‘Hey, Arkasha,’ the man in the earphones called out. ‘Don’t laugh now, but we’ll have to go again.’
‘What?’ said a hoarse voice somewhere in the centre of the hall.
Turning towards the voice, Tatarsky saw a strange device: a plywood slope like the ones you see in children’s playgrounds, only higher. The sloping surface broke off above a hammock supported on wooden poles, and an aluminium stepladder led up to its summit. A heavy, elderly man with the face of a veteran policeman was sitting on the floor beside the hammock. He was wearing tracksuit trousers and a tee shirt with an inscription in English: ‘Sick my duck’. Tatarsky thought the inscription too sentimental and not quite grammatically correct.
‘You heard, Arkasha. Let’s go for it again.’
‘How many more times?’ Arkasha mumbled. ‘Im getting dizzy.’
‘Try another shot to loosen you up. So far it’s still kind of tight. I mean it; take one.’
‘The last glass hasn’t hit me yet,’ Arkasha replied, getting up off the floor and wandering over to the engineers. Tatarsky noticed there were black plastic discs attached to his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles; and there were more of them on his body - Tatarsky counted fourteen in all.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘That’s Arkady Korzhakov. No, don’t go getting any ideas. Not Yeltsin’s old bodyguard. He’s just got the same name. Works as Yeltsin’s skeleton. Same weight, same dimensions; and he’s an actor, too. Used to do Shakespeare at the Young People’s Theatre.’
‘But what does he do?’
‘You’ll see in a moment. Like some beer?’
Tatarsky nodded. Morkovin brought over two cans of Tuborg. It gave Tatarsky a strange feeling to see the familiar figure in the white shirt on the can - Tuborg man was still wiping the sweat from his forehead in the same old way, afraid of continuing his final journey.
Arkasha downed a glass of vodka and went back to the slope. He scrambled up the slope and stood motionless at the top of the plywood structure.
‘Shall I start?’ he asked.
‘Hang on,’ said the man in the earphones, ‘we’ll just recalibrate.’
Arkasha squatted down on his haunches and took hold of the edge of the plywood surface with his hand, so that he resembled a huge fat pigeon.
‘What are those washers he’s got on him?’ asked Tatarsky.
"Those are sensors,’ replied Morkovin. ‘Motion-capture technology. He wears them at the points where the skeleton has its ball-joints. When Arkasha moves, we record their trajectory. Then we filter it a little bit, superimpose it on the model and the machine works it all out. It’s a new system, called Star Trak. The hottest thing on the market right now. No wires, thirty-two sensors, works anywhere you like, but the price - you can imagine…’
The man in the earphones turned away from the monitor.
‘Ready,’ he said. ‘Right I’ll run through it from the top. First you hug him, then you invite him to walk down, then you stumble. Only when you lower your arm, make it grander, more majestic. And fall flat, full length. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Arkasha mumbled, and rose carefully to his feet. He was swaying slightly.
‘Let’s go.’
Arkasha turned to his left, opened his arms wide and slowly brought them together in empty space. Tatarsky was amazed at the way his movements were instantly filled with stately grandeur and majestic pomp. At first it put Tatarsky in mind of of Stanislavsky’s system, but then he realised Arkasha was simply having difficulty balancing on such a tiny spot high above the floor and was struggling not to fall. When he opened his arms again, Arkasha gestured expansively for his invisible companion to descend the slope, took a step towards it, swayed on the edge of the plywood precipice and went tumbling clumsily downwards. As he fell he somersaulted twice, and if his heavy frame had not landed in the hammock there would certainly have been broken bones. Having fallen into the hammock, Arkasha carried on lying there, with his arms wrapped round his head. The engineers crowded round the monitor and began arguing about something in quiet voices.
‘What’s it going to be?’ Tatarsky asked.
Without saying a word, Morkovin held out a photograph. Tatarsky saw some kind of hall in the Kremlin with malachite columns and a wide, sweeping marble staircase with a red-carpet-runnner.
‘Listen, why do we show him pissed if he’s only virtual?’
