For instance, in response to the embryo ‘in Big Byz they’re all cunts and fuckheaded wankers’, after a couple of prods with a well-gnawed finger at the axes ‘cleverer’ and ‘more refined’, the articulator came up with the following paragraph:

  ‘The inhabitants of Byzantion must be conceited and insecure sexual neurasthenics, inclined to conceal their pleasure in other people’s pain behind false sympathy and hypocritical moral preaching – simply because no other mental modality is compatible with life here. At all other points of psychological equilibrium the reality of existence here will immediately reveal its essential nature and start inflicting searing pain.’

  And the obscure phrase ‘without a manitou they’re nobody, but with a manitou they think they’re big time’ was transformed by a number of more complex movements of the finger into this:

  ‘And if all the manitous were stripped out of their world, we would see hallucinating termites, working in cells of steel, and if all the manitous’ feelers were torn out of their minds, we would see decomposing protein bodies, feverishly generating one cerebral whirlwind after another in order to forget about their impending disintegration.’

  Both paragraphs were sucked in by the grateful manitou, which immediately transferred to Grim several thousand, which popped up at the top of the screen – when one of Grim’s passages turned out well several columns of figures appeared there. Grim didn’t understand exactly what they meant; all he knew was that the larger the figures were, the better he had pleased the system.

  After only two weeks he heard his own words from the screen in one of the fresh naval snuffs, which Chloe was watching at full volume after coming home (she spent the night at Alena-Libertina’s place a lot less often now). Both pieces were pronounced by an ‘Orkish countess’ (only people could have fallen for an idiotic title like that) in a break between oral caresses and making love lying on one side. After that the snuff showed the last war, which Chloe didn’t want to watch.

  Grim was very proud of himself. And Chloe, to whom he didn’t bother to explain how such an impressive text had been produced, also gave him a respectful look.

  But when Grim got to know the application a little bit better, it turned out that far more semantic axes opened up not in the area of ‘refined subtlety’ but in the zone of ‘trusting simple-mindedness’ – where touching naïvety merged into adolescent forthrightness, so to speak.

  It was precisely these modalities of self-expression that were in greatest demand by the upper people, although Grim hadn’t noticed that they were naïve or particularly frank. But for them complexly phrased intellectualising inevitably aroused associations with an underfed Ork – as his own creative success testified.

  It could only occur to an Ork to pull the wool over the eyes of the person he was talking to by speaking in a sophisticated and abstruse way – people simulated simplicity for that. When anyone spoke to them in a complicated manner, they simply stopped listening, just as no one listened to the Orkish countess in the snuff as she shuddered from the jolting blows against her pelvic bone.

  It was a mystery why CINEWS Inc. required the services of a screenwriter like himself if people had no trouble at all transforming any verbal stub into an expanded thought with any desired degree of resonance and depth.

  Grim racked his brains over this for a long time and came to the conclusion that it was precisely a matter of the Orkish intention, the contorted verbal embryo and the distinctive spurts of venom that he could spew out, since this was something people weren’t good at any longer. They were capable of lots of things, but not this. And in addition, even having created an embryo like that in their laboratories, they would never have moved the little cube of text along the axes of the creative articulator like he did. He was not simply unique, he was doubly unique.

  Once he realised that, Grim calmed down – he felt that he had his own special niche in the world. And that, as he knew, was the most important thing for any man.

  He finally realised that he had fitted into Big Byz when he noticed how time had speeded up.

  He couldn’t have said that it was moving too fast. It simply disappeared in entire chunks of the calendar. And then one day, after a whole week had vanished into nowhere, Grim guessed that all the rest of his life would disappear exactly like that.

  He recalled Alena-Libertina’s words – ‘Live here until the day you die.’ A rather strange thing to wish someone, if you thought about it. He wondered what she had meant.

  Grim loaded the embryo of his perplexity and sadness into the creative articulator, prodded it in the directions labelled ‘more heartfelt’ and ‘more sincere’, and then along the sub-axis ‘salinger’, which popped up in the final sectors of the augmented ‘soulful’ mode. He didn’t have even the vaguest idea of what this ‘salinger’ was, but just recently he had lost all qualms about simply copying all the cunning ruses of the upper people’s design.

  This was what came out:

  ‘But if you understand that what remains between your physical death and the point at which you are now is only a slick of time as smooth as an ice rink, what difference does it make how long you will be skimming across it? The second just before death will be the same as now. Nothing else will happen, only once again the politely smiling waiter will come over and serve you a slightly different cocktail of familiar drinks that have made you vomit so many times already. Perhaps death was that point at which you realised this, accepted the sentence and travelled on?’

  To Grim’s eyes the little cubes were turning out better and better, almost like upper people’s.

  Only for some reason the manitou was scoring him fewer and fewer points. Because of this, Grim almost always had a dreary, bleak feeling and he gradually began to understand the nature of the force that had prompted the late Bernard-Henri to descend into the accursed lands of the Orks.

