Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  what difference does it make?) was now, as required, distilled in a single line. Having said this, it could also refer to Ishtar herself because of her long serpent-like necks. But I suppressed the unpatriotic association.

  It would also be difficult to ignore the Headless Horseman, mounted on one of the horses of the Apocalypse: thus two great motifs in human culture were able to meet in the mind of a simple Russian vampire and unobtrusively shake hands and hooves with one another.

  Twenty seconds before the red second hand on my screen crossed the finishing line I clicked the ‘Send’ button. I had done it.

  The screen flickered and went dark. When it came to life again it was divided into two vertical sections. My poem could be seen on the right. The poem written by Mithra came up on the left. It looked like this:

  MOSCowITO

                        Mosquito

                      on the palm

                    though very small,

                  from the proportions

                of its body

              is like a mighty warrior

            now sunk in thought

          With its tiny head

        and torso long and round,

      were he a man

    he would be –

  Hero.

  Mithra had chosen the safe option.

  This was without doubt a most ignoble way to fight – a scrupulously written, politically correct verse from a plodding careerist, reminiscent of those earnest reflections on the young Lenin from the culture of the last century. The mosquito always was for vampires what the sakura is to the Japanese – a symbol of beauty, consummate in its transience, flying by. It also had, so it seemed, a mystical subtext: the fresco in Enlil Maratovich’s hamlet included a representation of the death of Count Dracula, a noble knight in black armour, from whose open breastplate could be seen flying off into the grey sky the humble mosquito of his soul.

  The poem was written in the reverse stairway form Baldur had mentioned, and now that I saw it I at last understood what this was.

  Even so, he had not completely succeeded in bringing off his twelfth line. That the mosquito is a hero, no one can deny. As the saying about Lenin goes, ‘he lived, he lives, he will live forever’. But syntactically it was not quite correct to write ‘he would be Hero’.

  But then it dawned on me. Mithra was not merely describing the mosquito as a hero, he was making the association with Hera. Needless to say, despite the long, round body and the tiny head, this was an iron-clad compliment. It was tantamount to calling some ordinary girl an angel.

  On the other hand, I thought bitterly, in my poem the main theme had been given poetical expression, in verse imbued with true lyric power. It touched on the most important strata of philosophy and Weltanschauung, and showed the drama of the human spirit. Above all, it fully reflected the culture and vitally important problems of contemporary civilisation …

  But in my heart of hearts I already knew I had lost. Mithra’s poem was better as any vampire would be forced to agree. My one remaining hope was that Hera would recognise some features of my style, and if she so wished …

  The screen flickered again and I knew my fate was about to be decided. The side of the screen on which Mithra’s poem was displayed went dark, and some writing appeared diagonally across the lines of verse, as if someone was scribbling on the monitor with a marker pen:

  Mack you!

  But that’s not necessarily conclusive, I thought, clinging obstinately to hope. A second later my half of the screen went dark, and across it splashed in flamboyantly lurid letters:

  YJLTG JGL

  I felt a slight twinge in the region of my elbow where the needle had gone under the skin, and thought I must have loosened the bandage with an awkward movement. I tried to fasten it with my free hand – but the hand would not obey. Then a wave of somehow involuntary fatigue flooded through my mind, and I took little or no further interest in the proceedings.

  Of the next hour or two I can remember only disconnected glimpses. Baldur’s and Loki’s faces appeared before me a few times. Loki removed the needle from my arm and Baldur began to read out, in an officiously bureaucratic tone, Mithra’s Duel Order. It went like this:

  To Loki IX from Mithra VI.

  Confidential

  Duel Order

  Rama the Second’s conduct is stupid and insulting, but provokes only pity for him. In the event of my victory in this idiotic contest I request that he be tied to those Swedish bars from which some time ago I freed him in order to welcome him to our world. I further request that on a table before him be placed a computer monitor to which will be transmitted images from a camera attached to my tiepin. I wish Rama the Second to view every last detail of my encounter with that individual whose forbearance and goodwill he has so shamelessly abused. Two concerns motivate me. The first is that he should be made to understand how a civilised man should behave in the presence of a lady. The second is that, knowing Rama the Second’s predilections for such spectacles, I wish to afford him some enjoyment. It is finally time for Rama the Second to abandon his alienating links with the Nazi air ace Rudel, through which he currently seeks solace from his solitude.

  In this connection I am ready to meet God.

  Mithra the Sixth

  Even through the dark torpor of my trance this enraged me – but despite my fury I was unable even to lift one finger.

  Loki and Baldur pulled me up out of the chair and carried me into the study. Both Nabokovs stared straight at me with immeasurable disgust, as if unable to forgive my defeat.

  Baldur and Loki then bound me to the Swedish bars. I could scarcely feel them touching me; only when they twisted my arm too hard did I experience a dull sort of pain, as if through layers of cotton wool. Then Baldur left the room, and I remained alone with Loki.

  Loki stood in front of me, and spent some time staring into my eyes, pulling up the lids with his finger. Then he pinched me hard in the stomach. This was extremely painful: the stomach was the one part of the body that evidently retained full sensitivity. I tried to cry out, but could not. Loki pinched me again, much harder this time. The pain was unbearable, but I had no way of reacting to it.

