Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  A man was standing in the semi-darkness behind the door. He held in his hands an object that looked like a blowtorch but I saw no more because something he did caused everything to go black.

  At this point, my memory of what had occurred reached a point which was in such close alignment with the present that I remembered where I was – and came back to myself.

  MITHRA

  I was standing upright at the Swedish parallel bars. I desperately needed to go to the toilet. Also, there was something odd about my mouth. Inspecting it with my tongue, I discovered that the upper incisors had been extracted and in their place were two holes in the gum. I must have spat out the teeth while unconscious, because there was no trace of them in my mouth.

  I sensed vaguely that the room contained another living creature besides myself, but since my eyes refused to focus I could see nothing in front of me except an indistinct smudge. The smudge was trying to attract my attention, uttering muffled sounds and repeating the same movements over and over again. Suddenly my eyes regained their focus and I saw before me a man I had never seen before, dressed in black. He was passing his hand in front of my face, testing whether I reacted to the change in light. Seeing that I had come back to my senses, the stranger inclined his head in a gesture of welcome and said: ‘Mithra.’

  I assumed that was his name.

  Mithra was a tall, scrawny young man with a piercing gaze, a pointy Spanish-style beard and barely detectable moustache. A faintly Mephistophelean air hung about him, one which might, however, perhaps have undergone a recent upgrade, increasing the level of tolerance. This particular devil would not necessarily shrink from a good deed provided it had a reasonable prospect of accelerating progress towards his evil goal.

  ‘Roman,’ I croaked in reply, and turned my eyes to the sofa along the wall opposite.

  It no longer supported a corpse. The blood on the floor had also vanished.

  ‘Where is …?’

  ‘They’ve taken him away,’ said Mithra. ‘A tragic event, alas, that took us completely by surprise.’

  ‘What was his mask for?’

  ‘The deceased had been rendered unsightly as a result of an accident.’

  ‘Why did he shoot himself?’

  Mithra shrugged. ‘No one knows. The deceased left a note to the effect that you are to succeed him.’ He measured me up and down with a thoughtful look. ‘And that seems to be the case.’

  ‘I do not want to,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Do – not – want – to?’ repeated Mithra, stretching out the words.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘By rights you should be extremely happy. After all, you are an advanced young man. You must be, otherwise Brahma would not have chosen you. You just haven’t yet understood how fortunate you are. Forget all your doubts. In any case, there is no way back … You’d do better to tell me how you are feeling in yourself?’

  ‘Bad,’ I said. ‘Head hurts terribly. And I need to go to the toilet.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Some of my teeth seem to have fallen out. The upper incisors.’

  ‘We’ll check everything out now,’ said Mithra. ‘One second.’

  In his hand appeared a short glass test tube with a black stopper. It was half filled with a clear liquid.

  ‘This vessel contains some red liquid from a man’s veins diluted with water. The concentration is one part to a hundred …’

  ‘Who was the man?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  I did not understand what Mithra meant by this.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ he directed.

  ‘Is there any danger?’

  ‘None at all. Vampires are immune to any diseases transmitted by red liquid.’

  I did as I was told, and Mithra carefully deposited on my tongue a few drops from the test tube. I could detect no difference between the liquid and ordinary water: if there was anything alien it, it had no taste.

  ‘Now rub your tongue against your upper gum, inside the teeth. You will see something after this. We call it the personality map.’

  I touched the palate with the tip of my tongue. Now I could feel something extrinsic. It was not painful, more of a slight tingling, as if from a low-powered electrical current. I took my tongue several times round the palate, and suddenly …

  Had I not still been strapped to the bars, I would have lost my balance. Without warning I experienced a blindingly powerful sensation, unlike anything I had previously known. I was seeing, or more accurately feeling, another human being from the inside, as if I had myself become him, as sometimes happens in dreams.

  Inside the aurora-borealis-like cloud within which the apparition presented itself to me, I could distinguish two contrasting zones, repulsion and attraction, dark and light, cold and hot. The zones overlapped at multiple points forming overlays and archipelagos so that the intersections sometimes resembled islands of warmth in a frozen sea, at other times icebound lakes in a temperate landscape. Everything in the zone of repulsion was unpleasant and painful – all the things this person did not like. The attraction zone, by contrast, contained all that gave him reason to live.

  I was looking at what Mithra had called his ‘personality map’. Indeed, I could sense an invisible path threading through both zones, hard to describe but nevertheless palpable, like rails along which, insensibly and involuntarily, the attention slid. It had been formed by traces of the mind’s habitual pathways, a furrow worn by repeated thoughts, a meandering trajectory of the mind’s daily cognitive processes. By studying the personality map for a few seconds it was possible to penetrate the subject’s most salient characteristics. I did not need Mithra to explain this to me; it was as if I had known it all along.

  This particular individual worked as an IT engineer in a Moscow bank and harboured a multiplicity of secrets, some of them shameful, which he kept from other people. But the most insidious, the most secret and humiliating of all his problems, was his inadequate grasp of Windows.

