Empire V

by Victor Pelevin, Anthony Phillips

Genres: General Fiction; Satire; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Roman thought he'd found the perfect opportunity to rebel. He may have been wrong. He awakens strapped to a set of parallel bars in a richly appointed sitting room, and begins a conversation with a masked man which will change his life. His world has been a facade - one which the mysterious Brahma is about to tear away. A stunning novel about the real world, and about the hidden chanels of power behind the scenes, EMPIRE V is a post-modern satirical novel exploring the cults and corruption of politics, banking and power. And not only are these cults difficult to join - it turns out they may be impossible to leave . . .

Release date: February 18, 2016

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 416

Sample

BRAHMA

When I came to, I found myself in a large room full of old furniture, antiques perhaps. I could see a mirrored sideboard encrusted with fretwork stars, an elaborate escritoire, two nude life-studies and a small picture of Napoleon on horseback in the heat of battle. One wall was taken up by an elegant floor-to-ceiling filing cabinet in Karelian birch, its drawer-fronts embellished with variously coloured labels and insignia. Next to the cabinet stood a stepladder.

I became aware that I was not lying flat, as would be expected of a person recovering consciousness, but was upright. The reason I had not fallen down was that my arms and legs were firmly strapped to Swedish exercise bars attached to the wall. I deduced that the structure was a set of parallel bars – I could feel the outline of a wooden crossbeam through my fingertips. Other bars were pressing into my back.

On a small red divan against the opposite wall sat a man wearing a red dressing-gown and a black mask. The mask was like a top hat coming down over the head as far as the shoulders, or perhaps the cardboard Stahlhelms worn by the Teutonic Knights during the Battle on the Ice in the film Alexander Nevsky. A sharp protuberance marked the area of the nose; the eyes looked out through two oval holes; while a rectangular slit had been cut out round the mouth and covered by a piece of black material. The overall effect was something like mediaeval doctors one sees in engravings of the Black Death in Europe.

This was way over the top. So much so that I wasn’t even scared.

‘Good day to you,’ said the man in the mask.

‘Hello,’ I replied, ungluing my lips with difficulty.

‘What is your name?’

‘Roman,’ I said.

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘Why have you not been called up into the army?’

Assuming he was having me on, I ignored the question.

‘I must ask you to excuse a certain theatricality in the setting,’ continued the man in the mask. ‘If you have a headache, it will soon pass. It comes from my having sprayed you with a special gas.’

‘What sort of gas?’

‘The kind that is used against terrorists. Nothing to worry about – it’s all over now. I advise you not to try calling for help. There is no point and it will do no good. The only outcome will be that I shall develop a migraine, which will spoil our conversation.’

The unknown man had a deep, confident voice. The cloth covering his mouth fluttered when he spoke.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘My name is Brahma.’

‘Why are you wearing a mask?’

‘Several reasons,’ said Brahma. ‘But in any case it is to your advantage. Should our relationship fail to progress to a satisfactory outcome, I shall be able to release you without any difficulty since you will not know what I look like.’

The prospect of eventually being allowed to go free was a relief, certainly. But the words might contain a trap.

‘What is it you want from me?’ I asked.

‘My desire is that a vital interest within a very important part of my body, and simultaneously of my spirit, should be stimulated in your direction. But this, you see, can only come about if you are a person of noble and aristocratic lineage …’

Man’s a maniac, I thought. Main thing is not to upset him. Better distract him by talking …

‘Why must I be of noble and aristocratic lineage?’ I asked.

‘The quality of the red liquid in your veins plays an important role. There is little chance of it, however.’

‘And what do you mean by a vital interest?’ I enquired. ‘Is the idea that I should be alive when this takes place?’

‘I can see I shall get nowhere with you by trying to explain it in words,’ said Brahma. ‘You need a demonstration.’

Rising from the sofa, he came towards me, folded back the black cloth covering his mouth, and leaned towards my right ear. Sensing a stranger’s breath on my face I shrank back, anticipating something loathsome.

What a fool I’ve been, I thought. Whatever possessed me to come here?

But nothing happened. Having breathed into my ear, Brahma turned away and went back to the sofa.

