Several circles above the Orkish capital and around it didn’t turn up anything. I started panicking – it occurred to me that Grim could have got rid of his marking. Putting Hannelore on autopilot, I took off my battle goggles and clambered over to the control manitou – in order to find out if that was possible.

  No, the system replied, as long as the patient (or, as the Orks literally translate it, the ‘sufferer’) is alive, the markers will be identifiable at long range. Grim had either departed for Alkalla (or whatever it is the Orks call it) or he was too far away from the capital. I couldn’t check the first possibility, so I decided to work on the second one.

  It took me five whole days.

  I’ll spare the reader an account of my wanderings above the dreary Orkish expanses, with their villages that look like swamps and swamps that look like villages, with their identical rice fields, with here and there a grey old nag plunking a hoof in the liquid mud (and the way they breathed, the creative articulator adds – ‘ the pale horse! the seventh seal!’), with their miserable banana plantations, with their terrified scarecrows, vainly imploring a pilot to take them out of their hempen hell, with their chapels camouflaged as haystacks, not daring to exhibit their semi-proscribed spastikas to the jaunty barrels of our cannons, with their destitute lakes, bankrupt rivers and insolvent coconut groves … Especially since the creative articulator has already described it all for me.

  Grim’s signal showed up on the southern border of Orkland. Not far from the area where the boundless ancient dumping ground begins. It was located in a little Orkish border village with the ancient name of ‘Shliudyanko’. The very sound of it made me feel depressed.

  Grim clearly wasn’t here to work – the instructions forbade the buying of children in this region because of the radiation.

  Of course, this prohibition was an unnecessary precaution because the radioactive dumping had happened two or three hundred years ago and now there was practically none of the radiation left. Besides, a north wind was always blowing here, so the background radiation level would be normal in any case. But even so, Grim had violated his instructions.

  I was shaking all over – I was certain that any moment now I would see Kaya. But Hannelore’s batteries were running very low and I decided to return to Big Byz in order to prepare for the final act of the drama. The autopilot could do that.

  Five hours later I was back at the controls. There had been enough time to take a rest, have something to eat, recharge and reload all the battle systems and have a bitter wank. The reader can see how difficult it is for me to separate myself from Hannelore. But only Manitou is capable of comprehending what it was like for me to lose Kaya – and what I felt for the Ork who had brought this disaster down on my head. My finger was simply dancing on the trigger. Grim was very lucky that his signal disappeared from the manitou screen as soon as I dropped lower.

  I released the stress by shooting up a scarecrow on the edge of a meadow where two cows were grazing (they ran off at such a clip that one stumbled and, I think, broke its leg). May Manitou Shiva forgive me – I’ve heard that he feels a special affection for these animals. After calming my nerves, I set out to look for my little friend – I wasn’t worried that I would lose him, because there was naked steppe on all sides and he couldn’t have got away. He could only get lost in the folds of the relief. Although how could there be any hollows in the steppe?

  The village itself consisted of little houses stretched out along a country track. Some of them served as dwellings for Orks and others as quarters for cattle, and in fact it was practically impossible to distinguish their functions even in zero-altitude flight. On the main street I came across a couple of chickens, a pig relaxing in a puddle and a drunken agricultural Ork in a coarse, dirty kaftan, with a pitchfork in one hand and a bottle of volya in the other. Honestly, if I’d seen him in the news, I’d have frowned and thought that military propaganda ought to be less crude.

  I decided to gain a bit of height and Grim’s signal appeared on my screen again. Now I realised why he kept appearing and disappearing. Not far from the village there was an ancient quarry where they used to extract something or other in the Age of Ancient Films. It had subsided and was overgrown with dense green vegetation now, but it was still possible to climb down into it. There was a half-ruined shed standing in its bottom. I pinpointed Grim when he had already climbed up and was heading towards the village.

  Cautiously moving in closer, I skirted round him and then followed, trying to keep my distance – despite his youth, Grim was already an experienced Ork in the military sense. My camouflage was engaged, naturally, and I performed all the usual precautionary manoeuvres, taking the sun and the wind into account.

  But once he reached the centre of the village, Grim suddenly turned towards me and raised one hand with the middle finger extended. His eyes were looking straight into mine, as if he really could see Hannelore – although I was approaching downsun and he shouldn’t have been able to see me, even without optical camouflage.

  To anyone watching it was a strange sight – a young Ork suddenly swung round in the village street, gave the sun the finger, spat and walked on. But from the approving grunt emitted by an Ork sitting on a roadside bench (I think it was the same agricultural Ork with the bottle, only without the pitchfork now), this gesture was entirely in keeping with the national spirit.

  Grim could hardly have spotted me. Perhaps he had been prompted by some kind of instinct, but most likely he had simply assumed that I could be following him and realised where my camera would be in that case. After all, I myself had explained the basics of flying tactics to him during our binges. He had nothing to lose, this young Ork, except perhaps the finger dispatched in the direction of the sun. But could anyone possibly count how many of them had already dissolved in its ancient yellowish-white fire? Shut up, creative articulator, shut up.

