Yes, down below there were many Orks who would have been wracked by envy at the sight of that white business card. But Grim couldn’t care less about their feelings, because he no longer understood how the Orks’ envy could be transformed into his own happiness.

  Things were no better with the upper people. Every day it became more and more clear that for someone who didn’t really like parties, the cheers of a crowd differed little from the crowing of a cock outside the window or the distant grunting of a pig – especially in those cases when these sounds were artificial.

  He had no interest in a reward like that. But the world had no other rewards to offer – apart, of course, from money. But if you thought things through, nobody had any manitous anyway, apart from those who printed them. The others were only allowed to hold them occasionally – in order to convince themselves that manitous truly did exist, and keep on working. But Damilola advised him not to pursue this question in any greater depth – this was the point at which the quicksands of hate crime began.

  Grim was in any case skirting closely round its very edge, and sometimes he overstepped it. Once he even reviled democraship, which Damilola said you should never do in a liberative society.

  In a new snuff the anti-democraship passage was given to an enemy of progressive reforms – a spiteful Orkish farmer, who waved a trident and net about as he hissed at his sexual partner:

  ‘Democraship made sense as an expression of the will of people who, to put it in agricultural terms, were “free-range organic fed” – and therefore in those days it was still possible to use the word “freedom”. Everyone accumulated wisdom and experience drop by drop – and the sum of those wills gave the best form of government in the world, which was organic. But now it’s become orkanic. Today democraship is the product of an expression of the will of worms that live in an iron honeycomb. Their only connection with the universe is via an information terminal that pumps through their brains a torrent of the mental chemicals, fertilisers and modifiers produced by the political technologists. Where’s the choice? What difference does it make which of the cockroaches allowed to run in the race comes first, if they’re all taken out of the same jar? Does it matter what colour the prophylactic is, as long as the dildo remains the same?’

  Damilola advised Grim to stop making this kind of joke – from reading his attacks on democraship the senior sommeliers might draw the conclusion that he was in favour of the Urkaganate.

  ‘The best porn actors of Big Byz have given their lives for the establishment of democraship in Orkland,’ he said drily. ‘If you live in our society, you should respect their memory. And don’t use the word “political technologist”, no one understands it here. You can’t put a footnote into the snuff every time – “an electoral sommelier in a society without elections”.’

  Grim himself understood how stupid his candid comments made him look. And it was clear how he ought to behave – on that point old Andrei-André had explained everything very precisely.

  Only was it really worth pretending?

  He thought about that for the first time when he noticed what had become of Tuscany in his window after his gaze had been grinding at it for so long. One by one, details had emerged that undermined all confidence in the landscape.

  Firstly, a cloud that was always the same shape, resembling his late uncle Khor’s profile, drifted over the distant mountains every few hours. Secondly, the wings of the windmill always turned at the same speed. Thirdly – and he was particularly irritated by that – the column of smoke from the chimney of the white house on the hill kept changing in such a way that after a very short while all its fluctuations were repeated in exactly the same sequence.

  Grim finally understood the meaning of the expression ‘a dead-end life’ when he noticed that he was drinking for the third evening in a row with an unshaven Damilola in his empty apartment, which seemed to have gone mouldy all of a sudden. At first he complained to Damilola about feeling depressed, then for some reason he told him about his great-uncle Mord and showed him his new business card. Damilola examined it with interest for a few seconds and then tossed it onto the table.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ he said. ‘You’re still young, that’s all. And youth is a period of life crisis and total hopelessness for everyone. It’s all over, there’s nothing left to strive for … Ha ha ha … At eighteen a man feels eighty, but then at eighty he feels twelve. If not four. You’re just stressed out because of Chloe, Grim. It’s stress and hormonal morning sickness.’

  ‘But what should I do?’ asked Grim, tying his tongue in knots.

  ‘I’ll tell you. Go to GULAG, to the rental centre. Find a sura that looks like Chloe. You can even order a temporary face for her from a photograph, if you don’t mind coughing up the manitou. Rent her out for the weekend. Put her in “Desdemona” mode, chat with her a bit about snuffs and culture, you know, and about music. And then strangle her. Slowly, with real feeling. So that she pisses herself. Then reset her, and do it again. And do that five times, until it’s imprinted in the subcortex. Only put a rubber sheet on the bed. You’ll wake up a different man. Try it, seriously … Give it five, the pupo jive.’

  Of course Grim had no intention of following Damilola’s advice. But his company was better than being alone. Although it was pretty dismal too.

  ‘Two abandoned failures …’

  No one spoke those words out loud, but they seemed to hover in the air.

  Not even what the manitou told him about the latest disturbances in Orkland was any help. As was only to be expected, the new Kagan was no better than previous ones and the fresh shoots of democraship soon became a farce. In the news Andrei-André appealed for support for the revolution, and they were already starting to bomb the outskirts of Slava a bit – more in homage to tradition than with any specific intent.

  But Damilola was glad. After the period of leave that he had taken out of grief, there promised to be lots of work, and after that the next war. The purchase of a new Kaya was gradually shifting from the realm of harebrained scheming over into the zone of sober budgetary planning.

