Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

Morkovin was sitting in Azadovsky’s reception room. When he saw that Tatarsky was soaked, he gave a laugh of satisfaction. ‘Nostrils flaring are they? Forget it. Leonid’s away; there won’t be any bee-keeping today.’

Tatarsky sensed something was missing in the reception room. He looked around and saw the round mirror and golden mask had disappeared from the wall.

‘Where’s he gone then?’

‘ Baghdad.’

‘What for?’

‘The ruins of Babylon are near there. He got some kind of idea into his head about climbing that tower they still have there. Showed me a photo. Real heavy stuff.’

Tatarsky gave no sign of being affected in any way by what he’d just heard. Trying to make his movements look normal, he picked up the cigarettes lying on the desk and lit one.

‘What makes him so interested in that?’ he asked.

‘Says his soul’s thirsting for the heights. Why’ve you gone so pale?’

‘I haven’t had a cigarette for two days.’ said Tatarsky. ‘I was trying to give up.’

‘Buy a nicotine patch.’

Tatarsky was already back in control of himself.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘yesterday I saw Azadovsky in another two clips. I see him every time I turn on the TV. One day he’s dancing in the corps de ballet, the next he’s reading the weather forecast. What does it all mean? Why’s he on so often? Does he just like being filmed?’

‘Yeah,’ said Morkovin, ‘it’s a weakness of his. My advice to you is not to stick your nose into that for the time being. Some time maybe you’ll find out all about it. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Let’s get down to business. What’s the latest on our Kalashnikov scenario? Their brand manager was just on the phone.’

‘Nothing new. It’s still the same: two old guys shoot down Batman over the Moskvoretsky market. Batman falls on to this kebab brazier and flaps his webbed wing in the dust; then he’s hidden by this group of old women in sarafans dancing and singing folk songs.’

‘But why two old guys?’

‘One has a short-barrel version and the other has a standard. They wanted the whole range.’

Morkovin thought for a moment.

‘Probably a father and son would do better than just two old guys. Give the father the standard and the son the short barrel. And let’s have not just Batman, but Spawn and Nightman and the whole fucking gang. The budget’s huge; we have to cover it.’

‘Thinking logically,’ Tatarsky said, ‘the son should have the standard and the father should have the sawn-off.’

Morkovin thought again for a moment.

"That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘Good thinking. Only we won’t have the mother with a holster, that would be overkill. OK, that wasn’t what I called you over for. I’ve got some good news.’

He paused tantalisingly.

‘What news is that?’ Tatarsky asked with feeble enthusiasm.

‘The first section has finally checked you out. So you’re being promoted - Azadovsky told me to put you in the picture. So I’ll do that right now.’

The canteen was empty and quiet. The television hanging on a pole in the corner was showing a news broadcast with the sound turned off. Morkovin nodded for Tatarsky to sit at the table by the television, then went over to the counter and returned with two glasses and a bottle of Smirnoff Citrus Twist.

‘Let’s have a drink. You’re soaked; you could catch a cold.’

He sat down at the table, then shook the bottle with some special kind of movement and gazed for a long time at the small bubbles that appeared in the liquid.

‘Well, would you believe it!’ he said in astonishment. ‘I can understand it in some kiosk out on the street… But even in here it’s fake. I can tell for sure it’s homebrew out of Poland… Just look at it fizz! So that’s what an upgrade can do…’

Tatarsky realised that the final phrase referred not to the vodka, but the television, and he switched his gaze from the opaque bubbly vodka to the screen, where a ruddy-faced, chortling Yeltsin was sawing rapidly at the air with a hand missing two fingers.

‘Upgrade?’ queried Tatarsky. ‘Is that some kind of cardiac stimulator?’

‘Who on earth spreads all of those rumours?’ said Morkovin, shaking his head. ‘What for? They’ve just stepped up the frequency to six hundred megahertz, that’s all. But we’re taking a serious risk.’

‘You’ve lost me again,’ said Tatarsky.

‘It used to take two days to render a report like this; but now we do it in a single night, which means we can program more gestures and facial expressions.’

‘But what is it we render?’

‘We render him,’ said Morkovin with a nod in the direction of the television. ‘And all the rest of them. 3-D.’

‘3-D?’

‘Three-dimensional modelling, if you want the precise term. The guys call it "fiddly-dee".’

Tatarsky gaped at his friend, trying to work out whether he was joking or serious. His friend withstood his gaze in silence.

‘What the hell is all this you’re telling me?’

‘I’m telling you what Azadovsky told me to tell you. I’m putting you in the picture.’

Tatarsky looked at the screen. Now it was showing the rostrum in the Duma, occupied by a dour-looking orator who seemed to have just surfaced from the agitated and murky millpond of folk fury. Suddenly Tatarsky had the impression that the Duma deputy really wasn’t alive: his body was completely motionless; only his lips and occasionally his eyebrows moved at all.

‘Him as well,’ said Morkovin. ‘Only his rendering’s coarser; there’s too many of them. He’s episodic. That’s a dummy.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, that’s what we call the Duma 3-Ds. Dynamic video bas-relief - the appearance is rendered always at the same angle. It’s the same technology, but it cuts the work down by two orders of magnitude. There’s two types - stiffs and semi-stiffs. See the way he moves his hands and head? That means he’s a stiff. And that one over there, sleeping across his newspaper - he’s a semi-stiff. They’re much smaller - you can squeeze one of them on to a hard disk. Yes, by the way, our legislature department recently won a prize. Azadovsky was watching the news from the State Duma, and all the semi-stiffs were saying how television’s whorish and calculating, all that kind of stuff. Naturally, Azadovsky took offence - he heard the word "calculating" and thought that they were trying to poke their noses into our business. So he decided to get to the bottom of this. He even got as far as picking up the phone and he was already dialling the number when he remembered there was nothing to get to the bottom of! We must be doing a good job if we manage to impress ourselves.’

‘You mean they’re all…?’

‘Every last one of them.’

‘Oh come off it,’ Tatarsky said uncertainly. ‘What about all the people who see them every day?’

‘Where?’

‘On TV… Oh, right… Well, I mean… After all, there are people who meet them every day.’

‘Have you seen those people?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where?’

Tatarsky thought about it. ‘On TV,’ he said.

‘You get my point, then?’

‘I’m beginning to,’ Tatarsky replied.

‘Speaking strictly theoretically, you could meet someone who tells you he’s seen them himself or even knows them. There’s a special service for that called The People’s Will. More than a hundred of them, former state security agents, and all Azadovsky’s men. That’s their job: to go around telling people they’ve just seen our leaders. One at his three-storey dacha, one with an under-age whore, one in a yellow Lamborghini on the Rubliovskoe Highway. But The People’s Will mostly works the beer halls and railway stations, and you don’t hang around those places.’