An Orkish couple – a boy and a girl of the same age, about sixteen or slightly older – were walking along the verge of the road. I can be so confident about their age, because this is the Orkish ‘age of consent’, and if either of them was younger, they would almost certainly never have dared to be seen together. The Orkish authorities imitate our mechanism of sexual repression with obtuse zeal – they’d adopt our age of consent too, if our advisers would only allow it. Apparently they think that’s how they’ll get on the road to a technotronic society. In any case, there’s no other road left open to them.

  The couple was carrying fishing rods. That immediately made everything clear – for young Orks ‘fishing’ takes the place of a back-row seat in a movie theatre.

  I switched to maximum magnification and studied their faces for a while. The boy was an ordinary Orkish lad, with clean good looks and flaxen hair. They’re all like that, until they start drinking volya and shooting up durian. But the damsel was absolutely ideal.

  She looked just great in shot. Firstly, she didn’t look like a child, and that was good, because they’d shown minors before the last two wars, and the audience was tired of them. Secondly, she was very pretty – I mean for a biological woman, of course. I was sure that Bernard-Henri would immediately get the urge to protect a little piggy like this from any kind of distress.

  I glanced at my manitou. The Kagan was still a long way off, and I had time to spare. But there wasn’t really any point in looking for other material. I informed Bernard-Henri briefly about my find and transmitted the damsel cutie to his manitou, and he was hooked instantly, I could tell from the way he was breathing. Then I engaged maximum camouflage, cautiously flew round the couple, came up to them from behind and started following, listening to their prattle.

  They turned into the forest and soon found a clearing on the bank of one of the streams flowing into the swamp. And there they immediately started … fishing. Apparently the lad was a keen angler, and he was trying hard to put other ideas out of his head. The girl soon became conspicuously bored, and so did I, but he just kept on fishing. And the fish were biting.

  When there was half an hour left until the convoy arrived, they started getting into more interesting things. But by then, unfortunately, it was time for me to interfere.

  CHAPTER 2

  Grim looked up at the immense sphere of Byzantion hanging in the sky.

  If he leaned his head over and screwed up his eyes, he could see it as the nest of some huge bird that had made its home in the next tree. If he screwed his eyes up even tighter, he could imagine it was a ball from a game of soccer being played by Titans – flying towards him out of the distant ancient times, before there were any palm trees here, when snow fell for many days of the year and hairy mammoths strode across the virginal white land …

  Grim looked at Chloe.

  ‘I’ve got to do it right now,’ he thought. ‘It’ll be too late afterwards … But how? What the hell, just get up, go over and put my arms round her? Then she’ll go and ask – what’s this, all of a sudden? Why now, and not earlier? Damn these fishing rods …’

  All the signs were that Chloe wanted the same thing as he did. She hadn’t put on any make-up before their date, and in the implicit code of teen ritual that was a hint that she was expecting decisive action that could leave her make-up seriously compromised.

  And it was good that she hadn’t done her face up.

  He liked her round head (with its funny protruding ears, pink cheeks and skin as tight as the head of a war drum) much better without any make-up. And Chloe smelled really nice too, not Orkish at all – she’d probably folded away her clothes overnight with sweet-scented herbs. Or bought the fashionable perfume of the season, Ancient Serpent – her family certainly wasn’t poor.

  She was dressed trendily too, in a new school dress that was simultaneously a reminder of childhood and an invitation to forget it. And over that she had a sleeveless waistcoat with pictures of Nicolas-Olivier Laurence von Trier in various roles from his long career. Waistcoats like that, with the slogan ‘Two Cultures – One World’, were made in the Yellow Zone, and they cost at least a hundred manitou. In Grim’s family they didn’t spend that kind of money on trinkets. And the little cosmetics purse hanging over Chloe’s shoulder was made out of Doberman skin – that wasn’t cheap either.

  ‘Wake up, you’ve got another bite.’

  Grim jerked his rod up, took the fish off the hook and tossed it to Chloe. She caught it and smacked its head lightly against a rock. Then she giggled and did it again. And again.

  Exasperated, Grim walked over and took the flapping fish from her. He stunned it with a single blow and went back to his rods.

  He didn’t feel like cussing her out – in comparison with other Orkish girls Chloe was really kind. She never tortured mosquitoes before she swatted them.

  ‘What’s go you so cranky?’ Chloe asked, putting the fish in a plastic bag filled with water, where two others were already languishing. ‘I’m bored. Can’t think why I bothered coming along really.’

  Grim’s blood suddenly ran cold. That’s it, he thought. And afterwards she won’t …

  ‘If you’re bored, then let’s talk,’ he suggested.

  Fortunately he had something to keep his hands busy – he had to skewer a fresh worm on the hook.

  ‘Come on then,’ Chloe sighed and hugged her knees.

  Grim cast his line, walked over to Chloe and sat down beside her, making sure he didn’t touch her accidentally.

  ‘Have you written your essay already?’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘I cribbed it. How about you?’

  ‘No,’ said Grim. ‘I haven’t even started.’

  ‘Then you’re screwed.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ Grim objected. ‘I’ll write it in a day. I’ll rip it off from the Free Encyclopaedia.’

