She was standing beside Damilola, who was dressed in a CINEWS pilot’s uniform. When Damilola waved his hand in greeting, she waved too, and smiled.

  She was obviously his daughter.

  She looked just a bit younger than Chloe. Her dark, almost black hair was trimmed in a simple, severe style with a fringe and side strands down to her shoulders – as if she had a helmet covered with dark, gleaming lacquer on her head. For some reason one of her eyebrows was green. She was a bit on the pale side. And very, very beautiful.

  So beautiful that her beauty could have been diluted in a hundred women’s faces and there would still have been enough for all of them. Beside her, Chloe looked … Well, not exactly a plain Jane. It simply became clear that the prettiness of her cute face was merely a specific instance of the universal rule that nature had formulated in the face of the unknown girl. This white-skinned, black-haired girl stood far closer to the source of beauty than all the faces that Grim had ever seen before.

  Looking at her he experienced a strange feeling that he had never known previously, a little bit like resentment – as if Manitou’s invisible ray, through which the light entered into his soul, had suddenly moved on to another creature, purer and better than him. And it had been right to move – if Grim had been in the ray’s place, he would have done the same.

  All these feelings flashed through him very fast. And then he started noticing the details.

  Firstly, her tank top was a couple of sizes larger than Chloe’s, which made it hard to look into her face – his eyes stubbornly kept trying to slip downwards, and Grim was obliged to admit that in comparison with her, Chloe looked primly dressed.

  Secondly, the unknown girl was looking at him, smiling and waving her hand with an air about her as if they had known each other for a long time.

  Damilola put his arm round her shoulder. The girl shook his arm off with a precise, economical movement. A lady in a silvery chiton, standing beside them, laughed, and Grim recognised Alena-Libertina, who had changed her hairstyle and dyed her hair a different colour. When Grim and Chloe walked up, she nodded to Grim, took Chloe (who had narrowed her eyes voluptuously) by the hand and led her off to the farthest corner.

  Grim noticed that the girl in the black tank top and Chloe contrived in some incredible way not to notice each other, not even when they were right up close – and he realised it had happened because of the identical tank tops. And clearly for the same reason, they immediately went flying apart to opposite ends of the hall, like two similar charges repelling each other.

  ‘Hi, Grim,’ said the girl. ‘I’m Kaya.’

  Grim wasn’t surprised that he was so well known – after all, it had to mean something that he and Chloe had been filmed by so many cameras on the day they arrived.

  ‘Hi,’ he replied and looked up at Damilola. ‘Is this your daughter?’

  Damilola winced, as if Grim had said something tactless. Kaya, on the contrary, laughed, showing off her sharp, pearly white teeth.

  ‘He’s my carbohydrate parent.’

  ‘Your who?’ Grim asked.

  ‘She’s joking,’ said Damilola, embarrassed. ‘There’s a Church English idiom – “sugar daddy”. An older man who keeps a young girl and gives her all sorts of presents.’

  ‘But you don’t give me any presents at all,’ said Kaya. ‘So you’re not a sugar daddy, but precisely a carbohydrate parent. Or even an aspartame supervisor. There used to be a sugar substitute called that.’

  ‘But why supervisor?’ asked Damilola.

  ‘From the word “pervy”.’

  Grim felt embarrassed that a family gripe session had started up in his presence and he tried to change the subject of conversation.

  ‘Have you already looked at the … er-er … exhibition?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Damilola.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ Grim suggested.

  Damilola gave a nervous shrug – but Kaya was already walking with Grim towards the large glass cube at the beginning of the exhibition.

  Inside it, on a stand of polished steel, were three identical glass containers that looked like pharmacist’s carboys with ground-glass stoppers. The containers were large, about five litres each, and they were firmly packed with a grey powder with a heterogeneous texture. There was a funereally severe little plaque on the steel stand:

  ASHES OF THE GLOOMY

  ‘The ashes of pupos,’ said Damilola.

