This zhizhek seemed to carry a semantic loading that was almost greater than that of the words themselves. The article devoted to it in the on-screen dictionary was set in fine print for smart people and had this title:

  The ‘special-universal’ dichotomy as Yin-Hegelyan

  Grim didn’t try to read it, but he was quite impressed.

  There were dozens, if not hundreds of similar articles on snuffs in the dictionaries and encyclopaedias. A countless throng of the upper people’s discoursemongers and sommeliers had hastened to offer this resonant acronym their respectful, high-quality services – the tips that came with this were clearly lavish.

  Grim discovered that the word SNUFF was really very old, and was already used in the Internet shitstorms of the age of the Ancient Films, with the meaning of ‘inordinately arousing actual art’ (one of the notes explained this definition as: ‘a porn movie with a real killing shot on film’). The fine print explained that a number of linguists believed that the modern-day interpretation had been appended to it in the new age, like the interpretation of the word GULAG – when, in waging their war against the Orks, people felt the need to declare themselves the exclusive heirs to the great past.

  In dividing a snuff, as it were, into two parts, the zhizhek corresponded perfectly to its inner structure.

  Exactly half the screen time of a snuff was filled with sex.

  It was performed by global celebrities who, although no longer young, were still rather attractive, such as the late von Trier and his partner of many years – de Auschwitz. Proceedings were diligently captured on celluloid and not one minute anatomic detail went unrecorded. Grim had known the faces of almost all the actors since he was a child – but until now he had never seen them completely naked, since the Orkish spiritual censorship hid the erotic action on the screen behind its logos.

  Once he saw what had been concealed so painstakingly, Grim thought it would have been far easier to turn viewers away from sin by showing it in full detail.

  The other half of the screen time was filled with death.

  This part of the snuffs consisted of military chronicles that Grim hadn’t seen in full either – this time because of the Big Byz military censor.

  And these chronicles simply astounded him.

  He saw the faces of Kagans of ancient times. He saw flags, the faded tatters of which were kept in the Museum of the Ancestors. He saw the deaths of heroes, of whom all that was left in his world were identical posthumous portraits, documents covered with a reddish-brown crust and baby shirts preserved by mothers – now yellowed and shrivelled with age.

  For every war the Orks donned a new uniform, often in several versions. There were wars of classical tunics, wars of shorts, wars of black leather harnesses and wars of formal suits. There were wars that looked like gay parades and wars that looked like these parades being dispersed. The people’s clothes didn’t change so greatly, but on the other hand, they entered into every war with new weapons and machines.

  More than anything else, Grim was astounded by the tanks, which he had already seen in the Ancient Films. About two centuries earlier the people had built about fifty of them from surviving design drawings and used them against the Orks. The tanks had proved so lethal that they hadn’t even left behind any traces in oral folk tradition – there was no one to spread the word. The demographic gap had had to be made up by using artificial insemination, with which the people had helped after the ceasefire (the so-called ‘girlie draft’ – it was studied in school now as an example of female wartime heroism).

  It was in this very battle with the tanks that the great Marshal Stug had got almost a million Orks killed. Now Grim could see the fighting from beginning to end with his own eyes.

  The marshal, sitting on a white horse, kept giving the order to attack ad infinitum. The Orks ran forward and every single one of the people’s tanks was transformed into a shapeless blob by the bodies sticking to it.

  Then this blob slithered about on the spot for a long time, grinding the heroes into a bloody pulp. A shot from a tank’s gun mowed down an entire Orkish detachment. After this, Marshal Stug gave the order to advance into a new attack and the gates of the Circus sucked in a new serving of Ork meat. Although the delivery was ideally organised, it took many days for the gates of the Circus to let through all the actors in the drama, and afterwards there wasn’t another war for three whole years.

  The people called the period of the girlie draft ‘the monotank years’ because for three years they had to repeat one and the same shot from different angles in all the snuffs.

  That time round the filming really was monotonous, because the people didn’t use the flying walls and shot the panorama of the tank battle from high altitude. For the first half hour this snuff (or at least its war component) was fascinating and terrifying to watch. But after that there was nothing left but nausea that got worse with every close-up angle provided by the nosediving cameras. They fell out of the sky by turns, to go hurtling between the huge machines wallowing in red slurry and then soar back up for another wide-angle shot.

  Panoramas of the tank battle alternated with bedroom scenes that completely failed to engage Grim’s empathy – since then, the people’s culture had gone through several complete cycles, and so the actors embodied a type of sexual attractiveness that had been obsolete for ages. Grim was equally disgusted by the shaven-headed, potbellied man – an enigmatic smile on his lips, the garland of flowers over flowing orange robes, and the timid woman with fading beauty, an unshaven pubis, stars tattooed round her nipples and a mane of wavy hair. They were at least two hundred years old by now, and it showed – so even the clay teapot that the man picked up every time he changed poses or the tiger skin on which coition took place were of no help.

