Empire V Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€˜What is it, exactly?’ I asked when I returned to the room.
    â€˜What are you referring to?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Lost your soul?’ Mithra asked. ‘What do you need it for, anyhow?’
    Evidently, confusion was written all over my face. Mithra burst out laughing.
    â€˜Is your soul the same thing as you, or is it not you?’ he asked.
    â€˜In what sense?’
    â€˜In the literal sense. Is what you call your soul you, or something else?’
    â€˜I suppose it is myself … or maybe not – perhaps it is something separate.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘I see you can talk anybody into anything.’
    â€˜And we’ll teach you to do so, as well. I know why you’re in such a stew about it.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜It’s not actually a sense of loss,’ I said. ‘I don’t even feel that I am I any more.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I remember,’ I said. ‘Brahma told me that his Tongue would transfer to me.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Whose Tongue is it now?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜But what, exactly, is it?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I don’t feel the Tongue with my body,’ I said, ‘but somehow differently.’
    â€˜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