‘Oh, how vulgar you are,’ said Kaya, wincing. ‘I feel ashamed for you in front of Grim.’

  I like it when she reacts to me emotionally. Even when she simulates this emotion for the sake of my symbolic rival. I chuckled and went on:

  ‘Bernard-Henri had a collection of genuine derp, old stuff. And not on his manitou, but on photographic paper – the biggest hit of all for a connoisseur. He used to sort it by category – facial, anal and so forth …’

  ‘Phoo! Phoo! Shut up immediately!’ Kaya said and stamped her foot.

  ‘What do you mean, shut up? Even children draw that sort of thing now. A table with uncles and aunties sitting at it, with their faces all skewed. And it’s all coloured in with crayons – the table, the carafe. When the parents find it, it means instant tears and thrashings.’

  ‘But why can’t people watch snuffs?’ asked Grim. ‘I mean as erotica?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Well, if you can’t understand that and feel it for yourself, I don’t know how to explain it. There’s even an Orkish saying: “Often – puff, seldom – huff, never – wank to a snuff”.’

  ‘Phoo, you coarse brute,’ Kaya snorted.

  And she blushed.

  Honestly, she blushed. And Grim was hooked immediately. And again he didn’t notice how.

  ‘I shouldn’t have started this conversation,’ he said, looking at Kaya. ‘But what kind of Orkish saying is that?’

  ‘In my young days I studied Orkish folklore,’ I replied. ‘In order to understand the soul of the enemy. I learned lots of new things. By the way, they’re still making historical discoveries from your sayings.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Grim asked in surprise.

  ‘Well … for instance there was a Siberian proverb: “His son and his daughter put the kibosh on Darth Vader”.’

  ‘What’s a kibosh?’ Grim asked.

  ‘Kibosh? I’m not completely sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this big black lacquered helmet. Like the one they put on you in the entertainment block. You remember?’

  Grim nodded.

  ‘And who is Darth Vader?’

  ‘He … Well, it’s a long story and doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we can conclude from this proverb that in the times when Urkaine was called the Siberian Republic, the forebears of present-day Orks had access to the Ancient Films.’

  ‘And what other discoveries have they made from sayings?’

  I suddenly felt curious about whether Kaya would continue making passes at him and took a few seconds to come up with something that would delight her. Fortunately it wasn’t difficult – every Orkish saying is a good pretext for a duel.

  ‘For instance, “Pissing without farting is like tea without tsampa”. The historians conclude that the Orks once had a higher standard of living than today. And contacts with the Tibetan Plateau, through which they obtained barley flour.’

  Kaya winced but kept quiet. But now she didn’t need to open her mouth – her manipulations had already galvanised Grim. He spoke up himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kaya. Another bad idea.’

  ‘No,’ said Kaya. ‘Not at all. Everything’s fine.’

  But she looked as if she had been forced to undress in front of a battalion of Ganjaberserks. Grim looked upset too – that happened to him every time he came face to face with the abysmal hideousness of his own nation.

  ‘I haven’t heard a single one of these sayings,’ he said.

  That wasn’t very surprising, because they had most likely been invented in the time of Loss Liquid by our sommeliers, who were assembling an anthology of Orkish folklore – in that period the Orks decided to buy in a bit more cultural history for themselves and paid pretty well for it. These sayings never infiltrated the broad masses, and down below it was mostly only philologists who knew them. But of course, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t study the soul of the enemy from them. On the contrary, it was very convenient – you got a clear picture in the minimum of time. If the Orkish masters of culture were capable of inventing anything themselves, they would have been certain to come out with much the same. But I didn’t talk about that – Kaya would have found something to carp about even there.

  ‘I’ll find out all about Orkish sayings,’ she promised Grim.

  ‘No, don’t,’ he growled. ‘But thanks, of course. It’s very kind of you, Kaya.’

  With tiny little steps like that my wily playmate advanced towards her goal – and soon reached it.

  Oh yes. And how.

  This one time we went to watch Ancient Films at the retro-hall, where they show them on the same apparatus as in the times when they were shot, which makes for total immersion in the historical atmosphere. It’s an interesting experience. I usually take a seat in the first or second row, because I like the big picture. But Grim and Kaya sat right at the back.

  I didn’t look round, but I had a nanocamera with me, which I put on my collar specially to keep an eye on them. And somewhere in the middle of the film they started kissing. Long and hard.

  So this was it.

  I can’t say that I felt jealousy. But when the kissing couple appeared in my mini-manitou, I started thinking about how I’d ended up with a life like this. And why, I wondered, had I adjusted my sura’s settings to such a mode that she was ecstatically kissing this Orkish untermensch, while I could only get a kiss out of her by cunning and blackmail?

  The answer, of course, was simple. When she kissed someone else, I believed in her sincerity, because it’s always easy to believe in something bad. But if she started kissing me as ecstatically as that … I could achieve that with just three twists of a knob. But I could never have forgotten for a moment that it was the ‘Cloud of Tenderness’ mode kissing me.

