Empire V (18 page)

Enlil Maratovich assumed a serious expression.

‘Of course, there might seem to be a contradiction here with something I have just said,' he observed in a concerned tone of voice. ‘It lies in the word “trust”. But the contradiction is only apparent. There is no suggestion that the Great Goddess trusts anything. Quite the contrary. She says this because … well, who will be the first to guess the reason why?'

I heard laughter from several vampires in the hall. Evidently I had missed the point of the joke. Enlil Maratovich bowed in acknowledgment, took me by the arm and we left the stage together.

The Chaldeans were picking up their drinks and talking among themselves. It was clear they all knew one another and were friends. I was curious to see how they were going to manage to eat and drink in their masks. In fact the problem was easily solved: the mask was fastened to a round leather cap and when the wearer went up to the buffet table he simply turned the mask round 180 degrees so that the golden faces now appeared at the back of the head.

‘Tell me please, Enlil Maratovich,' I asked, ‘what was the point of your joke about “the only bush I trust is mine”? I'm afraid I didn't get it.'

‘It was a pun, Rama,' replied Enlil Maratovich. ‘And from the Great Goddess's point of view it is no more than a phantom pain.'

Once again I could not work out what he was talking about. This irritated me.

Marduk Semyonovich came to my aid.

‘According to legend,' he said, ‘the Great Goddess was transformed into a shower of golden rain, rather like Zeus in the myth of Danae. You will understand that this is a metaphor: in both cases a divinity is changed into money – or more precisely, not into money but into something which stands for it. From that time forward, all human minds have striven to gain access to the Goddess. She is that faint radiance which through the centuries has driven all humanity delirious with longing. Figuratively speaking, there is a thread which connects her to everyone. You, Rama, are therefore already acquainted with her.'

‘Yes,' added Enlil Maratovich. ‘The Great Goddess is the summit of Fuji. Do you understand?'

I nodded.

‘But once the Goddess had become a shower of golden rain, she no longer had a body. And not having a body meant that she had no bush. Therefore the Goddess could safely say that she trusts it. What does not exist cannot betray or deceive.'

As a joke, it hardly merited the effort of teasing out its meaning. But that was not the reason for my irritation. I was getting bored with this prolonged game of hide-and-seek.

‘Enlil Maratovich, when are you going let me into the secret of how this whole business really works?'

‘Why be in such a hurry, little boy?' asked Enlil Maratovich sadly. ‘The greater the wisdom, the greater the sorrow.'

‘Please hear me out,' I said, trying to keep my voice under control and make it steady and authoritative. ‘First, I stopped being a little boy long ago. Secondly, I feel myself to be in an ambiguous position. You have presented me to this company as a fully fledged vampire, yet I am still kept in the dark about the most important and fundamental elements of our way of life. The result is that I am forced to ask about the meaning of every phrase. Do you not think it is time …'

‘It is time,' sighed Enlil Maratovich. ‘You are quite right, Rama. Let us go into my study.'

I looked at the company gathered in the hall.

‘Will we be returning to them?'

‘I hope so,' replied Enlil Maratovich.

AGGREGATE ‘M-5'

Enlil Maratovich's study was a large, serious, oak-lined room. Against the wall was a relatively modest desk with a swivel chair. Contrasting with it, rearing up in the middle of the room, was an antique wooden seat with arms and a high, carved back. The wood had been finished in now-faded gilt, and it occurred to me this was how the first electric chair in history might have looked, invented by Leonardo da Vinci on one of his rare days off when he was not busy protecting Mary Magdalene's mummy from the agents of the depraved Vatican. Presumably this stool of repentance would be where Enlil Maratovich would seat erring vampires before castigating them from behind his desk.

A picture hung above the desk. It depicted a strange scene, apparently a treatment being carried out in a Victorian lunatic asylum. Before a blazing fire sat five men in frock coats and top hats. They were tied hand and foot to their chairs, their torsos strapped in with thick leather belts as if in some primitive aeroplane. Each man had a stick in his mouth, held in place by a handkerchief tied round the back of the head. It was like the piece of wood forced between the teeth of an epileptic suffering a seizure, to prevent him biting through his tongue. The artist had caught in masterly fashion the reflection of the flames in the black nap of the top hats. Elsewhere in the picture could be seen a man in a long, dark red robe, but he was in shadow and only the outline of his body could be made out.

