Free Empire V by Victor Pelevin Page A

installing a pirate Turkish version of Windows 95 in a crucially important computer with no upgrade available, completely unprotected against spyware, Trojans and viruses, and with the added bonus – courtesy of an unknown geek – of a fucked-up dynamic *.dll library which causes the computer to crash every two minutes. What people need is a free, uncluttered, open-source architecture of the soul. But Judeo-Christians are extremely crafty and have succeeded in branding anyone who advocates any such architecture as the Antichrist. Truly, to continue crapping so far into the future from a fraudulent arse stuck in the distant past must be counted the most impressive of the miracles wrought by Judeo-Christianity .
    Naturally, some of these maxims may strike the reader as somewhat overconfident for a tyro vampire. In my defence I can only say that these sorts of concepts and ideas never meant much, if anything, to me.
    I mastered Discourse quickly and easily, although it set me on a generally misanthropic course. Glamour, however, presented me with difficulties from the very start. I understood almost everything up until the moment when Baldur said:
    â€˜Some experts state that there is no such thing as ideology in contemporary society, because none has been formulated in an unequivocal manner. But this is a delusion. The ideology of anonymous dictatorship is Glamour.’
    I was instantly gripped by a sense of terminal bewilderment.
    â€˜But what is the Glamour of anonymous dictatorship then?’
    â€˜Rama,’ said Baldur, visibly irritated, ‘this is where we began in the first lesson. The Glamour of anonymous dictatorship is its Discourse.’
    The words spoken by Baldur and Jehovah were always in themselves models of clarity, but it was hard for me to understand how images of bimbos with diamond embellishments to their silicone-enhanced tits could represent the ideology of a regime.
    Happily, there was an effective method of seeking clarification for knotty questions of this sort. If I could not understand something Baldur said, I would ask Jehovah at the next lesson, and get an alternative explanation. And if something Jehovah said was not completely clear, I asked Baldur. The result was that I forged upwards like a rock climber jamming his feet alternately against the walls of a chimney.
    â€˜Why does Baldur say that Glamour is an ideology?’ I asked Jehovah.
    â€˜Ideology is a description of the invisible aim which justifies visible means,’ he replied. ‘Glamour may be regarded as an ideology because it provides an answer to the question: “In the name of what was all this done?”’
    â€˜What do you mean by “all this”?’
    â€˜Look at your history textbook and read through the chapter headings.’
    By this stage I had absorbed enough concepts and terminology to be able to carry on a conversation at an acceptable level.
    â€˜How then would you define the core ideology of Glamour?’
    â€˜Very simple,’ said Jehovah. ‘Disguise. Masking.’
    â€˜Disguise? Changing clothes?’
    â€˜Yes, but “changing” has to be interpreted in a wide sense. Change embraces such things as moving from one part of town to another, say from Kashirka to Rublevka, or from Rublevka to London, transplanting skin from the buttocks to the face, changing sex, all transformations of that sort. In the same way, all contemporary Discourse leads merely to a repackaging of those few topics that are permitted to be discussed in public. This is why we say that Discourse is a variant of Glamour and Glamour is a variant of Discourse. Do you understand now?’
    â€˜Not very romantic,’ I said.
    â€˜Well, what did you expect?’
    â€˜Glamour seems to me to promise something miraculous. Didn’t you yourself tell me that the original meaning of the word was “sorcery”? Isn’t that why people place such value on