  ‘What, are they genuine?’ Grim asked, trying to make his voice sound respectful.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Damilola replied. ‘Possibly. But it should be understood symbolically. The point here is not to demonstrate what our bodies turn into. We want to remind people about the suffering that falls to the lot of minorities. And the fact that minorities continue to suffer to this very day …’

  Next came a large steel stand with black and white photographs. Grim saw a wooden Orkish house hemmed in on all sides by bushes. He recognised it immediately, and shuddered as a wave of sticky fear ran through him. On no account must he blurt out that he had ever been inside this house himself – he and Chloe had been warned about that very strictly before their first live broadcast.

  Below the photograph of the house there were enlarged images of graffiti on its walls – a spastika daubed with a spray can and the words ‘DETH DUH GLØMERASTEN’. Grim couldn’t remember anything like that at all. Of course the words could have been blanked out before his visit, but he couldn’t quite understand why they were in Upper Mid-Siberian, as if they had been written by a state bureaucrat and not a hooligan. And in another photograph, beside a blot from a broken bottle of ink, there was a plain vernacular phrase in red: ‘PUTRID PUPE’. The point was apparently that Trig had been hounded by all segments of Orkish society.

  Grim felt Kaya tug on his hand.

  In actual fact she didn’t tug on his hand, but on his index finger, grasping it neatly in her little fist. And although her gesture was perfectly proper, except perhaps for being overfamiliar, Grim felt a chariot, half of fire and half of ice, hurtle across his body from his pubic region up to his throat. Damilola, who was following all this closely, pulled a face, as if he suddenly had a toothache.

  ‘What?’ asked Grim.

  ‘Have you ever wondered,’ Kaya asked in a conspiratorial voice, ‘why the global oligarchy makes such a big deal out of the rights of sexual perverts?’

  Grim had never heard bold talk like that, not even in the Orkish barracks.

  ‘No,’ he said, opening his eyes wide. ‘Why? Because they’re perverts themselves?’

  ‘That’s not the only reason,’ replied Kaya. ‘Power over the world belongs to the financial elite. A bunch of blackguards who make everybody else suffer for the sake of their profit. These scoundrels hide behind a façade of false democraship and avoid publicity. That is why in order to actualise their pleasure they need a group of people capable of becoming their secret symbolic representative in social consciousness … Am I expressing myself clearly?’

  Grim nodded uncertainly.

  ‘But what do they need that for?’ he asked.

  ‘So that the shower of maximal preferential advantages will spill over onto the symbolic proxy-elite consisting of perverts, and the genuine, secret elite can experience vicarious crypto-orgasm. It’s obvious.’

  ‘What sort of nonsense is that?’ Damilola asked angrily. ‘Do you think all these people here, who care about the fate of pupos …’

  ‘All these people here are profoundly indifferent to the fate of pupos and other shit-eaters,’ Kaya interrupted, for some reason looking at Grim. ‘It’s just that people are cowardly and they’re always licking at the imaginary spot through which they believe the vector of force and power passes. It’s the elite’s absolute tyranny in the choice of objects of ritual worship that renders the crypto-orgasm by proxy possible.’

  Damilola took hold of Kaya’s ear between his finger and thumb.

  ‘Now you just shut up,’ he told her. ‘Tell me, where did you read all that gibberish?’

  ‘In Bernard-Henri Montaigne Montesquieu,’ said Kaya, elegantly twisting free of his grip. ‘The treatise Les Feuilles Mortes, in my own translation from Old French. A highly appropriate quotation, I think. This is his memorial too, isn’t it?’

  ‘If Bernard-Henri did write that,’ Damilola muttered, chastened, ‘it wasn’t so that anyone would read it. Apart from other discoursemongers, in any event. That’s precisely why the book’s in Old French. He would never have said anything like that in public himself.’

  Kaya didn’t answer that.

  Grim stopped at the next stand, which was covered with photographs and columns of text.