‘I could have bitten you on your arm,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, however, your arms are numb as a result of having been bound. The effect would not be the same.’

‘I suppose it was you who bound them?’

‘Yes,’ sighed Brahma. ‘No doubt I should apologise for my actions. I see that they must appear strange and reprehensible. Nevertheless, all will soon become clear.’

Settling himself on the divan and staring at me as though I were an image on a television screen, he studied me for several seconds, now and then clicking his tongue. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘I am not a sex maniac. You may rest easy on that score.’

‘Well, what are you?’

‘I am a vampire. Vampires are not perverts. They may sometimes pretend to be. But their interests and goals are entirely other.’

No, this is no common or garden pervert I’m dealing with here, I thought. This one’s insane as well. I must keep him talking to distract his attention.

‘A vampire? Do you drink blood?’

‘Not by the glassful,’ replied Brahma, ‘and it is not the basis of my self-identification … Although in a sense you are correct.’

‘So why do you drink it?’

‘It is the best method of getting to know another person.’

‘How so?’

The eyes visible through the oval holes blinked several times. Then the mouth behind the black cloth said: ‘There was a time when the two trees growing on the wall, a lemon tree and an orange tree, were more than trees – they were gates to a secret, magic world. And then something happened. The gates vanished, to be replaced by nothing but two oblong pieces of canvas hanging on the wall. Not only did the gates disappear, so did the world to which they led. Even the dreaded flying dog that stood guard over the entrance to the world reverted to being a wicker fan bought in some tropical resort or other …’

To say I was impressed by this account would fail utterly to describe its effect on me. I was stunned. What to any ordinary person would have been complete gibberish, to me was the secret code unlocking my childhood. Even more astounding, the only person in the world capable of formulating it was myself. Even though I was lost for words, after a while I could restrain myself no longer.

‘I don’t understand. I suppose I might have said something about the pictures while I was unconscious. But I could not possibly have said anything about the magic world on the other side of the gates, because that was not how I thought of it. Nevertheless, now you put it like that, I can see that, yes, that is exactly what it was …’

‘But perhaps you don’t know why it happened as it did?’

‘No, why did it?’

‘The enchanted world in which you formerly lived was the invention of a grasshopper hidden in the grass. Then along came a frog, and the frog ate the grasshopper. From that moment on, even though nothing changed in your room, you no longer had anywhere to live.’

‘Yes!’ I cried, taken aback. ‘That’s true as well. You have told it exactly as it happened.’

‘Please think of something,’ said Brahma, ‘anything that comes into your head, as long as it is something only you know about. Then ask me a question about it, the answer to which only you would know.’

‘All right, I will,’ I said, and plunged into thought. ‘Well, for instance … there was a fan hanging on the wall at home – you’ve already mentioned it. How was it attached to the wall?’

Behind the holes in the mask, Brahma closed his eyes.

‘It was glued. And the glue had been applied in the shape of the letter X. Not a conventional cross, but specifically an X.’

‘How …?’

Brahma raised his hand. ‘Just a moment. You glued the fan to the wall because you had come to believe it was really a vampire dog which would come down at night and bite you. Such an idea is, needless to say, not only arrant nonsense but an insult to true vampires.’

‘How do you know all this?’

Brahma rose from the sofa and came over towards me. Lifting the black cloth with one finger, he opened his mouth, revealing large, strong, nicotine-stained teeth. So far as I could see there was nothing unusual about the teeth, except perhaps that the canines were a little whiter than the others. Brahma raised his head to give me a view of his palate. In the middle was a peculiar, corrugated, orange-coloured membrane, as if a fragment of dental bridgework was adhering to it.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘That is the Tongue,’ said Brahma, carefully enunciating the word, making two syllables of it and freighting them with emphatic deliberation.

‘Tongue?’ I echoed.

‘Not a human tongue. It is the soul and essence of a vampire.’

‘Is it the Tongue that allows you to know things?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how does it do that?’

‘There is no point in trying to explain. If you want to understand, you will have to become a vampire yourself.’

‘I’m not sure I want to do that.’

Brahma returned to his seat on the sofa.