  Grim disappeared into a hut on the edge of the village. I waited for several minutes, flew in closer and tried glancing in through the window. Grim was sitting at a table and cutting a circular patch out of material that looked like leather with big rusty scissors. Lying on the table in front of him were a tube of glue, pieces of rope and offcuts of shiny fabric. The boy was making something. Sometimes he raised his head and answered the person sitting opposite him. I couldn’t see the other person and a chilly tremor of anticipation ran down my spine.

  I activated the long-distance microphones.

  ‘What does that mean, “they believe, they don’t believe”?’ Grim was saying. ‘That’s the Orkish approach. Their news isn’t for people to believe or disbelieve anything, it’s for knowing which way the wind’s blowing and what smells it’s carrying.’

  ‘Then why do they make news for us?’ his invisible companion asked. ‘We won’t understand anything anyway.’

  Kaya wasn’t there, it was some Orkish peasant.

  ‘Well, it’s like as if they replaced the signals from our sense organs with different ones,’ Grim replied. ‘Just imagine that you’re crawling towards the slaughtering table in a butcher’s yard. Creeping through blood on your belly. But your eyes show you a garden, your ears hear a little river splashing, and your nose smells flowers. And you’ve got this thought hammering away in your head that you need to buy some canned meat. But if, Manitou forbid, you really do crawl into a garden like that by chance, your eyes will immediately show you a bloody butcher’s yard. It’s all been fixed.’

  ‘You mean they show us nothing but untruth?’

  ‘Aha,’ said Grim. ‘But they don’t show us just one untruth – it’s at least two different ones. Ours and theirs …’

  He carried on talking after that, but I wasn’t interested any more. I flew back a bit from the window and activated the hyperoptics. The hut started shimmering with all the colours of the rainbow and two coarse-grained silhouettes appeared on the manitou – Grim and a paunchy man sitting opposite him. But he didn’t arouse my usual feeling of empathy with fat men.

  Kaya wasn’t anywhere there.

  Now I knew that for certain, because if I hadn’t located her from her outline (it’s the same as people have), I would have seen her battery’s signal on the manitou.

  I flew over the village, dropping down to each of the different-coloured houses. The hyperoptics presented to my gaze quite a lot of drunken Orks, several children crawling around on the floor and even a copulating pair. Kaya’s signal wasn’t anywhere.

  Then I flew to the old quarry out of which Grim had appeared. He could have hidden my little darling there – and that was my last hope. But soon it was dashed too. There was no one at all in the shed on the bottom of the quarry. Inside it there was some kind of cluttered workshop – through the window I could see a large work table with pieces of fabric, lengths of rope and plastic shavings. The villagers obviously worked here sometimes. But Kaya wasn’t there either.

  Beside the workshop I could make out the remains of ancient cabins – at first I thought the Orkish miners must have lived there at one time. But then I noticed a large, crude bas-relief on a stone wall – an image of an eye with a tear. I remembered that was the symbol of the Film Burners. Perhaps it wasn’t a tear, but blood, Kaya had said something about that. It wasn’t important. If they had hidden here at one time, that time was long past.

  Moving up a little higher, I scanned the quarry again – and saw only the silhouettes of small rodents in one of the cabins. I went back to the village and combed it again. A waste of time. Then I started cruising round it in ever-increasing circles, watching the manitou closely. Kaya’s signal wasn’t anywhere.

  When it got dark, I went back to the house where Grim was holed up, put Hannelore on autopilot, glued my eye to the sights and started waiting.

  I was woken by a cock crowing in my earphones.

  Turned out I had fallen asleep at my post – and slept for a long time. My camera was still hovering beside the house, but it was already light. Day had come.

  Grim had had enough time to send me a greeting.

  There was a dirty grey bed sheet stretched out on the wall of the house, with mocking, angular letters gazing out at me from it.

  DAMILOLA!

  KAYA HASN’T BEEN HERE FOR AGES.

  SHE FLEW OFF TO THE SOUTH.

  HONESTLY. GRIM.

  CHAPTER 24

  My eyes were still racing over the sheet, my brain was still analysing the meaning of the black squiggles – but I already knew that it was true.

  She had flown away …

  Never, do you hear me, never put your sura on maximum bitchiness. Because maximum bitchiness is when you realise that you can never get her back.

  I noticed that I was yelling at the top of my lungs and firing from both cannons. I couldn’t remember how it had started – I only became aware of what was happening when I saw the smoking sheet slip to the ground.

  Then the Orkish hut started falling apart, as if wasn’t made out of logs but dried-out sand. First the wall was blown away, then the shells started chewing up what was behind it. The table and benches, pots, bottle, trunks and chest of drawers all shattered into splinters and only the large white stove (Orks build them for religious reasons of some kind) withstood the blows of my shells for the time being, losing its shape as it shrank rapidly.

  Grim wasn’t in the house any longer. I only realised that when I ran out of shells and an Ork who was hiding from my fire behind the stove darted out into the field in nothing but his shirt. It was the man Grim had been talking to the day before – the priest from the local chapel, I think.

  There was absolutely nothing left of the hut apart from the stub of the stove, still rising up out of the wood dust and fine chips. I never even suspected that Orks could make such strong bricks.

