The soldier turned towards Grim, looked at him for a few seconds through the slits in the helmet, then dropped the sword into its scabbard and stepped into the same hole. The combined steps and hatch immediately rose up, and the hole dissolved into the air. Grim seemed to see the shadow of a small cloud move across the ground, and a second later no traces of the threesome were left. All there was in front of him now was an open field with dead bodies and a trembling striped ribbon.

  Grim turned away.

  The flying walls had been removed almost everywhere. The smoke was gradually being swept away by the wind. But there were no enemies and no Orks to be seen, all he could make out were the charred skeletons of ballistas and countless Orkish corpses, in some places lying on top of each other. And then Grim spotted a thin line of retreating stormtroopers in the field – all that was left of the Orkish force in the main sector.

  He looked towards the Hill of the Ancestors. In the distance he could just about make out the faint outline of the Urkagan’s barge. He couldn’t see anything else yet: the Hill itself and the entire central section of Orkish Slava were veiled with smoke from burning fuel oil.

  And then the cameras launched a rocket salvo.

  Grim had never seen this before. Slim needles of fire flew out of the dark dots in the sky, leaving a white trail in their wake, and hurtled towards the retreating Orks. There were thunderous explosions among them.

  Grim abandoned his moped and ran towards the Hill of the Ancestors.

  The Urkagan’s barge gradually came closer – and the Orks who had survived were hurrying towards it from all sides, as if it were a magnet. But then the barge suddenly swelled up and turned into a ball of fire and black smoke. Many of the soldiers standing around it fell to the ground.

  After that, Grim ran without hurrying and soon he was overtaken by several Orks from the retreating line. And then a gentle, warm strength lifted him up into the sky, carried him across the field and laid him down in the grass – so carefully that he didn’t feel any pain at all.

  It felt good lying in the grass. For some reason he couldn’t move, but he could see everything around him, and in his heart he felt calm and even amused. His cheek was stinging a bit, but that didn’t bother him. For a long time nothing interesting happened in his field of view – there was just a little blue flower swaying downwind, rising up out of the grass right in front of his face, and a little black stream spreading out from the shattered artery of a soldier who had fallen nearby.

  Then Grim saw a guardsman-stormtrooper running across the field. Grim could tell he was a guardsman from the propaganda banner for a banzai charge attached to his back – the white inscription on the black background read:

  I gobble greedily the guts

  Of spoiled little naughty brats!

  If Grim could have laughed he would have.

  The guardsman was so thin, it was clear at a glance that he had eaten nothing but bran and straw all his life or, at the very best, potato peelings. It wasn’t likely that he possessed the gastronomical experience proclaimed on his standard. To look at him, he was a typical Orkish loser – with an expression of vague resentment stamped into his mug.

  The guardsman was staggering and puckering up his face as he ran, without the slightest interest in what was going on – he was clearly thoroughly tired of life’s tempest already. And the universe came to his aid.

  A glittering metal star planted itself in his back. Then another one. The guardsman stumbled and fell. Then Grim saw two green ninja turtles – exactly like the ones on the wrappers of some upper people’s sweets that he had tasted once in his childhood. The turtles were escorted by a battle camera flying low over the ground.

  The first turtle skipped over to the guardsman and thrust a gleaming, crooked sword into his back. The other struck a martial pose and held it until the camera had flown all the way round the turtles. Then they went running on and the camera flew after them.

  For a long time nothing happened and Grim looked at the flower. Then the wind puffed some kind of crumpled document, thickly smeared with red, up against his face.

  Grim realised that it was one of the documents in Upper Mid-Siberian of the kind that under the new law, soldiers had taken with them into battle in order to get the papers bloodied – documents like that were scattered around everywhere in the grass. The piece of paper was lying very close, and he could even read some of the printed text.

  It seemed to be about some barn or other which had been built without due permission, but Grim wasn’t quite sure – his knowledge of Siberian wasn’t sufficient, and most of the sheet was covered thickly with blood. However, even he could see that the verb tenses in the document had been mixed up badly.

  Why are there so many mistakes? he thought morosely, as the paper was blown on its way. Did they translate it into Siberian themselves, or what? They’re trying to save money on a translation bureau, and we’re out here spilling our blood … Or is that the way they work now in the translation bureaus? The bastards have reduced the country to ruin …

  He looked at the field for a few more minutes, and then either fell asleep or lost consciousness.

  When he came round, it was already night. He had a splitting headache. But on the other hand he felt that he could move. Getting up onto his knees, he looked round.

  Above Orkish Slava he could see the scattered lights of battle cameras, looking like fireflies fluttering about in the night. The distant Gates of Victory were concealed by the Hill of the Ancestors, but behind its triangular profile there were searchlight beams flitting about and the red flashes of flares. A woman’s voice, amplified by powerful loudspeakers, rang out across the field:

  ‘Urkish warriors! You are exhausted and wounded! Walk towards the light and you will be helped to return home. Victory! Victory!’