‘You see, Roma,’ he said, ‘for all of us, what is to be is decided by fate. You came here yourself. And I have very little time.’

‘Are you going to be my teacher?’

‘No. Teaching is manifest not in the person of a vampire, but in his nature. Initiation consists in the vampire biting his student. However, it does not follow that a person has merely to be bitten by a vampire to become one. As they say in bad films, ha ha, that only happens in bad films …’

He chuckled at his own little joke. I too essayed a smile, but it was not a success.

‘There is one particular bite,’ he went on, ‘of which a vampire is capable only once in his life. And then only if the Tongue wills it. By tradition, this can take place on the day of the summer solstice. And here you are. My Tongue is about to transfer to you.’

‘How do you mean – transfer?’

‘In the literal sense. Physically. But I must warn you, the experience will be painful, both at first and later on. You will feel unwell, as though you had been bitten by a poisonous snake. You should not worry – it will pass.’

‘Could you not have found someone else to instruct?’

Brahma paid no attention to the question.

‘You may lose consciousness for a while. Your body will become numb. Possibly you will be visited by hallucinations. Possibly not. But whatever happens there is one effect you are certain to experience.’

‘What is that?’

‘You will recall everything that has happened in your life. The Tongue finds out and familiarises itself with your entire past life – it must know everything about you. Something similar is said to happen when a person drowns. But you are a young man and your drowning will not take long.’

‘And what will you do while this is going on?’

Brahma made a peculiar, strangled noise in his throat.

‘Don’t, er, worry about me. I have a meticulously worked out plan of action.’

With these words, he took a step towards me, grabbed hold of my hair with his hand and bent my head down to my shoulder. I thought he was going to bite me, but instead he bit his own finger. Blood immediately flowed over his wrist.

‘Keep still,’ he said. ‘It will be better for you.’

The sight of blood unnerved me, and I obeyed. He brought his bloodied finger up to my forehead and wrote there something with it. Then without warning he sank his teeth into my neck.

I tried to cry out but could manage no more than a half-choked moan: the angle at which he was holding my head made it impossible for me to open my mouth. The pain in my neck was unbearable, as though a crazed dentist were jabbing his electric drill into my jaw. For one second I was sure that the hour of my death had arrived, and I was reconciled to it. Then, suddenly, all was over. Brahma let go of me and leapt backwards. I felt blood on my cheek and on my neck, and saw that his mask and the cloth over his mouth were smeared with it.

I realised the blood was not mine but his own. It flowed out of his mouth down his neck, across his chest, down the red dressing-gown and splashed to the floor in viscous drops. Something appeared to have happened to Brahma; it was as though he, not myself, was the one to have been bitten. Swaying on his feet he returned to his red sofa, sat on it, and began to shuffle his feet agitatedly to and fro on the parquet.

There flashed into my mind Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublyov, the scene where a time-hallowed punishment is being inflicted on a monk, the pouring of molten metal into his mouth. The whole time leading up to his execution the monk lets fly at his torturers with a continuous stream of the most hideous curses, but from the moment when they begin pouring the metal down his gullet he utters not another word, while his whole body continues to jerk and twitch mercilessly. This silence was the most dreadful thing of all, and in the same way it was the silence of my interlocutor that now caused me the greatest terror.

Still shuffling his feet, he reached into the pocket of the dressing-gown, produced a small nickel-plated pistol, and shot himself in the head through the side of the cylindrical mask that covered his face. His head rocked from side to side, the hand holding the pistol slumped to the sofa, and he lay still.

At that moment I felt a kind of faint movement in my neck, just beneath the jaw. It was not exactly painful, more as though I was feeling it through an anaesthetic injection, but it was deeply unpleasant. Not long after I began to lose consciousness, so that my memory of what then took place is confused. I was being drawn inexorably towards sleep.

