‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise. And now come to Daddy … Only take that look of mournful resignation off your cute little face, all right? I want enthusiasm. Genuine enthusiasm. You’re doing a good deed, after all – saving an Orkish degenerate from the gas chamber. The joy that brings you must be clearly expressed in your face. Or else I might change my mind. Have you got that, my darling? That’s right, that’s it, good …’

  I kept my word.

  Before we went out the next time, Kaya spent almost an hour in front of the mirror, trying various combinations of the junk bought with my money. Several times I caught myself feeling genuinely annoyed, and I only managed to hold back with a serious effort, by reminding myself that she was trying so hard not for Grim, but for me – and getting exactly the result she wanted.

  But Grim was the one who really delighted me. When he saw her, he shuddered and turned away – and never looked at her once the whole day long. Now he was reacting to her in exactly the same way as Chloe.

  Possibly it was because he was very interested in ancient machines of death (we were walking round the Museum of the History of Snuffs) and couldn’t be bothered with modern machines of pleasure. Kaya was pale and sad. As far as I can envisage the mechanism of her emotional simulation, it’s like a game of chance: her control algorithms require her behaviour to be meaningfully consistent, and if she bets on a card and loses, she has to simulate sadness.

  It was very convincing.

  This picture stuck in my memory: Grim, Chloe and I are standing beside an imperial chariot that has been used many times in historical snuffs, and listening to the guide. An axle bristling with rusty blades juts out a long way from the reddish-brown wheel. Chloe examines the golden carving on the side of the chariot. Grim listens to the guide and thoughtfully runs his finger along one of the blades. Kaya, wearing a cheerful little pink T-shirt with a silvery kitten on the chest, stands off at one side with such a dismal air that the tears are about to well up in my eyes at any moment.

  Never mind, I think, with tenderness that no attempt at rationality can vanquish, when we get back home, Daddy will comfort you … And you’ll finally understand, my little fool, that apart from me, no one in this world needs you, absolutely no one …

  I try to catch her eye, but I don’t succeed.

  And there’s the trip to a seaside villa on the Côte d’Azur, with a genuine salty sea breeze blowing on the ten-square-metre observation platform. Grim doesn’t understand the way the hyperoptics shrink Chloe, sitting at the far end of the platform, and he walks backwards and forwards, trying to catch the point at which her image will double up or distort. And I …

  I look at Kaya, silhouetted in an arch of trembling leaves, and think that the gentle breeze toying with her hair, the cheerful equanimity of youth, the sunny strength that fills her to overflowing as she looks out at the sea from her transient green alcove – all of that exists not in her, but in me. Only in me. But she doesn’t feel anything at all. And youth in its pure form (if we accept that there is such a thing) is only to be found as a flash of reflected light in the heart of one who has lost it forever. And those who are genuinely young have nothing on their mind but dreary everyday concerns, petty envy, lust and vanity.

  I was certain that Grim had completely lost interest in Kaya. I had the most powerful complexes of the Orkish psyche on my side – the words ‘pupo’ and ‘doll-shagger’ are regarded as insults by them, and the corresponding activity is regarded as unworthy of a man, whose most important concern is to get blood on documents and perish in the Circus to the glory of the true faith. In order to carry on using Grim as my symbolic rival, Kaya would have to overcome all the Orkish prejudices.

  I was very curious about what she was going to do.

  Grim and Chloe were both very interested in London, because ever since they were children they had known that that was where all the rich Orks lived. When it turned out that London was simply a view from a window, they were a bit disheartened. But then Chloe remembered about the luxurious restaurants where the Orkish elite gathered, and all her interest in Big Byz became focused on them. It was pointless dragging her off, for instance, to the Archive of Ancient Films or the Museum of Technologies. The only thing that excited her now was the London restaurant VERTU HIGH.

