Grim drove away from the mammoth and stopped the car.

  ‘Where to now?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s go over that way,’ Chloe replied. ‘See, where there’s something red jutting up.’

  ‘That’s where the central front was,’ said Grim, pressing on the pedal.

  In the central sector, traces of the battle was especially frequent – the ground had been all ploughed up and he had to drive carefully to avoid having a wheel drop into a crater.

  Grim skirted round a line of soldiers lying on the ground in their tall hats and bright-red tunics. The soldiers were small dummies, connected together by a frame with an electrical hose. They were crudely made and looked like a fence blown over in a storm. The line had once been mounted on little spiked wheels that were positioned after every third dummy. Grim guessed that this was where the infantry square he had heard about fought, and the stormtroopers had managed to tear the front row off the overall structure at the cost of inconceivable casualties.

  In the central sector, the density of fire had been so great that several battle cameras that happened to be in the shells’ trajectory had been shot down. It wasn’t likely that any of the Orkish heroes who fought here had survived.

  Several ruined vampire’s nests drifted past the jeep. They could see the vampires in them, half-risen from under the ground – their power must have been cut off just at the moment when they were preparing to jump out onto the surface. The people’s shells were to blame for this too – they had severed the cable. The vampires had big yellow eyes that looked like the rear lights of a jeep. Complicated levers and springs could be divined under their black cloaks. They were still spine-chilling to look at even now, but in the smoke and semi-darkness they must really have driven Orks out of their minds.

  At last the signs of battle came to an end. Grim drove on and soon the sky was partially obscured by the wall that enclosed the Circus. Right in front of it there was a strip of old concrete, with grass growing out of the cracks in it. They had driven right across Orkish Slava.

  ‘What are those pieces of paper lying around everywhere?’ asked Chloe.

  ‘Documents for bloodstaining,’ Grim replied. ‘Only they’re useless …’

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the wall. There was no Orkish plasterwork on it here, and its original rounded form was visible – the wall was like a gigantic wave, frozen an instant before it hit the shore. This fall had been going on for many centuries: the grey concrete was covered in cracks, but so far time had not been able to do anything to it.

  Grim couldn’t even imagine the gigantic machines capable of constructing something like that. True, at school someone had told him that in ancient times construction work wasn’t performed by machines, but by tiny little beetles invisible to the eye, and to an onlooker it seemed as if the walls were growing by themselves. But no one knew if this was true or not, because the only thing left of the ancient buildings was their vitrified foundations. And the Orks themselves built with wood and brick. Not so very long ago they had still known how to make decent concrete blocks, but now they turned out worse and worse all the time.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Grim. ‘Now what, shall we go back?’

  Chloe thought a bit.

  ‘Get out,’ she told him.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Let’s wave our arms about. The camera directed us in here for some reason.’

  ‘Which direction shall we wave them in?’

  ‘Just upwards. Only straighten up your cap.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Bernard-Henri used to say that a modern man – if he’s not an Ork, of course – should be sizing up the way he looks all the time, and act as if he’s being filmed. Because the shooting can start at any moment.’

  ‘What makes you think there’s a camera up there?’

  ‘There might not be one,’ said Chloe. ‘But we have to act as if there is one. And then they’ll definitely come for us.’

  ‘It’s kind of stupid,’ Grim muttered.

  ‘And you’re so very smart,’ replied Chloe. ‘But where would we be now if I’d listened to you?’

  Grim could have said a lot about that, but he decided not to argue. He opened the door and got out of the car.

  Walking over to him, Chloe put her arm round his shoulder and told him:

  ‘Now raise you head, smile and wave your hand.’

  Grim squinted at her.

  There was already a smile on Chloe’s face – such a wide, toothy smile that there was no point in asking if it was sincere or not. She looked into the grey cloud and waved her hand. Grim tried to copy her smile (it didn’t turn out all that well, of course) and also waved his open hand through the air a few times. He felt like a total idiot and soon lowered his hand, but Chloe hissed through her smile:

  ‘Wave, you dimwit!’

  After another minute even Chloe got fed up of waving. Grim saw the bewilderment and anguish in her face.

  And then a miracle happened.

  Right in front of them a triangular door suddenly opened, then flipped downward, turning into a short ramp. The ramp led into mysterious semi-darkness. In there, beyond the slightest possible doubt, a new world began. And the entrance to it had been hidden in mid-air, only a metre above the ground – hidden so well that Grim could easily have banged his head against it if he had taken another couple of steps.

  Standing on the threshold of the new world was a very fat man, his arms round a huge bunch of flowers. He was dressed in a broad, brightly coloured dressing-gown, and he had the same kind of baseball cap on his head as Grim, with a silver knot and the word ‘CINEWS’ on it. His genial face radiated happiness. He looked as if he was terribly glad to see Grim and Chloe – or he simply knew that he was being filmed by several invisible cameras at the same time.

  The first thing he did was make a strange, extremely energetic movement – throwing his arms apart and sort of nudging the flowers with his belly. Grim and Chloe were showered with a fragrant, multicoloured rain.