  ‘I’ll make do with derporn for a couple of years,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll take a loan and buy. They say they’re going to print a lot of money for the Orks soon, and I’ll be able to get refinancing against the old equity. But with the new sura everything will be kept under warranty … Although … there’s not much chance I’ll be able to hold out, not really …’

  Grim listened to this as he looked out of the window.

  It looked as if Damilola was serious about it – since Kaya disappeared he’d been economising on everything. He’d even moved from Naples to cheap New York, and now outside his window it was always night, seen from the window of an ancient ‘skyscraper’.

  That was what they called the buildings people used to live in – in the Age of Ancient Films. They looked like incredibly high cliffs, studded with the bright dots of windows. The view was enchanting and terrifying. Grim liked it on the whole, but Damilola explained that it was one of the ancient horrors preserved by human memory. These expanses of concrete cliffs aged far more quickly than traditional flat cities. Literally in two or three hundred years the conglomerations of skyscrapers had been transformed from a symbol of the future into a reminder of the dismal past.

  ‘I want external reality to correspond to what I have inside me,’ said Damilola. ‘When I take a turn for the better, I’ll change the view. But meanwhile …’

  It occurred to Grim that the people in skyscrapers lived almost the same way as in the massive bulk of Big Byz – in boxes on top of each other, stretching up and down for level after level. Only now, instead of streets, there were tunnels. And the living units had no ‘outside’ any more– there was only ‘inside’ left.

  This thought could have been twirled about on an articulator, and the sommeliers would probably have put it into the mouth of some Orkish character or other in a new snuff. But Grim couldn’t be bothered even to write it down.

  Sitting at home in front of the manitou, more and more often he left the screen idle long enough for it to go blank. And then his face and part of the room behind him appeared in its black mirror. The window was also reflected – and in the mirror-image behind him, Tuscany was significantly less plausible. The reflections of real windows – down below – looked different.

  Well then, he thought, it looks like I’ve lived as far as death already. Let’s see if there’s anything else to come …

  This embryo could also have been transformed into something beautiful and complex, but Grim didn’t enter it in the creative articulator. His last phrase accepted for a snuff was this:

  ‘All your cultural sommeliers and discoursemongers are just evil little skunks in the service of the world government. And as for your women … I used to think they were bitches. But now I’ve realised that they’re just rubbery. In the bad sense of the word.’

  Two strange things happened with this passage.

  Firstly, in processing it on the articulator, Grim didn’t add a single one of the flourishes suggested by the programme.

  Secondly, for some reason in the snuff this text wasn’t recited by an Ork, but by a man giving examples of criminal hate speech.

  CHAPTER 23

  My final insights into the tenebrous soul of the young Ork were already half the product of my own imagination. And I won’t have a chance to entertain the reader with them now. But I don’t have much more left to tell.

  The words ‘I’ve lived as far as death’ are the last I remember from his babbling during our drinking sessions – simply because they sounded so exceptionally absurd, coming from such a young and vigorous creature. But nonetheless, they were entirely accurate – as far as I could judge from his confessions. I wasn’t listening to the muscular little beast very attentively, since I got drunk a lot faster than he did. And apart from that, my thoughts were occupied with other things.

  They couldn’t find Kaya anywhere. And nobody could help me. But then, no one tried particularly hard. The supremely benign consultant surologist referred me to the breach of warranty – and suggested that Kaya had self-terminated in the central garbage disintegrator. There really had been cases of that happening, and it was the most convenient cop-out for the manufacturers. I was offered a serious discount on a new sura of the same class. All the details of physical appearance could be reproduced precisely – but it wouldn’t have been Kaya. I promised to think about it.

  It soon became clear that Grim had no prospects at all in our culture. He suffered two image disasters in quick succession, and they both involved inept quotations from Bernard-Henri, who seemed to be avenging himself on his enemy from the grave. First Grim was invited onto the programme ‘Social Opinion’, where he declared that in the modern world social opinion doesn’t even exist, there is only a financial resource, absolutely teeming with a swarm of ravenous sommeliers, which shows itself on the manitou. Bernard-Henri hadn’t written that in Old French by accident, but our little mongrel cur thought he could repeat it out loud.

  When he was given a chance to put things right and explain himself a couple of days later, he told the people from the reception committee that he didn’t want to go to any more broadcasts at all. They started trying to impress on him that it wasn’t in his own interest to turn into a lone wolf but he replied with yet another quotation from the deceased discoursemonger – that ‘sullen hermit’, ‘inner exile’, ‘lone wolf’ and ‘prima donna’ was what a man was called in our time if he wouldn’t shag a pig in front of the cameras for nothing. And if he wouldn’t do it even for money, then they’d say, ‘He’s trying to surround himself with an aura of mystery …’

  I tried to explain to him that Bernard-Henri himself had never been a lone wolf or hermit, and he hadn’t surrounded himself with any aura – quite the opposite, he simply wallowed in the manitou, and in manitou as well. So it was all the more important for a clueless young Ork like Grim to make a mighty effort. But it looked like Grim had fallen into a depression.

