my normal human eyes I would probably not have noticed anything amiss. The area was entirely surrounded by trees while around the hole itself was a fence, which supported a camouflage netting with a thick layer of plastic leaves (I knew they were artificial because they were all of identical shape and size). Even had I looked at the sloping ground beneath the masking net, I would probably have taken it for a ravine and thought nothing of it. There are probably any number of ravines dotted about the countryside near Moscow, covered over with camouflage netting.

However, I was seeing it not with my eyes but with my echolocation apparatus, and to me it appeared as a tear in the very fabric of the earth. My cries went into it but did not return. It seemed that below its mouth the abyss widened out, although I could not be sure of this – the chasm was too deep; so deep that it filled me with dread. Perhaps it was not purely a matter of fathomless depth, but something else? At all events it was the last place on earth I wanted to go anywhere near, but Mithra was heading straight for it.

Entirely hidden by the netting, the pit resembled a flattened human heart – the outline one sees in comics. Or perhaps, I realised with a sinking feeling, the fan made of palm leaves on the wall above my childhood bed … All the way round the pit was the high, blank wall I had noticed from far off. But now it was clear that it comprised three different sections of fencing around three separate plots of private land. Together they formed a complete barrier without the smallest chink anywhere. There was no way the pit could be approached from the ground.

‘Be careful now,' commanded Mithra. ‘Do exactly as I do.'

Bending his wings back, he descended to the edge of the net, slowed his speed almost to a standstill, skilfully regrouped while hovering in the air, then dived under the edge of the net. I followed him and, just shaving the grass that grew round the edge of the pit, fell into the void.

Inside it was chilly. Here and there, growing out of the rock walls, were bushes and clumps of grass. The air smelled of the smoke from a fire of juniper wood, or something like it. I sensed many openings and cracks in the rock face. All I could see was a single light down below in the sheer wall of the precipice.

‘Do you see the lamp?' asked Mithra. ‘Head for it.'

‘Will I be able to find it on my own?'

‘You can't really get lost in here. Anyhow, you're not alone now …'

I was about to ask him what he meant, but he was already flying back up, away from me. At this point I noticed that another vampire had appeared in the shaft. He passed Mithra at the opening into the chasm and was now descending.

I realised that I would have to alight somewhere, and fast, because the shaft was too narrow for two bodies to fly safely side by side. Even for one it was awkward. I circled about like a swimmer in a pool, first to one side then to the other, losing height all the time.

Before long I had got down to the source of the light. It was shaded by a semi-circular arch, and in front of it was a small platform over the abyss, on which shone the yellow electric lamp. Here, evidently, was where I should land.

I had to fly several times backwards and forwards over the fissure, working out how I would be able to do this. The other vampire's wings were swishing only a few metres above me, and I was seriously concerned lest we crash into one another. There was no time to waste, and I decided I must trust my instincts.

Positioning myself directly above the platform, I slowed until I came to a complete stop in the air, furled my wings into fists and collapsed on to their bony knuckles. The manoeuvre was quite skilfully executed, but the resultant pose was somewhat melodramatic, as if I was praying on my knees before an altar. Almost at once the second vampire, with a rustle of wings, landed alongside. I turned my head but could see no more than his black silhouette.

All around was dark, damp and silent. Before us was the arch cut into the rock, and within it the feeble light of the electric bulb shining through a yellow glass shade in the form of an orange cut into quarters. Rather than dispelling the gloom it accentuated it. Beneath the lamp was a door, coloured so as to blend with the rock, so that I only noticed it when it began slowly to open inwards.

No one, however, was to be seen in the small rectangular entranceway. For a few seconds I hesitated, unsure whether to wait for an invitation or to proceed. Then I remembered the salutation I had been bidden to pronounce. Evidently this was the time to say it. I said it over to myself once or twice in order not to make any mistake, and then said loudly:

‘Rama the Second reporting to Heartland!'

As soon as I had spoken the phrase I realised I had done so in my normal human voice. I looked at my hands and saw regular human fists pressing against the stone floor. My best jacket was all torn at the sleeve, the elbows spattered with soot. Not only that, there was a fresh scratch on my left wrist. I straightened my legs and stood upright.