‘Improves the ratings.’
‘This improves his ratings?’
‘Not his rating. What kind of rating can an electromagnetic wave have? The channel’s ratings. Never tried to figure out why it’s forty thousand a minute during prime time news?’
‘I just did. How long has he been… like this?’
‘Since that time he danced in Rostov during the election campaign. When he fell off the stage. We had to get him coded double quick. Remember that by-pass operation he had? There were no end of problems. By the time they finished digitising him, he stank so bad that everyone was working in respirators.
‘But how do they do the face?’ Tatarsky asked. The movement and the expression?’
‘Same thing. Only it’s an optical system, not a magnetic one. "Adaptive optics". And for the hands we have the "Cyber Glove" system. Slice two fingers off one of them - and Boris is your uncle.’
‘Hey, guys,’ said one of the engineers, ‘keep it down a bit, can you? Arkasha’s got another jump to do. Let him rest up.’
‘What?’ said Arkasha, sitting up in the hammock. ‘You lost your marbles, have you?’
‘Let’s go,’ said Morkovin.
The next space Morkovin took Tatarsky into was called the ‘Virtual Studio’. Despite the name, inside there were genuine cameras and studio lights that gave off a pleasant warmth. The studio was a large room with green walls and floor. They were filming several people got up in fashionable rural outfits. They were standing round an empty space and nodding thoughtfully, while one of them rolled a ripe ear of wheat between his hands. Morkovin explained that they were prosperous farmers, who were cheaper to shoot on film than to animate.
‘We tell them more or less which way to look,’ he said, ‘and when to ask questions. Then we can match them up with anyone we like. Have you seen Starship Troopers? Where the star-ship troopers fight the bugs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s the same thing. Only instead of the troopers we have farmers or small businessmen, inside of the automatics we have bread and salt, and instead of the bug we have Zyuganov or Lebed. Then we match them up, paste in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour or the Baikonur launch-pad in the background, copy it to Betacam and put it out on air… Let’s go take a look at the control room as well.’
The control room, located behind a door with the coy inscription ‘Engine Room’, failed to make any particular impression on Tatarsky. The two guards with automatic rifles standing by the door made an impression all right, but the actual premises seemed uninteresting. They consisted of a small room with squeaky parquet flooring and dusty wallpaper with green gladioli that could clearly remember Soviet times very well. There was no furniture in the room, but hanging on one wall was a colour photograph of Yuri Gagarin holding a dove in his hands, and the wall opposite was covered with metal shelving holding numerous identical blue boxes, on which the only decoration was the Silicon Graphics logo, looking like a snowflake. In appearance the boxes were not much different from the device Tatarsky had seen once in Draft Podium. There were no interesting lamps or indicators on these boxes - any old run-of-the-mill transformer might have looked just the same - but Morkovin behaved with extreme solemnity.
‘Azadovsky said you like life to have big tits,’ he said. ‘Well, this is the biggest of the lot. And if it doesn’t excite you yet, that’s just because you’re not used to it yet.’
‘What is it?’
‘A 100/400 render-server. Silicon Graphics tu
rns them out specially for this kind of work - high end. In American terms it’s already outdated, of course, but it does the job for us. All of Europe runs on these, anyway. It can render up to one hundred primary and four hundred secondary politicians.’
‘A massive computer,’ Tatarsky said without enthusiasm.
‘It’s not even a computer. It’s a stand with twenty-four computers controlled from a single keyboard. Four 1,5-giga-hertz processors in every one. Each block calculates the frames in turn and the entire system works a bit like an aviation cannon with revolving barrels. The Americans took big bucks off us for this baby! But what can you do? When everything was just starting up, we didn’t have anything like it. Now, you know yourself, we never will have. The Americans, by the way, are our biggest problem. They keep cutting us back like we were some kind of jerks.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘The processor frequency. First they cut us back by two hundred megahertz for Chechnya. It was really for the pipeline - you realise that, anyway. Then because we stole those loans. And so on, for any old reason at all. Of course, we push things to the limit at night, but they watch TV in the embassy like everyone else. As soon we step up the frequency they pick it up and send round an inspector. It’s plain shameful. A great country like this stuck on four hundred megahertz - and not even our own.’