  Although the people’s weapons changed, the Orks’ tactics remained the same: first raise the flag on the Hill of the Ancestors and then, after dividing into three formations, repel the attack on the central front and the flanks, until the people had shot the material they needed. This manner of conducting the battle was probably chosen because it could be rammed, century after century and without any great difficulty, into the heads of even Orkish military men.

  From the point of view of editing or storyline, the snuffs were more primitive than the films of ancient times. But they were far more interesting to watch – and the most boring snuff was far more gripping than the most absorbing film.

  It seemed to Grim that the light which had imprinted recent history on temple celluloid was still alive and fresh, it was still flying off into space somewhere – unlike the dead light of the Ancient Films, which had faded forever. The great battles that drifted across the screen were genuine. And so was the Circus – Grim himself had only just passed through it, and it was simply astounding how little it had changed.

  Everything in the Ancient Films was lies and play-acting. But everything in the snuffs was the truth. And not because the people had become any more honest over the centuries.

  The very nature of love and death meant that you couldn’t possibly engage in them as make-believe. It was irrelevant whether those participating in the procedure believed in what they were doing – the important thing was that it was really happening to them. Copulating and dying could only be done for real, either in domestic solitude or in front of hundreds of cameras in the arena. And so there was no longer any need to ‘suspend disbelief’, as the late Bernard-Henri used to say.

  ‘The youth of great civilisations,’ an unknown philosopher explained in an on-screen dictionary, ‘is characterised by the flowering of representative forms of government. Their maturity is characterised by the construction of a Circus which, at various stages of social development, can be informational and virtual, as well as physical and material. The mediacracies of the past were precarious because they oppressed man by constraining libido and mortido. Manitou the Antichrist forbade this on pain of love and death …’

  The embryonic plot present in each snuff was almost insignificant, and yet in some ways they resembled the melodramas of ancient times. They often told the story of two lovers. This could be a tragic love between one of the people and an Ork – Grim watched the snuffs like that first of all.

  The ‘Ork’ was usually made up to look like a youthful man or woman of emphatically uncivilised appearance, and always had to have a straw sticking out of his or her hair (at first Grim thought this was a propagandist attack on his people, but then he guessed that it was more probably a symbolic indication of closeness to nature). The women’s hairstyles and the way they applied their make-up changed greatly from century to century. For men the most significant change was in the design of their wallets.

  There was something medical about the lovers’ coupling – it was captured by a camera in every possible pose, including an obligatory close-up of genitals coupled together right in front of the lens (evidently for those who were bone idle, because the remote control included a little trackpad that allowed the viewer to adjust the magnification and viewing angle for himself).

  The ancient news broadcasts that ended up in snuffs were like flies in amber – their authenticity and hideousness were amazing. Here too Grim quickly identified a repeated motif: an agitated anchorman in CINEWS uniform (which also changed over time) informed humanity of the latest obscenity committed in Slava – for instance, a mass killing of journalists, which drunken Right Protectors had bragged about openly in the market, or something else of a similar kind.

  That was followed by shots of the gruesome details – undoubtedly real (what Grim found interesting to look at were not the puddles of blood, but the way the market square and familiar streets used to look a hundred or two hundred years ago).

  When the news section ended, the lovers started discussing what they had seen, and here the Ork usually gave vent to some vicious nonsense – for instance that Orkish journalists killed Right Protectors themselves, and to think that they were good while the others were bad was just plain stupid.

  This was the point, of course, at which the unalloyed propaganda and brainwashing began. Grim couldn’t imagine a compatriot of his who would come up with that kind of rubbish. Everyone down below realised that a journalist wouldn’t dare say boo to a Right Protector. The Ork on the screen was telling massive whoppers, but for some reason he didn’t tell the truth that Grim would definitely have told. For instance, that journalists were always stealing horses, and if they couldn’t steal them they took turns to rape them, binding their feet and muzzles with wire, and afterwards the horses were ill for a long time, so the peasants often hired Right Protectors themselves. In Urkaine even the children knew that.

  The only place he found an explanation for this intercultural misunderstanding was in an on-screen dictionary.

  Journalist – Fr. Ch. Eng. – words implying daily activity (journal, diurnal). A thief who steals in the daytime – as opposed to a nocturnalist, or night-time thief. In olden times information sommeliers used to be called this, and in Church English the word ‘journalist’ still has connotations related to the information business. This is why for a long time the protection of journalists served as a reason for Circus wars.

  There now – a reason for Circus wars.

  Who needed the truth? Grim realised that the people didn’t even set out to malign the Orks by showing them as malicious idiots, but were simply trying to encompass all the inconvenient complexity of their life in a single streamlined cliché that migrated from snuff to snuff, because that way it was easier to fill up the three minutes of time set aside for this – and any non-standard development of the subject would have transformed three minutes into five, or even fifteen.

  Of course, there were welcome departures from the stereotypes, but the greater part of CINEWS Inc.’s output was cast in one and the same mould.

