"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

'But just what is the Tower of Babel?'
He swayed on his feet, feeling the earth swing round smoothly beneath
him. He only stayed upright because the axis of the earth's rotation ran
precisely through the top of his head.
The confusion of tongues coincides in time with the creation of the
tower. When there is a confusion of tongues, then the Tower of Babel starts
to rise. Or maybe it doesn't rise;
maybe it's just that the entrance to the ziggurat opens up. Yes, of
course. There's the entrance right there.
A pair of large gates decorated with three-dimensional red stars had
appeared in the barbed-wire fence along which Tatarsky was walking. Above
them blazed a powerful lamp surmounted by a cowl, and the bright-blue light
illuminated the numerous graffiti covering the green sheet-metal of the
gates. Tatarsky stopped.
For a minute or two he studied the traditional mid-Russian attempts to
write the names of the surrounding villages in Latin script, various names
surmounted by crude crowns, symbolic representations of a penis and a vulva,
the English verbs 'to fuck' and 'to suck' in the third person singular of
the present tense, but all peppered with incomprehensible apostrophes and
abundant logos from the music business. Then his gaze fell on something
strange.
It was a large inscription - significantly larger than all the rest,
stretching right across the gates - written in fluorescent orange paint (it
gleamed brightly in the rays of the electric lamp): THIS GAME HAS NO NAME.
The moment Tatarsky read it, all the other ethnographic material ceased
to register in his awareness; his consciousness held nothing but these
glittering words. He seemed to understand their meaning at a very deep
level, and although he could hardly have explained it to anyone else, that
meaning undoubtedly required him to climb over the gates. It proved not to
be difficult.
Behind the gates was an abandoned building site, a wide area of waste
ground with only sparse indications of any human presence. At the centre of
the site stood an unfinished building - either the foundations of some
intergalactic radio telescope or a strangely designed multi-storey parking
lot:
the construction work had been broken off at a stage when only the
load-bearing structures and walls were in place. The structure looked like a
stepped cylinder made up of several concrete boxes standing one on top of
another. Round them wound a spiral roadway on reinforced concrete supports,
which ended at the top box, surmounted by a small cubic tower with a red
signal lamp.
Tatarsky thought it must be one of those military construction projects
begun in the seventies that had failed to save the empire, but had shaped
the aesthetic of 'Star Wars'. He recalled Darth Vader and his asthmatic
wheezing and marvelled at what a wonderful metaphor he was for the career
communist: probably somewhere on his starship he had a dialysis machine and
two teams of cardiologists, and Tatarsky recalled vaguely that there had
been hints at something of the kind in the film. But in his present state
thinking about Darth Vader was dangerous.
The unfinished building was illuminated by three or four floodlights