Ice Trilogy

by Vladimir Sorokin

  The brothers sat down at the table in silence.

  For a few minutes they sat, preparing their hearts. Then Shua spoke.

  “You know that the Brotherhood has acquired the last three. The search is complete.”

  A slight tremor passed through everyone at the table. Of course they knew. But they had restrained themselves, not permitting any joy to disturb the balance of their hearts.

  “The time for the Last Achievement has arrived. We must decide everything. And eliminate whatever hinders us.”

  “The meat is the only thing in our way,” uttered Uf. “It’s coagulating, sensing that the end is approaching.”

  “The Brotherhood must defend itself,” Rim responded. “We are able.”

  “We are ABLE!” they all declared.

  “The meat is counting on a rift,” Atrii said. “We shall move the shields!”

  “We shall move the shields!” they all declared, and confirmed with the might of their hearts.

  “The ships have left their moorings,” said Tsefog. “They will be in transit for six days.”

  “During this time the last acquired will cleanse themselves through heart crying,” Shua concluded.

  “There are eighteen weak ones,” said Uf. “I know this.”

  “They may grow in number,” declared Uf. “I know this. The meat in each of them will begin to resist. But their fear must be removed. Four of the weak are flickering,” Uf continued. “They could leave. Then we would have to wait until they reincarnate.”

  “We need the support of the Mighty,” said Atrii. “Khram and Gorn are not with us, they are on the island.”

  “Their hearts are tired,” Uf summed up.

  “They have given so much to the Last Search,” Shua responded.

  “They will support as well as they can,” Rim declared.

  “The Circle of the Mighty is needed,” concluded Tsefog.

  “The Circle of the Mighty is needed!” they all cried out.

  Their hearts spoke. Hundreds of the Mighty across the entire Earth responded. The hearts of Khram and Gorn responded as well.

  Forty-four minutes passed.

  The Circle of the Mighty shone: WE ARE READY!

  Distant hearts were quenched.

  When everyone at the table had calmed down, Rim spoke.

  “It’s time!”

  All five removed delicate gold chains from around their necks. On each chain hung a tiny gold pin. Each took his pin. Five hands holding these pins stretched toward the gold circle in the center of the table. Inside the circle five barely perceptible apertures could be made out. The brothers’ hands fit the pins into the openings, and froze.

  An intermittent signal beeped.

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

  The brothers pressed on the pins. The pins became embedded in the circle. The circle began to move smoothly out of the table. A gold cylinder rose over the table. It stopped. A hologram flashed above it, the emblem of the ICE Corporation: a shining heart flanked by two Ice hammers. The Ice hammers disappeared, the shining heart alone remained. A woman’s voice spoke.

  “The Search program is complete. The Transformation program has been launched.”

  Everyone around the table cried out. They grabbed one anothers’ hands. Their hearts flared. Each of the five knew what the Transformation was. All had participated in its development, each knew the role he had played in it, each had contributed his light and earthly intelligence to it. They had all been waiting for it, moving toward it, and craving it, and their hearts had been patient in anticipation of it. They had all tried to live until it came to pass. But now each of them simply felt it with his heart. The hearts of Rim, Shua, Uf, Atrii, and Tsefog felt the signal issuing from the silvery-blue skyscraper to all four corners of the Earth: “Transformation!”

  Each of the 23,000 had to receive this signal. He had to go and find each brother, each sister. He had to touch all of them. In thousands of cell phones, in dozens of languages, the word “Transformation” appeared; thousands of faxes printed the word on paper, it lit up on thousands of monitors, the young lips of brothers whispered it to thousands of helpless old people and infants whose hearts were already prepared: “Transformation!”

  Ten hands interlaced, five hearts flaming with the Joy of Anticipating the Main Event of the Brotherhood. The hearts above the gold cylinder shone. The signal was flying to all corners of the Earth: “Transformation!”

