You can manage without the maintenance tablets – feed her compressed fish-food, or any other organic concentrate, and her internal structure will pick out the substances it requires. And at a pinch, she can manage without that – even if you tear a little piece out of her body, she can still restore her previous shape. The poor wee thing will simply lose a few grammes of weight.

  Self-restoring, quasi-organic nano-fabric – I think that’s what the manual calls it.

  She only needs water on those magical days when we make love – or if she wants to torment me by crying – but that brings us back again to a delicate subject that I’d rather not broach.

  However, I’ve been talking too long about what’s on the inside of her – it’s time I told you what’s on the outside.

  When you purchase a sura of this class, you spend a lot of time with a team of sommeliers, carefully considering all the intimate details of the future product. You hypercritically inspect every square centimetre of the body – you’ll be spending the rest of your life with it. The discussion covers the kind of nuances that no one talks about, even with their very closest friends. Eyes, nose, chin, the line of the cheekbones, the form of the nipple, the navel – and everything lower down. Every one of these details can take hours, or even days. But the final tweaks go in at the debugging stage, and all this is still not the most important thing about a sura.

  The most important thing about her is that devastating blow she strikes at your senses every time you lay eyes on her. The sommeliers tried to explain to me what’s happening here, and I think I understood.

  Viewing the human female in the most cynical light – and that is precisely how the manufacturers of suras view her – she is simply a biological machine that can conventionally be divided into two functional systems: the ‘hypno-emitter’ and the ‘sperm receiver’, as the consultant surologist who worked with me put it.

  The reproductive system is the assembly line for the production of new human beings, and everybody already knows everything about that. But the information system …

  At this point I run into difficulties articulating the concept. Let’s just say it’s a totality of signals which the woman broadcasts in order to facilitate (or, on the contrary, exclude) the likelihood of reproduction. Or rather, she thinks that she’s broadcasting them, but nature actually does ninety per cent of it for her, and couldn’t give a rotten damn for this particular female. And this, of course, is the primary source of woman’s ancient woe.

  Why is female allure so very powerful? Why is this force, dwelling in a young creature, capable of shattering empires?

  The reason is that the beauty of a young girl is the future, scrolled up tight in the present. It’s a message, stating that the door into a distant tomorrow can quite easily open here and now – one of the doors through which Manitou has been escaping from Himself into times to come for so many millions of years. Manitou enjoys seeing a door like that through our eyes. We are merely His servants and pawns. And all we can do is carry out His orders respectfully and promptly. Even in those difficult moments when His glance halts on boys or lambs.

  Now let me try to repeat the same thing less poetically.

  The informational signals intended to ensure reproduction impinge on each of the six sense organs. The effect involves elements of smell and touch, the taste of someone else’s lips, the sound of words, and the thoughts aroused by those words – but even so the most important channel, of course, is visual.

  From the scientific point of view, female beauty is nothing more than summary information about a woman’s genome and reproductive capacity, which is analysed by the male brain in a split second: a man realises from the very first glance if he finds a woman attractive or not. And if she is attractive to him, this feeling acquires extreme intensity immediately, for the man could be killed by wild beasts five minutes later, and nature doesn’t want to take that risk.

  But we live in a society, not in caves. And therefore the religious moralists were absolutely right when they made women cover both the sperm receiver and the hypno-emitter with a special piece of cloth. For a woman’s primary sexual organ, of course, is her face. It’s no accident that the Orks, with their sensitive ear for the quiet voice of nature, use the word ‘fuckface’ for ‘a likeable girl or woman of reproductive age’. Of course, this is all very obvious – I don’t even need to cite the existence of such a paradigmatic genre of temple porn as the facial. Not to mention the significance of make-up.

  Our offspring from certain women have a better chance of surviving (or for some other reason they seem preferable to the huge biological programme of which we are all part). These women are more attractive to us than others – that is, not to us, but to that very programme, and with its intrinsic cynicism, it plunges us first into a state of romantic inebriation, then into long, agonising emotional torment, and finally into tedious legal turmoil.

