Grim asked me to water the plants while he was away, and I agreed. But I forgot about this request as soon as he left to go down below. And I forgot simply because they almost cut off my hot water too and I was only saved by one tiny little loan secured against Hannelore (as my colleagues like to joke, you buy a sura secured against a camera, and a camera secured against a sura, and it’s all paid for by the Orks, for whom they print five tonnes of fresh green manitous every spring).

  I had good reason for saying that our destinies were strangely linked. I certainly had no grounds for mocking Grim – my sweetheart had managed to spend all my money just as cunningly as his Chloe, which was the final proof that a sura will never be outdone by a live woman in anything. And I had to abase myself by taking on low-paid hackwork.

  Now I flew out on my Hannelore almost every night to launch a firework display over the upper hemisphere – where there is always restrained celebration in the air and battle cameras are forbidden to fly. Only thoroughly seasoned pilots are allowed up there to work, and there aren’t too many of those – so there were commissions to fill.

  They came especially often through GULAG – from David-Goliath Arafat Zuckerberger. Notwithstanding all our gloomy solidarity, one could hardly call this work highly paid, especially taking my problems into account, and for the first time in my life I felt the full weight of the Orkish idiom ‘sucking dick for food’. I don’t wish to be witty on the subject of GULAG, as the creative articulator is suggesting, especially since everything’s clear anyway.

  On the other hand I had a rare opportunity to examine David-Goliath’s residence. It was a copy of the Emperor Tiberius’s home on Capri, where he lived at one time with Manitou Christ.

  The villa was located slightly above the equator of Big Byz. It was a marble mansion lavishly embellished with statues and eagles, drowning in the greenery of absolutely genuine gardens. Immediately below its walls there was a steep cliff – everything just like on the distant isle of Capri. A long path for walks ran along the cliff top, and David-Goliath used to stroll along it in the company of his surs and hangers-on. But it wasn’t this multi-billion open-air path, lined with live rose bushes, which really impressed me – it was his famous ‘nooks of Venus’.

  These were marble summer houses, set back among the greenery, in each of which two or three surs to his taste simulated an orgy of love twenty-four hours a day, waiting for David-Goliath, wreathed in roses, to wander in, during one of his strolls. I was unfortunate enough to witness all of this with my own eyes, but I must admit that it wasn’t the erotic aspect of what was going on that set me thinking. Any one of those surs – any single one! – cost as much as my Kaya.

  But someone even richer lived beside him. This man had twice as much land. And his own river. I’m not joking – his own river, flowing through a meticulously unkempt garden. It ended in a waterfall that fell into a steel inlet pipe, concealed in the bushes. And all this was real and alive, protected against the high altitude cold by an invisible screen. By the way, to this day I still can’t understand how those screens manage to keep the air in, but let through cigar butts and champagne corks (of which I was regularly informed by the radar on my battle Manitou).

  Of course, I pondered the economic basis for such great prosperity more than just once or twice.

  The entire upper surface of the offglobe, which looks like an immense green hill, dotted with occasional external villas, belongs to either old porn actors (no mystery there) or to the lads from the Manitou Reserve. The guys who print the money for us and Orkland. Of course, the expression ‘print the money’ is only meaningful as applied to the Orks down below, where holographic pieces of paper really are in circulation. But on Big Byz manitou doesn’t have any palpable material existence – it’s just numbers on a manitou.

  And to me, a person far removed from economics, it remains a mystery to this day how these persons unknown contrive to produce something completely immaterial and intangible – and use it to keep a tight grip on the balls of an entire material world, the existence of which they strictly forbid us to doubt through their sommeliers. There’s clearly a good reason why the words ‘Manitou’ and ‘manitou’ only differ by the upper case of a single letter.

  But I was rescued from the path leading into the dark abyss of hate crime by a timely sighting. One day I saw David-Goliath out on his strolling path – he was wearing a light toga and walking with his arms round two terrifying boys like the one that I had seen at the opening of Trig’s memorial.

  While working on commissions like this, it’s forbidden to engage the filming apparatus. But in launching fireworks one uses the same system as for launching rockets. You have to set the sight on the spot where the client is located and press the trigger – after that you don’t have to worry about anything else. There’s a chip in every firework that calculates the flight trajectory and the moment of detonation so as to optimise the view.

  Well anyway, taking my aim on the strolling path, I saw David-Goliath’s greatly magnified head in the cross-wires. And I noticed earplugs in his ears – and a very glum scowl on his face. I activated the external microphones for a second – and understood everything. The air was throbbing with thunderous music from a party being thrown by his porn-actor neighbour who lived in the green paradise beyond the artificial waterfall. And a trustee of the Manitou Reserve – the great Arafat Zuckerberger himself – couldn’t do a thing about the queerasts who had dug in on the other side of the river and were cranking up their music equipment. That’s how the world government bites itself on the tail with its venomous teeth – that is, if Orkish divinatory books can be trusted.