  ‘You’re always boasting about that encyclopaedia of yours,’ said Chloe. ‘You twist the conversation round every time, just so you can mention it. How would you like me to boast about my dad having a motorbike?’

  Grim blushed – she’d hit the bull’s eye.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘That’s not why I brought up the encyclopaedia. It’s because there are so many things I can’t find even there.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Why are the names of all the Orkish rulers chosen up there at Big Byz? Take the Torns, for instance. Durex or Skyn – those aren’t Orkish words, are they?

  ‘No, they’re not Orkish,’ Chloe agreed.

  ‘They take words from the ancient times, ones our people don’t remember. Maybe they mean something insulting, and we don’t know about it. And they invent our soldiers’ uniforms. They just send the pattern down to us before the war starts. There isn’t a word about that in the encyclopaedia. And they were saying at the market that the Torns keep the entire Orkish treasury up there with them. Otherwise they wouldn’t print manitous for us.’

  Chloe cuffed Grim gently on the back of his head.

  ‘Better keep your mouth shut about that,’ she said. ‘Or they’ll boil you in shit with the orktivists. Some great hero from the Yellow Zone you are!’

  She gave him a thump on the ear and moved closer – close enough for Grim to feel her side touching him. It was very pleasurable. But for some reason he pulled away. Chloe sighed.

  ‘All right then, look at this,’ said Grim, sticking his hand in his pocket and pulling out a five-manitou note.

  Folding it in an intricate sequence of movements, he managed to transform the holographic giant with the multi-cornered hat, supporting the sphere of Byzantion on his shoulders, into an incredibly repulsive dwarf with legs that sprouted from his armpits.

  ‘You’ve worn me out with your politics,’ said Chloe. ‘And you’ve got another bite.’

  Grim put his money away, ran over to the rods, deftly jerked the fish out and tossed it to Chloe. This time she stunned it with a single blow.

  ‘That’s the fourth already,’ she declared, putting the fish in the plastic bag of water. ‘Maybe we should go before a crocodile eats us?’

  Grim nodded stoically.

  ‘I’ll just put some make-up on, then,’ said Chloe, giving him a look of frank derision.

  Grim looked away.

  After tying the plastic bag of fish with a sturdy double knot, Chloe opened her dog-skin purse and started dolling herself up.

  Glancing sideways at her, Grim started folding away his rods. If only he didn’t have such a sick, dismal feeling, it would really be funny. He knew the entire sequence of actions that would follow now – he’d seen it already on his last, equally fruitless fishing trip.

  Chloe took a charcoal pencil out of her purse and drew three jagged zigzags on her forehead: they looked like an old woman’s wrinkles – the so-called ‘wisdom lines’. Orkish girls believed that the lines made them look clever, but Grim had his doubts. Next a white-clay pencil appeared in her hands. After applying a thick layer of white to her rosy cheeks, she put the pencil away, took out her rouge and drew two round crimson spots over the white clay – they were supposed to represent the healthy, ruddy bloom of young cheeks.

  To complete the procedure, she carefully positioned on her face a pair of massive black spectacle frames with no lenses, and held together at two points with thread – the very latest chic streak of girly fashion.

  But even after all these procedures, in Grim’s eyes there was still something attractive about her – although now Chloe reminded him of the piglet Snort, the heroine of an Orkish fable who wallowed in mud and hay on the eve of the Great Gluttony, so that she could pretend to be an old rat and cheat her fate. The moral of the fable was simple – they ate all the other piglets in silence, but cracked jokes and told funny stories while they ate Snort.

  Chloe put away her cosmetic tackle, raised her little face and shot him an entrancing glance from under her thick ginger lashes.

  ‘We can go now,’ she said.

  And at this point – perhaps because now he thought Chloe looked much less attractive – Grim finally made up his mind.

  He took a step towards Chloe, embraced her resolutely and kissed her – at first on the cheek, and then on her upper lip.

  ‘What are you up to …? What … Ooh … Go away, will you, you idiot. I’ve got my make-up on already … I mean it …’

  But Grim didn’t back off, and after a few more minutes of intense snuffling, Chloe was lying on her back with the triumphant Grim on top of her, and everything he had previously only dared to do in his imagination was actually taking place.

  Chloe didn’t do anything to encourage what he was doing, but she didn’t actually object – she looked off to the side, puckered up her face and sighed contemptuously, as if she’d been sick and tired of this sort of thing for years. Grim wasn’t really very adept, since he had almost no experience at all, but eventually all the necessary buttons had been unfastened, the bands of fabric had been parted and he realised that now it was really going to happen.

  In fact it had already started happening, when Chloe suddenly slapped him on the back.

  ‘Look,’ she said, and nodded towards the clearing.

  Grim looked up.

  There was nothing there. But from the way Chloe’s body had tensed up, he realised that she wasn’t joking.

  Then he saw it too.

  A kind of trembling in the air above the clearing. A vague, quivering patch. And it wasn’t the only thing quivering – the trees on the other side of the clearing were too, like when you look through a current of heated air on a hot day. It was almost impossible to spot at first, but the longer Grim looked, the stranger the trees in that patch seemed – as if they weren’t genuine trunks and branches, but only reflections, distorted in a corridor of mirrors.

