Grim pondered. So was ‘offshore’ the same as ‘offglobe’ or not? That was the second time he had come across the word. He didn’t think so – someone had once mentioned that this confusion had been perpetually tripping up the school-leavers: in the Barbed-Wire Age, a civilisation of this kind did exist. It was even mentioned, briefly, in the curriculum on our native land’s history, but when it was time to sit graduation exams no one remembered a thing about it.

  He could also add a phrase from a propaganda broadcast that had stuck in his mind: Big Byz was doomed to remain forever moored above the Orkish capital, so in the final analysis the Orks and the upper people shared the same fate, a fact that the arrogant oligarchy of Byzantion had so far failed to appreciate. But that was for later, to be placed right at the very end.

  It would be good to throw in something technical, something intelligent and serious as well, but one had to be careful not to overdo it …

  He found a suitable phrase in an article on the gravity drive – and ripped it off in full.

  Unlike the offglobes of the past, Byzantion cannot fly to another site or gain altitude – above it lies a zone of powerful winds where it could be ripped off its ring-shaped concrete footing that conceals the solenoids of the gravitational anchor. The anchor is essential because the gravity drive is overloaded with excessive mass.

  Elegant and incomprehensible.

  In the article entitled ‘Religions of the World’ he discovered a paragraph about the reformed religion of Byzantion:

  Movism is a hypocritically distorted form of Manitouism that regards Manitou the Antichrist as only one of many incarnations of Manitou that have trodden the earth. The esoteric doctrine of Movism is kept a deep secret by its adepts …

  Well, he also had to say a couple of words about the name. ‘“Byzantion” used to be the ancient name of a city that was simultaneously the last capital of the West and the first capital of the East, and this symbolic role, la-di-da-di-da …’ In short, that part was clear enough.

  Grim put another volume of the Free Encyclopaedia back in its place and took down an economics textbook – the essay definitely had to include a passage about economic life. This, again, was something that he could crib without worry.

  The original strategy for the development of the Orkish economy is to catch up with and overtake Big Byz in terms of major stock indices. There are two schools of Orkish economic thought, which propose diametrically opposed ways to achieve this goal.

  The first school, known as ‘Byzantism’, believes that we should adopt the Byzantine stock indices and then, through modernisation, ensure that their values would rise higher for the Orks. This is regarded as the classical tendency in economic thought.

  The second school has come into being only recently. Its founder was the scholar Cosm, who had worked on an internship on Big Byz and was considered a natural genius by the economists there (to them he was known under the pseudonym of Adam-Smith Wesson Malthus).

  Cosm asserted that for several centuries the world had already been living in the Age of Saturation – when technologies and languages (both human tongues and IT codes) hardly changed at all, since the economic and cultural meaning of progress had been exhausted. This should not be regarded as stagnation – it is a normal state of society. In the Palaeolithic age, people had lived like this for many hundreds of thousands of years; the age of ‘progress’ accounts for no more than one per cent of human history. There is every reason to expect that the Age of Saturation will be long and stable – but of course, a lot happier than the past historical plateaus. Cosm accepted the possibility that in the distant future it would be replaced, yet again, by a spiral of frenetic growth – but that is all in Manitou’s hands.

  Many of Cosm’s views, especially in the area of political economy, seemed revolutionary to his contemporaries. He claimed that Orkish stock indices could not outgrow those in Byzantion in principle, since the Orks did not have a stock market. And what’s more, the Byzantines had not had one either, not for a long time – they determined their indices during the solemn divination held in the House of Manitou, and in our time that is simply one of the religious rituals of Upper Manitouism (so-called Movism).

  In addition, Cosm asserted that it was pointless for Urkaine to compete economically with Byzantion, since the offglobe and the lower territories presented a single cultural and economic system, a kind of ‘metrocolony’. His statement that the true capital of Urkaine was London (a sector of Big Byz where the highest-ranking Global Orks had long since been acquiring hover-estate) provoked universal indignation. Shortly before Sacred War No. 216 (when Orks wore a carnation in their breast pockets), Cosm was hanged in a market square to boost the morale of the general public.

  Subsequently, Cosm was rehabilitated. The second tendency in economic thought, Cosmism, has arisen on the basis of his ideas: it calls on the Orks to develop their own stock indices – in such a way that those would be the right ones from the very beginning. But to many this doctrine seems too bold and simple, and so the state’s economic strategy is based on an amalgam of the two approaches.

  That incomprehensible word, ‘amalgam’, worked perfectly well as an ending. Everything became clear now – another day or two to polish it up, and he could hand his essay in. Only he would definitely have to add something about global warming and the death of the Gulf Stream, about the high-altitude winds, and the fact that all the black holes were one and the same Singularity – ‘the Body of Manitou, the same point of reference, and it only seemed to us that they were scattered across the sky …’

  Having annotated his text, Grim sighed in relief – homework was over for the day.

