That’s all there is to it. But we spend so many years writing insightful verse and poems, we just can’t calm down, and worst of all, we hide the truth from ourselves, because it threatens investments that have already been made … Although when you get right down to it, the truth is well known to everyone – at least in its practical, everyday aspect.

  A woman is not a human being. And a prostitute is the only thing that can save a man from a woman.

  The articulator advised me twice to remove the word ‘rubber’ in the previous paragraph. What if an elderly, socially active feminist, one of those who raise our age of consent year after year, should come across this page – perhaps she might croak right on the spot.

  Okay, so I’ll do it – simply out of my love for art.

  The articulator still doesn’t know what’s in store for elderly feminists even without any effort on my part. But the floor is already healing over noticeably, and there is very little time left.

  The consultant said there was another reason why Kaya might have left. After all, bitchiness wasn’t the only parameter that she had set on maximum. It turns out that the maximum spirituality setting includes an algorithm that orders the sura to share this spirituality of hers with those ‘whom she can still help’, as the consultant put it. Possibly my little darling looked straight through me with an indifferent gaze and then, like an ancient torpedo, performed a spiral search in the dark depths of our world, and that mongrel cur appeared in her sights.

  Or perhaps she really was stricken by love.

  That seems a particularly bitter possibility to me – and a highly probable one. After all, human love is also a programmable event, a particular kind of tunnel effect – impelled by the sexual instinct, it punches straight through all the matrices of consciousness. Something similar could quite well have happened inside Kaya. Ultimately, electrical circuits behave according to the same laws whether it’s a simulation or not.

  But I don’t see anything exalted in this. Love is a repulsive, egotistical, inhumane feeling, because obsession with its object is accompanied by ruthless indifference to others. And in any case, it makes no difference now.

  As I said, I don’t regret at all that Grim is alive. I’m even glad of it.

  Do you know why?

  Because I myself could not have devised a more terrible revenge.

  Grim was my symbolic rival, who got all the affection and loving caresses stolen from me by maximum bitchiness. But what will happen when I depart? The full weight of maximum bitchiness will come crashing down on him, it’s inevitable. So may his skeleton crack under this hammer of the witches! I think the day is not far off when Chloe will seem to him like an angel who flew through his life, and at the mention of Sacred War No. 221 nostalgic tears will course abundantly down his flaxen eyelashes. The fun will start when Kaya realises that I’m not around anymore – and now Grim is not the symbolic rival, but the new target.

  That’s why I have spent so many days working on the articulator, honing this stiletto, this posthumous firework display, which will allow me to surprise my little Orkish friend even from the next world. And what a joy it is that I shall be helped in this for the last time by my old Hannelore, every bit as dead as me.

  Kaya, can you hear me? Yoo-hoo!

  Grim will like his new manitou.

  Admittedly, after Kaya managed to get into my control terminal and copy the passwords, she acquired the ability to change her own settings herself. But I doubt very much that maximum bitchiness will ever allow her to take herself off maximum bitchiness – no matter what pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jungo her speech synthesisers might process day after day. If anybody has studied that rubber soul closely, I have.

  But that’s enough about Orks and their battlefront girlfriends.

  I want to say something else that’s important.

  The whole of Big Byz thought that it was carrying out the will of Manitou – but then why is our world crashing down, why is the universe slipping out from under our feet? What should a sincerely religious man make of this?

  Probably Manitou no longer wishes us to believe that we are acquainted with him in person, and especially that we know his plans and secrets.

  Manitou does not wish to have professional servants and proclaimers of His will, and our sacraments are repugnant to Him. He does not want us to nourish Him with the blood of others, offering Him our immaculate gerontophilic snuffs as a gift. How can He love us if even our own devices for concupiscence, created in our own image and likeness, flee from us? Why would He want a world where only a rubber doll is capable of unconditional love?

  We are vile in the eyes of Manitou, and I am glad that I have lived to see the moment when I am not afraid to say this out loud. Everything will be different now. But in what way – only Manitou knows.

  What will remain of me in the universe when I go to a place where no rubber woman will ever break my heart again? Perhaps a certain likeness of a multidimensional information wave. Possibly this wave will splash up onto the sand of other worlds, and what I have heard from Kaya will help the new me to start my ascent into the heights, where I shall acquire peace and my spirit will become free and light. Or perhaps I am destined to become an Orkish pig and end my days in a sty (with or without a 3D manitou). In any case, it will no longer be me, because that ‘I’ never existed at all – right, Kaya? So is it even worth guessing?

