A memorial to Trig!

  Oh yes. Precisely that. CINEWS had decided – effectively giving GULAG a kick in the teeth by completely failing to consult with it – to open a memorial to the pupo Trig, martyred in his own home by the Orkish secret police. And not simply a memorial, but a whole museum with exhibits – it was announced on all the information channels. There was nothing GULAG could do but put a brave face on things and join in at the last moment, leaving the showdown for later. And the lads from CINEWS, not being fools, immediately made GULAG pay for the memorial out of its own till.

  ‘The battle is eternal, peace is but a dream …’ As the ancient poet Blok keenly observed. And by the way, he was also a pupo in his soul. It was no accident that he spent all his life writing about harlequins and unknown women in masks – these days any psychoanalyst knows what that means.

  Alena-Libertina, who conducted the opening ceremony in person, insisted that I come with Kaya. As she explained to me, this was an order, rather than a piece of advice.

  ‘Come out of the closet, Damilola,’ she said playfully. ‘We all know about you.’

  ‘I’m not hiding anything,’ I snarled. ‘It’s just that my girl has never been out of the apartment before.’

  ‘And you’re afraid that she’ll lose her milk?’

  I felt like retorting that it was dangerous for a woman on the verge of menopause to joke about such things but as usual I refrained. In ancient times, a combat pilot could be saved by a parachute, but in our days the only thing that can help is ironclad self-possession.

  Alena-Libertina started explaining that I would escort Grim and Chloe for CINEWS. But I was also a member of the gloomy community, and Kaya was attending at the request of the GULAG leadership, for GULAG wanted everyone finally to believe that high-end segment suras were within the reach of the middle class – although with certain provisos.

  I gradually started feeling relieved. To be quite honest, I even felt a prick of vanity. You can’t possess a priceless treasure and hide it from people all your life – the urge to boast will build up in the subconscious and at some moment it could spill over in a most imprudent manner. So possibly it was all for the best.

  I had to decide how to tell Kaya about it. And this, of course, was where my professional experience came in helpful.

  After all, what is the essential nature of the media business? When people suffer affliction, try your damnedest to sell it as news – and their misfortune will be your good luck. This time the problems that had come up were my own – but it looked as if the chance to transmute my pain in the neck into pleasure had come floating along with them. All it took was to sell my management’s order as a fit of personal chivalry – and I could count on a sizeable dopamine credit from Kaya.

  There’s a simple rule: when you make a generous gesture, do it simply and unaffectedly – for if you speak too many words, the object of your favours might happen to glance into your soul, and that will kill the entire effect.

  ‘Kaya,’ I said next morning, ‘I’ve got good news for you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You asked me to deactivate your spatial blocking. I agree. You’ll be able to leave the apartment. And I’ll introduce you to Grim too.’

  She looked up at me with a very thoughtful expression. Perhaps I imagine it, or perhaps it’s true that she completely forgets to blink when she’s genuinely interested in something.

  ‘Today we’re going to the opening of a memorial,’ I went on. ‘There’ll be people there who might start talking to you. So remember: everything you’ve seen on my battle manitou before today is personal information.’

  Kaya nodded. I knew that I’d been heard by a sub-programme that reacted to the code words ‘personal information’, so I didn’t have to do any more explaining – she wouldn’t give any secrets away to anyone.

  ‘Grim will be there. You’ll be able to meet him. But for this …’

  She hopped over and gave me a resounding smack of a kiss on the mouth.

  ‘For this, anything you like, fatty …’

  I won’t describe the next two hours.

  If only because any recital of the physical basis of what was happening (and that’s what all detailed accounts essentially come down to) will give the reader the entirely false impression that he understands everything – and my experience isn’t all that different from what he gets from his sack of potatoes after stuffing himself with Dumedrol on a Saturday evening.

  If a camera had filmed us, the observer wouldn’t have seen anything special. Possibly our coupling might have seemed to him like the union of two sloths: instead of the movements affirming the joy of life that are comprehensible to any benevolent observer, he would have seen a display of sluggish stroking.

  But inner reality often differs from the outward one. After five minutes of this slow dance I felt like a seething kettle that has blown its lid off – and over the flames of unendurable pleasure what used to be my personality was being transformed into a cloud of steam, into one of those vaporised souls that drift through the blue void of the sky in the guise of clouds …

  When I came to, Kaya was no longer beside me – she was busily getting dressed.

  I finally saw what kind of clothes she had bought for herself.

  ‘You want to wear that …’

  ‘Don’t stick your nose into this at least,’ she said with a frown. ‘You don’t really think you understand this too, do you?’

  She put on a baggy black dress with a huge ‘smilie’ – two white dots for eyes and the semicircle of a smiling mouth, which also had a red tongue sticking out of it. On looking more closely, I realised it wasn’t even a dress. It was a large-size man’s tank top.

  Actually, lots of Orkish girls go about like that in hot weather. And our young people often adopt their fashions – as a gesture of protest against the management, as the discoursemongers say.

