A long time ago the population of a certain country became divided into groups, which in time almost ceased to understand each other. Although all the people seemed to use the same language, some very important words gradually acquired a different, at times diametrically opposite meaning, depending on who was using them.
Often certain people could not remember the meaning of the word “bread,” for example, and when some people said “home,” others understood it as “palace” and still others as a khrushchovka.
Such ancient notions as “honesty,” “dignity,” “promise,” “oath of allegiance,” etc., became double entendres. The people in that country, including the clergy, also had differing concepts of religious tenets relating to repentance, forgiveness, salvation, sharing one’s property with the poor, and so on. This inventive nation deleted “not” from the words of Christ, Ye cannot serve God and mammon, and this made life much easier.
The notion of truth became particularly multifaceted; it had more nuances and implications than the phrase “fair elections,” the latter being a modern oxymoron. It reached the point that citizens who were determined to uphold their image stopped using the suspicious word “truth” and lost nothing by doing so.
With time various connotations of truly important words led to a spatial partition of the state. Some people remained in their own land (the phrase “own land” had also acquired a number of dangerous connotations) in their homes, somewhere in the remote Middle Ages. The “better half of that nation” managed to “tear itself away” from the land and created a giant satellite of sorts that hung over the heads of the “lower” strata, always shrouded in a thick black cloud. The fact that the manmade black cloud obscured the “lower” people’s view of the sun did not disturb anyone (except the “lower” people), nor the fact that some people could breath pure, fresh air while others, those below, had to inhale the fumes and dust of the degrading earth.
One ought to give the “ones at the top” their due, however. They never forgot about their former fellow countrymen and tried both to help them and guide them in the right direction. The “ones at the top” needed the “lower” ones’ votes, otherwise they risked finding themselves down below (how ineffectively this world is made!).
Meanwhile the guiding impulses from above were hardly if ever accepted down below, not because of any ill will but simply because the people of the earth could not figure out what was going on up in that thick black cloud. Down below it seemed that the people above were constantly playing tug of war and other children’s games, like hurdles, and fencing tournaments using sticks instead of foils, and playing the popular kindergarten shouting contest. In addition, the poor terrestrials were constantly showered with feathers, cellular phones, fragments of Socratic skulls, foreign-made neckties, and other weird objects they could not even identify.
However, at times it was obvious (to both the “lower” people and those in neighboring countries) that behind the black cloud were raging cataclysms, something like the War of the Titans. And the cloud got darker, torn by lightning, with bursts of thunder scaring crows off the desiccated trees below. Yet the outcome was always the same: a downpour of millions of leaflets flying down from the satellite, covering the earth like snow. People below gathered them and used them to kindle their stoves and for other important needs. Now and then, as a result of some unknown process, people would fall out of the dark cloud and hit the earth.
At other times some of the people at the top, conscientious ones (but impossible to identify because of the height), would peek out of the cloud and shout to the people below: “Hang on! We are with you!” There were even cases when a rope would be lowered from the satellite and shouts were heard, “C’mon! Climb up everybody! Rise to the sun!”
But every rope turned out to be rotten and couldn’t bear the weight of even one person, let alone all the people. It was also true that no one below ever expected to reach those heights, for it was a different world that existed according to its own “laws” (another polysemous and long since compromised notion) and “concepts.”
So the “lower” people continued to live in the usual way, in misery, without protection, hope, and decency. They were especially aggrieved by the realization that the land, the once famous chornozem, was being wasted because everything they needed to cultivate it had long since disappeared into the depths of the black cloud, along with many young and ambitious people. They scrabbled to the satellite like rock climbers and then disappeared among the aliens. A few returned to earth, and for a long time could not cleanse themselves of dark stains.
These veteran travelers told their fellow countrymen incredible stories about the satellite. According to them, it was ruled by former gentlemen of fortune, sleight-of-hand sideshow artists, safe blowers, cardsharps, and brilliant but unscrupulous but financiers, and they were served by scholars, experts in various fields, actors, and journalists keen on earning a living this way.
Naturally, few believed these stories from the travelers who had visited the upper reaches. How could one believe that all the men ruling up there spent most of their lives in beauty parlors, having crowded out almost all the women? That their ratings (the rungs on the ladder of power) were determined last but not least by the quality of manicures and pedicures and the price of aftershave? People listened to these stories and laughed because they considered them jokes.
Above these very different levels of that country existed another level, the highest and invisible level inhabited by immortal deities for whom everything happening below was nothing more than a Punch-and-Judy show. The deities laughed mercilessly and they are still laughing.