  Will I be remembered on earth?

  I’m sure that my emblem for Sacred War No. 221 will be included in many creative textbooks and historical annals. But for how long will mankind annalise them, or whatever it is they do with them annals? I couldn’t give a damn anyway. What difference does it make whether the world will remember me or not, if I shall be only too glad to forget it, and myself, too?

  And how impetuously the finale approaches. I still have half an hour – just enough to write in a full stop and transmit this book to Hannelore. The creative articulator is suggesting to me several entirely worthy options for a final phrase, including quotations.

  Here, for instance, from the ancient composer of texts Ivan Bunin, who, when it was his turn to kick the bucket (I don’t entirely understand the articulator’s joke, but there’s no time to go into it), decided to say something regal and magnificent in conclusion, and quoted an even more ancient sommelier by the name of Maupassant.

  The passage is already on my manitou:

  A freshening breeze drove us over a tremulous wave, I heard a distant bell – somewhere they were pealing, the Angelus was ringing out … How I love this light and fresh morning hour, when people are still asleep, but the earth is already awakening! You breathe in, you drink, you see the corporeal life of the world being born – life, the mystery of which is our eternal and great torment …

  ‘Bernard is thin, agile, exceptionally devoted to cleanliness and order, attentive and vigilant. He is a pure-hearted, faithful man and a superb sailor …’

  That was what Maupassant said about Bernard. But Bernard said the following about himself:

  ‘I think I was a good sailor. Je crois bien que j’etais un bon marin.’

  He said that as he was dying.

  But what did he wish to express with these words? Joy in the knowledge that, living on this earth, he was of use to his neighbour by being a good sailor? No: it was that, together with life, God gives each of us one talent or another and imposes on us the sacred duty of not burying it in the ground. To what end, why? We do not know this. But we must know that everything in this world that is incomprehensible to us definitely must have some meaning, some exalted divine intention, directed towards making this world ‘a good place’, and that the zealous fulfilment of this divine intention is always our merit in His eyes, and therefore both joy and pride to us … I think that I, as an artist, have earned the right to say about myself, in these final days of mine, something similar to what Bernard said as he was dying.

  Thanks for the hint, dear manitou, but here my path and that of the articulator must part.

  The articulator suggests that I crack a witty joke about Bernard and Bernard-Henri (say, for instance: What difference does it make what all these Saint Bernards whinged about before they died?) and then conclude with the phrase: I think I was a good pilot. Je crois bien que j’etais un bon pilote.

  But I don’t want to be like the people of the past who earned their bread with their brows so soaked in sweat that even on the edge of the grave they were tormented by their professional complexes (my remorseless little darling would probably add that they were simply looking for an excuse to get off on an inner high one last time). As the free and enlightened horseman number four (farewell, Dürer above my work station!) I wish to pose the question more broadly. So that my words could be repeated in his final moment by any Damilola of this world – both ancient, and contemporary, and the one still to come hereafter.

  Kaya was sent to be my comfort and joy – although she was, of course, just a rubber doll. But if she told the truth about how my mind is arranged, why would Manitou want a rubber doll by the name of ‘man’? And why would Manitou wish us to feel pain when smouldering butts are stubbed out against our skin?

  Alas, there are no answers. Or rather, there are – but of such a kind that even more riddles spring up.

  Then again, Kaya used to say that we ourselves are the answer.

  We ourselves – and what we do with life, our own and that of other people.

  Or perhaps I’m confusing things. Perhaps it was the late Bernard-Henri who said that – during the war before last, when he was fraternising with the Orks who had passed the auditions and I was filming him on temple celluloid. Words are the same for everyone, after all, and who on earth hasn’t tried putting them together this way or other?

  That’s all, there’s no time left. I take my leave.

  Manitou, I hope I have done my work well.

  A Gollancz eBook

  Original text copyright © Victor Pelevin 2011

  English translation copyright © Andrew Bromfield 2014

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Victor Pelevin to be identified as the author of this work and of Andrew Bromfield to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2015 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 473 21305 0

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

 

 

  Victor Pelevin, S.N.U.F.F.

 

 

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