Damilola looked at Kaya with a feeling that seemed very much like hatred. But then he immediately laughed and shook his head.

  ‘I actually like that boat,’ he said. ‘It’s a reminder of the cyclical nature of all existence. What did you come in here for, kitten?’

  ‘Come and eat,’ said Kaya. ‘It’s all ready.’

  When she went back to the sitting room, Grim finally realised what seemed so strange about Damilola’s home. Apart from the control screens round the exercise machine with the saddle, there wasn’t a single manitou here.

  It seemed logical. Otherwise the paintings on the walls depicting exploding manitous would have looked incongruous. But even so it wasn’t clear how his host established contact with the information universe.

  ‘But tell me,’ Grim asked, taking the plunge, ‘where’s your manitou?’

  Damilola smiled and pointed to the door of the happiness room.

  ‘No,’ said Grim. ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant where your manitou is.’

  Damilola smiled again and pointed at the door again. Grim blushed, thinking he was being taken for an idiot, and to smooth over the awkwardness, he thought it best to follow Damilola’s directions.

  ‘Sit on the toilet,’ Damilola shouted from the corridor.

  Grim did as he was told.

  As soon as his body touched the seat a glittering screen appeared in the air in front of him, and down at the bottom of it letters, numbers and icons started flickering in empty space – located at a position that made it convenient to press on them with your knees parted and your elbows lowered onto your thighs. This screen and its buttons had no material substance that Grim could understand; they were simply a glimmering in space that responded to the touch of fingers. The fact that Damilola had installed this ephemeral console in the privy subtly complemented the theme of protest in the art displayed on his walls.

  As soon as Grim got up, the manitou immediately faded away. He’d never seen anything like it.

  ‘That’s the cheapest kind there is,’ Damilola explained when Grim came out. ‘But the panels at Bernard-Henri’s place are antiques, two-dimensional plasma. And they’re much more expensive. He used to say he liked composing texts on them – the great discoursemongers of the past worked on manitous like that.’

  ‘Are they really old?’ asked Chloe.

  ‘Copies, of course. But they look exactly like the real thing. An ancient panel would cost about three million at least. And it’s best not to switch it on – they break down immediately. And there are vacuum tubes with crystal displays too. Like the old emperors used to have. But they cost as much as a view of London.’

  Grim wanted to say that you didn’t have to be an ancient emperor – the Orks still had vacuum manitous made by the factory that produced the ‘Urkaine’ mopeds. That was what his Uncle Shug used to work on before he was arrested for being untrustworthy, and they were the Orks’ technological pride and joy, an inheritance from their great ancestors. But then he decided that Damilola probably knew far more about that.

  At last they all sat down at the table.

  Grim was sitting opposite Kaya, and he could get a really good look at her. She seemed to him even more beautiful than before. She was dressed in her house clothes – a funny, fluffy dressing gown with little green rabbits on it – and this almost childish outfit made her look indecently young. Chloe had no doubt carefully compared Kaya and herself on all points, and now she was looking glum.

  Kaya really had chosen the food well. In honour of Grim and Chloe, the Orkish dish mantow – tofu dumplings – was served. The mantow tasted delicious – only Kaya didn’t eat any at all, although there were several lying on the plate in front of her. However, she did explain that this dish symbolised the severed heads of enemies, which the Orks used to boil and eat in times long ago. Grim couldn’t tell if she was making fun of him or not – but he decided she probably wasn’t. The Orks really could have had a custom like that. Especially since the upper people still did – as the collection in Bernard-Henri’s little cupboard showed.

  Apparently Grim wasn’t alone in recalling their recent discovery – Chloe did too. Responding to some comment about the heavy yoke of the Orkish experience, Damilola said:

  ‘Everyone has a skeleton in the cupboard.’

  Chloe apparently didn’t understand the idiom; she tittered genteelly and blurted out:

  ‘Oh, but we’ve got two of them!’

  Kaya laughed, but Damilola frowned as if he was afraid the conversation was about to sink into a bottomless pit.

