An Orkish bureaucrat has to study the language for ten years at first, but after that he’s the lord of the world. Every official document must first be translated into Upper Mid-Siberian and then officially logged as received, following which a decision from the executive authority must be appended, in Upper Mid-Siberian – and only then is it translated back for the petitioners. And if there is even a single mistake in the document, it can be declared invalid. All the Orks’ official commissions and translation bureaus – and they have more of those than they have pigsties – live and grow fat off this.

  Upper Mid-Siberian has made virtually no inroads into colloquial speech. The only exception is the name of their country. They call it the Urkainian Urkaganate, or Urkaine, and they call themselves Urks (apparently this was a hasty revamping of the word ‘ukry’ – a High Russian name for an ancient Slavic tribe – although there are other philological hypotheses). In everyday speech the word ‘Urk’ is unpopular – it belongs to high-flown, pompous style and is regarded as fusty, bureaucratic and old-fashioned. But it was the origin of the Church English ‘Orkland’ and ‘Orks’.

  The Urks, especially the urban Urks, who absorb our culture through every pore of their skin and try to follow our lead in just about everything, have called themselves Orks, after the Church English manner, for centuries, deliberately exaggerating the ‘o’ sound. For them it’s a way of expressing their protest against authoritarian despotism and emphasising their own civilisational preference – all of which suits our motion picture industry just fine. And so the word ‘Ork’ has almost completely supplanted the term ‘Urk’, and even our news channels start calling them ‘Urks’ only when the dark storm clouds of history gather and I am ordered into the skies.

  When I say ‘ordered into the skies’, that doesn’t mean of course that they instruct me to carry out the initial attack. Any novice can handle that. The task I’m entrusted with is filming events on temple celluloid for the news immediately before the war. Anyone in the information business will realise how important this work is.

  In fact, an immense number of people work on every war, but what they do is invisible to outsiders. Wars usually begin when the Orkish authorities suppress the latest revolutionary protest too harshly (they don’t know how to do it any other way). And it just so happens that the latest revolutionary protest occurs when it’s time to shoot a new batch of snuffs. About once a year. Sometimes not quite so often. Many people can’t understand how it is that the Orks’ revolts break out at precisely the right time. That’s not something I take care of myself, of course – but the mechanism is clear to me.

  To this day people in the Orkish villages still have fits of religious terror at the sight of microwave ovens. They can’t understand what’s happening: there’s no flame, no one touches the hamburger, but it keeps getting hotter and hotter. It’s very simple to do – you just have to create an electromagnetic field that induces violent agitation in the hamburger’s molecules. The Orkish revolutions are cooked up in exactly the same way as hamburgers, with one difference: the field that makes the particles of shit in Orkish craniums vibrate is not electromagnetic, but informational.

  We don’t even need to send any emissaries to them. It’s enough for some global metaphor or other – and all of our metaphors are global – to hint to the proud Orkish countryside that if the love of freedom should suddenly awaken there, certain people will be on hand to help. And then the love of freedom is guaranteed to awaken in this countryside, purely in the hope of making a profit – because the central authorities will pay the village elders more and more every day not to awaken completely, but the advance of history will be impossible to halter. And what’s more, we won’t spend a single manitou on all this, although we could print absolutely any amount for them. We’ll simply sit back and observe the events with interest. And when the process attains the required intensity, we’ll start bombing – whoever we need for the footage.

  I can’t see anything especially reprehensible about all this. Our information channels don’t lie. The Orks really are ruled by exceptionally vile scumbags, who deserve to be bombed at any moment, and if their regime isn’t actually evil in its pure form, that’s merely because it’s significantly diluted by degenerative senility.

  In any case, we don’t have to justify ourselves to anyone. Condemn us if you like, but unfortunately we’re the best thing this world has to offer. And we’re not the only ones who think so – the Orks do too.