Morkovin went over to the stand, pulled out a slim blue box and lifted up its lid to expose a liquid-crystal monitor. Below it was a keyboard with a track-ball.
‘Is that the keyboard it’s controlled from?’ Tatarsky asked.
‘Of course not,’ said Morkovin with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘You need clearance to be able to get into the system. All the terminals are upstairs. This is just a check monitor. I want to see what we’re rendering at the moment.’
He prodded at the keys and a window with a progress indicator appeared at the bottom of the screen. It also had several incomprehensible messages in English in it: memory used 5184 M, time elapsed 23:11:12 and something else in very fine script. Then the pathway selected appeared in large letters:
C:/oligarchs/berezka/excesses/field_disgr/slalom.prg.
‘I see,’ said Morkovin. ‘It’s Berezovsky in Switzerland.’
Small squares containing fragments of an image began covering the screen, as though someone was assembling a jigsaw. After a few seconds Tatarsky recognised the familiar face with a few black holes in it still not rendered - he was absolutely astounded by the insane joy shining in the already computed right eye.
‘He’s off skiing, the bastard,’ said Morkovin, ‘and you and me are stuck in here breathing dust.’
‘Why’s the folder called "excesses"? What’s so excessive about skiing?’
‘Instead of those sticks with flags on them the storyboard has him skiing round naked ballerinas,’ Morkovin replied. ‘Some of them have blue ribbons and some of them have red ones. We filmed the girls out on the slope. They were delighted to get a free trip to Switzerland. Two of them are still doing the rounds over there.’
He turned off the control monitor, closed it and pushed the unit back into place. Tatarsky was suddenly struck by an alarming thought. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you say the Americans are doing the same?’
‘Sure. And it started a lot earlier. Reagan was animated all his second term. As for Bush - d’you remember that time he stood beside a helicopter and the hair he’d combed across his bald patch kept lifting up and waving in the air? A real masterpiece. I don’t reckon there’s ever been anything in computer graphics to compare with it. America…’
‘But is it true their copywriters work on our politics?’
‘That’s a load of lies. They can’t even come up with anything any good for themselves. Resolution, numbers of pixels, special effects - no problem. But it’s a country with no soul. All their political creatives are pure shit. They have two candidates for president and only one team of scriptwriters. It’s just full of guys who’ve been given the push by Madison Avenue, because the money’s bad in politics. I’ve been looking through their election campaign material for ages now, and it’s dreadful. If one of them talks about a bridge to the past, then a couple of days later the other one’s bound to start talking about a bridge to the future. For Bob Dole all they did was rewrite the Nike slogan from "just do it" to "just don’t do it". And the best they can come up with is a blow job in the Oral Office… Nah, our scriptwriters are ten times as good. Just look what rounded characters they write. Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Lebed. As good as Chekhov. The Three Sisters. Anyone who says Russia has no brands of its own should have the words rammed down their throat. With the talent we have here, we’ve no need to feel ashamed in front of anyone. Look at that, for instance, you see?’
He nodded at the photograph of Gagarin. Tatarsky took a closer look at it and realised it wasn’t Gagarin at all, but General Lebed in dress uniform, and it wasn’t a dove in his hands but a white rabbit with its ears pressed back. The photograph was so similar to its prototype that it produced a kind of trompe I’oeil effect: for a moment the rabbit in Lebed’s hands actually seemed to be an indecently obese pigeon.
‘A young miner did that,’ said Morkovin. ‘It’s for the cover of our Playboy. The slogan to go with it is: " Russia will be glossy and sassy". For the hungry regions it’s spot on, a bull’s eye - instant association with "sausage". The young guy probably only used to eat every other day, and now he’s one of the top creatives. He still tends to focus on food a lot, though…’
‘Hang on,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I’ve got a good idea. Let me just write it down.’