  A dress of this kind has a distinctive appearance. The most interesting thing, of course, is what happens with the breasts, because the straps of the tank top don’t so much conceal them as provide a formal pretext for considering that the proprieties have been observed.

  It suited Kaya terribly well.

  She also painted one eyebrow green – again in the latest Orkish counterculture fashion.

  ‘Draw on a bruise as well,’ I said.

  ‘You’d better take a look at yourself.’

  The girl proved to be right.

  When I went into the happiness room and looked in the mirror I saw the dark circles under my own eyes. Not very noticeable – the kind that could appear after a sleepless night. But I’d never had them before. I hastily tidied myself up, put on my CINEWS Inc. dress uniform and we walked out of the apartment, Kaya on my arm.

  To be quite honest, I felt a bit weird – but Kaya behaved as if she did this sort of thing every day and always had done.

  Five minutes later, the tube spat us out onto an esplanade filled with people, where this walk-round memorial had been set up.

  It had been allocated a standard hundred-metre unit with a direct tube exit, which indicated the high status of the event.

  The buffet reception had already begun and there were quite a lot of guests. A crowd of people from our news department were clustering around Alena-Libertina, who had put on a silvery chiton and large ruby earrings in honour of the occasion. GULAG was represented by several well-known pupos with their suras.

  The guests from the friendly sexual minorities were stars of the first magnitude – the dyb-triette ‘Les Three’: three skinheaded wenches in leather aprons (looking exactly like in their pre-war clip ‘Ork Meat Rare’). I’d only ever seen them on the manitou before. In real life they were just as enchanting, only I thought before that they were a lot taller.

  The girls had already given out their autographs and were clearly bored – they’d been shipped in because of their hit ‘Pupo Trig – My Heart Jig-a-Jig’, which they had been incautious enough to release a month earlier, and now they had to work off the karma. From the way they were standing and the direction in which they were smiling, I could tell immediately where the nanocameras were hanging over our hall. They put ‘Pupo Trig’ on over and over again, and whenever a sommelier standing over at one side raised his hand, the girls started dancing and miming to their own recording.

  The large number of security men in muted blue and grey togas testified to the presence of someone very important. But I couldn’t believe my eyes when I realised that the weary, elderly man in a black cavalry cloak who was walking towards me was David-Goliath Arafat Zuckerberger.

  He might not be the most famous pupo, but he’s certainly the richest. He’s one of the trustees of the Manitou Reserve, and it makes no sense to call those guys rich, because everyone else’s wealth and poverty is held up on their backs, as if they were whales. They live in the same area as the snuff stars – in immense villas on the upper section of the offglobe, and cameras are forbidden to fly up there. A pilot can only get a look at their residences if they hire him to put on a firework show during their parties. They have open gardens up there with invisible conditioning screens. A genuine paradise. But if you fly in too close to a garden like that, they’ll shoot you down without warning.

  David-Goliath isn’t the biggest wheel in the Reserve, but to all other mortals, he’s a god. And now this god was walking towards me, smiling at me like an equal – and walking alongside him was his new sur. I actually shuddered at the sight of him.

  To be quite honest, the sight of David-Goliath’s surs is enough to make you laugh and cry at the same time. And the amount of laughter in the cocktail is at most ten per cent – all the rest is tears. If you dream of one of his puppets at night, you might never wake up again.

  But on the plus side he is a hundred per cent gloomy and one of GULAG’s deans. I respect him because he is a proud man and has this inner freedom which makes him unafraid of other people’s gossip-mongering. Instead of going underground (where, I presume, most of his colleagues in the Reserve are languishing) he keeps an entire staff of sommeliers and lawyers who monitor the information environment and rebuff politely but sharply everyone who starts exercising their wit or their conscience on the subject of his surs.

  ‘Not wishing to blindly indulge the intents and preferences induced in his psyche by inherited memory and coercive cultural encoding, our client strives to direct the destructive forces of his libido into a channel where they will not harm anyone. This is an irreproachable civic stance, and it would be splendid if our detractors and critics could say the same thing about themselves with a clear conscience …’

  And so on. As far as I understand he has never tried any straights at all. He likes little boys – but a kind that nature doesn’t produce. His surs (and he has an entire harem of them) are nimble dwarfs with predatory faces who look like children but are not completely human. And their dildo unit is so large that the gibes eventually forced David-Goliath to start dressing them only in long, loose garments.

  The sur, whom David-Goliath was leading on a tether, came up to his waist. What can I say, he looked hideous – a predatory, large-headed child in a spiked collar, who has just breakfasted on a small dinosaur and is now searching for something he can have for lunch. His hands were chained together and he was dressed in something like a black silk straitjacket (Hate Couture from Adolph-Kiki Dior Galliano – I’ve heard that that fashion house lives exclusively off dressing David-Goliath’s dolls).

  But the external shell couldn’t fool me – I knew that this frightening little creature had the same kind of filling inside him as my Kaya. And that, I must say, filled me with pride – even David-Goliath couldn’t treat himself to anything better. Simply because nothing better existed.

  Kaya and David-Goliath’s companion spotted each other.