  I didn’t particularly trust them. But it was hard not to recall Kaya’s words about the corridor of torment. It turned out that a nonentity like me wasn’t alone in wandering along it: the most august David-Goliath was too. Sic transit gloria mundi from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. It probably is not earthly glory any longer, it’s airborne – but as we can see, there isn’t any difference. There’s no point in getting jittery over petty preferences here.

  In my free time I tried to understand how Kaya had contrived to spend my money and what on. It wasn’t all that easy – but in the end I succeeded.

  It had been enough for Kaya to obtain access to the control manitou just once. Judging from the dates, it had happened on the same day that the war began – when I had wanted to change her settings for the last time. Evidently the stress had been too great, and I forgot to log out of the system before I flew off. While I was fighting in the sky, she slipped into the happiness room and copied all my passwords and digital signatures.

  Since then she had been able to spend my manitou. She only needed the hundred and seventy-five thousand that she scrounged from me as a blind – so that I wouldn’t start wondering what mazooma she was using to order things. And she had used my final resources to splash out on something completely incomprehensible. She had bought …

  There was a whole list of it.

  Several large rolls of synthetic fabric. Like the kind that nomadic Orkish herdsmen use for their yurts, and in the same colours – grey and black. Was she planning to raise cows?

  And also a pair of large-meshed fishing nets – and the most expensive kind too, made of practically weightless, super-strong thread. Was she planning to catch crocodiles?

  And also a whole heap of odds and ends of building materials and tools: plastic panels and fasteners, several kinds of assembly paste and so on. It would take two screens to list it all – and along with all the rest there was an aqualung breathing apparatus, gas burners and a mountaineer’s watch.

  All in all, a pretty bizarre selection.

  Perhaps she needed one of these things and she had bought all the rest as a blind, trying to set me thinking about cows and crocodiles?

  She had paid for all this on some kind of complicated instalment scheme, so that the bills only arrived after a long delay. My little darling had clearly decided not to distress me too soon, and with good reason. But now I had the receipts, and that made things significantly easier for me.

  I entered codes into the manitou and started rummaging through databases. And pretty soon I found everything. The purchases had been delivered to the address of a transport terminal in the Yellow Zone. Two years of storage had been paid for – at absolutely crazy rates. I contacted the terminal and received a short reply: ‘Received by the addressee’. The addressee was an Orkish woman by the name of Hama ITN 1 5052 09 043 12 7. She had also claimed the unused payment for storage and received it in cash.

  Kaya was down below.

  And she had money too – far more than her daddy did. Not because she had so very much. It was just that her daddy didn’t have any at all now. The whole operation had been very easy for her – a Slava Certificate (the Orkish identity card) could be bought on every corner in Urkaine. For any name and number (you could even have the ITN re-perforated, if you had the manitou).

  But after that her tracks vanished.

  First I had to understand how she had got down below.

  I checked to see if any excursions to Orkland had coincided with her disappearance, and found two departures for the Circus, both with stops in the Yellow Zone. The tourists on these routes are counted with a biometric implant scanner, it happens automatically while they board the trailer. The checking apparatus only reacts to people – you can carry a vacuum cleaner or a juice extractor through under your arm. So my little darling had given the scanner a wink, like sister to brother, walked through and sat down in a free place. Nobody had noticed anything. Now it was impossible even to find out which of the excursions she had left with to reach the Yellow Zone.

  She had stayed down below, but it was impossible to find her.

  After this doleful discovery I binged for two days. A substantial portion of what I drank left my body in the form of tears. I pictured my little darling sitting somewhere in an Orkish bazaar, wearing a widow’s headscarf for disguise, with a heart-rending little suitcase containing all of her simple girly belongings – three replacement pussies, Fury of Aphrodite gel and a greasy wad of manitous lifted from my account.

  But why did she need the materials for building a yurt? Was she really going to join the Orkish cattle-herders? Or did she want to make Orkish one-piece baby suits, lighting her basement workshop with gas? Lunacy. Sheer lunacy.

  And it was only on the third day that my drunken brain put two facts together: Kaya was down below and Grim was down below. Until then I’d clearly been thinking that they’d gone down to two different Orklands – or I’d been thinking about them with different hemispheres. It had never even occurred to me that they could have arranged to meet.

  But as soon as I realised that it was possible, the conjecture metamorphosed into dismal certainty. And I remembered that Grim had asked me to water the plants – and I hadn’t done it even once.

  Once inside Bernard-Henri’s apartment (I still hadn’t got used to thinking of it as a den of Orks), I dashed for the manitou. The trusting Grim hadn’t protected it with a password. I slipped into the inbox. It was full of spam from jewellery and cosmetic firms, which Chloe was still attracting after she’d left – like some extinct star, still enticing dreamers with its light.

  There was a lot of correspondence, and I didn’t even know what to look for. Fortunately I thought of looking in Grim’s sent mail – and I saw that he had answered one of the advertising messages.

  That was strange, even for an Ork. I opened the letter and read it carefully.

  And I realised how events had developed.