  Grim hardly ever talked about his problems with Chloe – they were incomprehensible to her. And at the same time she kept insisting that he should ‘get into the local social scene’, and he made an honest attempt to do this, accompanying the sociable Chloe to all the parties that she was invited to.

  People usually got together in some large space that was dark, with loud music playing and coloured zigzags of light running over the faces and the walls. Chloe really liked this dizzying, fresh darkness transfixed by bright flashes of light and filled with thunderous bass rumbling, but Grim just couldn’t relax completely in it – he thought the problem here was his combat experience, in which a loud ‘boom-boom’ meant something different.

  Some people hid in the corners, secretly sniffing various forbidden powders, and Chloe rapidly acquired a taste for this.

  The powders weren’t really forbidden seriously, but rather, as someone put it ‘for the extra adrenalin buzz’, which was more or less understandable, even though the words were unfamiliar. But after he tried the mixture once, Grim almost went out of his mind. He imagined that he was still in Orkish Slava, and everything that was happening was just another cunning attack by the people, who had paralysed his brain with an unknown weapon, and it was all going to end as usual, with an air strike, which he wouldn’t be able to hide from now. While Chloe hopped about in the vivid, multicoloured splashes of light, he spent the whole night shuddering silently in a corner – and covered himself, as she informed him later, in everlasting shame.

  On the other hand, at one of the parties Grim met another Ork who had established himself among people, an orktivist in exile by the name of Drip – ITN 1 5406 20 677 43 2. He was better known to people under his pseudonym of Andrei-André Gide Tarkovsky. He was a bald, bearded little old man with elusive eyes.

  After the death of the legendary Ivan-Yves Montand Karamazov, whose pupophobia and brutal nationalism the upper people had learned to forgive for the sake of his exceptionally photogenic exterior, Andrei-André had become the foremost representative of the Orkish underground conscience on Big Byz. Grim even remembered his poem ‘A Gecko on a Church Spastika’, for which Andrei-André had been stripped of his Orkish citizenship.

  Tell me, gecko gaily painted,

  Answer, groves of cannabis,

  Why one twentieth of the planet

  Has to breathe a stench like this?

  Andrei-André didn’t like the word ‘sommelier’ and called himself a writer – just like the late Ivan-Yves, whom he still envied bitterly to this very day (‘daily photosessions from the conspirative revolutionary underground – that’s life and fate for you, brü …’)

  At first Grim took the word ‘writer’ to mean a sommelier whose little cubes weren’t taken for even a single snuff. Andrei-André corrected him, saying that a writer didn’t write for his contemporaries, but for eternity. Grim enquired if eternity had returned the gesture by agreeing to support Andrei-André, but the writer good-naturedly explained that he was sometimes quoted in the news – entirely without recompense, of course. But then, in parallel, and entirely independently of his social position, he received a small university welfare grant. He didn’t keep any secrets from Grim – he was too old for that.

  ‘Listen, kid,’ he said, ‘you’re an Ork. They keep you here so that people can hear an honest Orkish voice when they need it. That’s what they feed you for. So you have to pinpoint the precise moment when the honest Orkish voice should speak up and what it should say. And for that you have to watch the news and the snuffs all the time, and ideally read all the frontmen-gunlayers of the assault fleet, in translation from the Old French, right there on their special sites, to know which way the wind’s blowing. Then you’ll be able to get a small lead on things and astound everyone with the freshness of your views.’

  ‘In other words I have to lie all the time?’

  Andrei-André shook his head.

  ‘On no account. Always give them the truth straight from the shoulder. But along the right trajectory, and up here there’s only one of those, and you have to sense it with your butt. And be in the news all the time, in the news … In that department the late Ivan-Yves was a real ace, even though he didn’t know Church English. And if you don’t want to take any risks, there’s an easier way. Repeat their morning headlines. Only in the first person and straight from the heart. You can give it a positive twist or a negative one. That makes no odds to them, we’re Orks anyway.’

  ‘But can’t they tell us themselves what to say? At least roughly?’

  Andrei-André laughed.

  ‘No one’s going to explain to you what to say, you’ve got to sense that for yourself. This is a high-class musicians’ gig here, Grim. Has been for many long years. And there’s only one thing they want from you – your honest voice mustn’t disrupt the harmony of the orchestra. Fit in with the symphony. One note a month, and you can dine for free at buffet lunches for the rest of your life. But if you don’t mind, please don’t foul up that one single note – you’ve got to understand things for yourself …’

  He worked his lips for a little while, contemplated the liver spots on the back of his hands and added sadly:

  ‘Honestly, this smart free speech of theirs isn’t for the feeble-minded. All that different bullshit you have to remember for three hundred manitous and a free burger … Do you know how the discoursemongers here keep themselves fed? Say some kind of event happens. And they all have to take turns to speak out about it. And what’s more, they have to speak out about it incisively and boldly, so they’ll get remembered and their grant will be renewed. And they all take turns to talk, and the others listen and filter it, to see if there’s anything inappropriate or incorrect in there.

