I really, really ought to have thought about it! But I didn’t.

  The problem was probably that for most of the flight my brain had been balancing between three states. I was reckoning up my losses, thinking about how I would kill Grim and imagining my meeting with Kaya. In the end I’d started dealing with these tasks simultaneously, as if I was making things up with Kaya, killing Grim while I was at it, and signing yet another loan deed with his blood. I kept an eye on the time – and when the moment came I noted that I would have to turn back soon – so it was possible that I wouldn’t see Kaya again and would only manage to kill Grim. But then his balloon started to descend, and I decided I still might get everything done.

  The strangest thing of all was that I had no clear idea of what I would do when I saw her. Lurking somewhere at the bottom of my mind, of course, was a vague hope that was absolutely insane from a technical point of view – that at the moment of meeting she would repent, come up close and embrace my Hannelore, and the only thing I love would bring back home the only entity that is dear to me. Or vice versa; it’s not important – I’m not a discoursemonger, after all, but a battle pilot … Of course, the load would have been too heavy for my Hannelore to lift, but I felt as if everything would change at the moment of meeting, even the laws of physics.

  Grim had already descended to one kilometre, and now his balloon was flying fairly slowly – the wind had almost completely died away here. I thought to myself that the Film Burners, whoever they were, really had found a very convenient way of travelling – a balloon’s speed could be regulated simply by changing altitude, because lower down the wind blew gently, but above four kilometres it got up so much speed that not even my Hannelore could have kept up with it.

  And then I suddenly felt as if my brain had teeth that had been chewing on semi-liquid porridge for a long time – and all of a sudden they’d hit a steel ball bearing. Which shattered them instantly.

  I realised that I couldn’t go back.

  I’d forgotten about the wind.

  With fingers that suddenly felt feeble I instructed the manitou to calculate the reverse course. It turned out that I wouldn’t even get as far as the dumping ground – I’d bellyflop somewhere in the desert.

  Every battle pilot faces the risk of losing his camera every day, but you have to act as if the danger doesn’t exist. This is no profession for cowards, and I had never lost my composure in battle, in the very thick of blood and death. Only then losing my camera had been no more than a statistical probability – but now …

  Now it was inevitable. There were only a few hours left before Hannelore would be a wreck.

  This seemed all the more absurd because there was absolutely no palpable danger emanating from the world around me. Hannelore was alive and well, all her systems were functioning normally, and even the prehistoric sputnik communications link was working amazingly well – like some ancient genie, whose long wait for a client had finally been rewarded.

  I shouted out loud and my head started bobbing about furiously in all directions, as if it was trying to snap the stalk of my neck. Tears flooded my battle goggles, turning the world around me dim and blurred. I was even afraid that I might not be able to control Hannelore.

  I just couldn’t get my head round the fact I had gone and lost this second, or rather, first body of mine so easily. The pain was as bad as the day when Kaya left. I was convulsed like an Ork caught in a burst of cannon-fire from the sky.

  It was especially unbearable to realise what Kaya would have said about my torment (I had spent enough magical nights with her to know this almost verbatim): ‘If you think about it, you flying lard-arse, your drama comes down to the fact that one machine can’t find another with its groping electromagnetic fields, and a bloated seal who’s receiving reports from a rusty sputnik is sobbing in his faraway sealer …’

  Then I calmed down – and the Pilot in me awoke. As if the spirit of one of the ancient Asiatic airmen, who flew off coolly into the attack knowing that there was no way back, had descended unto me.

  I understood what they felt at that moment. Every second was transformed into a little lifetime, the figures on the manitou were filled with incredibly precise meaning, little Kaya came to life in the photograph above the altitude sensor – and sent me a smile from the dazzling peak of bitchiness and seduction.

  And then I understood what had been hidden away at the bottom of my consciousness right from the start. I understood why I wanted to find her.

  Not so that she would come back to me. That was impossible. And naturally, not in order to kill her – that was also unachievable, for her ontological status, as the late Bernard-Henri would have said, had been non-existence from the very beginning. But if I couldn’t bring Kaya back into my existence, my Hannelore could take her along.

  And Grim was perfect in the role of an escort.

  As soon as this decision crystallised in my mind, everything that followed became simple. I calculated the time I had left with camouflage engaged or disengaged: with interim usage, the result ought to be somewhere in the middle. I was really hoping that I would have enough time, since Grim had descended a long way and was now flying really slowly – his destination was obviously already close.

  It was getting harder and harder for me to stay below him – and flying at the same height as him was risky: I would have stood out against the bright stripe of the sunset (last day in the sky, someone said in my ear). When Grim went down even lower, I moved sideways and gained some height – and I had to engage the camouflage. The sky was still too bright.

  I had absolutely no idea what region this was – I could only see mountains in the distance, lit up by the blaze of the setting sun. There was blue mist eddying between the mountains, and it occurred to me that it looked like the clouds going to bed (that’s not the creative articulator; I really did think that at that moment). Open space, a beautiful, boundless expanse – and every glance at it reminded me that my magical eye was about to close forever.