  As he was putting the book back in its place, a piece of paper, folded up to look like a pleat and covered with his own writing, fell out of it. It was his own crib on the past tenses of Upper Mid-Siberian, written in mischief two or three years ago:

  Ay u føker

  Ay u føken

  Ay u føkend

  Ay u føkender

  Ay u føkenden

  Ay u mav føkendend

  Ay u mad føkendender

  Ay u man føkendenden

  On the other side, in blue ink and the same schoolboy writing, were examples of correct usage – mnemonic rules for scribes and translators, some of which had long since become popular expletives:

  Ay vey yur ma føkend

  Ay vey yur grundma føkender

  Ay vey yur grundgrundma føkenden, ohh wehh

  Grim sighed. The piece of paper had survived, but Grim, the happy, carefree Grim who had written it before that long-ago exam – he had already disappeared, melted away like a cloud at the summer noontime, and there was no way back.

  His relatives were still singing – more and more aggressively with every minute. Grim decided to watch something on the manitou.

  Unfortunately, the old snuff that was on could hardly be called a radical cultural alternative to what was happening downstairs. Especially since Grim had already seen it a couple of times.

  I wonder, he thought, why they never set us essays on snuffs? We don’t even write that they demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of the rotten Byzantine elite. But we could … It’s probably because of the censorship …

  The battle scenes in the snuff had been brutally cut. The only part they showed in full was the Orkish army lined up for battle, in their felt helmets and leather coats meant to look like ‘Parthian armour’. There were occasional fleeting glimpses of the enemy – long shots of upper people, dressed in multi-coloured togas. But as soon as the electric catapults appeared in the frame, there was a gap so crude that scissors seemed to flicker across the screen.

  But they showed the Orks in felt caps, as they were being killed by the concrete balls, very generously – at great length and in great detail, to the accompaniment of tragic music that seriously spoiled Grim’s mood.

  Fortunately, the battle fragment came to an end and a love fragment started – a relatively young Nicolas-Olivier Laurence von Trier appeared in shot with an Elizabeth-Nathalie Madonna de Auschwitz who looked still quite fresh.

  The great actors were standing, by a bed, in front of a wall painted with mysterial frescoes, gazing at each other, damp-eyed, and holding hands. Nicolas-Olivier was wearing a purple toga and a diamond coronet, and Elizabeth-Nathalie had on a pink ancient-Greek-style robe with countless bijouterie knick-knacks. They kissed with feeling, and suddenly youthful servants and maidservants started flitting about – some removed the stars’ numerous items of jewellery, some fluffed up the bed, and some lit the oil lamps. Grim watched all this for the sake of the maidservants – some of them were really very pretty.

  Unfortunately, Nicolas-Olivier and Elizabeth-Nathalie were almost undressed already, and as soon as Elizabeth-Nathalie reached for the clasp of her pearl-embroidered brassiere and Nicolas-Olivier raised his strong hand to clasp her flawless bosom, a logo appeared on the screen with a caption in ornate lettering:

  SPIRITÜLØ CENZØRSHEEP DUH ÜRKAINØ

  Only the upper people had the right to cut a snuff – but they never touched the erotic scenes, they only removed their military secrets from the shot. But even though the Orkish censorship couldn’t cut anything out, it had the right to obscure the image temporarily with its logo. The logos kept changing all the time – Grim hadn’t seen this one before.

  Glowing brightly below the inscription was a golden spastika – a cross with three ends bent counterclockwise and one long leg with a stroke across it. The spastika was animated – sunshine sparkled across its golden surface, and below the long leg, which ran into a frizzy drawing of a forest grove, jolly little animals were dancing: little piggies skipping about on their hooves, little monkeys fighting playfully and little chickens flapping their wings.

  Grim felt certain that all the Orks watching the screen at that moment were performing, just like him, the same mental calculation – figuring out how much the guys in the Department of Cultural Expansion had pocketed on this order. And they must have pocketed a lot, because animation work like that, even with a tacky five-second loop, could only have been produced above or in the Green Zone. Or maybe, at a pinch, in the Yellow Zone. And all the prices in those places had lots of zeroes on the right.

  As soon as the languid sighs started up in the speakers, the original soundtrack was cut off too, and replaced by jangling Orkish music. It was a three-stringed cross between a mandolin and balalaika, introduced by Loss Solid to unify Orkish and Byzantine music – an instrument initially known as mandalaika, but renamed mondolaika by the Department of Cultural Expansion. In those days, not many Orks had their own manitous, so they mostly watched the snuffs in the army barracks, and when the screen was obscured by the spiritual censor’s logo, a military musician amused the soldiers by playing a mondolaika. The tradition had caught on and was still followed. Loss Solid had been planning to catch up and overtake the upper people – but after his eleventh military victory he was killed on the Hill of the Ancestors by a coconut that fell off a palm tree, and his entire legacy was declared accursed by Manitou. But the mondolaika had survived.

  The other channels were also showing two snuffs censored into total incomprehensibility – one really old, from the time of Loss Liquid, when the Orks went into battle in suits and ties, and the other one relatively recent, from the time of Torn Skyn, when they fought in doublets and wigs. It was all deadly boring and Grim had seen it all many times before. He turned the manitou off.

  And then he swung round sharply towards the window.