  I’ll try to explain what this name means. To start with, vertuhai is an ancient Old Russian word that still lingers on. According to the dictionary, it came from the prison slang – and means, quote – prob. a machine-gunner on a prison-camp observation tower, early (?) Barbed-Wire Age. Kaya has her own version of etymology, though – and perhaps she knows better. Today the meaning of the word is different (albeit very slightly) – it is a self-designation of the upper stratum of the Orkish elite who call the shots in Orkland. Others usually call them ‘Global Orks’ – from the Upper Mid-Siberian Ürkainisher Gløbüs, as the Orkish propagandists officially refer to our offglobe, thus sending a hint to their great nation that we are only one of the jewels in the crown of the Urkaganate.

  Naturally, the Global Orks don’t live down below, but up here among us. This restaurant is one of the places where they congregate – hence the name, slightly polished and dignified by our sommeliers, whom they often hire for such purposes. Anyone at all can go there, but for most people it’s absurdly expensive, and for those who can afford it, it’s absurdly vulgar. And so the Global Orks are able to maintain the purity of their ranks even on Big Byz. I personally wouldn’t touch an establishment like that with a bargepole – not out of thrift, but because I don’t like sitting in the same hall as gentlemen whom I am used to seeing through a gun sight.

  The hall of the restaurant was the same astounding mixture of bad taste and pomposity that is so typical of the life and manners of rich Orks. It was sickening to look at those tablecloths of black and gold brocade and the oak panels with a spastika woven into the carving. Naturally, even in London, Orks cling to the true faith. The hall had a little devotional corner, reflecting traditional Orkish values as inscribed in the new, civilised landscape: a coconut from the Hill of the Ancestors, a portrait of the Kagan and an image of Manitou, and down below them, a small inflatable woman with a thick gold chain round her neck. For the Orks, the thing of value wasn’t the rubber woman, of course, but the chain (symbolic in every sense), but this was how they extended the sweaty hand of friendship to us. Gee thanks, I almost wept.

  And there was also a cartouche with a motto:

  ONE ROOF, TWO CULTURES

  The CINEWS Inc. daily allowance that I had at my disposal was only enough to get Grim, Chloe and me a coffee and ice cream. But on the other hand we got a window table with a superb view of Big Ben, which is, by the way, something of a fetish for the Orks. I had never seen the clock face of this tower from so close up – there turned out to be golden words that resemble an appeal to Manitou, set into the stonework below it.

  Grim looked by turns at the customers sitting in the hall and out of the window – but his gaze never rested for single moment on a grief-stricken Kaya.

  ‘But where are our orktivists?’ he asked.

  I almost laughed.

  ‘Orktivists don’t fly this high, Grim. This orbit is way too elevated for them.’

  I don’t like the Orkish orktivists. Of course, they’re not all halfwits or clowns, kissing the offglobe’s reflection in the puddles of their animal farm. There are sincere and honest specimens among them. And I must admit that they are the best of the Orks – but that kind isn’t even allowed into the Yellow Zone, let alone the VERTU HIGH restaurant. They wouldn’t go there anyway – a strange, endangered species that we haven’t had up here for a long time. And its members don’t live long down below either – unless, of course they work under supervision and contract. They’re dying out because, to put it mildly, they’re not very bright. They think everything’s so bad down there because Torn Trojan is in power.

  Ah, you poor, poor souls. It’s completely the other way round – Torn Trojan is in power because things are so bad down there. And they’re bad because that’s the way they were yesterday and the day before yesterday, and after Monday and Tuesday there always comes a Wednesday in the week. So you liquidate your Urkagan (along with the final remnants of a tolerable life, because revolutions come at a high price) and then what? If you don’t like the word ‘Trojan’, then you’ll get some other Torn Latex. What difference does it make? You’ll still be the same … And then, you don’t live in a vacuum, but right below us. An intercultural dialogue is bound to start up. And in cases like that our sommeliers don’t waste much time on choosing their words. They are too busy choosing targets.

  But I didn’t say that to Grim. And anyway he’d already forgotten about the orktivists that he’d been expecting to meet here for some reason.