  And then I spotted lights ahead.

  In fact, it would have been hard not to spot them in the gathering twilight down below. The bright electric lamps glowed in a long dotted line, one lamp every hundred metres or thereabouts. Evidently Grim was expected – or perhaps these lights burned here all the time. As a pilot I noticed that despite being so primitive, this was a convenient navigation system – it was impossible to miss a long chain like that from altitude. All Grim had needed to do was rise into the air from the old quarry – and the wind, like a river, had delivered him to his destination. Probably the time of departure had also been calculated so that he would reach his goal in the twilight, when the signal lights were easy to make out.

  Grim had clearly noticed the lights – his balloon started descending sharply.

  The gondola touched the ground at the edge of the forest, and he immediately jumped out.

  They were already running towards him.

  At first I didn’t understand where these people had come from. Then I spotted a canopy covered with bark – on the boundary line between the field and the forest, with several horses tethered under it. I assume that Grim’s heart must have rejoiced, since the men meeting him looked more or less as ‘ancient Urks’ could have looked – if we accept that this nation ever really existed somewhere outside the bounds of Orkish historiography.

  They were wearing dark robes with belts round them. Some were armed with crossbows and had knives hanging on their belts. Enlarging the image, I noticed that they had strange hairstyles – a knot of hair on the back of the head, tied round with a bright-coloured ribbon.

  They surrounded Grim and the young Ork explained something for about a minute, waving his arms in the direction of the still-bright western sky. They seemed to understand him. It seemed to me that his appearance wasn’t really a great surprise. Soon there were only two of them left beside Grim, while the others surrounded the balloon, which had already metamorphosed into half of an immense onion, and started dismantling it into its constituent elements. The deftness with which they removed the burner suggested that it wasn’t the first time they had done this.

  The two men led Grim to the canopy. I was afraid that they would keep him there for the night and my plans would collapse, but fortunately they only let him drink his fill and take a rest, and then they mounted their horses. They gave Grim a horse too – the Orks know how to ride them (it’s part of their military training, in case cavalry scenes might be required in the snuffs). Then all three of them galloped into the forest.

  It was already completely dark in there. Grim’s guides put on headbands, and two bluish-white beams shone from them onto the road. The light wasn’t too bright, but it lit up their way perfectly well. My Hannelore has a headlamp … That is, she used to have one. Doesn’t matter. I only mean to say that the forest men not only had electricity, which many primitive tribes have, but also things like this, obviously not manufactured in our Yellow Zone. Because of the crossbows behind their backs, it hadn’t even occurred to me that they could produce something like that themselves.

  When we finally arrived, the red ‘battery low’ sign was already glowing on the manitou. The system usually worked for an hour or two after that, but it could hold out for a little bit longer. I was starting to get nervous already. They seemed to take too long dismounting from their horses.

  They had stone houses. At least, partly stone: the walls and the roofs were made of wood and bark, but the foundations and supporting columns were made of stone and cement.

  It was something like a village hidden away in the forest – the houses stood in the gaps between the trees and the paths connecting the houses ducked under their crowns. Our apartments for the ecologically minded middle class have similar views in the window (‘among the giant sequoias’, ‘a thousand years before Antichrist’), but for obvious reasons, it would be hard to get close to the trees there …

  They led Grim to a house with a large terrace, lit up with yellow paper lanterns that looked like huge mandarins. Men were sitting cross-legged on the cushions below them – unarmed and dressed rather colourfully. There were about twenty of them. However, I didn’t examine them for long, because …

  Yes. She was sitting on the same kind of cushion, facing them – my stolen joy. She was wearing a long garment in gold and green – a kind of dress made of a single piece of fabric, wound round her body (the Orks call it a sarifan). And of course, she was doing what she liked best, brainwashing these guys the same way she had been brainwashing me only recently. They were listening to her attentively. I pointed the microphone at her – and managed to record a few phrases.

  I think that during our last days she had been pouring an extremely similar detergent into my cerebral convolutions:

  ‘When you feel anger or pain, you appear. It seems to you that there is someone who is smitten by them – and afterwards it is he who acts and suffers. You simply do not know that you are not obliged to react to these sensations and thoughts. But the reaction begins with you agreeing to consider them your own. However, the chemical whiplash cracking in your brain is by no means your supreme master. You have simply never subjected to doubt its right to command. If you learn to perceive its blows, they will lose their power over you. And they can only be seen from one angle – when the one who accepts them as his own disappears. There is an ancient Orkish saying: “Where is best? Where we are not …” What does it mean? As long as you view the world from the little hillock that you have learned to regard as “yourself”, you will pay a very high rent for it. But what will you receive in exchange? You do not even know which cracks of the whip will drive your “I” into its nightmare journey in a moment’s time …

