‘Excellent,’ said the consultant. ‘And what do you feel?’

  ‘Rage. Sometimes revulsion for myself. Sometimes a desire to hit her.’

  ‘Do this rage and revulsion come over you immediately?’

  ‘Instantly,’ I replied.

  ‘Is it an intense feeling?’

  ‘Extremely,’ I said. ‘It makes it impossible to think of anything else.’

  ‘Is the post-coital sober view of things maintained while this happens?

  I realised where he was heading.

  ‘You mean to say that a sura … That is, a woman, deliberately muddies the water …’

  ‘Precisely. So that the suspended matter, thus stirred up, would render invisible the fundamental truths about her role in a man’s destiny, which we have already discussed. Their concealment is facilitated by the severe psychological and emotional overload to which she subjects her partner as she endeavours to divest him of his clarity of perception by any means possible.

  ‘In reality “bitchiness” is not a negative personality trait, but a distinctive kind of counterpoint to the reproductive instinct that has been generated by human culture. A sura’s programming merely simulates this ancient mechanism.’

  ‘In this area your sommeliers have attained perfection,’ I said.

  The consultant smiled.

  ‘You think you’re paying a compliment, but that’s true,’ he replied. ‘The post-coital syndrome that we have discussed is by no means all that a client encounters at maximum bitchiness. I’d like to warn you about another effect that often occurs here. This is the so-called “symbolic rival”.’

  I felt my heart lurch in my chest. This was it – at last we were talking about the big question.

  ‘The strategy of a sura operating on maximum bitchiness may include an attempt to arouse a reaction of jealousy in you. To do this, she starts simulating an interest in some other man, more often than not a young member of the household, or in the case of couples living on their own, a film hero or a news anchor. For instance, the sura constantly asks her owner to put on a snuff for her where an actor she has chosen would be playing a lead, or to turn on the news programme. Here her behaviour can … er … vary. Sometimes she extols the virtues of the symbolic rival, sometimes she says nothing – allowing her owner to draw his own conclusions. This technique has quite a devastating effect on most men. Let me tell you a secret – one of the main reasons why we annul the warranty for suras operating in this mode is that the owners regularly inflict on them such serious mechanical damage as to require, subsequently, expensive in-house repairs. The company simply can’t afford to pay for all that …’

  ‘And what can you do if you constantly fall victim to this technique?’

  ‘Sometimes you can try to kill the programme. But don’t do it too often.’

  ‘Kill the programme?’ I echoed. ‘How?’

  ‘When you sense that the sura is about to ask you for a date with the symbolic rival, show her that you know about it and that you are feeling annoyed.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ the consultant said with a smile.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to be able to picture what will happen inside her head. Or wherever.’

  The consultant thought this over for a moment.

  ‘You’re touching on a sensitive area that borders on confidential know-how,’ he said. ‘But since you have bought the most expensive model on the market, I’ll try to accommodate you. Only I don’t know how extensive your knowledge in this area is … But then, as a military man, you’re probably familiar with the operating principle of a guided weapon?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You work with rockets,’ the consultant continued, ‘but we used certain algorithms that were employed in the final generation of antisubmarine torpedoes. It’s almost the same thing, although no one has made torpedoes for several centuries already … Strangely enough, it proved to be one of the best models for simulating female behaviour. Do you know how a torpedo that has been thrown off its target works?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ I replied.

  ‘When the target-pursuit programme fails, the torpedo sets a spiral course and scans the space around it until it has investigated a defined area. If a target matching the search parameters is not located, the torpedo sets a straight course, moves to a different point and repeats the spiral search, and so on for as long as its power lasts. Have you pictured that?’

  ‘Aerial rockets function slightly differently,’ I said, ‘but, overall, that’s about the size of it. So what?’

  ‘A sura and – dare I say it – a woman acts in exactly the same way. With the exception that the space in which she sets her spiral course when the programme fails is not physical, but informational. Although at a social gala, even her movement through space … Anyway, that’s not important. Putting it simply, if the programme fails, the “random subject search” operator is activated. The sura changes the subject, but only in order to regroup. To do this, she sorts through her data baggage until she finds an appropriate informational object that she can present to the other person – so that, acting from this new point, she can gradually return to the basic algorithm for precedent search.’

  ‘How is this new point selected?’

  ‘The search parameters are largely determined by the situation, therefore the choice of a new subject is effectively unpredictable. Everything’s like it is in life.’

  ‘And how is it in life?’ I asked ironically.

  The consultant smiled.

  ‘If you throw the torpedo off its course, it flutters its eyelashes a few times and then, with charming female inconsistency, attempts to return you to a condition of mental torpor, which makes sober assessment of her presence in your life impossible. Any of the emotions in the dark spectrum can be used to induce brain paralysis – wrath, anxiety, wounded pride, self-doubt – and also, of course, carnal desire.’

  ‘One way or another, it all sounds pretty bleak,’ I muttered.

  ‘Perhaps the greatest joy lies precisely in throwing oneself on the mercy of this torrent,’ the consultant said drily.

  I realised that the moment of candour was over and the person facing me was once again the formal representative of the selling firm. But I was grateful for at least this brief glimmer of sincerity, which is such a rare thing between people in our time.