  I was amazed by the strange parallelism of our destinies. We had both had loneliness forced on us and immediately run into financial difficulties. Of course, the reverse sequence of events would have appeared more logical, but evanescent and romantic girls who look like angels can sense approaching poverty every bit as keenly as rats abandoning their cosy familiar nooks before disaster strikes.

  There were funny moments too. Grim already regarded himself as a fully fledged content sommelier, gliding smoothly round all the bends in the new world. He only realised that possibly this wasn’t entirely the case when they cut off his hot water.

  I remember him coming to share his strange discovery with me. The little sweetheart had spotted an interesting connection between the fact that the figures in the upper right-hand corner of his manitou had turned red and acquired a minus sign, and the fact that the water in his tap had turned cold. Only he still didn’t seem to understand which was the cause and which the effect. I paid him a visit (it’s interesting that after Chloe’s departure the apartment of the late Bernard-Henri immediately ceased to resemble an Orkish pigsty) and delved into his accounts.

  It turned out that the advance generously issued to him by the House of Manitou following his arrival had already run out. The CINEWS Inc. grant, paid after his memorable appearance in the entertainment block, had also been spent. Chloe had blown almost all of it on jewellery of some kind that Grim vehemently assured me he had never even laid eyes on.

  The most interesting conclusion from the financial records was that Grim had already learned how to earn money for himself, and had been doing pretty well, especially at the beginning of his creative career.

  But the poor soul had misunderstood his place in our culture. Instead of the bombastic Orkish phrases brimming with elaborate, barbarous complexity, which the snuffs needed so much, he gradually started feeding the senior sommeliers his juvenile fantasies about life, licked into shape on the creative articulator entirely in the style of our own people (not to say our own losers). Naturally they credited him with less and less manitou for this – although old Andrei-André had explained, with exceptional generosity for a competitor, how an Ork ought to earn his daily bread if he seriously intended to survive.

  It ended the same way it always does – they cut off his hot water.

  For several days the cleanly child of the lower plains came knocking at my door clutching a pathetic towel in his hand, until I finally had to explain to him that the home of a CINEWS Inc. battle pilot isn’t an Orkish bathhouse. After that he apparently started washing with cold water and our joint drinking sessions fizzled out … But we carried on seeing each other, and soon he told me that he had found work down below.

  I agreed that this was the best solution for him, since Chloe intended to sell Bernard-Henri’s apartment eventually, and in any case with his unstable income he couldn’t live in my neighbourhood any longer. He had two ways out – move to a three-square-metre cupboard room that looked like an enlarged copy of my privy (a toilet bowl with a shower, a coffee machine, a manitou right across the small wall and a twenty-four-hour view of night-time Manhattan), or find a risky job among the Orks, which would allow him to scrape together at least a little money. He chose the second option – and he was right, because his competition up here was an army of content-sommeliers who were up for anything and whose skills with an articulator and a dictionary of cultural codes were a lot better than his. But down below he was like a fish in deep … Creative articulator is not quite sure whether I should say ‘shit’ or ‘water’.

  And his business cards would come in handy too.

  During our final meeting Grim was incredibly focused and calm – and I noticed for the first time that there was nothing of the Ork left in his external appearance. He looked exactly like a loser should look when he’s sublimating an unsatisfactory sexual fling into low-budget romantic drama – all in black, with a fringe down to his eyes, a zigzag trimmed into the back of his head and tiny little metal skulls on his left sleeve – everything in the latest youth protest fashion (the poor soul really still hadn’t understood that’s the way those who are well past forty dress when they want to look thirty and roger those who are just over twenty). But it suited him.

  He’ll go down below, I thought, and find himself a new Orkish girl. Only they won’t let her up here with him. Never mind, if need be, he can polish up her skull as a memento. Bernard-Henri’s residence probably had that kind of karma. I think that was what my fugitive love called it …

  When I learned what kind of work he had found for himself, I was surprised at first. Well, in another five years or so it could look pretty natural, but straight away … But at least it became clear what he was protesting against so elegantly.

  It turned out that he had decided to become a child-dealer.

  We need these people. And it’s best if they’re former Orks. Having your own children isn’t encouraged up here for eugenic reasons – with the best will in the world it’s hard to apply the rule ‘don’t look – don’t see’ to pregnancy and birth, which the law says are only legal after the age of forty-six. The high age of consent that has been imposed on society results in the production of sickly offspring. Therefore, in order to have children who are legal and healthy, people prefer to adopt them in Orkland. This is better for us, for it ensures a constant influx of fresh blood into our melting-globe – although, of course, no one would dare to talk about ‘fresh blood’ in public.

  The work is simple – you have to select little children according to a genome test that is carried out with a tiny little drop of blood by a special portable manitou. Every year different genetic combinations are required – depending on social planning needs and the preferences of the adopting parents. It’s hard for the dealers to find the right material immediately – sometimes they have to spend a long time traipsing round remote Orkish villages. Basically the job’s like being a travelling salesman, which suited my little friend’s rebellious image just perfectly. Make a purchase, call a platform, load it in, give your hem a quick wash and move on, swinging the skulls on your sleeve.