  He hated it, and had been hating many a version of this operating system for more than a decade already – as a long-term convict in the camps learns to hate several generations of guards. The depth of his hatred verged on the comic, to the extent that when Windows Vista came on stream he would be upset by hearing the Spanish expression ‘hasta la vista’ when he went to the cinema. Everything connected to his line of work was to be found in his zone of repulsion, and in the centre of this zone fluttered the flag of Windows.

  At first I thought that sex was the nodal point of the zone of attraction. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the chief source of joy in this particular life was, in fact, beer. Stated simply, the man lived to drink good German beer immediately after sex, and for this was ready to endure all the horrors of fate. He may not have known himself what for him was the key to life, but to me it was as clear as day.

  I cannot claim that the stranger’s life was opened to me in its entirety. It was more as though I stood at the half-open door of a darkened room, tracing by the light of a torch the images depicted on its walls. Whenever I allowed the light to linger on a particular picture it would momentarily expand and then dissolve into hundreds of others; this pattern was repeated again and again. Theoretically I could have accessed every single one of the memories, but there were simply far too many of them. After a while the images faded, as though the battery in the torch was exhausted, and everything grew dark.

  ‘Did you see?’ asked Mithra.

  I nodded.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘A computer specialist.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  ‘Like a set of scales,’ I said. ‘Beer on one side, Windows on the other.’

  Mithra showed no surprise at this strange phrase. He took a few drops of the liquid into his mouth and for a few
seconds moved his lips back and forth.

  ‘Yes,’ he assented. ‘Windows Ex Pee …’

  The response did not surprise me. It was one of the ways our computer expert had demonstrated his special loathing of this particular version of the operating system marketed as XP.

  ‘What was I seeing?’ I asked. ‘What was it?’

  ‘What you have been experiencing was your first degustation, your first tasting. In the weakest possible concentration. Had the solution been at full strength, you would have lost all knowledge of who you yourself really are, and if that had happened everything would take much longer to accomplish. Until you get used to it, it can produce a severe psychic trauma. But you will only have as strong a reaction as that in the initial stages; later you’ll get used to it … In any case, my congratulations. You are now one of us. Or at least, almost one of us.’

  ‘Forgive me for asking,’ I said, ‘but who are you?’

  ‘I am your friend and comrade. I’m a little older than you. I hope we are going to be friends.’

  ‘In the light of our future friendship,’ I said, ‘might I ask you to do me a friendly service in advance?’

  Mithra smiled. ‘But of course.’

  ‘Could you untie me from these wall bars? I need to go to the toilet.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Mithra. ‘I ask your pardon, but I had to be certain that everything in the procedure had gone according to plan.’

  When the straps binding me fell to the floor, I attempted to take a step forward but would have fallen over had Mithra not caught hold of me.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘You may have problems for a while with your vestibular apparatus. It takes a few weeks for the Tongue to take root fully … are you able to walk? Shall I help you?’

  ‘I can walk,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Down the corridor on the left. By the kitchen.’

  The bathroom appointments were consistent with the style of the rest of the apartment: a museum of Gothic sanitaryware. Sitting on a black throne with a hole in the middle, I tried to compose my thoughts. But in this I was unsuccessful: my thoughts simply refused to be corralled into any sort of coherence. It was as if they had vanished somewhere. I felt no fear, no excitement, no concern for what would happen next.

  Emerging from the toilet, I realised that no one was keeping guard over me. There was no one in the passage, nor in the kitchen. The back door through which I had entered the apartment was only a few paces from the kitchen. But the strangest thing of all was that the idea of flight did not occur to me. I knew that I was going to return to the room and continue my conversation with Mithra. Why have I no desire to escape? I thought.

  The reason was that in some way I knew that to do so would not be right. In my efforts to understand why this should be so, I discovered something very odd indeed. My mind seemed to have developed a centre of gravity of its own accord, a kind of black sphere implanted so ineradicably that nothing could threaten the balance of a soul so equipped. Located in this sphere was the faculty of reviewing and assessing all possible options for acceptance or rejection. The prospect of flight had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

  The sphere wanted me to return, and this being what the sphere wanted, I complied. It was not an instruction; all the sphere had to do was tilt in the direction of the desired decision, and I followed the inclination.

  So that was why Mithra allowed me to leave the room, went through my mind. He knew I would not run away.

  I deduced that the source of Mithra’s knowledge was his possession of a similar sphere.

  ‘What is it, exactly?’ I asked when I returned to the room.

  ‘What are you referring to?’

  ‘I’ve got some kind of nucleus inside me. Everything I try to think about now passes through it. It’s as though I have lost my soul.’

  ‘Lost your soul?’ Mithra asked. ‘What do you need it for, anyhow?’

  Evidently, confusion was written all over my face. Mithra burst out laughing.

  ‘Is your soul the same thing as you, or is it not you?’ he asked.