  In the upper section there was a photograph of a fat military commander of ancient times, wearing epaulettes and a black blindfold over his eyes. The caption stated that this was General Kutuzov – a Siberian war-chief of the early Barbed-Wire Age who invented the gas bomb used to incinerate the ancient Orkish capital, together with the forces of United Europe that had occupied it under the leadership of Reichskanzler Napoleon.

  Below that was an aerial photograph that made Grim’s heart shudder. He could have taken a photograph like that himself if he’d had a camera during the battle at Orkish Slava.

  It was a trolley with four blue cylinders on it – the same gas bomb that the suicide platoon with reed pipes had trundled off into the smoke before his very eyes. The photograph even clearly showed the young lad, sitting between the cylinders with the trigger cord in his hand.

  The column of text explained that this was a resurrected weapon of the ancient Orks, used by them against sexual minorities since olden times. Kutuzov bombs had already killed two illustrious Byzantines – von Trier and Bernard-Henri – and the threat hanging over civilisation required an immediate response. Which, make no mistake about it, would follow.

  In the lower section there was a diagram of the mine dug under the house of the pupo Trig, through which the Ganjaberserks had brought the Kutuzov bomb down. The painstakingly delineated geological strata made the cross-section look very convincing.

  ‘We can already guess what the reason for the next war will be,’ Damilola said sadly.

  ‘Because of the pupos?’ Grim asked.

  ‘No. Because Torn Trojan used gas as a weapon. The war for the pupos will come later. But I could be wrong, of course. We’ll have to wait and see.’

  Kaya glanced at Damilola, but didn’t say anything.

  The next stand displayed a notional Trig Set – an open sack of wax potatoes, a head, with snakes instead of hair, smashed off some ancient statue, a pack of tablets, a can of Orkish stewed pork and a dentate dagger that looked absolutely terrifying. A red warning sign emphatically cautioned visitors not to attempt to emulate the heroic feat of the legendary pupo independently.

  After that there was a small case with personal items of Trig’s (the little scarlet child’s woolly cap with two pompoms on the tie-strings was especially touching) and printed excerpts from his blog, in which the sections lambasting tyranny had been emphasised with bold script. But this also failed to arouse Grim’s interest.

  Only one stand, the very last, was devoted to Bernard-Henri, who had been killed together with Trig (Damilola explained that this stand had not been financed by GULAG, but by the public relations department of CINEWS Inc., which was well known for its stinginess). The stand looked simple in the extreme – a photograph of the sadly smiling philosopher had been set on a polished steel background. Below it were two handwritten extracts from Les Feuilles Mortes in Old French (the deceased had apparently copied them out specially, by hand, for facsimile reproduction). There was a translation in Church English beside them.

  S.N.U.F.F. is life itself, with love in the numerator and death in the denominator – a fraction that is simultaneously equal to zero and infinity – as is Manitou, who thirsts avidly for this.

  Grim didn’t entirely understand the meaning of these words, but he didn’t dare to ask, afraid that Kaya would upset Damilola again in some way. But the second excerpt was somewhat clearer:

  In criticising the repressive Orkish regime we often forget what its genuine nature is. And the more complicated the definitions that we use, the more confused the question seems. However, the essence of the matter can be explained extremely simply.

  The regime is everybody who lives well under the regime.

  This includes not only the bureaucrats who take bribes and the Ganjaberserks who smash skulls, but the discoursemongers who jocosely denounce them, the frisky journalists from the Yellow Zone, the titans of pop, poppins- and popper-art, the masters of Orkish culture who invoke the eternal values, the drawing-room orktivists and other high-gloss Global Orks who condemn the regime on a daily basis at buffet receptions closely guarded by the authorities.

  It should not be forgotten that the irreconcilable struggle with dictocracy is one of the most important functions of a modern-day dictocracy intent on long-term survival. The Urkagan’s accomplices can adopt a laisser-faire attitude to education and medicine, but on no account can they do so in this sensitive area, otherwise there could be an unplanned rotation of power. Hence this appalling dearth of honesty down below – for any Orkish ‘new sincerity’ is nothing other than well-forgotten old lies.