  However, in a huge number of snuffs (shot, for instance on historical or mythological subjects), Orks weren’t even mentioned. At first Grim couldn’t figure out where the ‘special newsreel’ that had been promised was – and then he realised that it was the Circus section. Any war in the Circus was the main news of the year – and the most genuine event.

  In visual terms the ‘newsreel’ was always segued perfectly with the ‘feature film’. It was hard to say which was the chicken and which the egg: whether the costumes of the battling Orks had been chosen to suit the scenarios or the scenarios had been written to match the military uniform – but the transition from the chronicle of events on Orkish Slava to the love sections didn’t require any additional bridges at all.

  Every snuff began with a standard formula about the actors and models having reached the age of consent and the Government of the Urkainian Urkaganate bearing complete responsibility for all scenes of violence and cruelty. Basically, everything was clear. Apart from one thing.

  What did the people shoot snuffs for?

  Strangely enough, in all the numerous articles there was no direct answer to that question. All that was clear was that snuffs were somehow connected with the local religion, and for that reason they were shot on light-sensitive ritual film.

  And they didn’t simply have something to do with religion.

  It seemed that snuffs were the central sacrament of movism.

  Every Sunday the House of Manitou showed a fresh, or as they said here ‘virgin’ snuff. For the last hundred or hundred and fifty years not many people had gone to the temples, but on Sunday morning anyone could watch the new snuff at home. This tradition was so fundamental to the Byzantine identity that it was the usual thing to observe it – or at least pretend that you did.

  That meant that CINEWS Inc. shot more than fifty snuffs a year. The footage in every one of them had to be original (although, as the story of the tank battle showed, the same event could be shot from various angles). That was why such a large number of cameras was required over the field of battle – the war had to be sawn up into a whole heap of different stories.

  There was no information about the sacred mysteries of movism in the on-screen dictionaries. Nothing was even said about the symbol of the faith or the essence of the teaching – in response to all queries the on-screen dictionaries suggested seeking oral instruction at the House of Manitou.

  Grim, however, had experience of using the Free Encyclopaedia and knew that grains of truth were sometimes to be found in articles devoted to debunking the wrong views of others. The on-screen dictionaries of Big Byz turned out to be organised in the same way. Although there was practically no information about movism as such, it was possible to get a glimpse of this religion from the articles about its heresies.

  The most important of these was the sect of the ‘Film Burners’.

  The article about this movement, which had appeared about a hundred years earlier, was written in a tone of incensed loathing, and there was a lot in it that seemed obscure to Grim. But there were a few things he did understand.

  The Film Burners taught that the external world is a projection of the inner world and the projector that creates the world is not located in the hands of Manitou, but inside man himself. The light of this projector is the light of Manitou, and the same in everyone. But the ‘film’ through which it passes is different for everyone and everyone lives in their own illusory world, where they suffer from loneliness. The primary spiritual task of a member of the sect was to find this ‘film’ and burn it.

  The Film Burners believed that those who ‘had burned the film’ could be born in a different world after death. And some of them maintained that it was possible to go to that world even while still alive. In the end, the Film Burners, in perfect keeping with their own metaphysics, had tried to burn the Archive of Ancient Films. After this act of sacrilege their sect had been banned.

  Grim found this so interesting that he even decided to visit Damilola at an unsociable hour.

  Damilola received him seated at a table covered with tiny bottles of sake. This evidently wasn’t the first day he had been drinking – the shadows under his eyes had turned into black circles. But on the other hand, Kaya astounded Grim once again with her beauty.

  She was wearing a figure-hugging kimono of green silk and her hair was arranged in a black ponytail caught up with a rubber band that had funny little animal-bobbles on it. Her movements looked economical and precise – she occasionally came over to the table to wipe it down or to serve a bottle warmed to the required temperature, and immediately walked away again in order not to interrupt the men’s conversation. But Grim received one long glance from under half-lowered eyelashes, after which he started wondering what he had really come to Damilola’s place for.

  ‘Film burners?’ Damilola asked with a frown. ‘Yes, we used to have them. A very interesting sect. They said they’d found a way out of the world. And apparently they all took off through it, he he. There haven’t been any here for ages. But they’re still recruiting new members.’

  ‘How?’ asked Grim.

  ‘Directly through the manitou. They send letters.’

  ‘But how do they know who to send them to?’

  ‘From queries. They have access to the net, they watch to see who’s interested in the subject and start working on them.’

  ‘But how can they send letters if they’re not here anymore?’

  ‘Elementary,’ Damilola said with a wave of his hand. ‘They left spambots behind.’

  ‘Spambots?

  ‘Yes,’ said Damilola. ‘It’s from the word “spam”. Advertising and all sorts of idiotic messages. It came from the expression “spiced ham”. That was what they called dog food in the Age of the Ancient Films. A spambot is like a little kind of organism that lives in a manitou and adapts itself to changes.’

  ‘So then,’ Grim asked in fright, ‘if I looked them up in a dictionary, does that mean those organisms will start on me now?’