  The creators of suras exploit this bioinformational mechanism. First they take a sample of your DNA. Then they calculate the type of female beauty that will be perfectly congenial to your genome. Your sura will have almost exactly the same effect on others – we’re all fairly similar in genetic terms. It’s just a question of the nuances. But, as everyone knows, they’re what make all the difference.

  Of course, beauty like that is absolutely stunning: it’s something you have to experience for yourself. All that’s left for you to do is choose the virtual age of your destined partner and polish up the fine details.

  When it comes to the optimal age, there isn’t any real consensus in the pupophile community – just as there isn’t any among the straights. Bernard-Henri, who has a thing for Orkish juveniles, claims that the blossom of human beauty withers rapidly and you have to hurry to pick it while it’s still fresh. In some ways, of course, he’s right. I think Chloe’s age is the best for women – sixteen, the boundary line that nature herself has laid down (addressing us in the language of criminal codes, among others, for she is many-tongued). And after all, it’s no accident that this is the age of consent for the Orks, who have retained a conspicuously close kinship with the natural world.

  Women under the age of sixteen are only of interest to children and deviants. Women older than that already understate their age, to make it easier for the hypno-emitter to entice a client into the sperm receiver. And since the women behave this way, it must be the voice of nature speaking.

  But Kaya will never have to understate her age. Kaya is a blossom that will never fade.

  A sura isn’t some bedroom dummy with looks perfectly suited to your taste. No, she can talk. And she doesn’t just pronounce words, she engages you in full-blooded personal interaction. Her behaviour can be modified across a wide range, but I’ll tell you all about that next time. For now I’ll just explain what I did when I succumbed to blind resentment.

  Well then, after putting Kaya on pause, I opened her emotional and volitional parameters screen on my private manitou and thought for a while about whether I should take her off maximum bitchiness. But the words ‘flying lard-arse’ had already stopped reverberating in my ears, and I decided not to.

  However, since I was already in the fine-tuning menu, I did make one minimal intervention: using a few secondary controls in an auxiliary window, I adjusted her for heightened interest in my work – so she wouldn’t even think of carrying out her threat. Maximum bitchiness means she bears grudges for a really long time. But I like it when she sits at the control manitou while I’m flying.

  I didn’t bother to specify which particular aspects of my work she should be interested in, leaving the entries ‘any’ or ‘self-orien’ in all the fields. It wasn’t a particularly risky operation. And anyway, at that moment I was still seething with resentment and I needed to do something to keep myself occupied.

  At the end of the procedure, I remembered I’d already promised myself twice not to interfere with her tuning, since that transforms her from a unique life partner into a wind-up toy. A genuine pupo doesn’t do that – he tunes his sura just once, for life.

  I swore solemnly once more that this would never happen to me again. And to make sure my oath would be more than just a load of hot air, I limited tuning module access by setting a compulsory half-hour delay – so now, if I put her on pause, I had to wait thirty minutes to get to the controls. This is an extremely valuable feature of the programme, introduced following numerous requests from users. While I’m waiting, I thought, my gloomy pride will awaken.

  Then I took her off pause.

  When I got back, she was looking into the control manitou.

  The camera had already parked itself in the maintenance bay and the control figures were scrolling across the screen.

  ‘I was scared, but fascinated,’ she said, looking up at me with her dark eyes. ‘Thanks, sweet buns. That was entertaining. But I want to know what happened to those Ork youngsters afterwards. Especially to that boy. Will you show me?’

  Now, why couldn’t she say that in the first place?

  ‘And what will that get me?’ I asked.

  ‘The usual,’ she said, lowering her eyes.

  ‘When do you want to take a look at them?’

  ‘Today. Right now. Please, okay?’

  I just love it when this girl asks me for something.

  I looked at the control manitou. My Hannelore was standing in the charging and loading queue – the whole procedure, including replenishing the ammunition, shouldn’t take more than half an hour. But I didn’t want to spoil her too much.