  Spotting the trailers rising up into the air in the distance (he could only see the red and green parking lights), Grim realised that it was true. The people were leaving Orkish Slava. Which meant that the Orks had successfully defended their bitter, blood-soaked land – for the umpteenth time.

  Getting to his feet raggedly, he tried to take a step. Then another one. It worked – no bones seemed to be broken. Then he plodded towards the Gates of Victory, avoiding the corpses and cowering down when yet another camera sped past, its white and green lights glaring into his eyes. They weren’t firing any longer.

  In the silence of the night he could hear the cameras buzzing – like large, smart and very cunning wasps.

  CHAPTER 9

  When I noticed that I was getting seriously irritated by her constant requests to keep track of that Orkish kid, I started analysing my feelings.

  Sometimes my anger had an objective cause. For instance, as I was enlarging the scrap of paper in front of Grim’s face as he lay concussed, I was almost snagged by a Sky Pravda approaching for a rocket attack.

  But I could fly into a fury without any particular reason.

  One thing was clear – if time after time she could rouse me to such a frenzy, she was doing a really first-rate job.

  I only realised that after talking with a specialist on the simulated psychology of suras. If you’ve paid as much for your lifetime companion as I have, you enjoy the right to free consultations and you can ask about anything at all. They even give you something like a session of psychoanalysis.

  With his painstakingly groomed beard and the infinitely gentle look in his eyes, the consultant surologist looked like a genuine womaniser who had broken more than one rubber heart in his time. But then a crack discoursemonger from the special assault group Le Coq d’Ésprit could have looked exactly like that, too.

  I felt too awkward to state my problem straight away, and I thought it would be best if we approached it gradually. First I ought to chat a little bit about general subjects.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said to him, ‘does she really think, after all, or not?’

  He laughed.

  ‘If you only knew how many times I’ve been asked that …’

  ‘Is she rational?’

  ‘She … From the legal point of view, that’s a slippery term. Let me answer like this. Scientists once tried to make a machine think on the basis of the rules of mathematics and logic. And they realised that it’s impossible. In that kind of sense – no, she isn’t rational. But don’t forget that a human being doesn’t use mathematical algorithms at all for thinking. And to be quite honest, nobody needs logic. Perhaps, apart from our military philosophers – in order to demoralise the enemy in conditions of close urban warfare. People take decisions on the basis of precedents and experience. A human being is simply an instrument for the application of culture to reality. And essentially, so is a sura.’

  I’d already heard something of the kind before. The problem is that after explanations like that, you think you’ve understood everything. In actual fact they merely place an opaque cover over the little hole in your mind where the gaping question used to dwell.

  ‘What does “the application of culture to reality” mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Direct perception is transformed into mental representation. And then the mind analyses all of the culture’s precedents associated with the invariants of this representation and selects the most appropriate model of behaviour.’

  ‘But how does it select it?’

  ‘Also on the basis of available experience. But the experience of making a choice. Interaction between mental representations takes place in accordance with the rules determined by the precedent of such interactions.’

  ‘But what is a “mental representation”?’

  The surologist smiled patiently.

  ‘It’s the proximate identified precedent. The sura reproduces this mechanism, with the only difference that there’s no observer of representations, only a set of behavioural patterns loaded into her memory that compete among themselves: the choice made between them depends on the intensity of excitation in sporadically occurring electromagnetic circuits. The most intensive zone of excitation also temporarily becomes her technical “self” …’

  I thought that the last phrase could perfectly well apply to me too, but I didn’t say anything out loud. The surologist went on.

  ‘A sura is a very large and complexly organised data bank into which have been loaded not only precedents of responses, but also precedents of the search for precedents and so on … The programme algorithms perform only a subsidiary function here. But inside her, she has those too. Among others, her settings.’

  ‘But how does she really think when she’s talking to me?’ I asked. ‘Taking it step by step. I want to understand the mechanism.’

  ‘She doesn’t think. I repeat, there isn’t anyone inside her who thinks. But if you want to understand the mechanism … You know, people once invented an experiment called “The Chinese Room”. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘A man who doesn’t know Chinese is sitting in a locked room. Through the window he is handed notes with questions in Chinese. To him they are merely pieces of paper with squiggles drawn on them, and he doesn’t understand what they mean. But in the room he has lots of different books of rules that describe, in detail, how and in what sequence to reply to certain squiggles with different ones. And by following these rules, he hands out through another window replies in Chinese that make everyone standing outside absolutely certain that he knows Chinese. Although he has absolutely no understanding of what questions they are handing him and what his answers mean. Have you pictured that?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘A sura is the same kind of Chinese room, except that it’s automated. Instead of a person with textbooks she has a scanner that reads the hieroglyphs, and a huge database of references and rules that enable her algorithms to select a hieroglyph for the reply.’

  ‘That would be a lot of rules,’ I murmured.