  Informational support for the revolutionary movement in Orkland is provided by sommeliers from a different department, and I’m responsible solely and exclusively for the video footage. Which is substantially more important, from both the artistic and religious points of view. Especially at the very beginning of the war, when the high tide of the initial headlines has already receded (‘THE WORLD HAS WARNED THE ORKS …’), but there isn’t any decent feedback as yet.

  For the last few wars I’ve worked as a team with Bernard-Henri Montaigne Montesquieu – a name that you’ve probably heard. In fact, Bernard-Henri was my neighbour (the rumours of his lavish lifestyle are greatly exaggerated). We didn’t become friends, because I didn’t approve of some of his habits, but we were close acquaintances, and in the professional sense we made a good, solid team. I doubled as trailing wingman and cameraman and he was the frontman-gunlayer (or, as he himself once dubbed it in some esoteric mix of Church English and Old French, the aimer d’aimer).

  He preferred to call himself a philosopher. That was how he was presented in the news. But in the payroll register, which is kept in Church English, his job title is given unambiguously as ‘crack discoursemonger first grade’. In actual fact he’s another military man, just like me. But there’s no contradiction in this. We’re not children after all; we understand that the power of contemporary philosophy lies not in syllogisms, but in close air support. And that’s the reason why the Orks frighten their children with that word ‘discoursemonger’.

  Just as every genuine philosopher is supposed to do, Bernard-Henri wrote an obscure book in Old French. It’s called Les Feuilles Mortes, which means ‘Dead Leaves’ (he himself translated it slightly differently, as Dead Pages). Crack discoursemongers pride themselves on their knowledge of this language and trace their family trees back to Old French thinkers, inventing similar names for themselves.

  Of course, this is unadulterated travesty, burlesque – pure and simple. They, however, take the matter very seriously – their special assault group is called Le Coq d’Ésprit, and in public they constantly toss around incomprehensible phrases punctuated with guttural ‘r’ sounds. But I know for certain that Bernard-Henri knew only a few sentences in Old French and even listened to songs with a translation. So, putting two and two together, the book must have been written for him by a creative articulator with a French language module.

  We know how these treatises in Old French are composed: take some obscure ancient quotation, stick it into a manitou, tap your fingers on the menu for a couple of seconds, and it’s done – heap the blocks of words all the way up to the ceiling, if you like. But the other gunlayers of our aerial strike force don’t even go to that much trouble. So Bernard-Henri was a conscientious professional, and if it wasn’t for that grim hobby of his, the on-screen dictionary would devote a lot more space to him.

  To this day many people regard him as some kind of altruistic knight of spirit and truth. He wasn’t. But I don’t condemn him for that.

  Life’s too short, and the sweet drops of honey along the way are all too few. A normal public intellectual prefers to spin his lies comfortably along the force lines of the discourse, which start and end somewhere in the upper hemisphere of Big Byz. Sometimes, in a safe area, he allows himself a free-spirited crow – usually in Old French, to avoid accidentally hurting anyone’s feelings. And also, obviously, he denounces the repressive Orkish regime. And that’s all.

  Any other behaviour is economically unjustifiable. In Church English this is called ‘smart free speech’ – an art mastered to perfection by all participants in the global Spirit Pride.

  It’s not as simple as it might seem. A certain internal flexibility isn’t enough, you also need to know something about the way these force lines actually curve, which the Orks can never understand. The lines also have a persistent tendency to shift their position steadily, so the work is almost as edgy and risky as a stockbroker’s.

  Ah yes, by the way – the creative articulator surmises that the word ‘smart’ (meaning ‘astute’), was formed from the ancient sign for a ‘dollar’ (as a manitou once used to be called) and ‘mart’ – an abbreviated form of ‘market’. It could well be true. But on its own, a mastery of ‘smart free speech’ is a rather low-paid skill, since the supply significantly exceeds the demand.