  These were our final outings in Big Byz. The introduction phase was over – Grim had got his bearings in the environment well enough now to carry on getting to know Byzantion independently.

  From now on he could only see Kaya in my home. I didn’t intend to deny him this small joy – if only because I didn’t want to deny myself the great joy that was waiting for me every time after he left.

  I hadn’t known before that the list of services provided by suras included this one: ‘Non-symbolic triumph over the symbolic rival’. As amplified by dopamine resonance, too.

  It seems to me now that those were the happiest days of my life. Kaya immersed herself in simulating her romance with Grim and was very glad that I didn’t obstruct their occasional meetings (I even used to fly out on a mission sometimes, pretending that I didn’t notice their whispering and kissing in the corners, but they didn’t go any further than that). In response she gave me happiness readily and obediently. And also, I think, without any particular revulsion – insofar as that’s possible under the sullen skies of maximum bitchiness.

  One day I got a call from the manufacturer.

  Apparently Kaya had acquired paid access to materials that weren’t in the general info-library … The company wanted to know if I was aware that she was paying for it herself. The materials were entirely inoffensive in character – ancient religious treatises on human nature, information on the functioning of the brain and so on.

  I decided that Kaya wanted to find out more about what makes us tick, so that it would be easier to manipulate us. And suddenly I realised that I was thinking about her as if she was alive.

  I couldn’t understand how she contrived to behave in such a way that all the time I saw before me a real personality, exactly like myself. After all, I knew that the light of Manitou wasn’t in her, that this was simply an electronic mirror hanging in front of me.

  But it was a mirror that could play chess. And when you’re playing chess, can you tell who’s sitting opposite you from the way the pieces move?

  It suddenly seemed incomprehensible to me how I could have taken on trust, and for so long, the company’s assurance that she was in no way qualitatively different from a complex domestic electrical appliance.

  Of course, the reason why the company said that was clear enough.

  Only was it really true?

  CHAPTER 19

  Grim journeyed through the new world all alone – Chloe could have accompanied him, but she didn’t want to, and Kaya was eager to, but she couldn’t.

  Getting around was easy. All he had to do was walk into a metrolift cabin and enter the address in the manitou with his finger. The list of options was refreshed after every new letter, exactly like in an on-screen dictionary.

  If the destination was displayed in large font, it meant that there would be a large public space outside the door (these were mostly stations devoted to the great cities of antiquity – but despite the numerous tube exits, crowds of people rarely gathered there).

  Smaller text led into malls, restaurants or cultural centres such as the memorial to Trig. They were usually empty. Byzantines hardly ever came here – only for a gala dinner, some kind of media event that required the presence of lots of people, or when a consumer wanted to touch a product with his own hands before buying it.

  Really small text related to private addresses. Several times when Grim made a mistake the tube disgorged him into corridors exactly the same as the one where the door of his own residence was located.

  It looked like the inhabitants of Big Byz preferred to spend their time in their own individual space.

  Grim knew that there were also restricted zones, which weren’t in the transporter’s menu – to get to them you had to know the code. But for the time being the freely accessible world was enough for him.

  He mostly travelled to the very biggest words – ‘Florence’, ‘Carthage’, ‘Los Angeles’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘St Petersburg’ and so on. Every time he found himself in fantastically beautiful places that he had only seen before in the Free Encyclopaedia or on the manitou. Of course, if he really thought about it, he was seeing them on a manitou now as well – but he tried not to think about that.

  The boundaries of physical reality could almost always be identified directly through the three-dimensional apparition. Points at which there was a danger of banging a head or an elbow were marked with little green perimeter lights; if they were anything to go by, reality was rather cramped. The cities consisted of several city squares, the squares were actually round halls with low ceilings, and what looked like streets turned out to be narrow tunnels. Apparently the underlying space looked like the scruffy corridor that Grim had seen on his first day on Big Byz, which hadn’t been connected to a generator of illusions.

  But the three-dimensional projectors transformed these crooked technical burrows into extremely convincing avenues with tall old trees and fairy-tale palaces. The illusion went beyond a simple three-dimensional mirage. If Grim was walking past dusty railings screening off a shady garden, he could even blow on the dust – and see it go flying up off a cast-iron flourish. The important point was not to touch anything with his fingers. But the world was arranged in such a way that it left very few opportunities for unmasking it.

  The space was always a joy to look at – but it was physically beyond reach, because he was separated off from it by either a fence, or a deceptively light screen, or a concrete parapet that coincided with a real wall. Distant parks, rivers and hills were quite literally no more than a fleeting glimpse – they existed only as they went fleeting by.

  But the universe was cordoned off with such cunning that the unstated prohibition on crossing its boundaries never seemed as crude and offensive as in Orkland, where everything was real. And Grim was amazed to realise that all his life down below he had been taking what he saw on trust – but essentially the pathways along which destiny had herded him were every bit as crooked as in Big Byz.