Brahma had spoken the truth. My past life began to appear in a series of trance visions, as though someone was screening in a small, intimate cinema inside my head a documentary film of my childhood. How strange, I thought, my greatest fear was always vampires …

CITY OF THE SUN

From the time of my birth, I lived with my mother in Moscow. Our flat was in a building belonging to the Professional Dramatists Union, not far from the Sokol Metro station. It was a multi-storey beige brick structure, built in a vaguely Western style and enjoying Soviet Category A status – the sort of building usually inhabited by Central Committee nomenklatura and select echelons of the Soviet intellectual elite. Black Volga cars with flashing beacons were always to be seen around the building, and one could not fail to notice that the cigarette ends that littered the staircase and elevator landings were those from the most coveted American brands. My mother and I occupied a small two-room flat of the kind known in occidental lands as a ‘one-bedroom’.

My formative years were spent in this one bedroom, which had clearly been envisaged as such by the architect. It was small and elongated, with a tiny window overlooking a car park. I was not permitted to arrange it according to my tastes: my mother chose the colour of the wallpaper, decreed the location of the bed and the table, and even the pictures on the walls. This last was the subject of many disagreements: after I once called her a ‘little Soviet tyrant’ we were not on speaking terms for a week.

For my mother, no more offensive accusation could have been imagined. A ‘tall, thin woman with a faded face’, as a playwright neighbour once described her to a policeman, she had in her youth been associated with various dissident circles. In memory of this affiliation she often used to play to visitors a tape recording of a baritone with a reputation for defying the establishment. This man was reading some heretical verses, to which my mother’s voice could be heard contributing a sarcastic commentary from somewhere in the background. The baritone declaimed:

Your nickel’s in the Metro slotAnd two plain-clothes cops are on your tail …While queuing for another vodka shotYou know they’ll haul you off to jail.

At this point my mother’s youthful voice intruded itself: ‘Why don’t you read the one about Solzhenitsyn and that cunt with the bushy eyebrows?’

It was the first time I heard the kind of obscene word that well-brought-up children in the era of perestroika usually learned from sniggering peers in the kindergarten dorm. My mother, whenever she played this tape recording, felt it necessary to explain that the obscenity was justified by artistic necessity and by the context. As for me, I found the word ‘context’ even more puzzling than the word ‘cunt’ since the whole scene was dimly suggestive of the mysterious and threatening grown-up world towards which the winds of change issuing nightly from the TV were imperceptibly wafting me.

My mother’s pro-human-rights cassette had been recorded many years before I was born. It would seem that marriage, a state of life crowned by my appearance in this world, was the cause of her abandoning an active role in the struggle. But her propinquity to revolutionary democracy, which irradiated my childhood with a romantic glow, went apparently unremarked by a regime already sliding into its dotage.

On the wall to the right of my bed were two small identically sized pictures. Forty centimetres wide by fifty centimetres high, they were the first objects I measured with the ruler in the geometry set that I received as a gift in my first grade of school. One picture depicted a lemon tree in a tub, the other a similarly planted orange tree. The only difference between them was the shape and colour of the fruit: the yellow ones elongated and the orange ones spherical.

Directly above the bed hung a wicker fan in the shape of a heart – purely decorative because it was too large to be of any use. In the hollow between the two knoll-like ventricles was a round knob, making the whole thing resemble a gigantic bat with a tiny head. In its middle was a blob of red lacquer paint.

I was convinced that this fan was actually a flying vampire-dog (a creature I had read about in a magazine called Around the World) which during the day was at rest on the wall but came to life at night. As with a mosquito’s abdomen, I could see through his skin the blood he had drunk: this would be the origin of the red stain in the centre of the fan.

The blood, I assumed, was mine.

I realised my terrors were an echo of stories I had heard at summer camps (they tended to be repeated unchanged for years on end). Despite this, I was regularly visited by nightmares from which I would awaken in a cold sweat. Eventually, so concrete did the presence of the vampire-dog spreadeagled against the wall become, and so afraid of the dark was I, that I had to switch on the light to make the dog once again assume the form of a fan made of palm leaves. I knew it would be no good confiding my terrors to my mother. The only thing I could think of was to fix the fan firmly to the wallpaper with superglue. Once I had done that, the terror left me.