‘Hera the Eighth reporting to Heartland!'

I turned my head. Beside me stood the girl who had sent me her photograph. She was taller than I had thought, slim, wearing dark trousers and an equally muted t-shirt. I recognised her flamboyantly piled up shock of hair.

‘Well now, my young friends,' came the voice of Enlil Maratovich out of the darkness, ‘since you have arrived, welcome to my humble hamlet.'

And the lights came on in the room before us.

MIND ‘B'

There was not a stick of furniture in Enlil Maratovich's hamlet, except for a stepladder. The setting was extremely ascetic: cushions of an indeterminate grey colour on the floor and a circular fresco in similarly depressing muted tones, depicting the funeral of an unknown knight accompanied on his final journey by a multitude of worthy gentlemen in lace collars, the deceased himself encased in a suit of black armour with a cleft breastplate, above which hovered a brilliant blue mosquito as big as a well-fed crow.

At approximately the height of my shoulders was a wide copper hoop attached to the ceiling by three rods. It took up almost all of the room. My first impression of this metal ring was that it was a very, very old object.

Enlil Maratovich was hanging head downwards, his legs hooked over the hoop and his arms crossed over his breast. He had on a tracksuit of thick black jersey. The black hood hung down and looked absurdly like the sort of fantastic stand-up collar ruff the Mosfilm costume department might pick out for a vampire.

‘You look like one of the mobile vampires,' said Hera.

‘What?' said Enlil Maratovich in some surprise.

‘There was an advertisement on television a little while ago, about vampires who only use their mobiles at night so as to economise on the daytime tariff. During the day they sleep with their heads pointing down, like bats.'

Enlil Maratovich gave a snort of derision.

‘As far as I know,' he said, ‘vampires don't economise on tariffs. Vampires economise on advertising.'

‘Allow me to disagree with you, Enlil Maratovich,' said Hera. ‘I think … that is to say, I am sure, that a PR campaign has been running now for some years aimed at rehabilitating the image of vampires. Those mobile vampires I mentioned are just one example. Any fool could see that it was really advertising vampires, not mobile phone tariffs … to say nothing of the treatment vampires get from Hollywood.'

I could see exactly what she meant, and she was right. All sorts of instances came to my mind to confirm what she had said. For some unknown reason people seem anxious to idealise us vampires. We are portrayed as exquisite connoisseurs, melancholy romantics, pensive dreamers – but always with a marked undercurrent of sympathy. Vampire roles are taken by good-looking actors, popstars are happy to appear as vampires in their music videos. Celebrities in the West and in the East see nothing shameful in appearing as vampires. It is most odd: sexual abusers of minors and gravestone vandals are much closer to the man in the street than we are, but in the world of human culture generally you will not find a shred of sympathy for them, while vampires are drenched by a positive outpouring of understanding and love … Only now did I see what it all meant. It was incredible that I had not worked it out for myself.

‘Yes, that is indeed how things are,' said Enlil Maratovich. ‘Vampires all over the world regularly chip in to support yet another vampire movie, the idea being to put people off the scent of who is actually drinking their red liquid, or how it is done. But of course this cannot go on for ever. The day will come when the symphony of man and vampire can no longer be kept secret. And against that day we need to groom public opinion.'

I decided the moment was right for me to put the question that had been bothering me.

‘Tell me please, Enlil Maratovich, our flight here … was that the Great Fall?'

‘No.'

It was not the answer I had been expecting.

Enlil Maratovich smiled.

‘The Great Fall is when you learn what I am about to explain to you today. For this reason it would be desirable for your heads to be functioning at their best, so I suggest you get yourselves into position.'

He indicated the hoop.

The copper ring had a soft padded cover of clear plastic, similar to a chin-up bar in a gym. I waited until Hera had got off the ladder (I had wanted to give her a hand but she managed it very adroitly on her own), then climbed up and hung on the ring myself with my head downwards. The blood rushed to my head, but I found the sensation pleasant and calming.

Hera was hanging directly opposite me, her eyes closed, the yellow light from the lamp falling on her. Her t-shirt hung down, exposing her belly button.

‘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?'