  ‘Quite a number,’ the consultant agreed. ‘She translates every phrase you speak into several symbolic languages, dividing it into numerous layers and levels. Then every layer is correlated with its own database. After that a reverse synthesis of the invariants occurs, and we get a complex response that possesses semantic, stylistic and emotional aspects, which mutually complement each other, creating the impression of a unique, live reply addressed to you personally. Of course, this is a simulation. But children imitate their parents and peers in exactly the same way – often until they reach old age. When you interact with a sura, you’re dealing with the past of mankind.’

  ‘And when you interact with a human being?’

  The surologist shrugged.

  ‘The same thing applies to people. The difference is purely a matter of hygiene. Entering into contact with a human being, you are rummaging in mental humus that is teeming with poisonous worms, but a sura, so to speak, takes you into a museum … Her baggage is far more refined and complete – she is the eternal woman, if you wish, Eve, the archetype … But what exactly about her behaviour is bothering you?’

  It was time to get down to the point. I assumed the air of a jaded, bored bon vivant and asked:

  ‘Tell me, why does bitchiness exist in general? What lies behind it as a biological mechanism?’

  The consultant wasn’t surprised in the least. He obviously had a good idea of the problems that his clients encountered.

  ‘You know, Damilola, that’s such a complex subject that there are two ways it can be talked about. Either the correct way, but in terms that are complicated and hard to understand – and we’ll immediately get tangled up in psychoanalytical terminology. Or the incorrect way, which is simple and comprehensible – and then we’ll drown in the lowest possible kind of cheap cynicism. Your choice?’

  I explained that I was a battle pilot for CINEWS Inc., and so in no danger of drowning in cynicism.

  ‘All right,’ said the consultant, ‘then screw your eyes up.’

  He passed his hand over his face, as if he was stripping everything human off it.

  ‘For about hundred and forty years now, the top class suras that we produce have an adjustable setting for “bitchiness”,’ he began. ‘Like everything in their simulated psychology, this is an imitation of specific female traits. You ask why nature invented bitchiness. But do you know what it is?’

  I was at a loss for an answer. But he didn’t seem to be counting on one.

  ‘It really isn’t easy to formulate. At a first approximation we can say it is an apparently irrational form of behaviour manifested by a woman who is, as a rule, young and beautiful – for bitches who are not beautiful are subjected to involuntary reformatting at a very early stage of their lives – which arouses in a man the desire …’

  ‘To grab her by the ear and bang the back of her head against a wall for a long time,’ I interrupted. ‘Or better still, against the floor. It’s harder.’

  ‘Possibly,’ the consultant said with a smile. ‘You must agree that the most important thing about such behaviour is its offensive irrationality. It costs a woman nothing to behave like a human being, rather than put a man through the maximum of unpleasant experiences. And what’s more, more often than not it doesn’t even require any effort from her – on the contrary, she has to make a serious effort to be a bitch … And of course, this sort of thing doesn’t exist only in our culture. You probably don’t know that the Orks have a book called The Book of Orkasms for conducting divinations before battle …’

  ‘Oh, indeed I do,’ I said, ‘I know that very well. I’ve even seen an actual divination.’

  ‘There is one passage there that is called just that – “On the Female Heart”. Would you like me to read it to you?’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m allergic to Orkish wisdom.’

  The consultant didn’t take offence.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s just that there it’s put with brutal animalistic directness … Anyway, the essential point is simple. Nature strewed the path towards the moment of coitus with roses, but immediately after it the blossoms wither and the hormonally induced distortions of our perception disappear. Nature is also a bitch in her own way – she is extremely economical and never treats us to psychotropic substances unless it is absolutely necessary. Therefore, immediately after the act of love, for a few seconds we see all the insanity of what is happening with clear eyes – and we realise that for some reason or other, we have got tangled up in a murky business whose outcome is unclear, with the prospect of large outlays of money and great emotional distress, for which the only reward is that spasm which has only just finished, and which has absolutely nothing to do with us personally, but is derived exclusively from the ancient mechanism for the reproduction of protein bodies. In the case of a sura of your class, you don’t think of the emotional torment that is in store for you, you simply remember the loan taken out to buy her.’

  ‘Don’t hit below the belt,’ I told him.

  ‘All right,’ the consultant agreed. ‘Of course, you have to understand the most important thing – as a biological and social agent, a woman has little interest in you taking a sober view of her for very long. You say your sura is operating on maximum bitchiness. What does she usually say immediately before intercourse – and straight afterwards?’

  I realised that I had to be frank, as if he was a doctor.

  ‘“Go away, you slobbery freak, I’m sick of you.”’ I replied. ‘Or, for instance, “I’ve got a headache.” But she stopped saying that because I used to laugh. After intercourse she often turns away to face the wall, jabbing me in the stomach with her elbow. Sometimes there are tears. A combination of all these factors is also possible.’