  ‘Hello, my friends!’ said the fat man. ‘Greetings, Chloe! Greetings, Grim! My name is Damilola Karpov and we have been acquainted with each other at a distance for many, many days. You were promised that you would live among people. Did you think you had been forgotten? But people always keep their word. Welcome to Big Byz!’

  PART 2.

  ASHES OF

  THE GLOOMY

  CHAPTER 13

  The ancient Orks and the late Bernard-Henri weren’t the only ones who liked to talk about power and truth. An advert for assault cameras makes the same claim: power is where the Pravda is (if you didn’t know, pravda is the Old Russian word for truth). Well, the same goes for my Hannelore. That is, in case anyone still hasn’t caught on yet, it’s not where stoned butts with their worries and munchies jangle their rusty iron, but where the invisible eye of people with caring hearts hangs in the air.

  Apparently Grim had never realised this, but he had been saved by the CINEWS Inc. baseball cap he was wearing when he drove into Orkish Slava.

  At first the senior sommeliers were going to neatly blot the young Ork out, together with his ambiguous media past. If they had wanted to take only Chloe into the future I would, of course, have obeyed the order, and Kaya would have had to look for a new metaphorical … symbolic … I’ve forgotten what the surologists call it.

  These shots hadn’t gone into a snuff and such a thing was permissible from the religious point of view. And Chloe’s appearance at Orkish Slava could have been reshot from scratch for the news. No problems were anticipated with this, and Grim would most likely have been wiped right there in the Circus, seeing as the corpses were still being cleared away and there were places available in the mass grave if anyone wanted one – or even if he didn’t. Then this whole story would have turned out differently.

  But one of the senior sommeliers who were monitoring the incoming material liked the look of Grim’s head in our uniform baseball cap. Apparently it was a good match for his bruises. They contacted Alena-Libertina. She didn’t object.

  Not only did the old witch not object, she immediately started coming up with creative ideas. She gave the order for me to go down in the trailer to get the Orkish couple in person, since she wanted to shoot the touching moment of meeting. I had to put Hannelore on autopilot and Kaya on pause, and take the tube urgently to the bay. But because I had to shave before the shoot, the Orks had to drive around the Circus for a while.

  The meeting went well – I really looked pretty good on the manitou. Kaya admitted that afterwards.

  We didn’t speak all the way up, except for Grim asking me politely: ‘How’s the time?’ I didn’t really understand exactly what he meant and replied with a polite banality, saying that there was never enough time, so it should be used sparingly.

  There was a film crew waiting for us topside. The Orks were washed off, dressed in fashionable, clean clothes and given a short briefing about what they could and couldn’t say on camera. Grim was worried when they took away his notepad with the poems, but they told him that was the procedure in quarantine.

  After that the rescued Orks were presented to mankind. To remind everyone who they were, they played the pre-war shots, with Bernard-Henri standing beside Chloe with his staff in his hand – in the full splendour of the authority granted to him by his conscience and his M-vitamins. Then they showed the Orks who were bearing down on him being torn to shreds by my bursts of fire – they hadn’t played that in full before. The commentator explained that the Orks were attempting to use underage civilians as a living shield, and only the skill of our battle pilots … Our thanks to the warriors of the sky … Blah-blah-blah …

  Well, thanks are a big deal. But I’d rather take a bonus.

  They showed a photograph of my Hannelore and kept me in the frame for a while, announcing that I was the one who rescued the Orkish couple. They put in a close-up of Grim and Chloe shaking my hands – the girl even gave me a peck on the cheek.

  And then they immediately cut to the breaking news and the presenter announced the woeful story of the demise of the celebrated discoursemonger: he had supposedly been killed together with the legendary Trig when the cowardly authorities blew up the first Orkish pupo in his own home (I’ll tell you about this Trig a little bit later – but for now I’ll just remark that this grotesque announcement actually came pretty close to the truth). The newsreader surmised that Bernard-Henri had hoped his presence there would protect Trig – but even this had failed to halt the Orkish machine of repression and murder.

  They played the key sequence – what was left of the house after the rocket salvo. Then they put up a bit of archive material – some Ganjaberserk with a brutal face talking on a mobile phone. And after that they showed the motorenwagen that Bernard-Henri had managed to give to the young Orks just before he died, so that they could escape. There was a distinct whiff of the next war in the air – although there was still at least a year to go until then.

  The programme about the rescued Orks naturally merged into a memorial to Bernard-Henri – the viewer adores that kind of spontaneity in live broadcasting. They put up selected shots of the late discoursemonger, read out a few excerpts from Les Feuilles Mortes, set his silently grimacing face in a black frame of mourning … The universe now officially had one philosopher less. I just kept feeling more and more amazed: taking out that much garbage all in one go – that takes some doing …

  Then the manitous lingered on a close-up of Grim and Chloe’s faces contorted in grief – they didn’t just turn pale, they actually started shaking in grief and horror, that sort of thing can’t be faked. But the humane benevolence of mankind came to their aid even here.

