Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘I’m asleep,’ Tatarsky mumbled into his pillow. ‘I’m asleep…’

He carefully turned over on to his other side, but the shrill sound didn’t disappear. Raising himself up on one elbow, he cast a gloomy eye over the thousand-dollar prostitute snoring gently beside him: in the dim light it was quite impossible to tell she wasn’t Claudia Schiffer. He reached out for the mobile phone lying on the bedside locker and croaked into it: ‘Allo.’

‘What’s this, been hitting the sauce again?’ Morkovin roared merrily. ‘Have you forgotten we’re going to a barbecue? Get yourself down here quick, I’m already waiting for you. Azadovsky doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

‘On my way,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’ll just grab a shower.’

The autumn highway was deserted and sad, and the sadness was only emphasised by the fact that the trees along its edges were still green and looked just as though it was still summer; but it was clear that summer had passed by without fulfilling a single one of its promises. The air was filled with a vague presentiment of winter, snowfalls and catastrophe - for a long time Tatarsky was unable to understand the source of this feeling, until he looked at the hoardings installed at the side of the road. Every half-kilometre the car rushed past a Tampax advertisement, a huge sheet of plywood showing a pair of white roller skates lying on virginal white snow. That explained the presentiment of winter all right, but the source of the all-pervading sense of alarm still remained unclear. Tatarsky decided that he and Morkovin must have driven into one of those psychological waves of depression that had been drifting across Moscow and its surroundings ever since the beginning of the crisis. The nature of these waves remained mysterious, but Tatarksy had no doubt whatever that they existed, so he was rather offended when Morkovin laughed at him for mentioning them.

‘As far the snow goes you were spot on,’ he said; ‘but as far as these wave things are concerned… Take a closer look at the hoardings. Don’t you notice anything?’

Morkovin slowed down at the next hoarding and Tatarsky suddenly noticed a large graffito written in blood-red spray paint above the skates and the snow: ‘Arrest Yeltsin’s gang!’

‘Right!’ he said ecstatically. ‘There was the same kind of thing on all the others! On the last one there was a hammer and sickle, on the one before that there was a swastika, and before that, something about wops and nig-nog s… Incredible. Your mind just filters it out - you don’t even notice. And the colour, what a colour! Who dreamed it all up?’

‘You’ll laugh when you hear,’ answered Morkovin, picking up speed. ‘It was Malyuta. Of course, we rewrote almost all the texts - they were much too frightening - but we didn’t change the idea. As you’re so fond of saying, an associative field is formed: ‘days of crisis - blood could flow - Tampax -your shield against excesses’. Figure it out: nowadays there are only two brands selling the same volumes they used to in Moscow, Tampax and Parliament Lights.’

‘Fantastic,’ said Tatarsky, and clicked his tongue. ‘It just begs for the slogan: ‘Tampax ultra-safe. The reds shall not pass!’ Or personalise it: not the reds, but Zyuganov - and according to Castaneda, menstruation is a crack between the worlds. If you want to stay on the right side of the crack… No, like this: Tampax. The right side of the crack…

‘Yes,’ said Morkovin thoughtfully, ‘we should pass these ideas on to the oral department.’

‘We could bring up the theme of the white movement as well. Imagine it: an officer in a beige service jacket on a hillside in the Crimea, something out of Nabokov… They’d sell five times as many.’

‘What does that matter?’ said Morkovin. ‘Sales are just a side effect. It’s not Tampax we’re promoting; it’s alarm and uncertainty.’

‘What for?’

‘We have a crisis on our hands, don’t we?’

‘Oh, right,’ said Tatarsky, ‘of course. Listen, about the crisis - I still don’t understand how Semyon Velin managed to delete the entire government. It was all triple protected.’

‘Semyon wasn’t just a designer.’ replied Morkovin. ‘He was a programmer. D’you know the scale he was working on? They found thirty-seven million in greenbacks in his accounts afterwards. He even switched Zyuganov’s jacket from Pierre Cardin to St Lauren. Even now nobody can figure out how he managed to break into the oral directory from our terminal. And as for what he did with neckties and shirts… Azadovsky was sick for two whole days after he read the report.’

‘Impressive.’

‘Sure it was. Our Semyon had a roving eye, but he knew what he was getting into. So he decided he needed some insurance. He wrote a program that would delete the entire directory at the end of the month if he didn’t cancel it personally, and he planted it in Kirienko’s file. After that the program infected the entire government. We have anti-virus protection, of course, but Semyon thought up this fucking program that wrote itself on to the ends of sectors and assembled itself at the end of the month, so there was no way it could be picked up from the control sums. Just don’t ask me what all that means - I don’t understand it myself - I just happened to overhear someone talking about it. To cut it short, when they were taking him out of town in your Mercedes, he tried to tell Azadovsky about it, but he wouldn’t even talk to him. Then everything defaulted. Azadovsky was tearing his hair out.’

‘So will there be a new government soon?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘I’m already tired of doing nothing.’

‘Soon, very soon. Yeltsin’s ready - tomorrow we’ll discharge him from the Central Kremlin Hospital. We had him digitised again in London. From the wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s - they’ve got it in the store room. It’s the third time we’ve had to restore him - you wouldn’t believe the amount of hassle he’s given everyone - and we’re finishing off the NURBS for all the others. Only the government’s turning out really leftist; I mean, it’s got communists in it. It’s those schemers in the oral department. But that doesn’t really bother me much - it’ll only make things easier for us. And for the people too: one identity for the lot and ration cards for butter. Only so far Sasha Blo’s still holding us back with the Russian Idea.’

‘Hold hard there,’ Tatarsky said, suddenly cautious; ‘don’t frighten me like that. Who’s going to be next? After Yeltsin?’

‘What d’you mean, who? Whoever they vote for. We have honest elections here, like in America.’

‘And what in hell’s name do we need them for?’

‘We don’t need them in anybody’s name. But if we didn’t have them they’d never have sold us the render-server. They’ve got some kind of amendment to the law on trade - in short, everything has to be the way it is there. Total lunacy, of course, the whole thing…’

‘Why should they care what we do? What do they want from us?’

‘It’s because elections are expensive,’ Morkovin said gloomily. ‘They want to finally destroy our economy. At least, that’s one of the theories… Anyway, we’re moving in the wrong direction. We shouldn’t be digitising these deadheads; we need to make new politicians, normal young guys. Develop them from the ground up through focus-groups - the ideology and the public face together.’

‘Why don’t you suggest it to Azadovsky?’

‘You try suggesting anything to him… OK, we’ve arrived.’

There was an earth road adorned on both sides with Stop signs branching off from the road they were on. Morkovin turned on to it, slowed down and drove on through the forest. The road soon led them to a pair of tall gates in a brick wall. Morkovin sounded his horn twice, the gates opened and the car rolled into a huge yard the size of a football pitch.