  All this has happened before. Many times.

  Trig has no friends at all down below.

  Vive la révolution!

  BHMM

  Grim looked at Damilola, then back at the quotation. Damilola shrugged.

  ‘He hasn’t got any up here either,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ah?’ Grim didn’t understand.

  ‘I mean friends,’ said Damilola. ‘I myself can’t understand why they hung this up here. Probably the number of voluntary helpers down below has got out of hand. In two or three wars’ time we’re going to bomb the Yellow Zone, so this is how they’re preparing public opinion. But that’s not important for you, lad. You’re free now.’

  The idea about the nature of the regime seemed broadly correct to Grim – he had always felt something of the kind. Although it wasn’t clear, of course, if the generalisation applied to Bernard-Henri himself.

  Chloe was nowhere to be seen. A glance round the hall convinced Grim that she had already disappeared – together with Alena-Libertina. They had left without saying goodbye …

  Kaya noticed the way his face darkened.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she suggested. ‘Where do you want to go, Grim?’

  ‘He hasn’t been anywhere yet,’ said Damilola. ‘This is his first social outing. What would you be interested in seeing?’

  ‘London,’ Grim replied without a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘Why London exactly?’

  ‘That’s where all our guys go when they leave,’ said Grim. ‘The ones who’ve made a success of life.’

  ‘All right then,’ Damilola agreed. ‘London it is. I don’t like the food there. Although I do know one good place … But where’s Chloe?’

  ‘She left already,’ said Grim. ‘With Alena-Libertina.’

  ‘Ah,’ replied Damilola. ‘Ah. So we’ll get going then?’

  Grim suddenly realised that Kaya was holding his hand again.

  Her hand was warm and dry. She scraped one finger gently over his wrist, as if to draw his attention to the fact that she was holding his hand. And Grim, surprised at himself, replied with a similar scrape of the finger.

  Kaya looked at him, smiled and tugged him towards the doors of the tube. Damilola followed them – if he had noticed anything, he didn’t give even the slightest sign of it.

  In the little metrolift cabin Damilola jabbed his finger at the manitou several times. Grim saw a cheerful little message appear.

  GULAG recommends

  BI GBEN

  ‘Here we go,’ said Kaya. ‘Daddy’s going to drag us round his pervy dives again.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with dives,’ growled Damilola. ‘This is the best restaurant I know in London. The Global Orks hardly ever go there. And the fact that it happens to be in the GULAG listing is pure coincidence. I think GULAG recommends it because it takes a certain courage to go with a name like that. Even if it is disguised as a pun.’

  ‘Right, right,’ said Kaya. ‘We don’t doubt that in the slightest.’

  When he heard that ‘we’ and saw Damilola’s sour face, Grim realised he should be very careful to avoid getting involved in a family squabble. Kaya was still holding his hand, and to give himself something to do, he started studying the control manitou.

  All sorts of jolly frivolities flitted across the screen: balloons, cartoon film heroes, an animated advertisement for a new diet – and in the lower section large, green figures flickered as they counted down. Grim decided it must be the time remaining to their destination. And so it was; when the figure zero popped up on the manitou, the door opened.

  In front of them was a hall about the same size as Trig’s memorial – with tables standing beside tall windows. Noticing some kind of movement above him, Grim looked up – and he was stupefied.

  In the mysterious semi-darkness above his head, cogwheels and metal arcs, gleaming with oil, were rotating, and a huge, heavy pendulum was swinging to and fro, wafting a palpable breath of air through the hall at every stroke. It was a clock mechanism, but a very large one. And if it was an illusion too, the realism of it was absolutely incredible.

  And outside the windows, stretching off in all directions was a bird’s-eye view of an ancient city.

  ‘Is that London?’ asked Grim.

  ‘Yes,’ Damilola confirmed. ‘The historical view from the clock tower. As far as they were able to reconstitute it from a surviving 3D panorama.’