  I killed the connection with the consultant, went to the happiness room, entered the password and took Kaya off pause (all this time she had been sitting motionless on the sofa). When I got back she gave me a sullen look – she can’t stand it when I put her on pause. I ran though the instructions on killing the programme in my mind, and before she could say anything to me I blurted out:

  ‘Come on then, baby. Ask me again to show you that Orkish degenerate. That yellow-eyed untermensch. That juvenile scumbag. Go ahead, ask. I’ll do anything for you, sweetie pie.’

  Kaya blinked a few times.

  ‘Why untermensch, especially?’ she asked. ‘You’re exactly the same kind of untermensch, aren’t you, sweetheart. You’re like family, you and Grim.’

  ‘We what?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘You’re both Russian. Your surname’s Karpov, isn’t it?’

  I turned round, went to the happiness room and put her on pause again. And then I sat down at the manitou and got down to some research.

  It turned out that my honeybunch was right and wrong.

  Strangely enough, moreover, she was very probably right about me, but almost certainly wrong about Grim.

  Yes, Grim and all Orks speak High Russian. But so what? Everyone here knows that language too, since the offglobe has been hanging above Siberia for many hundreds of years. But during the last few centuries, down below there have been so many climate migrations, wars of liberation, genocides, artificial insemination programmes and other paradigm shifts that now their state language is quite different, and there’s no way they can trace their own roots, even if the law allowed them to (but they’re not allowed – as the priests and turds put it – ‘to introduce no difference into the Singular’).

  And there’s no question of any nationality. The Orks haven’t had any surnames since way back. They only have an Individual Tracking Number, which is applied to their right hand. It takes the place of a surname and all the rest of it. Grim’s full name, for instance, is Grim ITN 1 3505 00 148 41 0, and Chloe’s is Chloe ITN 1 3598 47 660 12 2. And who they are, really, in terms of nationality, Manitou only knows.

  But my surname really is Karpov. It’s Russian, from the name of a fish (a battle pilot among fish, let me add: a carp flies at low altitude just above the bottom and eats everything that appears in its sights). My ancestors could possibly have had blood ties with Grim’s. But since then a huge amount of water has flowed under the bridge, and today it’s equally hard to say whether we, those who live topside, have nationalities or not.

  In the old sense, definitely not.

  Rather, we have certain professional and social communities, united by a common cultural ritual that has come down to us from ancient times. When you choose a profession for yourself you also choose, as it were, the shadow of the nationality whose spirit illuminates it, and join a specific club.

  For instance, the ‘Germans’ are the best mechanics and technologists. They devise and build the super-expensive motorenwagens for the rich Orkish bureaucracy, brew forty different kinds of beer, shout ‘Hoch!’ and fly to visit Orkish prostitutes in the Yellow Zone, which is also where their assembly lines are located. They don’t like suras. They even have a saying: ‘a rubber woman is the first step towards alcohol-free beer’ (apparently some northern sage said that). But that doesn’t mean at all that they are plodding, obtuse philistines. In their souls, ‘Germans’ are romantics, secretly they always remain faithful to their ideals, and at the end of their lives simply adore taking cyanide to the music of Wagner. They say that was the way Eureich’s offglobe was scuttled – after worldwide demand for motorenwagens had plummeted to almost zero.

  The ‘Japanese’ draw 2D-japorn in silhouette, shadow, curtain and other forms, as well as derp-hentai – everything that doesn’t formally come under the law on underage pornography. They assemble all sorts of ingenious electronic wanking devices and also, of course, suras – thank you, lads, from all us pupophiles, although it is not we who are your true brothers, but the ‘Germans’. The ‘Japanese’ have the same kind of suicidal-heroic culture as the manufacturers of motorenwagens, only it’s infused with masturbation instead of beer. Even the passing centuries are powerless to do anything about this, and I suppose there’s a certain beauty in that. It’s no accident that so many old snuffs are devoted to the destruction of the Yamato offglobe. They used to say that under Loss Liquid they were considering in earnest how to flood the Circus so as to film it on water, but the technical sommeliers and the House of Manitou’s Department of Public Morality forbade it.

  The ‘Americans’ … America, great America, which once saved the world from Hitler, Bin Laden, Count Dooku, Megatron and Professor Moriarty! The ‘Americans’ shoot snuffs. They also make the manitous on which we watch snuffs. And they also, of course, print the manitous we use to pay for all this. They also had a hand in my Kaya – the historians tell us that the sura is the offspring of a marriage between the Japanese love doll and the American unmanned aerial drone. The rich guys in the upper hemisphere – what else can I say about them? The envious tongues claim that they secretly worship a huge bat, which they keep hidden somewhere in the region of the central reactor – and that they occasionally find processor chips, with state-of-the-art architecture, in its droppings. But that, of course, is the whinging of unalloyed envy, and I’m not going to relay it.

  The ‘Jews’ are the priests who hold the copyright on Manitou – they even say that Manitou the Antichrist was a Jew from the Bronx. They also shoot snuffs, together with the Americans – and it’s not hard to guess who’ll be top dog there. The neural tissue of the global brain, which invented gravity interest and the loan drive – no wonder they’re the first to get it in the neck from everyone who wants to make the world beautiful, muscular and easy to understand.