  Then I remembered about the workshop on the bottom of the quarry. Grim could be there. I swung round …

  And in the distance I saw a balloon rising up into the air.

  It looked like a cloud of smoke. I engaged the light filters and magnification – and I made out a plastic cube, with a gas burner working away at full power above it. The flame ran up into a grey-and-black sphere, inflated inside a fishing net, to which the gondola was attached. The sphere was black on top, apparently so that the sun would perform part of the work of warming it. And it also looked a little bit like an eye – on its grey flank there was a black spot that was reminiscent of a pupil constricted by some kind of hallucinogen. Perhaps a valve or a patch.

  Everything suddenly fell into place – the fabric, and the gas burners, and even the Film Burners’ symbol.

  It wasn’t any kind of eye with a tear in it.

  It was a hot air balloon.

  In a single second I understood everything about her deception, about the ‘mystical flight’ and even the ‘burning of the film’ (possibly some members of the sect really did burn ancient celluloid to fill the envelope with hot air). If she really had flown south on a balloon like that – and since the wind here always blows from the north, it’s hard to fly anywhere else – it meant that she was no longer in Orkland.

  Grim’s balloon was rising higher rapidly. I flew towards it, gaining altitude. I could shoot it down at any second – although I had no shells left, I still had the rockets. But then I would have lost the final thread that linked me to Kaya – and that thought prevented me from acting emotionally. Really, if Kaya had flown off on the same kind of balloon, where could Grim fly except after her?

  I glanced at the instruments. The battery had lost only a quarter of its charge overnight. A forced landing in Orkland was no problem – it had happened to me before. I could call an evacuator from Big Byz, although that had become an expensive option for me now. But if the battery went flat faraway over the dumping ground … No one would fly out there, for sure. And I was already right on the border. But Hannelore should hold out for twenty-four hours – and that meant I could fly away from the border for almost a day and still be able to return.

  I decided to go for it.

  I had to conserve energy, so I disengaged the camouflage. But I took every precaution to prevent Grim from seeing me. I kept behind and below him, trying to make myself just an indistinct dot against the ground.

  The balloon was gaining height. When Grim had risen above three kilometres, he started switching off the burner temporarily – he clearly had precise instructions on when to do what. His balloon continued rising by inertia. I realised that he was entering the zone of strong wind and I had no choice but to follow him.

  Soon the ground speed indicator started showing some very serious figures. But at altitude I could barely feel the wind at all, because we were flying along with it: Grim’s balloon hung in front of me as tranquilly as a Christmas tree decoration. I switched Hannelore into automatic tracking mode. I was clearly going to be flying for more than just an hour or two, and I decided to pay a visit to the kitchen for a bite to eat. After that I got washed – I can’t stand it when I start feeling itchy during a flight.

  This was all frayed nerves, of course.

  When I got back, I saw that Grim had risen higher and now he was flying even faster. That was risky, because of the wind – at high altitude there were vertical gradients that could tear the balloon off the gondola. But Grim was acting cautiously.

  Watching the box he was sitting in wasn’t interesting – the hyperoptics showed that he was squeezed in between the gas cylinders, wrapped in blankets, and every now and then tugging on the ropes leading to the burner – they served as his control levers. He was obviously keeping track of his altitude and the time on a mountaineering watch, checking with his instructions – and breathing through a respirator.

  The poor wretch was feeling very cold, of course, and every now and then I got the urge to warm him up with a precisely targeted rocket. I wasn’t planning on denying myself that satisfaction, but it was still too early yet.

  An hour later the dumping ground below me came to an end and the Great Desert began. I never expected that I would ever see it with my own eyes – I’d always thought it was much further away from Orkland. Not even reconnaissance probes had been sent out here for quite some time – what was the point? The desert looked like a sea, covered with a film of brown scum. Here and there the stumps of ancient wind turbines stuck up out of it – as if giants who had been buried here were giving the bygone finger to the sky and me. And to the creative articulator too, probably.

  After an hour, contact with Hannelore deteriorated badly. That frightened me, because I hadn’t thought about it at all – over Orkland, there are relay stations hovering everywhere, but in the region where I was pursuing Grim there hadn’t been any technological civilisation for many centuries. The final relay station was too far behind me and any moment now we would move out of its range. I was all ready to fire a rocket salvo and turn back, but just then the system switched over to an ancient sputnik – after warning me how much it would cost.

  I just gritted my teeth even harder.

  But now the communications link was working perfectly. I even picked up a satellite radio channel – they were broadcasting a memorial programme about Nicholas-Olivier Laurence von Trier. They played excerpts from the last long interview with the deceased.

  ‘It can’t be easy – being number one in sales in the “first teen fucks” category for a whole forty years. How do you manage it?’

  ‘Well, honey, if there was any simple answer to that question … Let me put it this way – the very second I wake up, I’m already working on myself …’

  Soon I noticed that patches of green had started appearing below me. They were getting denser all the time. Little rivers flickered by. And then a forest started. Did that mean the Great Desert was already over? Or we had just cut across the very edge of it? It seemed strange to me that we had covered such an immense distance, but at that moment I didn’t attach any significance to it.