  Hundred of kilometers away, in the house on the island, Khram’s and Gorn’s eyes opened slowly: their tired hearts rejoiced, with a quiet joy...

  The Key

  On Wednesday morning, cutting out her 121st strip, Olga hurt her finger, and Horst, the brigade leader, transferred her to the old people. Settling at the table in a corner of the workshop, she began to sort the cut-out strips, placing them in plastic boxes. An older Rumanian woman who didn’t speak English sat next to her; across from her, a gray-haired, trembling Icelander; and next to him, that German, Ernst Wolf. Olga had had lunch and dinner with him several times; he was interesting to her. When Olga ended up in the geriatric corner with a bandaged finger, Wolf smiled and winked at her like an old friend. It seemed to her that over the last month his face had grown even more yellow and withered, but he remained unfailingly cheerful, composed, and collected. He constantly joked with her in his old-fashioned English, learned in confinement. Olga liked the old man for some reason, although she, like her deceased parents, didn’t have much love for Germans. But a kind of enchanting, charming calm radiated from Wolf. His unflappableness reassured Olga, infected her with confidence, which was so missing here in the bunker. Over their meals Wolf had told her a great deal. She knew everything about him and almost everything about the Brotherhood of the Light. And the most surprising thing for Olga was that Wolf believed in the Brotherhood’s mission, he believed in the 23,000, believed that once they gathered, the Brothers of the Light would bring the history of the Earth and humankind to an end. At first Olga laughed at the old man condescendingly, then she argued with him until she was hoarse. But then she began thinking seriously.

  “You don’t understand, my dear, to what extent our planet is unique,” Wolf told her. “Believe me, there is and has never been anything like it. All those arguments about brothers in intelligence, about new forms of life on other planets, are utter nonsense. On a billion billion planets there is no life and can be none. The Earth is alone in the Universe, she’s totally unique. And Homo sapiens — is twice, thrice unique. And if this is so, then the Earth must be seen as an anomaly, as a strange plant, as a lacuna in the body of the Universe.”

  “But perhaps — as a miracle?” Olga objected.

  “Miracles are anomalies, Olga. And any anomaly in the Universe is a violation of its equilibrium, the destruction of order. A straight line can be drawn between two points, through three, through thirty-three. But there’s no sense in drawing a straight line through a single point. Because one point is just a point. It’s not a path. It’s not a pattern consistent with natural laws. Therefore you and I, like our entire planet, are a mistake of the Universe. And we have no future.”

  “So that means you want the Earth to disappear?”

  “I’m not against it, given my age and my present situation.”

  “And so you’re on the side of the Brotherhood?”

  “Oh, no, Olga, not at all. I am not on the side of the Brotherhood.”

  “But why? After all, in your opinion they are striving to correct the Universe’s mistake.”

  “And they will try hard to do this, believe me. But I’m not on their side.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know how to speak with the heart. That’s the first thing. The second is that they are physiologically repulsive to me. All in all,” he said, “put it this way — Old Man Wolf is simply jealous of them!”

  It was after this conversation that Olga began to think seriously about certain things. Lying on her bunk at night, her thoughts went on,
accompanied by the quiet murmur of the air conditioner and the women’s heavy breathing and snoring.

  “What if it’s actually true? What do we really know about our world? That the Earth is round? That spring will always follow winter? That humans evolved from the apes? That we’re smarter than animals? In school and at college they told me that the Universe was infinite, that everything derived from the Big Bang, from a spark...something flashed, and the stars and planets were formed. Everyone believes this. And what was before that? A void? Why? And who created the void? Where did it come from? It just appeared all by itself? People believe in what they can agree on...A thousand years ago they believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe. And before that — that the Earth stood on the backs of four elephants...If this Brotherhood really believes — if they are spending huge amounts of money based on what they believe in, committing crimes, kidnapping and killing people, if such a powerful corporation is seriously engaged in this — then perhaps it isn’t the ravings of a sordid bunch of sect members, but the pure truth. And people are in fact divided into the chosen, who are able to speak with the heart, and the rest, who are trash. And the chosen ones will become rays of light at some point, and the Earth will disappear. And we will all die, like idiots...”

