Empire V (14 page)

‘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 are 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 …'

He extended his hand in front of him as if to show the panorama of the invisible city beyond the walls.

‘What people are actually doing is producing something the nature of which they completely fail to understand,' he continued, ‘despite spending all day every day thinking about it to the exclusion of everything else. Don't imagine it gives me any pleasure to say it, but the workspace for today's office proletarian – his cubicle – even
looks
like a stall for a large cattle stock. The only difference is that in front of his face instead of a feeding trough he has a monitor displaying his fodder digitally. And what does he produce in his pen? The answer is so obvious that it has even entered into the idiom of most languages: the worker is
making money
.'

I wanted to register another objection.

‘Money is not a product which is being made,' I said. ‘It is merely one of those inventions which have made life simpler, one of the evolutionary legacies by which mankind has risen above the animals …'

Enlil Maratovich turned to me with an amused smile on his face.

‘Do you really believe man rose above the animals as a result of evolution?'

‘Of course,' I replied. ‘Surely that is so?'

‘No,' he said. ‘He placed himself lower down, far lower. Nowadays the only person who can afford the lifestyle of an animal is a retired millionaire – to live in the bosom of nature in ideal climatic conditions, to move freely, to consume only ecologically pure food and, above all, to be entirely free from worry about anything. Just think about it – no animal works.'

‘What about squirrels?' asked Hera. ‘They gather nuts, don't they?'

‘My dear, that's not work. If squirrels spent all their time from morning till night frenziedly trying to flog each other rotting bear shit, that would be work. Gathering nuts is just free retail therapy. The only animals who work are beasts of burden whom men have bred in their own image and likeness. Plus, of course, man himself. If, as you say, the purpose of money is to make life easier, why is it that people strive all their lives vainly trying to earn it, only to collapse at the end into a senile heap of debris? Can you seriously imagine that people do all that for their own convenience? Oh please! Man does not even know what money truly is.'

He swept Hera and me with his gaze.

‘But the truth is,' he went on, ‘it's not at all a difficult or complex problem to understand what money truly is. All you have to do is pose the elementary question: where does it come from?'

The question seemed to be directed at me.

‘It's not easy to explain in a couple of words,' I said. ‘Economists still argue about it after all these years …'

‘Let them go on arguing, for ever if necessary. But it makes no difference to the poor moneymaker. His time and his strength is where money comes from. His vital energy, drawn from the air, from the light of the sun, from nourishment and other life-giving experiences, are all transmuted into it.'

‘You mean metaphorically?'

‘I mean literally. Man thinks he is generating money
for
himself. In fact, he generates it
from
himself. Life is so arranged that the only way he is able to get hold of a little money for his own use is if he manages to produce considerably more for someone else. And everything that he does succeed in keeping for himself has this strange habit of slipping through his fingers … You must have noticed that? When you were working as an unloader in the supermarket?'

Hera looked at me with some curiosity. I wanted to kill Enlil Maratovich on the spot.

‘I did notice,' I muttered.

‘There is a simple reason why people do not understand the true nature of money,' continued Enlil Maratovich. ‘They are only allowed to talk about it within the confines of cargo discourse. Human life has been processed into what to them is an unintelligible substance, but this is never mentioned. What does get endlessly discussed is which particular currency offers the best prospects at any given time – the euro or the yuan. Or should one be putting one's trust in the yen? Serious people never think or talk about anything else.'

‘That's only natural,' I said. ‘A man has to strive to obtain money, because otherwise he will die of hunger. That's the way life is.'

‘The words are the correct ones,' agreed Enlil Maratovich. ‘But I would put them in a slightly different order. That would alter the nuance.'

‘How would you say it?'

‘The way life is, a man will die of hunger if he strives to acquire anything other than money. And what I'm trying to explain at the moment is who set it up like this, and why.'

‘That may be so,' said Hera. ‘But how exactly does a man produce money? A cow has an udder. A man doesn't have anything like that.'

Enlil Maratovich smiled.

‘Who told you that?'

I thought Hera was a trifle embarrassed by this.

‘You mean a man does have an udder, like a cow?'

‘Yes, I do mean that.'

‘Where is it, then?' asked Hera, very quietly.

I could not stop myself looking at her breasts. My glance did not escape Enlil Maratovich's attention.

‘In the head,' he declared, looking at me meaningfully and tapping his skull with his fingers.

‘Where, exactly?' I asked.

‘That's what I have just been explaining to you,' replied Enlil Maratovich. ‘Mind “B” is the money-producing organ. It functions as a money-generating gland that is found only in mankind, not in any other animal …'

‘Hold on a minute,' I interrupted. ‘We were talking about how Mind “B” can explain the difference between two Mercs. What's money got to do with that?'

‘If you bring it out into the clear light of day, the points of difference between the two Mercedes, seen by Mind “B”, boil down to money. Nothing else. And the cultural landscape that consists of such differences is the mine from which money is produced. This mine, as you have already grasped, has no external reality at all, but is a construct within people's heads. That is why I say that people generate money out of themselves.'