  The physical world coincided with the projected version at principal key points, the so-called ‘sphincters’. For instance, the entrances to palaces and houses, marked with little green perimeter lights, were absolutely genuine – in the sense that they allowed Grim to enter a multi-storey space in which the electronic windows offered views from the height appropriate to each individual storey, and he could see the street that he had just left in order to come inside. The view was as illusory as the street itself – and just as convincing. Sometimes he could go out onto the roof and survey the city from above – but an unobtrusive barrier prevented him from getting too close to the edge.

  The people he occasionally met during his walks were unsociable – they often seemed to be simply part of the overall 3D-panorama. And soon Grim noticed that he was spending more and more time in front of his personal manitou at home – because the choice of illusions here was much wider than in the public spaces.

  Firstly, the manitou allowed him to watch movies shot by people in the distant past without any restrictions – those self-same Ancient Films that were practically never shown down below.

  In Big Byz they were regarded with religious reverence. Before every film Grim saw this caption:

  THE HOUSE OF MANITOU

  AND

  THE ARCHIVE OF ANCIENT FILMS

  ARDENTLY PRESENT

  The Ancient Films were mostly two-dimensional, two-hour stories. They could be about anything at all – about wizards and the forces of evil that people had worshipped and prayed to before the coming of Antichrist; about a solitary hero in search of money; about love and the death that accompanies it; about the inhabitants of a concrete hell, trying to sell their jaded sex to the big city; about cosmic democraships and dictocracies and so on.

  Chloe watched the movies with her eyes popping out of her head, but Grim himself rapidly lost interest in them. Possibly what he had heard from Bernard-Henri was hindering him. He really did find it hard to perform the inner act of will that the discoursemonger had called ‘the suspension of disbelief’. Even if Grim made a conscious effort to suspend his disbelief, the sheer idiocy of what was happening on the manitou unfailingly brought the feeling back again. And the moments when the moviemakers’ intentions showed through the picture were particularly unpleasant.

  Ancient man was a happy child – he could believe in the reality of the rock paintings that he danced around with his spear, or in stories invented and acted out by other people, shot on a two-dimensional film camera and clumsily touched-up with electronic cosmetics on a low-speed manitou.

  But Grim couldn’t do that anymore. He knew that an illusion could take any form at all, and it wasn’t worth a damn. Watching the Ancient Films wasn’t interesting – as if the lie-infected light that the film had once captured had turned rank over the centuries in the round tin boxes where its coils were kept. A night dream was a hundred times more interesting and real, because it wasn’t the work of people with their carefully calculated untruth, but of the gloriously inconsistent Manitou.

  There was another reason why he found watching the old stories disagreeable.

  The people on the screen were always getting into difficult and awkward situations. They experienced (or rather, portrayed) humiliation, embarrassment and fear. It was clear that things were arranged like this to provide some kind of logical basis for the action, some developmental impulse to keep the plot moving. But Grim couldn’t give a damn for the logic of the lies on the screen – only critics in the pay of the cinemafia could take those seriously. In his view, it would have been better if the ancient shades had acted without any reason at all, instead of torturing him to death with their contrived dramatic effects.

  The negative emotions portrayed by the actors were transmitted to his soul, not because he believed in them, but simply by virtue of the law of resonance. Every time the characters ended up in yet another ghastly situation, Grim pressed the pause button in reflex response: by doing that he could halt his own anguish – which was real, unlike the false anguish on the screen. And so he didn’t even suffer with the characters, but instead of them.

  Apparently, archaic man not merely believed in the reality of what he saw, but also fed off the false suffering of others – or used it in some way to spruce himself up before the new working day. But Grim, who didn’t even believe in what was happening, pressed pause so often that it took a whole night to watch a two-hour melodrama. Chloe usually left him and went to another manitou.

  Basically, Grim wearied very quickly of the antiquity that had been consumed by the nuclear fire – and he couldn’t figure out why the Archive of Ancient Films was regarded as just about the most important religious shrine on Big Byz.

  Another opportunity that the manitou offered was far more important. Now he could watch any snuffs at all in full – without any military censorship or Orkish spiritual oversight.

  He finally discovered the meaning of that word – a subject on which even the Free Encyclopaedia remained silent, to say nothing of school textbooks. The on-screen dictionaries helped him here. The acronym ‘S.N.U.F.F.’ stood for:

  Special Newsreel / Universal Feature Film

  The phrase seemed clear enough, but there were subtle shades of meaning to it. For instance, in antiquity the phrase ‘Universal Feature Film’ meant ‘a film from Universal Studios’, and it only later came to be used with the meaning ‘universal work of art’. The word ‘universal’ also had religious connotations relating to the word ‘Universe’. But for the time being Grim didn’t delve into that.

  The forward slash in the decoded phrase was called a ‘zhizhek’ in honour of some legendary European thinker or other. The dictionary explained that it demarcated the particular and the general, which complemented each other.