  Olga tried to share her thoughts with her neighbors in that cursed bunker. Bjorn listened to her attentively, then in his customary tedious manner refuted Olga’s concerns regarding the Earth’s destruction. He was certain that the kidnappings, the video games with the ice, and all the rest — was only the tip of the iceberg of the ICE Corporation, which was headed by a powerful group of international criminals who were trying to take power in China. Bjorn claimed that ICE was involved in secret experiments with genetic engineering. The goal of these experiments was the creation of a new race founded on entirely new moral principles, an elite that was capable of ruling a powerful country like China, and of achieving world dominance.

  “Given its rapid technological progress, China needs only one thing to rule the world — a new ideology,” Bjorn said with conviction. “A new ideology not only for China but for humankind in general.”

  Olga listened to this six-foot-seven graduate of his university’s physics and mathematics department, who had grown up in a family of Swedish mathematicians who worshipped theoretical physics, who kept portraits of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Einstein at home, who trusted only formulas and technology; she listened to this giant who dreamed of a career as a great scientist, but who, because of an event that didn’t depend on formulas, had ended up here, in a bunker where he skinned dead dogs, and...she didn’t believe him. Bjorn’s logic was too linear, his arguments were too correct. Whereas everything that had happened to him was totally illogical, was anomalous, and eluded logical analysis.

  But Bjorn held stubbornly to his views.

  He immediately swept aside any arguments about the Brotherhood of the Light, without letting Olga finish her thought.

  “Olga, since childhood I have believed only in things that are subject to the laws of physics. Light is a directed stream of photons. Do you want me to write down the formula?”

  Olga grew tired of arguing with him. She felt like she kept hitting a wall that wouldn’t budge an inch.

  “I was taught to believe only in what can be touched or understood logically. What I don’t understand doesn’t exist for me!” he said.

  Bjorn’s parents had been confirmed atheists, part of the left-leaning Swedish scientific elite. In the turmoil of ’68 his father had joined with the Swedish Maoists, going to university lectures wearing a yellow armband with the Chinese character that meant “self-criticism” on it and carrying the little red book of the Great Helmsman.

  Olga’s parents had also been atheists. And they likewise taught Olga to believe only in what can be understood and touched.

  “Whatever doesn’t participate in the exchange of commodities simply doesn’t exist,” the professor of macroeconomics at the university Olga attended like to say.

  Olga never believed in God, or in the supernatural. But as a Jew she believed in fate. Although fate wasn’t so simple, either.

  “Fate takes its own path,” her mother would say. “You have to feel your own fate, believe in it, and not scare it off.”

  Her father would also mutter something about the “power of destiny.” But for the most part the question remained murky.

  “The millions of Jews who died in the concentration camps also believed in fate, believed in God,” Olga thought. “So what? Fate turned away from them, God didn’t help. So that means you have to believe only in your own powers and rely only on yourself.”

  Now, having become the victim of a mysterious Brotherhood, having lost her parents, and having ended up in this sinister bunker, Olga had lost belief in herself. Over the last two months she had realized there was something greater than herself, more powerful than her own will.

  But what? Fate?

  Bjorn didn’t help Olga answer the question.

  With a wry smile, the old man Wolf said horrible things she didn’t want to believe. Wolf’s calm arguments emitted a feeling of inescapable death and nonbeing. Olga tried to discuss all of this with other inhabitants of the bunker. Liz, who sometimes gave Olga a bit of affection at night, was convinced that the people who had kidnapped her and maimed her with the ice hammer and the people who now kept her in the bunker weren’t connected. The infamous Michael Laird, who had lured them all to Guangzhou, had simply used information from police sources and organized a site for victims of this unknown cult in order to sell them all into slavery.