Two prints hung on the other wall. In the first a vigorously brushed dark green shadow floated above the darkened earth. This picture was entitled
Alan Greenspan's Last Flight
. The other showed a triple projection of a red carnation sticking out of the barrel of a machine-gun, with a caption in bold type:

Intra-barrel anti-infantry Carnation. Standard equipment for CNN military frogmen, BBC-SAS, Telewaffen landing detachments and other psy-ops units of NATO countries.

There were no other objects of particular interest in the study, except for a model in metal on Enlil Maratovich's desk of the first Sputnik to encircle the earth, and beside it a silver paperweight in the shape of a frock-coated and top-hatted Pushkin reclining on his side. He was propping up his peacefully benevolent face on his fist, exactly like a dying Buddha. Underneath Pushkin was a pile of clean white sheets of paper, and next to him a souvenir pen in the shape of a small sword. There was a lingering smell of coffee in the room, but no coffee machine to be seen – perhaps it had been put out of sight in the cupboard.

The clinical cleanliness of the place evoked somehow a disagreeable feeling, as though someone had recently been killed there, the body removed and the red liquid mopped up. Such were the associations produced in my mind by the dark stone floor with its prominent black fissures between the tiles: there was definitely something ancient and forbidding about it.

Enlil Maratovich motioned me to the chair in the middle of the room, and seated himself at his desk.

‘So,' he said, raising his eyes to meet mine, ‘you've already heard something about
bablos
?'

I nodded.

‘What do you know about it?'

‘Vampires collect used banknotes that are impregnated with human life-force,' I replied. ‘Then they do something with them. Probably distil an alcohol infusion of their spirit. Or perhaps boil them.'

Enlil Maratovich laughed at this.

‘Have you been talking to Hera? We've already heard this version. Rather clever, original and, as you would say nowadays, Gothic. But way off target. Used banknotes are not impregnated with energy, all they are impregnated with is human sweat. And seething with germs. I would not drink a decoction made from them even if personally ordered to by Comrade Stalin. Banknotes do certainly play a role in our rituals, but it is a purely symbolic one and has nothing whatever to do with nectar of the gods. Another go?'

I thought that if Hera's theory had been so wrong, mine might be nearer the truth.

‘Maybe vampires do something with the money in bank accounts? Build up a large sum somewhere offshore, and then … in some way distil it into liquid form?'

Again Enlil Maratovich broke into laughter. Our conversation was obviously affording him considerable pleasure.

‘Rama,' he said, ‘do you really think vampires are able to use financial resources in a completely different way from human beings? Money, after all, is simply an abstraction.'

‘A pretty concrete one,' I said.

‘Yes. But you must agree that money has no existence outside the limits of the human mind.'

‘I don't agree,' I replied. ‘As you are so fond of telling everyone, there was a period in my life when I worked unloading trucks at a supermarket and got a wage for it. And I can tell you for a fact that what they paid me came from outside my mind. If I had been able to get it from inside my own head, why would I have got up and gone to work in the mornings?'

‘But if you had passed on your wages to, let us say, a cow, she would not have understood what you were doing – and not just because you were being paid such a pitifully small amount. To her your wages would have meant nothing but a heap of crumpled paper. There is no such thing in the world as money independent of human beings. There is only the activity of the human mind in its preoccupation with it. Do remember this: money is not a real substance, it is an objectification.'

‘What's an objectification?'

‘I'll give you an example. Imagine a prisoner incarcerated in the Bastille for having committed some dreadful crime. One day at dawn he is put into a carriage and taken to Paris. On the way he realises that he is being taken to execution. On the square there is great crowd of people. He is led up to the scaffold, where the sentence is read to him. He is strapped into position beneath the guillotine … a strike of the blade, and his head flies into the basket …'

Enlil Maratovich clapped his knee with his palm.

‘And?' I enquired nervously.

‘At that moment he wakes up and remembers that he is not after all a prisoner but a supermarket unloader, and a big heart-shaped fan fell down from the wall onto his neck while he was asleep.'

‘It wouldn't have fallen,' I said quietly. ‘It was glued on.'

Enlil Maratovich paid no attention to my retort.

‘In other words,' he went on, ‘something can occur in reality which a man cannot understand because he is asleep. However, he cannot completely ignore it. His sleeping mind therefore creates a convoluted and detailed dream-explanation for it. This dream is called an objectification.'

‘I understand,' I said. ‘What you're saying is that money is a colourful dream that people see in an attempt to explain something of which they have an inkling but do not actually understand.'

‘Exactly.'

‘But I believe,' I said, ‘that people understand it all very well.'

‘They think they understand.'