  There were lots of Orkish celebrities on all sides – Grim had only seen them on the manitou before. Although he had met one man sitting in the hall in person – that was Torn Durex’s mezzanine-adjutant, with whom he had ridden, side by side, into Orkish Slava on the Kagan’s barge. There was also a couple of big-time gas Orks with their bodyguards. And all the Orks were looking terribly alarmed – as if they had been doused with boiling water. Everyone was looking at the manitou up near the ceiling.

  The news channel B INSIDE B (Big Byz’s cable news, which isn’t broadcast to Orkland in any shape or form) had just started transmitting some breaking news.

  Torn Durex, who was living in exile in London, had been killed.

  Yes, that was news.

  That’s interesting now – why had I started thinking about liquidating the Kagan just a moment earlier? Maybe my ears had picked something up without me realising it, and my subconscious had processed the information before I could make sense of it? Or did information waves propagate on their own in a mental environment, without any material medium at all?

  It happened like this: late in the evening, when Durex was sitting on the balcony of his open duplex in the lower section of the offglobe (the highest level of luxury accessible to a global Ork, regardless of his financial resources), ‘three unidentified cameras’(ha ha ha) had flown up to his residence.

  One of them fired a paralyser dart at Durex and another grappled him with a hook and dragged him over the parapet of the balcony, all the way through the conditioning barrier, and the great leader of the Urks had taken a long, involuntary dive down to Orkish Slava, where he melded with the souls of his ancestors. The third camera crashed into the golden sphere with a crown, installed on Durex’s balcony in imitation of the view from Big Ben. All the Global Orks who can afford an external balcony and a conditioner-screen have these spheres with crosses or crowns (like the ones outside the windows of the BI GBEN restaurant). The catch is that they can’t be projections – they have to be genuine, made of stone and metal. These are a must-have item for them, the ultimate status symbol, and between themselves they call them ‘bollocks’.

  To take a good look at these celebrated Orkish ‘bollocks’, I only had to turn my head towards Big Ben in the window of the restaurant. At the edges of the tower the spheres were twice as large, and they had crowns – for the most serious clients. Torn Durex probably had one like that. I wondered if the ancient architects had foreseen this or not.

  Our discoursemongers are fond of saying that the Orkish elite’s cult of Big Ben is a manifestation of their repressed homosexuality, which they don’t dare to bring close to the surface of their consciousness by any other means. And that’s why generation after generation of them come to London. Perhaps this is correct from the ideological point of view, but actually they don’t have any problem with butt love (I’m not talking about Ganjaberserks here) – down below I’ve observed it plenty of times myself. Perhaps they just don’t bring it close to the surface of their consciousness? But after all, I’m not a discoursemonger. And what I was thinking about wasn’t this clock-tower symbolism at all.

  Smash up a camera in kindergarten conditions like that! Some bloody pilots. It really was breaking news.

  The official version of the killing, which was offered by B INSIDE B, was infighting among the upper echelon of the Global Orks. But it was all clear to me immediately. This was a greeting to all the big-shot Orks still down below, global and otherwise. Torn Durex had made a big mistake with his gas bomb. And others had to learn the lesson.

  Of course, not a word was said about this. But the news about Durex’s death was followed immediately by a live report from the funeral of Nicolas-Olivier Laurence von Trier, who had apparently been kept in a freezer for all this time – so that now even the most stupid viewers would be able to trace the link between cause and effect.

  Von Trier was buried in a hundred-metre-long swimming pool, transformed for this solemn occasion into a sea, with a Nordic boat sailing away across it into the sunset. The boat and the sea both came out well. Nicolas-Olivier in person lay on his open funeral bed, with his bat on his chest. When the boat had sailed away from the shore a little, the people gathered at the funeral began making movements as if they were firing arrows from bows. Fiery arrows started showering down onto the boat, and soon it was transformed into a blazing bonfire drifting away from the shore. I don’t know if they used a real smoke effect or not, but it was all done in good taste.

  The Global Orks watched the manitou, spellbound. But Grim and Chloe didn’t seem able to get their heads round why the news was showing the Kagan’s portrait in a black mourning frame again. For them, Torn Durex had been killed with his headquarters staff at Orkish Slava. I heard, by the way, that it almost did happen – supposedly he got so drunk that they only managed to shove him into the trailer at the very last moment. The report from von Trier’s funeral was interrupted several times – to show Durex’s twisted body in a white shirt and nightcap, lying in the grass at Orkish Slava.