  The ‘French’ are Big Byz’s strike-force intellectuals. Anyone can start a war, but no one else will do it so elegantly. All the best discoursemongers from the Le Coq d’Ésprit special assault group have to know at least a little bit of Old French. They’re great guys. The military men even have a saying: ‘as disciplined as a platoon of French intellectuals’. Meaning discipline of the mind, naturally. But also of the heart – because not every heart would be able to bleed selectively on account of the assigned goal, and circumvent any number of false targets released by the enemy; manoeuvring with supreme precision, in any weather conditions and also at an immense distance. As a combat pilot, I understand what a demanding task that is.

  The ‘English’ – in their youth, they make the best protest punks, and at a mature age, the best bank clerks. A great nation. It’s no accident that even now we handle all our business documentation in Church English. It’s impossible to list all the things they have done for civilisation. Without the English, there would be no fish & chips. They invented tabloids and hypocrisy, and were the first to unite the world under its flag – and to this day they keep its sacred flame burning. I’m not joking. Where would we be today without hypocrisy? Under the law on the age of consent, no one would be able to make love until the age of forty-six. They have my respect and admiration. Rule Britannia!

  But all this is more by way of residual national traits, the shadow, as it were, of ancient traditions which still live on among us today. And everything that I have just mentioned is each individual’s cultural and professional choice, rather than the call of the blood.

  But what does it mean to be ‘Russian’?

  There isn’t any specialisation associated with it.

  It seems to be as incomprehensible today as it was seven hundred years ago.

  What did it mean then, if we can believe the on-screen dictionaries?

  Riding in a German motorenwagen, watching Asian porn, paying with American money, believing in the Jewish God, quoting French discoursemongers, proudly distancing yourself from ‘the thieves in power’ – and trying all the time to steal something, if only in digital form. In short, the heart of the world and a universal synthesis of all cultures.

  Our ancient Russian tradition was built around the fact that it had nothing of its own, apart from the language in which the conceptualisation of this ‘nothing’ took place. The Jews did something similar, but they called their void God and managed to sell it at a profit to the more stupid nations. But what about us?

  We tried to sell mankind the absence of God. From the metaphysical point of view, that’s a much bigger deal, and at first it actually went pretty well – that’s why our peoples were once considered to be mystical rivals. But while it’s possible to put a national stamp on God, how do you put it on what doesn’t exist? That was the origin of the ancient crisis of civilisation suffered by my ancestors, the problem of self-identification and low self-esteem, leading constantly to the stranglehold of clerical and bureaucratic obscurantism and anal tyranny.

  But all this was a long time ago, so long ago that now it’s only of interest to historians. Or suras, functioning at peak bitchiness and spirituality.

  That’s the kind of tangled undergrowth a man has to plunge into because a rubber woman bats her eyelashes a couple of times. But after all, it’s interesting, isn’t it? When else would I ever have paused to consider all this?

  It had taken me several hours to get a thoroughgoing grasp of the issue, but at least now I was ready to continue the conversation. I went into the happiness room and took my little darling off pause.

  When I got back Kaya was sitting on the sofa, looking at me with that same sullen expression, as if the hours that had dropped out of her life had never existed.

  ‘I’m not Russian,’ I told her. ‘Or rather, I’m post-Russian, I don’t share any common destiny with the lads who failed to make the move to the offglobe in good time. And Grim isn’t Russian either. He’s an Ork, with a number instead of a nationality. The only thing Russian in all of this is the language that we’re speaking now. And even that’s not Russian, but High Russian. Not to be confused with Upper Mid-Siberian. There haven’t been any nationalities in Siberia for three hundred years now. Have you got all that, my little fool?’

  She blinked a few times.

  ‘You know what,’ she said, ‘if you ever want to put me on pause again, don’t do it when you’re diving into the on-screen dictionary, but when you’ve decided to make love to me. All right?’

  And she glowered at me. With the kind of look, you know, that seemed to contain a hint – not even a hint, but the slight probability, tending almost to zero, of a hint, that today she didn’t find me as repulsive as usual.

  And again, she completely threw me for a loop, inasmuch as I was ready for a serious discussion of nations and ethnicities, but not at all for this.

  But she had turned away already and was looking at the floor now, but with a little grin on her face that made it clear she was really looking at me and, moreover, she was watching me extremely closely – and with all her body.

  Well, I’m not made of ceramic composite armour, am I? And a minute later she was already shouting at me:

  ‘I don’t want it on the table! How many times have I told you I don’t like it on the table, bonehead! It’s hard! It makes no difference to your fat backside, but it’s too rough for me. Too rough!’

  Rough.

  A very precise word. Yes, it turned out rough, coarse and glorious. Although too fast.

  Afterwards, when I was lying on the sofa, feeling drained and grateful, she came up, sat down beside me, leaned down to me and kissed me on the nose. I already knew that now she would ask me to show her Grim. But I didn’t initiate her programme failure. What for? Life is life. Let the young heart beat as it wishes.