He took his notebook out of his pocket and wrote:
Silicon Graphics amp; big tits - new concept for the Russian market. Instead of a snowflake the outline of an Immense tit that looks like its been filled out with a silicon implant (casually drawn with a pen, for ‘graphics’). In the animation (the clip) an organic silicon worm crawls out of the nipple and curves itself into a $ sign (model on Spedes-II). Think about it.
‘A rush of sweaty inspiration?’ Morkovin asked. ‘I feel envious. OK, the excursion’s over. Let’s go to the canteen.’
The canteen was still empty. The television was playing away with no sound, and their two glasses and unfinished bottle of Smirnoff Citrus Twist were still standing on the table below it. Morkovin filled the glasses, clinked his own glass against Tatarsky’s without saying a word and drank up. The excursion had left Tatarsky feeling vaguely uneasy.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s one thing I don’t understand. OK, so copywriters write all their texts for them; but who’s responsible for what’s in the texts? Where do we get the subjects from? And how do we decide which way national policy’s going to move tomorrow?’
‘Big business,’ Morkovin answered shortly. ‘You’ve heard of the oligarchs?’
‘Uhuh. You mean, they get together and sort out things? Or do they send in their concepts in written form?’
Morkovin put his thumb over the opening of the bottle, shook it and began gazing at the bubbles - he obviously found something fascinating in the sight. Tatarsky said nothing as he waited for an answer.
‘How can they all get together anywhere,’ Morkovin replied at long last, ‘when all of them are made on the next floor up? You’ve just seen Berezovsky for yourself.’
‘Uhuh,’ Tatarsky responded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, of course. Then who writes the scripts for the oligarchs?’
‘Copywriters. All exactly the same, just one floor higher.’
‘Uhuh. And how do we decide what the oligarchs are going to decide?’
‘Depends on the political situation. "Decide" is only a word, really. In actual fact we don’t have too much choice about it. We’re hemmed in tight by the iron law of necessity. For both sets of them. And for you and me too.’
‘So you mean there aren’t any oligarchs, either? But what about that board downstairs: the Interbank Committee
…?’
‘That’s just to stop the filth from trying to foist their protection on us. We’re the Interbank Committee all right, only all the banks are intercommittee banks. And we’re the committee. That’s the way it is.’
‘I get you,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I think I get you, anyway… That is, hang on there… That means this lot determine that lot, and that lot… That lot determine this lot. But then how… Hang on… Then what’s holding the whole lot up?’
He broke off in a howl of pain: Morkovin had pinched him on the wrist as hard as he could - so hard he’d even torn off a small patch of skin.
‘Don’t you ever,’ he said, leaning over the table and staring darkly into Tatarsky’s eyes, ‘not ever, think about that. Not ever, get it?’
‘But how?’ Tatarsky asked, sensing that the pain had thrown him back from the edge of a deep, dark abyss. ‘How can I not think about it?’
"There’s this technique,’ said Morkovin. ‘Like when you realise that any moment now you’re going to think that thought all the way through, you pinch yourself or you prick yourself with something sharp. In your arm or your leg - it doesn’t matter where. Wherever there are plenty of nerve endings. The way a swimmer pricks his calf when he gets cramp. In order not to drown. And then gradually you build up something like a callus around the thought and it’s no real problem to you to avoid it. Like, you can feel it’s there, only you never think it. And gradually you get used to it. The eighth floor’s supported by the seventh floor, the seventh floor’s supported by the eighth floor; and everywhere, at any specific point and any specific moment, things are stable. Then, when the work comes piling in, and you do a line of coke, you’ll spend the whole day on the run fencing concrete problems. You won’t have time left for the abstract ones.’
Tatarsky drained the rest of the vodka in a single gulp and pinched his own thigh several times. Morkovin gave a sad laugh.
‘Take Azadovsky,’ he said, ‘why d’you think he winds everyone up and comes on heavy like that? Because it never even enters his head that there’s something strange in all of this. People like that are only born once in a hundred years. He’s got a real sense of life on an international scale…’
Babylon Page 20