  Surs and suras have a specific interaction protocol and they can exchange information over the air at prodigious speeds. So that the users will know when this is happening, surs and suras emit a melodic whistle (they are obliged to do this by a law passed at the insistence of consumers – so that suspicious aging grannies will know when their rubber lapdogs try to conspire together). Moreover, the law specifies the minimal length of this whistle, because the surs exchange information very fast.

  The encounter between my Kaya and David-Goliath’s sur looked like this: they slapped palms together (a young people’s greeting), Kaya whistled and the sur whistled back.

  Kaya looked at me and said:

  ‘But my …’

  And she whistled again.

  What exactly she whistled, of course, I didn’t know – but David-Goliath’s little companion roared with laughter.

  Somehow I got the impression that she was complaining to her little caste brother about our painstakingly concealed poverty. I found this particularly intolerable, since she herself was the reason for it. Perhaps she really did think that I wasn’t sufficiently well off for her? Perhaps she despised me for my inability to wrest from this hostile world a chunk of wealth that was worthy of her?

  ‘And at our place …’ the boy from hell said and whistled again.

  In reply Kaya simply spread her hands in a shrug.

  Of course, a second later I realised that they weren’t exchanging any personal information – that’s strictly forbidden at the programme level, otherwise bank passwords could be stolen though surs and suras. It was simply another way of involving us emotionally in what was going on – and I must say that the attempt succeeded. David-Goliath had turned crimson too. But he soon came to his senses, grinned and asked:

  ‘On maximum?’

  ‘On maximum,’ I sighed.

  And I immediately noticed the dark circles below his eyes, concealed under foundation cream. At that point it was as if we exchanged telepathic whistles, just like our suras, and blinked at each other, almost imperceptibly. I realised that he knew about dopamine resonance, and he realised that I knew.

  ‘Just look what they do to us, eh?’

  I nodded.

  We shook hands with real feeling and parted. What else was there to say?

  David-Goliath soon left – and there was suddenly a lot more space in the hall, because almost half the people there were his security men. I don’t know how they guard him on the move – they had to leave in several shifts.

  Before it could really sink in that I had shaken hands with David-Goliath Arafat Zuckerberger himself, there was Alena-Libertina walking towards me.

  ‘Where’s Chloe?’ she asked. ‘I need the girl in shot.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It looks like she and Grim haven’t arrived yet.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ve got lost?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Even an Ork can manage to walk along the corridor to the tube … Ah, there they are. Talk of the devil.’

  CHAPTER 16

  When Grim saw how Chloe had dressed for their first appearance in society together, he was horrified.

  They had to visit an ‘open-air memorial’ erected on some Orkish pretext (in the reception committee they explained to him that their absence from an event of this kind would look strange), so a touch of ‘Orkishness’ in the manner of dress was appropriate.

  But Chloe had togged herself up in a man’s white tank top, adorned with a crude image of a smiling mouth with a red tongue sticking out of it. In other words, without the slightest exaggeration, she had dressed exactly like the girls from the Slava suburbs who rented out every orifice in their body for two manitous.

  When Grim explained to her in rather crude terms what he thought about this, Chloe led him over to the manitou without saying a word and opened the catalogue of the season’s fashions. It turned out that soldiers’ singlets (100% Natural Orkish Tailoring, in Black and White Versions) were the very latest craze in local fashion, and they cost so much that down below you could buy a small peasant farmstead for the same money.

  After that Grim lost his aesthetic bearings completely and meekly allowed Chloe to dress him in a pair of striped shorts, with legs of different lengths, and a clownish sweatshirt with a hood like a pointed cap. She also bought him a new hairdo: the self-distending ribbon gathered Grim’s hair into a ‘Mohican’ standing erect on his head, at the same time dying it the colour of hay scorched into pallor by the sun.

  Chloe contemplated the result thoughtfully.

  ‘A toga would suit you, of course,’ she said, ‘but we don’t know for sure that we’re allowed to wear them. We’re Orks after all. So this will do for a start.’

  When the doors of the tube opened, Grim couldn’t believe his eyes. Right there in front of him was a large clearing in a forest. People were strolling about in the most incredible outfits, examining display stands and show cases set out in the clearing.

  The exhibition had an old-fashioned kind of formality. It consisted of 2D-photographs and other items set in excessively massive frames of polished steel inside sturdy glass boxes. The monumentality of the informational objects symbolised the inviolability of memory. And starting right behind the stands and little cases, there were bushes and trees; in the distance birds were singing, and the setting sun shone in fragmented splinters through the foliage swaying in the wind.

  Soon Grim noticed that all the people stayed in a rather narrow rectangle formed by the exhibition’s display stands, and not one of them walked towards the sun and the birds. At this point his focus of perception shifted and he realised that he was in a small hall about ten metres by ten, the walls of which represented the three-dimensional world with incredible verisimilitude – just like the windows in his apartment.

  At first Grim was afraid that in her prostitute get-up Chloe would make everyone laugh. But then he saw a girl in a black tank top with exactly the same design on it.