  ‘Do you see it?’ Chloe whispered.

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Grim.

  Trying not to let Chloe slip out from under him, he grabbed a lump of earth and grass in his fist, hoisted himself up a bit and flung it at the quivering circle.

  He really shouldn’t have done that.

  Instead of flying through the circle, the earth scattered and fell. The impact was only very light, but it was followed by absolutely astounding changes.

  In a split second the circle shrank in towards its centre and disappeared. And at the point where it had just been, Death appeared.

  Grim realised straightaway what it was – as if someone had already shown him the scene and explained what their final meeting would be like. He recognised it and was hardly even scared at all.

  Death was matt-black and looked like a long, low motorbike – with no wheels, but lots of asymmetrical headlamps on its nose. Some of them were transparent and some were white, like a blind man’s eyes. There was no rider on the motorbike, but that seemed quite natural for Death. Death had short black wings jutting out crookedly at the sides, and its asymmetrically assembled body consisted of a host of smoothly swaying plane surfaces – like a series of valves constantly opening and closing.

  Death even had a tattoo – red arrows that came together towards the nose, and zigzagged at the centre of the fuselage. There were little symbols under the arrows, recording victories – large and small human figures and some numbers, very substantial numbers. Right behind the numbers on the fuselage there were sooty steel brackets with the short muzzles of cannons protruding from them. And Death hummed too – but very quietly: if Grim hadn’t deliberately listened, he’d never have noticed it.

  ‘A camera,’ Chloe gasped, and Grim realised that Chloe was right.

  But that didn’t mean he’d been wrong about Death.

  He’d never seen a combat camera from so close up. Only in pictures.

  ‘Stop shaking like that,’ Chloe whispered. ‘If he wanted to kill us, he’d have done it by now. He wants something. Let’s get up, only slowly … And put your hands up.’

  Trying not to make any sudden movement, Grim got to his feet – and realised the full seriousness of his situation. It was easy for Chloe: once she got up, all she had to do was adjust her dress. But his trousers fell down, and he stood there, red-faced with shame, looking into the wall eyes of the black motorbike suspended in the air in front of him.

  Suddenly loud music started playing: the camera’s external speakers had come on.

  The music was strange, not Orkish at all. It was menacing and piercing, and it reminded him of ancient times, forgotten glory and death. It carried on playing for a whole minute at least, and towards the end of it Grim felt such a surge of valour in his chest that he bent down, pulled up his trousers and fastened the button.

  The music stopped and the camera swayed smoothly in the air, as if it was indicating which way to go. Grim took an indecisive step in that direction and the camera immediately nodded its white nose, exactly like someone expressing agreement.

  Grim took another step, and then another. The camera moved along with him.

  ‘He wants us to go out on the road,’ said Chloe.

  ‘I realised that,’ Grim answered. ‘Maybe we should run into the forest? How’s he going to catch us in among the trees?’

  It was hard to believe it, but the camera seemed to have heard what he said. It swung round towards the forest dividing the clearing from the road, and Grim saw the complex curve of its body in profile. On one of the stabilisers he could clearly make out the emblem of Byzantion – two capital Bs reflecting each other, looking like a figure eight with a vertical line drawn through it.

  There was a loud crack. The camera was shrouded in smoke, and incredibly fast-moving red threads went hurtling into the forest, leaving a smoky trail behind them. When the threads collided with tree trunks, yellow clouds of wood dust swirled up and the tall old trees went tumbling in different directions, sliced through like wax candles.

  Then the camera stopped firing, turned back to Grim and Chloe and moved its nose from side to side several times – exactly like someone shaking his head. When it stopped, they could still hear the cracking of trees toppling.

  ‘That’s how he’s going to catch us,’ said Chloe. ‘Got it?’

  ‘Got it,’ Grim replied, not really knowing who to – the camera or Chloe.

  Now there was a smoking corridor leading straight out to the road, and choosing which way to go was easy. The camera let them go ahead and floated after them.

  Out on the road, Grim and Chloe stopped.

  ‘Now where?’ Grim asked.

  ‘He’ll explain that in a moment,’ Chloe guessed.

  Grim turned towards the camera.

  The camera did something very strange. Without taking its wall-eyes off them, it floated up and off to the side, towards the sun – and suddenly disappeared. Grim realised it had activated its camouflage again. Immediately there was no way of telling where it was – he couldn’t spot any trembling in the air.

  Grim gazed up into the sky for a few seconds.

  ‘Maybe it’s flown away?’ he suggested.

  No one answered.

  Grim turned round and saw Chloe lying in the road, curled up in a neat little ball. She looked as if she was sleeping serenely, and there was some kind of green dart sticking out of her arm. Grim was just about to lean down when he heard a click and felt something sting him. He saw the same kind of green dart sticking out of his chest. He pulled it out – the plastic stalk ended in a short, flexible needle, so thin that no blood came out.

  ‘No big deal,’ he thought.

  Then he suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to sit down in the road, and the desire was absolutely impossible to resist. And once he sat down, he realised he had to lie down, so he did.