  ‘Fool!’ said Loki. ‘Stupid, stupid fool! Who do you think you are, eh? What were you playing at with all that stuff about the “Nous of the Archons”? What are you, a real vampo or a woolly, layabout, left-wing dreamer? “The Lord of This World” and “The Mosquito” are the same theme! Exactly the same! Simply a different formulation. Did you really not grasp that?’

  He then pinched me again, this time with such force that everything went dark before my eyes.

  ‘We were all so sure that you would win,’ he went on. ‘All of us! We even gave you time to go into the study and choose whatever preparation you wanted. I staked my entire store of bablos on you – five whole grams. More than a whole lifetime’s accumulation! You’re a cheap little swine, that’s what you are!’

  I thought he was going to pinch me again, but instead he suddenly broke into sobs – an old man’s weeping, feeble and hopeless. Then he wiped away the tears with his sleeve, along with the smeared mascara, and continued speaking, now in an almost affectionate tone:

  ‘You know what they say, Rama – everyone has a Prince of Denmark in his hamlet. It’s quite understandable. But your prince has somehow set everyone’s teeth on edge. Because of him, you’ve become a pain in the neck to everyone around you. It’s high time you got over all that left-wing posturing. You’ve got to grow up. Because the road you’re on now is going nowhere, I tell you that as your older comrade. You know they sa
y there’s a war between heaven and earth. Did you never think what it’s about? I’ll tell you. The war is because no one knows where earth is and where heaven is. There are two heavens, two heights fighting one another, each intent on turning the other upside down. When the matter is resolved the losing side will become earth. But until it is, nobody knows which way it will go. You are a field commander in this war, do you know that? The Lord of This World – that’s you. But if you’re not up to it, just go off into a distant trench by yourself and put a bullet in your head. Before you do, though, pass on the baton of the Tongue. And don’t bother shooting yourself metaphorically in some stupid poem, do it for real. That’s how it is …’

  I breathed in deeply, and at that moment he pinched me with incredible force in the navel. The pain made me lose consciousness for several seconds – Loki had presumably eaten a death candy. When I came to, he was calmer.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It was because of the bablos. You must know that yourself …’

  I did know, and therefore was very relieved when Baldur returned to the room.

  Positioning the table directly in front of me, Baldur placed the laptop on it. A tangle of cables led out of it into the passage. Adjusting the screen so that it was convenient to my angle of view, he asked:

  ‘See all right, eh?’

  Cupping his hand to his ear, he waited for a response, but when none came, gave up and continued:

  ‘Silence means assent, ha ha … The conditions of the Order have been fulfilled. I must say, Rama, you’ve been very lucky. Up till this moment you could have lost your life several times over. But here you are, alive and well. It looks as though you are going to get away with nothing more than a bruised elbow. Congratulations, my young friend.’

  I could see the screen with no difficulty. Presently it was filled with a grey snowstorm, through which it was hard to see anything identifiable.

  ‘Mithra will initiate the transmission himself,’ said Baldur. ‘Good luck now.’

  I expected Loki to give me one more parting pinch, but nothing happened. The door closed, and I was alone.

  For some time the monitor on the laptop in front of me showed the kind of rippling grey lines on a television set before it has been tuned to a channel. Then a bright horizontal line appeared; it spread out to fill the screen, and I saw Mithra. To be precise I saw Mithra’s reflection, as he was standing before a mirror combing his hair.

  ‘Seventh to Fifth, come in Fifth,’ he said, imitating a police car, and smiled. ‘Can you hear me?’

  He pointed to the glittering pin on his tie, and then stroked it with his finger. I heard a sound like distant thunder.

  ‘Isn’t it amazing what technology can do these days? All the same, there are limits to progress. I’ve often wondered whether it would be feasible for us to film ourselves flying? We’ll find out today. Hera has fixed our appointment in Heartland, right at the bottom. She really has style, that girl. As you’ll appreciate, the only way I can get there is to fly on wings of love. I wonder, would you ever have enough fire in your belly to do that?’

  He turned away from the mirror and I could no longer see him. But what I could see was a large room with sloping windows – evidently a spacious loft. There was practically no furniture, but along the wall stood statues of well-known people – Mick Jagger, Shamil Basayev, Bill Gates, Madonna. They were as if frozen inside blocks of black ice, their faces fixed in grimaces of suffering. I knew this was currently all the rage in Moscow, probably a remote tribute to the Chronicles of Narnia – there was even a company specialising in interior design of this sort, and it was not particularly expensive.

  Then I saw Mithra’s hands. They were holding a little flask in the shape of a bat with folded wings. Mithra deliberately brought it up to his chest where the camera was, to let me see it clearly. The flask disappeared from view, and I heard the sound of breaking glass – Mithra must have flung it to the floor, as used to be the practice after drinking a toast.