  Grim decided to change the subject urgently.

  ‘Is it hard being a pilot?’ he asked. ‘Could I be one, for instance?’

  Damilola’s eyes clouded over with an indeterminate feeling – either pride, or sadness, or a mixture of both.

  ‘It’s not likely,’ he said.

  ‘Because I’m an Ork?’ asked Grim.

  ‘No,’ replied Damilola. ‘You have to start working towards it from early childhood. You haven’t even seen a single snuff right through, let alone the Ancient Films. But for this work you have to grow up in the visual culture. So that you’re impregnated with it from infancy.’

  ‘And is flying a camera difficult?’

  ‘It’s not enough just to fly it. You have to physically merge with it.’

  ‘I’ve got good reflexes,’ said Grim.

  Damilola laughed.

  ‘It just looks like it’s easy. Sitting there in front of the manitou and flying it. But actually it takes half a lifetime to learn. You have to know all about aerodynamics and lighting, camera angles and angles of attack, spin and flutter, not to mention wind and light exposure. If you have a specific assignment to hover over some pit with a vampire in it, that’s easy. But if you’re freelance, you have to feel instinctively which glide path they’ll use in a snuff and which they won’t. You have to be a sniper in every possible sense. Bombing with shot shells from a nosedive is just like surgery.’

  ‘And what’s harder,’ asked Grim, ‘hitting the target from a cannon or with a bomb?’

  ‘With a bomb,’ said Damilola. ‘When you’re nosediving, the target’s in your sights for half a second at the most. Of course, there are guided bombs and rockets, but they cost ten times as much, and all the expenses go on your balance sheet. That’s why most pilots use shot shells for pummelling a target. You know what the times are like yourself – they economise. And to hit the target with a shot shell, you have to know in your gut when to drop it. You have to fire your cannon without even thinking about it. And you mustn’t miss. Especially when you’re covering a star and firing plugs.’

  ‘Plugs?’

  ‘Stealth-kill ammunition. That’s …’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ said Grim.

  ‘It might be low-visibility, but if you hit the eye or the cheek, the face bursts open, and you’ll spoil an expensive shot. Who’s going to work with you after that? But the worst nightmare is smashing up the camera. That’s why everyone guzzles M-vitamins or shoots up all the time, but no one admits it. The doctors close their eyes to it, of course, because they know there’s just no other way. And at the age of fifty you’re a wreck already …’

  Damilola turned sad.

  ‘But there’s only a battle once a year at the most, isn’t there?’ said Grim. ‘What do you do for the rest of the time?’

  ‘What about the news? And the bombing raids? Every day over Orkland.’

  ‘Over the market?’

  ‘Over the market too, and over all the garbage tips. You hardly need to fire at all there, but firing’s actually easier than shooting. For that, you have to find the right expressions on faces, the right clothes, the right scene of devastation – you can only learn all that over the years. You even have to fly over a garbage tip the right way. You have to sense what they’ll put in a shot and what they won’t. Not just shoot an old woman with a bowl of rotten cabbage, but get a ginger kitten meowing in the shot … Everyone works on instinct. The pilot and the senior sommeliers.’

  ‘But are there any rules?’

  ‘In the information business there aren’t any rules at all on the verbal level. But one step to the right or the left, and you’re off the air. They’ll put in someone else, who’ll provide the right mood. That’s why you have to spend all your free time sitting in front of the manitou. Watching which way the trends are shifting. And the Orkish delinquents have got completely out of hand just recently – they fire stuff at the cameras with slings. Nuts and bolts. If they smash your lens, just you try proving afterwards for the warranty that you didn’t scrunch it yourself.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Grim, ‘is it true that any camera can kill anyone at all, and no one will find out about it?’

  ‘No. Out of the question. There’s even a law – when the weaponry’s in operation, there’s a control recording …’

  Damilola thought for a moment and pulled a sour face.

