Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

He looked to make sure there was no one else in the hall and began talking in a whisper.

‘And now down to business. I don’t think this place is bugged, but talk quietly just in case. Well done, that went just great. Here’s your share.’

Three envelopes appeared in his hand - one fat and yellow and two rather slimmer.

‘Hide these quick. This is twenty from Berezovsky, ten from Raduev and another two from the Chechens. Theirs is the thickest because it’s in small bills. They took up a collection round the hill villages.’

Tatarsky swallowed hard, took the envelopes and quickly stuffed them into the inside pockets of his jacket. ‘Do you think Azadovsky could have twigged?’ he whispered.

Morkovin shook his head.

‘Listen,’ whispered Tatarsky, glancing round again, ‘how is this possible? I can understand about the hill villages, but Berezovsky doesn’t exist, and neither does Raduev. That is, they do exist, but they’re only a combination of ones and zeroes, ones and zeroes. How can they send us money?’

Morkovin shrugged.

‘I don’t really understand it myself,’ he answered in a whisper. ‘Maybe it’s some interested parties or other. Maybe some gangs are involved and they’re re-defining their image. Probably if you work it all out it all comes back down to us. Only why bother to work it all out? Where else are you going to earn thirty grand a throw? Nowhere. So don’t worry about it. Nobody really understands a single thing about the way this world works.’

The projectionist stuck his head into the hall. ‘Hey, are you guys going to stay there much longer?’

‘We’re discussing the clips,’ Morkovin whispered.

Tatarsky cleared his throat.

‘If I’ve grasped the difference correctly,’ he said in an unnaturally loud voice, ‘then an ordinary advertisement and what we’ve seen are like straight pop-music and the alternative music scene?’

‘Precisely,’ Morkovin replied just as loudly, rising to his feet and glancing at his watch. ‘But just what exactly is alternative music - and what is pop? How would you define it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tatarsky answered. ‘From the feel, I suppose.’

They walked past the projectionist loitering in the doorway and went towards the lifts.

‘There is a precise definition,’ said Morkovin didactically. ‘Alternative music is music the commercial essence of which consists in its extreme anti-commercial ethos. Its anti-pop quality, so to speak. Which means that, in order to get this quality right, an alternative musician must first of all be a really shrewd merchant, and those are rare in the music business. There are plenty of them, of course, but they’re not performers, they’re managers… OK, relax. Have you got the text with you?’

Tatarsky nodded.

‘Let’s go to my office. I’ll give you a co-author, just like Azadovsky ordered. And I’ll stick the co-author three grand so he won’t spoil the scenario.’

Tatarsky had never gone up to the seventh floor where Morkovin worked. The corridor they entered on leaving the lift looked dull and reminded him of an old Soviet-period office building - the floor was covered with scuffed and dirty wooden parquet and the doors were upholstered with black imitation leather. On each door, though, there was an elegant metal plaque with a code consisting of numbers and letters. There were only three letters - ‘A’, ‘0’ and ‘D’, but they occurred in various combinations. Morkovin stopped beside a door with a plaque marked ‘i - A-D’ and entered a code in the digital lock.

Morkovin’s office was imposingly large and impressively furnished. The desk alone had obviously cost several times as much as Tatarsky’s Mercedes. This masterpiece of the furniture-maker’s art was almost empty - there was a file containing papers and two telephones without number pads, one red and one white. There was also a strange device: a small metal box with a glass panel in its top. Hanging above the desk was a picture that Tatarsky took at first for a cross between a socialist realist landscape and a piece of Zen calligraphy. It showed a bushy corner of a shady garden depicted with photographic precision, but daubed carelessly across the bushes was a giant hieroglyph covered with identical green circles.

‘What’s that?’

‘The president out walking,’ said Morkovin. ‘Azadovsky presented it to me to create an air of responsible authority. Look, you see, the skeleton’s wearing a tie. And some kind of badge as well - it’s right on top of a flower, so you have to look closely. But that’s just something the artist dreamed up.’

Turning away from the picture, Tatarsky noticed they weren’t alone in the office. At the far end of the spadous room there was a stand with three flat monitors and ergonomic keyboards, with their leads disappearing into a wall covered with cork. A guy with a ponytail was sitting at one of the monitors and grazing his mouse with lazy movements on a small grey mat. His ears were pierced by at least ten small earrings, and there were two more passing through his left nostril. Remembering Morkovin’s advice to prick himself with something sharp whenever he began thinking about the lack of any general order of things in the Universe, Tatarsky decided this wasn’t a case of excessive enthusiasm for piercing; it was the result of close proximity to the technological epicentre of events - the guy with the ponytail simply never bothered to remove his pins.

Morkovin sat at the desk, picked up the receiver of the white phone and issued a brief instruction.

‘Your co-author’ll be here in a minute,’ he said to Tatarsky. ‘You haven’t been here before, have you? These terminals are linked into the main render-server. And this man here is our head designer, Semyon Velin. You realise what a responsibility that is?’

Tatarsky deferentially approached the guy at the computer and glanced at the screen, which showed a trembling grid of finely spaced blue lines. The lines were linked up in the form of two extended hands, the palms held close together with the middle fingers touching. They were slowly revolving around an invisible vertical axis. In some elusive fashion the picture reminded Tatarsky of a shot from a low-budget science-fiction movie of the eighties. The guy with the ponytail moved his mouse across the mat, stuck the arrow of the cursor into a menu that appeared at the top of the screen and the angle between the palms of the hands changed.

‘Didn’t I say we should program in the golden section straightaway?’ he said, turning to face Morkovin.

‘What are you talking about?’

"The angle. We should have made it the same as in the Egyptian pyramids. It’ll give the viewer this unconscious feeling of harmony, peace and happiness.’

‘Why are you wasting time messing about with that old rubbish?’ Morkovin asked. ‘"Our Home Russia" has no chance.’

‘"Our Home Russia" be buggered,’ Velin replied. "They had a good slogan - "The Roof of Your House". We can make this roof out of fingers. The target group will instantly be reminded of bandits’ finger-talk and the works. The message will be clear: we provide protection. We’re bound to come back round to it anyway.’

‘OK,’ said Morkovin, ‘put in your golden section. Let the punters relax. Only don’t mention it in the documentation.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ said Morkovin, ‘you and I know what the golden section is. But the accounts department’ - he jerked his head upwards - ‘might not approve the budget. They’ll think if it’s gold it must be expensive. They’re economising on "Our Home Russia" now.’

‘I get you,’ said Velin. "Then I’ll just put in the angle. Call to get them to open the root directory.’