  If there really had been a Byzantine camera hovering out there, Grim wouldn’t have been able to see it against the sky in any case. But after that nightmare on the road, he kept getting the feeling that someone was watching him. It was probably a consequence of nervous shock.

  The scene outside the window was the same as before – shabby three-storey buildings from the time of the late Losses, a few scraggy palm trees and a funeral wagon, with Uncle Khor already lying in his sputnik.

  Two of his relatives were smoking beside the wagon – Uncle Shug, in his black cloak of a Right Protector, and a visitor from the south whom Grim hadn’t seen at a family gathering before.

  Uncle Shug wasn’t really a Right Protector. He worked at a classified factory where they made ‘Urkaine’ mopeds – everyone there was issued an officer’s uniform.

  Both men were well drunk – they were carrying on with some kind of conversation that had started at the table.

  ‘Why haven’t we got any technologies?’ the visitor from the south was asking vehemently. ‘Not even the ones that were in place a hundred years ago. What do you call that if not sabotage?’

  Uncle Shug laughed as if he was talking to a child but – at least to Grim’s mind – the answer he gave was perfectly serious.

  ‘Who needs sabotage? No sabotage is required. In the first place, engineers are regarded as an inferior caste round here. And the hero of our time is a Global Ork with a hangout in London. Or maybe, at a pinch, some shiterary philolophile who spent seven years at the uni being taught how to give the Kagan a royal blow-job. Especially if he’s wheedled his way into the Yellow Zone and blows upper people as well. I’m just a kind of mechanic, a servant. So now just try and think – why would I, an engineer, go and give myself a hernia, hoisting those schmuks up into the sky? They can go drown in shit, and take their Word on the Word with them.’

  Uncle Shug swayed, but the visitor managed to keep him on his feet.

  ‘And in the second place …’ Uncle Shug went on.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We Orks are always torturing each other. Our way of doing things is through underhand deception and fear. And we try to dominate matter in exactly the same way …’

  ‘Don’t the upper people do the same?’

  ‘The upper people treat material like a woman. They cajole it and persuade it. They rouse its interest. But Orks try to cheat it or shag it to death. And they can’t even do that right. They start shagging it to death before they’ve finished cheating it. Or they start to cheat it after they’ve already shagged it to death. They yell at it, like they do in prison – barge over, you bitch! I’ll give you what for! And all the time they’re smashing it with this imaginary sledgehammer. The same way they’ve been beaten themselves, ever since they were kids. That’s why all our things look so horrible and don’t work properly. Atoms and molecules stopped being afraid of our powers-that-be ages ago … Aagh … So how can we suddenly go and make something beautiful and useful, when …’

  Uncle Shug swept his arm round in a wide arc, as if adducing the panorama of the world around him as his final point. The argument was rock solid, of course.

  ‘Our forefathers made microchips,’ said the visitor from the south.

  Uncle Shug spat.

  ‘Have you just fallen out of a palm tree, or what? That’s all propaganda. Every civilisation has its technological limits. You’ve read The Book of Orkasms. What kind of microchip can you make in an Urkaganate, listening to criminal songs? The only thing we can produce to a high quality here is Church-fearing philolophiles. And we can trade in corpse gas, too. Or saw up a pipeline and sell it over the Great Wall.’

  ‘What pipeline?’ asked the visitor.

  ‘It’s this legend. Under the first Losses a certain redhead of a Global Ork was put in charge of gas. And in the first year he sawed up all the old pipelines and sold them to the Kingdom of Sheng as scrap.’

  ‘And he stole the manitou?’

  ‘Why bother stealing it? He paid it to himself as a bonus. For profits in the annual returns.’

  ‘And what happened to him?’

  ‘Ha, what do you think? He flew off to London. And since then we’ve been selling gas in cans. At least we still make the cans ourselves. And you talk about microchips …’

  They put out their fag ends and went back in the house. Grim sighed – Uncle Shug was right about everything, he didn’t want to be an engineer either. Chloe wouldn’t have gone into the woods with a future engineer, that’s for sure.

  The lid of the sputnik had already been closed – it was a hot day, and they’d said their farewells to his uncle early, to avoid taking any risks with the smell. Following an old superstition, the two halves of the sputnik were sewn together with consecrated cow’s tendons (so the dead man wouldn’t climb out into space before he reached Manitou – no one believed that, of course, but they observed the custom anyway). The sputnik was of the cheapest kind – with four white-painted sticks jutting up crookedly towards the sky from a crudely woven sphere that looked like a large inverted basket. They were burying his uncle without any pomp or ceremony.

  There was no camera anywhere around, of course.

  Grim laughed.

  ‘Ah, who’s interested in me anyway?’ he said loudly.

  The words had a strange ring to them in the empty room, and Grim immediately realised that he really shouldn’t have spoken them.

  In actual fact, the yard didn’t look exactly as it did before. A new object had appeared beside the wagon, one that he hadn’t noticed at first against the background of the freshly dug vegetable patch.

  It was the black motorbike that belonged to the district public prosecutor, Chloe’s father. And although the motorbike didn’t look particularly streamlined or menacing, Grim still thought it was a bit like a Byzantine battle camera.