  Don’t get the idea that I look down on all these guys, though. Basically I’m no better than them. As a commercial visual artist I’m undoubtedly a cowardly conformist – a state of affairs that I’m just fine with. But I’m also an audacious and experienced flyer, and that’s a fact. As well as being a resourceful and ardent lover, although it’s unlikely that she to whom my love aspires will be able to appreciate that adequately. But more about that later.

  Anyway, it all started with Bernard-Henri and myself being given an assignment for the newsreels – to film the formal video-pretext for War No. 221, the so-called ‘casus belly’ (the dictionaries claim that this Church English expression derives from an ancient idiom meaning ‘to tear [the enemy’s] stomach’). To film actually means ‘to organise’. Bernard-Henri and I understand this without it needing to be said, since we have already started two wars together – No. 220 and No. 218. As for No. 219, it was started by our creative competitors.

  Organising a casus belly is an esoteric, delicate assignment and by no means easy. An assignment that is only entrusted to the very finest specialists. That is, to us.

  The most convincing and indisputable video-pretext for a war, on which absolutely all the critics, commentators and pundits in modern visual culture are agreed (as they have been for centuries) is considered to be the so-called ‘damsel in distress’. I apologise again for the Church English, but there’s no other way to say it. And I also actually like the sound of these menacing words that positively reek of gunpowder smoke.

  A ‘damsel in distress’ is not simply ‘a young woman in anguish’ as this phrase is translated. Let’s just say that if an Orkish maiden is sleeping in a hayloft somewhere and has a nightmare that makes her break out in a sweat and sets her trembling all over, you can’t start bombing because of that. If the young Orkish maiden has fallen into a pile of shit, been given a thick ear by her granny and is sitting in a puddle, roaring her head off, that’s no help to you, although her anguish might be entirely sincere. No, a ‘damsel in distress’ presupposes, firstly, offended innocence and, secondly, heavily armed evil hovering over it.

  Generating a scene like that at any required degree of resolution is a simple five-minute job for our sommeliers. But CINEWS Inc. only does that sort of thing in its entertainment schedule. Everything that finds its way into the news clips must actually happen on the physical plane and become part of the Light of the Universe. ‘Thou shalt keep thy newsreel wholesome,’ said Manitou. Well, perhaps he didn’t actually say it, but that’s what we’ve been told.

  It’s for religious reasons that news clips are shot on temple celluloid film. Photons burn their way into a light-sensitive emulsion prepared according to ancient formulae by votaries of the House of Manitou, precisely as it was done many hundreds of years ago (even the width of the film is devoutly reproduced).

  The film has to be flammable – because the Formulations contain the phrase ‘it blazes like the blood of Manitou’. And the reason why a living imprint of light needs to be preserved is explained during initiation into the Mysteries, but I’ve been out of short pants so long now that I can’t remember it – and anyway, I don’t wish to stick my nose into questions of theology. The really important thing here is that a film camera takes up an awful lot of space in my Hannelore. If not for the camera, plus the rockets and the cannons, the rest of the technology could be tucked away in a container the size of a standard dildo – but there’s nothing to be done, if that’s what Manitou wants.

  When it comes to the news, we can’t falsify the representation of events. But Manitou, as far as the theologians’ understanding goes, won’t object if we give these events a little nudge to help them happen. But no more than a mere smidgen, of course – and here you have a borderline that can only be sensed by genuine professionals. Such as Bernard-Henri and myself. We don’t falsify reality. But we can arrange a caesarean section, so to speak, to reveal what it’s pregnant with – in a convenient place and at the right time.

  We waited several days for a suitable moment for the operation. Then an informant in the Urkagan’s retinue informed us that Torn Durex, whose hands were already stained with the blood of rebel Orks (a wing of combat cameras had managed to forestall a massive bloody massacre with a missile strike, but the Kagan still had the collateral casualties on his conscience) was returning to Slava (that’s what the Orkish capital is called) by the northern road.

  Bernard-Henri and I immediately flew out on an intercept course.