‘But to understand, after all, means to think. And to think means to understand.'

Enlil Maratovich looked at me searchingly.

‘Do you know what goes on in the mind of a cow which has been milked all her life by an electric milking machine?'

‘A cow doesn't think.'

‘Oh yes, she does. Just not as people do. Not with abstract concepts but with emotional reflexes. And on her level she also understands perfectly well what goes on.'

‘How?'

‘She believes that human beings are her deformed offspring. Hideous and misshapen though they are, nevertheless they are her dear little children, and they must be fed because otherwise they will suffer hunger. For that reason she eats her fill of clover every day and tries to give them as much milk as she can …'

Enlil Maratovich's phone rang. He flipped it open and brought it to his ear.

‘No, not yet. It will be some time. Keep going with current business for now. Do the casting of the lots later.'

Closing the phone, he replaced it in his pocket.

‘Well now,' he said. ‘All that now remains for you to do is to assemble the various bits into the whole picture. Do you think you can do that?'

I shook my head.

‘Think hard about it!' said Enlil Maratovich, raising his finger significantly. ‘I have brought you right to the threshold of our world. You are standing before the door. But you cannot open it. Never mind open it, you can't even see it … Our world is so completely hidden that if we do not drag you physically into it by the hand you will never know that it exists. This, Rama, is what is meant by total camouflage.'

‘Perhaps,' I offered, ‘I am just too stupid.'

‘Not only you. Everyone. And the cleverer they are, the more stupid they are. The human mind is either a microscope through which a man examines the floor of his room, or a telescope through which he looks at the stars in the sky outside his window. But the one thing he never sees is himself in the right perspective.'

‘And what is the right perspective?'

‘This is precisely what I am talking about, so listen very carefully. Money is simply an objectification needed by people to account for the spasms of the money gland – those mental contractions that Mind “B” continually experiences. And as Mind “B” is constantly at work, it follows that …'

I suddenly had a wild thought.

‘Do vampires milk people remotely?' I breathed.

Enlil Maratovich beamed.

‘Well done! Of course!'

‘But … things don't happen like that,' I said, dismayed.

‘Think. How do we get honey?'

‘All right,' I said. ‘The bee herself brings the honey. But to do that she has to fly into the hive. There is no way honey can be transmitted in the air.'

‘Not honey, no. But life-force can be.'

‘How?' I asked.

Enlil Maratovich took the pen from the table, took a sheet of paper, and drew this diagram on it:

‘Do you have a clear idea of what a radio wave is?' he asked.

I nodded, then thought a little more, and shook my head in denial.

‘I'll try to keep it simple,' said Enlil Maratovich. ‘A transmitter is a piece of equipment that excites electrons to rush about in a metal rod to and fro in a sine wave. The rod is the antenna. It produces radio waves, which travel at the speed of light. In order to capture the energy of these waves, a second antenna is needed. Both antennae must be of a length proportionate to the length of the wave, because the energy is transmitted on a resonating principle. I expect you know that when you strike one tuning fork, another one placed near it will begin to sound. But for the second one to ring in response, it must be identical to the first one. In practice, of course, it is all rather more complicated: in order to transmit and receive energy, the waves must be concentrated in a particular cluster of rays, the antennae must be correctly positioned spatially in relation to one another, and so on. But the principle is the same … now let me draw you another diagram …'

Enlil Maratovich turned over the sheet of paper and drew the following:

‘You mean, Mind “B” is the transmitting antenna?' I asked.

He nodded.

‘And what is the person thinking while the transmitter is working?'

‘Difficult to say. It depends what kind of person he is: a corporate manager or a guy with a fruit stall by a Metro station. But the inner dialogue of any contemporary urban dweller will fall essentially into one of two alternative patterns. In the first he thinks: “I'm winning! I'm getting there! I'll show the lot of them! I'm going for the throat! I'll screw all the money I can out of this shitty world!”'

‘Yes,' I agreed, ‘that makes a lot of sense.'

‘And there is another pattern where he thinks: “I'm drowning! I'll never make it! I'm in deep shit! I'm a hopeless loser and will die dirt poor!”'

‘That can happen too,' I confirmed.

‘In any given consciousness these two processes take hold and turn about, and may be considered a single stream of thought altering direction cyclically. It's like an alternating current radiating from an antenna, transmitting the person's life-force into space. But human beings are not capable of capturing or registering this radiation. It can be captured only by a living receiver, not by any mechanical device. People sometimes refer to this energy as the “biofield”, but exactly what that might be no human being understands.'