  ‘And if anyone makes a slip because he’s hungry, they all immediately swoop down on him and start pecking away at his liver. It’s a frightening sight. If I was younger I’d fly the coop, go down below to pull in some money … But no, I’m wrong there. When I read those downside magazines, like that Siberian Nights or Orkana, I can’t sleep afterwards. Revolution’s a fine thing, of course, I gave half my life to it, but Manitou forbid that we should ever lose our grip on the reins. We’ll see some really first-class bastards creeping out of the woodwork then …’

  ‘But do you believe in revolution?’

  Andrei-André gave him a bleary look.

  ‘Just don’t you ever say this on camera, son, but remember it for yourself – every revolution in our Urkaine, without exception, ends in blood, shit and slavery. From century to century it’s only the proportions that change. And freedom lasts exactly long enough to pack a suitcase. If you have anywhere to go.’

  Andrei-André was a good-natured and sincere Ork – and he treated Grim as if he was his own son. He willingly shared his own professional secrets.

  ‘You have to realise straight off that all you can sell here is snuff and derporn. You’ll deal in derporn when you get old. But while you’re still young and handsome, you should sell snuff.’

  ‘How’s that done?’ asked Grim, puzzled.

  ‘You have to portray the young green shoots of life that have broken through the concrete of social oppression and are intertwining above it in an exuberant dance of love, and while you’re at it you have to show what’s special about this particular generation’s dance of love. And later you have to describe the steamroller of oppressive despotism snapping off the young shoots of life and rolling new asphalt over them. But you can’t just prattle away at random here, you have to check everything against the news and the discoursemongers – so the asphalt will be the same kind as they showed in the news … Then they’ll give you a bite to eat. Would you like us to do it together?’

  He said a lot of interesting things. He also kept promising to give Grim a copy of his unpublished memoirs, titled after some Ancient Film Don’t Call Me Bwana. Unfortunately, he got drunk very quickly, and it was only possible to make conversation with him for a few minutes. Grim spent the rest of the time feeling bored in some corner, waiting for Chloe to dance herself out so that they could go home.

  He didn’t enjoy parties.

  And yet he couldn’t even formulate exactly why – until the creative articulator helped him out when one day Grim spent a long time chasing around a little text cube that began with the words ‘a bunch of party snakes’. The result produced was this:

  ‘A party is a camouflaged social arena, a micro-coliseum that people come to supposedly to take a break and relax, but actually they all have gladiator equipment hidden under their clothes. They bring their own murky intentions along with them and dance to their tune all evening, and not at all to “a different drum” as they laboriously explain in conversation. And then, following a thousand supposedly casual moves in a freakishly lit aquarium, these bright-coloured reptiles end up twined together in a manner strictly appropriate for ingesting and inseminating each other. What appears to the naïve observer to be convivial merriment is a constant and unceasing struggle for existence laced with social ritual.’

  Chloe felt right at home at these parties. She usually put on outfits for them that Grim thought were absolutely bizarre – some kind of blouse made of feathers, or a dress with large fabric flowers that looked like malignant tumours. But people liked that, although they didn’t dress that elegantly themselves. Chloe acquired a lot of friends and she spent entire days babbling away to them over the sound link while choosing a new outfit on the manitou.

  She went out to these parties on her own more and more often.

  And then she left altogether.

  It happened simply and prosaically, and it didn’t come as a blow to Grim – a rather hostile alienation had already sprung up between them long before. Grim was actually amazed to realise how well prepared he was for it.

  Chloe moved in with a certain young snuff director who didn’t have the slightest objection to her friendship with Alena-Libertina and promised her a part. Chloe had been dreaming about that for a long time.

  She even acted generously: from the legal viewpoint Bernard-Henri’s former residence belonged to her – but for the time being she let Grim have it. The view she now had from her new windows was Paris in springtime. Of course, Grim couldn’t offer her anything like that.

  Chloe sent him two or three letters – they were cold and insincere, or they just seemed that way because she wrote them without a creative articulator. Grim didn’t reply. Not because he was hurt – he simply didn’t have anything to say.

  At this time an event occurred in his life that appeared insignificant from the outside but shifted all the social settings inside his head in a strange way.

  He made himself business cards.

  On Big Byz, of course, there was absolutely no need for them. Theoretically they could come in useful if he took off to Orkland on business. But he actually needed them for something quite different.

  He thought up the design and the text himself. Or rather, he didn’t think it up, he reproduced it – from the very same business card that used to hang above his desk in Slava for so many years.

  After printing out a pack, he glued a sweet-smelling card to the upper frame of the manitou, so that it was in approximately the same place as his great-uncle Mord’s used to be. Then he lowered his eyes, waited for a few seconds – and flung his head up sharply.

  There in front of him was a cardboard rectangle with a text in simple, austere lettering:

  Grim ITN 1 3505 00 148 41 0

  Content Sommelier at Discourse

  Big Byz 093458731 - 4091

  It was a victory certificate.

  Grim had earned it at a very young age, not even twenty – when the life and fate of most Orks who had survived in the Circus were only just coming together. But he didn’t feel a thing. Just as late great-uncle Mord probably didn’t feel anything about his own cards any longer.