  When I say ‘we’, it means that my Hannelore flew there, armed with film and shells, and taking my conscious perception with her, while my body stayed at home, swivelling its head in combat glasses and pressing buttons on levers. But Bernard-Henri was actually delivered to Orkland in person. That’s his job: it’s a risk, of course, but with my Hannelore there, only a very small one.

  The transport platform dropped Bernard-Henri off at the side of the road a couple of kilometres from Slava – and then rose back up into the clouds to avoid wasting its battery on camouflage.

  The mission had begun.

  Bernard-Henri told me to survey the terrain and locate some suitable material while he prayed. Prayed, indeed … In reality the old satyr was simply tanking up on dope, the way he always did before a combat shooting. But the senior sommeliers turn a blind eye to that, because it makes Bernard-Henri look better on camera. And it goes without saying that the most important thing of all in the work of an on-screen discoursemonger is the way he looks while he’s talking. Expansive gestures, open posture, a calm, slow speaking voice, a confident manner. No scratching your head or sticking your hands in your pockets. We live in a visual culture, and the semantic content of on-screen babble accounts for only fifteen per cent of the overall effect. All the rest is in the picture.

  Bernard-Henri’s substances start taking full effect after about an hour, or an hour and a half – exactly when the Kagan’s convoy was due to appear. There was plenty of time, but I couldn’t afford to waste it – I had to get everything set up urgently.

  I climbed higher.

  The terrain was rather depressing. That is, on one side of the road it was actually quite picturesque, as far as that word can be applied to Orkland – there were hemp and banana plantations, a little river and a couple of stinking Orkish villages. But on the other side lay Orkland’s most dismal jungle. It’s not dismal simply on its own account, but because of what comes after it. After only a few hundred metres the trees thin out, giving way to an immense swamp which also serves as a cemetery.

  The Orks call it the Swamp of Memory – this is where the whole city of Slava buries its dead. From the air it looks like a murky, grey-green lake, with the veins of narrow streams running into it. It’s dotted all over with dark specks – from the air they look like freckles. These are floating Orkish coffins, the so-called ‘sputniks’ – round boats covered with a roof of straw with four sticks jutting upwards. The Orks believe that in these garbage pails their souls fly off into outer space to Manitou. I’m not so sure about that.

  The Orks deliberately planted the forest along the edge of the swamp (yes, such things really do happen – an Ork planting a sapling). They did it to drive back the stinking, bluish-green slurry from the road and their vegetable gardens. When the Kagan passes by, he’s always accompanied by bodyguards, since it’s easy to set up an ambush here. And the area is thinly populated in any case: the Orks are afraid of their own dead. Someone once hammered it into their heads that each generation inevitably betrays the one before it, and fear of their ancestors has assumed the proportions of a collective neurosis for them. A neurosis supported by the fat crocodiles living in the swamp, although they don’t bother to come out of the water: the sputniks are more than enough for them.

  In ancient times, so-called ‘sages’ used to settle here in an attempt to enhance their spiritual status by daily proximity to death. And the urban Orks used to come to them to have their fortunes told from The Book of Orkasms – they believed that in this way they could ask Manitou Himself a question (I’m not joking, the Orks really do have such a book, although it was very probably written by our sommeliers).

  But under the Orkish emperor Loss Solid, the free-trading sages were abolished, and all fortune tellers were made subordinate to the General Staff. Since then the only people who go into the cemetery forest are young couples who have nowhere to be alone. They’re afraid of dead people and crocodiles, of course, but love is stronger than death. If I was a philosopher, like Bernard-Henri, I would definitely sing a hymn of praise in Old French to the secret festival of life that blossoms so brightly in these thickets of decay.

  I could search for suitable material near the villages, where Orkish wenches of a tender age wander, pasturing their cattle. Or I could fly above the margin of the jungle, along the road. I chose the latter course, and after flying literally for only five minutes, I came across what I needed.