  I saw a white leather chair. It moved nearer, then over to the side of the screen, and disappeared. Now I could see the grate of a fireplace. For a long time it did not move – presumably Mithra was sitting and waiting motionless in the chair. Then the picture failed, and grey lines of interference rose up one after the other from the bottom of the screen and disappeared at the top. There was no sound either.

  The vision was off for a long time, at least two hours. I dozed. When the picture eventually came back to the screen there was still no sound, so I may have missed something.

  A narrow passage swam towards me, carved out of the rock. This was Heartland. Whenever he entered an altar room, Mithra bowed to the mummified head above the altar. I had not realised this was the convention – no one had ever told me to do that.

  In one of the rooms Hera was standing beside the altar. I recognised her immediately, despite the unfamiliar clothes she was wearing – a long white dress that made her look like a schoolgirl. It suited her wonderfully. If I had had any way of turning off the computer, I would have done so now. Of course I could not, any more than I could force myself to keep my eyes tight shut.

  Hera did not move to face Mithra, but turned away and vanished into a side passage where it was too dark to see anything. Mithra followed her.

  The screen went dark. Then appeared a dot of light, which grew into the rectangle of a doorway. I saw Hera again. She was standing leaning against the wall, her head bowed, as if grieving for something. She resembled a sapling, a young willow perhaps, touchingly trying to take root on the banks of an ancient river. A Tree of Life that does not yet know it is the Tree of Life. Or then again, perhaps it does already know … Mithra stopped – and I sensed that what he saw impressed him as much as it did me.

  Hera vanished again.

  Mithra went forward into the room. It was full of people. But I had no time to study them before something happened.

  The screen flickered crazily, zigzags and bands of interference obscuring the picture. Someone’s face came momentarily into view, covered with gauze and goggles, then the camera crashed into a wall and stayed there without moving. Now all I could see was the blobs and spots and irregularities of the paint.

  I looked at these for several minutes. The camera then swung round and showed bright lights shining down from the ceiling. The ceiling swung off to the right, from which I deduced that Mithra was being dragged somewhere. There was a glimpse of a metal table and people standing round it, wearing surgeons’ scrubs. The metal objects they held in their hands looked more like Aztec implements than medical instruments.

  Then everything disappeared behind a white fabric screen, which hid both table and surgeons from my view. But for one second before this, a hand appeared on my monitor screen, holding something round – about the size of a football. The hand was holding it in an odd way, for a moment I could not work out how – then I realised it must be by the hair. Only when the round object had vanished from view did I realise what it was.

  It was Mithra’s severed head.

  For a long time all I could see was the fabric of the white screen trembling in the draughts that came from deep underground. Sometimes it seemed to me that I could hear voices, but I was not sure where they were coming from – whether out of the computer speakers or from the neighbouring apartment, where the television was on at full volume. Several times I lapsed into unconsciousness. I do not know how many hours passed. Gradually the tranquilliser began to wear off: I could now move my fingers a little. Next, I found I was able to raise and lower my chin.

  All this time thoughts were racing through my mind. The weirdest was the idea that Mithra had never untied me from the bars, and everything that had happened since then had been purely a hallucination, which in real time had lasted no more than a few minutes. This notion seriously alarmed me because it seemed so plausible in terms of my bodily posture, which was exactly as it had
been on that far-off day when I had come back to consciousness and seen Brahma sitting on the sofa. But then I figured that the laptop computer sitting on the table in front of me proved the reality of everything that had taken place. And right on cue, to provide further evidence, the screen which was obscuring the view disappeared.

  Now I could again see the room, flooded as before with bright light. But now there was no metal table or surgeons, and it could be seen that it was an ordinary altar room, except that it was a completely new one with all kinds of techno-junk on the floor, and it lacked an altar. Where the altar would normally be, in front of the niche in the wall, there towered up a piece of sophisticated medical apparatus attached to a perforated metal framework. As well as the medical equipment, the frame also supported a head hanging in front of the wall, enveloped in snow-white bandages.

  The eyes in the head were closed. Below them were wide, black bruises. Below the nose was a half-effaced bloodstain. Another had dried at the corner of the lips. The head was breathing stertorously through transparent tubes inserted in the nose and leading out into some medical cabinet. I thought at first that someone had shaved off Mithra’s Spanish-style beard. And then I realised the head was not Mithra’s.

  It was Hera’s.

  At the very instant that I recognised her, she opened her eyes and looked at me – that is to say, at the camera. Her swollen face was barely able to register emotions, but it seemed to me that pity and terror passed fleetingly over her features. Then her bandaged head moved aside, disappeared beyond the edge of the screen, and darkness descended.

  VAMPILOGUE

  A letter delivered by courier is always a gift of fate, since it mandates a brief emergence from the hamlet. And when in addition the letter looks so beautiful and smells so ethereally enticing …

  The envelope was rose-pink and smelled delectably of a subtle, artless but at the same time unattainable – not eau de cologne exactly, but a single constituent of it, a secret, intrinsically aromatic ingredient that is almost never experienced by human nostrils in its pure, unadulterated state. It was the scent of secrecy, of unseen hands on the levers of power, of the wellsprings of dominion. The last, one might even say, was accurate in the literal sense – the package came from Ishtar.