  ‘But there are probably special operations too,’ he went on. ‘So anything’s possible … The key point would be that no one has shot it on a different camera.’

  Talking about work had definitely put Damilola in a glum mood – his hands were starting to tremble slightly.

  Kaya asked:

  ‘Tell me, Grim, what’s it like being an Ork?’

  ‘Damilola knows more about that,’ Grim muttered.

  Damilola laughed and slapped his hand on his thigh, as if Grim had said the funniest thing he had ever heard in his life. His mood seemed to have improved.

  Suddenly a screen lit up in the air in front of the table – the same kind as in the happiness room, only several times larger. Grim noticed a little black box in Kaya’s hands, and he guessed that the manitou in Damilola’s home could be switched on not only in the privy, but anywhere else as well.

  Damilola went red with embarrassment.

  ‘What have you switched that rubbish on for?’

  Kaya smiled.

  ‘They’re going to show Grim in a moment.’

  ‘In the news?’ Damilola asked in surprise. ‘The report on Trig’s already been on.’

  ‘No,’ said Kaya. ‘It’s just about him.’

  ‘About me?’ asked Grim, astonished. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There was an announcement. You’re going to read your poem in the entertainment package.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Damilola, ‘the entertainment package. I see.’

  ‘Me? A poem? But I haven’t been filmed for your entertainment package!’

  Damilola livened up again. This time tears even came to his eyes.

  ‘Grim,’ he said. ‘You’re so funny. This isn’t a snuff, you know, and it’s not the news. They can show anything at all in the entertainment package! Why would they want you for the shoot? I’m sorry, but you could only get in the way!’

  An anchorwoman in a T-shirt made of black feathers appeared in the empty space in front of the table. She looked so real that they could easily have sat her at the table. But her mouth moved soundlessly – it seemed like this was the usual thing in Damilola’s home.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ Grim asked eagerly.

  ‘She’s reminding us that a young Orkish soldier, who could no longer bear his torment, has chosen freedom and defected to us,’ Kaya replied.

  ‘How do you know?’ Grim asked in amazement.

  ‘I’m lip-reading,’ said Kaya. ‘Now she’s saying that from your childhood years you were an underground dissident and an orktivist. You worked in rights protection journalism …’

  Grim broke down and started laughing hysterically.

  ‘Rights protection journalism!’ he said. ‘They made it up, would you believe it!’

  ‘He was persecuted by the authorities,’ Kaya continued, ‘and is presently in Byzantion with the status of a guest. Grim, ITN 1 3505 00 148 41 0, is not only an orktivist, but a talented Orkish poet …’

  ‘A poet?’ Grim exclaimed in embarrassment. ‘But I haven’t written … That is, I only tried … I’m not very good at it. Only a few rough drafts, and they took those in quarantine.’

  ‘They’ll give you a hand with the poems too,’ Damilola chuckled. ‘They’ll finish them on a creative articulator. Welcome to civilisation, Grim.’

  ‘His poems,’ said Kaya, continuing her translation of silence, ‘are rough, harsh and truthful. They express the typical mood of the contemporary Ork … Shall we turn the sound on?’

  Damilola nodded, and the next second the anchorwoman disappeared and Grim himself appeared in front of the table

  Grim didn’t even realise at first that it was him.

  Standing right there was a morosely magnificent black warrior, with a sword on his belt. His cloak was similar in style to a high-ranking Right Protector’s – a gold spastika glittered on his sleeve, its three cross-pieces indicating the rank of a colonel. The curved sword in the black scabbard and the lacquered helmet with the perforated visor were certainly very beautiful and costly, but absolutely not Orkish – Grim had never seen any like that in even a single snuff.

  ‘An Ork’s Song Before Battle!’ the warrior proclaimed, then removed his helmet and flung it aside.

  Grim saw his own face. His double’s hairstyle was strange – the hair had been smeared with gel and set in a shape that was hard to describe, reminiscent of either a candle flame fluttering in the wind or a squashed onion. Perhaps his hair really would have looked like that if he had galloped through the night without taking his helmet off.