  ‘There’s no way it can be today, honeybunch,’ I said, tugging on her sleeve. ‘Later. In about three days. If you behave yourself.’

  ‘But why not now?’

  ‘My Hannelore needs to take a rest. And Kaya here still has a little job to do …’

  She nodded and blushed slightly. And even though, when we’d only just got to know each other, I personally spent two evenings fine-tuning that effect, my heart started beating noticeably faster.

  CHAPTER 4

  Grim couldn’t concentrate because they were making such a racket downstairs.

  The boozing had been going on down there for hours and hours – Uncle Khor, a cobbler invalid, had died two days earlier, and they were seeing him off on his final journey. First, there had been a long quarrel between the relatives, and a lot of foul language was reaching Grim’s ears. Then everyone downstairs had made peace and started singing Orkish folk songs.

  The first song they rendered – with deep feeling, almost weeping, was ‘No Fucking Way to Break Out from This Shithole’. And when they struck up ‘My Bloody Homeland Really Sucks’ they hit such a raucous note that Grim upstairs, trying to do his school homework, had to stick plugs in his ears.

  In two days’ time he had to submit his graduation essay on the topic of ‘What I know about my Fatherland and the world’, and it wasn’t ready yet. But Grim wasn’t particularly worried, because what they had in the house was the paper edition of the Free Encyclopaedia, published in the time of Loss Liquid. He usually copied all his essays straight out of there, distorting the language a bit – to make it more believable, missing out minor facts and adding in a few mistakes. He got away with it, because his teachers didn’t have an encyclopaedia like that – the only place you could find one now was in the Yellow Zone.

  He resolutely copied out the first section of his essay from the historical outline:

  In the age of Ancient Films there were two great countries, Ameriza and Tchina, which towered above worldwide Chaos and fed each other. When antiquity fell into a state of decadence, Tchina cut itself off from the world with the Great Wall and disintegrated into separate kingdoms. In Ameriza wars broke out between Hispanics and Blacks, and it was divided into several feuding regions.

  Now the most powerful country in the world was the narco-state Aztlan, which included the Spanish-speaking south of Ameriza and the former state of Mexizo. The people living there were blessed to see Manitou the Antichrist, who took on human form in order to give them the New Law. Of his own free will, the Antichrist took for Himself this name and the sign of the spastika, in order to cleanse the minds of men. For He purged with His Light all that was most abominable and appalling and declared that the past was no more, and from henceforth the voice of Manitou would speak from out of the darkest corners, so that men would know that there was no place which was not the Home of Manitou. And Aztlan killed Him and took His blood upon itself.

  Aztlan was a sinister despotism, ruled by a cruel and immoral elite. The states of Yamato, Brazil, the Kingdom of Sheng, the Siberian Republic and Eureich were the same – those were the countries that had raised their offglobes above the land’s surface.

  Now he had to write about the offglobes. Grim got up from the desk, put the gold-and-black volume of the encyclopaedia back on the shelf and took another. Opening it at the article he needed, he sat back down at the table and carried on writing.

  Initially, the offglobes were tax-free extraterritorial zones where terrestrial laws did not apply. They appeared when the President of Aztlan, Jorge the Horrible, granted the whole world Aztlanian citizenship and compelled everyone living on earth to pay taxes, under the threat of nuclear holocausting. The offglobes, tethered above the earth on a gravity drive, were not formally subject to this law.

  The movie industry, science and finance sector gradually moved to them – and the ancient dream of the bankers of all the earth, an offshore money-printing bank, became a reality. The offglobes began turning into huge flying cities, where the elite of mankind lived without any fear that some ‘Occupy ’em!’ movement would break in with their tents, loudspeakers and revolutionary banners. All the technologies of social protest known in the past became powerless. When, for some obscure reason, a great war of mutual extermination broke out between the terrestrial states, the offglobes were not affected because they were declared a peace zone and nuclear weapons were not used against them …

  Grim looked across to the next page, ran his eyes over it in bewilderment and cursed. The next five or six pages had been torn out.