  “But who needs straps from the hides of dead dogs?” Olga objected.

  “Sweetie, in today’s world everything’s for sale,” Liz replied. “I’m sure the Chinese use these strips for medicinal purposes. And they probably sell them for a lot of money to wealthy Europeans.”

  “But why can’t they openly skin the corpses? There’s a ton of cheap labor in China! To kidnap foreigners, support them, feed them, hide them — and force them to skin dogs! Nonsense!” Olga answered indignantly.

  “Olga, it may very well be that these dogs...aren’t quite so simple...” Liz intoned significantly.

  “What are they — talking dogs?” Olga suggested sarcastically.

  “A lot of us here are convinced that the dogs are infected with something. Or irradiated.”

  “Liz, some people have been locked up here for years. Why haven’t they gotten sick?”

  “Maybe all of us already have leukemia. The teeth of two of the Rumanian women have blackened. A lot of us have problems with menstruation, with digestion...The men are quietly going mad...”

  “That’s all from isolation! From a lack of vitamins! Leukemia has very definite symptoms.”

  “They aren’t just regular dogs, believe me,” Liz insisted.

  Olga felt that Liz was dragging her into her own mania. But the other Friends of Dead Bitches weren’t any better. Their opinions split them into three groups. The first group claimed that this was all the madness of a powerful corporation that was trying to unite ancient cults with the newest technologies in its quest for power over people; the second believed that it was somehow connected with forbidden experiments in cloning people; and the third believed that new psychotropic weapons were being tried out on the inhabitants of the bunker. The Russians had their own ideas, and, as always, they “knew absolutely everything.”

  “It’s just one of the oligarchs who’s lost his marbles,” the gruff fellow Pyotr told Olga. “He watched too many films, read all kinds of shit. There’s a lot of goons out there in the world, just turn on MTV — they show all kinds of mutants there! But there aren’t that many of them with money: You’ve got bin Laden, and who else? So another one’s turned up. I tell you Olga, I’d bet my life on it — this asshole is one of us, a Russian! I’m dead sure. He’s getting off on it! Nothing else! And there ain’t no secrets. Or maybe it’s a group of mutants!”

  “T
he shits’ve sniffed their noses right off and now they’re just enjoying the high,” Lyosha seconded Pyotr.

  “Besides, China’s close by, it’s easy to make arrangements.” Igor, the quiet one, shook his head.

  “But the ICE Corporation doesn’t belong to Russians,” Olga objected.

  “Everything can be bought!” Pyotr shook his red head. “Every sign, every brandy.”

  “The world went stark raving mad a long time ago, don’t you get it?” Boris asked her.

  Olga did get it. On September 11, at home in New York, in NoHo, it had truly seemed to her that the world had gone mad. During the catastrophe, she stood at her south-facing window and watched the twin towers burning. When they collapsed, and lower Manhattan was engulfed in an impenetrable cloud of smoke and cement dust, the earth shook underfoot. Also shaken was Olga’s certainty that there was something fixed, unshakable, constant, positive in life, something which people had calmly relied on — a family, career, love, children, creative work, even money for that matter. For centuries people had stood fast on all of this. Now, though, everything had somehow cracked, collapsed, crept underfoot. Her parents had died. And even that wasn’t enough. Now this bunker with its dead dogs! A real horror film...

  Looking at Pyotr’s cheerfully spiteful face, caught up in his stories about “international” gangsters, Olga could barely hold back tears: The horror of it was that this could quite well be true! After September 11, after the blows with the ice hammer to the chest, after the death of her closest relatives, after the site www.icehammervictims.org, after the kidnapping, after the bunker, after the smell of carrion and thousands of dog-skin straps — anything, anything at all, everything could be true!

  “The world has changed quite dramatically, Olga,” Wolf said to her after a meal. “An agonistic quality has appeared, don’t you think?”

  “Do you think that it’s...because of the Brotherhood?”