Another idea I took from those summer camps was my earliest conception of the physical world. At one of them I saw a remarkable fresco. It showed the earth as a flat disc resting upon three whales swimming in a pale blue ocean. Trees grew upwards from the earth, telegraph poles poked skywards, and there was even a jolly red tram bowling along between a higgledy-piggledy jumble of identical white buildings. Round the front edge of this terrestrial disc were spelt out the letters U S S R. I knew that I had been born in the USSR, and that sometime later it had disintegrated. This was very puzzling, because whereas the houses, trees and trams were still where they always had been, the solid ground on which they stood had evidently vanished … However I was still very little, and my mind accommodated itself to this paradox as it did to hundreds of other imponderables, all the more so as I was already beginning to grasp the true bottom line of the Soviet economic catastrophe: a country that finds it necessary to have two police officers in civilian clothes spying on people who would, in a normal society, be receiving unemployment benefit, could hardly be expected to end otherwise.

But these were vague, phantom shades of childhood. The moment at which my childhood came to an end was my first truly personal memory. It occurred while I was watching an old cartoon film on television, Dunno in the City of the Sun. Marching across the screen was a column of cheerful, tubby little midgets from Soviet comics. Waving their arms in glee, they sang:

And then along came Mr Frog,His tummy brightest green,His tummy brightest green.He swallowed up a grasshopper,Who had no time to think, no time to guess,What was about to come,What was about to come,That all would end like this …

I knew without a doubt who was the grasshopper they were singing about, the tiny insect Russians for some reason call the ‘little smith’. He was the muscular forger of the new world, seen on all those old posters, tear-off calendars and postage stamps, swinging his hammer high in the air. The jolly little midgets were waving a final salute to the Soviet Union from the safety of their City of the Sun, the road to which the Soviet people had so miserably failed to find.

Seeing the beaming faces of the diminutive marchers, I burst into tears. My grief had nothing, however, to do with nostalgia for the USSR, which I barely remembered. No, the tiny figures marching along through enormous bluebells half as high again as they were, reminded me of something simple that I knew to be of fundamental significance, although I could no longer remember what it was.

The loving, gentle world of my childhood, where every object seemed as huge in scale as these giant flowers and where there were as many happy sunlit paths as in the cartoon film, now lay forever in the past. It was lost in the long grass that had been home to the grasshopper, and now I knew that henceforth it would be the frog I must deal with. The longer this went on, the more indissoluble would be the relationship.

The frog’s belly was indeed green, but it had a black back and on every street corner an armour-plated outpost known as an exchange bureau. Grown-ups believed implicitly in the frog, and only in the frog, but I had a feeling that at some time in the future the frog would betray them too, and then there would be no bringing back the little smith …

The cartoon midgets were the only people who were concerned to bid farewell to the ridiculous country in which I had been born. Even the three whales on whose backs it had rested now pretended that they had had nothing to do with it, and opened a furniture store which they advertised with an endlessly repeated TV jingle: ‘Three whales, three whales, they’re the best, forget the rest …’



Of my own family’s history I knew precisely nothing. But some of the Lares and Penates with which I was surrounded bore the imprint of something dark and mysterious.

First, there was an old black and white print of a lion-woman with a languorously thrown back face, naked breasts, and paws armed with powerful claws. This print hung in the hallway, below a wall light reminiscent of an icon lamp. The feeble illumination it provided in the half-darkness caused the image to take on a fearsome, magical aspect.

In my imagination some such creature must lie in wait for people beyond the ‘threshold of the grave’. This expression, frequently to be heard on my mother’s lips, I learnt by rote before I had any notion of what it meant: to imagine a concept as abstruse as ceasing to exist was beyond my powers. My idea of death was of being translated to another location, probably the place at the end of the path that led up between the paws of the Sphinx in the black and white print.

Another message from the past was contained in the silver knives and forks emblazoned with a crest consisting of a bow and arrow and three cranes in flight, which I found one day in the sideboard my mother usually kept locked.

Once she had done bawling me out for inquisitiveness, my mother informed me this was the family crest of the Baltic Barons von Storckwinkel, the stock from which my father was descended. My own surname was the rather less aristocratic Shtorkin. According to my mother, during the years of War Communism it was common practice to have one’s name surgically operated on, in the hope of concealing its social origins.