  Someone in his family had done that – for a common, everyday purpose that was quite obvious. And what’s more, they had done it quite recently, because Grim had read the article only a few months earlier. It was so interesting he’d been looking forward to reading it again – in vain, as it turned out.

  Searching for inspiration, Grim looked up at the wall in front of his workspace.

  His great-uncle Mord’s business card was hanging there – Mord was a deceased relative of his mother’s who had somehow contrived to become a genuine lawyer in Big Byz and work for the rich Global Orks from there. The letters and numbers on the card looked simple and austere:

  Mord ITN 1 7012 00 126 01 8

  Attorney-at-Law

  Big Byz 093 457 890-3288

  The business card had been hung up there by Grim’s mother when he was still very young, so that every time Grim looked up he would remember what an ordinary Ork could achieve through his own hard work. Strangely enough, the example did help. At this moment, for instance, Grim decided that he could manage perfectly well without the torn-out pages.

  He still remembered a few things. Especially the story of the destruction of the great offglobes of the past – lots of interesting and spine-chilling stuff there. For instance, the offglobes of Eureich and Yamato were scuttled in the sea after their commanding officers had committed suicide (he even remembered that on Eureich the entire elite had taken cyanide after listening to an ancient opera, and the offglobe had fallen into the Baltic Sea where it still towered up out of the water like a dead black mountain). The colossal offglobe of the Kingdom of Sheng, with more than a hundred million people living on it, was flung out into the outer space when the incorrectly copied gravity drive ran out of control. To this very day that was still considered the worst catastrophe in the history of mankind, and the Warring Kingdoms behind the Great Wall had changed their development model largely under the influence of this tragedy.

  There were rumours that the last two offglobes, belonging to Aztlan and Brazil, were not destroyed by modern weapons but by the power of magic. Nobody knew anything for sure about Aztlan, because after Manitou the Antichrist was killed that land was believed to be cursed. But they said that the Brazil’s offglobe was supposedly brought down by a boy, wreathed in flowers and driven there in a chariot made of jaguar skulls – and he did it by playing on a reed pipe.

  All in all, Grim had managed to squeeze out enough information for a few sentences only – but that would have to do.

  After that he had to say a few words about the world’s last remaining offglobe – Byzantion, or Big Byz. And even though Big Byz was hanging right over his head, this task turned out to be the hardest.

  It wasn’t clear what tone he should adopt in writing about it. The meticulously balanced blend of servile submission and rabid hatred that made up the Orkish news didn’t easily lend itself to imitation. And he only had to overdo it slightly with the hatred (or, indeed, the respect), and there could be problems.

  Grim decided to present the dry basic facts and leave it at that:

  Big Byz has a population of about thirty million. The political regime is a liberative democraship in the form of a Manitoual Demarchy (or the other way round, no one really understands what these words mean anyway). The state language is Church English, but High Russian is also current. The political system is tripartite ritual. The Frontman of the Manitou Reserve, aka the President and the Auspex General, is chosen from the Whitefaces, Augustes or Hobos for a term of six years. By provision of the Constitution, no one ever knows his name or sees his face; it is also forbidden to mention him in the news.

  The precise size of the offglobe is classified [we can’t even measure that for ourselves, thought Grim], but it is the largest that has ever existed, since everything that could be uncoupled from the offglobes of the past, before they had been destroyed, was transferred to Big Byz. That was the reason for its barely perceptible asymmetric hump. The offglobe, as you have already guessed, hangs above our beloved capital city, an ancient cradle of civilisation, where there was once a late Barbed-Wire Age offshore settlement, wiped out by a nuclear explosion during the war between the Siberian Republic and Aztlan … The Orkish city of Slava now stands on the site of that explosion, and directly above it is Big Byz, which was moved here several centuries ago.