  The double snatched at his sword and started declaiming, raising his voice dramatically with every quatrain:

  When the prosecutor public with the pierced ear lobe

  Kick-started his fleet motorbike, saying he must fly,

  ’Twas then our glances met across a rusty barrel

  With the terse inscription ‘sand’ (which was a blatant lie).

  On the left, in a furrow from a giant dump truck’s wheels,

  Round and massive as a sputnik, a fat pig lay.

  And I was only saved because the lads were all still sleeping

  On the heaps of padded jackets, dirty bed sheets and hay.

  Despite the smell of Orkish feet and other body parts,

  And all the facial attributes of common race and land,

  I knew that almost all of them were designated queerasts

  And any one of those would have written that word ‘sand’.

  But am I any better? I also am submissive.

  I also watch world cinema, in cowering compliance,

  And all our abject souls, so timorous and passive,

  Differ only in their mutterings of counterfeit defiance.

  I climbed out of the window. The sky was overhead;

  Below the sky – a fence; beyond that – a ravine.

  And it was all so ludicrously, laughably absurd,

  That it would have been very funny if not so obscene.

  Ah, fuck this Orkish homeland right up its shitty ass,

  This dump truck creeping into nowhere, loaded up with shite.

  Since I was just a kid here I’ve been beaten and harassed

  And no one ever granted me a bill of human rights.

  So flush the whole works down the tubes or suck it

  Up the spout – that’s now for the enemy to choose

  I’ll bloody no more bloody documents for you now, fuck it –

  Farwell to arms! Across the river and into the trees!! Vamoose!!!

  The obscenities, which the warrior practically yelled, were drowned out by beeping.

  The on-screen double recited superbly – and he almost danced as he did it, striking ever more terrifying poses with every quatrain. At the end, with his voice rising to a scream, he started furiously brandishing his sword, as if he was fighting off a crowd of phantoms. When he finished reciting, he suddenly calmed down, flung his sword after his helmet and drooped over in front of the camera, as if casting himself on the mercy of the people sitting in front of their manitous.

  The smiling anchorwoman reappeared.

  ‘That was “An Ork’s Song Before Battle”,’ she repeated and sighed. ‘Only where will you ever vamoose, you silly goose?’

  Then she turned serious and started talking about something incomprehensible. A cross-section of some kind of spherical machine appeared in the air, and Kaya immediately switched the manitou off. Grim realised that his three minutes of fame were behind him.

  ‘Well now,’ said Damilola. ‘They presented you well. Usually everything here has a hint of mockery to it. But they made you so cute, you could hold the candles in a snuff. What do you say?’

  Grim could have said a lot.

  Firstly, if he had a sword and helmet like that, he wouldn’t have tossed them away, but sold them at the market and lived a quiet life on the proceeds for about five years.

  Secondly, he had never written this poem – at least not in this form. It had been patched together out of the rough drafts in his notepad – with some of his ideas badly distorted. And some had simply been added in. Along with all the obscene words.

  ‘Queerasts’ really had been mentioned in his rough notes, but in a completely different sense. Grim couldn’t believe that so many of the lads from his draft, even if they were grubby, unwashed and none too bright, could have been cursed by Manitou with a black destiny and condemned to die. But this made it seem as if he completely agreed with it.

  He hadn’t written the quatrain about his Orkish homeland at all.

  It had been taken from the folk song ‘My Bloody Homeland Really Sucks’, to the spasmodic broken rhythms of which Grim had composed his work. Only in the original it was ‘this dump truck driving into nowhere, loaded up with shite’ – but it had been changed to ‘creeping’, evidently in the belief that this way it was more offensive. The line ‘and no one ever granted me a bill of human rights’ was incomprehensible too – in the song about his homeland it said ‘and no one’s ever given me a full bowl of rice’. Grim couldn’t help but notice that the upper sommeliers had even managed to improve the dubious Orkish rhyme.