  ‘The ancient gays told their enemies the same thing as today’s Ork brutes – “Know thyself”. For good reason, they regarded this as a terrible insult. For there is nothing in the “self” that can be known, just as there is nothing that can be known in the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope. There is not even anyone within you who can remember this impossibility for five minutes. But to shout out on every corner that no “I” exists is even more stupid. Not because it does exist, but because it is this very non-existing apparition that will pretend that it does not exist. Do not take on a burden that is beyond your strength, and do not accuse Manitou of dumping it on your shoulders. Let Manitou bear this burden Himself – that is what Manitou is there for …

  ‘Why do you want the monstrous responsibility for the play of the light and shade that have never asked you for anything? Why grow your hair and nails with a terrible effort of will, if they grow of their own accord? You have no more power over yourself than over the weather – and if you can occasionally predict it correctly, that does not mean that the rain falls because of your incantations. Do not take on yourself any of those things that become visible when the thread of life unravels. And do not fear to offend Manitou by your lack of understanding – when He wants something from you, you will be the first to know …’

  And then she saw Grim.

  She immediately got up and walked towards him. They met on the path, smiled at each other as if they had parted only a minute ago, joined hands and walked into the forest without speaking. Someone managed to give them two headbands with lamps, and they put them on. Kaya could see in the dark, but I remembered that her programmes were wary of frightening off the client by demonstrating this ability: when we were still together, my little darling often asked me to turn on the light.

  They walked a long way into the forest – two bluish-white spots on the uneven ground, two vague black silhouettes. Then one ray of light tilted up into the black sky and other turned down into the nearby ground, sometimes snatching Kaya’s laughing face out of the darkness. And then they switched off their lamps.

  In the infrared spectrum they didn’t look so romantic. Especially to me – every one of the bleached-out details inflicted unbearable pain on my heart. So I only looked at them out of the corner of my eye. I evaluated the position (I mean Hannelore’s, not theirs), trying to view reality with the eyes of a battle pilot and not a cuckolded husband, because cuckolded husbands often miss when they shoot.

  They had snuggled down on a spot at the edge of a large clearing. I flew into the centre of it, rose another four metres into the air and carefully fixed my sights on them, setting up a salvo of all six rockets. I even checked the distance to the target to see if the camera might be damaged by debris, although that wasn’t really important now.

  At this point my camouflage disengaged itself – that meant Hannelore had only ten minutes left to live at the most. And although Kaya and Grim were swaying smoothly to and fro in the red ‘target locked’ square, for an instant I forgot all about them – and tears sprang to my eyes. I don’t know which of them I loved more – Hannelore or Kaya. And now I had to lose them both in a single instant. And all because of this Ork.

  They didn’t notice anything, because I was hovering in darkness – but now I wanted them to see me, right at the end. See me and hear me. And not even fearing any more that it would drain Hannelore’s final strength, I switched on the headlamps and navigation lights and then cut in the music too, the good old ‘Flight of the Valkyries’ that has served so many generations of battle pilots. Let the Orkish hero depart to Alkalla to the sounds of the music machine that he hated so much.

  Then I zoomed in on their faces that were turned towards me and switched the image to standard light mode. This was probably the only time I ever regretted that my camera was a Hannelore and not a Sky Pravda. If I’d had a Sky Pravda, I would have seen them exactly as I would in daylight. But now the colour distortions made it seem as if I was looking at a rubber boy lying on a rubber girl. Never mind, I thought, that will do for a last glimpse.

  Kaya had never seen my Hannelore so close up. Now look, I thought vengefully, take a last look at the flying lard-arse, my little sweetheart. Now you can see what I’m really like. Look at who it was that you embraced treacherously for so many nights in order to swap him for this Orkish freak. Depart into non-existence together with him. Or rather, meet him there, do …

  But Kaya knew that I was looking into her eyes, and she gazed up into the black sky in order not to give me this final joy. And her face set in a calm, even scornful half-smile.

  Bitchiness on maximum, what else can you expect?

  But Grim looked straight at me. I enlarged his face so that it filled the entire sight. He remembered my Hannelore without camouflage – that was how their acquaintance had begun. He had already heard that fragment of Wagner before, when he froze in my sights without his trousers for the first time. But standing. How miserly life is with her inventions.

  When I saw his eyes, I realised that he had recognised his own death. As if this instant in the night-time forest and that instant by the stream in Orkland had merged into a single long second, during which the poor little kid dreamed that he had almost slipped out of death’s bony grasp. But death always keeps his promise. And now here he was – and at that moment Grim probably clearly realised that all this time death had been waiting patiently beside him.

  And then I pressed the launch button.

  The starting flash was reflected in Grim’s eyes and his face contorted in a grimace of revulsion in the face of death. I had caught this final transformation of Orkish features on celluloid many times, after which everything disappeared in a swirling vortex of fire.

  Only I didn’t see any vortex.

  Grim gaped in wild confusion, and I realised that he wasn’t looking at Hannelore any longer, but somewhere higher and off to the side. Kaya was looking in the same direction, and for the first time I saw her jaw drop in surprise – until then I had never managed to trigger this subroutine …