  This insert had been shot well. They started with the cap, with a streak of blood on it, occupying the entire screen, then moved on to the face that was battered black and blue, with a fly crawling across it, and then the entire body, with the legs doubled up under it, appeared on the screen (there was surprisingly little blood for a height like that), and after that the shot zoomed out rapidly, and in two or three seconds the little white figure on the grass was transformed into a tiny dot in an immense sea of green (the mass graves could no longer be distinguished under the fresh turf).

  I thought they would have enough wits and good taste to zoom out a little bit further and cut to my recent emblem of the war, only they didn’t think of that. But it came out pretty well as it was – it inspired obscure, barely intelligible thoughts about man’s insignificance in the face of nature and the cosmos. And also, it stands to reason, of another man. First and foremost.

  And at this point, while I was following the news, Kaya moved into the attack.

  I didn’t notice how and when it happened. At some moment I simply discovered that she was talking to Grim again, and he was listening to her very carefully, nodding every now and then. Even Chloe was listening to her – and also, it seemed to me, with interest.

  Kaya acted simply and unexpectedly.

  While the Orkish Kagan had used gas as his weapon, she attacked Grim using her vast range of knowledge. I’m not sure, by the way, that this word is really even applicable to her – there isn’t any clear boundary between the contents of her own memory and the data she can access via air port.

  While I was watching the crowd taking its leave of von Trier (at least forty people had come, almost as many as came for the pupo Trig – and probably about ten million were watching), she had started explaining to the young Orks where the word ‘vertuhai’ came from.

  Naturally, they didn’t know this, although they had heard the word ever since they were kids. Kaya had started retelling a section of Les Feuilles Mortes for them. She was speaking rapidly and distinctly, like an aircraft cannon.

  ‘There’s no certain etymology for this word in the dictionaries. But Bernard-Henri gave a detailed explanation of it – and even adduced various accounts of its origin. According to one, in ancient times a “vertuhai” was what Orks especially loyal to the Kagan were called. He rewarded them with a valuable “Vertu” telephone and, on top of that, a small estate with serfs. Several of these phones, bearing scars from sabre blows, bullets and teeth, are still kept in the Museum of the Ancestors in Slava today. After the owners died their Vertu phones were placed in the burial mound, since it was believed that by holding on to them they could ascend into Alkalla, or at least be reborn in London. This is the account that is reflected in the name of the VERTU HIGH restaurant. The Urkaganate is working assiduously to resurrect the custom of rewarding the pillars of the regime with precious mobile phones, for which purpose it constantly orders deliveries of such phones from the jewellers in the Yellow Zone …’

  Chloe tried to ask something, but Kaya didn’t stop.

  ‘According to another theory, “vertuhai” was what Mongolian tribute gatherers were called, and it was from them that the Vertu telephone acquired its name. This is the most scholarly hypothesis. According to a third explanation, “vertuhai” was a name for a tea sommelier who sat on the high machine-gun tower beside a teahouse, urging the horsemen ranging over the Siberian plain to come for tea. In order to spot them from afar, he had to have a very keen eye-sight. Hence the other name for a “vertuhai” – a “supervisor”.’

  Grim asked:

  ‘But what were those horsemen doing on the Siberian plain? And why did they have to be urged?’

  Kaya beamed brightly and started talking again – and what’s more, I got the feeling that if I just strained my eyes a little, I would be able to see the information waves pouring into her little head through the air connection.

  ‘Of course, the horsemen didn’t need to be urged. The Mongols, who conquered Eurasia in prehistoric times, sent their tribute gatherers to the indigenous population without needing any reminders. Essentially, that was all that their state administration consisted of. Gradually the Mongols started appointing their local protégés as “vertuhai”. They knew the local customs better, they were in the know about who had what hidden away, and where – and they were a match for the Mongols when it came to cruelty.’