  It turned out that Bernard-Henri had managed to adopt Chloe under Orkish law. He always did that anyway, so that his bimbo would be allowed into the Green Zone – because it was never for long in any case. But the news didn’t say anything about that. Bernard-Henri didn’t have any heirs, and so Chloe was solemnly presented with a symbolic key to his home on camera and the viewers were informed that I, as a neighbour and friend of the deceased philosopher, would take his place as the Orkish couple’s mentor – and would help the new citizens of Big Byz get their bearings in an unfamiliar world. I should say that this was as much news to me as it was to Grim and Chloe – but I didn’t object. Any job you do for CINEWS Inc. comes with good pay, and immediately after a war pilots don’t have a lot of work.

  Basically, it made a great show.

  Naturally, no one bothered to ask the Orks what the relationship between them was and if they were going to live together – all that was bracketed out, left as an elegantly transparent innuendo, in perfect accord with the juvenile rule ‘don’t look – don’t see’. On the other hand, after the shoot, Alena-Libertina expressed a desire to meet Grim and Chloe in person, so that she could be involved in their development.

  Chloe spent no less than three hours in her office – and Grim had to wait out in the corridor. Alena-Libertina postponed her meeting with him for later. I think that after her acquaintance with the late Bernard-Henri, Chloe was no longer surprised by any human weaknesses. If Grim realised anything (and I’m by no means certain that he did), he gave no sign of it.

  By the way, it’s long been a mystery to me why rich, aging lesbians carry on chasing after live young floozies until their hair turns grey and don’t just live a contented life with suras. Some people claim that this is no longer a matter of amorous inclination, since by the age of fifty-five a lesbian metamorphoses into a sex vampire – a predator on the life-force of others, with cold fish’s blood in her veins. But I wouldn’t risk repeating these words in public – they’re not much more than a step away from cynicism.

  And so Kaya and I acquired new neighbours.

  That evening I showed Kaya a recording of the entire broadcast. She watched it with her eyes popping out of her head, I think she even stopped blinking. And when she found out that now Grim and Chloe were going to live less than forty metres away from us (Bernard-Henri and I used to walk along the corridor to visit each other), I realised from the way she looked at me that if the war down below was over, the one in my home had only just begun.

  And that was how it turned out.

  If the consultant on sura behaviour hadn’t warned me in advance about the ‘symbolic rival’ effect I might very soon have inflicted on my little darling the exact kind of serious mechanical damage that isn’t covered by the manufacturer’s guarantee.

  Of course, I knew that her efforts were exclusively intended to put me through the torments of jealousy. Feeling offended with her was as stupid as feeling offended with a kettle or a rice cooker. But she had nibbled her way into my heart so subtly with her little white teeth that I clean forgot about that every time.

  One morning I was woken by her gazing at me intently. That often happens with us. But usually her expression as she looks at me is the same as if I was a janissary suffering from leprosy, who’s snatched her from the conservatory where she was learning to play the harp and dumped her in a harem that doubles as a piggery, where the prime of her youth will now be spent. I find this terribly arousing, but I never tell her that. As soon as she realises how much I like it, she’ll immediately take this small joy away from me, and there’ll be nothing I can do about it: she’ll be compelled to do that by the same sheer, unbounded bitchiness that prompts the look she gives me in the morning.

  But the look she was giving me this time was quite different – somehow humbled and submissive, I’d even say imploring – as if she had come to terms with the harem-piggery and decided to fight to sell her labour power on better terms. This surprised me, and I propped myself upon my elbows.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sweet Daddy,’ she said, ‘have you ever given any thought to the fact that I’ve got practically no decent clothes?’

  That was perfectly true. All she had were several sets of lacy underwear that I liked to tear off her sometimes, and two fluffy dressing gowns – a blue one with zigzags and a green one with little rabbits. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear, her settings compelled her to pretend that she couldn’t stand the dressing gown with the zigzags.

  ‘I like you naked best of all,’ I said.

  ‘That’s you,’ she replied. ‘But what if there’s someone else? What if you have visitors, and I’m sitting here in my dressing gown? Or let’s say you decide to let me out somewhere after all – what do I do, go in my lacy knickers?’

  ‘You fool,’ I exploded, ‘do you know how many more years I’ll be paying off the loan for you? Maybe you’d like me to go around in my shorts? And anyway, where are you planning to go?’

  ‘Nowhere yet,’ she said sombrely.

  I already thought the incident was over and done with. But it turned out that she had calculated all the moves a long way ahead, like a chess grandmaster.

  I’d absolutely forgotten that I was completely in her power now. No, she couldn’t deny me her caresses. Or rather, such a denial was envisaged in the instruction manual, and was … hmm, how can I put it … included in the range of services. Her tears merely testified that her settings had been adjusted correctly. This sort of thing happened quite often with us – that’s why people keep their suras on maximum bitchiness.

  But I’d completely forgotten about dopamine resonance.

  Or rather, I remembered it very well. But for some reason I thought that since I owned Kaya, lock, stock and barrel, I owned this service too. I’d lost sight of the fact that I had absolutely no idea of how she achieved the effect, and I wouldn’t be able to get my way by force. There wasn’t a single word about dopamine resonance in the manual. Or in the screen dictionaries either. It was an illegal operating mode. The likeable consultant surologist probably wouldn’t even have discussed the subject with me.