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘In the literal sense. Is what you call your soul you, or something else?’

  ‘I suppose it is myself … or maybe not – perhaps it is something separate.’

  ‘Let’s look at this logically. If your soul is not you but something other, why should you bother about it? But if it is you, how could you possibly lose it, when here you are?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see you can talk anybody into anything.’

  ‘And we’ll teach you to do so, as well. I know why you’re in such a stew about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Culture shock. According to human mythology, anyone who becomes a vampire loses his or her soul. That is nonsense. You might just as well say that a boat loses its soul when it is fitted with an engine. You haven’t lost anything. You have only gained. But you have gained so much that everything you knew previously has been so compressed as to become virtually non-existent. That is why you feel you have lost something.’

  I sat on the sofa that only a short while ago had supported the corpse of the masked man. Normally I would feel most ill at ease sitting in such a place, but the heavy black globe inside me was quite indifferent.

  ‘It’s not actually a sense of loss,’ I said. ‘I don’t even feel that I am I any more.’

  ‘Correct,’ replied Mithra. ‘You are not you now, you are another. What you sense as a nucleus is your Tongue. Before you it lived in Brahma. Now it lives in you.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘Brahma told me that his Tongue would transfer to me.’

  ‘But don’t run away with the idea, please, that you have Brahma’s Tongue. Brahma was the servant of the Tongue, not the other way round.’

  ‘Whose Tongue is it now?’

  ‘You cannot say it is anyone’s. It belongs to itself. The vampire’s person is divided between the head and the Tongue. The head is the human side of the vampire, the social person with all his or her accumulated baggage and impedimenta. But the Tongue, the other centre of the personality, is the more important. It is the Tongue that makes you a vampire.’

  ‘But what, exactly, is it?’

  ‘The Tongue is another living creature, one from a higher plane of nature. The Tongue is immortal and moves from one vampire to another, or rather from one person to another, like the rider of a horse. But it can exist only in a symbiotic relationship with a human brain. Take a look at this.’

  Mithra pointed to the picture of Napoleon mounted on horseback. The Emperor looked a bit like a penguin, and if you felt like it you could see the picture as a circus number: a penguin riding a horse in the midst of a firework display.

  ‘I don’t feel the Tongue with my body,’ I said, ‘but somehow differently.’

  ‘Quite right. The trick is that the Tongue’s consciousness elides with the consciousness of the host in whom it has taken up residence. Just now I compared the vampire with the rider of a horse, but a truer analogy would be a centaur. Some people say that the Tongue subordinates the human mind to itself. But it would be more accurate to see the relationship as the Tongue raising the human being to its own higher level.’

  ‘Higher level?’ I queried. ‘My feeling is just the opposite, I’m at the bottom of some kind of pit. If this is higher, why does everything seem so dark to me?’

  Mithra hesitated.

  ‘Darkness can be under the earth, and also high in the heavens. I know how you feel. It is a difficult time both for you and for the Tongue. You might think of it as a second birth – metaphorically for you, literally so for the Tongue. For the Tongue it is a new incarnation, as all the human memory and experiences that have accumulated in a former vampire host evaporate when it moves to a new body. You are a blank sheet of paper, a newborn va
mpire who must study, study, study.’

  ‘What do I have to study?’

  ‘Your job is to become, in a short space of time, an individual of high culture and exceptional refinement, significantly superior in intellectual and physical capacity to the great majority of humankind.’

  ‘How am I supposed to achieve this in a short space of time?’

  ‘We have special methods, very quick and effective ones. But the most important things the Tongue will teach you. You will cease to feel it as something alien. You and it will become one.’

  ‘How does that work? Does the Tongue absorb part of my brain?’

  ‘No. It replaces the tonsils and makes contact with the prefrontal cortex. In effect it adds a supplementary element to the brain.’

  ‘And I remain myself?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Well, will I suddenly become someone else?’

  ‘Look, whatever happens, tomorrow you will be different from what you are today, and the day after tomorrow even more so. If something is destined to happen, let it happen to your advantage. Is that not so?’

  I got up from the sofa and took a few steps around the room. Each step was difficult to accomplish and inhibited my ability to think. I felt that Mithra was manipulating the conversation, or perhaps laughing up his sleeve at me. But in my present state I was in no position to argue with him.

  ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ I asked. ‘Should I go home?’

  Mithra shook his head.

  ‘In no circumstances. You live in this apartment now. The deceased’s personal belongings have all been removed. Whatever remains here is your inheritance. You have work which you must get down to.’

  ‘What at?’

  ‘You will have private tuition. Make a start on getting used to your new status. And to your new name.’

  ‘What new name?’

  Mithra took me by the shoulders and turned me around so that I was facing the mirror on the sideboard. I looked terrible. Mithra pointed with his finger to my forehead, where I observed a brown-coloured inscription, already drying out and cracking, and remembered that before Brahma died he had written something there in blood.