My father left the family hearth immediately after I was born. Despite all my efforts, this was the only information I succeeded in gleaning about him. I had only to touch on the subject for my mother to turn pale, light a cigarette and repeat the same phrases, quietly at first but gradually rising to a scream:

‘Get out of here, do you hear? Be off with you, you loathsome scum! Leave me alone, you criminal!’

I assumed that her reaction was connected in some way with a dark and mysterious secret. But when I entered the eighth grade, I learnt more about my father as a result of my mother having to resubmit the paperwork for our living accommodation.

He was a journalist on a leading newspaper. I even found his column on the Internet: a bald man with an ingratiating smile lurking behind gig-lamp specs. The gist of the article was that Russia could not hope to become a normal country until her people and the powers-that-be recognised other people’s property rights as deserving of respect.

As a concept it made complete sense, yet for some reason it failed to inspire me. This may have been because my father was overfond of using expressions I did not at the time understand (‘plebs’, ‘responsible elites’). The smile on the paternal visage was obviously addressed not to me but to the ‘responsible elites’ whose comfortable substance I was being exhorted to respect.

Approaching the end of my school days, I began to think about a profession. Glossy magazines and advertisements vaguely indicated the direction I should take to succeed in life, but the nature of the recommended steps that would lead to the achievement of my goal remained, so far as I could see, a closely guarded secret.

‘If the quantity of fluid passing through a pipeline per unit of time remains static or increases only in a linear progression,’ my physics teacher was fond of intoning during lessons, ‘it is only logical to assume that it will take a long time for the number of people with access to the pipeline to increase.’

The theorem had the ring of plausibility, but rather than encouraging me to join the lemming rush towards the pipeline in question, it made me want to distance myself as far as possible from it. I decided to enter the Institute of African and Asian Countries, to learn some exotic language and work in the tropics.

The course of study needed to gain admittance to the Institute was expensive, and my mother categorically declined to pay for tutors. I appreciated this was due not to simple miserliness but to the lack of money in the family budget, and did not make too much of a fuss. A suggestion that I might approach my father precipitated the usual row, my mother declaring that a real man ought to be able to make it from scratch on his own.

I would have been happy to make it from scratch on my own, but the problem was that I could not see how, or where, to start scratching. The thick fog all around was not in itself the problem: I simply had no idea in which direction I should set off in search of sun and money.

I failed at the first hurdle, an examination essay. The exam was, for some reason, based in the physics faculty of Moscow State University, and the subject was: ‘The Image of the Motherland in my Heart.’ I wrote about the cartoon film in which the small tubby characters had sung about the grasshopper, about the sliced-up hockey puck labelled ‘USSR’, and about the smart, conniving whales … Needless to say I knew in my bones that in any attempt to enter such a prestigious Higher Education establishment it would be suicidal to speak the truth, but I had no choice. What sealed my fate, so I was informed, was a phrase in my essay: ‘Despite everything, I am a patriot: I love our cruel, unjust society living in conditions of permafrost.’ The word ‘society’, apparently, should have been followed by a comma.

On my way to the final interview with the entrance application panel, I caught sight of a drawing on the door depicting a happy-looking snail (its smile, as with the photograph of my father on the Internet, directed at someone else). Below it was a verse from an ancient Japanese poet:

Oh snail!When climbing to the top of Mount Fuji,there is no need to hurry …

Taking out a pen, I added:

There are enough snailson the top of Mount Fujias it is.

The rejection letter was the first real reverse of my life. My response to fate’s decree was to take a job as a lorry unloader at the supermarket not far from our house.

For the first few days I felt as though I had sunk to the very dregs of existence, below the level at which the laws of Social Darwinism could begin to operate. But I soon came to realise that no chasm, no ghetto, could be deep or isolated enough to insulate one against these laws, because any individual cell in the social organism functions according to principles identical to those of society as a whole. I even recall the circumstances in which this became clear to me (I was at the time teetering on the brink of clairvoyance, although this was to become clear only much later.)

I was watching an English film, Dune, in which interstellar travel is accomplished by beings called Navigators who routinely