Empire V by Victor Pelevin Page A

martial to be hanged). Needless to say, such researches appeared to me a complete waste of my time and energy.
    Before long, however, I grew to understand that the object of these excursions was not just to absorb yet more information, but to remodel my entire mode of thinking. The truth is that there is a vital difference between the mental processes of a vampire and those of a human being. When thinking, the vampire employs the same cerebral constructions as the man, but the path taken to get from one premise to another is as different from predictive human thought as is the exquisite trajectory of a bat flying through the dusk from a pigeon circling over an urban rubbish dump.
    â€˜The best human beings are capable of thought almost on a level with vampires,’ said Baldur. ‘They have a name for it in their world – genius.’
    Jehovah’s take was more restrained.
    â€˜About genius I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Genius resists analysis and explanation, it’s a bit of a grey area. With us, everything is straightforward and clear. Thinking becomes vampiric when sufficient degustations have been imbibed to generate new parameters of associative connections.’
    Technically speaking, my brain was already equipped to function in a new way. But the inertia of human nature still imposed its innate conditions. Many things which to my mentors were crystal clear I failed to grasp. What they saw as a logical bridge all too often presented itself to me as a conceptual chasm.
    â€˜There are two main aspects to Glamour,’ declared Jehovah at one of our lessons. ‘On the one hand, it is the searingly painful shame and humiliation brought about by one’s poverty and physical ugliness. On the other, it is a malignant glee at the sight of the depravity and imperfections which others have not succeeded in concealing …’
    â€˜How can this be so?’ I marvelled. ‘You told me Glamour was sex expressed as money. Surely there must be something attractive about it. Where is that in what you have just said?’
    â€˜You’re thinking like a human being,’ said Jehovah. ‘Why don’t you tell me where it is?’
    I thought. But nothing came into my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said finally.
    â€˜Nothing that exists is imperfect or hideous in or of itself. Everything depends on correlation. For a girl to realise that she is a fat, poor, ugly freak, all she has to do is open a glamour magazine, where she will be confronted with a slim super-rich beauty queen. Then she has someone against whom to compare herself.’
    â€˜But why should the girl want to do this?’
    â€˜Well, come on, you can answer that,’ said Jehovah.
    I thought some more.
    â€˜She has to …’ and suddenly vampire logic laid out the answer clearly before me. ‘She has to, so that she and all those other people the glossy mags have turned into humiliated freaks will carry on financing the Glamour industry out of their wretched earnings.’
    â€˜Quite right, well done. But even that is still not the ultimate objective. You rightly talk of Glamour needing to be financed, but what is its aim?’
    â€˜Glamour drives the economy forward because its victims start stealing money?’ I hazarded at random.
    â€˜Far too much like human logic. You’re not an economist, Rama, you’re a vampire. Concentrate.’
    I was silent, because nothing entered my head. Jehovah paused for a minute, then said:
    â€˜The aim of Glamour is to ensure that the life of mankind passes in a miasma of ignominy and self-contempt, a condition known as “original sin”. It is the direct result of consuming images of beauty, success and intellectual brilliance. Glamour and Discourse submerge their consumers in mediocrity, idiocy and destitution – qualities which are, of course, relative, but cause real suffering. All human life is dominated by this