  About a month after Chloe left, Grim had received a letter from the Film Burners. Or at least a message that was very much like such a letter. Perhaps some had arrived earlier too, but this was the first one he had read. It said:

  ‘Grim will like his new manitou!’

  The picture attached to the letter probably seemed strange to Grim – it didn’t have any manitou in it. It was a girl in a yellow dress standing in a meadow. In one hand she was holding a burning clump of transparent plastic, and in the other a placard with the words:

  OPEN WITH AN EDITOR!

  I didn’t understand this caption myself – I had to delve into an on-screen dictionary. It turned out that the word ‘editor’ didn’t mean only a person who corrected someone else’s work. It had another meaning as well, a manitou programme that processed text. The creative articulator also fell into this class of applications, but I wasn’t able to open the picture with it.

  There were other text editors in Grim’s manitou. He himself used an old Orkish programme ‘Kompøzer!’ and I made another attempt using that. The manitou asked if I was certain I wanted to do it. I confirmed that I was.

  A moment later the picture opened up as text and a chaotic conglomeration of symbols appeared in front of me. There were ordinary letters. There were Church English and Upper Mid-Siberian letters. There were some that I had never even seen before. But what there was most of, was the strange kind of symbols that mad scientists in the Ancient Films used to write in chalk on blackboards as they prepared to train their death ray on mankind.

  There were very many symbols and letters. I patiently looked through several pages – and suddenly saw the word ‘grim’ in a gap.

  After scrambling through the forest of incomprehensible squiggles, I finally ended up with the following text:

  grim – the manitou reads all letters – this way the manitou doesn’t see – if you’ve read this, reply – manitou not needed

  I think that by force of Orkish habit Grim took fright and tried to be cunning. Instead of writing the terrible words ‘manitou not needed’, he sent a slightly different reply:

  Thank you for your letter.

  Manitou sees – at the present moment the Manitou that I have suits me perfectly well. I don’t need a new one.

  The Orkish warrior had probably written ‘Manitou’ with a capital letter deliberately, so that he couldn’t be accused of sacrilege. At the same time he had hinted to his unknown correspondent that he was concerned about the secrecy of their correspondence. And if he was called to account, he could have said that he had replied to a commercial mailshot out of naïve inexperience. The poor soul still didn’t know that the world around him lived according to different laws that were cruel and simple, and if anything went wrong this stupid Orkish cunning wouldn’t help him one tiny little bit.

  The next letter addressed to him had arrived two days later.

  This time it didn’t have any external signs at all of a message from the Film Burners – apart from the same return address. It was a typical roaming advert with the words: ‘crazy reductions on an extravagant window view’. The attached photograph of a black volcanic plain covered with streams of crimson lava was clearly that self-same view – so it was immediately obvious why there were crazy reductions on it. It was a genuine worthwhile offer. If things get really tight, I thought, I’ll move there from New York.

  I opened the picture with the editing program, like the last time, and after painstakingly sifting through many pages of incomprehensible code I filtered out the following:

  grim – there is a way out – you can do it – it’s all in the next letter – kaya

  After the word ‘kaya’ there was a little black heart in the line. In fact they occurred quite often in the jumble of symbols.

  A little black heart. A little black heart. Nothing could have been more appropriate.

  The letter with the final instructions had arrived three days after the second one. There had obviously been a direction to delete it and then empty the recycle bin, which Grim had done. Only his reply had been saved – it consisted of just two words: ‘Got you’. The address was the typical kind of one-day barakadabra used by distributors of spam – I didn’t even bother to check it in the database.

  I didn’t need any addresses. If my hunch was correct – and I had no doubt about that – I needed to find Grim in order to see my little darling again. And finding Grim couldn’t have been easier.

  The thing is that buying children is a rather risky business and it’s not so easy to find volunteers for it. Sometimes the buyers are covered from the sky, in which case a deduction is made from their account. Of course, pilots of my class don’t lower themselves to that kind of trade – you won’t even make back the cost of the cannon shells. But in the military register you can find the contact signatures of all the buyers working in Orkland. They spray special markers onto them so that if anything happens they can be located rapidly from altitude.

  What a pity that no one had thought of marking Kaya in the same way. But it was forbidden to export suras to Orkland anyway – because of problems with batteries. Clearly the fact that that they could go there by themselves had never entered the manufacturers’ heads …

  The atomic battery could still help me though. For some technical reasons or other, it had an electronic passport – a signal detectable within a radius of a hundred metres. At that distance my instruments ought to pick it up. But trying to find Kaya in the Orkish swamp from that super-quiet squeak was like searching for happiness in a haystack. On your own, I mean.

  I needed to find Grim.

  I gave myself a day to sober up, loaded his data into Hannelore and on a murky Orkish morning I flew out on my search. I say ‘a murky Orkish morning’ because our people had intensified the camouflage cloud and so that day in the Orkish capital had turned out rather dismal indeed. But while Hannelore was diving towards the clouds, the weather was perfectly sunny.